Hinkley Point C fire enforcement notices: safety lessons for project teams
Reviewed by Joe Ashwell
First reported on The Construction Index
30 Second Briefing
Fire enforcement notices have been served by the Office for Nuclear Regulation on all five MEH alliance contractors at Hinkley Point C – Altrad Babcock, Altrad Services, Balfour Beatty Kilpatrick, Cavendish Nuclear and NG Bailey – following a December 2025 inspection of the Unit 1 HF electrical building. Inspectors found no suitable fire risk assessment, inadequate means of escape with too few emergency exits for current workforce numbers, and combustible materials stored in a designated emergency stairway. The firms must now embed compliant fire arrangements, while main works contractors Bouygues Travaux Publics and Laing O’Rourke Delivery are separately facing court action over safety breaches.
Technical Brief
- Fire safety compliance was assessed against the Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005 within the Unit 1 HF building.
- ONR’s targeted inspection in December 2025 focused specifically on MEH fire safety arrangements during installation phases.
- Enforcement notices require not just corrective actions but embedding systematic fire arrangements to prevent recurrence across MEH activities.
- ONR head of regulation explicitly framed fire safety as a non‑optional legal requirement directly protecting workforce life safety.
Our Take
Hinkley Point C is one of the few UK Infrastructure pieces in our database where the Office for Nuclear Regulation is named directly, which signals that fire protection non-compliances here are likely to trigger closer scrutiny of other high-hazard sites rather than being treated as routine construction issues.
With five MEH alliance companies cited at the Unit 1 HF electrical building, this incident underlines the coordination risk in multi-contractor nuclear workscopes; practitioners on other UK megaprojects are likely to see ONR and client teams push harder for single-point accountability on life-safety systems during fit-out.
Among the 652 Infrastructure stories and 1,800-plus safety- or failure-tagged items in our coverage, very few involve enforcement at the construction phase of a nuclear power station, so this case will probably become a reference example for UK fire strategy, temporary works, and permit-to-work regimes on complex energy builds.
Prepared by collating external sources, AI-assisted tools, and Geomechanics.io’s proprietary mining database, then reviewed for technical accuracy & edited by our geotechnical team.
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