Who can actually carry out a fire risk assessment?

There's a persistent misconception that carrying out a fire risk assessment requires a specific, named qualification — a single certificate that makes someone legally entitled to sign one off. That's not quite how the current Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005 frames it. What the Order actually asks for is that the assessment is carried out by a "competent person," and competence is a broader, more situational test than a single piece of paper.

What "competent" means in this context

Competence generally means having enough training, knowledge and experience to identify the risks in a given building and judge what's needed to address them. For a small, simple, low-occupancy building, a responsible person with reasonable fire safety knowledge might reasonably carry out their own assessment. For anything more complex — mixed occupancy, vulnerable residents, unusual layouts, sleeping risk — that bar rises quickly, and self-assessment becomes a harder position to justify.

Why 'in-house' assessments carry more risk than they look like

The appeal of doing it in-house is obvious: it's cheaper and faster than bringing in an external assessor. The risk is less obvious until something goes wrong — an in-house assessment that misses a significant finding a genuinely competent assessor would have caught is a harder position to defend afterwards, because the responsible person had the option of an independent, qualified view and chose not to take it.

What to look for in an external assessor

• –Relevant fire risk assessment qualifications or accreditation through a recognised professional body
• –Demonstrable experience with buildings of a similar type, use and complexity to yours
• –Professional indemnity insurance appropriate to the work
• –A clear, structured report format with significant findings and a prioritised action plan, not just a pass/fail summary
• –A track record you can actually verify — references, or membership of a body that maintains standards

Competence isn't transferred by hiring someone

It's worth being clear that hiring a competent assessor doesn't hand the responsible person's legal duty to someone else. The responsibility for fire safety in the building stays with the responsible person — the assessor's job is to inform that duty with an expert, independent judgement, not to take it on wholesale.

Multiple assessors, multiple buildings

On a portfolio, it's common to use several different assessors across different buildings over time — different firms, different individual assessors as staff move on. That's not a problem in itself, but it does mean the format and thoroughness of assessments can vary noticeably between buildings, which makes consistent tracking of actions across a portfolio harder unless it's pulled into one place rather than left across separate PDFs and separate filing systems.

Competence is specific, not general

Competence is not a single badge that covers every building. Someone entirely capable of assessing a small single-occupancy office may not be the right person for a complex multi-occupancy residential block with a single staircase, and the gap between those two is where problems concentrate. The useful question is not whether the assessor is competent in the abstract but whether they are competent for this building, with its particular construction, occupancy and complexity.

Worth establishing before appointment rather than after: what comparable buildings they have assessed, what they would refer on rather than assess themselves, and what their professional indemnity position actually covers. An assessor who is candid about the limits of their own scope is usually a better sign than one who is not.

Common mistakes

• –Treating competence as general rather than specific to this building type
• –Appointing on price without establishing relevant experience
• –Not asking what the assessor considers outside their own scope
• –Assuming an in-house person is competent because they have done it before
• –No record of why the assessor was judged suitable
• –Reusing an assessor as the portfolio grows into building types they have not worked on

What counts as sufficient competence for a specific building is ultimately a judgement call best made with reference to current official guidance and, where there's any doubt, a conversation with a genuinely independent fire safety professional.