Monthly checks that keep a high-rise compliant

A high-rise residential building does not fail safety in a single dramatic moment. It drifts. A firefighters' lift develops a fault that nobody logs. A dry riser inlet gets blocked by a parked car. A self-closing device on a corridor door stops working and stays that way for months. Each of these is small on its own, and each is exactly the kind of thing a monthly check is designed to catch before it becomes the reason an evacuation goes wrong. Since the Fire Safety (England) Regulations 2022 came into force, the monthly check is no longer good practice. For the tallest residential blocks, it is law.

What the regulations require, and where they come from

The Fire Safety (England) Regulations 2022 were made under Article 24 of the Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005 and came into force on 23 January 2023. They implement recommendations from Phase 1 of the Grenfell Tower Inquiry, and they put concrete, recurring duties on the responsible person for high-rise residential buildings. In this context, high-rise residential means a building at least 18 metres tall or at least 7 storeys, containing two or more domestic premises.

Among those duties is a specific monthly obligation. Responsible persons of high-rise residential buildings must carry out monthly checks of the firefighters' lifts and of the key pieces of firefighting equipment in the building, and must record the outcome. Where a fault is found that cannot be fixed within 24 hours, it has to be reported to the local fire and rescue service. The point of the cadence is simple: equipment that firefighters may rely on in the worst moment of a building's life should be known to work, not assumed to work.

The monthly check is not the whole picture

It helps to see the monthly check as one layer in a stack of obligations that run at different speeds. The same regulations require the responsible person to share external wall system information and floor and building plans electronically with the local fire and rescue service, and to keep hard-copy floor plans together with a single-page orientation plan and the responsible person's contact details in a secure information box for firefighters. Those are set-up-and-maintain duties rather than monthly ones, but they sit alongside the recurring checks and depend on the same up-to-date information.

The table below is one way to picture how the cadences interact. Treat it as an illustration of the rhythm, not as a substitute for the regulations themselves.

For a fuller view of the FRA that sits behind all of this, see the fire risk assessment beyond a tick-box.

Doing the check so it counts

A monthly check that produces no usable record is barely worth doing. The value is in the evidence, and the evidence is only as good as the discipline around it. A few habits make the difference:

• Check at the time and record at the time. A note written from memory after the round is weaker than one captured at the lift door, even when the finding is the same.
• Name the person who did it. A check with no owner is hard to stand behind and easy to challenge.
• Photograph anything you act on, so the before and after are not a matter of recollection.
• Log faults the moment they appear, and start the 24-hour clock from that record, not from when somebody remembered to write it up.
• Keep the months in sequence, so that twelve checks read as a continuous story rather than twelve loose files.

The aim is a trail a stranger could follow in order. If an inspector, or a colleague covering for you, can pick up the record and see what was checked, when, by whom and what happened next, the building is in a defensible position.

The plans that make a check meaningful

A check of the firefighters' lift means little if the plans that direct firefighters to it are out of date. The monthly cadence and the plan-keeping duty are two halves of the same obligation, which is why the orientation plan in the secure information box, the floor plans shared with the fire and rescue service, and the equipment you check each month should all be drawn from one current set of information rather than three drifting copies. We have written separately on the single-page orientation plan, and why it matters.

Keeping the cadence honest

The hardest part of monthly checks is not the checking. It is making sure they actually happen every month, that the record survives a change of staff, and that a missed month is visible rather than silently absorbed. A spreadsheet works until the person who owns it moves on. The duty does not move on with them.

This is the kind of recurring obligation a compliance calendar is built for: the check is scheduled, the responsible person is named, the record is dated and owned, and a slipped deadline shows up instead of disappearing. In SAMRISK, those monthly records sit alongside the building's building plans and fire risk assessment, so the evidence and the information it depends on stay in one place.

This is general information rather than legal advice, and you should confirm the current requirements for your building before acting. The underlying point is steady, though. In a high-rise, the things firefighters depend on should be checked on a known rhythm, recorded as you go, and held somewhere the next person can pick up without you.