Fire safety for managing agents
Portfolio-wide compliance across mixed residential and commercial buildings — independent advice that leaseholders and freeholders can rely on.
A mixed managing-agent portfolio can include residential-only blocks, commercial-only premises, and mixed-use buildings where a ground-floor commercial unit sits beneath leasehold flats — each of which may sit under a different regulatory instrument, with different duty-holder relationships, and with leaseholders watching every service-charge item. Getting the right scope for each building, maintaining it across a large portfolio, and being able to explain and justify the spend is a sustained programme management task, not a one-off commission.
The regime
The core complexity for managing agents is that a mixed-use portfolio can span two separate regulatory regimes simultaneously. The residential parts of a building, including communal areas, external walls and the structure of a block of flats, fall under the Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005 and the Fire Safety (England) Regulations 2022. The RRFSO requires a suitable and sufficient FRA for the non-domestic parts of a residential building; the 2022 Regulations add the specific fire door check cycles (quarterly checks of communal doors and best-endeavours annual checks of flat entrance doors, in buildings over 11 metres) and the duty to provide fire safety information to residents. The commercial parts of the same building, a ground-floor shop or office, fall under the RRFSO independently, with the commercial tenant or the person in control carrying the duty-holder obligation for those areas. The methodology mirrors the split: residential parts are assessed under BS 9792:2025, commercial parts under PAS 79-1:2020 — one building, two instruments, one coherent programme.
Where blocks meet the Building Safety Act 2022 (BSA) definition of a higher-risk building — at least 18 metres tall or seven storeys, with two or more residential units — the accountable-person and principal accountable-person framework applies. A managing agent acting for a freeholder or for a residents' management company may be engaged to assist with or to lead on BSA compliance: building registration, the building safety case and safety case report, the resident engagement strategy, and maintenance of the golden thread of building information. The BSA introduced a new tier of regulatory oversight through the Building Safety Regulator, and the requirements are enforceable.
For external walls — a persistent area of uncertainty in leasehold and mixed-use stock — a fire risk appraisal of external walls (FRAEW) carried out under PAS 9980:2022 provides an independent, proportionate appraisal of the risk presented by the wall construction. PAS 9980 was written specifically to apply professional judgement rather than a tick-box pass/fail, and to prevent the reflex towards expensive cladding remediation where the actual risk does not justify it. For a managing agent answerable to leaseholders, independent FRAEW advice from a consultant with no remediation interest lets the agent show leaseholders that the advice reflects risk rather than a contractor's pipeline.
The pressures
- Navigating dual regulatory regimes in mixed-use buildings — matching the right instrument (RRFSO, Fire Safety (England) Regulations 2022, or both) to each part of a building.
- Justifying fire safety expenditure to leaseholders through the service charge — every recommendation needs to be defensible as required, not merely advisable.
- Managing external-wall uncertainty across a portfolio where not every block has a current, credible FRAEW — and where the consequences of getting it wrong run in both directions.
- Quarterly communal-door and annual flat-entrance-door checks under the Fire Safety (England) Regulations 2022, maintained across large numbers of doors.
- Demonstrating a portfolio-wide compliance position to freeholders, to the Building Safety Regulator (for HRBs), and to insurers — across buildings managed on behalf of multiple different clients.
In practice
A managing agent responsible for a portfolio of mixed residential and commercial buildings — leasehold blocks of flats, mixed-use buildings with ground-floor commercial units, and standalone commercial premises — needed to establish a consistent compliance position it could stand behind with freeholders, leaseholders, and where relevant the Building Safety Regulator. The portfolio had been assessed piecemeal by different assessors, and the agent had no single, comparable view of risk across the buildings. Apex worked through the portfolio building by building: FRAs for the residential and commercial elements under the appropriate instruments, fire door surveys and compartmentation surveys for the communal areas, and FRAEW surveys under PAS 9980 for external walls where construction history raised questions. Findings were consolidated into a single prioritised schedule phased so that the highest-risk items and the most urgent regulatory obligations came first, and so that the service-charge spend could be explained and justified to leaseholders line by line. Because Apex has no installation or remediation arm, the agent was able to present the findings as independent advice: the position leaseholders and freeholders need to see.
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