Phoenix Journal · Fire Safety
If a fire officer, an insurer or a coroner ever asks how you manage fire safety, the answer cannot be a shrug and a memory. A fire safety file is where you keep the proof, and building one properly is simpler than it sounds.
Modern fire safety law is built on a simple demand: you must not only keep people safe, you must be able to show how. Since the Fire Safety Act 2021 and Section 156 of the Building Safety Act 2022 strengthened the Fire Safety Order, written fire risk assessments and documented arrangements are expected of all applicable premises in England, and the responsible person must keep records. A fire safety file is how you meet that demand in practice: one organised place that holds the evidence your premises is genuinely managed.
The term is not a single legal document but a working collection, sometimes called a fire logbook, that gathers everything relating to how fire safety is managed on site. It sits alongside a separate strand of information: under Regulation 38 of the Building Regulations, fire safety information about the building's design, escape routes and protection should be handed to the responsible person when work is completed, and for higher-risk buildings this connects to the golden thread of building information required by the Building Safety Act. Your file brings the as-built information and the ongoing management records together, so the whole picture lives in one place.
What goes in it
A good file starts with the current fire risk assessment and its action plan, with evidence that findings have been closed out, plus the emergency plan and evacuation strategy for the premises. To that you add the maintenance and testing records that prove the protection works: fire alarm tests and servicing, emergency lighting checks, extinguisher servicing, fire door inspections, electrical inspection reports, and the servicing of any fire suppression system. Staff training records and fire drill logs sit alongside them, because competent people are as much a control as any piece of equipment.
For a food business, one set of records earns its place near the front: the kitchen extraction cleaning certificates. Because grease-laden extract is a recognised fire path, an assessor, a fire officer and an insurer will all want to see when the system was last cleaned, to what standard, and by whom. A file that can produce that certificate on request quietly answers one of the sharpest questions any of them will ask, and its absence raises exactly the opposite suspicion. Those same records feed the fire risk assessment itself, because an assessor cannot conclude the extract is controlled without evidence of when it was last cleaned and to what standard.
The point of gathering all this is not neatness for its own sake. Under the strengthened Fire Safety Order the responsible person has to be able to demonstrate how fire safety is managed, and a file that pulls the evidence together is the most practical way to do it, whether the person asking is a fire officer at a routine audit, an insurer after a claim, or a court after an incident. What you cannot evidence, you may as well not have done.
Keeping it alive
The most common failure is not building a file but letting it rot. Certificates expire, staff change, layouts alter, and a folder full of out-of-date paperwork can actively mislead. The maintenance records in particular need refreshing on their own cycles, which is why the relationship between maintenance records and fire insurance is so direct: an insurer relies on those records to show the conditions of cover were met, and a lapsed certificate can be the detail that turns a paid claim into a disputed one. Set review dates, diarise the servicing, and treat the file as a living system rather than a drawer.
The document that proves the extract
For any premises with a commercial kitchen, the extract cleaning certificate is one of the most valuable single pages in the file, because it evidences that the biggest fire path in the building is being controlled. A proper extraction cleaning compliance certificate records the date, the standard the system was cleaned to, the areas covered and the before-and-after condition, and it is exactly what an underwriter and a fire officer want to see. Keeping it current, and keeping it filed where you can find it in seconds, is one of the highest-value habits a food business can build into its fire safety file.
Questions
There is no single law naming a fire safety file, but the Fire Safety Order, as strengthened by the Fire Safety Act 2021 and Section 156 of the Building Safety Act 2022, requires the responsible person to record the fire risk assessment and fire safety arrangements and keep records. A well-kept file is the most practical way to meet those duties.
Regulation 38 of the Building Regulations covers fire safety information about the building's design and protection, handed to the responsible person when building work is completed. The fire safety file is broader: it holds that as-built information alongside the ongoing management records, assessments and maintenance certificates for the life of the building.
Whenever something changes. Maintenance and test records are added as checks are carried out, and the fire risk assessment should be reviewed regularly and after any significant change to the building, its use or occupancy. Diarising servicing dates and review dates is the simplest way to stop the file falling out of date.
Phoenix Duct Clean · by the numbers
A TR19 Grease cleaning certificate belongs in every food business fire safety file. Phoenix cleans the full system and issues it, UK-wide, overnight.