Residential blocks and social housing

Since January 2023, the Responsible Person for a multi-occupied residential building with storeys over 11 metres must carry out quarterly checks of fire doors in communal areas and annual checks of flat entrance doors, on a best-endeavours basis, and keep a record. Below 11 metres, the duty to provide residents with information about fire doors still applies — and the general duty under the Fire Safety Order applies to every block regardless of height.

For a housing provider with a stock of blocks, that is not a fire door problem. It is a programme management problem with a fire door in it. The hard part is not checking a door; it is knowing how many doors you have, where they are, which ones you checked in which quarter, and being able to prove it two years later when somebody asks.

Alongside the doors sits the compartmentation itself — and in low-rise terraced and converted stock, the single most common and most serious defect is in the roof void, where the party wall was never taken up to the underside of the roof covering.

The regulations that bite in this sector

• Fire Safety (England) Regulations 2022, Regulation 10 — quarterly communal and annual flat entrance door checks in buildings over 11 metres.
• Regulation 5 — information to residents about fire doors, applying to all multi-occupied residential buildings.
• Fire Safety Act 2021 — confirming that structure, external walls and flat entrance doors fall within the fire risk assessment.
• Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005 — the underlying duty on the Responsible Person.
• Building Safety Act 2022 — Golden Thread and, for higher-risk buildings, the safety case.

What we typically find

• Flat entrance doors replaced by residents with unrated doors, or original doorsets with the intumescent seals painted solid.
• Communal doorsets propped, wedged or with closers disconnected because they are too heavy for residents.
• Party walls stopping at ceiling level in the roof void — the single most common serious defect in terraced and converted stock.
• Services run through compartment walls during rewires, boiler replacements and broadband installs, never sealed.
• Riser and meter cupboard doors with no rating and no self-closing.
• No asset list at all — the provider does not know how many doorsets are in the block.

Illustrative — our own project photography is being added as we collect it.

Working inside the constraints

Related work

Costed, banded remedial programmes and continuous Regulation 10 records — written so a small team can act on them without a consultant to interpret them.

From enquiry to certification