Before selecting a person to undertake an assessment or inspection, a building owner must be satisfied that they are a Competent Fire Safety Practitioner (see clause 167A of the Environmental Planning and Assessment Amendment (Fire Safety and Building Certification) regulation 2017).

Due to a broad range of fire safety measures that may be encountered, more than one practitioner may be required to undertake the assessments and inspections for a building. For example, an electrician may have the competency to assess the illuminated exit signs, but may not be competent to assess the fire sprinkler system or fire detection and alarm system.

While assessing the competence of a practitioner can be undertaken in several ways, it is suggested that building owners follow these basic steps:

1. Identify tasks that the fire safety practitioner will need to perform
2. Consider the fire safety practitioner’s competence to perform those tasks, including knowledge and experience
3. Establish and record an opinion of the practitioner’s competence.

There has always been a requirement to be competent. However, the new Regulation now requires building owners to provide details of and sign-off by ‘competent fire safety practitioners’ for Annual and Supplementary Fire Safety Statements.  The Regulation requires owners and certifying authorities to provide a written opinion that the practitioner they have used is competent, prior to recognition of industry schemes.

Access our team of NSW Fully Qualified and Competent Fire Services engineers and Fire Safety engineers to work on your next project.  FSP offers quality but affordable design services for both residential and commercial projects including renovations, developments, mixed-use, retail and shop/office fit-outs. Our Fire Engineers and Designers are Competent Fire Safety Practitioners (CFSP) and are holds appropriate qualification/s with The Building Professionals Board, NSW (e.g. BPB NSW Accredited Certifier: C8,C9,C10 and C14) or with  Fire Protection Association Australia (FPAA:  Fire Systems Designer and Fire Safety Assessor ).

After you have provided some initial information we will contact you and advise what is needed to complete the fire safety works and then prepare a realistic free, no-obligation quote which not only matches your exact requirements but will also meet statutory requirements of the Building Code of Australia (BCA), the Environmental Planning and Assessment Regulation, relevant Australian Standards and relevant conditions of the Development Consent.

1) All plans should be in Adobe PDF or CAD file format.

Documents should default to their intended size when printing. The size and scale should be indicated (i.e. 1:100 @ A1) and a scale bar present.

2) Other documents

a) Photographs and other illustrations that do not need to be reproduced to scale can be submitted as .jpg, .tif and .gif files or images in a Word doc.

b) Printed reports and other text based documents can be submitted as either .pdf, or Word documents

3) Files sizes General

Individual files should not exceed 10MB to make sure that download times are reasonable. Please keep file sizes as small as possible.