Planning for a smaller pool of accredited practitioners
Demand for accredited fire safety practitioners is rising while supply narrows. Procurement teams need to act now.
The Fire Protection Accreditation Scheme (FPAS) has steadily tightened entry requirements since the NSW reforms, and the same pattern is playing out in other states through their own competent-practitioner regimes. Demand from owners is rising, every commercial AFSS, every social housing programme, every Class 2 building, while the practitioner pool is growing more slowly than the workload.
The procurement consequence is straightforward: practitioners are increasingly selective about the work they accept. They want clean scopes, organised site access, paid invoices and clients who will come back next year. Portfolios that arrive late, change scope mid-engagement and pay in 90 days are moving to the back of the queue.
Owners with large asset registers should be locking in multi-year framework arrangements now, not running annual tenders. The market clearing price for late, disorganised work is materially higher than the price for planned, programmatic work, and in some sub-disciplines (façade, complex Class 9) capacity simply will not be available at short notice in 2027.