The Landlord's Annual Fire Compliance Checklist

The single-let baseline checklist

• Smoke alarms every storey + CO alarms per combustion appliances: working at tenancy start (documented — the photographed-test habit from the landlord rules guide), repaired promptly on report
• Electrical: EICR within 5 years (the statutory line), PAT sense on supplied appliances, fuseboard-era honesty (the upgrade conversations EICRs force)
• Gas safety annual (the parallel regime — landlords know this one; alignment of visit calendars is the efficiency play)
• Furniture and furnishings compliance on supplied items (labels surviving — the 1988 regulations' long tail)
• Escape route sanity at refits: internal door quality, key-free egress (thumb-turns where locks touch escape paths — the HMO principle scaled down), no tenant-trapping ironmongery
• Records per property: the compliance folder (alarm tests, EICR, gas, repairs log) — renewal-ready, deposit-dispute-proof, enforcement-answering (the file habit at portfolio scale)

The HMO and block layers

HMO landlords add the licensing schedule's full apparatus — Grade D1/Grade A alarm systems with testing logs (the HMO alarm guide's specifications), FD30S door regimes (the HMO doors guide), emergency lighting where scheduled (testing rhythms per its guide), and the management-regulation duties (routes clear, equipment maintained, the annual gas/EICR/alarm calendar consolidated) — budget £300–£800/property/year serviced properly (the HMO fire guide's enforcement landscape pricing the alternative). Block-owning landlords (freeholds/RMC participations) carry the common-parts estate: FRAs on cycle (types per the typing guide), the 2022 regulations' door-check rhythms, AOV servicing (the forgotten-system guide), communal lighting/alarm provisions per strategy — the responsible-person duties guide's full frame, delegated to agents perhaps but owned regardless (the demarcation truth).

Portfolio efficiency and the service relationship

Running it at portfolio scale without drowning: calendar consolidation (gas + EICR + alarm + (HMO) lighting/doors aligned per property — one or two visit windows yearly; the bundled-visit economics every guide reaches), standardised kit across stock (the alarm-platform standardisation from the landlord security guide extending to detection — one ecosystem, predictable servicing), template documentation (per-property folders in one drive structure — handover-proof, audit-fast), and the service relationship model (providers holding your schedule, chasing your renewals, certificating per visit — the compliance-package architecture in landlord trim; ours runs exactly this for portfolios across our patch). Costs settle predictably once systematised: single lets £100–£400/year all-in; HMOs £300–£800; blocks per common-parts scope — against an enforcement environment (civil penalties to £30k per offence on the housing side, the Order's unlimited fines on the fire side) that prices sloppiness in different currency. The boring rhythm wins again, propertied.