The Complete Guide to Fire Risk Assessments in the UK (2026)

We are an independent fire risk assessment practice serving Hampshire, Dorset, Surrey, and West Sussex. This is the guide we wish every Responsible Person had read before we walked onto their premises. It covers the legal framework, the assessment process, real costs, what a good assessment actually looks like, and the common findings we see on jobs every week. It is written for the person who has been told they need a fire risk assessment and is trying to work out what that actually means, what it should cost, and who to trust with the work.

What is a fire risk assessment?

The legal foundation sits in Article 9(1) of the Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005, which requires the Responsible Person to make a “suitable and sufficient assessment of the risks to which relevant persons are exposed for the purpose of identifying the general fire precautions he needs to take.” That phrase — suitable and sufficient — is not defined in the legislation, but it is the phrase enforcement officers, insurers, and courts will use to judge whether the assessment you produced genuinely covers what it needs to cover.

The methodology most fire risk assessors work to is PAS 79-1:2020 for non-domestic premises (offices, retail, warehouses, industrial, education, healthcare) or BS 9792:2025 for housing (HMOs, blocks of flats, student accommodation, specialised housing). PAS 79-1 sets out a nine-step process that goes considerably deeper than the Home Office’s simplified five-step checklist. The five-step version is designed for Responsible Persons who feel competent to carry out their own assessment on the simplest types of premises. For anything beyond a single small shop or office, the professional nine-step methodology is the standard that a competent assessor will follow.

A fire risk assessment is not the same thing as a fire safety audit carried out by a Fire and Rescue Service. The audit checks whether you are complying with your duties under the Order. The fire risk assessment is the document that proves you are. They are connected — an enforcement officer inspecting your premises will ask to see your assessment first — but they are carried out by different people for different reasons.

What does the law require?

The Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005

The Fire Safety Order (commonly called the RRO) is the principal fire safety legislation for England and Wales. It came into force on 1 October 2006, replacing more than seventy earlier pieces of fire legislation with a single, risk-based framework. Article 9 sets the duty to assess, Article 11 sets the duty to maintain fire safety arrangements, Article 13 requires appropriate firefighting equipment and detection, and Article 14 covers means of escape. Article 32 sets out the offences and penalties for failing to comply.

The Fire Safety Act 2021

The Fire Safety Act 2021 clarified that the external walls, flat entrance doors, and the structure of buildings are all covered by the Fire Safety Order and must be accounted for in fire risk assessments. This was a direct response to the Grenfell Tower fire and closed an ambiguity in how the Order applied to the building envelope of multi-occupied residential premises.

The Building Safety Act 2022, Section 156

Section 156 of the Building Safety Act 2022 amended the Fire Safety Order and came into force on 1 October 2023. It introduced four significant changes that every Responsible Person needs to understand.

First, the duty to record the assessment in full was extended to all Responsible Persons regardless of employee count or premises type. Previously, only businesses with five or more employees (or premises subject to licensing) had to record anything more than the “significant findings.” That threshold is gone. If you are a Responsible Person, you must now record the assessment in full.

Second, the identity of any person appointed to carry out or review the assessment must be recorded, along with their organisation where applicable. This creates a traceable record of who actually did the work — and a clear audit trail for enforcement officers, insurers, and future owners of the building.

Third, the Act introduced a future legal requirement that any person appointed to make or review the assessment must be competent. This specific provision has not yet been brought into force — the government has committed to publishing guidance and setting a commencement date in due course. In the meantime, current guidance from the Home Office and every Fire and Rescue Service strongly recommends that Responsible Persons satisfy themselves of an assessor’s competence before appointing them. The duty to ensure the assessment is suitable and sufficient remains with the Responsible Person regardless of who carries it out.

Fourth, the maximum fine for specified offences — including failing to provide a copy of the fire risk assessment when requested by an inspector — was raised from Level 3 (£1,000) to Level 5 (unlimited). Enforcement authorities have acted on the new powers: prosecutions related to fire safety violations rose by 79% year-on-year in the most recent published figures.

The Housing Act 2004 and HMO-specific duties

For HMOs, the Fire Safety Order sits alongside the Housing Act 2004 and the Housing Health and Safety Rating System (HHSRS). The Fire Safety Order applies to the common parts. The HHSRS applies to the individual rooms and considers fire as one of twenty-nine assessed hazards. Mandatory and additional HMO licence conditions add a third layer. Underpinning all of this is the LACORS Housing Fire Safety Guidance, published in 2008 — not legislation, but treated as the de facto benchmark by virtually every local housing authority and fire and rescue service in England. Councils such as Eastleigh Borough Council explicitly state that they use LACORS as the minimum standard that will be accepted for HMO fire safety.

HMO fire risk assessments sit under BS 9792:2025 — the current British Standard for housing fire risk assessments, published in August 2025 — alongside LACORS. The assessment methodology comes from BS 9792; the practical fire precaution standards that councils and fire services judge your premises against come from LACORS. A competent HMO fire risk assessor works across both. We go into more detail on the HMO side later in this guide and on our dedicated HMO fire risk assessment page.

How much does a fire risk assessment cost?

Honest pricing is one of the reasons we started the business. The fire risk assessment market in the UK includes providers at every price point, from DIY templates at £25 to boutique consultancies charging four-figure sums for large complex premises. Understanding what actually drives the price helps you compare like with like.

What drives the price

Floor area is the easiest variable to price against, which is why most providers (including us) publish pricing bands based on square metres or room count. But floor area is a proxy for complexity, not the real driver. The things that genuinely affect the work involved are:

• Compartmentation — how the building is divided into fire-resisting zones and whether those zones can be judged reliably on a non-intrusive inspection. Cable and pipe penetrations through compartment walls are a common weak point.
• Sleeping risk — premises where people may be asleep require a fundamentally different escape analysis, including waking time, navigation in smoke, and protected routes that work in the dark.
• Protected route architecture — the stairwell and escape corridor that occupants rely on to reach a place of safety. In most premises, and especially HMOs, the protected staircase is the single point on which the entire escape plan depends.
• Occupancy pattern — a warehouse with ten employees is not the same job as a retail premises with 400 members of the public on a peak day, even at the same floor area. Reaction speed and crowd behaviour change the analysis completely.
• Specialist features — kitchen ductwork, solar PV systems, compressed gas storage, lithium-ion battery charging, hot work areas, and flammable substance storage all add layers that have to be assessed against the appropriate standards.
• Document review — previous assessments, servicing certificates, EICRs, fire alarm and emergency lighting records, and fire door inspection reports all need to be cross-checked against what is actually present on site.

A typical commercial site visit takes two to three hours. Writing the assessment up properly takes considerably longer — often twice as long as the visit itself. That is where the professional judgement happens: turning observations into a reasoned risk analysis, cross-checking findings against the relevant standards and legislation, and producing an action plan that is genuinely prioritised rather than a flat list of recommendations. If the written report does not reflect that level of thought, you have not had a proper fire risk assessment.

Why you should be suspicious of £45 and £90 fire risk assessments

At the bottom of the market, we see fire risk assessments advertised at £45, £90, and £150. The honest question to ask about these prices is this: what is the provider valuing their own knowledge and professional judgement at? A thorough assessment involves five or six hours of work when you include travel, site inspection, document review, and report writing. At £90, that is not even minimum wage — and that is before insurance, professional development, software, and overheads.

What tends to arrive is a templated report — often generated in part by an AI tool — with generic findings that do not reflect the specific building, a tick-box action plan, and no substantive risk reasoning. We have been called in to replace these after Fire and Rescue Service audits have rejected them, after insurers have refused to accept them, and after HMO licensing officers have served improvement notices. The saving is false. The replacement assessment costs the same as a proper one would have done in the first place, and the Responsible Person has lost time, money, and credibility.

A fair price for a small commercial premises or a small HMO in 2026 is in the £200 to £400 range. For larger or more complex premises, £400 to £700 is normal. Anything significantly below that warrants very careful questions about what you are actually getting. You can see our own pricing on our commercial fire risk assessment and HMO fire risk assessment pages — we publish it openly because transparent pricing is how we think this market should work.

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What do we find on real jobs?

Most fire risk assessment failings we find on site are not dramatic. They are the small, steady accumulations of ordinary use that no one is actively watching for. Here are the ones that come up on almost every job.

Electrical and charging risks

Daisy-chained extension leads are something we pick up on near enough every commercial job. Office desks become spaghetti. Workshop power boards get plugged into other power boards. Kitchen appliances share sockets with coffee machines and phone chargers. It looks harmless because it is normal, but overloaded sockets and chained extensions remain a significant cause of workplace electrical fires.

Lithium-ion battery charging is a rapidly growing concern, and one where best practice is evolving fast. UK fire services recorded approximately 1,330 lithium-ion battery fires in 2024 — a 93% increase over 2022, according to data compiled by QBE Insurance through Freedom of Information requests to forty-two fire services. E-bikes alone accounted for 362 fires, double the 2022 figure. The Office for Product Safety and Standards recorded 211 notified e-bike and e-scooter fires in 2024, resulting in 86 injuries and 8 fatalities. When a lithium-ion battery goes into thermal runaway, it burns at between 700°C and 1,000°C — hotter and faster than conventional fires, and almost impossible to extinguish once it has started.

For a fire risk assessment, this means looking at where staff charge phones, vapes, e-bikes, e-scooters, mobility scooters, power tools, and any other battery-powered equipment. It means asking whether there are charging policies, whether charging happens on or near combustibles, whether there is any building-wide restriction on where charging can happen, and whether staff have been made aware of the risks of counterfeit chargers and aftermarket conversion kits. This is an area where we expect practice to tighten significantly over the next few years.

Rooftop solar panels that trigger a review

Rooftop photovoltaic installations are a significant change under Article 9(3) of the Fire Safety Order, which means they trigger the duty to review the fire risk assessment. This is not widely understood by Responsible Persons, and in fairness, Approved Document B does not currently contain specific provisions for building-applied PV systems — a gap that RICS and major insurers have flagged publicly.

The real issue is that PV systems introduce new risks that the original assessment would not have considered. Panels generate their own electricity in any light, meaning parts of the system are always live — making firefighting considerably more difficult. The air gap between panels and the roof can create a stack effect that accelerates fire spread. PV inverters are a recognised ignition source, particularly when installed in combined plant rooms alongside gas meters and main electrical supplies without compartmentation. Insurers such as Zurich have published explicit guidance that a suitable and sufficient fire risk assessment should be carried out for all industrial, commercial, and domestic PV installations under the Fire Safety Order.

If you have had solar panels installed in the last three years and your fire risk assessment has not been updated since, you almost certainly have a live compliance gap.

Emergency lighting — internal and external

Internal emergency lighting tends to be in place, but we regularly find three problems with it. The first is servicing: monthly functional testing is either not being done, not being recorded, or being done by someone who does not know what a correct test result looks like. The second is coverage: the emergency lighting that is installed does not actually illuminate the full escape route. There are dark spots on corridors, at changes of direction, at fire exit doors, and at final exits that would leave people navigating blind in a power failure. The third is that emergency lighting is rarely tested in actual darkness. We almost always recommend that clients turn the mains lighting off and walk the escape route in the dark, under emergency lighting alone, to see what is actually covered. Clients never think about what darkness plus a smoke-filled room actually looks like until they try it.

The bigger gap, particularly across rural and semi-rural premises in Hampshire and Dorset, is external emergency lighting. Many premises have no external lighting at all once you leave the building. On a winter evening with no borrowed light from streetlamps, people evacuating a premises into a dark car park or yard are effectively walking blind. Very few assessments produced by non-specialist providers pick this up.

Servicing certificates that no one has read

Almost every commercial premises we visit has servicing certificates for fire extinguishers, fire alarms, and emergency lighting. Very few Responsible Persons have actually read them. The certificate says the extinguishers have been inspected — but does not say the type or rating of every unit. The fire alarm certificate carries an engineer’s additional notes recommending follow-up actions — which have not been read, let alone acted on. The EICR is in a folder on a shelf, but it carries an unsatisfactory status from three years ago and no remedial works have been completed. “Serviced” is not the same as “compliant.”

Compartmentation failures at service penetrations

Compartmentation is the passive fire protection that buys people time to escape. Walls, floors, and ceilings designed as fire-resisting barriers do their job — until a cable, a pipe, or a ductwork penetration passes through them without proper fire stopping. We find this most often in service cupboards, above suspended ceilings, and around kitchen extract ductwork. A small unsealed penetration turns a thirty-minute compartment into something considerably less useful. On a non-intrusive inspection we cannot open every void, so we flag the areas we cannot see and recommend intrusive follow-up where the risk warrants it.

Fire drills that have never been tested under real conditions

This one surprises people. Large retail and hospitality premises often have comprehensive fire drill records — but when we ask, the drills are always carried out before opening or after closing. The evacuation has never actually been tested with members of the public on site. If your drill has never been run with 200 customers in the building, you do not know how long evacuation will actually take, how many people will ignore the alarm, how the fire wardens will cope, or whether the final exits will be usable when people are trying to reach them under stress. An e-learning certificate is not the same thing as a tested evacuation plan.

Portable heaters, flammable storage, and the ordinary

The cost-of-living pressure has pushed many businesses and HMOs from gas heating to electric portable heaters, which get moved around, left unattended, placed next to cardboard or paper, and knocked over. Flammable aerosols and solvents are stored loose in workshops without flammable cabinets. Waste paper accumulates in exit routes. Wedged fire doors, blocked final exits, and broken emergency lighting made up more than 10,000 of the breaches recorded in English Fire and Rescue Service audits in 2024/25. These are the ordinary failings, and they are still the most common ones.

Is HMO fire risk assessment different?

BS 9792:2025 was published by the British Standards Institution on 1 August 2025 and came into effect on 31 August 2025, replacing the withdrawn PAS 79-2:2020. It is the current British Standard for housing fire risk assessments and covers HMOs, blocks of flats, student accommodation, and specialised housing. It introduces a formal Type 1 to Type 4 framework that matches the depth of inspection to the risk profile of the building. Alongside BS 9792, the LACORS Housing Fire Safety Guidance (2008) remains the practical standard that local authority licensing teams and fire and rescue services use to judge whether the fire precautions in an HMO are proportionate to the risk. A good HMO fire risk assessment reads off both — the methodology comes from BS 9792, and the practical benchmarks come from LACORS.

At Clear Fire Compliance we carry out Type 1 and Type 3 HMO fire risk assessments — both non-intrusive. A Type 1 covers common parts only; a Type 3 covers common parts plus a sample of individual let rooms. We do not carry out Type 2 or Type 4 intrusive inspections, which require destructive opening-up work and a different competence profile. For older buildings with multiple extensions, former hotel conversions, or complex escape routes, we refer the work to assessors equipped for intrusive inspection.

The single most important feature of any HMO fire risk assessment is the protected staircase. In most HMOs the main staircase is the only route of escape from every upper floor. If the compartmentation between the staircase and the letting rooms fails — wedged fire doors, unsealed service penetrations, missing intumescent strips, door closers that have been removed because they are annoying — the entire escape plan fails with it. For a third-floor sleeper, the time budget to wake, recognise the alarm, leave their room, navigate a corridor possibly filling with smoke, descend two flights of stairs, and reach a final exit is tight enough without any of those failures. It is why we spend a disproportionate amount of time on fire door condition, compartmentation, and alarm coverage in HMO assessments.

HMO fire risk assessment also has to account for something commercial premises largely do not: the behaviour of people in their own living space. Occupants smoke, charge personal devices unsupervised, overload sockets in rooms the landlord rarely sees, leave flammables on windowsills, put candles near curtains, cook at odd hours with the smoke alarm temporarily disconnected. Some are strangers to each other; some are friends; the evacuation dynamics are completely different between those two cases. A good HMO fire risk assessment acknowledges that the landlord cannot control occupant behaviour, but it does evaluate whether the physical fire safety measures are robust enough to tolerate realistic behaviour.

HMO licensing and why fire risk assessments are now required with your application

Two of the largest councils in our service area now require a fire risk assessment as part of the HMO licence application — not as an afterthought, not on request, but as a standard documentation requirement.

Portsmouth City Council launched its Additional HMO Licensing Scheme on 1 September 2023, running until 31 August 2028. The scheme is city-wide and covers all HMOs with three or more occupants from two or more households. A fire risk assessment must be submitted with the application. If you do not have a current FRA at the time of application, Portsmouth will issue a one-year licence with a special condition requiring you to obtain one — and will not grant a full five-year licence until you have one in place.

Southampton City Council launched its Additional HMO Licensing Scheme on 1 October 2025, running until 30 September 2030. The scheme covers smaller HMOs (fewer than five occupants) and HMOs within purpose-built accommodation blocks in nine designated wards: Banister & Polygon, Bevois, Bargate, Portswood, Swaythling, Bassett, Freemantle, Shirley, and Millbrook. Those nine wards contain approximately 86% of all known HMOs in Southampton. A fire risk assessment is a required part of the licence application alongside gas safety, electrical safety, and floor plans.

Other councils in our service area — including Eastleigh Borough Council — require fire risk assessments for all HMOs under mandatory licensing and explicitly reference LACORS as their minimum standard. Whether or not your council has an additional licensing scheme in place, a fire risk assessment of the common parts of any HMO is a legal requirement under the Fire Safety Order. The additional licensing schemes simply mean that councils are now actively checking, rather than relying on self-declaration.

If you are an HMO landlord in Hampshire or Dorset and you do not currently have a fire risk assessment that meets the LACORS benchmark and BS 9792:2025, you have a live compliance gap — and if you are in Portsmouth or Southampton, that gap is also blocking your licence. We cover this in more detail on our HMO fire risk assessment service page.

Bringing it together

A fire risk assessment is not a document you obtain to make a compliance officer go away. It is the one piece of work that forces you to look at your premises the way a fire would. It asks a direct and unsentimental question: if a fire started here tomorrow, with the people who are actually in the building tomorrow, would the arrangements you have in place be enough?

The legal framework — the Fire Safety Order, the Building Safety Act, the Housing Act, the current British Standards — is the scaffolding around that question. It is important scaffolding, and we have spent the last few thousand words walking through it. But the scaffolding is not the point. The point is whether the answer to the question is yes. And the uncomfortable truth is that for a significant proportion of non-domestic premises in England, the honest answer today would be no, or at best not quite.

That is fixable. A thorough fire risk assessment, carried out by someone competent for your type of premises, will identify what needs to change, prioritise it, and give you a defensible record of how fire safety is being managed. It will stand up to an enforcement officer, an insurer, a tribunal, and — if it ever comes to it — a fire investigation.

If you are a business owner, landlord, or managing agent in Hampshire, Dorset, Surrey, or West Sussex, and you are not sure whether your current fire risk assessment is fit for purpose, we can help. Our commercial fire risk assessments and HMO fire risk assessments are priced openly, carried out by a qualified assessor, and delivered as proper narrative reports rather than tick-box documents. You can see our scope and pricing on the service pages, or get in touch directly to talk about your premises.