The fire log book is the single document that shows a fire safety regime is being operated rather than merely installed. Every other document says what should happen. The log book says what did happen, on which date, and who did it, which is why it is the first thing an enforcing officer asks for after the risk assessment.
What belongs in it
Weekly fire alarm tests with the device used. Fire alarm service visits and their findings. Emergency lighting function and duration tests. Fire door checks. Extinguisher checks and services. Fire drills with the time taken and the problems found. Every actual alarm activation and what caused it. Training records. Any defect and what was done about it. Any temporary arrangement while a system was out of service.
Recording failures is the point
A log book full of unbroken ticks over several years is not evidence of a well run building, it is evidence of somebody ticking. Real systems develop faults. What a good record shows is faults found, faults fixed, and the gap between the two shrinking. An inspector reading a book with no failures will ask how the tests were done, which is a conversation nobody wants.
Paper or software
Either works. Software makes the reminders automatic, makes the record hard to lose and makes remote oversight of several buildings possible. Paper is immediate, needs no login and lives beside the panel where the person doing the test is standing. What matters is that the record is contemporaneous and that somebody reads it, not the format.
What the recent legislation added
The Fire Safety Act 2021 confirmed that structure, external walls and flat entrance doors are within scope of the assessment in buildings with two or more sets of domestic premises. The Fire Safety (England) Regulations 2022 then added specific recorded duties in blocks of flats, including fire door checks and information for residents. The practical effect on the log book is that in residential buildings it now has named things it must contain.
Questions people ask about fire log book
Is a fire log book a legal requirement?
The Order requires records where five or more people are employed and requires measures to be maintained. The log book is how maintenance is evidenced, and in blocks of flats in England specific checks must now be recorded.
What if there is a gap in the records?
Record the gap and the reason rather than filling it in later. An explained gap reads as a managed system; an entry written retrospectively is what turns a routine inspection into a serious one.
Who should fill in the fire log book?
Whoever does the test, at the time they do it. A log completed monthly from memory by somebody who did not carry out the tests is not a contemporaneous record.