An enforcement officer from your local fire and rescue service can serve a prohibition notice that closes your office the same afternoon they walk in, and they do not need an actual fire to justify it. A blocked stairwell, a wedged-open fire door, or a fire risk assessment that no longer matches the building is enough. Autumn is exactly when those gaps open up, which is why an office fire safety review now, before people settle back into full weeks, is the cheapest protection you will buy all year.
Under the Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005 (the RRO 2005), the responsible person, usually the employer or whoever has control of the premises, must keep the fire risk assessment current. Reviewing your workplace fire risk assessment is not optional box-ticking. Article 9 of the RRO 2005 requires a review whenever there has been a significant change, and government guidance recommends a full review at least once a year. Skip it and you are exposed on two fronts: the enforcing authority, and your insurer, who can decline a claim if your paperwork was out of date when a fire started.
Why autumn is the moment to review
Fire risk assessments go stale quietly. The building on paper slowly stops matching the building people actually work in, and autumn is when the drift is at its worst. Summer leavers have gone, new starters are arriving, and the pattern of who is in the office on which days has shifted again.
Hybrid working is the big one. If your assessment assumed 30 people on site five days a week and reality is now 12 on Mondays and 40 on Wednesdays, your escape route capacity, your fire warden coverage, and your headcount for a roll call are all built on an out-of-date picture. Desks get moved to fit the new pattern, and a desk in the wrong place can narrow a corridor or block a final exit without anyone deciding to do it.
Then there is the heater problem. As the office cools, portable heaters come back out of the cupboard, often the cheapest fan or bar heaters someone brought from home. Placed against a bin, a stack of paper, or a curtain, and plugged into an already busy extension lead, they are one of the most common causes of workplace fires in the colder months. Darker evenings also mean your emergency lighting earns its keep: if the power fails at 4pm in January, people need to find the stairs in the dark.
What the RRO 2005 actually requires you to check
The legal trigger for a review is not the calendar, it is change. Article 9 of the RRO 2005 says the assessment must be reviewed regularly to keep it up to date, and in particular where there is reason to suspect it is no longer valid or there has been a significant change to the premises, the people, or the way the work is organised. New starters, a reorganised floor, a change of use for a room, or a near miss all count as significant change.
There is a second point that catches a lot of small employers out. Since 1 October 2023, when Section 156 of the Building Safety Act 2022 amended the RRO 2005, every responsible person in England and Wales must record the fire risk assessment in full, along with the fire safety arrangements. The old rule that only businesses with five or more employees had to write it down is gone. If you employ three people and keep nothing on paper, you are now in breach whatever your headcount. If you are unsure who carries this duty in a shared or leased building, our guide to the responsible person under UK fire safety law sets out how it works.
The RRO 2005 covers England and Wales. Scotland runs under the Fire (Scotland) Act 2005 and the Fire Safety (Scotland) Regulations 2006, and Northern Ireland under its own fire safety order, but the core duty to assess and review is the same wherever you trade. Penalties for serious breaches are not trivial: fines for the worst cases are unlimited, and enforcement can extend to prohibition notices and, in the gravest cases, prosecution.
Your office fire safety review checklist
You do not need to start from scratch. An office fire safety review is a structured walk through the building with your existing assessment in hand, checking that what it describes is still true. Work through these areas:
- Escape routes and final exits. Walk every route out. Nothing new should be blocking a corridor or stairwell, no deliveries stacked in the way, no bikes, no boxes, and every final exit should open easily from the inside without a key.
- Fire doors. Check they still self-close fully, are not propped or wedged, and that seals and closers are intact. New furniture or a new door wedge from the summer is a common culprit.
- Detection and alarm. Confirm the weekly alarm test is being logged, call points are reachable and not blocked by a relocated desk, and no detector heads were removed or covered during any summer redecoration.
- Emergency lighting. Test it and log it. This matters more every week as the evenings draw in.
- Portable heaters and electrical load. The autumn question. Inspect any heaters coming back into use, keep them well clear of anything that burns, and check for overloaded sockets and daisy-chained extension leads under desks.
- Extinguishers. Right types for the risks, in date, and on their brackets. Servicing should follow BS 5306.
- People. An up-to-date list of who works there, who needs help to get out (each of those people should have a personal emergency evacuation plan), and who your trained fire wardens are.
- The document itself. Read your significant findings against the building today. If a paragraph describes a layout or a headcount that no longer exists, it needs rewriting, not just re-dating.
For a full room-by-room method rather than a refresh, the step-by-step office fire risk assessment guide takes you through each stage from identifying hazards to writing up the action plan.
New starters need more than a desk
Every new employee should get a fire safety induction on day one, not in week three when someone remembers. That means showing them the escape routes from where they actually sit, the assembly point, where the call points and extinguishers are, and what the alarm sounds like. Under the RRO 2005 you have a specific duty to give employees clear information and training on the fire precautions in place.
New starters also change your warden maths. If two of your three fire wardens left over the summer, your evacuation plan has a hole in it that nobody has spotted. Autumn is the time to count heads against cover and book refresher training, and our guide to how many fire wardens your workplace needs helps you work out the right number for your layout and shift pattern.
Do not forget the people who visit rather than work for you. Contractors, temporary staff, and clients in the building need to know how to get out too, which is why your evacuation plan and your signage have to be clear enough that a stranger can follow them.
When a review is not enough
Most autumn refreshes are genuine reviews: you confirm the assessment still holds, update the details that have moved, and record the date and findings. But some changes are big enough that a review is the wrong tool. If you have knocked walls through, changed what a floor is used for, taken on a mezzanine, or roughly doubled the number of people on site, you are effectively assessing a different building and you need a fresh assessment rather than an edit.
Getting that call right matters, because a review that papers over a structural change will not stand up to an inspection or an insurance claim. Our guide on when a fire risk assessment review is enough versus a new one sets out where the line sits so you do not over-service a minor change or under-service a major one.
Next steps
Block out an hour this month, print your current assessment, and walk the building against the checklist above before the heaters come back on and the new starters bed in. Log what you find, fix the quick wins that day, and diarise the bigger jobs with owners and dates.
If your existing assessment is thin, out of date, or you have never had one recorded in full since the 2023 rules changed, do not carry that risk into winter. FRASafe's small business fire risk assessment walks you through every area the RRO 2005 requires, completed online in 30 to 45 minutes for £45, giving you a PDF you can show your insurer, landlord, or council.