Commercial premises compliance package from £395

If you employ anyone or control premises where people work, the Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005 requires you to assess fire risk and record the significant findings. The Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations 1999 require the same for general workplace risks, recorded where you employ five or more people. Emergency lighting must be maintained and tested to BS 5266, with a monthly function test and an annual full-duration test recorded. Non-domestic premises being let or sold need a valid commercial EPC, and the Minimum Energy Efficiency Standard has applied to continuing commercial lettings since April 2023 for sub-band-E properties. In practice these documents get asked for as a set — at insurance renewal, at lease assignment, and by any client running a supplier assurance process.

Surveys can be run before opening, after closing or on a quiet day, and our assessors work without interrupting service — no evacuations, no alarm activations without agreement, no ladders across a shop floor at lunchtime. For restaurants and pubs we pay particular attention to extraction and duct cleaning records, gas interlocks, cellar access and the route from the kitchen; for retail, to stock in escape routes and to the back-of-house corridor everybody uses as storage; for warehouses, to racking, charging areas for forklifts and pallet trucks, hot works and contractor control; for offices, to occupancy numbers against escape capacity, server rooms, and the arrangements for assisted evacuation.

In a multi-let building this is where most confusion sits. The landlord is normally the responsible person for the common parts and the base building systems; the tenant is responsible for its demise, its own staff and its own fire safety arrangements. Both need assessments, and they need to be consistent with each other. We look at the lease position, state clearly what falls where, and produce an assessment that stops at the right boundary while noting where a landlord's failure affects your escape route. That single clarification resolves a large proportion of the disputes we see, and it is far cheaper than discovering the boundary after an enforcement notice.

One pack: the PAS 79 fire risk assessment, the scored health and safety audit with a gap list and model documents, the emergency lighting and signage review with a testing schedule you can hand to a maintenance contractor, the lodged commercial EPC, and a combined action plan ordered by risk with owners, dates and indicative costs. Plus a one-page summary for a board, a franchisor or an insurer. Everything is dated and attributed to a named, registered assessor.

The package starts at £395 for small premises and is priced on floor area, number of floors, headcount and activity. Out-of-hours surveys carry no premium for standard evening slots. Multi-site operators — a restaurant group, a retail chain, a serviced office provider — get a standardised scope, a per-site rate that falls with volume, a rolling survey programme and one dashboard showing every site's status and renewal date. That dashboard is usually the thing that sells the programme: it turns compliance from a pile of PDFs into something a head office can actually manage.