What managing agents are actually taking on when they accept fire safety duties

Fire safety duties often arrive inside a management agreement almost as an afterthought — a line or two buried among a much longer list of general property management responsibilities. That's a mismatch, because what's actually being taken on, when a managing agent accepts fire safety duties for a building, is a meaningfully specific and ongoing set of obligations, not a background task.

What the role typically covers in practice

For a managing agent acting on behalf of a freeholder or owner, fire safety duties usually include arranging and keeping current a fire risk assessment, ensuring identified actions are tracked through to completion, arranging servicing of fire doors, alarms and other equipment, and keeping the records that evidence all of this. Whether the agent formally holds responsible person status, or is instead carrying out these duties on behalf of an owner who retains it, should be spelled out clearly in the management agreement rather than left implicit.

Why vague delegation is a problem for everyone involved

A management agreement that says an agent will "manage fire safety compliance" without further detail creates risk on both sides. The owner may believe everything is covered when only some of it is. The agent may be carrying more legal exposure than they realise, or less than the owner assumes — and that mismatch usually only surfaces after something has already gone wrong.

• –Which party arranges and pays for the fire risk assessment, and how often it's reviewed
• –Who is responsible for tracking FRA actions through to close-out, and reporting on outstanding items
• –Who arranges servicing for fire doors, alarms, emergency lighting and extinguishers, and on what schedule
• –Who keeps the underlying records, and what happens to them if the management agreement ends
• –Whether the agent is expected to proactively flag risk, or simply execute instructions from the owner

Portfolios with multiple agents or a change of agent

Larger property owners often work with several managing agents across a portfolio, sometimes changing agent on individual buildings over time. Each transition is a genuine risk point for fire safety records specifically, because they're often less visible to an incoming agent than rent rolls or service charge accounts — nobody hands over a fire door register the way they hand over a set of accounts.

Making the handover less fragile

The practical fix is less about the wording of the agreement — though that matters — and more about where the records actually live. An agent whose fire safety records sit in a shared, building-attached system rather than their own internal files can step away from a building and leave a complete, current record behind, rather than the incoming agent starting from a near-blank slate. That continuity is a large part of the case for treating fire safety records as belonging to the building, not to whichever agent currently manages it.

What the management agreement actually says

Agents frequently operate on a shared understanding of scope that the underlying agreement does not reflect. The agreement was drafted for a portfolio, the building is atypical, and the practical arrangement has evolved through custom rather than through amendment. That works until a dispute, at which point the document rather than the custom is what gets read.

The useful exercise is comparing what the agreement says about fire safety scope against what the agent is actually doing — in both directions. Agents are as likely to be carrying out duties the agreement does not cover as to be omitting ones it does, and both create exposure.

Common mistakes

• –Operating on custom rather than on what the management agreement states
• –Scope that has evolved without the agreement being amended
• –Assuming a standard agreement fits an atypical building
• –No clarity on who instructs and pays for remedial work
• –Taking on duties informally that the agreement does not cover
• –Not reviewing scope when a building is added to the portfolio