Fire Door Safety Week runs 21–25 September, and if you manage an office, this is one awareness week actually worth five minutes of your time — because fire doors are, in my experience auditing SME premises, the single most consistently neglected part of a fire risk assessment.
Not because anyone's being reckless. Because fire doors sit in an odd gap: facilities-managed but rarely facilities-checked, mentioned in the fire risk assessment but rarely walked against it, and — critically — genuinely inconvenient when they're doing their job properly. A fire door that closes itself firmly against a stiff frame is also a fire door that's mildly annoying every time someone carries a coffee through it. That's usually where the problems start.
What actually goes wrong
In practice, three failures turn up again and again in office premises:
- Wedges and hold-open devices that shouldn't be there. Fire doors get propped open for airflow, to make deliveries easier, or just because someone got tired of pushing it. Once wedged, a fire door is not a fire door — it's a hole in your compartmentation.
- Disconnected or failed self-closers. Over time these get adjusted, damaged, or simply stop closing the door fully from a wide-open position. Nobody notices until it's tested.
- Missing or damaged intumescent strips, especially after redecoration or a repaint that's gone over the strip rather than around it.
None of these show up on a casual walk-through unless you're specifically looking for them — which is exactly why they survive so long.
The paperwork has just got more important, not less
In July 2026, MHCLG updated the enforcement guidance under the Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005. The headline change is a new formal route: where you and the enforcing authority genuinely disagree about what the Order requires, and both sides agree, the dispute can go to the Secretary of State for a determination rather than straight to an enforcement notice.
That sounds like good news for responsible persons — and it is, but only if you can back your position up. The guidance is explicit that this route runs on documentation: fire risk assessments, drawings, maintenance records, commissioning certificates. If your fire door records are patchy, this option isn't available to you in practice — and the same documentation gaps that stop you using it are usually what triggers enforcement action in the first place.
What to do during Fire Door Safety Week
- Walk every fire door on your premises. Check the self-closer shuts it fully from any open position — not just from a few inches — and that the gaps around the frame are consistent, roughly 3mm.
- Remove any wedge or hold-open device you find, and treat the underlying reason (usually heat or poor ventilation) as a separate problem to solve properly.
- Check intumescent strips are intact and unpainted.
- Write down what you checked and when. A five-minute walk-round is worth nothing to an inspector — or under the new dispute process — if there's no record it happened.
If you haven't had your fire doors looked at as part of a proper fire risk assessment recently, Fire Door Safety Week is as good a prompt as you'll get. NEHS can build that check into your existing FRA review rather than leaving it as a once-a-year awareness-week afterthought.
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