14 September 2026 · Arctic Fire guides
Fire doors and fire stopping are life-safety installations that fail invisibly: a door with the wrong gaps or a seal with the wrong fill looks perfectly fine until the night it matters. That's why third-party certification exists — because in this trade, 'trust us' is not a quality system.
The three-layer system
It helps to know who checks whom. Companies are certified — audited against a scheme standard by a certification body. Certification bodies are accredited — licensed to run those schemes by UKAS, the national accreditation service. So BM TRADA is accredited by UKAS; Arctic Fire is certified by BM TRADA. When a contractor calls themselves 'accredited', they're either using the word loosely or borrowing a status that belongs to the auditor.
What a Q-Mark scheme actually audits
Q-Mark is a product and workmanship certification scheme, and it's invasive by design. The certification body audits the company's processes and records annually, inspects completed installations, and — the part that matters most — requires every operative to be individually competency-assessed and signed off, task by task, by a named Approved Person before they do that work unsupervised. Work carried out under the scheme is labelled and registered, traceable back to the person who did it.
There are separate schemes for separate disciplines. Arctic Fire holds three: scheme 052 (fire door installation), scheme 058 (fire door maintenance) and scheme 05B (fire stopping installation, across all four groups — penetration seals, linear joint seals, cavity barriers and air transfer grilles). All under certificate 4515, with named Approved Persons for doors and for fire stopping.
The honest edges
Certification has boundaries, and a straight contractor tells you where they are. Only work within the scheme's approved scope gets the Q-Mark label; anything outside it must be formally notified, not quietly passed off as certified. And no contractor can 'certify' another firm's past work — anyone offering to should worry you. What a certified firm can do is survey it, tell you its real condition, and bring it up to standard under their own scheme.
Three questions to ask any contractor
Which schemes, exactly, and what certificate number? (Check it with the certification body — takes five minutes.) Who is your Approved Person, and are the operatives on my job individually signed off? And: what evidence do I receive when you're done? If the answers are vague, the certification probably is too.
Need this applied to your building?
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