Fire Safety Mistakes to Avoid | Flame Shield London

In short

Fire safety in most buildings does not fail dramatically. It drifts. An assessment gets written and filed, a layout changes, a closer gets disconnected, a zone gets isolated during a false alarm and never restored, and the log book fills with identical entries. Every item below is cheap to correct on its own. What costs money is finding nine of them at once, during an inspection, with a deadline attached.

The pattern behind all nine

Fire safety is a system of small, boring, repeated actions. It fails when one of those actions stops happening and nothing in the building notices. The fix is almost never expensive equipment; it is a named person, a date and a record.

1. Treating the assessment as the finish line

The fire risk assessment produces an action plan. Filing the assessment and leaving the actions open is worse than not having one, because it is written proof you knew.

We regularly open a fire safety file, find a competent, well-written assessment, and find the same eleven actions still open two years later. The Responsible Person is not being negligent in their own mind — the report arrived, it got read, it got filed, and the actions had no owner and no date.

If an action genuinely is not going to be done, the honest response is to reassess whether it was necessary, in writing, and record why. Silence is the worst of the three options.

2. Assuming the contract transfers the duty

It does not. Under the Fire Safety Order the duty stays with the Responsible Person. A maintenance contract is evidence you took it seriously, and only counts as evidence if the contractor can be shown to be competent.

Because there is no licence to service a fire alarm in the UK, competence is demonstrated through third-party certification. That is what makes scope worth checking carefully. Registration schemes are specific to the work they cover: a scheme covering fire detection and alarm systems does not cover extinguishers, fire risk assessment, emergency lighting or fire doors, which sit under separate schemes.

Ask any supplier which scheme number they hold and for which scope, and ask them to point you at the register so you can look it up yourself. A supplier who answers precisely is telling you something. So is one who answers vaguely.

3. Never testing the parts that are not detectors

Door hold-open devices, disabled refuge communication, interfaces to plant and lifts, and sounders in areas nobody visits. They are part of the fire alarm system and they are the parts most likely to have gone untested.

A service visit that walks the building triggering detectors and signing the certificate looks complete. The question worth asking your engineer is when the hold-opens were last proved to release, and when somebody last spoke into the refuge point and got an answer. On a takeover audit these are the first things we ask to see demonstrated, because a certificate that does not cover them is not describing the whole system.

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4. Living with false alarms

A system that cries wolf trains people not to evacuate, and pushes managers into isolating zones that then stay isolated. Recurring unwanted signals are a design or siting fault, not a fact of life.

The causes are usually identifiable: an optical smoke detector too near a kitchen pass, a shower room, a loading door or a dusty process; a detector type chosen for the price list rather than the environment; a warehouse where roof height means smoke stratifies before it ever reaches a point detector. Each of those has a proper answer — heat detection, a different detector type, beam or aspirating detection.

The dangerous part is not the noise. It is the isolation. A zone gets isolated at 3am to stop the sounders, the night manager goes home, and nobody restores it. That building now has a hole in its detection that exists on nobody's paperwork.

5. Letting the building change without telling anyone

A partition, a new tenant, a change of use, a mezzanine, a refurbished kitchen. Each changes escape routes, occupancy or risk, and each is a trigger to review the assessment and the alarm design at the time, not at the next anniversary.

Warehouse conversions are the sharpest version of this. The detection was designed when the building was one open industrial volume; it is still laid out that way even though there are now twelve studios, a mezzanine and a shared kitchen. A mezzanine almost always needs detection underneath as well as above. If the use changed and the alarm did not, the certificate on the wall is describing a building that no longer exists.

Keep a one-line change log. Date, what changed, who did it. It is the cheapest fire safety measure available, and it turns an expensive reconstruction exercise at review time into a ten-minute conversation.

6. Buying the wrong alarm category

BS 5839-1 categories describe how much of a building is covered and why. Your fire risk assessment should name the category the building needs. Buying to a lower one because it quoted cheaper is a decision that surfaces at the worst possible moment.

The category is a design decision driven by the assessment, not a product tier. It is worth asking to see the design and commissioning certificate, because that document states the category the system was actually built to. Where a building has no certificate at all, that absence is itself the finding — you cannot demonstrate compliance with a standard you have no record of meeting.

7. Wedging fire doors

A fire door that does not close does nothing. Wedging is almost always practical rather than careless, which is why removing the wedge without fixing the reason simply produces a new wedge.

If a route genuinely needs the door open, the compliant answer is a hold-open device wired to the fire alarm, so it stands open all day and releases when the alarm sounds. Then it joins the list in point three — and has to be proved at every service.

8. Extinguishers chosen by price rather than risk

Type and siting follow what could burn. A CO2 near electrical risk, foam or water on ordinary combustibles, a wet chemical unit in a commercial kitchen. A row of identical extinguishers along a corridor is a purchasing decision, not a fire safety one.

Servicing follows BS 5306, and the visible signs of neglect are easy to spot yourself: a missing or expired service label, a pressure gauge outside the green, a broken tamper seal, an extinguisher on the floor rather than on its bracket, or one that has quietly migrated to prop open a door. The last one is two failures in a single object.

9. No log book, or a log book nobody fills in

The log is where you demonstrate that everything above actually happened. An inspector reading four identical quarterly entries on a building with a visibly wedged door learns about the whole management system, not just the door.

Weekly alarm test, with the call point used recorded and rotated.
Service visits and the engineer report from each one.
Emergency lighting tests, monthly function and annual duration.
Fire door checks, with anything that failed and when it was put right.
Extinguisher servicing and any discharges.
Drills, training, false alarms and their causes, plus every remedial with a closed-out date.

Nobody is grading the handwriting. Dates, names and honest entries beat a tidy book with nothing real in it. A log that records a false alarm, the cause and the fix is far stronger evidence of a managed building than one that records nothing ever going wrong.

Common fire safety mistakes, your questions answered

What is the most common fire safety failing in a commercial building?

Paperwork that has fallen out of step with the building. The assessment describes a layout that changed two years ago, the servicing records stop somewhere in the middle, and the log book has a run of identical entries. The individual items are usually cheap to fix; the pattern is what an inspector reads.

Does having a maintenance contract make me compliant?

No. A contract is evidence that you took the duty seriously, and it only works as evidence if the company can be shown to be competent. The legal duty under the Fire Safety Order stays with the Responsible Person and cannot be transferred to a contractor.

Are false alarms actually a compliance problem?

Yes, in two ways. People stop evacuating, which is the real danger, and repeated unwanted signals push building managers into isolating zones and forgetting to restore them. A recurring false alarm is a design or siting fault to be corrected, not a nuisance to be tolerated.

How do I know if my fire alarm is the right category?

Your fire risk assessment should state the category the building needs, expressed in BS 5839-1 terms such as L2 or M. Compare that with the category on the alarm design and commissioning certificate. If you have no certificate, or the two disagree, that is the finding.

What should be in a fire safety log book?

Weekly alarm tests with the call point used, service visits and their reports, emergency lighting tests, fire door checks, extinguisher servicing, drills, training, false alarms and their causes, and any remedial work with the date it was closed. Dates and names matter more than neatness.

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Nine fire safety mistakes we find again and again