The Home Office has introduced a new bill to improve fire safety in buildings
Building on action already taken to ensure tragedies like the Grenfell Tower never happen again, the new Fire Safety Bill amends the Fire Safety Order 2005. This clarifies that the responsible person or duty-holder for multi-occupied, residential buildings must ensure fire door maintenance is carried out regularly. This is to manage and reduce the risk of fire for entrance doors to individual flats that open into common parts of the building.
More details will emerge over the coming months, but the Fire Door Experts team welcome this new Bill as this is an area of building maintenance that is often overlooked. Fire doors often only appear on a responsible person’s radar when they become faulty – by that time, they’re endangering life, and probably have been for some time!
With such exacting tolerances, such as 3mm gaps around the leaf edges, front entrance doors need to be regularly maintained and fit for purpose. This may sound a strange comment to make – they also need to be a fire rated door-assembly in the first place!
When carrying out surveys or maintenance works, we’re often presented with doors missing vital elements such as intumescent strips and fire rated hinges. Unfortunately, it’s not just a simple job for our technicians to fit these parts to “upgrade” a door into a fire door; without these parts present, we have to assume it was never a factory tested fire door – or the intumescent strips would have been present!
Simple, regular maintenance visits by accredited fire door technicians can keep all fire doors at optimum performance levels, and providing effective passive fire protection.
