The most common fire risk assessment actions, and how to actually close them

Look across enough fire risk assessments from unrelated buildings and a pattern emerges quickly — the same handful of action types recur again and again, regardless of building type. Recognising them in advance makes them easier to close efficiently rather than treating each one as a fresh surprise.

Fire door defects

Doors that don't close fully, damaged or missing intumescent seals, unauthorised holes for cabling, or self-closers that have been wedged open are consistently among the most common findings. These are usually cheap and quick to fix individually, but they tend to recur across a building if the underlying cause — often a door being propped for convenience — isn't addressed alongside the physical repair.

Escape route obstructions and signage gaps

Stored items blocking a corridor, a fire exit sign that's no longer illuminated, or final exit doors that are difficult to open quickly under panic conditions all show up repeatedly. Most of these are operational rather than structural — they're about how a space is actually used day to day, which is exactly why they reappear between assessments if nobody owns keeping the route clear.

Servicing and testing gaps

Fire alarm systems, emergency lighting and extinguishers that are overdue for servicing, or where the paperwork evidencing the last service can't be produced, are a recurring finding — sometimes the equipment is fine and the issue is purely that the records weren't to hand when the assessor asked for them.

Missing or out-of-date documentation

A surprising number of actions are really record-keeping actions in disguise: no current fire door register, no evidence of staff fire safety training, no up-to-date evacuation plan for the building. The underlying safety measure might genuinely be in place — the finding is that nobody can currently prove it.

• –Fire doors that don't close and latch properly, or have damaged intumescent seals
• –Escape routes obstructed by storage, furniture or waste
• –Fire exit and directional signage missing, damaged or not illuminated
• –Alarm, emergency lighting or extinguisher servicing overdue, or evidence of it missing
• –No current fire door register or servicing records available on request
• –Fire safety training for staff not delivered, or not evidenced

Why the same actions keep reappearing

The frustrating pattern on many buildings is actions being closed once, then reappearing on the next assessment a year later — not because the fix failed, but because there was no ongoing routine keeping the underlying issue in check between assessments. A door gets propped open again within a month of being fixed; nobody notices until the next assessor does.

Breaking that cycle needs two things: a genuinely closed-out action (fixed, evidenced, dated) rather than a verbally agreed one, and a routine check between formal assessments that catches drift early — which is closer to what regular fire door checks are for than waiting for the next annual review to catch the same problem again. On a single building, a spreadsheet can just about track this. Across a portfolio, recording actions with photo evidence and a genuine close-out date — rather than a status someone remembers to update — is where a system like FireOptix tends to replace the spreadsheet, not because the spreadsheet is wrong in principle but because it stops getting kept up to date past a handful of buildings.