Fire risk assessment software for building safety managers on HRBs.

The building safety case answers the question "is this building, with its current management arrangements, an acceptable level of risk to its residents?" The FRA addresses a narrower question: "what fire risks exist in the common parts and what reasonable measures should the Responsible Person take?" The two documents inform each other and overlap on evidence, but they are distinct.

For the building safety manager, the FRA is one of the input documents the safety case references. The fire risk findings, the reasonable measures the RP has put in place, the action plan close-out evidence: all of this feeds into the safety case argument. A weak FRA produces a weak safety case input. A strong FRA, with traceable evidence and a defensible methodology, produces a strong input the PAP can lean on under BSR scrutiny.

The Building Safety Act 2022 requires the PAP to operate a resident engagement process and a complaints system that allows residents to raise building safety concerns. Many of those concerns will be fire safety related: storage in escape routes, propped-open fire doors, faulty fire safety equipment, vulnerable resident evacuation arrangements. They feed back into the next FRA review.

For the building safety manager, having the FRA workflow capture where a finding originated from a resident concern (rather than from the assessor's observation alone) is part of the audit trail the BSR is interested in. FRA Flow supports this by allowing observations to be tagged as originating from a resident concern, with a reference back to the original case in whatever resident engagement system the PAP runs.