Fire safety audits, and the notices that rose this year

The Home Office published its fire prevention and protection statistics for England on 2 September 2026, covering the year to March. The audit total is the headline most people will read, but it is the least interesting number in the release.

Fire and rescue authorities carried out 50,195 fire safety audits in the year ending March 2026, down 1.6% on the 50,996 the year before. Of those, 29,909 had a satisfactory outcome recorded, which is 60%, close to the 59% of the previous year (Home Office, Fire prevention and protection statistics, England, April 2025 to March 2026).

So four audits in ten did not come back satisfactory, and that proportion has barely moved. What did move is what happens afterwards.

The enforcement side moved, the audit side did not

Formal notifications reached 3,355, up 11% from 3,026. Within that:

Enforcement notices under Article 30 of the Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005: 1,896, up 6.9% from 1,773, and 57% of all formal notices.

Prohibition notices under Article 31: 1,224, up 27% from 965.

Alteration notices under Article 29: 202.

The prohibition figure is the one worth sitting with. An enforcement notice tells a responsible person what to fix and by when. A prohibition notice restricts or stops the use of the premises, or part of them, and it takes effect immediately where the risk is judged serious. A quarter more of those in one year, against a slightly smaller number of audits, is a change in disposition rather than a change in volume.

What gets audited

The premises types are not what a lot of people assume. Shops accounted for 8,932 audits, 18% of the total, followed by care homes at 6,004 and licensed premises at 4,940. Purpose built blocks of flats are audited, and they draw attention, but the bulk of the programme lands on ordinary commercial and care stock.

If you manage a mixed portfolio, that matters. The retail unit with three flats over it, the small care home, the pub with letting rooms above, these are the buildings the audit programme actually reaches, and they are usually the ones with the thinnest documentation because nobody has ever treated them as a compliance problem.

The audit is a documentation exercise

An inspecting officer arrives to establish whether the responsible person has complied with the Fire Safety Order. In practice that means being asked, in some order, for the fire risk assessment and its review date, the significant findings and what was done about them, the maintenance records for the fire alarm, emergency lighting, extinguishers and any fixed installations, the fire door inspection records, the arrangements for anyone needing assistance to evacuate, and the record of staff instruction and drills.

Almost none of that is about the physical building on the day. It is about whether the building has a history you can produce. A building can be in decent order and still fail an audit because the evidence sits across three inboxes, a filing cabinet and a contractor's own portal.

The second common failure is subtler. The fire risk assessment exists, it is in date, and its significant findings were never closed out. The document itself becomes the evidence against you, because it records a known deficiency and there is nothing after it showing the deficiency was addressed. An assessment with open actions and no audit trail is worse than useless at that point.

What a reasonable position looks like

The responsible person under the Fire Safety Order is whoever has control of the premises, which in managed property is usually the managing agent or the landlord, and the duty does not transfer by writing it into a contract. Article 32 makes the underlying offences criminal, and the Building Safety Act 2022 raised the ceiling on fines for the more serious ones.

For most portfolios the useful work is not new inspection. It is putting existing evidence somewhere it can be produced in an afternoon:

The current fire risk assessment attached to the building, with its review date driving a task rather than sitting in a document nobody opens.

Every significant finding tracked to a close out date, with the remedial work and its evidence attached to the finding, not filed separately.

Servicing records held against the asset, so the alarm panel, the emergency lighting and the fire doors each carry their own history.

The evacuation arrangements, including anyone who needs assistance, recorded and dated rather than assumed.

Names and dates on all of it. An undated record is a claim.

Where SAMRISK puts it

SAMRISK holds the building and the land it sits on across thirty connected systems, twenty for the building and ten for the land. The fire safety register, the risk assessments, the audits and the compliance calendar are the same record, so a finding raised in an assessment carries its remedial action, its evidence and its close out date in one place, and the review date generates the next task instead of being typed into a spreadsheet.

The audit itself is unpredictable. Forty per cent of them last year came back unsatisfactory, and the enforcement response is getting firmer rather than softer. The part that is within anyone's control is whether the answer to a reasonable question is a date and a document, or a fortnight of searching.

Sources: Home Office, Fire prevention and protection statistics, England, April 2025 to March 2026, published 2 September 2026.