I work in a 7 acre manufacturing site and we do them inhouse and usually find something new or something that has changed. There are options other than NEBOSH aswell. Im Im not sure where we would stand from an insurance / legal point of view if we missed somthing that caused a fire though? Our insurers are happy for us to do them too. Id focus on the day to day management of the real fire risks as apose to who wrote the assessment. Proactive. Good luck

Aleemen - re the insurance issue. EL insurance is generally free of policy warranties since it is a legal requirement to protect employees, not the policyholder. Fire Risk Assessments are a mechanism for the prevention of injury and death from fire and explosion. To that end, I am not aware of any property insurer applying policy conditions to the effect that an FRA must be completed to ensure cover. I've worked for 4 insurers, 3 mainstream and 1 niche - none of them had it. Not saying a smaller player might not have a condition but it would be unusual to go against the market. There will be warranties / conditions relating to fire fighting measurers such as sprinklers, FEA, electrical testing and heating systems but these will have been agreed at policy inception stage or renewal. Finally, most of the insurance surveyors have a preference for H&S (and FRA) being completed in house by a competent person due to greater day to day involvement with the issues arising. Nothing against consultants at all - just the issue when some clients delegate all H&S management to a consultant and pay it lip service in between consultant visits.

Some good advice given here so I would head it and once you have a good assessment in place it should not take long to update it NB: I personally do not use the PAS79 template as I find that it is not suitable and sufficient and have noted that disclaimers are being used in many cases along side the PAS79 itself [PAS79 in my view is mainly a check list] - but disclaimers are not what risk assessment are about A recent PAS example I evaluated had not even considered the place of safety where very young children were expected to go and highlighted within it many areas that had not been evaluated at all! - the mind boggles

I am also not a huge fan of PAS79. Its not the tick box part that I am not keen on, it's the general messy layout and the risk assessment matrix part that I find is not user friendly. By that, I mean that for fellow H&S and F/Safety professionals it's not rocket science, but when you provide such a complicated document to a small businessman or the RP of a SME, it's often just too difficult for them to understand. I had an opportunity to clear a huge storeroom of fire safety files when I was an Inspecting Officer (IO). Much of the archive was being binned. So I liberated scores of different FRA designs and have merged what I consider the best into one format. The aim is to make the design easy to understand for the average punter, using a clear font, plain English, colours and tables etc. I see my role to interpret the law and give the punter ways of complying. I am not in the game of producing a huge difficult to read document full of technical speak. The only real advantage of PAS79 is that most (but not all) IOs recognise the format as an acceptable design if completed well

I've been doing fire risk assessments forever - or so it seems, from fire prevention when in fire brigade through the Fire Precautions (workplace) Regs in 1997 to the rrfso. I developed my own template from the Workplace Regs guidance and amended it when rrfso came in. It works fine for me and met with the approval of a few Fire Safety Officers in the local FRS. Although it is not a tick box sheet they said it "ticks all the boxes" for them. I have looked at PAS79 and although there are one or two points I could incorporate into my template I decided not to as I believe the rrfso guidance documents contain all relevant information necessary for me to undertake a suitable and sufficient fire risk assessment. I do not produce pages and pages of reports, just the "Main Findings" as required by the rrfso. I make it into a 'priority" sheet and suggest what they should do first, second, third etc. and give them a date for review, offering to carry out the review but leave it to them to decide. Some call me back and other don't. Most of my FRA clients are small to medium enterprises and can't afford loads of money on fra's and they are not all the brightest buttons in the box so need everything to be as simple as it can be. I recently asked 'who reads the reports anyway?" well if you make them too detailed they will not be read.