Fire safety strategy

For a general overview of issues related to fire see: Fire safety design.

"..at the heart of a fire engineer’s work is the fire safety strategy and the Panel agrees that this should be the fire engineer’s central, protected function. Fire engineers should have clear responsibility for preparing, delivering, and periodically reviewing the fire safety strategy across a building’s lifecycle, from design, construction, handover, occupation, ongoing use and eventual decommissioning. With no authoritative definition of a fire safety strategy, and varied approaches to this task between existing fire engineers, the Panel’s view is that it should include:

a description of all features of the building that may be affected by a fire or should play a role in preventing and managing a fire
a description and technical demonstration of how the building is expected to perform over the duration of a fire, including underlying assumptions, key actions to be taken, safety measures in place and any uncertainties or complications that might arise
an explanation of how different safety systems work together, including any interactions, dependencies or conflicts, and how effective and reliable the fire safety measures are
a description of how people in or about the building in the event of a fire will be kept safe, including those who are vulnerable
a plan to enable fire and rescue service intervention
a plan for how the building will be managed and maintained to keep it fire safe over its lifetime, including details of all the parts of the strategy that need regular checks and maintenance, and an inspection schedule

The statement goes on to describe that the fire engineer’s role in delivering a fire safety strategy is fundamentally integrative, coordinating inputs from architects, structural and MEP engineers, and other specialists to ensure their individual design decisions collectively achieve a coherent, whole-building fire safety solution. While each discipline remains accountable for its own technical scope, the fire engineer synthesises these elements to prevent fire where possible, control fire and smoke spread, and enable safe evacuation and effective emergency response.

In reviewing fire safety strategy as a restricted function, the Panel considered Recommendation 10 of the Inquiry, which proposes a statutory requirement for registered fire engineers to produce fire safety strategies for higher-risk buildings. The Panel supports this as an initial priority but advises that government explore extending mandatory fire engineer involvement to a broader range of buildings and critical infrastructure where the potential consequences include catastrophic loss of life. It emphasised that any expansion of scope should be subject to detailed analysis and consultation to enable phased, proportionate implementation.

The RIBA Plan of Work published by the RIBA in 2020 suggests that:

‘The Fire Safety Strategy forms an integral part of the design and must be integrated from the point at which a building project is identified and will continue though the ongoing Asset Management of the building, providing a golden thread of fire safety information. A high-level Site Appraisal to determine the fire safety suitability against the Client Requirements informs the viability of the project through Feasibility Studies. Layers of fire safety are integrated into the design as the project develops then constructed and managed in use in accordance with the Fire Safety Strategy and maintenance requirements.’

'A fire safety strategy for a building should describe its structure and the various fire protection systems it contains and set out how they work together to ensure the safety of the occupants in the event of a fire. Those involved in the design and execution of the Grenfell Tower refurbishment failed to understand properly the need for a fire safety strategy and therefore failed to ensure that a final version of the Outline Fire Safety Strategy begun by Exova was completed. That allowed the building to be in a dangerous condition on completion. In order to avoid a repeat of that error, we consider that there is a compelling case for requiring a fire safety strategy to be produced as a condition of obtaining building control approval for the construction or refurbishment of any higher-risk building and for it to be reviewed and approved on completion. We therefore recommend that it be made a statutory requirement that a fire safety strategy produced by a registered fire engineer (see report for definition) to be submitted with building control applications (at Gateway 2) for the construction or refurbishment of any higher-risk building and for it to be reviewed and re-submitted at the stage of completion (Gateway 3). Such a strategy must take into account the needs of vulnerable people, including the additional time they may require to leave the building or reach a place of safety within it and any additional facilities necessary to ensure their safety."

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