Three quarters of fire doors inspected across the UK aren’t fit for purpose. If yours are among them, a fire inspector can shut down part of your premises on the spot.

That figure comes from the Fire Door Inspection Scheme, based on over 100,000 inspections. Often, the failures that cause doors to be condemned are things you’d walk past every day without noticing.

Determining which doors need to be fire doors

Not every door in your building needs to be a fire door. Which ones do is determined by your fire risk assessment.

As a general rule, any door on an escape route needs to be fire-rated. So do doors to stairwells, corridors and higher-risk rooms like kitchens, boiler rooms, server rooms or anywhere flammable materials are stored.

The point of a fire door is to hold fire and smoke in one area long enough for people to get out safely. If a door sits between a fire and someone’s route out of the building, it should be a fire door.

If you’ve never had a fire risk assessment done, or if your assessment doesn’t specify which doors need to be fire-rated, you’ve already got a compliance gap before you even get to the condition of the doors themselves.

Reasons why fire doors fail inspection

The single biggest reason fire doors fail inspection is excessive gaps between the door and the frame. When a fire door is closed, the gaps around the top and sides should be consistently under 4mm. Anything wider than that and fire and smoke get through. The door can’t do its job.

After gaps, the next most common failures are damaged or missing intumescent seals and faulty self-closing devices.

Intumescent seals are the strips fitted into the door or frame that expand when they get hot. They create the seal that holds fire back. If they’ve been painted over or damaged, the door won’t perform to its fire rating. Cold smoke seals work alongside them to prevent smoke spreading before the heat reaches the door. If those are missing, smoke moves freely through the building from the moment a fire starts.

Self-closers fail regularly too. If the closer is broken or has been removed, the door is effectively useless in a fire. The same applies to any door that’s been wedged or propped open, which is one of the most common things inspectors find.

Other issues that come up:

• Non-fire-rated hinges or fewer than three hinges on the door

• Glazing that’s been retrofitted without the correct fire rating

• No certification label, meaning there’s no evidence that the door is a genuine fire door

• Signage missing or incorrect

And roughly a third of failures come down to poor installation, meaning that the door was never right from day one.

What happens when they fail

Inspections are usually carried out by your local Fire and Rescue Service. They can visit your premises without warning, as a routine inspection, prompted by a complaint or triggered by a fire or incident at your premises or a similar business nearby.

If a fire inspector finds problems with your fire doors, the response depends on the severity.

For minor issues, you may get verbal or written advice.

For lower-level issues, you’ll get an enforcement notice with a legal deadline to fix the problem. For anything that puts people at serious risk, a prohibition notice can restrict or stop the use of your premises immediately.

Fines for fire safety offences are unlimited and, for serious breaches, the responsible person can face up to two years in prison.

There’s also the insurance angle. Non-compliant fire doors can also create an insurance headache. If a fire happens and your insurer finds that your doors weren’t maintained or weren’t genuine fire-rated doors, they can refuse the claim. You’d be covering the damage yourself.

How to make sure that you’re fire door compliant

Fire doors should be formally inspected at least every six months. That’s the recommendation under BS 8214, the British Standard for fire door maintenance, and is widely regarded as good practice.

Between formal inspections, obvious defects shouldn’t be left unreported. Doors that don’t close fully. Gaps that have widened. Seals that are visibly worn or missing. Doors that have been wedged open or had their closers removed. Any of those should be flagged and dealt with.

Your fire risk assessment should specifically reference your fire doors and their condition. If it doesn’t, or if it hasn’t been reviewed recently, that’s something an inspector will pick up on.

And if you don’t actually know whether the doors in your building are certified fire doors, that’s the first thing to resolve.

How we can help

We help businesses understand and manage their fire safety responsibilities. That includes carrying out fire risk assessments, identifying fire door issues and helping businesses address them before they become a problem.

Fire Door Safety Week runs from 21 to 25 September. If you’ve never had your fire doors properly checked, now is a good time to get it done.

Get in touch and we can tell you where you stand.