If you own, manage or work in a building in the UK, there’s a decent chance you’ve heard of an EPC – an Energy Performance Certificate.
There’s also a decent chance you’ve never seen your building’s fire risk assessment.
That gap isn’t just a small technicality. It’s a serious blind spot in how we manage building safety.
Recently, I completed fire risk assessments for two commercial occupiers in the same building – a mixed-use property with shops at ground floor and residential accommodation above. The building has previously suffered severe fire damage.
Both businesses now have up-to-date fire risk assessments.
Both have clear action plans.
And both, so far, have done… almost nothing with them.
This is not unusual. And it’s exactly why I believe we need a central, national fire risk assessment register – something with the same visibility, permanence and accountability as the EPC register.
EPCs vs Fire Risk Assessments: One Is Public, One Might as Well Not Exist
Let’s look at the contrast.
EPCs
Every building that’s sold or let must have an EPC. EPCs are logged on a national register. Anyone can check them – tenants, buyers, lenders, solicitors, surveyors, regulators. That transparency creates pressure: if your rating is terrible, you know people will see it.
Fire Risk Assessments
Every non-domestic building (and the common parts of residential buildings) must have a suitable and sufficient fire risk assessment. The findings should be acted upon: improvements made, actions closed out, records kept. Yet in practice, many FRAs: live in a ring-binder behind reception sit in someone’s email inbox as a PDF or are buried in a shared drive nobody ever checks
No central database.
No national register.
No simple way for residents, staff, regulators, insurers or even new duty holders to see:
When the FRA was last done What actions were raised Whether they were ever completed
In other words: we centralise how efficient a building is, but not how safe it is.
The Building That Already Burned
Back to that building.
Mixed use: two commercial units at ground floor, residential above. History of serious fire damage. Two separate duty holders. Two separate fire risk assessments completed.
On paper, you might say, “great – they’re compliant.”
But when you dig into it:
Significant actions identified. Some relatively straightforward improvements. Clear risk reduction measures.
And yet, months later, no meaningful action.
No one external can see that gap:
The residents living above can’t log into a system and check if key fire actions have been completed. Insurers don’t have automatic visibility of overdue high-risk actions. The local fire and rescue service doesn’t have a single, authoritative record to reference before they walk into a building that’s already burned once.
If there were a central register – just like the EPC database – those outstanding actions wouldn’t be so easy to ignore.
Meanwhile… Everyone Wants To Be the “Gold Standard”
What makes this more frustrating is the noise in the market.
Every week, a new organisation pops up aiming to be:
“The UK’s leading fire risk assessment provider” “The gold standard in building safety compliance” “The go-to platform for fire safety management”
We have:
Accreditation schemes Training bodies Competence frameworks Software platforms “Market-leading” portals And countless consultancies (like mine) genuinely trying to do the right thing
But what we don’t have is a basic, shared, national system that says:
“Here is this building.
Here is the latest fire risk assessment.
Here are the actions.
Here’s whether they’ve been completed.”
In other words, we’re busy polishing the branding of fire safety while leaving the infrastructure of accountability underdeveloped.
It’s like building more and more fancy sat nav apps when we still haven’t bothered to put road signs on half the roads.
What a National Fire Risk Assessment Register Could Do
I’m not talking about something over-engineered. The principle is simple:
If you must have a fire risk assessment, it should live on a national, digital register.
That could:
Follow the building, not the consultant When duty holders change, the new owner/tenant can instantly see the history of assessments and actions, instead of starting from scratch or hunting through old files. Expose inaction Actions could be logged with target dates and completion statuses. Overdue high-risk items would be visible to: residents enforcing authorities insurers lenders Support the Fire and Rescue Service Crews and protection teams could access up-to-date FRA information when planning visits or responding to incidents. Reinforce competence, not just claims If you want to brand yourself as the “go-to standard”, show that your assessments: are uploaded correctly are clear and actionable and actually lead to completed actions Empower residents and staff People who live in or work in a building would have a route to see whether their building is: assessed overdue or stuck in “we’ll get to it” limbo.
“But We Already Have Systems…”
Yes – lots of them. And that’s part of the problem.
Right now, we have:
Individual consultancy portals Landlord-owned systems FM and CAFM platforms Excel sheets, SharePoint folders, and ad-hoc databases
All doing their own thing.
These can be useful tools, but they’re fragmented and private. They don’t provide the clear, public accountability that something like the EPC register does.
A national fire risk assessment register wouldn’t replace all of those systems – but it would give them a common destination. Think of it as the “final, authoritative copy” of the FRA record.
This Isn’t About Blame – It’s About Making the Right Thing the Easy Thing
Most duty holders I meet aren’t malicious or reckless. They’re busy. They’re juggling costs. They’re overwhelmed by competing priorities.
A central FRA register would:
make it harder to “forget” serious recommendations make it easier to hand over responsibility properly and help regulators and insurers focus attention where the risk is highest.
We’ve already accepted that energy performance is important enough to warrant a national database.
Surely life safety deserves at least the same treatment.
Where Do We Go From Here?
I don’t pretend to have all the technical answers, but I am clear on this:
We already require fire risk assessments by law. We already know that “paper-only” systems fail people. We already have a working model in the form of the EPC register.
So the real question is no longer “can we do this?”
It’s: “How long are we willing to wait before we do?”
In the meantime, if you’re a building owner, landlord or business:
Don’t let your FRA sit in a drawer. Track the actions. Close the gaps. Treat your fire risk assessment like a living document – not a one-off tick box.
And if you work in the world of fire safety (like I do), maybe it’s time we spent a little less energy claiming to be the “go-to standard” – and a bit more pushing for the shared infrastructure that would finally hold all of us to account