- The Building Safety Act 2022 and Fire Safety Act 2021 have significantly expanded the responsibilities of social housing landlords, with flat entrance doors and external walls now firmly within scope of fire risk assessments.
- Passive fire protection, including fire doors, compartmentation and firestopping, remains the area most commonly found lacking, and the consequences of failure are serious both for resident safety and regulatory standing.
- Selecting a FIRAS-accredited contractor is no longer optional best practice. It is the clearest way to demonstrate due diligence to the Regulator of Social Housing, the Housing Ombudsman, and insurers.
The regulatory environment facing social housing providers has shifted fundamentally since Grenfell. The Fire Safety Act 2021 and the Building Safety Act 2022 between them clarified and extended accountability in ways that leave little room for ambiguity. Flat entrance doors, external walls, communal fire doors, and the structure of multi-occupied residential buildings are now all within scope of fire risk assessments. For responsible persons managing large, dispersed residential portfolios, that creates a compliance task of considerable scale.
What has made this harder to ignore is the sharp increase in scrutiny from above. Housing Ombudsman interventions increased to over 21,000 instances in a single year, up from 7,000 the year before, with fire safety featuring prominently among the issues being examined. The Social Housing (Regulation) Act 2023 gave the Housing Ombudsman new powers and duties from April 2024, including a statutory complaints handling code that all social landlords are now required to follow. Meanwhile, the government’s own data shows that only 58% of fire safety audits in England resulted in a satisfactory outcome in the year to March 2025, the lowest proportion recorded since 2011. Around 25% of social housing providers have yet to take action on fire safety measures applicable to their buildings, a gap the regulator is increasingly unwilling to overlook.
The consequences of falling behind are no longer theoretical. One district council was handed a C4 regulatory grade after inspectors found more than 1,000 overdue fire safety fixes and no clear records of stock surveys since 2016. That kind of finding does not just carry reputational risk. It brings the prospect of statutory intervention, management changes, and unlimited fines.
Where the Gaps Are Most Often Found
For most social housing providers, passive fire protection is where the most significant compliance shortfalls exist. Fire doors are frequently identified as the primary area of concern. Under the Fire Safety (England) Regulations 2022, responsible persons must carry out regular inspections of communal fire doors and annual checks on flat entrance doors in buildings 11 metres or above. In practice, years of inconsistent maintenance and ageing stock mean that many doors simply do not meet current standards.
Alongside fire doors, compartmentation integrity and firestopping are areas where deficiencies can be invisible to the untrained eye but catastrophic in a fire. Penetrations through fire-rated walls and floors, created during years of maintenance works and service installations, are among the most common findings in fire risk assessments. They are also among the most straightforward to remediate when you have the right contractor and a clear programme in place.
The Occupied Building Problem
What makes fire compliance programmes in social housing genuinely complex is that the work has to happen in people’s homes. Unlike a vacant commercial building, you cannot clear the site and work uninterrupted. Residents need to be communicated with, access needs to be coordinated, and disruption needs to be managed sensitively.
Good communication is not just a courtesy, it is operationally essential. Residents who understand why the work is being done, what to expect, and how long access is required are far more likely to grant that access on time. A well-structured programme with clear appointment scheduling, plain-language resident communications, and dedicated on-site coordination will move significantly faster than one that treats residents as a logistical inconvenience. JPS Projects has been working in the social housing sector since 2010, delivering planned maintenance and compliance works in occupied residential environments across the UK, and that operational experience makes a meaningful difference to programme delivery.
Compliance leads and project managers running large programmes should plan for a proportion of missed appointments and have a clear protocol for re-booking. Tracking completion rates by block and tenure type also allows resources to be directed where progress is slowest, rather than discovering shortfalls only at the end of a programme.
Why Accreditation Matters
When selecting a passive fire protection contractor, FIRAS accreditation should be a baseline requirement, not a differentiator. FIRAS is the industry’s specialist third-party certification scheme for fire protection contractors, covering fire door installation and maintenance, firestopping, and compartmentation works. Holding FIRAS accreditation means a contractor’s operatives are assessed and their work is independently audited on an ongoing basis.
For responsible persons under the Building Safety Act, this matters in a direct and practical sense. In the event of a fire or a regulatory inspection, demonstrating that works were carried out by an accredited contractor with independently verified competence is a significant component of evidencing due diligence. Conversely, remediation works carried out by unaccredited contractors can leave organisations in a difficult position, both with insurers and with the regulator.
The Real Cost of Delay
It can be tempting to treat fire compliance programmes as something to schedule when budgets allow. The regulatory picture now makes that a difficult position to sustain. The Regulator of Social Housing collects quarterly fire safety remediation data from all buildings 11 metres or taller, and the direction of travel on enforcement is clearly toward more intervention, not less.
Beyond the regulatory risk, there is the straightforward issue of liability. A fire in a building where known remediation work had not been completed carries consequences that go well beyond financial penalty. The reputational, human and legal dimensions of that scenario are reason enough to treat compliance programmes with the urgency they warrant.
How JPS Projects Can Help
JPS Projects is an experienced, accredited passive fire protection contractor working with social housing providers, local authorities and housing associations across the UK. The business delivers fire door installation and remediation, firestopping, and compartmentation works in occupied residential buildings, bringing the operational experience to run programmes at scale without disrupting residents more than necessary.
With a track record of delivery in complex, live environments and the accreditations that responsible persons need to demonstrate compliance, we take the logistical and contractual complexity out of large-scale fire remediation programmes. If you are working through a compliance backlog or planning a new programme, let’s have a conversation.