What BAFE SP203-1 actually covers, and what it does not

No, and anybody telling you otherwise is selling something. The Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005 requires the Responsible Person to appoint a competent person, and it names no scheme, no register and no qualification. What third-party certification does is answer the competence question with evidence rather than assertion: an independent body has audited the work against the scheme and continues to audit it. If you are ever asked to justify your choice of contractor to an insurer, a fire officer or a tribunal, "they were registered under SP203-1 and here is the number" is a considerably better answer than "they seemed to know what they were doing".

Fire detection and alarm systems in non-domestic premises, across four separate stages: design, installation, commissioning and maintenance. The stages matter because a company can be registered for some and not all of them, and a firm registered only for maintenance is not certificated to design your system. It is also worth knowing what the scheme is silent on. It says nothing about fire extinguishers, nothing about fire risk assessment, nothing about emergency lighting and nothing about fire doors, and it does not extend to domestic premises.

Because the register lists the legal entity rather than the trading name. Search 303184 and it returns Electro Heating Limited, which is the company Flame Shield London is a trading name of. That is normal and it catches people out constantly, because a register that does not show the name on the van looks at first glance like a registration that does not exist. If you ever check a contractor and the name does not match, ask them for the registered company name before concluding anything: the honest answer takes them one sentence.

No, and this is the part almost nobody knows. BAFE writes the schemes and holds the register, but the assessment is carried out by an independent, UKAS-accredited certification body. In our case that body is NICEIC. So there are three parties, not two: the scheme owner, the certification body that audits against it, and the registered company. That structure is the whole point, because it means the organisation being audited is not paying the organisation that writes the rules to mark its own homework.

Go to the BAFE register verification tool and enter the organisation number. It returns the registered company name, the location, the scheme and the certification body. Three things are worth checking rather than one: that the number returns a record at all, that the scheme listed is the scheme relevant to the work you are buying, and that the company name resolves to the business quoting you. Ours is 303184 and we would rather you checked it than took our word for it.

No, and we say so on every page rather than leaving it ambiguous. BAFE runs separate schemes for other disciplines, including fire risk assessment and portable extinguisher maintenance, and registration 303184 covers SP203-1 only. We carry out fire risk assessments, emergency lighting, extinguisher servicing and fire door work, and each of those is done to the British Standard or the regulation named on its own page rather than under a BAFE scheme. Naming the standard instead of borrowing the badge is the honest way round.