A fire officer from your local fire and rescue service can walk into your office without an appointment, ask to see your written office fire risk assessment, and if you cannot hand one over you are already breaking the law. The fine is no longer a token amount. The penalties under the Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005 (the RRO 2005) are severe: an unlimited fine, and for failings that put people in danger, up to two years in prison. Your insurer can also walk away from a fire claim if you never assessed the risk in the first place.
Here is the part many office employers miss. The old rule that only businesses with five or more staff had to put the assessment in writing was scrapped on that same date, under Section 156 of the Building Safety Act 2022. Every responsible person now has to record the fire risk assessment in full, whatever the size of the office. A workplace assessment is not a form you download and file once. It is a five-step process the RRO 2005 expects you to work through, and this guide takes you through each step applied to a real office.
Who is responsible, and what the law wants from an office
Under the RRO 2005 the duty falls on the "responsible person". In most offices that is the employer, or whoever has control of the premises. If you rent a single floor in a shared building, you are responsible for fire safety inside your own space, and you have a legal duty to cooperate and share information with the building owner and other tenants, who look after the shared stairwells, lobbies and plant rooms.
The RRO 2005 applies to workplaces in England and Wales. Scotland runs on the Fire (Scotland) Act 2005 and the Fire Safety (Scotland) Regulations 2006, and Northern Ireland on its own 2010 regulations, but the five-step method and the underlying duties are broadly the same across all three. If you want the full picture of what the Order demands of a workplace, read our guide to the small business fire risk assessment legal obligations under the RRO 2005. And if you are still not certain the law applies to you, whether your small business needs a fire risk assessment settles the question: almost every office with staff or visitors does.
The five steps of an office fire risk assessment
The government's recommended method has five steps. Follow them in order, write down what you find at each stage, and you produce a document that stands up to an enforcement visit.
Step 1: Identify the fire hazards
A fire needs three things: a source of ignition, something to burn, and oxygen. Your job is to walk the office and list where those meet. In a typical office the biggest ignition risk is electrical, and it is the one people ignore because it looks harmless.
Look hard at daisy-chained extension leads, the four-way adaptor plugged into another four-way adaptor under a desk, and the drawer full of phone and laptop chargers left running overnight. Cheap, unbranded USB chargers and lithium battery devices left on charge are a genuine cause of office fires. Add the kitchenette (toaster, microwave, a build-up of grease), portable heaters brought in during winter, and the server or comms room, where equipment runs hot around the clock and dust settles on it.
Then list the fuel: stacks of paper and cardboard, waste bins, storerooms, upholstered furniture and cleaning chemicals. Note anything that lets a fire breathe or spread, such as wedged-open fire doors or oxygen cylinders. Portable appliance testing on office equipment and a fixed wiring inspection by a competent electrician are the practical evidence that your electrics are being kept in check.
Step 2: Identify the people at risk
Next, work out who is in the building and who would struggle to get out. Start with your own staff, then add the people who are easy to forget: visitors and clients who do not know the layout, contractors and delivery drivers, cleaners working alone early or late, and anyone working on their own after hours.
Pay particular attention to disabled occupants and anyone with reduced mobility, poor hearing or sight, or a temporary injury. If the office is above ground level, a wheelchair user cannot use the lift in a fire, so you need a Personal Emergency Evacuation Plan (a PEEP) for them, setting out how they reach a refuge point and how they are helped down the stairs. Visitors with access needs should be covered by a standard evacuation plan you can apply on the day. Do not overlook a first-floor kitchen or a basement archive where someone could be cut off from the main exit.
Step 3: Evaluate, remove and reduce the risk
Now you take each hazard and decide what to do about it. The order of priority is: remove the hazard if you can, reduce it if you cannot, and protect people from what is left. Swap that daisy-chained extension lead for a properly rated one on its own socket. Move combustible storage away from heaters and electrical intake cupboards. Ban personal heaters, or restrict them to safe, thermostat-controlled models.
Then check the protective measures the RRO 2005 expects an office to have in place:
- Detection and warning. An automatic fire alarm suitable for the size and layout, so a fire in an empty server room at night is detected before it spreads.
- Escape routes. Clear, unobstructed routes and exits, final exit doors that open easily from the inside without a key, and travel distances short enough for everyone to get out in time.
- Emergency lighting. Lighting that comes on if the power fails, so stairs and corridors stay usable in smoke or darkness.
- Fire doors. Doors that hold back fire and smoke, kept shut or on approved automatic closers, never propped open with a wedge or extinguisher.
- Firefighting equipment. The right extinguishers for the risks present, serviced annually to BS 5306, plus a fire blanket in the kitchenette.
- Signs and notices. Running-man exit signs, fire action notices, and clear marking of assembly points.
This is also where you set up your fire safety arrangements: appointing and training fire wardens (also called fire marshals) to sweep the floor and manage the assembly point, running a fire drill at least once a year, and giving all staff basic fire awareness on their first day. In a multi-storey office you need enough wardens to cover every floor, including cover for holidays and sickness.
Step 4: Record your findings and prepare an action plan
This is the step that has changed most, and the one enforcement officers check first. You must now record the assessment in full and write down your fire safety arrangements, whether you employ two people or two hundred. There is no small-office exemption any more.
A recorded office fire risk assessment sets out the significant hazards you found, the people at risk, the control measures already in place, and, crucially, an action plan for the gaps. The action plan is the working half of the document: each shortfall, who owns it, a target date, and a tick when it is done. Assessors call the missing action plan the most common failing in a self-completed assessment, because it is the difference between "we know about this" and "we are actually fixing it". This new duty to record in full sits alongside the wider tightening of the rules, which we cover in our guide to the Building Safety Act 2022 and the written fire risk assessment requirement.
Step 5: Review and keep it live
A fire risk assessment is a live document, not a one-off certificate. Review it at least once a year, and always after anything that changes the risk: a refit, a new mezzanine or partition, a jump in headcount, a new server room, or a near miss. Log the review date each time, even when nothing has changed, so you can prove the assessment was kept current.
Keep the paperwork that backs it up in the same place: alarm and emergency-lighting test records, extinguisher service certificates, the fire-door check log, drill records and staff training dates. When a fire officer or your insurer asks, one folder answers every question, and that is exactly the position you want to be in.
Next steps
Start with a walk round your office today, clipboard in hand, working through the five steps above. Most problems in an office are cheap to fix once you have written them down: a proper extension lead, a serviced extinguisher, a fire door that actually closes, a trained warden on each floor. The expensive outcome is the one where you never wrote anything down.
If you would rather not face a blank page, 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. It turns the five steps into plain questions and produces the recorded document and action plan the law now expects from every office, however small.