Fire Door Safety Week Q&A
Posted Monday, October 31, 2022
At Fexco Property Group, fire door safety is extremely important to us, and to mark this year’s postponed Fire Door Safety Week campaign, running from 31 October – 4 November 2022, we spoke with our Head of Building Safety, Graham Oliphant for his expertise, insights, and recommendations.
What is your experience with fire door safety in the property management industry?
I have a Diploma in Fire Doors through the National FDIS scheme (Fire Door Inspection Scheme), as odd as that may sound! I also have 14 years practical experience in the London Fire Brigade.
In my last company I also set up, trained, and managed a team of 30 nationwide fire door assessors. So, it’s safe to say I have a good appreciation of the practical, and logistical challenges, of maintaining these key safety assets.
How important is fire door safety?
Fire door safety is extremely important, and it’s also critical to remember that fire doors are not just doors. They are part of highly engineered systems that are designed into the fabric of the building, to operate as part of an interconnected system of passive fire protection.
Not only are they designed to stop the passage of smoke and fire, which reduces the damage caused to the building in the event of a fire. They are also essential for protecting the means of escape, allowing occupants to escape safely, whilst at the same time providing the fire service a protected route to access the building. This means firefighters can rescue occupants and extinguish the fire as quickly and safely as possible.
What is a building owner or landlord’s responsibility?
It is a legal requirement under the Fire Safety Order 2005 that all fire safety assets in a building are regularly serviced and maintained by a competent person.
Following the Grenfell fire in 2017 there has been significant legislation change occurring. An outcome of the Grenfell Enquiry has been the recent Fire Safety Act 2021 which has led to further amendments to the original Fire Safety Order. This has specifically detailed that all apartment front doors which access into a communal area are now to be assessed. It is therefore now a statutory requirement for the ‘Responsible Person’ to ensure that this is carried out, to ensure the safety of all occupants in the building.
There are now additional prescriptive requirements for quarterly checks on communal fire doors and annual checks on apartment front doors for buildings, dependent on their height. These take effect from January 23rd 2023 across England. As a result of critical findings from the Grenfell enquiry, there is now additional scrutiny on fire door safety.
What would you recommend building owners, managers or landlords do to improve fire door safety?
I would suggest developing a planned preventative maintenance schedule. This factors in regular visual checks and then prioritises works that need to be done to ensure the door’s compliance. We must remember that a fire door is a paradox really – they are there to provide a critical function to prevent the spread of fire and smoke when closed, however, we still need many of them to open freely to let people pass through.
In heavy traffic areas such as stairwells or corridors, these doors will experience heavy use and wear and tear, as well as the temptation to be wedged open! With regular visual inspections, a programme of education, and practical advice, we can hopefully help maintain and retain these crucial elements of passive fire protection in good working order so that the doors do their job effectively should the need arise.
How does Fexco Property Group enforce proper fire door safety?
Primarily, this comes down to communication and part of our resident engagement strategy. We have some 60,000+ fire doors across 1,400+ buildings, covering our Group-wide portfolios.
- We provide practical advice to occupants on how to identify faults and to notify us in these instances.
- We also want to empower occupants so they can be enfranchised in the process of making their buildings safe places. Together, we can then quickly identify and rectify any fire doors which may need attention or have been propped open.
- As part of our resident engagement work, we emphasise that a fire door is only effective if it can close unobstructed and is not wedged open.
- Our teams follow best practice guidance with technical support from our centralised Building Safety Team and we are now adjusting to meet the requirements of the new Fire Safety (England) Regulations which will require more prescriptive frequency of checks for all our buildings over 11m in building safety height across England.
Do you have any examples of fire door safety projects that the team have been working on?
We have already embarked on a Group wide project to have all our fire doors professionally audited and remediated by qualified third party providers. We will then have a task force of internal staff, trained to a competent level to provide visual inspections at required intervals. We have also already negotiated central service level agreements with key preferred partners so we can offer our clients parity across the country with a defined price and service level. After which we will manage a regular programme of fire door inspection and recording. This all forms part of our ‘planned preventative maintenance’ (PPM) programme.
What is the secret to your approach that sets you apart from other Property Managing Agents?
Managing fire doors on this scale is a real logistical hurdle to tackle and we have approached this as a nationwide project.
To assist us deliver this and provide transparency and a clear audit trail we are employing QR codes so every fire door will have a unique identifier and the QR code as the interface to a database of all the works and inspections and actions related to that one asset.
We are also embracing new SaaS platforms to provide a tech solution, by migrating to an e-log book facility which we will employ as a management tool across the Group. This will enable our front-line staff to maintain an audit trail on every asset, as well as provide compliance reassurance to both the Business and reassure our clients. This forms one part of our commitment to meeting the consolidation of critical safety information as part of a ‘digital golden thread’ and we can track compliance centrally, identify trends for reporting, all of which can be managed remotely.
This is a really challenging and exciting time to make a real difference in the industry and this project is a real game changer.
How are you raising awareness of Fire Door Safety Week this year?
We are launching ‘The Big Count’ competition to engage all our staff. Each of our property managers will re-confirm the number of communal fire doors in every one of our 1,400+ buildings across England and Wales, as part of their next property visits.
Entrants will then submit their guess for the total number of fire doors across the Group and the closest answer will win the opportunity to be a Firefighter for a day and extend our relationship working with the Fire Rescue Service (apparently, I’m not allowed to enter!).
The competition kicks off on Monday 31 October and closes on 25 November 2022.
