Reference

UK fire engineering consultancies

A directory of UK practices with a substantial fire engineering capability, compiled from public information. Nobody has paid to be here and nobody has paid to be left out. Every link is checked before publication and rechecked periodically; practice names open in a new tab.

29 practicesNo paid placementsReviewed 2026-07-25

The practices

Practice	Type	Notes
AECOM	Multidisciplinary	Global infrastructure consultancy with a UK fire engineering team working across buildings, transport and infrastructure.
Arup	Multidisciplinary	Global engineering practice; its fire team is among the largest and oldest in the field and has shaped much of the performance-based methodology used in the UK.
Ashton Fire	Fire specialist	Independent fire engineering consultancy, one of the faster-growing in the UK, with offices in London, Oxford, Birmingham, Manchester and Edinburgh.
Astute Fire	Fire specialist	Independent Glasgow practice, the Scottish continuation of the former Astute Fire group. Useful where a scheme sits under Scottish Building Standards rather than the Approved Documents.
AtkinsRéalis	Multidisciplinary	Engineering and project management group with a UK fire engineering team across buildings and infrastructure.
BB7	Fire specialist	Specialist fire and façade engineering, fire strategies, CFD and fire risk management across ten UK and Ireland offices. Acquired by CERTANIA in October 2025; the BB7 brand continues.
Buro Happold	Multidisciplinary	Engineering consultancy with fire engineering delivered alongside structures and building services.
Cundall	Multidisciplinary	Multidisciplinary consultancy with a UK fire engineering team.
Design Fire Consultants	Fire specialist	Independent fire engineering consultancy covering strategy, regulatory approval, CFD, structural fire and mass timber, from Leeds, London, Manchester, Sheffield and Birmingham.
FDS Consult UK	Fire specialist	Independent fire engineering consultancy based in Kent and London, part of the wider FDS group.
Fire Ingenuity	Fire specialist	Independent fire strategy and fire engineering practice, established 2010 and widely used on major London schemes.
Hilson Moran	Building services	Building services and engineering consultancy with a UK fire engineering discipline.
Hoare Lea	Building services	Building services engineering practice with an established fire engineering discipline integrated with smoke control and services design.
Introba	Building services	Buildings engineering consultancy with a UK fire engineering team. Formed from Integral Group, Elementa and Ross & Baruzzini.
Jensen Hughes	Fire specialist	International fire and life safety specialist with UK operations.
Kiwa Fire Safety Compliance	Fire specialist	Fire engineering, smoke and evacuation modelling, structural fire engineering and product certification. Formerly International Fire Consultants (IFC Group), acquired by Kiwa in 2021.
Mott MacDonald	Multidisciplinary	Engineering and development consultancy with UK fire engineering across buildings and infrastructure.
NDY	Building services	Norman Disney & Young; the London office carries a fire engineering service line. Part of the Tetra Tech group but trading under its own brand.
OFR Consultants	Fire specialist	Independent fire engineering consultancy with a research-led profile and a substantial existing-buildings practice. The former UK arm of Olsson Fire & Risk.
Ramboll	Multidisciplinary	Engineering and consultancy group with UK fire engineering capability, including structural fire engineering.
Semper	Fire specialist	Fire engineering, research and surveying with a substantial residential and remediation practice, including PAS 9980 appraisals and higher-risk building safety cases. Renamed from Astute Fire (South) in 2022.
SOCOTEC UK	Multidisciplinary	Testing, inspection and compliance group with a UK fire engineering team, which absorbed the former Trenton Fire practice through the Butler & Young group.
Stantec	Multidisciplinary	Global engineering consultancy whose UK fire engineering team absorbed Hydrock in 2024.
Sweco UK	Multidisciplinary	European engineering consultancy with a dedicated UK fire safety engineering team covering smoke management, CFD and fire strategy.
Tenos	Fire specialist	Independent specialist fire engineering consultancy.
Tetra Tech	Multidisciplinary	Consultancy group with UK building safety and fire engineering services.
The Fire Surgery	Fire specialist	Independent London practice with a heritage and complex mixed-use specialism.
Trigon Fire Safety	Fire specialist	Independent fire safety engineering consultancy in Richmond, working across new build and remediation.
WSP	Multidisciplinary	Large UK fire engineering team spanning new build, existing buildings and remediation, across buildings and infrastructure.

How to choose one

The differences that actually matter on a project are rarely the ones on the website.

Who does the work. The director you meet at the interview is not the person writing your strategy. Ask who is, and what they have done.
Relevant building type. A team that is excellent on hospitals is not automatically the right team for a 25-storey residential tower going through Gateway 2. Ask for a comparable project, not a client list.
Gateway 2 experience, specifically. Not "we are familiar with the Building Safety Act", but how many applications have they taken through, and what happened to them.
Whether they do performance-based work in house. If your building will need modelling, find out whether it is done by the same team or subcontracted.
Professional indemnity insurance. Cover levels and, critically, whether there are cladding or combustible-materials exclusions. This is the question people forget to ask and regret later.
The exclusions in the fee proposal. Compare those before you compare the numbers. See our guide to fire engineering fees.

Specialist or multidisciplinary

3 broad categories appear above, and the practical trade-off is this. A multidisciplinary practice gives you fire engineering coordinated with structures and services under one appointment, which removes a coordination risk that is real and expensive. An independent specialist gives you a team that does nothing else, and an opinion that is not shaped by the rest of the appointment.

Neither is better. On a complex building with heavy services interaction the coordination argument usually wins; on a contested existing building where the opinion itself is the deliverable, independence usually does.

Corrections and additions

This list is compiled from public information and will be incomplete. If your practice should be listed, a detail is wrong, or your ownership has changed, email hello@firestrategy.ai and it will be corrected. There is no charge and no advertising on this page.

Before you appoint

If you run one of these teams

FireStrategy.ai is built for fire engineering teams, not for individual users. It drafts and reviews strategies against UK guidance and standards, keeps drawings consistent with the report, and gives every engineer in the team the same grounded answer to the same question.