Fire Separations in New Zealand: What the Form 12A Signature Actually Costs
Every year someone signs a Form 12A saying your fire separations were fully complied with. Since November 2024 they commit an offence if that isn't true. This page is about what they need in order to sign it, and about the parts of the New Zealand regime that are weaker than you may have been told.
First — the golden thread is not a New Zealand concept
Assaya is built in the United Kingdom, and most fire-stopping software is sold on the UK Building Safety Act 2022 and its "golden thread" of building information.
It has no application here. That Act is English legislation. It creates no duty for anyone in Auckland, Wellington or Christchurch. We would rather say so plainly than let you assume our UK argument travels, because it does not.
And we will go further, because it matters more than the sales pitch: New Zealand has no requirement that you record what fire stopping you installed. We looked. Building Code clauses C1 to C6 — protection from fire — do not contain the words record, document or evidence in any performance requirement. C/AS2 requires that fire stops match the tested prototype, and says nothing about proving it afterwards.
If a supplier tells you New Zealand law obliges you to keep a register of every seal, ask them which section. There isn't one.
What there is instead, and why it is worth more than it sounds
New Zealand's pressure is not at construction. It is annual, it is personal, and it never stops.
Where a building has a compliance schedule, fire separations sit on it as specified system SS 15/3, alongside final exits and smoke separations. The compliance schedule sets the inspection, maintenance and reporting procedures — and for fire separations those inspections look for exactly the things you were paid to get right: signs of damage affecting fire resistance, the condition of closures, exposed fire-stopping, and new penetrations without suitable fire-stopping.
One caveat we would rather give you than have you discover: fire separations are a specified system only where the escape route also carries an active system — sprinklers, alarms, pressurisation and so on. Most commercial stock does. Not every building does, and anyone telling you "every building" is rounding up.
The annual signature
Under section 108 of the Building Act 2004 the owner must supply the territorial authority with a Building Warrant of Fitness each year, stating that the inspection, maintenance and reporting procedures have been fully complied with for the previous twelve months. Attached to it are Form 12A certificates from the Independently Qualified Person who carried out the work.
The Ministry's own guidance is blunt about that form: it "cannot be amended or altered to create exceptions from the requirement to fully comply with the inspection, maintenance, and reporting procedures for the previous 12 months." There is no partial credit. It is signed or it is not.
And on 26 November 2024 the Building (Earthquake-prone Building Deadlines and Other Matters) Amendment Act inserted section 108A: an IQP must not state, in a warrant of fitness or any other document, that those procedures have been complied with when they have not. That is now the IQP's own offence, in their own name.
Which changes the question. It is no longer "will somebody sign this". It is "what are you giving them to sign it on".
Who actually carries the duty — and it is not you
This is the part most software written for the UK gets wrong about New Zealand.
In Britain the duty runs down the supply chain to the contractor. Here every enforceable obligation binds the building owner. Sections 105, 108 and 110 of the Building Act bind the owner: to hold the compliance schedule, to supply the annual warrant, to obtain written reports from an IQP, to keep them for two years, and to produce them on demand.
So if you install fire stopping in New Zealand, the law asks nothing of your records at all. Your client is the one exposed — to a notice to fix, to fines, and to an insurer taking an interest in why the warrant lapsed.
That is not a reason to keep worse records. It is a reason to understand what you are selling when you hand them over: you are handing your client the evidence for a signature they need every year for the life of the building.
Producer statements are custom, not law
A PS3 is a real and near-universal commercial expectation, and it is exactly a "what did you install, where, against which detail" document. But producer statements have no status under the Building Act 2004. No building consent authority can compel one; councils accept or decline them at their discretion, and several will not accept another council's template.
We mention it because it is worth knowing which of your obligations are contractual and which are statutory. A PS3 is the former. It still has to be right.
Where Assaya comes in
The app records each seal where it sits on the drawing, with the rating, the product, the date and the person who fitted it, and photographs it. What that produces is the thing an IQP has to have before they can sign in their own name: a register of what is there, when it was checked, and what changed.
It also answers the awkward one. When next year's inspection finds a penetration that was not there before, the question is whether it was missed or whether it is new. If the original work is recorded, that is a five-second answer instead of an argument.
Buying from New Zealand
The app is on the App Store and Google Play in New Zealand. You can buy on this site without speaking to anyone — no demo, no sales call.
Pricing is set and charged in pounds sterling — roughly NZ$74 a slot a month at the time of writing, though the rate moves and your card issuer sets it, so treat the sterling figure as the price. We are a UK company, the data sits in a London data centre, and UK VAT does not apply to a business customer outside the United Kingdom.
This page draws on the Building Act 2004, the Building (Specified Systems, Change the Use, and Earthquake-prone Buildings) Regulations 2005, MBIE's Compliance Schedule Handbook and its Building Warrant of Fitness guidance. Where we were unsure we have said so rather than rounded it up — and if you find something here that is wrong, tell us and we will fix it. That is rather the point of the product.