The assessment is the start, not the finish

There is a comfortable moment when a fire risk assessment lands in your inbox. The job feels done. A professional has been, they have looked at the building, and there is a document to prove it. But the assessment is not the finish line. It is the starting gun. What matters is what you do with the significant findings, and this is exactly where most buildings quietly come unstuck.

What a significant finding is

A fire risk assessment does not produce a pass or a fail. It produces a list of significant findings: the things the assessor judged matter to the safety of people in the building, each with a recommended action and usually a priority. Some will be urgent. Some will be housekeeping. Together they are a plan of work, and the law expects you to act on them.

The duty is to act, not just to assess

This is the part people miss. The Fire Safety Order does not ask you simply to obtain an assessment and file it. It asks you to make sure the general fire precautions are in place, and to act on what the assessment finds. An assessment sitting in a drawer with a stack of open actions is not evidence of compliance. It is evidence, in writing and with your name on it, that you knew what needed doing and had not done it. That is a worse position than not having asked.

Why buildings stall here

The stall is rarely down to negligence. It is usually capacity. The assessment names twenty things. Some need a contractor, some need a decision, some need money, some need a resident's cooperation. No single person owns the list, so it drifts. Six months later the actions are still open, the assessment is ageing, and nobody can say with confidence which items are done. The building has not got any safer, and the paper trail now shows a known risk left unaddressed.

How to close the loop

Closing out findings is unglamorous but simple in principle. Someone has to own the list. Each action needs a person, a plan and a date. High priority items get done first and get recorded when they are. The whole thing needs reviewing so that "in progress" does not quietly become "forgotten". And when the next assessment comes round, the assessor should be able to see that the last set of findings was actioned, which is one of the clearest signals of a well-managed building there is.

Where an outsourced function fits

This is precisely the work an outsourced fire safety function exists to do. Not the assessment itself, but the unglamorous business of holding the actions, chasing them, recording them and making sure the loop actually closes. Most managing agents and resident boards do not have anyone whose job that is, which is why the findings stall. Because OmniFire has no works arm, when we tell you an action matters, or that one can wait, that judgement is about your building, not about work we stand to win.

If you are sitting on an assessment with findings you have not worked through, that is the thing worth fixing first. Email s.coogan@omnifire.co.uk.