The law says you must have a fire risk assessment. It does not say who is allowed to write one. There is no licence, no register you can check, and no qualification anybody is legally required to hold. Someone can decide they are a fire risk assessor this morning and be quoting you this afternoon.
So the question is not where to find an assessor. There are thousands. The question is how you tell a competent one from someone with a template and a clipboard, when the law gives you nothing to check them against. That is what this page is for, and it ends with assessors covering your area.
Do you need one?
Almost certainly, unless the building is a private home you live in yourself. The duty falls on whoever the law calls the responsible person, and government guidance puts it plainly: “As the responsible person you must carry out and regularly review a fire risk assessment of the premises.”
- If you employ anyone, you are caught. Offices, shops, workshops, warehouses, pubs, restaurants, salons, garages.
- If you are a landlord, you are caught for the common parts of any building you let, and in full for an HMO.
- If you manage a block of flats, the duty covers stairwells, corridors, plant rooms and anywhere else residents share.
- If you run a care home, a school, a village hall or a holiday let, you are caught.
- A single private dwelling you occupy yourself is the main thing sitting outside it.
It has to be written down. Government guidance is unambiguous: “You must keep a written record of your fire risk assessment.” An assessment that lives in your head is not one, and it will not help you if you are ever asked to produce it.
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What you are actually buying
Not a document. Liability cover.
If there is a fire and the assessment turns out to be inadequate, the person prosecuted is the responsible person. That is you, or your company, and the penalties under fire safety law are unlimited fines and, in serious cases, imprisonment. Appointing a competent assessor does not transfer the legal duty. What it does is put a qualified third party’s name and reasoning on the document, so your position is that you appointed someone competent rather than that you formed your own view and got it wrong.
There is a second reason, and for many people it is the deciding one. Insurers, freeholders, mortgage lenders and licensing authorities routinely require an assessment by a competent third party, whatever the legal minimum happens to be. A refused claim after a fire is a worse outcome than the fee you saved.
There is no such thing as a licensed fire risk assessor
This is the part most people get wrong, and it is worth being blunt about.
The law requires a competent person. It does not define competence as a qualification, it does not name a scheme, and nobody maintains a statutory register. Compare that with asbestos removal, where the HSE issues licences and publishes the list, and you can check a contractor’s number in thirty seconds. Fire risk assessment has no equivalent.
What exists instead is voluntary third party certification, most commonly BAFE SP205, alongside registers run by professional bodies. These are meaningful. They are audited, and a firm has to evidence its competence to get on them. But because they are voluntary, two things follow:
- A good assessor may not be on any of them. Certification costs money and takes time, and plenty of experienced people never bother.
- Nobody is breaking the law by not being on them. So absence tells you less than you would like, and presence does not remove your duty to satisfy yourself.
The practical consequence: you cannot outsource this judgement to a register. You have to ask questions instead, and the next section is the questions.
Five questions to ask before you pay anyone
Ask all five, before money changes hands. Anyone worth appointing answers them without hesitating, because the answers are what wins them the work.
- What are your qualifications, and who awarded them? You are listening for a recognised fire safety qualification and a professional body, not “twenty years in the fire service”. Time served is valuable, but firefighting and fire risk assessing are different disciplines and one does not confer the other.
- Are you third party certificated, and under which scheme? If yes, take the registration number and check it with the scheme directly rather than taking the logo on the website at face value.
- What is your professional indemnity cover, and does it extend to fire risk assessment? If their assessment is wrong and you are prosecuted, this is the only thing between you and their apology. Ask for the figure, not just whether they have it.
- How many premises like mine have you assessed? A care home, a listed pub and a distribution warehouse are different jobs. Someone excellent at small offices can still be the wrong appointment for your building.
- What will I actually receive, and will you walk me through it? Ask to see a sample report with the client details removed. If they will not show you one, you have your answer.
What a proper report contains
The gap between a competent assessment and a worthless one is visible in the document itself. A report you can rely on identifies the following, specifically to your building rather than in general terms:
- The fire hazards and ignition sources actually present, named and located.
- Who is at risk, including anyone sleeping on the premises, anyone with mobility or sensory impairment, lone workers, and visitors unfamiliar with the layout.
- The condition of escape routes, travel distances, final exits, and whether they work in practice rather than on the plan.
- Fire doors, compartmentation and fire stopping, with an honest note of anything that could not be inspected without opening up.
- Detection, alarm and emergency lighting, whether the coverage suits the building, and when each was last tested.
- An action plan with priorities and timescales, so you know what to fix this week and what can wait until spring.
- A stated review date, and what would trigger an earlier one.
What should worry you: a report that is mostly tick boxes, one that could describe any building on the street, photographs of somebody else’s premises, and no action plan. A short report is not automatically bad. A generic one always is.
What it should cost
Prices move with size, complexity and whether anyone sleeps in the building. A small single storey office is a different job to a six storey block of flats, and quotes reflect that.
What matters more than the headline number is what sits inside it: whether the fee covers a return visit, whether the action plan is included or charged separately, and whether you are buying a document or a document plus somebody who will explain it. Get more than one quote and get them in writing. Location moves the price as well, which is part of why we list assessors by area. For the national picture on pricing, see what a fire risk assessment should cost.
Can you do it yourself?
Legally, yes. Government guidance says so directly: “You can do the fire risk assessment yourself with the help of standard fire safety risk assessment guides.” We would rather tell you that than have you discover it later and wonder what else we left out.
In practice it is a narrower option than it sounds, and the reason is that the things which fail in a fire are mostly the things an untrained eye cannot see.
- Anywhere people sleep, treat it as out of the question. Sleeping accommodation raises the stakes enormously and the assessment gets correspondingly harder.
- More than one storey, or more than one occupier, and escape routes and compartmentation stop being observations and become judgement calls.
- Fire stopping above ceilings, cavity barriers, the true rating of a door. These are the common failures, and none of them are visible from the corridor.
- If an insurer, freeholder, lender or licensing authority is involved, your own assessment will usually not satisfy them anyway.
- Remember who carries the risk. Doing it yourself does not lower the duty or the penalty. It removes the one person whose professional judgement you could point to afterwards.
Where it genuinely is reasonable: a small, simple, single storey premises with an obvious layout, few people, nothing unusual stored in it, and nobody sleeping there. If that describes you, the official guides are free and you do not need to pay anybody. If it does not, the fee is cheap next to what it covers.
Questions people ask
How often does a fire risk assessment need reviewing?
There is no fixed interval in law. The duty is to review regularly, and whenever the assessment is no longer valid. In practice that means annually for most premises, and immediately after any material change: building work, a change of use, new occupiers, a near miss, or a significant change in who is in the building.
Who is the responsible person if I rent my premises?
It can be both of you. A landlord typically holds the duty for common parts and the structure, the tenant for the area they occupy and control. Read the lease, and if the split is unclear, settle it in writing before there is a fire rather than after.
Does a fire risk assessment expire?
Not formally, but it stops being valid the moment the building or its use changes enough that the assessment no longer describes reality. A three year old assessment for an unchanged building may still be sound. A three month old one for a building that has just been refurbished is not.
Is a fire risk assessment the same as a fire safety certificate?
No, and fire safety certificates no longer exist in the way people remember them. Anyone offering you a “fire safety certificate” instead of an assessment is either using loose language or is not current on the regime. Ask which.
Do you carry out assessments yourselves?
No. We are not assessors and we do not quote for the work. We publish what the law asks of you and who covers your area, and where any listing is ever paid for, that page will say so in the place you would look.
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