If you're reading this, chances are you've had a fire risk assessor flag it, or a board member's asked "who's actually checking our fire doors?" and nobody had a straight answer. That's the usual starting point. No paperwork trail, no fixed schedule, just doors that were installed years ago and haven't been looked at since - or looked at once, informally, by whoever was in the building that week.

Maybe you've inherited a block from another agent and there's no baseline at all. Maybe you're a landlord with an HMO licence coming up for renewal and someone's mentioned fire door checks need evidencing. Or you're simply aware that London blocks over 11 metres carry duties under the 2022 regulations and you're not sure your building's covered. Whatever's brought you here, the common thread is the same - no documented programme, and a nagging sense that it should exist.

What it might mean

A few things could be going on, and it's worth being honest that they're not mutually exclusive.

Most commonly, the building is over 11 metres and falls under Regulation 10 of the Fire Safety (England) Regulations 2022, which brings a duty to carry out quarterly checks on communal fire doors and annual checks on flat entrance doors. Plenty of responsible persons genuinely don't know this applies to them until someone points it out.

It's also common that no maintenance programme has ever existed - not because anyone's been negligent, but because fire doors don't shout for attention the way a leak or a lift breakdown does. They just quietly degrade.

And sometimes it's an action item straight out of a fire risk assessment - the assessor's noted "establish a documented fire door maintenance programme" as a recommendation, and now it's sat on someone's action list for months.

There's a fourth possibility worth mentioning: right-to-buy has left some blocks with a genuinely confused picture of who owns which door. Communal doors are usually the responsible person's; flat entrance doors are often the leaseholder's - but not always, and getting that wrong means gaps in coverage nobody's spotted yet.

How urgent is it?

This is plannable work - nobody's suggesting you drop everything today. But the regulatory clock doesn't wait for you to get organised. If your building's top storey is above 11 metres, the quarterly communal door checks and annual flat entrance checks should already be happening. If they're not, that gap exists right now, not from some future date.

Call now if you've got a fire risk assessment sat on your desk with a fire door recommendation you haven't actioned, or if you can't currently say when your fire doors were last checked. Those are the two clearest signs the gap needs closing before it shows up as a finding at the next inspection.

If you've got some kind of ad hoc checking happening already, there's more room to plan it properly rather than rush - but "some checking" isn't the same as a documented programme, and assessors know the difference.

What you can safely check

Before anything else, work out whether your building's top storey is above 11 metres. That single fact determines whether Regulation 10 applies to you directly, and it's usually on file with your building safety information or your last fire risk assessment.

Pull out your fire risk assessment and read the actions properly - not just skim them. If there's a specific recommendation about fire door checking frequency, that's your starting brief.

Gather anything that already exists: old survey reports, previous contractor notes, even email threads where someone mentioned a door issue two years ago. A maintenance programme needs a baseline, and existing records - however patchy - save time and money working one out from scratch.

What you shouldn't do is start ticking off checks yourself without knowing what you're looking at. A quarterly Regulation 10 check is meant to be a simple visual look - closer working, seals intact, no damage, closing properly - done by the responsible person. That's fine as far as it goes. But it's not the same as a proper fire door survey, and it won't tell you whether a door that looks fine is actually fit for purpose underneath.

What we check

We start with the building itself - height, number of fire doors, which regulatory tier it sits in, and who the responsible person actually is for each door type. That sounds basic, but on estates with mixed tenure it's often the part that's never been properly established.

If there's no existing survey, we carry one out as the baseline - every fire door recorded, condition noted, defects logged. This is what turns "we think our doors are okay" into something you can actually stand behind.

From there we design the schedule itself: quarterly visits for communal doors, annual for flat entrance doors, matched to what Regulation 10 actually asks for rather than a generic template. And critically - we agree how defects get reported, what escalation looks like when something's found, and what the response time is for remedial work. A programme without a clear defect pathway just generates paperwork nobody reads.

We see the same patterns across London's stock repeatedly. Post-war council blocks with original timber FD30 doors, closers seized or intumescent strips perished. Victorian and Edwardian conversions in inner London where the flat entrance door was never fire-rated to begin with - a routine survey failure, not a rare one. Composite doors in newer developments let down by ironmongery that isn't rated to match the leaf. None of it's unusual. All of it needs catching before it becomes an inspection finding.

How it's fixed

The fix here isn't a single job - it's a structure. An ongoing fire door maintenance programme, built around a proper baseline survey where one doesn't already exist, with remedial repairs picked up as they're found rather than left to accumulate.

That's the real value of doing it properly. A failed self-closer caught on a quarterly visit is a five-minute fix. Left alone for a year, it's a door that's been propped, misused, and possibly damaged enough to need replacing outright. Small defects are cheap. Ignored defects aren't.

Reporting matters just as much as the physical work. Inspection reports and remedial records are supplied as applicable to the work completed - the kind of paper trail that lets you answer a fire risk assessor, an insurer, or a resident's question without scrambling for evidence you don't have. Insurers are increasingly asking for exactly this as a condition of cover, so having it ready isn't just tidy - it's protective.

Call now if

Call now if your building's over 11 metres and there's no documented quarterly or annual check happening. Call now if a fire risk assessment has recommended a maintenance programme and it's still sat unactioned. And call now if you simply can't say, with confidence, when your fire doors were last properly looked at - that's not a small gap, that's the whole gap. The line's answered 24/7, and same-day inspections are available across London, seven days a week, subject to engineer and materials availability.

Managing agent or responsible person needs to set up a fire door maintenance programme in London