Government & Public Buildings
Passive fire for buildings that have to answer for themselves.
Overview
Government offices, civic and council buildings, courthouses, police stations, emergency services facilities and public administration buildings. Fire Rated Systems works on them in new construction, refurbishment and existing-building compliance work.
The work is the same work. What is different is that a public asset has to be able to show its position rather than assert it — at audit, at handover, at a change of facility manager, and sometimes years after the contractor has gone. So the record we leave behind matters as much as the installation.
The evidence is part of the deliverable
Public procurement asks for the evidence up front and keeps asking for it afterwards. Every penetration, doorset and enclosure we complete carries its location, the system it was built to, who installed it and when — recorded as the work goes in rather than assembled at the end from memory and photographs.
That is what makes the next inspection cycle possible, and it is what answers an auditor without anyone having to reopen a wall. A building that cannot show what is behind its finishes has to prove it the expensive way.
Open to the public, and running while you work
A council office, a courthouse or a library has the public walking through it during the day. The work gets staged around opening hours, or it happens after them, with the area handed back clean and finished each time rather than fenced off for a fortnight.
Some of these buildings also have areas the public never sees and contractors do not enter casually. Courthouses, police stations and emergency services facilities come with security arrangements, escorts and conditions on tools and access. Those get planned before the crew arrives, because they are not negotiable on the day.
Older buildings and altered records
Civic buildings tend to be old and to have been changed many times, with each alteration adding services and rarely adding records. Heritage fabric is common, and so are drawings that describe a building that no longer exists.
We record what is observed separately from what the documents say and send the mismatch to technical review rather than resolving it quietly on site. Where the fabric cannot be disturbed, that goes into the method before it goes into a variation.
What you get from us
- Service penetration fire stopping through rated walls, floors, risers and shafts, for every trade.
- Fire and smoke doorsets, including exit and egress doors on public paths of travel.
- Structural fire protection, fire-rated construction, ducts, dampers, cable transits and enclosures.
- Baseline surveys and asset registers for buildings where the records have not kept up with the alterations.
- Staged defect rectification worked from the report you already hold, rather than a fresh survey.
- Certification of our own work, and third-party certification of installations carried out by others.
- Handover records in the form the asset owner's compliance regime asks for.
The conditions we plan for
- Public access during hours — Staged around opening times, or worked after them, with each area handed back finished.
- Secure and restricted areas — Clearances, escorts and tool conditions agreed before mobilisation.
- Heritage and older fabric — The material question asked before intrusive work, with constraints written into the method.
- Records that do not match site — Observed conditions recorded separately from documented ones, and the difference escalated rather than absorbed.
- Audit and reporting obligations — Tell us what your regime requires and we will confirm we can meet it before the work starts.
Questions
Frequently asked questions
- Can you work while the building is open to the public?
- Yes. The work is staged around opening hours or done outside them, and each area is handed back clean and finished rather than left hoarded off.
- Do your crews hold security clearances?
- Tell us the facility and what it requires, and we will confirm what our crews already hold and what has to be arranged before mobilisation. It is dealt with at pricing rather than on the first morning.
- We have an old defect report and no budget to do all of it. Where do we start?
- Send the report as it stands. We keep your wording, map each item to a system and a location, group the repeat items so they price as volume, and stage the programme so the highest-risk items go first.
- Can you certify work that somebody else installed?
- We can inspect it and tell you what the evidence supports. Where the installation and its evidence stand up we can certify it as a third party; where they do not, you get a defect list and a repair path instead of a signature.
Related
Drawings, photos or a defect report in front of you?
Send what you already have. We will tell you what else is needed before the work can be reviewed, priced or booked for site inspection.