Fire safety for residential and high-rise buildings
Independent assessment and engineering across social housing, leasehold blocks and higher-risk buildings — with no remediation arm to push.
Housing associations, registered social landlords and private landlords have sat across two overlapping regulatory frameworks since 2021, with the Building Safety Act 2022 adding a third layer for taller buildings. Apex works across the full range — from a single leasehold block to a large mixed-tenure portfolio — providing FRAs, FRAEW surveys and Building Safety Act compliance without any commercial interest in the remediation that may follow.
The regime
The Fire Safety (England) Regulations 2022 introduced specific duties for responsible persons in multi-occupied residential buildings with two or more sets of domestic premises. Quarterly checks of communal fire doors, annual best-endeavours checks of flat entrance doors (in buildings over 11 metres), and the provision of fire safety information to residents are now statutory rather than best practice. These are not one-off events: they form an ongoing programme that requires a documented, repeatable process.
The Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005 remains the primary legislative instrument for all occupied premises. It requires a suitable and sufficient fire risk assessment (FRA) for the common parts, external wall and structure of residential blocks, with a responsible person who keeps that assessment up to date and acts on its findings. BS 9792:2025 — the British Standard that superseded PAS 79-2 for housing — provides the methodology for Type 1 to Type 4 assessments, with the assessment type matched to the construction, height and risk profile of the building rather than applied uniformly.
For higher-risk buildings (HRBs) — defined under the Building Safety Act 2022 (BSA) as residential buildings of at least 18 metres or seven storeys with at least two residential units — accountable persons and principal accountable persons face additional duties: a building safety case, a building safety case report, registration with the Building Safety Regulator, and an ongoing golden thread of building information. Where external walls are in question, a fire risk appraisal of external walls (FRAEW) under PAS 9980:2022 provides an independent, proportionate assessment of risk; the standard specifically guards against unnecessary remediation by anchoring judgements to actual risk, not blanket categorisation.
The pressures
- Keeping pace with the Fire Safety (England) Regulations 2022 fire-door inspection cycles across large or dispersed portfolios.
- Demonstrating a defensible, consistent assessment methodology to the Building Safety Regulator, to insurers, and to leaseholders and residents.
- Managing external-wall uncertainty — balancing the genuine risk of delaying FRAEW against the equally real risk of recommending expensive remediation that PAS 9980 would not require.
- Above 18m, commissioning Building Safety Act compliance work — safety cases, accountable-person duties, golden-thread documentation — without over-engineering the scope.
- Maintaining a risk-ranked, renewals-managed programme across stock of different ages, heights and construction types.
In practice
A registered social landlord with a mixed portfolio — post-war towers, mid-rise blocks and low-rise stock — needed to replace a patchwork of inconsistent assessments with a single, comparable, risk-ranked programme it could stand behind with a regulator. Apex set up a rolling FRA programme using a common methodology (PAS 79, carried forward under BS 9792:2025), matched assessment type to each building rather than applying a single level uniformly, and carried out FRAEW surveys where external walls raised questions. The outcome was a prioritised portfolio-wide risk register and a defined re-inspection cycle, turning a pile of reports into a managed programme. Because Apex holds no installation or remediation arm, the priorities in each assessment reflected risk and regulation alone.
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