Fire door inspection programmes for blocks of flats from £249

Since January 2023, responsible persons for multi-occupied residential buildings with storeys above 11 metres have two separate fire door duties. Communal fire doors — those in the stairs, corridors, bin stores, plant rooms and risers — must be checked at least every three months. Flat entrance doors that open onto a communal area must be inspected at least annually, using best endeavours to gain access. Below 11 metres, the duty is lighter: residents must be given fire door information, and the fire risk assessment still has to consider door condition. The distinction matters, because a great many blocks are being sold quarterly inspection programmes they do not need, while others above the threshold have no programme at all.

The flat entrance door duty is where most programmes fall apart. You cannot force entry, so the law asks for best endeavours — but an enforcement officer will want to see what those endeavours were. That means a written notification before the visit, an attempt at a reasonable hour, a second attempt at a different time or day, a card left with a way to book, and a record of every leaseholder who declined. We run that sequence as standard and hand you the log alongside the inspection results, so the doors you could not reach are as well documented as the ones you could. Getting into 60 per cent of flats with a full paper trail is a stronger position than getting into 90 per cent with no record of how.

Each inspection follows the same structure so results are comparable year on year. We work to the principles of BS 8214 and the recognised competency criteria for door inspection, and we photograph what we find rather than describing it, because a photograph of a 6mm gap ends an argument that a sentence starts.

The output is a schedule, not a narrative. Every door has a unique reference tied to its location, a photograph, a pass or defect status against each check, a severity band, and a plain description of the remedial work needed. Defects are grouped so a contractor can price the whole estate in one go — all closers, all seals, all doors requiring replacement — rather than working through a report door by door. The schedule is issued as a PDF for the record and a spreadsheet for the works programme, and the next quarter's inspection updates the same schedule so you can see what has been closed and what keeps recurring.

Not every defect means a new door. Painted seals, missing screws, closer adjustment, damaged intumescent strips and unfilled ironmongery holes are almost always repairable, often at a fraction of replacement cost. Distortion, delamination, unknown construction with no evidence of specification, and doors modified so heavily that the original certification no longer holds are a different matter. We say which is which. A block manager who is told a hundred doors need replacing when sixty need adjusting has been given a very expensive report, and it happens more often when the inspector also fits doors.

Fire door inspection is an area where the conflict of interest is obvious and rarely disclosed. If the same company inspects, condemns and then quotes to replace, the defect list is a sales document. We only inspect and report. When remedial work is needed, you can put the schedule out to any contractor and, if it helps, we will review the completed work independently afterwards to confirm the findings have genuinely been closed. That independence is the reason managing agents keep the programme with us across renewal cycles.

For agents and housing providers with multiple blocks, the value is in the calendar as much as the inspections. We build a schedule across the estate so quarterly visits land in a predictable pattern, hold the notification templates for flat door access, and report by block and by portfolio so you can see which sites carry the most open defects. Renewal reminders come from us, not from your diary. Where we also carry out the fire risk assessments, door findings feed straight into the assessment action plan instead of sitting in a separate system nobody reconciles.

A fire risk assessment considers doors, but it samples them. Regulation 10 asks for a routine inspection regime, which is a different thing, done more often and recorded separately. The two need to talk to each other: the assessment should reference the inspection programme as a control measure, and serious door findings from an inspection should trigger a review of the assessment where they undermine the compartmentation the strategy relies on. We connect the two as standard, and clients who hold both with us pay less for each.

A single block visit covering communal doors starts at £249 for a small block and typically runs to £449 for a larger site with multiple cores. Flat entrance door inspections are charged per door, from £6 per door on estates and £12 to £18 per door on one-off small jobs, including the access attempts and the log. Full annual programmes — four communal visits plus the annual flat door round — are quoted per block and discounted across portfolios. Everything is fixed in writing before we start, and schedules are issued within 48 hours of each visit.