Guidance for people responsible for fire safety.
Practical writing on fire risk assessments, fire door checks and remedial actions, from the team building FireOptix.
Fire safety over Christmas: cold weather, decorations and a thinner rota
Winter adds heaters, lights and deliveries to a building at the same time as it takes staff out of it. Here is what actually changes, and what to check before the break.
Read the article →Martyn's Law and your fire strategy: invacuation is not evacuation
Martyn's Law requires procedures for evacuation, invacuation, lockdown and communication. Two of those send people the opposite way to a fire alarm, and the building has one set of occupants who have to be told which is which.
Residential PEEPs: what the 2025 Regulations put behind the acronym
The Fire Safety (Residential Evacuation Plans) (England) Regulations 2025 give residents with disabilities an entitlement to a person-centred assessment, a written statement and information shared with the fire service. In a stay put building that is a harder conversation than it sounds.
Waking watch: a bridge, not a destination
A waking watch is an interim measure that buys time while a building's fire strategy is restored. Where it becomes permanent, the cost falls on residents and the underlying defect stays unfixed.
Fire drills and evacuation records: what you need to be able to show
A drill that happened and was not recorded is, evidentially, a drill that did not happen. What to capture, what a useful drill actually tests, and why the awkward findings are the ones worth writing down.
Questions worth asking a fire safety software vendor before you buy
A demo is designed to show a product at its best. These are the questions that tend to surface how it actually behaves once real, messy data is loaded in.
Fire extinguisher servicing: what a responsible person actually needs to know
Extinguishers are one of the more visible bits of fire safety kit in a building, which makes an out-of-date one an unusually obvious gap to an inspector.
Delegating fire safety duties without delegating liability
A responsible person can hand off the work. What they generally can't hand off is the underlying legal duty — and that gap catches people out.
Digital fire door registers vs paper records: an honest comparison
Paper isn't wrong, exactly — it's just a format that stops scaling at a fairly predictable point. Worth knowing where that point actually is.