Fire Safety Testing: What to Check, How Often, and Who Signs It Off
Somebody in your building presses the alarm test button on a Tuesday morning. Somebody else has extinguishers serviced once a year because a company turns up and does it. Emergency lighting is tested by whoever the landlord uses, or possibly by nobody.
That is a maintenance arrangement in the loosest sense, and it is what most offices have. The gap between it and a defensible one is not usually the work. It is the schedule, the records and the question of who is competent to sign anything off.
What the law actually requires
Less prescriptive than most people assume, which is why the schedules confuse people.
Article 17 of the Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005 requires the responsible person to ensure that premises and any facilities, equipment and devices provided are subject to a suitable system of maintenance, and are maintained in an efficient state, in efficient working order and in good repair. Article 13 requires appropriate firefighting equipment and detection, and that any non-automatic equipment is easily accessible, simple to use and indicated by signs.
The Order does not specify intervals. Those come from British Standards, which are not law in themselves but are the recognised means of demonstrating that a system of maintenance is suitable. The frequency for your building follows from your fire risk assessment under article 9, informed by those standards.
So the honest framing is this: the intervals below are the recognised benchmark rather than a statutory timetable, and departing from them requires a reason you can articulate.
1. Fire alarm and detection
The most familiar and the most commonly done badly.
A weekly user test is the convention: a different call point each week, so that over time every point is exercised, with the result recorded. That is a competence-light task somebody on site can perform.
Servicing is different. Periodic inspection and servicing by a competent person, typically at six-monthly intervals with a full annual service, is what verifies that detection, sounders and panel functions actually work. The weekly test tells you the sounders make a noise. It does not tell you that a detector on the fourth floor still detects.
Two frequent findings. The weekly test is done and not recorded. And nobody knows whether the panel is monitored, or by whom, out of hours.
2. Emergency lighting
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The system most likely to be entirely untested, because nothing indicates a failure until the power goes.
Two tests matter. A short monthly function test confirming that luminaires illuminate on loss of supply. And an annual full duration test, running the system for its rated duration, commonly three hours, which is the only test that establishes whether the batteries still hold charge.
The annual test is the one that gets skipped, because it takes the rated duration to perform and leaves the building without emergency lighting while the batteries recharge, so it needs scheduling outside occupied hours. An organisation that has never done a full duration test does not know whether its emergency lighting works, and batteries degrade predictably with age.
3. Fire extinguishers
Three levels of attention, and organisations usually know about one.
A visual check by someone on site, monthly or thereabouts, confirming that extinguishers are present, in the right place, unobstructed, with seals intact and gauges in the correct range. This is the cheapest control on the list and it catches the most common problem, which is an extinguisher that has been moved or used as a doorstop.
An annual basic service by a competent person. And an extended service or overhaul at longer intervals depending on the extinguisher type, which is where a compliant-looking programme sometimes falls short: the annual sticker is present, the longer-cycle work is not.
Provision itself follows from the fire risk assessment. Our guide to extinguisher types covers what fights what, and the assessment determines how many of which and where.
4. Fire doors and escape routes
Covered in more detail elsewhere on this blog, and it belongs on the schedule.
Periodic inspection of fire doors, with frequency set by the assessment and by traffic, plus routine checking of escape routes for obstruction and of final exits for accessibility. Escape route checks are effectively a daily or weekly walk rather than a formal test, and they are the item most often assumed to be somebody else's job in a shared building.
5. Anything electrical that supports the system
The connection people miss.
Alarm panels, emergency lighting, door hold-open devices and powered exit hardware are electrical installations, and the duty to maintain them so far as reasonably practicable to prevent danger sits under regulation 4 of the Electricity at Work Regulations 1989 as well as under fire legislation.
Where a fire safety system depends on a mains supply and a battery backup, both are part of the maintained system.
6. Competence, and what a certificate proves
The question that determines whether the records are worth anything.
Weekly and monthly checks can be done by a trained person on site. Servicing, testing and certification should be done by someone competent for that equipment, and third-party certification of the servicing provider is the usual way of evidencing that.
Two things a certificate does not prove. That the work covered everything it should have, if the scope was narrower than the system. And that identified defects were fixed, which is a separate record and the one an inspector will actually pursue.
7. The log book is the deliverable
The part that converts activity into evidence.
A fire safety log recording tests, services, defects, actions and drills is what demonstrates a suitable system of maintenance. Without it, the work happened and cannot be shown to have happened, which under article 17 is close to the same thing.
Keep it retrievable rather than in a cupboard in one building, particularly across multiple sites, which is where health and safety consultants and software are worth more together than either alone.
The schedule at a glance
| System | On-site check | Competent person | Most common gap |
|---|---|---|---|
| Alarm and detection | Weekly call point test, rotating, recorded | Periodic service and annual inspection | Test done, not recorded |
| Emergency lighting | Short monthly function test | Annual full duration test | Duration test never performed |
| Extinguishers | Monthly visual check | Annual service, longer-cycle overhaul | Extended service missed |
| Fire doors | Routine inspection per assessment | Repair and replacement | No frequency decided |
| Escape routes | Routine walk for obstruction | n/a | Assumed to be the landlord's |
| Electrical support | n/a | Maintained under electrical duties | Not connected to fire regime |
| Records | Log maintained | Certificates and defect closure | Defects logged, not closed |
The right-hand column is where most organisations sit. Note that four of the seven gaps are recording or follow-through failures rather than failures to do the work.
In leased and multi-tenant buildings
The recurring split, with a fire-specific consequence.
The operator or landlord typically maintains the building systems and holds the certificates. You occupy the space and remain responsible for your own arrangements and your people.
Ask for three things in writing: the current certificates for alarm, emergency lighting and extinguishers covering your demise, confirmation of the testing schedule, and the route by which defects affecting your floor are reported to you. Where more than one responsible person has duties in respect of the same premises, the law requires co-operation and co-ordination, and government guidance on workplace fire safety responsibilities sets out the framework.
An operator who cannot produce a current certificate has answered a more important question than the one you asked.
For international groups
Fire safety testing regimes are national and prescriptive in a way that transfers poorly. Intervals, certification requirements and who may perform the work all differ, and several jurisdictions require registration or licensing of servicing providers that has no British equivalent.
A group standard requiring that every site has a documented maintenance schedule, a competent provider and a retrievable log will transfer. The intervals themselves will not. Periodic health and safety audits are the practical mechanism for confirming each site meets its own national requirement rather than the group's assumption.
Where Arinite fits
Arinite's fire safety work covers the assessment that determines what your building needs and the schedule that follows from it. We support 1,500+ businesses across 50+ countries and protect 100,000+ employees, with 95%+ client retention over 15+ years. Our health and safety consultants work extensively with legal, finance and banking and IT and software organisations, most of them in premises they do not control.
Where sites span several countries, our global health and safety consultants establish what each jurisdiction requires, and our international health and safety consultants keep that current as buildings change.
If you could not produce a full duration emergency lighting test result for your building, a free gap analysis will tell you what else is missing from the log.
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Written by
Arinite Health & Safety Consultants
Health & Safety Expert at Arinite
