Pub Health and Safety Records: What to Keep and How

Published 19 October 2026 · gribit

Pub manager handing over a safety records binder

A UK pub needs a handful of health and safety records kept up to date: the fire risk assessment and emergency plan, the fire alarm and emergency lighting checks, food safety records, an accident book, and the staff training and licensing evidence your council can ask for. The law cares less about the checks themselves than about whether you can prove they happened, what they found and what you did next. This guide covers each record, who asks for it, and how to keep the lot in one place.

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TL;DR

Most pubs are licensed premises, so you must record your fire risk assessment’s significant findings and keep an emergency plan, whatever your headcount.
Food records (temperatures, cleaning, training, corrective actions) can be paper or electronic, as long as an environmental health officer can see them.
Licensing officers often ask first for staff authorisation, training logs and safety certificates. Gaps there put your licence at risk.
The weak point is rarely the check. It is the missing result, the missing follow-up or the certificate nobody can find.
One dated, searchable system beats three folders, a spreadsheet and a clipboard behind the bar.

Why records matter more than the checks themselves

Every landlord tests the fire alarm, wipes down the kitchen and checks the first-aid box. The trouble starts when an officer asks you to show it.

Fire safety guidance from Hampshire and Isle of Wight Fire and Rescue Service makes the same point as environmental health teams do. Doing a check is not enough. You must show it was done, the result was written down, and any fix was followed through. Audit failures tend to come from gaps in that chain: a test was carried out, but the record or the evidence of the repair cannot be found.

Food safety works the same way. The Food Standards Agency’s HACCP record-keeping guidance explains that after a food safety incident you may need to show you took all reasonable precautions. Organised, chronological records are your evidence.

So think of your records as your defence file. You will rarely need it, but on the day you do, it decides how the conversation goes.

Why records matter more than the checks themselves — overview diagram

The records a pub should keep

The list below covers the main areas. Your premises licence conditions and your local fire and environmental health teams may add to it, so read your own licence alongside this.

Area	What to record	Who may ask
Fire	Risk assessment findings, emergency plan, alarm tests, emergency lighting tests, extinguisher servicing, drills	Fire and rescue service, licensing, insurer
Electrical and gas	Electrical installation condition report (EICR), gas safety certificate, portable appliance checks	Licensing, insurer
Food	Temperatures, cleaning schedules, staff training, corrective actions	Environmental health
People	Accident book, near misses, incidents, violence and abuse	HSE, insurer, licensing
Licensing	Staff authorisations, age-check training, refusals and incident logs	Licensing officers, police
First aid	Kit checks, restocking, trained first aiders	HSE, insurer

Fire safety records

Fire is where most pubs have the clearest legal duty on paper.

Risk assessment and emergency plan

Under article 11 of the Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005, the responsible person must put in place suitable fire safety arrangements. The duty to record significant findings and keep an emergency plan applies if the premises is licensed or you employ five or more people. That covers virtually every pub. South Yorkshire Fire and Rescue Service lists a pub as an example of licensed premises that must record the plan.

A warning from the same hospitality guidance: copying a generic template is a pitfall inspectors spot quickly. An assessment has to be suitable and sufficient for your building, with your cellar, your upstairs flat or function room, and your real opening hours. A template is fine as a starting point, but it must be edited to describe your pub. Tandridge’s example template guidance is written for small and medium businesses and says it can be extensively edited to suit them.

Risk assessment and emergency plan — overview diagram

Alarm, lighting and equipment checks

The Fire Protection Association explains that BS 5839-1 expects commercial fire alarm systems to be tested weekly, rotating the call point you test so every one is covered over time. A weekly test that is not written down is, for inspection purposes, a test that did not happen. Log the date, who did it, which call point, and whether it passed.

A sensible fire log also holds:

emergency lighting tests and the annual certificate;
extinguisher servicing dates;
fire door checks;
evacuation drills and who attended;
staff fire safety training;
every defect found and the date it was fixed.

That last line is the one that gets forgotten. A failed test with no recorded repair is worse than no entry, because it proves you knew.

Licensing records: protecting the licence

Pubs operate under the Licensing Act 2003, and licence holders must promote the four licensing objectives, one of which is public safety. A council committee report from Brent notes that failing to keep required records, such as staff alcohol sales training or incident logs, can lead to a licence review, suspension or revocation.

The same document makes the practical point: staff authorisation and training records are the main defence against allegations of illegal sales, for example to under-18s. Keep them current and easy to reach, because they are often the first things a licensing officer asks to see.

Safety certificates as licence conditions

Many licensing authorities publish pools of sample conditions that they attach to premises licences. Carlisle’s pool of conditions, published by Cumberland Council, is one example, and conditions of this kind can require safety check and inspection certificates to be kept and produced on request. Check your own licence, because the wording varies by council. If yours includes electrical or emergency lighting evidence, then losing the certificate is a licence problem, not just an admin problem.

A few things to hold alongside the dates:

the certificate itself (a scan or photo, not just a note that it exists);
who carried out the work and when it expires;
the date of the next test;
any remedial work the engineer flagged and proof it was done.

Accident, incident and near-miss records

The HSE accident book is described as an essential document for employers and employees, who are required by law to record and report details of specified work-related injuries and incidents. Separately, some serious events must be reported to the HSE under RIDDOR, and the HSE has a page on reporting accidents and ill health that sets out what counts, including certain near misses and cases of work-related disease.

For a pub, the value goes beyond the statutory minimum. Write down:

customer and staff slips, burns and cuts;
near misses, such as a cellar hatch left open or a wet floor that nearly caused a fall;
verbal abuse and threats towards staff;
refusals of service and ejections.

The HSE leaflet INDG423 on managing work-related violence in licensed and retail premises gives practical advice on assessing and tackling the risk of violence to staff. Incident records are how you do that assessment with evidence rather than guesswork. If three incidents happen between 10pm and midnight on Fridays, you have a staffing question to answer. The same log helps if an insurer disputes a claim or a licence review follows an incident.

Personal details in an accident book are personal data. Keep them where only those who need them can reach them, and tear-out pages in a book on the bar do not do that well.

Food safety records

If you serve food, even toasties and bar snacks, you need a food safety management system based on HACCP principles. The Food Standards Agency’s HACCP guidance says this means documented records of things like cleaning schedules, temperature checks, staff training and the corrective action taken when something goes wrong. Records can be electronic or paper diaries, provided they are accessible to environmental health officers on inspection.

Environmental health officers generally want a system that visibly works rather than perfect paperwork. A fridge log with a recorded high reading and a note of what you did (moved the stock, called the engineer, discarded the food) is more convincing than a column of identical figures that looks filled in at the end of the week.

Where pub records usually fall apart

Spend a week with any busy pub and the same failures appear.

The kitchen log and the bar log live in different places. Nobody sees the whole picture.
Certificates are with the last manager. Handovers are where records vanish, especially in a trade with high staff turnover.
Dates are tracked in someone’s head. The emergency lighting test lapses because the one person who remembered is on holiday.
Failed checks have no closing entry. The defect is noted, fixed, and never written up.
Entries are made in bulk. Backfilling a fortnight of fridge temperatures is easy to spot and damages your credibility on everything else.
Records are held only on paper. One spilled pint, one flood in the cellar, and a year of evidence is gone.

None of these is a knowledge problem. They are system problems, and they have system fixes.

Paper, spreadsheet or digital logbook

None of the sources above demand a particular format. The test is whether the record is accurate, dated, and available when asked. Here is how the options compare in a typical pub.

	Paper logbook	Spreadsheet	Digital logbook
Cost	Low	Low	Subscription
Reminders for due checks	None	Manual	Automatic
Follow-up actions tracked	By memory	If someone adds a column	Built in
Certificates stored with the check	Separate folder	Separate folder	Same place
Handover to a new manager	Hand over a pile	Hand over a file	Give them access
Risk of loss or damage	High	Medium	Low if backed up
Out-of-hours access for an inspector	Only if on site	Only if you have the file	Via login or export

Paper still works for a small, tightly run pub with one steady manager. But as soon as you have several staff doing checks, a rota that changes weekly, or a licence with certificate conditions, the cost of chasing paper starts to exceed the cost of software.

How to set up your records in an afternoon

List every recurring check. Fire alarm, emergency lighting, extinguishers, fire doors, first-aid kit, fridge and freezer temperatures, cellar and gas checks, cleaning.
Set a frequency for each. Weekly alarm testing is the clearest benchmark; for others, follow the manufacturer, your engineer, your risk assessment and your licence conditions.
Name an owner and a deputy. Every check needs two people who can do it and record it.
Collect the certificates. EICR, gas safety, emergency lighting, extinguisher servicing, fire risk assessment, food hygiene training, personal licence details. Scan them.
Define what happens on a fail. Who is told, what is done, where the repair evidence is stored, who signs it off.
Check it monthly. Look for overdue items and open actions, not just whether boxes were ticked.

Our view: records are for fixing problems, not for filing

We built Gribit around a simple observation: small businesses don’t skip checks because they don’t care. They skip the record because paperwork is the first thing to slide in a busy shift. The aim should be to spend your time resolving the issue (the dead call point, the fridge running warm) rather than managing the paper trail around it.

That is why we focus on three things. First, reminders that arrive before a check is due, so it never depends on one person’s memory. Second, follow-up actions that stay open until someone closes them, so a failed test can’t quietly disappear. Third, certificates and documents stored with the checks they support, so when a manager leaves, the next one inherits a complete history rather than a drawer.

If you take one habit from this article, make it this: never record a fail without recording the fix. That single pairing is what turns a log into evidence.

— Jon

Keeping it all in one place with Gribit

Gribit is a digital logbook for recurring safety checks. You schedule checks by site, item or location, record results, assign follow-up actions, store certificates and documents, give staff their own access, and export records when someone asks to see them. For pubs, that means the weekly alarm test, the first-aid kit check and the EICR certificate sit in one system with their due dates.

The Site Logbook annual plan costs £49 per year per site. If you run more than one pub, each site has its own subscription. It is built for owners and managers who want compliance records kept without the clipboard.

FAQ

Does my pub need a written fire risk assessment?

In practice, yes. The Fire Safety Order requires significant findings and an emergency plan to be recorded if the premises is licensed or you employ five or more people, and pubs are almost always licensed. The assessment must reflect your actual building and activities, not a copied template. Your local fire and rescue service can advise if you are unsure.

Can I keep health and safety records electronically?

For food safety, the Food Standards Agency says records can be electronic or paper provided environmental health officers can access them. For other areas, no source we found requires paper. Whatever you use, make sure entries are dated, show who made them, and can be produced on request. Check your premises licence conditions in case they specify how certificates are kept.

How often should a pub test its fire alarm?

The Fire Protection Association explains that BS 5839-1 expects commercial fire alarm systems to be tested weekly, rotating the call point tested. Record each test with date, tester, location and result. Your fire alarm engineer will also carry out periodic servicing, and that certificate should be stored too.

What records will a licensing officer ask for?

This depends on your licence conditions, but staff authorisation and training records and incident logs are commonly requested, along with safety certificates where a condition requires them. Read your own premises licence and your council’s published conditions, and ask your licensing team if any wording is unclear.

Do I need an accident book if nobody has been hurt?

You need one in place so any injury can be recorded when it happens. The HSE says the accident book is for recording specified work-related injuries and incidents. Many pubs also use it, or a linked incident log, for near misses and abuse towards staff, which helps you spot patterns early.