Hannah Mansell: Rethinking Fire Door Strategy with the ASFP Green Book
26 September 2025
The Association for Specialist Fire Protection (ASFP) is preparing to launch its new Green Book, developed from the work of ASFP’s TG10: Fire Doors. This publication comes at a pivotal moment for the UK’s built environment, challenging stakeholders to rethink how fire doors are specified, procured, and verified as life-saving systems embedded in the full building lifecycle management. Fire doors are often reduced to a box-ticking exercise, installed, signed off, and forgotten. Yet they are one of the most critical safety features in any building, buying vital time, preserving escape routes, and protecting lives. With millions of fire doors entering the UK market annually, this is not a marginal concern but a multi-million-pound industry that underpins safety across homes, hospitals, schools, high-rise buildings, and public infrastructure. But compliance alone doesn’t guarantee safety. As recent history has shown poor specification, fragmented guidance, and weak maintenance can turn essential safety assets into hidden liabilities. The Green Book highlights that fire doors cannot be understood simply as a set of components or separate performances. They are complex systems that must perform under dynamic real-world conditions, and the Green Book highlights the deep planning, design, and procurement decisions, and due diligence, at the very early stages of projects to mitigate risks from emerging later on. The sector is now dealing with a huge variety of doors, components, materials, and configurations. Each must be chosen for specific intended uses and context, and specific user needs. Yet too often, scrutiny only begins at inspection, when risks are already locked in. The Green Book calls for earlier engagement, shifting focus to design, specification, and stakeholder responsibility. The UK fire door sector is at a turning point. The transition from British Standards to the European classification framework is reshaping testing and classification. Post-Grenfell reforms are introducing new duty-holder roles, digital record-keeping, and a Golden Thread of accountability focused on real-world performance. The new EU Construction Products Regulation (CPR) goes further, demanding declarations not just of fire resistance, but also sustainability and life cycle analysis, acoustic integrity, accessibility, and even enhanced digital traceability through product passports. With IoT-enabled technologies enabling remote monitoring and predictive maintenance, the industry is starting to move from reactive inspection toward proactive intelligence. The ASFP’s Green Book serves as more than guidance, it is a mirror reflecting some uncomfortable truths of current protocols and processes. Too many fire doors are specified late, installed without understanding their system interfaces, and maintained reactively rather than proactively. This disconnection creates risk and cost, not through malice, but through fragmented responsibility. The Green Book reframes fire door strategy as a lifecycle commitment, from design to decommissioning. It urges practitioners to see fire door systems not as isolated products but as nodes in a safety network, interacting with their surrounding passive and active systems, users, and their environments. The publication stresses that fire door integrity is a shared responsibility across the entire supply chain and across the lifecycle within a building. Stakeholders, from regulators to residents, now demand transparency: clear test data, traceable certification, and accessible digital records. This requires moving beyond static documents to interoperable formats that support lifecycle management. Every fire door becomes a promise of futureproofed safety and compliance, one that must hold not just at installation, but throughout its service life. The Green Book advises stakeholders to: - Engage with the users of the building, the fire door strategy, specification, and due diligence at the earliest stages of projects
- Map out competences, reposting protocols, responsibilities, and performance verification across disciplines.
- Use the Green Book as a conversation tool and not just a technical manual.
- Build feedback loops from near-miss reporting, inspections, incidents, and resident reports into future specifications.
The ultimate goal is not perfection but futureproofed vigilance, designing with foresight, specifying with integrity, and embedding consequence-awareness into decision-making. The launch of the ASFP Green Book marks a shift from compliance to consequence. By treating doors as lifecycle commitments, the sector can move toward a safer, more accountable future. The door to reform is open. The challenge is how quickly the sector will walk through it.
|
Email to a Friend