Fire doors and the fire risk assessment

Fire door compliance does not start with the doors. It starts with the fire risk assessment. The assessment is the document that decides which doors are fire doors, what standard they need to meet, and how the building expects to keep them safe. Everything else, the checks, the inspections, the records, flows from it.

This article explains how fire doors feature in a fire risk assessment, what an assessor looks at, and why the assessment sets the inspection regime rather than replacing it.

Where the FRA comes from

Under the Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005, the responsible person must carry out a suitable and sufficient fire risk assessment of the premises and keep it up to date. Recent changes to the Order now require that assessment to be recorded in full, rather than only where a threshold of employees was met as was previously the case. So for regulated premises, a written, current fire risk assessment is the foundation of compliance, and fire doors sit within it.

How fire doors appear in the assessment

A fire risk assessment looks at the building as a system for protecting people: how a fire could start, how it would spread, how people would escape, and what stops it. Fire doors show up in two of those areas in particular.

First, compartmentation. Fire doors are part of how a building is divided into areas that contain fire and smoke, limiting how far and how fast a fire can spread. The assessment considers whether that compartmentation is adequate and whether the doors forming it are doing their job.

Second, means of escape. Doors protecting corridors, stairwells and lobbies keep escape routes usable. The assessment considers whether those routes stay protected long enough for people to get out.

So when an assessor walks a building, the fire doors are not a separate exercise. They are examined as part of whether the escape strategy and the compartmentation actually hold.

What an assessor looks at

At the assessment stage, the focus is on whether the right doors are present and broadly performing: are there fire doors where the strategy needs them, do they appear to be the right rating, do they close, are they obviously damaged or compromised, and is there a regime in place to keep them maintained. The assessor is forming a view on whether the building's fire door provision is adequate and managed, and flagging where it is not.

The FRA sets the regime, it does not replace inspection

This is the relationship worth understanding. The fire risk assessment is the overarching judgement about the building. It identifies that fire doors matter and that they need to be kept in good order. It does not, by itself, keep them in good order. That is the job of the ongoing checks and detailed inspections that follow, at the frequencies the assessment and the regulations call for.

In practice the two feed each other. The assessment sets the inspection regime; the inspections produce the evidence and the defect history; and that history informs the next review of the assessment. A building with a good assessment but no inspection records cannot show its doors are actually being maintained, and a building with inspection records but a stale assessment may be checking the wrong things.

Keeping it joined up

The thread that connects the assessment to the doors is the record. A clear fire door register, kept current, is what lets a responsible person show that the regime the assessment called for is actually happening, door by door. It is also what an assessor wants to see at the next review.

How DoorTRACE helps

DoorTRACE is the inspection and record layer that sits beneath the fire risk assessment. It holds every door, its rating and certification, its schedule, its inspection history and its defects, so the regime the assessment requires is carried out and evidenced. When the assessment is reviewed, the door history is ready. See the platform or get in touch.