Gain a competitive advantage with a holistic approach to fire test report data, says Rachel England.
The building safety landscape has changed fundamentally. The Building Safety Act 2022 – the most significant overhaul of building regulation in over 50 years – has redefined accountability across the design and construction process.
Fire test reports are at the heart of the data that designers need to evidence the system selections they make. However, these reports remain complex, highly technical documents that are not always easy to access, interpret or apply.
In a panel discussion at the Building Safety Forum, part of InstallerSHOW 2026, host Liam Poole, Head of Marketing at Knauf UK, spoke to a manufacturer, a principal designer and an advisor to explore how the industry can work collaboratively to ensure that fire performance data is authentic, accurate, applicable, up to date, and available at the point of specification – and what happens when it isn’t.
The evolution of fire test reports
The panel kicked off with Poole asking Dave Vanderson, Principal Director of Residential High-Risk Buildings (HRBs) at Weedon Architects, how the role of fire test reports have shifted day-to-day workflows and risk management when selecting systems for HRBs.
“It’s more important than ever to have systems conversations as early as possible,” said Vanderson. “You don’t want to inadvertently bake issues into your design that you’re going to struggle with further down the line.”
The panel agreed that data – and crucially, stress-tested data – is central to these early conversations. “You need the right information at the right time, otherwise you end up with 11th-hour engineering judgements because the system requirements step outside the limits of the data testing,” said Vanderson. “Sometimes we’ll be on-site screaming at test results, ‘If only you’d tested for 5mm more deflection!’”
Jimmy Collins, Head of Portfolio and Technical at Knauf UK and Ireland, added that from a manufacturer’s perspective, the demand for test data and evidence has increased – not just in volume but in complexity. “If you’re promoting your systems in the market, you need to be able to substantiate and validate claims in the right way. People will say, ‘have you got a system? Is it tested in a fire?’ Great. Tick. But that doesn’t cover all the design detail that’s required – there’s a multitude of variations that you need to be able to account for and help make informed decisions on.”
Collins also offered a word of caution to the audience. “Once upon a time the attitude was, ‘If you want data, you need to ask for it’. A cultural shift means it’s now, ‘Here is all our data, help yourself’. But even if it’s in the public domain, you still need to interrogate that data. We still see assessments in the market from decades ago, signed off by people who no longer work in the business, to standards that no longer exist.”
Approval process
The host then asked R5 Consultants’ Director, Architect, CDM and Principal Designer, Nasar Ishfaq, to reflect on scrutiny around fire test reports, and whether he’s seen any evidence of missing or ambiguous reports slowing down approval processes.
“We include them in all of our submissions. I think the trouble has been that because there are viability and cost requirements from contractors, it’s still about whether schemes go ahead even if they do have approval,” said Ishfaq. “A lot of that depends on things like smoke control, what’s going to form shaft wall systems, what’s going to form partition systems, and because there is such a range of performance requirements for these systems, they’ll go to a manufacturer that can give the broadest range of certification. So they start from stage three having already identified the supplier they’ll go with.”
Poole then asked the panellists what a technical fire report needs to demonstrate to give them the confidence to sign off on a design.
“There are two levels here,” said Vanderson. “One is just the basics and you’ll be amazed how many fire test reports we get that are out to date, cross-reference a British Standard that’s no longer applicable, or even in some cases miss off the figure references behind it that explain what it’s all about. Secondly, it’s about making it clear what a product doesn’t do as well as what it does do. Take the dry line system, for example. How many penetrations can we have in any linear length of wall?”
Vanderson added that this is another area where design decisions need to be made early. “We know that you can only get two double sockets between every stud, but you’ve got a kitchen setup that requires five in a row because it’s pretty heavily congested. The correct design decision is for us to thin the party wall and put a liner in front of it so that the firewall has then got no penetrations through it. But that solution may have area impact on the net – did the architect consider this at planning stage? More detailed analysis in fire tests provide the information needed to make the right decisions early on.”
However, this detail can present challenges in verification. As Ishfaq explained: “We’ve found that some parties will say, ‘We’ll draw a detail but we won’t say that it’s compliant’. Then the fire engineer will say, ‘We’ll state the performance, but we can’t say if the details are okay’. So there’s a gap where nobody – for whatever reasons – wants to take responsibility.” However, he added, R5 Consultants offers services that bridge that gap. “We can interpret a test report, translate that into a detail, and then work with the architect.”
Strategic advantage
Finally, the panel discussed how fire test reports can go beyond compliance to become a strategic advantage, with Poole posing the question, ‘How do we avoid treating fire test reports as a box-ticking exercise, and embed that technical data into an early workflow with the speed of delivery?’
“We need to look at it holistically,” said Ishfaq. “Is it buildable? Does it deliver what we need to achieve. Companies that use the data as part of the whole development picture will see better workflows. More businesses are starting to take this approach.”
Vanderson agreed, noting that holistic data needs to be complemented by understanding and transparency. “We encourage all of our staff to ask any question they want in front of any supplier, manufacturer or consultant – there are no stupid questions. We’re in a rapidly evolving compliance landscape and what might have been the standard two months ago may well have changed by now.”
