FRA FAQ
The competent person who carries out the assessment fills out the form, whether an in-house officer or an external consultant, with input from people who know the premises. The responsible person then reviews, approves and owns the record; that approval is the part the law tests.
Holding the pen
In a workplace the author is usually internal: a manager or health and safety adviser assessing an operation they understand from the inside. For the common parts of residential blocks it is more often an external specialist carrying out a Type 1 inspection, because judgements about construction, compartmentation and evacuation strategy sit beyond most in-house roles. The completeness bar is identical either way: significant findings, the people especially at risk, measures taken and planned, and reasoning that connects the evidence to each conclusion.
There is no single official form to hunt for. HSE publishes example templates for general workplace assessments, and housing fire risk assessments normally follow the structure of BS 9792:2025 or the PAS 79 lineage before it. Format matters far less than content: the five contents every record needs are set out under what are the 5 things a risk assessment should include, and a handsome template with hollow reasoning fails the same legal test as a scruffy one.
Approval and ownership
Whoever completes the form, ownership never moves. The responsible person carries the duty to have a suitable and sufficient assessment and keeps ultimate liability even when a consultant did every hour of the work; since the full-record duty arrived, choosing a competent assessor is itself part of what they answer for. Identifying who holds that role in a block or business is covered under who is the responsible person in a fire risk assessment.
The classic governance failure is the bare signature: a responsible person countersigning a report they have not read, filing it and treating the duty as discharged. Genuine approval means reading the findings, challenging anything that does not match the building, agreeing each action with an owner and a date, and following the actions through to completion. Larger landlords increasingly formalise this as a named-reviewer stage before any report is accepted, a working pattern familiar to housing association compliance officers.
FAQ
Signing unread is the failure, not the compliance. Liability for a defective assessment stays with the responsible person regardless of who wrote it, so approval has to involve checking findings against the building and committing to the action plan. If the document is later challenged, an unexamined signature reads as evidence of neglect rather than diligence.
No. Staff and residents who describe how the building really runs take on no duty by doing so. The assessor answers professionally for the quality of the work, and the duty holder answers legally for the outcome, as explained under who is legally responsible for a risk assessment.
Section 156 of the Building Safety Act 2022 removed the old recording threshold, so every responsible person must now record the assessment in full: all significant findings, all measures, and who carried out the assessment. Partial notes or summary sheets no longer satisfy the duty, whatever form they are written on.
FRA Flow drafts the record from site evidence and routes it to a named reviewer before sign-off, so approval leaves a trail. Free tier available.
