Eight years on from Dame Judith Hackitt's Building a Safer Future, and with the Building Safety Act regime now bedding in, the fire safety profession in England and Wales finds itself in an unfamiliar position. The regulatory framework — for the first time in a generation — has caught up with what practitioners have long known the work demanded. The competence expectations now placed on those carrying out fire risk assessments, external wall reviews and higher-risk building work are explicit, traceable and enforceable in ways they were not before.
What has not caught up, at anything like the same pace, is the supply of suitably qualified people to do the work.
A regulatory environment that finally names competence
The shift began with the Hackitt Review's central finding: that the system had been failing not because the rules were absent, but because the people applying them often were not competent to do so. The legislation and guidance that followed — the Fire Safety Act 2021, the Fire Safety (England) Regulations 2022, Section 156 of the Building Safety Act 2022, the Higher-Risk Buildings regime, PAS 9980 and the Building Safety Regulator's emerging competence frameworks — have collectively done something the Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005 did not. They have made competence a precondition rather than an assumption.
The Responsible Person under the Fire Safety Order must now record their fire risk assessment in full and, where they delegate it, must ensure the assessor is competent. "Competent" is no longer a word the profession can shrug at. Insurers are asking sharper questions, principal accountable persons of HRBs need to demonstrate the chain of competence behind every assessment they hold, and the Building Safety Regulator has signalled that it expects to see evidence, not assurances.
Where the gap is most acute
In practical terms, the competence gap shows up in four places.
The first is high-rise and higher-risk residential. Every HRB owner needs Type 4 FRAs carried out by someone who can credibly attest to the construction and compartmentation as built, not just as drawn. The pool of assessors with both the technical depth and the survey experience to do this work is small.
The second is external wall assessments under PAS 9980. The code of practice is now embedded in the lending and remediation landscape, but the qualified assessor base — particularly those who can interpret façade build-ups alongside fire engineering principles — has lagged demand badly.
The third is complex non-residential stock: healthcare, education, heritage, custodial and mixed-use schemes. These buildings rarely fit neatly into template FRAs and require an assessor who understands construction, occupancy and operational risk in equal measure.
The fourth, and perhaps most overlooked, is the mid-market commercial estate. Portfolio holders who relied for years on light-touch Type 1 assessments are now finding insurers and tenants pushing for Type 3 and Type 4 work — and acting on the recommendations that follow.
Why building engineers belong in this conversation
It is no accident that the Chartered Association of Building Engineers has taken an increasingly visible role in the competence debate, alongside the IFE, IFSM and the wider industry competence groups. Building engineers — MCABE and CBuildE in particular — bring exactly the cross-disciplinary literacy the new regime rewards: building pathology, construction technology, regulatory interpretation, and the survey discipline to read a building as it actually is rather than as it was drawn.
Fire risk assessment, done properly, is not a checklist exercise. It is a survey-led judgement about how a specific building, with a specific construction history and a specific occupancy profile, behaves under fire conditions.
That is engineering territory as much as it is fire safety territory. The professionals best placed to close the competence gap are often those who began in building surveying or building control and added fire-specific accreditations as the work pulled them in that direction.
What the sector now needs is more of them, faster — and better routes for those already in adjacent disciplines to formalise their fire competence without starting from zero.
What this means for the profession
Three things follow from this, and they are not particularly comfortable.
The first is that demand for genuinely qualified fire surveyors and risk assessors is structurally elevated, not cyclically so. The remediation pipeline alone is a multi-year programme of work; the HRB stock will need ongoing reassessment; the wider FRA market is moving up the complexity curve. Firms that have built credible fire safety divisions are already busy and looking to grow.
The second is that growth is constrained at the senior end. Junior assessors can be trained, but the work that insurers and Responsible Persons will actually rely on needs people with years of survey experience behind them. That cohort cannot be created on a twelve-month timescale.
The third is that the firms doing this work well are increasingly competing for the same small group of qualified individuals. Pay is rising, flexible working is now expected rather than offered, and senior surveyors holding MCABE, CBuildE, MIFireE or equivalent credentials are in a stronger position than they have ever been to choose where they spend the next phase of their career.
A profession growing into its role
None of this is a counsel of despair. The fire safety profession in 2026 is more rigorous, better-defined and more respected than it has been at any point in the post-war period. The competence agenda has achieved what years of voluntary improvement could not. The work matters, the standards are clearer, and the practitioners doing it well are recognised for it in ways they were not a decade ago.
The challenge — and the opportunity — is to keep widening the pipeline of people coming into the work, particularly from the building engineering and surveying community where the relevant foundations are already in place. That is a conversation worth the whole sector having, and one this author is glad to be part of.
Frequently Asked Questions
What does the Building Safety Act change about fire risk assessor competence?
Section 156 of the Building Safety Act 2022, alongside the Fire Safety Act 2021 and the Fire Safety (England) Regulations 2022, makes competence a precondition rather than an assumption. Responsible Persons must record their fire risk assessment in full and, where the assessment is delegated, must ensure the assessor is competent. The Building Safety Regulator has signalled it expects evidence of that competence — not assurances.
Why are MCABE and CBuildE qualifications relevant to fire risk assessment?
Fire risk assessment, done properly, is a survey-led judgement about how a specific building behaves under fire conditions. That is engineering and construction-technology territory as much as fire safety territory. Building engineers — MCABE and CBuildE in particular — bring the cross-disciplinary literacy the post-Hackitt regime rewards: building pathology, construction technology, regulatory interpretation and the survey discipline to read a building as it actually is rather than as it was drawn.
What is a Type 4 Fire Risk Assessment?
A Type 4 FRA is the most thorough form of fire risk assessment in the PAS 79 framework. It is destructive and intrusive — opening up the structure to verify the construction and compartmentation as actually built, rather than as drawn. Every higher-risk building (HRB) owner needs Type 4 FRAs carried out by an assessor with both the technical depth and the survey experience to attest to the construction credibly.
What is PAS 9980 and why does it matter?
PAS 9980 is the Publicly Available Specification giving a code of practice for fire risk appraisal of external wall construction and cladding on existing residential buildings. It is now embedded in the lending and remediation landscape, but the qualified assessor base — particularly those who can interpret façade build-ups alongside fire engineering principles — has lagged demand badly.