The FRA should be reviewed when -
material alterations take place
there is a significant change
there is a reason to suspect that the original fire risk assessment is no longer valid.
Have any of these things happened? If not, why do I need to pay somebody to review it for me?
This list of three possible occurrences is valid but not complete. If these three items were sufficient then we would be accepting that nothing ever routinely goes wrong in these premises. But all fire risk assessors know that it is very rare that they come away from an inspection without having made some recommendations to bring the premises to a more acceptable level. Things do routinely go wrong with the fire safety elements in a building so the above list has to be supplemented with 'regular' routine re-inspections.
This is a nightclub we're talking about here. High life risk premises. You can never cut corners with nightclubs. Every year somewhere in the world there is a large scale tragedy in a nightclub, let's keep them out of the UK.
The five year gap between FRAs is nonsense, much too long for these types of buildings.
Any fire risk assessment must be reviewed by the responsible person regularly so as to keep it up to date. There is no definition of regularly but annually is generally accepted to be best practice.
The general practice seems to be that a full FRA is carried out every 5 years and in the intervening years it is reviewed on an annual basis i.e. looked at, has anything changed and what update what has been done.
As for this 'review', what is that? Is it a fire risk assessment or isn't it? I know a lot of people do 'reviews' but what is the difference between them and full FRAs? I know that if you have already inspected a building the previous year then you are familiar with it and don't have to put as much effort into the inspection but I would argue that you should still class it as a fire risk assessment and not a mere, undefined 'review'.
It cannot be denied that a satisfactory 'review' implies a satisfactory building. Therefore, if you conduct a 'review' you cannot leave any stone unturned otherwise it is a waste of time. It's like having a fire resisting door in a wall made of hardboard, it's incomplete and useless. Yes, I agree that the 'stones' you have to turn may be easier to turn or, indeed, you may actually know what is under them without turning them but they still have to be considered and they still contribute to the overall level of safety and therefore to the 'review' process.
I think there may be a marketing element to offering 'reviews' as clients may be more willing to subscribe to cheaper annual reviews than to what are perceived as more expensive full inspections - just speculating here, I don't do marketing.
If the 'review' you're referring to, Mike, is more a matter of assessing, maybe annually, whether or not a fire risk assessment is required then that's a strange beast. How can you judge if a fire risk assessment is required without full knowledge of what the process entails? You can't, so they can only be undertaken by competent fire risk assessors. Ok, so now we have a fire risk assessor on site. To assess whether or not a fire risk assessment is necessary he has to check certain things. Now, making these checks will be easier than was the full FRA the first time he did it and he may be able to work down some sort of checklist but the point is, this is not a 'review', it is a fire risk assessment.
Anyway, back to the nightclub. General default re-inspection period should be annual. Inherent mitigating circumstances or proven track record of effective management might stretch that period to two or three years maximum. Let's face it, some of these places should be inspected every couple of months.