For years, public discussion of the Building Safety Act 2022 stayed fixed on one place... cladding. Grenfell, the remediation debates, the Building Safety Fund.
For years, public discussion of the Building Safety Act 2022 stayed fixed on one place... cladding. Grenfell, the remediation debates, the Building Safety Fund.
How a Hackney tower block moved all its fire-safety servicing to one provider
A residential block has a lot riding on its fire safety. Alarms. Emergency lighting. Fire doors. Each one needs servicing, on its own schedule, to its own standard.
Managed separately, that is a lot of contractors to chase... and a lot of gaps where a job can slip through unnoticed.
When the housing provider Hyelm looked at the fire-safety servicing for one of its Hackney tower blocks, it decided to change that. It moved the whole lot - alarms, emergency lighting and fire doors - to a single provider. That ...
Most Responsible Persons did not choose the signalling path on their fire alarm panel. An installer fitted it, a service contract covered it and for years it quietly worked. Then on 15 December 2025, BT Redcare shut down for good. And the question landed on the desk of whoever signs off on fire safety for the building.
The problem is not that there is no answer to fire alarm monitoring after BT Redcare. There is one, and it is well established. The problem is that the answer was chosen by someone else - an installer, on your behalf, often years ago ...
Imagine... your Fire Alarm System goes into fault. No obvious cause. An engineer arrives, opens the panel, tells you it's all clear... and ten minutes after they leave, the fault comes back.
That's not a scenario we made up for effect. It's the kind of call-out Fire Alarm engineers deal with in the real world and it matters because a panel showing "all clear" doesn't always mean every part of the system is genuinely fault-free.
Addressable vs Conventional Fire Alarm System: The Core Difference
In a fire emergency, every second counts. Choosing between an addressable vs conventional fire alarm system often decides how fast you find out where the fire actually is. Knowing which room triggered the alarm, not just which floor, can mean the difference between a contained incident and one that escalates.
For any Responsible Person (the person or organisation legally responsible for fire safety in a building — usually the employer or owner), that speed matters. The type of fire alarm system you install shapes how quickly your team can respond.
Conventional fire alarms group ...