Fire risk assessment report in 24 hours from £99

Report turnaround looks like an administrative detail until it is the thing holding up a licence, a renewal or a completion. Much of the industry quotes five to ten working days, and in practice that often becomes three weeks, because the report is written by somebody other than the surveyor from notes taken on a form. Two things follow from that delay. The obvious one is that your deadline arrives before your document does. The less obvious one is that the assessment becomes less accurate: detail that was clear on site fades, photographs are matched to the wrong location, and follow-up questions cannot be answered because the person who attended has surveyed nine buildings since. Writing within 24 hours is partly a service promise and largely a quality control.

A PAS 79 report is a structured document, not a checklist. It records the building and its use, the occupancy profile and anyone who would need assistance to evacuate, the fire safety measures found in place, the hazards identified, an evaluation of the risk and — the part that actually matters — a prioritised action plan. Each significant finding carries a photograph, a location, the duty it relates to and a timescale. The assessor is named, with their IFSM registration and NFRAR listing, because the first question any enforcing authority, insurer or lender asks about an assessment is who wrote it and what makes them competent.

The assessor who surveys the building writes the report. That single decision removes the handover, the transcription errors and the queue. Findings and photographs are captured on site as the survey progresses rather than written up from memory afterwards, and the report is completed and quality-checked the same working day or the following morning. The practical consequence for you is not only speed: because the author was in the building, the report answers questions in a way a transcribed one cannot, and if your enforcing officer or insurer queries a specific finding six months later, the person who saw it is the person who answers.

Most people never read the whole report; almost everyone reads the action plan, and that is the right instinct. Ours is banded by priority — items to address immediately, items within one to three months, and items that are advisory or longer-term — with the reason each sits where it does. That banding is what lets a freeholder, a managing agent or a business owner budget properly instead of treating everything as urgent or nothing as urgent. It is also what an enforcing authority looks at first, because a dated action plan with progress recorded against it is the clearest possible evidence that a duty holder is managing the risk rather than filing it.

It does not wait 24 hours. A blocked or locked final exit, a disconnected alarm panel, a fire door that no longer provides any protection on the only escape route — these are raised with you verbally before the assessor leaves the site, with a plain explanation of what needs to happen and how quickly. Where the finding is severe enough to affect how the building is used, we say so directly and follow up in writing the same day. The full report still arrives within 24 hours, but you are never in the position of discovering something critical in an email two days later.

Rarely just you. In practice the same document is read by a fire and rescue authority officer, an insurer or broker, a licensing officer, a lender's solicitor, a managing agent, a contractor pricing the remedial work, and sometimes residents. That is why it is written in plain English with every finding tied to the duty it satisfies — a report that requires an interpreter creates work for everybody. Send it to any of those parties directly; if they have questions, we would rather answer them ourselves than have the assessment mis-explained on our behalf.

The report is the start of a cycle, not the end of a job. Actions get done, the building changes, and the assessment needs to reflect both. We hold your review date and prompt you before it falls due, and where possible send the same assessor, so the review records what has actually changed rather than reassessing the building from scratch. Previous versions are worth keeping: the history of how risks were identified and closed out is what demonstrates ongoing compliance, and it is exactly what an officer asks to see when something has gone wrong elsewhere in the borough.