This is the personal jaded opinion of a dinosaur who has recently retired after spending 42 years in the industry as a fire officer, fire safety manager and 11 years as a consultant.
I am certain the system is totally broken and am sure between us (those who care about standards) we could come up with hundreds of case studies to prove it. First problem though is client confidentiality - as a consultant I see plenty of breaches of the Regs, all reported but rarely actioned but I have no right to disclose details of work I have carried out (and been ignored) or work I have refused to carry out that has still gone ahead despite being so off the wall as to be dangerous.
So who should complain to Mr Wharton? The client is unlikely to complain as this will only bring hassle on himself, the developer will not complain as they simply bully the fire engineer and AI into accepting whatever they want on threats of losing future work.
Many new buildings are a shambles whether you look at alarms, compartmentation, fire stopping, fire door standards, cavities and voids. The plans are not scrutinised by the enforcement authorities as they used to be to pre-empt problems, strategies are accepted on the nod without often a glimmer of scrutiny or common sense ( basic questions like will it work?), projects are broken down between a myriad of subcontractors and there is rarely the equivalent of a clerk of works to keep everyone in line, monitor standards and ensure one contractor does not undo the previous work of another - particularly a problem with fire stopping. So often signed off before The IT guys go in there. And many sites never actually visited by the AI.
The fire service view taking into account budget cuts and re-organisation appears to be one of wait and see - rather than scrutinising building proposals as we used to with the BCO they are now working on a reactive basis and considering prosecution after a fire. My fear is that we will see many more fires in the future especially affecting residential buildings.
In my view the system is too far broken for any individual voice to be heard - it would need a co-ordinated approach from the fire protection industry bodies- but their only solution is likely to be Third Party Certification or BIM (not that that will make any difference) The weakness of this is it does not fix the co-ordination issues and damage by contractors undoing others work. But first the problems need to be recognised and all we have at present is a few old dinosaurs banging their rusty old drums.
Fact is its an attitude problem throughout the whole of the commercial sector in which profits are put before anything else in this world and nobody cares about standards anymore. It's all make make make.
End of rant for now- sorry for being so boring and predictable.
