By Steven Doherty, Managing Director of Neo.
Fire Door Safety Week 2025 has kicked off with its vital “Recognise it, Report it” message — but what happens after you spot the problem? The real challenge isn’t just identifying fire door defects; it’s implementing a comprehensive strategy that transforms reactive maintenance into proactive protection.
As Fire Door Safety Week begins across the UK, building managers are once again focusing their attention on fire door compliance. With over 38,000 fires recorded in England last year, this annual awareness campaign serves a critical purpose — helping people identify the signs that fire doors may not perform when lives depend on them.
But as thousands of building safety professionals participate in this week’s events and training sessions, a more complex challenge emerges: recognition is just the beginning of effective fire safety management.
Moving beyond the checklist
Fire Door Safety Week has successfully transformed how the industry approaches fire door defects. Building managers can now confidently identify damaged seals, misaligned doors and faulty closers. Maintenance teams understand what to look for during inspections. The “recognise and report” message has taken root.
Yet many organisations remain trapped in what we might call the “recognition gap” — they’re excellent at spotting individual problems but struggle with the systematic approach that modern building safety demands. The issue we see is that with checklists and basic training, site teams can now recognise the problems, but without the right levels of Skills, Knowledge, and Experience they can’t diagnose the cause or recommend the remedial work. At this stage, under the Building Safety Act (SKEB), their behaviour should be to report this and bring in someone who can.
This gap becomes particularly evident during Fire Door Safety Week itself. Intensive inspections reveal multiple defects across building portfolios, but the subsequent repair programmes often treat each issue in isolation rather than addressing the underlying systems that support fire door performance.
The interconnected reality of fire safety
Today’s building safety landscape requires us to understand that fire doors don’t exist in isolation. They’re critical components that are part of buildings’ Fire and Evacuation strategy that may be impacted by other compartmentation considerations, detection and alarms or other warning systems. A perfectly maintained fire door loses its effectiveness if the surrounding fire stopping is compromised. Similarly, compliant compartmentation means nothing if the fire doors within it can’t perform their life-saving role.
Traditional approaches often treat fire safety elements as separate systems. Different contractors arrive at different times, often with limited understanding of how their work impacts the broader fire safety strategy. The result? Fragmented solutions that may address individual defects while missing system-wide vulnerabilities.
The Monday morning challenge
As building managers return to their desks armed with new insights from Fire Door Safety Week resources and training, they face a familiar challenge: how to translate awareness into action. The week’s activities excel at highlighting what to look for, but the practical implementation of systematic fire safety management requires a different approach entirely.
Many will spend this week coordinating between multiple contractors — one for fire door repairs, another for fire stopping work, a third for sprinkler maintenance. This fragmented approach, while common, creates dangerous gaps in both protection and accountability.
The financial implications compound the safety concerns. Multiple callout charges, duplicated site visits, and conflicting repair schedules mean organisations often spend significantly more on fire safety while achieving lower levels of protection than a coordinated approach would deliver.
Technology-enabled systematic approaches
As Fire Door Safety Week 2025 emphasises the importance of recognition and reporting, the most forward-thinking organisations are leveraging technology to transform how they act on these insights. Modern fire safety management demands more than traditional inspection and repair cycles.
Advanced systems provide real-time visibility into fire safety asset performance across entire portfolios. Instead of managing findings through spreadsheets and separate contractor systems, building managers can access comprehensive data on fire door condition, maintenance history and compliance status through unified platforms.
This technological integration enables the proactive maintenance scheduling that Fire Door Safety Week advocates. Rather than waiting for annual awareness campaigns to highlight problems, intelligent systems can predict maintenance needs and schedule interventions before defects compromise fire safety performance.
This week’s opportunity: Strategic implementation
Fire Door Safety Week 2025 presents the perfect opportunity for organisations to move beyond recognition toward systematic implementation. As training sessions and awareness activities highlight the importance of fire door compliance, building managers can use this momentum to establish comprehensive approaches that address their buildings as integrated safety systems.
The week’s events provide excellent forums for understanding not just what to look for, but how to implement systematic solutions. Industry experts presenting at Fire Door Safety Week sessions consistently emphasise that effective fire safety management requires coordinated approaches rather than component-by-component fixes.
For organisations ready to transform their fire safety management, this week offers the ideal catalyst. The heightened awareness of fire door importance can drive conversations about comprehensive partnerships that address entire passive fire protection systems rather than individual components.
Measuring success beyond this week
The true measure of Fire Door Safety Week’s impact isn’t the number of defects identified or repair orders generated. It’s whether organisations use this week’s insights to implement systematic approaches that transform reactive maintenance into proactive protection.
The most successful Fire Door Safety Week outcomes occur when organisations recognise that comprehensive fire safety requires comprehensive solutions. They understand that effective fire door management is inseparable from broader building safety strategies that address compartmentation, fire stopping, sprinkler systems, and emergency planning as integrated systems.
Today’s action: From awareness to partnership
As Fire Door Safety Week 2025 begins, the most impactful action building managers can take isn’t just scheduling more inspections or generating more repair orders. It’s using this week’s momentum to establish partnerships that provide complete accountability for fire safety outcomes.
The buildings that will benefit most aren’t those that identify the most defects or complete the most repairs. They’re the buildings whose managers understand that sustainable fire safety requires moving beyond recognition toward systematic protection through comprehensive partnerships.
Fire Door Safety Week reminds us why fire doors matter. But the real measure of this week’s success will be whether that recognition translates into the systematic approaches that keep buildings and their occupants truly safe — not just this week, but every week throughout the year.
The future of building safety belongs to those who understand that effective fire door management is just the beginning of comprehensive building protection.
PTSG Fire Solutions is proud to support Fire Door Safety Week 2025 and provides comprehensive fire protection services across the UK, including independent risk assessments. For organisations ready to transform recognition into systematic action, visit www.ptsg.co.uk to discuss how comprehensive partnerships can enhance your building safety strategy.
