One of the most common questions a responsible person asks is also one of the least clearly answered: who is actually allowed to inspect our fire doors? There is no single legal licence that someone must hold. What the law asks for instead is competence, and understanding what that means is the key to getting it right.
This article explains what competence means in this context, who should carry out which kind of check, and why the accountability does not move just because the work is delegated.
The fire safety legislation requires the responsible person to appoint one or more competent persons to help meet their duties. Competence is generally understood as having sufficient training, knowledge and experience to carry out the task properly. It is a standard, not a certificate, and the right level of competence depends on the task.
That distinction matters because there are two quite different fire door activities, and they need different levels of competence.
The routine checks required under Regulation 10, the quarterly checks on communal doors and annual checks on flat entrance doors, are visual checks. They look at whether the door closes and latches, whether seals are present and undamaged, whether gaps look right, and whether there is obvious damage or any wedging.
These can be carried out by a person who has been suitably trained to do them. That might be a member of the building or estates team who has had appropriate training. The bar is genuine training and understanding, not guesswork, but it does not require a specialist inspector for every check.
A detailed inspection is a different thing. Carried out periodically against a standard such as BS 8214, it goes deeper: examining the closer mechanism, the hinges, the certification evidence, the fixings, and the assembly as a whole. This calls for a higher level of competence, the kind you would expect from an experienced fire door inspector.
For this work, third-party certification schemes exist to demonstrate competence, such as the Fire Door Inspection Scheme and similar accredited programmes. Using a certificated inspector is not a strict legal requirement in every case, but it is a recognised way to show that the person doing the work is genuinely competent, which is exactly what the responsible person needs to be able to demonstrate.
This is the point that catches people out. You can delegate the work, but you cannot delegate the responsibility. If a responsible person appoints a contractor to inspect their doors, the legal duty still sits with the responsible person. They need to satisfy themselves that the person is competent, that the inspections actually happened, and that what was found was acted on.
That is why evidence matters so much. It is not enough to have hired someone good. You need to be able to show, after the fact, that the right checks were done at the right frequency by someone competent, and that defects were followed through. Records are how delegated work stays defensible.
DoorTRACE records who carried out each inspection and when, against every door, on the engineer app, so the trail of who did what is built automatically. For a responsible person relying on external engineers, that visibility is the difference between hoping the work is being done and being able to prove it. See the platform or book a demo.
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