Emergency Call Out for London Commercial Buildings

Before you ring: the three things worth doing first.

Most of the damage from a building failure happens in the first hour, before anyone is on site. Three actions cost nothing and change the outcome.

• Water: find the isolation valve or stopcock for the affected area and close it. In most London offices it is in the riser cupboard, the plant room or under the sink nearest the leak. If you cannot find it, close the main stopcock for the building; a dry building for an hour is cheaper than a wet one.
• Power: if a circuit has tripped, note which breaker and leave it off until someone has looked at why. Do not keep resetting it. If there is a burning smell, scorching or a buzzing board, keep people away from it and ring. Never open a distribution board yourself.
• Gas: if you can smell gas, do not operate switches, open the windows, get people out and ring the National Gas Emergency Service on 0800 111 999 before you ring anyone else. For a fire, ring 999 and evacuate. We attend afterwards, not instead.

Then ring us. If the building is on contract with us, we already hold the access details and the isolation points, and the call can go straight to dispatch.

What to tell us when you ring.

Five things let the call be logged and prioritised correctly without a return call.

• Where in the building: floor, room, riser, roof, the nearest door number.
• What is actually happening: not "the heating is broken" but whether there is water, a smell, a noise, no power at all or no power to one area, a door that will not lock or one that will not open.
• Whether anyone is at risk, whether the building can still be occupied and whether it can be locked.
• What you have already done: valve closed, breaker off, area cleared.
• The best number for someone who will be on site, and how we get in if that person leaves.

The call is time-stamped and logged. You are told which response band it has been put in before the call ends, and you are given an attendance time that is realistic rather than a comforting one.

How the call is prioritised.

Every emergency line promises to attend. The useful question is what the promise means, so the bands are written down. For contract buildings they are agreed in the contract; the table further down this page is the standard we work to, and it carries the same commitments published on our reactive maintenance page.

Something is an emergency when it affects safety, security or the ability to trade: an active leak, loss of power or water, a fire safety failure, a building that cannot be locked or cannot be entered. It is urgent when it is disrupting the building but contained. It is routine when it can wait for a planned visit without getting worse. We tell you which band the job is in when it is logged, and if you disagree we talk about it then, not on the invoice.

Make safe first, permanent repair second, and which one you are paying for.

For most out-of-hours calls the right first move is to stop the damage and make the building safe, not to complete a permanent repair at 3am with the wrong parts on the van. Capping a burst pipe, isolating a faulty circuit, boarding a broken pane, securing a door: these are make-safe repairs. The permanent repair, replacing the pipe section, rewiring the circuit, reglazing, replacing the lock, is priced and scheduled as a separate step, usually in working hours at working-hours rates.

We tell you plainly which one you are getting. A temporary repair logged as temporary, with the permanent repair priced and dated, is more useful than a permanent repair claimed and not delivered. The log records both, so nothing capped at night is forgotten in the morning.

On charging: contract clients have call-out terms, including out-of-hours rates, agreed up front, so there is nothing to negotiate on the night. For a building that is not on contract we quote before attending wherever the situation allows it, and we say what the out-of-hours attendance covers and what would be extra before anyone sets off. Out-of-hours attendance costs more than a daytime visit, and any contractor who says otherwise is recovering it somewhere else.

Where we attend, and for whom.

We cover all London boroughs, with the densest coverage across the City, Canary Wharf, Shoreditch, Westminster and the east London corridor. Engineers are based in and around the capital, not travelling in from outside the M25.

Most emergency calls come from offices and multi-let buildings, retail units and estates, leisure and sports buildings, industrial and warehouse premises, and the common parts of residential blocks managed by agents and landlords. For contract buildings we hold keys, alarm procedures, isolation points and site-specific information, so an out-of-hours attendance does not depend on reaching the one person who knows the building.

Some faults belong to a specialist: a lift stuck between floors, a gas appliance, a fire alarm panel under a maintenance agreement with its installer, a security system on an insurer-approved contract. We still take the call, make the building safe where we can, and get the right specialist there, then stay on the job until it is closed. One number, one log, one person chasing it.

The emergencies that were never emergencies.

A building that generates a lot of emergency calls is usually telling you something about its planned regime. A boiler that fails every January, a drain that blocks every quarter, an emergency light that is dead when the fire officer visits: each of these is an emergency that a servicing calendar would have caught in working hours at working-hours rates.

Where we hold both the reactive line and the planned schedule, every emergency call is reviewed against the asset register and, where the fault is recurring, designed out rather than repeatedly attended. That is where the emergency spend starts falling, and it is the case for a maintenance contract rather than a call-out number on the wall.

Common questions

Questions we get asked about emergency call outs.

Guidance reviewed September 2026