Fire safety guidance for block management: what managing agents need to know

Managing agents responsible for residential blocks sit at the centre of fire safety compliance for those buildings — coordinating access for inspections, commissioning fire risk assessments, and, in practice, being the point of contact when leaseholders or residents have concerns. Getting this right across a portfolio of buildings, each with its own age, construction and risk profile, is one of the more demanding parts of the role.

The legal framework

The Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005 applies to the common parts of any residential building containing more than one set of domestic premises — the Responsible Person for those common parts (typically the freeholder or managing agent) has the core duties of assessing and managing fire risk. For higher-risk buildings — broadly, those at least 18 metres or 7 storeys with two or more residential units — the Building Safety Act 2022 adds a further layer, introducing the role of the Accountable Person and additional duties around building safety cases, mandatory occupation information, and resident engagement. Managing agents need to be clear about which regime applies to each building in their portfolio, since the two frameworks operate alongside each other rather than one replacing the other.

What good fire safety management looks like across a portfolio

For a managing agent overseeing multiple blocks, the practical challenge isn't usually understanding any single building's requirements — it's maintaining a consistent, current picture across every building at once: which blocks have a current fire risk assessment, which have outstanding actions and how urgent they are, which fire doors are due for inspection, and which review dates are approaching. Without a structured system, this information tends to live in separate reports and email threads per building, which makes it very difficult to answer a simple question like "are we compliant right now?" with confidence.

Communicating with leaseholders and residents

Fire safety in residential blocks isn't purely a technical or legal matter — leaseholders and residents reasonably want to understand what's being done and why, particularly following the significant increase in scrutiny of building and fire safety across the sector in recent years. Being able to show a clear, structured compliance record — what's been assessed, what's been actioned, and what's scheduled — is as much a trust and communication tool as it is a legal safeguard.

Common pressure points

The recurring issues we see in block management fire safety tend to be the same across different portfolios: fire risk assessments that technically exist but are out of date and haven't been reviewed against current guidance; fire door inspection findings that were identified but never tracked through to completion; and a lack of any single, portfolio-wide view that would let a managing agent answer a compliance question quickly and confidently, rather than having to dig through individual building files.

How we support managing agents

We work with managing agents to bring fire risk assessments, fire door inspections and the resulting actions into a single, ongoing compliance record across a portfolio — so compliance status is something you can state with confidence at any point, not something that has to be reconstructed when it's asked for. If that's a gap in how your portfolio currently operates, it's worth a conversation.