England's Fire Safety Bill Just Made Accredited Training Mandatory by End of 2025 — What Building Managers Must Do Now

The Fire Safety Bill is now law, and it brings a new requirement that affects every building manager in England. By the end of 2025, you must complete accredited fire risk assessment training. This is not optional. It is a legal duty.

The change comes from the Building Safety Act 2022 and the Fire Safety (England) Regulations 2022. Together, they close a gap that existed for years: anyone could conduct a fire risk assessment, regardless of training. That is no longer the case.

What the Fire Safety Bill Requires from You

The new requirement is straightforward. As the responsible person for your building, you must be competent to carry out or oversee fire risk assessments. Competence means completing accredited training from a recognised body.

The deadline is 31 December 2025. After that date, if you have not completed the training, your fire risk assessment is legally invalid. Your building is non-compliant.

This applies to all buildings covered by the Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005. That includes hotels, student accommodation, offices, retail spaces, and residential blocks above 11 metres. If you manage a building where people sleep, this affects you.

The training must cover:

• Fire risk assessment methodology
• Fire prevention and protection measures
• Emergency planning and evacuation procedures
• Record keeping and review cycles
• Building-specific hazards (compartmentation, cladding, fire doors)

Accredited bodies include the Institution of Fire Engineers (IFE), the Fire Industry Association (FIA), and the National Fire Chiefs Council (NFCC). Your local fire authority can also advise on approved providers.

What the Bill does not do is prescribe a single curriculum. Instead, it sets a competency standard that your training provider must meet. This means you cannot simply attend a half-day webinar and consider yourself compliant. The training must be role-specific: a manager of a high-rise residential block will need different depth in compartmentation and cladding analysis than a hotel manager focused on guest evacuation and sleeping-risk profiles. You are also required to demonstrate ongoing competence — the Bill implies a periodic refresher cycle, typically every three years, though the exact interval depends on your building's complexity and any post-incident findings. Crucially, the training must be recorded and auditable. Your local fire authority can request proof of completion during an inspection, and failure to produce it renders your entire fire risk assessment void, regardless of its technical quality. This shifts the burden from simply having a document on file to proving the human capability behind it. For operators managing multiple sites, this means tracking individual training records across your portfolio and ensuring each building's responsible person holds a valid, accredited certificate before the 2025 deadline. The practical implication is clear: begin vetting providers now, as accredited courses often have waiting lists, and last-minute compliance will be costly.

Why This Matters for Your Insurance and Liability

Insurance companies are already asking for evidence of competent fire risk assessments. We covered this in our earlier article on fire compartmentation and insurance renewal. The new training requirement adds another layer. But the real shift here is in how liability is now being assigned upstream. Previously, a building manager could outsource the fire risk assessment to a third-party consultant and assume that transferred liability. Under the new mandatory training framework, that assumption no longer holds. The regulator expects the building manager to possess sufficient competence to verify the quality of any outsourced assessment. If the consultant misses a compartmentation breach or fails to identify a combustible material in a common area, the building manager cannot claim ignorance. The training certificate becomes the baseline for due diligence — and without it, your legal defence collapses.

If your fire risk assessment is not carried out by a trained person, your insurer may refuse a claim. In the event of a fire, the HSE or fire authority will investigate. They will ask for your training certificate. If you cannot produce it, you face prosecution. This is not merely a paperwork exercise. The investigation will reconstruct the chain of decisions leading up to the fire. They will examine whether the building manager understood the specific risks of the building’s construction type, occupancy profile, and fire detection systems. A generic training course will not suffice. The regulator expects the training to be role-specific and building-specific. This is where many operators fail: they treat the requirement as a tick-box compliance item rather than a continuous competency obligation.

The penalties are serious. Unlimited fines. Up to two years in prison for individuals. For companies, the fine can be a percentage of turnover. The HSE does not wait for a fire to act. They can prosecute for failure to comply with the Fire Safety Order alone. This is the same approach we saw with the £900k Legionella fine. The regulator is moving from reactive to proactive enforcement. They do not need a death or injury to take action. Non-compliance is enough. For building managers across the GCC and UK, this means your insurance premium is no longer the primary financial risk. The real exposure is the regulatory fine combined with reputational damage that follows a prosecution notice. Proactive training documentation is now your strongest risk mitigation tool — not just for compliance, but for demonstrating a culture of safety that insurers and regulators alike are beginning to demand as standard.

What Competence Looks Like in Practice

Competence is not a one-day course. The Fire Safety Bill requires training that is proportionate to the complexity of your building.

For a simple low-rise office, a one-day accredited course may be sufficient. For a 200-room hotel with a basement plant room, a restaurant kitchen, and multiple escape routes, you need more. The training should cover the specific fire risks in your building type, including the behaviour of modern construction materials, the interaction between active fire suppression systems and passive compartmentation, and the particular vulnerabilities of transient occupants who may be unfamiliar with escape routes. A competent building manager must also understand how to interpret fire risk assessment findings and translate them into actionable maintenance schedules, staff drills, and contractor oversight.

You also need to refresh your training. The guidance recommends every three years, or sooner if there is a significant change to the building or its use. A refurbishment, a change of tenant, or a new heating system all trigger a review. Critically, competence is not static: regulatory updates, such as amendments to Approved Document B in England or the UAE Fire and Life Safety Code, can introduce new requirements that render previous training incomplete. A manager who does not track these changes may unknowingly operate outside compliance.

Record keeping matters. You must document:

• The date of your training
• The accredited body that provided it
• The scope of the training, including specific modules completed
• The date of your next review

Keep these records with your fire risk assessment. The fire authority will ask for them during an inspection. Beyond inspection readiness, thorough records demonstrate a systematic approach to safety management, which can be critical in the event of an incident investigation or insurance claim. Without this documentation, even well-trained managers may struggle to prove their competence when it matters most.

How This Connects to Other Compliance Deadlines

The Fire Safety Bill training requirement sits alongside other changes we have covered on this blog. The EPC operational standard and the MEES Band E deadline both demand that building managers understand their buildings at a deeper level. Fire safety is part of that picture.

If you manage a building in the UAE, the picture is different but related. The UAE Fire Code 2023 and the mandatory fire audits we covered in Abu Dhabi's Mandatory Fire Audit also require competent persons to carry out assessments. The principle is the same: the regulator wants to see that the person responsible knows what they are doing.

For UK managers, the Fire Safety Bill training requirement is one of several changes coming in 2025. The Building Regulations 2024 fire compartmentation update, the new short-term rental register, and the SECR 2025 tenant energy reporting all land in the same window. It is worth mapping your compliance calendar now. Critically, the training mandate creates a competency chain that intersects with these other deadlines. For example, the compartmentation update requires building managers to verify fire-stopping integrity in concealed spaces — a task that demands the same risk-assessment logic the Fire Safety Bill training enforces. Similarly, the SECR 2025 tenant energy reporting requires managers to collect and verify data from multiple tenants; the procedural rigour learned in fire risk assessment training — documenting assumptions, identifying gaps, and scheduling reviews — directly applies to energy data governance. In the UAE, the 2023 Fire Code’s requirement for annual third-party audits of active fire systems dovetails with the training mandate: a manager who cannot demonstrate competence in interpreting audit findings risks non-compliance on both fronts. The practical takeaway is that these deadlines are not isolated events but a layered compliance ecosystem. A single training investment in fire risk assessment methodology can satisfy the competency requirement across multiple regulatory regimes, reducing duplication and audit fatigue. Managers should treat the Fire Safety Bill training not as a standalone checkbox but as the foundational process standard that underpins their entire 2025 compliance strategy.

Where to Start

First, check your current fire risk assessment. Look at the date and the name of the person who carried it out. If it was done by someone without accredited training, you need to redo it before the end of 2025. This is not merely a paperwork exercise — the Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005 places the duty on the "responsible person" to ensure the assessment is suitable and sufficient. An untrained assessor may miss critical compartmentation issues, escape route obstructions, or fire door deficiencies that could invalidate your entire compliance position. The new Bill effectively closes this loophole by mandating that the assessor's competence be demonstrable and verifiable.

Second, book your training. The IFE, FIA, and NFCC all offer accredited courses. Many are available online. The cost is typically £200–£500 per person, depending on the level. For a building manager, this is a small price compared to the cost of non-compliance. Consider that a single enforcement notice can halt operations, trigger insurance premium hikes, or lead to prosecution under the Fire Safety Order. The training should cover not just the mechanics of assessment but also the legal duties, record-keeping obligations, and the specific risks posed by your building type — whether a hotel, residential block, or commercial office.

Third, update your records. Make sure your training certificate is filed with your fire risk assessment. Set a reminder for your three-year review. The Bill does not specify a fixed renewal interval, but best practice and most accreditation bodies recommend refresher training every three years to account for regulatory changes, building modifications, and lessons from recent fire incidents. Your records should also log any interim reviews triggered by alterations to the building layout, occupancy changes, or new fire safety guidance from the National Fire Chiefs Council.

If you manage multiple buildings, consider a centralised system to track training and assessments. This is where a platform like Herman can help. It keeps all your compliance data in one place, so you can see at a glance what is due and what is overdue. Talk to the HermanWa team to see how it works for your portfolio.

— The HermanWa Team