Fire Risk Assessment for Small Offices: What's Actually Different

 A fire risk assessment for a small office is not a scaled down version of one for a warehouse or a building site, it just has fewer hazards to work through. Under the Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005, the person responsible for the office, usually the employer or whoever controls the premises, has to carry out a suitable and sufficient fire risk assessment, keep it up to date, and act on what it finds. For a small office that mostly means desks, computers, a kitchenette and maybe a server cupboard, so the assessment looks different to one for a factory floor, but the legal duty is exactly the same.

What makes an office assessment different

Offices tend to have a narrower range of fire hazards than industrial premises. You are mostly looking at electrical equipment (several extension leads daisy chained into one socket is still one of the most common findings), portable heaters, kitchen appliances, and stored paper or card. There is rarely anything flammable in bulk, no welding, no chemical storage. That means the assessment can usually be done in an afternoon rather than needing specialist input, but it still has to cover every area an employee could be in, including store cupboards, comms rooms and any shared kitchen.

The checks that actually get done

A competent assessor will walk the whole floor and check that escape routes are clear and lead to a final exit, fire doors close properly and are not wedged open, fire extinguishers are the right type and in date, smoke alarms or a fire alarm system are tested and logged, emergency lighting works if the escape routes have no natural light, and the electrics are not overloaded. They will also work out how many people could realistically be in the building at once and whether the escape routes and final exits can cope with that number getting out quickly.

Who counts as the responsible person

In a small office this is usually the employer, but if you rent space in a shared building, the landlord or managing agent is responsible for shared areas like stairwells and the main entrance, while you are responsible for what happens inside your own unit. It is worth checking your lease, because a lot of small business owners assume the landlord has this covered when the split of responsibility is actually different, and inspectors will ask specifically who signed off the assessment.

How often it needs reviewing

There is no fixed legal interval, but you need to review it whenever something changes, such as moving desks around, taking on more staff, changing the layout, or an incident, even a near miss. In practice most small offices review it annually as a minimum, just to catch anything that has drifted since the last check, like a fire door that has started sticking or an extinguisher that has gone out of date.
If you want to see exactly what an inspector checks room by room, our fire risk assessment checklist article breaks it down in full, and if you are weighing up whether to bring someone in, our guide to typical fire risk assessment costs in the UK is worth reading first.
If your office has not had a proper fire risk assessment, or the last one is starting to look out of date, it is worth getting a professional set of eyes on it rather than guessing. Tony Carlyon's fire risk assessment service covers UK properties and businesses of this size, done properly and written up so you have a clear record to show if anyone ever asks for it.

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