Systematic fire safety work — what Swedish law requires

Systematic fire safety work — systematiskt brandskyddsarbete, universally abbreviated SBA — is the continuous work a property owner and an operator must conduct to meet the requirement in the Swedish Civil Protection Act (2003:778) to maintain reasonable fire protection. The requirement is in Chapter 2, Section 2 of the Act; how the work should be conducted is described in the Rescue Services Agency's general recommendations on systematic fire safety work (SRVFS 2004:3). The supervisory authority is the municipal fire and rescue service.

What the law actually requires

The statutory text is short and functional: owners and holders of rights of use must to a reasonable extent maintain equipment for extinguishing fire and for life-saving, and otherwise take the measures needed to prevent fire and to prevent or limit damage resulting from fire.

Two words carry the whole requirement:

• Reasonable. The level is not the same for a terrace housing estate and for a care home. It is set by the building, the activity and the consequences of a fire.
• Otherwise take the measures needed. This is where the systematic work comes in — the general recommendations say it is reasonable for every operation to conduct systematic fire safety work and to document it.

There is therefore no provision listing exactly what you must do. That is deliberate, and it is also why SBA feels vague until you have written your own.

The parts an SBA usually contains

Part	What it answers
Responsibility and organisation	Who is fire safety officer, who does what, what applies between owner and tenant
Structural fire protection	What protection the building has: escape routes, compartmentation, alarms, extinguishing equipment
Training	Who needs what training and when it was last done
Instructions and routines	How to act in a fire, how hot work is handled, how evacuation happens
Self-monitoring	What is checked, how often, by whom — and what happened to the deviations
Follow-up	That the work is reviewed regularly and changed when the building or activity changes

The fifth row decides whether the SBA is alive or a binder. Self-monitoring without traceable handling of deviations is a walk-round, not a check.

Does a small housing company really need documented SBA?

The requirement in law is reasonable fire protection, and the general recommendations say it is reasonable for the work to be conducted systematically and documented — the scope is adapted to the operation. A small housing company does not need the same documentation as a hospital, but it does need to be able to show who is responsible, what is checked and when it was last done. At an inspection those are exactly the questions the fire and rescue service asks, and "we do it but we don't write it down" is hard to answer. A simple documented routine is cheaper than that conversation.

The written account has been abolished

A common misunderstanding worth clearing up: the requirement to submit a written account of fire protection (skriftlig redogörelse) to the municipality was removed from the Act on 1 January 2021, and the regulations on the account were repealed at the same time.

That changes nothing in the responsibility. Owners and holders of rights of use must still maintain reasonable fire protection and, as part of that, conduct systematic fire safety work. What disappeared was a report to the municipality — not the work.

Responsibility between owner and tenant

The Act places responsibility on both the owner and the holder of the right of use. In practice that means the boundary needs to be written down, because otherwise the parties assume it differently:

• The owner typically answers for the building's fire protection — compartment boundaries, escape routes, alarm systems, doors.
• The operator typically answers for how the premises are used — flammable goods, blocked escape routes, training of its own staff.

The most common deficiency found at inspection is not technical but exactly this: nobody wrote down who does what, and therefore nobody does it.

What an inspection looks like

The fire and rescue service supervises under the Civil Protection Act. An inspection visit generally follows the same pattern, and it is worth knowing because it says what the documentation actually has to withstand:

1. Review of the documentation — who is responsible, what is checked, what has been done.
2. A walk-through of the building where what is in the binder is compared with reality.
3. Questions to the responsible person about routines, training and how deviations are handled.
4. An inspection report with any deficiencies, and where needed an order with a deadline.

Step two is where the difference between a live and a dead SBA becomes visible in five minutes: a blocked escape route that has appeared in three self-monitoring rounds without being cleared says more about the work than the whole binder.

Getting started — the order that works

If you are building an SBA from nothing, this is the order that tends to hold, and it requires no system to begin:

1. Appoint a fire safety officer and write down what the role involves.
2. Inventory the structural fire protection per building — what exists, where, and who maintains it.
3. Write the boundary of responsibility towards tenants and attach it to leases going forward.
4. Make a simple checklist and walk it once, in one building. Adjust it against what turned out to be missing.
5. Set intervals per checkpoint and who performs them.
6. Only then decide how deviations are registered and followed up.

The order is deliberate. Most start at point six, with a system, and discover they do not know what to check.

Self-monitoring is the work

Everything else in an SBA is preparation. What makes a difference in reality is that somebody walks the round regularly, sees that an escape route is blocked or a door closer has failed, registers it as a deviation, and that the deviation gets an owner and a date.

That is the part fire safety and inspection rounds in Emphyx is built for: checklists, deviations with photos, actions and history per building, so the round leaves a trace instead of becoming a signed form. The system does not replace the fire safety officer, makes no risk assessment for you and draws no compartmentation plans.

Read on: the annual calendar of statutory inspections for how SBA relates to ventilation control, radon and refrigerants, which all have harder date requirements but less continuous work — and fire protection documentation, which is the building rules' document and is regularly confused with the SBA binder.