What Is A Fire Risk Assessment

A Fire Risk Assessment is an organised and methodical look at your premises, the activities carried on there and the likelihood that a fire could start and cause harm to those in and around the premises.

The aims of the Fire Risk Assessment are:

• To identify the fire hazards.
• To reduce the risk of those hazards causing harm to as low as reasonably practicable.
• To decide what physical fire precautions and management arrangements are necessary to ensure the safety of people in your premises if a fire does start.

Important Definitions within a Fire Risk Assessment

Hazard: anything that has the potential to cause harm.

Risk: the chance of that harm occurring.

Who Conducts A Fire Risk Assessment?

Believe it or not, the law doesn’t specify who is allowed to carry out a fire risk assessment but only requires that they are competent enough to complete a ‘suitable and sufficient’ assessment of that particular building. It is the responsibility of the Responsible Person to ensure a Fire Risk Assessment is conducted. However, because a fire risk assessment carries legal weighting, most ‘Responsible Persons’ choose to engage the services of a professional fire risk assessment company (such as Fraigneux) to complete it for them.

How is a Fire Risk Assessment Recorded?

Traditionally, findings were recorded with a notepad and pen, moving toward word processed templates (still filled out by hand) through to digital software. Now, the software is so developed that there is ‘smart’ software (such as GoPAD fire risk assessment software) that greatly assists the risk assessor, reduces errors and provides very clear reports and action plans.

How is a Fire Risk Assessment Scored?

This can be largely subjective but there are general guidelines that follow a matrix of likelihood versus consequence.

Likelihood	Potential Consequence
	Slight Harm	Moderate Harm	Extreme Harm
High	Moderate	Substantial	Intolerable
Medium	Tolerable	Moderate	Substantial
Low	Trivial	Tolerable	Moderate

 

What happens after completion of a Fire Risk Assessment?

At the end of a fire risk assessment, the building will have earned a score. This gives an indication of the fire safety rating of the internals of a building’s common areas. Often, an assessor will identify items that need corrected in order to comply with fire safety regulations and these will be noted on a ‘Tasks List’ or ‘Action Plan’. Some of the tasks that may require correction are out of date fire extinguishers, blocked fire escapes or corridors, missing smoke detectors or to recommend carrying out fire drills.

One of the important elements of a completed fire risk assessment is the review date. Currently, the only requirement is that the Responsible Person needs to carry out a review of the assessment at ‘regular’ intervals. The Local Government Association (LGA) recommends that, for high rise buildings, the fire risk assessment is reviewed annually and redone at least every 3 years. For the highest risk buildings, the LGA recommends completing a new one every year.