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There is a specific kind of bad afternoon familiar to most facilities managers: a fire risk assessor flags a door that no longer closes correctly, and it turns out the access control retrofit installed eighteen months ago changed the door’s closing mechanism just enough to breach its certification. Nobody did anything wrong on purpose. The security contractor fitted what they were asked to fit. The fire contractor certified what they were shown. Nobody involved in either project was in the room for the other one.
You are the one who has to explain it.
Under the Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005, the “Responsible Person” (usually the facilities manager, whoever technically holds the title) carries the legal duty to ensure fire safety measures remain effective for the building’s entire life, not just at handover. The Fire Safety Act 2021 and the Building Safety Act 2022 have only sharpened that further, extending scope and raising the evidential bar for what “effective” means. None of that liability transfers to whichever contractor happened to be on site when something changed.
The problem isn't incompetence. It is the seam.
Fire detection, access control, CCTV and intruder systems in most commercial buildings are bought, installed and maintained by different specialists, on different contracts, on different renewal cycles. Each one does their job well within their own scope. The failure point sits in the gap between them. The door hardware nobody cross-checked, the escape route a new turnstile narrows by four inches, the fire panel integration that was never tested end to end because two different engineers handled the two ends.
A facilities manager overseeing a multi-tenant office or a mixed-use campus can easily be running six or seven separate maintenance contracts for systems that all physically touch the same doors, ceilings and corridors. Coordinating that can be a structural failure, nobody owns the whole picture, so nobody is positioned to catch what falls between two competent specialists doing their jobs correctly.
What changes when one team owns both
Evolution designs, installs and maintains electronic security and life safety systems as a single operation. The same engineers who understand door hardware for access control also understand what that hardware does to a fire door’s certification. A change on one system triggers a check against the other, because it can be the same team, the same visit, and often the same person.
That matters most at the exact moment things usually go wrong: during change. A tenant fit-out. A new alarm zone. An access control upgrade on an existing fire-rated door. When one contractor is responsible end to end, that cross-check happens by default rather than by hoping someone remembers to make a phone call.
It also matters for the paperwork you will need if you are ever asked to prove compliance. As-built documentation, commissioning records and maintenance history that sit in one place, built by one accountable team, hold up considerably better under scrutiny than a filing cabinet of contractor handover packs from five different companies over ten years.
The question worth asking your current contractors
Not “are you compliant” (every contractor will say yes). Ask instead: if your fire system and your security system both touch the same door, who is responsible for checking that a change to one hasn’t quietly broken the other? If the honest answer involves two separate companies and no formal process connecting them, that is the gap sitting in your building right now, waiting for a risk assessment to find it before you do.
Evolution designs, installs and maintains integrated electronic security and life safety systems under a single accountable operation. If you would like a second opinion on where the seams sit in your own building, we are happy to have that conversation.