The Building Safety Act 2022 overhauled how higher-risk buildings are regulated in the UK. For architects, the most significant change isn't the creation of the Building Safety Regulator or the new gateway process, though both matter. It's the shift in accountability.
Under the old regime, building control sign-off was largely a box-ticking exercise. Approved Inspectors reviewed designs, flagged obvious issues, and signed off on completion. The specification was one document among many, and its accuracy wasn't scrutinised with particular rigour.
The new regime is different. Gateway 2, which must be passed before construction begins on higher-risk buildings, requires detailed fire safety information including specifications of fire-rated elements, compartmentation strategy, and materials. Gateway 3, before occupation, checks that what was built matches what was approved. The specification is no longer background paperwork. It's a regulatory record that the Building Safety Regulator can examine, challenge, and hold the design team accountable for.
This matters because fire safety specifications are among the most technically dense documents a practice produces. They reference Approved Document B, BS 9999, BS 9991, and dozens of product-specific test standards. They define fire ratings for doors, walls, floors, and penetrations. They specify cavity barriers, fire stopping, smoke control systems, and means of escape provisions. Getting any of this wrong isn't just a coordination error. Under the new regime, it's a potential criminal offence.
The golden thread concept, introduced by Dame Judith Hackitt's review and embedded in the Building Safety Act, requires that key building safety information is created, maintained, and passed on throughout the building's lifecycle. The specification is a primary source of that information.
When a fire engineer specifies a 120-minute fire-rated compartment wall, the golden thread requires that this performance requirement is documented at design stage, verified during construction, and accessible to the building's responsible person throughout occupation. If the specification says 120 minutes but the installed product only achieves 90 minutes, the thread is broken. Under the old system, this might have gone unnoticed for years. Under the new system, the Building Safety Regulator can audit the information at any point.
For architects, this means fire safety specifications can't be treated as something you write once and forget. They need to be accurate at every project stage, traceable back to the design intent, and consistent with the drawings, schedules, and fire strategy. The specification is the written promise that the building will perform as designed. The golden thread ensures someone can check whether that promise was kept.
The most common errors aren't dramatic. They're the kind of quiet inconsistencies that accumulate across a complex project and surface too late to fix cheaply.
Fire door specifications that reference an FD30 rating while the fire strategy requires FD60. Cavity barrier specifications that don't account for the actual cavity width in the cladding build-up. Fire stopping specifications that name a product but don't specify the substrate it's been tested against, meaning the installed system may not achieve its rated performance. Compartmentation clauses that assume a wall build-up which doesn't match the current design.
These errors happen because fire safety specifications involve cross-referencing multiple documents: the fire strategy, the door schedule, the wall type schedule, the cladding details, and the relevant British Standards. When any one of these changes during the design process, the specification needs to update too. On a large project, that coordination is a full-time job. Most practices don't have a dedicated specifier, let alone a dedicated fire safety specifier. The work falls to whoever is available, often late in Stage 4, under pressure to issue for tender.
The Building Safety Act also introduced competence requirements for those involved in the design and construction of higher-risk buildings. Architects are expected to demonstrate that they have the skills and knowledge to carry out their role safely. For specification writing, this means understanding not just which fire rating to specify, but how to specify it correctly: the right test standards, the right installation requirements, the right interface details.
Most architecture courses don't teach fire safety specification writing in any depth. Most CPD doesn't cover it adequately either. Architects learn it on the job, often by copying clauses from previous projects and hoping the context is similar enough. That approach worked, or seemed to, when the regulatory bar was lower. It doesn't work when the Building Safety Regulator can audit your specification and ask you to demonstrate why a particular fire rating was chosen, which test evidence supports it, and how you verified it was correctly specified for the specific application.
This is where the gap between what architects know about fire safety design and what they know about fire safety specification becomes a real risk. You might understand the design principle of compartmentation perfectly well. But if your specification references the wrong BS EN test standard or fails to account for a service penetration detail, the building won't perform as intended.
The core problem with fire safety specifications is coordination and accuracy across multiple interrelated documents. That's a problem that AI is well positioned to address.
Tools like Avoice approach fire safety specifications the same way they approach any specification challenge: by ingesting the project's existing documentation and cross-referencing it against the specification. When a practice feeds in their fire strategy, door schedules, wall type schedules, and material selections, Avoice's AI agents can draft fire safety specification clauses that reference the correct standards, match the performance requirements in the fire strategy, and flag where the spec and the schedules disagree.
This doesn't replace the architect's professional judgement. You still need to understand why a compartment wall needs a 120-minute rating and whether the chosen system achieves it. But the tedious, error-prone work of ensuring the specification accurately reflects the design intent across hundreds of fire-rated elements is exactly what AI agents handle well.
Consider the fire door example. A typical education project might have 200 fire doors across the building, with a mix of FD30 and FD60 ratings, different ironmongery requirements, different glazing specifications, and different acoustic ratings. Manually cross-referencing the door schedule against the specification against the fire strategy takes hours and still leaves room for error. An AI-powered tool can read all three documents, identify where they disagree, and draft specification clauses that are consistent with the project data.
The Building Safety Act doesn't prescribe how to write a specification. But the regulatory intent is clear: fire safety information must be accurate, traceable, and maintained. A few principles follow from this.
Fire safety specification clauses should reference specific test evidence, not just generic fire ratings. Instead of specifying "60-minute fire-rated wall," specify the system manufacturer, the test report reference, and the specific build-up that achieves the rated performance. This gives the contractor clear instructions and creates the traceability the golden thread requires.
Fire safety specifications should be updated whenever the design changes. This sounds obvious, but in practice it's the step most likely to be skipped. When the cladding build-up changes, the cavity barrier specification needs to change with it. When a door is upgraded from FD30 to FD60, every related clause needs to reflect that. This is where tools like Avoice add the most value: by maintaining the link between design data and specification so that changes propagate rather than getting lost.
The specification should also be treated as a live document throughout the project, not a one-time deliverable at Stage 4. Under the golden thread requirements, the building's fire safety information needs to be accurate at every stage. A specification that was correct at tender but doesn't reflect the as-built condition is a compliance failure.
The Building Safety Act regime is still evolving. Secondary legislation and guidance continue to be issued. The Building Safety Regulator is building its enforcement capabilities. But the direction of travel is clear: fire safety documentation, including specifications, will face more scrutiny, not less.
Practices that invest in getting their fire safety specifications right now, whether through better internal processes, better tools, or both, will spend less time dealing with regulatory queries, PI claims, and post-completion remediation later. The cost of a good specification is a fraction of the cost of getting it wrong.
The firms seeing the best results are the ones that treat specification writing not as an administrative task to rush through at the end of a project, but as a professional responsibility that deserves the same attention as design. AI-powered tools make that practical by handling the coordination work that would otherwise consume days of senior staff time. The architect's role doesn't diminish. It refocuses on the judgement calls that actually require expertise, while the mechanical checking happens systematically.
If you want to see how Avoice handles fire safety specifications on a real project, the team offers demos tailored to your practice's standards and classification system.
