What is a fire risk assessment review?
A review is a reconsideration of an existing fire risk assessment to check it is still valid. Reviews are triggered by change, by incidents and by time, and they may or may not lead to a new assessment.
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<a href="https://fireoptix.co.uk/glossary/review">What is a fire risk assessment review?</a> — diagram by
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</figure>The purpose is to catch the moment an assessment stopped describing the building. A refurbishment, a change of use, new occupants, a near miss or an actual fire all make an existing assessment less true than it was.
A review is not automatically a full reassessment. Where nothing material has changed, recording that it was reviewed and remains valid is the correct outcome and takes very little time.
The failure is almost never the review itself — it is that the trigger passes unnoticed. A review date that lives inside the document rather than in a system that raises it will be missed.
In practice
An assessment reviewed on its anniversary and nothing else.
The building has had a fit-out, changed its occupancy and lost a stairway to construction works, all since the last review.
Review is triggered by change as well as by time, and a material alteration is the trigger people miss because nobody treats their own works as material.
The anniversary is a backstop rather than the mechanism.
What goes wrong in practice
- Review dates held in the assessment document and nowhere that alerts anyone.
- A refurbishment completed with no review triggered by it.
- Reviews recorded with no statement of what was considered or concluded.