A hospital fire strategy differs from a standard building because most patients cannot evacuate themselves. The design therefore relies on progressive horizontal evacuation, moving people sideways into an adjoining fire compartment rather than out of the building. That demands smaller compartments, higher fire resistance, more robust construction and staffing levels that make assisted movement realistic.

Everything else follows from that single fact. If patients cannot leave, the building itself has to become the refuge, and the document is fundamentally about compartmentation and staffing rather than about escape routes.

The guidance framework for healthcare

Healthcare buildings comply with the Building Regulations like any other, and Part B applies. The sector then works to its own technical standards on top, and those are usually what is written into the contract.

In England, Health Technical Memorandum 05-02, “Firecode: guidance in support of functional provisions, fire safety in the design of healthcare premises”, is the design guidance. It carries a 2015 edition date, and it sits inside the wider HTM 05 firecode series alongside HTM 05-01, “Managing healthcare fire safety”, version 3 of July 2016, and HTM 05-03, “Fire safety in the NHS: operational provisions”, which is published in lettered parts.

Wales runs a parallel series. Welsh Health Technical Memorandum 05-02, first edition 2014, covers fire safety in the design of healthcare premises for providers of NHS-funded healthcare in Wales and is published by NHS Wales Shared Services Partnership Specialist Estates Services, with WHTM 05-01 and the WHTM 05-03 parts alongside it. Approved Document B is also published separately for the two nations: the England documents are the 2019 edition incorporating the 2020, 2022 and 2025 amendments, while Wales works from 2006-edition documents last amended with effect from 20 December 2025.

Care homes and other residential care settings sit differently again. They are usually assessed against BS 9991:2024, which was published on 27 November 2024, replaced BS 9991:2015 and for the first time brings care homes expressly within its scope, and they carry duties to the relevant care regulator alongside fire safety law. Note also that the 2025 amendments to the England Approved Document B make provision for sprinklers in all new care homes.

Before anybody scopes a healthcare fire strategy, establish which standard the client is contractually working to. Writing to the wrong one is expensive and the error surfaces late.

Progressive horizontal evacuation and what it demands

Progressive horizontal evacuation means moving patients from the compartment where the fire is into an adjoining compartment on the same floor, separated by fire-resisting construction. If conditions worsen, they move again, to a further compartment or vertically.

For that to work, several things must be true at once, and the document has to establish each of them.

Compartments must be sized to receive the patients from next door. A receiving compartment needs space for beds, chairs and equipment, plus the staff moving them, without blocking the onward escape route. Compartment sizing in healthcare is driven by this rather than by area limits alone.

Compartment construction must actually perform. Fire resistance periods, door specifications, glazing, and above all the sealing of the many services crossing compartment lines. Medical gas pipelines, nurse call, data, ventilation and drainage penetrate walls repeatedly. Poorly sealed penetrations are the most common defect found in healthcare estates, and they defeat the whole approach.

Staffing must be sufficient to move patients in the time available. This is a design assumption and it has to be written down. A document that assumes a staffing ratio the ward does not actually run at night is not valid. Night-time staffing is the binding case.

Equipment must be available and usable. Evacuation aids, movement routes wide enough for the beds actually in use, and door widths that accommodate them.

Patient dependency changes the design

A ward of ambulant day patients and an intensive care unit are not the same fire safety problem. Healthcare strategies therefore work from patient dependency, meaning how much assistance each patient needs in order to move.

How patient dependency drives the fire strategy in a healthcare building.

Higher dependency drives smaller compartments, higher construction standards and, often, suppression. The strategy states the dependency assumption for each area and designs to it.

Some areas need specific treatment. Operating theatres, where a procedure cannot simply stop. Intensive care and high dependency units. Neonatal units. Imaging, particularly MRI, where the magnetic field constrains what equipment can enter and how the fire and rescue service responds. Mental health units, where locked doors, ligature-resistant design and patients who may not co-operate all interact with fire safety in ways that need explicit resolution rather than a generic paragraph.

Hazards specific to healthcare buildings

Medical gases, particularly piped oxygen, are the defining hazard. Oxygen enrichment makes materials burn far more readily. The strategy must address pipeline routing, area valve service unit locations, isolation procedure, who holds authority to shut off a supply, and cylinder storage. Isolation is a clinical decision as well as a fire safety one, and the document should say how that decision is made and by whom.

Then the rest: dense electrical and battery-powered equipment at bedsides, sterile services and decontamination plant, kitchens at scale, laundries, plant rooms and service risers, laboratories and pathology, pharmacy stores including flammable and controlled substances, clinical waste, and helipads on some acute sites. And, on almost every campus, equipment stored in corridors, which is a management problem the strategy will inevitably make assumptions about.

The estate problem: hospitals are never one building

Acute hospital sites are among the most complicated estates in the country. A typical district general has a post-war main block, decades of extensions, a wing built under a different procurement route to a different standard, modular ward units, and a network of link corridors and tunnels.

The consequences are predictable. Compartment lines that no longer correspond to anything built. Alarm systems from four eras interfaced together. Escape routes that pass through three buildings. Historic approvals nobody can locate. And a fire risk assessment carrying the same unresolved findings year after year, because the design intent is unknown.

A whole-site strategy plus a coherent drawing set is the way out. For most existing estates that is a retrospective fire strategy, and the fire strategy drawings are what the estates team uses daily.

Continuous occupation and continuous construction

Two further constraints shape healthcare work.

Hospitals never close. There is no quiet period in which to take a compartment line out and rebuild it. Works have to be phased, and each phase needs interim fire safety arrangements covering temporary compartmentation and escape routes, alarm coverage during changeover, and hot works control. The strategy should say who produces those and to what standard.

Healthcare estates are also almost permanently under construction somewhere, so the document is a living one. It needs an owner, a review trigger and a revision history, or it will be inaccurate inside a year.

How to take this forward

For a new build or major refurbishment, the document wants commissioning at concept stage and developing through the design, with dependency and staffing assumptions agreed with clinical teams early rather than assumed by the design team.

For an existing estate, the priority is a whole-site document with accurate compartmentation drawings that estates, the risk assessor and the fire and rescue service can all use. A fire strategy report is the deliverable in both cases.

Competence matters more here than almost anywhere. Ask what comparable healthcare buildings the author has worked on, what their position is under BS 8670-1:2024, the competence framework code of practice that superseded BSI Flex 8670 v3.0:2021, and whether they will attend clinical meetings to agree the staffing assumptions.

Healthcare is treated as a high-liability sector here, so hospital and care projects are taken case by case rather than as standard work. Describe the site, the works and the stage they are at, and fit is confirmed before any quote is issued. Reports are arranged across England and Wales through a network of chartered fire engineers, so matching the project to the right engineer is the first step rather than an afterthought. For the wider service, see fire engineer or fire strategy consultant.

A fire strategy for a block of flats sets out how the building contains a fire inside the flat where it starts. It covers compartmentation between dwellings, common escape route protection, flat entrance doors, external wall construction, smoke control, detection and fire service access, and it states whether the building operates a stay put approach.

Almost everything in a residential block follows from one design decision: whether a fire is expected to stay in one flat. If it is, the building carries a heavy compartmentation burden and the common areas can stay comparatively simple. If it is not, the escape routes and the alarm system have to do far more work.

The three kinds of residential building this covers

The phrase “buildings and flats” covers three quite different problems, and confusing them is the most common mistake in residential enquiries.

Purpose-built blocks. Designed as flats from the outset, usually with compartment floors and walls, a protected common stair and a stay put approach. The documentation question is normally whether the design intent was ever recorded, and whether the building still matches it after decades of alterations.

Converted buildings. A house, an office or a warehouse turned into flats. Compartmentation has to be created rather than inherited, and it frequently is not achieved to the standard assumed. Converted blocks are where the gap between the paperwork and the building is widest.

Mixed use. Flats above a shop, a restaurant, a gym or a car park. The commercial use below is often the dominant risk, the two parts may have separate responsible persons, and escape routes and compartmentation have to be resolved across the boundary between them.

The higher-risk threshold, and why it changes everything

The Building Safety Act 2022 introduced a separate regime for buildings defined as higher-risk, and the definition is worth stating rather than paraphrasing.

In England, during the occupation phase, a higher-risk building is one that is at least 18 metres in height or has at least 7 storeys, and contains at least 2 residential units. It is height or storey count, either one, and then the residential units on top. Storeys are counted from the storey at ground level to the top storey, ignoring storeys below ground, rooftop machinery and plant rooms, and gallery floors covering less than half the storey below.

Wales sets its own criteria and they are not the same. Under the Building Safety (Description of Higher-Risk Building) (Design and Construction Phase) (Wales) Regulations 2023, a building at the design and construction stage is higher-risk if it is at least 18 metres in height or has at least 7 storeys, and contains at least one residential unit, or a hospital with at least one bed intended for an overnight stay, or a care home, or a children’s home, and is not an excluded building. One residential unit rather than two, and care settings named outright, so a building outside the English definition can sit inside the Welsh one.

Crossing that threshold changes the process, not just the paperwork. In England, design and construction work on a higher-risk building runs through the Building Safety Regulator’s gateway process rather than through ordinary building control. There are three statutory gateways: gateway 1 at planning, gateway 2 before work starts, and gateway 3 at completion, which the building must clear before occupation. The Regulator became a standalone body sponsored by the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government on 27 January 2026, having previously sat within the Health and Safety Executive. Dutyholder roles are defined in regulation, and the building carries golden thread obligations, meaning building safety information must be accurate, maintained and accessible throughout its life.

Wales operates its own arrangements, and they are still being stood up. The Building Safety (Wales) Act 2026 is on the statute book and the Welsh Government published an implementation consultation on 15 June 2026.

The practical consequence for a fire strategy is that it stops being a design-stage deliverable and becomes a living record. It needs an owner, a version history and a trigger for review. A document written once, filed and never updated does not satisfy a golden thread duty, however good it was on the day it was issued.

Below the threshold, the Building Regulations still apply in full, and so does the fire safety information handover duty in regulation 38 of the Building Regulations 2010: the information must reach the responsible person no later than the date of completion or the date of occupation, whichever comes first. England strengthened that duty from 1 October 2023, adding acknowledgement of receipt by the responsible person and notification to the relevant authority. Wales brought equivalent requirements in from 1 July 2026. Being outside the higher-risk regime is not the same as being outside the requirement.

What the fire strategy has to resolve in a block of flats

What a fire strategy for flatted accommodation has to establish, and why each item matters in a residential block specifically.

Stay put, and when it stops being safe

Stay put is a design conclusion, not a default and not a policy anyone can simply adopt. It holds only while the compartmentation between flats holds and the common escape routes stay protected.

That means a stay put approach is only as good as its evidence. A block operating stay put should be able to show what the compartment lines are, that the flat entrance doors meet the assumed specification, that service penetrations through compartment walls and floors are properly sealed, and that the common areas are kept clear.

Where that evidence does not exist, or where a survey finds defects, the usual course is a temporary change to simultaneous evacuation, often with a temporary common alarm and sometimes a waking watch, until the defects are resolved. The National Fire Chiefs Council’s Simultaneous Evacuation Guidance, fourth edition of 17 August 2022, is the reference for making that change, and it discourages prolonged waking watch where a common alarm would do. That is expensive and disruptive, which is why establishing the design intent early is worth doing before somebody else forces the question.

The number of stairs matters here too. Single-stair residential buildings have been the subject of significant recent guidance change. In England the threshold is settled: new residential buildings above 18 metres require a second staircase. The Approved Document B amendment was published on 29 March 2024 and comes into force on 30 September 2026, with transitional provisions where an application was made earlier and work is sufficiently progressed, meaning concrete poured for foundations or piling. Do not rely on what was accepted on a previous scheme.

Existing blocks with no documentation

This is the most common residential enquiry. A managing agent is asked for the fire strategy by a lender, an insurer, a fire risk assessor or a new freeholder, and there is nothing in the file.

The route is a retrospective fire strategy: survey what is actually there, establish what the design intent must have been, identify where the building departs from it, and record the compartment lines on drawings the managing agent can hand to anyone who asks. See fire strategy drawings for what that drawing set contains.

Two things usually run alongside it. An appraisal of the external wall construction, which is a separate specialist exercise with its own methodology. The reference document is PAS 9980:2022, the code of practice for fire risk appraisal of external wall construction and cladding of existing blocks of flats. It is current, and a revision is under way, so check the edition when scoping. And the fire risk assessment, which is a different document with a different purpose: it examines how the building is managed, whereas the strategy establishes what it was designed to do. Assessors routinely carry findings they cannot close because the design intent is unknown, and the strategy is what closes them.

How to take this forward

For a new residential scheme, commission at concept stage. The evacuation approach, stair provision and compartmentation strategy all set the plan form, and changing them after the layout is fixed is expensive.

For an existing block, start with what you can evidence, then fill the gaps. A fire strategy report written for a residential block is only useful if it reflects the building as it stands, not as it was drawn.

Residential blocks carry a high liability profile, so these projects are taken case by case rather than as standard work. Tell us the building, its height and storey count, whether it is purpose-built or converted, and what documentation already exists, and fit will be confirmed before any quote is issued. Reports are arranged across England and Wales through a network of chartered fire engineers, and the higher-risk regime differs between the two nations, so the jurisdiction is established at the outset. For the wider service, see fire strategy consultant.

A fire evacuation strategy describes how people leave a building in a fire: who moves, in what order, by which route, assisted by whom. A fire strategy is the wider design document that makes that possible, covering compartmentation, escape route protection, alarm systems and fire resistance. The evacuation strategy is one output of the strategy.

That dependency is the whole point, and getting it the wrong way round causes real problems. A building manager writing an evacuation strategy without knowing the design intent is guessing about whether the building can actually support what the document promises.

The four evacuation approaches used in UK buildings

Almost every building uses one of four approaches, or a combination of them in a mixed-use building.

Simultaneous evacuation. Everyone leaves at once on the alarm. Standard for offices, schools, shops and most low-rise buildings. It requires escape routes and stairs sized for the whole occupancy moving at the same time.

Phased evacuation. The floor of the fire and the floor above evacuate first, then other floors in sequence. Used in tall buildings where evacuating everyone at once would overwhelm the stairs. Approved Document B volume 2 sets the conditions at paragraph 3.21: stairs approached through a protected lobby or protected corridor at every storey except the top one, lifts reached through protected lobbies, every floor a compartment floor, a fire warning system to at least the L3 standard in BS 5839-1, an internal speech communication system linking a control point at fire and rescue service access level to a fire warden on every storey, and sprinklers throughout if any storey sits more than 30 metres above ground level.

Stay put, also called defend in place. Residents outside the flat where the fire started remain in their homes. Standard for purpose-built blocks of flats. It depends entirely on the compartmentation between flats holding, and on the common escape routes being protected. Where compartmentation is compromised, the approach is not safe, and a temporary simultaneous evacuation arrangement is usually put in place until it is repaired.

Progressive horizontal evacuation. People move sideways into an adjoining fire compartment on the same floor rather than leaving the building. Standard in hospitals and care settings where moving patients down stairs is dangerous or impossible. It depends on adequate compartment sizes and on staffing.

Each of those is a promise about what the building does. The promise is made in the fire strategy.

The two documents compared

Fire evacuation strategy compared with fire strategy: scope, author, timing and legal driver.

Where the management document fits

A fire safety management strategy is the third document in the set, and it is the one most often missing.

It covers how fire safety is run day to day: who the responsible person is, who holds which duties, testing and maintenance regimes for alarms, emergency lighting, sprinklers and fire doors, staff training and drill frequency, permit-to-work arrangements for hot works, contractor control, and record keeping.

The relationship between the three is simple. The fire strategy sets the design intent. The management document sets the arrangements that keep the design intent true over time. The evacuation strategy sets what happens when the alarm sounds. Every fire strategy contains management assumptions, and those assumptions are precisely what the management document has to deliver. If the design assumed that doors are kept closed and nobody checks them, the design intent has quietly lapsed and nothing on paper records it.

For the wider strategic document that ties design intent and management together, see fire safety strategy.

What an evacuation strategy should contain

If you are writing one, cover these.

The evacuation approach and why it applies to this building. Alarm arrangements and what each signal means to occupants. Escape routes from every part of the building, with plans. Assembly points and the route to them. Roles: who sweeps, who takes the roll, who meets the fire and rescue service, who has authority to declare a full evacuation. Assisted evacuation, meaning refuge locations, evacuation lift arrangements and personal emergency evacuation plans for people who cannot use stairs. Arrangements for visitors and contractors who do not know the building. Out-of-hours and lone-working arrangements. Drill frequency, and how findings are recorded and acted on. And the trigger points for review.

Personal emergency evacuation plans deserve a specific note. They are individual plans agreed with a named person who would need help to leave. They are not a generic paragraph. Expectations for residential buildings have moved sharply. In England the Fire Safety (Residential Evacuation Plans) (England) Regulations 2025 came into force on 6 April 2026. They apply to residential buildings containing two or more domestic premises that are at least 18 metres in height or have at least 7 storeys, and to buildings over 11 metres operating a simultaneous evacuation strategy. The responsible person must identify residents whose ability to evacuate unaided is compromised by a physical or cognitive impairment, carry out a person-centred fire risk assessment on request, put reasonable and proportionate measures in place, record a written residential emergency evacuation statement, share the relevant information with the fire and rescue authority with the resident’s consent, and review the arrangements annually. Those regulations extend to England only.

Where evacuation strategies fail

Four failure patterns come up repeatedly.

The strategy assumes compartmentation nobody has verified. Most common with stay put in older converted blocks. The document promises that a fire will stay in one flat. Nobody has confirmed that the flat entrance doors, the compartment walls and the service penetrations actually deliver that. This is the most serious version of the problem by a distance.

The strategy was written for the previous use. The building became a hotel, or a floor was subdivided, or the ground floor became a restaurant, and the evacuation document never changed.

Assisted evacuation is a paragraph rather than a plan. Refuges exist on the drawings but nobody is assigned to attend them, and the evacuation lift has no operating procedure.

Nobody has drilled it. A phased evacuation that has never been practised is a theory, not a strategy.

Three of those four are diagnosed by comparing the evacuation strategy against the fire strategy. Where no fire strategy exists, the comparison cannot be made at all, which is why the two documents keep turning up together in enquiries.

Which one do you need

If you are designing, altering or changing the use of a building, you need the fire strategy first. The evacuation strategy follows from it. Start with a fire strategy report.

If you occupy or manage a building and have been asked for an evacuation strategy, you need to know what the building was designed to do before you can write one honestly. Where that information does not exist, a retrospective fire strategy is the way to establish it.

If you have both documents and they contradict each other, or the fire risk assessment has flagged that the evacuation arrangements are not supported by the building, that is work for a fire strategy consultant. Reports are arranged across England and Wales through a network of chartered fire engineers.

A school fire strategy covers the same subjects as any building, with school-specific answers: dense occupancy in short bursts, pupils who evacuate under supervision, laboratories and workshops with ignition sources, halls used by the public out of hours, and estates built in phases across decades. Building Bulletin 100 is the sector design guidance in England.

Schools are unusual for one reason above the rest. The occupancy is dense, young and directed. Evacuation depends on staff moving whole classes rather than on individuals finding their own way out. That changes the design assumptions, and it changes what the document has to say.

The guidance that applies to schools

Schools fall under the Building Regulations like any other building, and Approved Document B applies. England and Wales publish separate versions, and they are not close: England uses the 2019 edition incorporating the 2020, 2022 and 2025 amendments, while Wales still works from 2006-edition documents last amended with effect from 20 December 2025.

Building Bulletin 100, “Design for fire safety in schools”, is the Department for Education’s guide and dates from 2007. Its status has moved, and this is the single most important thing to get right on a school project. The Department consulted on a revised edition in 2021, the consultation closed on 18 August 2021, and as at 3 August 2026 gov.uk still shows the outcome as under analysis, so the 2007 document remains the published version. Meanwhile the DfE Technical Manual: Employer’s requirements, dated January 2026, states plainly that “the use of BB 100 (2007 version) is no longer required” and directs designers instead to its own fire safety section, to Approved Document B volume 2 and to BS 9999:2017. That manual is contractual on DfE-funded work, so a school project can now sit under two quite different expectations depending on who is paying for it.

Welsh schools are not covered by the DfE documents at all. BS 9999:2017 is often used where a risk-based approach suits the building better than the prescriptive route.

Funders add their own layer. The Department for Education sets output specifications for its own programmes, and academy trusts and local authorities frequently impose estate standards on top of both. Establish which of those apply before anyone scopes the work, because they change the deliverable.

Sprinkler provision in new schools is a moving policy area, and the position sits in sector guidance and funder requirements rather than in the Building Regulations. It moved again in 2026 when the DfE Technical Manual displaced BB100 on funded projects, and the change drew public criticism from fire sector bodies. Do not assume either way, and confirm the client’s own estate standard at project outset as well.

Occupancy: the defining school problem

Occupancy in a school is not steady. It peaks hard and then empties.

A hall used for assembly may hold the entire school. A dining hall runs at capacity for forty minutes and is nearly empty either side. Corridors carry the whole population in a three-minute changeover. A sports hall laid out for exams has a completely different density from the same hall used for PE.

The strategy has to set occupancy figures space by space, based on actual use rather than a single floor area calculation, and size exit capacity for the peak. Halls, dining spaces and sports halls are where under-provision is usually found: large rooms with high densities and often fewer exits than the numbers require.

Corridor width and stair capacity follow from the same analysis. So does door swing direction, which sounds trivial until a doorway carrying two hundred pupils opens against the flow.

Evacuation: supervised, not individual

Most schools use simultaneous evacuation. Everyone leaves on the alarm. The strategy needs to state that and size the routes accordingly.

The mechanism, though, is nothing like an office. Pupils evacuate as classes, led by staff, to designated assembly points, followed by a roll call. The document has to address class-by-class routes, assembly point capacity and location, since several hundred children may stand there for an hour in February, and the sweep of toilets, changing rooms and practical spaces where a pupil may be alone.

Assisted evacuation needs specific attention. A school will have pupils and staff with mobility, sensory, cognitive or behavioural needs, and the population turns over every year. Refuges, evacuation lifts and personal emergency evacuation plans have to be designed for a roll that changes annually, not for a fixed set of individuals. Special schools, and provision for pupils with special educational needs within mainstream schools, change the analysis substantially.

Early years provision inside a primary school needs separate consideration, because very young children cannot follow instructions independently and staff ratios drive the achievable evacuation time.

Hazards specific to school buildings

Science laboratories with gas supplies, flammable liquids and chemical stores. Design and technology workshops with dust extraction, hot works and machinery. Food technology rooms with multiple domestic-scale cooking stations. Art rooms with kilns. Theatre and drama spaces with lighting rigs, drapes and stored scenery.

Each is a genuine ignition source and each affects compartmentation and detection design. Chemical stores need containment. Kilns need separation and ventilation. Dust extraction ductwork can carry fire between spaces if it is not treated properly.

Then there is arson, a well-recognised risk in the school sector. It drives decisions about external storage, bin locations, boundary treatment, roof access and external wall construction. The strategy should address it explicitly rather than leaving it to the security consultant.

Estates that grew in pieces

Very few schools are one building from one year. A typical secondary is a 1950s block, a 1970s extension, a 2000s sports hall and two temporary classroom units, joined by links, with a corridor that was once an external route.

This creates the sector’s most common documentation problem. Each phase may have had its own approvals, and no single document describes the site as it now stands. Compartment lines that made sense when a block stood alone now run into a link corridor. Alarm systems from different eras are interfaced rather than integrated.

A whole-site strategy resolves it. It establishes what each part of the estate is doing, where the compartment lines actually run, whether the alarm zones make sense across the site, and how connected blocks interact during an evacuation. Temporary and modular classrooms get assessed in the same exercise rather than assumed away. For most existing schools that is a retrospective fire strategy, and the drawing set it produces is usually more valuable day to day than the text. See fire strategy drawings.

Out-of-hours and community use

Schools are used by other people after the bell: community sports lettings, adult education, polling stations, holiday clubs and weekend religious use.

Out-of-hours use changes almost every assumption. The occupants do not know the building. Trained staff may not be present. Only part of the building may be in use, so parts of the escape route may be locked.

The strategy should identify which parts of the building are lettable, what escape provision each zone has when the rest of the site is closed, and what management arrangements a letting requires. If a hall can only be let safely with a named person on site who knows the evacuation procedure, that belongs in writing rather than in somebody’s head.

How to take this forward

For a new build or major refurbishment, the document wants commissioning at concept stage and developing through the design, with school-specific analysis of occupancy, evacuation, hazard rooms and community use. A fire strategy report is the deliverable.

For an existing estate, the priority is a whole-site document plus drawings the site team can use and a fire risk assessor can check against. Trusts with several schools benefit from every site being documented to the same structure.

Schools are treated as a high-liability sector here, so they are taken case by case rather than as standard work. Tell us the project, the estate and the stage it is at, and fit will be confirmed before any quote is issued. Reports are arranged across England and Wales through a network of chartered fire engineers, and the right match matters more in this sector than the speed of a quote. For the wider service and what the deliverable contains, see fire strategy consultant.

A fire strategy template will not pass building control because a fire strategy is not a form. It is reasoning about one building. Travel distances, compartment lines, occupancy and evacuation approach come from its geometry and use. A template gives you headings. Building control assesses what sits under the headings, which no template can supply.

That is the whole answer. The rest of this page sets out what the assessor actually tests, which part of a template is genuinely worth keeping, and the narrow set of projects where a short annotated statement really is enough.

What building control actually assesses

Building control does not tick boxes against a document structure. Bodies in England and Wales are testing whether the design meets the functional requirements of Part B of the Building Regulations, and whether you have shown your working.

Three things get scrutinised.

Whether the numbers came from this building. Travel distances measured from the furthest point of each room. Stair widths against the population they serve. Compartment lines drawn where they actually run. A template contains the guidance figures. It cannot contain your figures, because it has never seen your plans.

Whether departures from guidance are identified and justified. Almost every real building departs from Approved Document B somewhere. In England that is the 2019 edition incorporating the 2020, 2022 and 2025 amendments, published on 11 March 2025, which already has further amendments dated 2026 and 2029 collated into it. Wales publishes its own Approved Document B, still based on the 2006 edition and most recently amended by a slip that took effect on 20 December 2025. That is normal and acceptable, provided the departure is named, quantified and justified with a compensating measure that is written down. A template has no departures in it, because it does not know the design. A document listing no departures, for a building that visibly has some, reads as a document nobody checked.

Whether the author understood the building. Assessors read a great many of these. Generic prose is obvious within a page. Phrases such as “adequate provision has been made” and “in accordance with current standards” tell the reader nothing, and they signal that the analysis was avoided rather than done.

The specific things a template cannot contain

Here is the concrete list. Every item has to be worked out from your drawings and your intended use, and every item gets checked.

Travel distances in single-direction and multi-direction escape, measured route by route. Occupancy figures derived from floor area and actual use. Exit capacity and stair width calculations. The location of every compartment line and the fire resistance period each one needs. Structural fire resistance for the frame. Cavity barrier positions. External wall build-up, the combustibility restrictions that apply by building height and use, and boundary distance calculations for unprotected areas. In England, regulation 7(2) of the Building Regulations 2010 requires materials in the external walls and specified attachments of a relevant building, meaning one with a storey at least 18 metres above ground level containing dwellings, an institution or a room for residential purposes, to achieve European class A2-s1, d0 or A1, and since 1 December 2022 relevant metal composite material has been banned in the external walls of any building at any height. Wales lowered its own threshold from 15 metres to 11 metres and added hostels, hotels and boarding houses to the buildings covered, with effect from 20 December 2025. Detection and alarm category. Smoke control performance requirements. Fire service vehicle access, hydrant distances and riser outlet locations. Refuge provision and evacuation lift arrangements. And the management assumptions the whole strategy quietly depends on.

That list is not a sales argument. It is the content of the document. A template can hold the headings for all of it and none of the answers.

Template compared with an assessed strategy

What a downloadable template gives you, compared with an assessed, building-specific fire strategy.

The part of a template that is genuinely useful

Templates are not worthless. They are useful for one thing, which is scoping. If you are the person commissioning the work, a structure tells you what to ask for and lets you compare quotes fairly.

Use it as a checklist against a proposal. A quote that covers all of the following is comparable with another that does. A quote that covers half of them is cheaper for a reason.

Building description and scope, including exclusions. Design basis and the guidance route chosen. Occupancy and evacuation approach. Means of escape with figures. Compartmentation and structural fire resistance. Internal and external fire spread. Detection, alarm, smoke control and suppression. Fire service access and facilities. Management assumptions. Marked-up drawings. Named author and a competence statement. And, importantly, whether responding to building control comments sits inside the fee or is charged as an extra.

That last line is where fixed fees quietly turn into variable ones. Ask about it before you appoint, in writing.

When you genuinely do not need a full strategy

This is the honest part, and it matters more than any sales pitch.

Some projects are simple enough that a full standalone document is not required. A small single-storey building following Approved Document B without departure, with a straightforward layout and a common use class, may be signed off on annotated drawings and a short compliance statement. Your building control body will tell you. Ask them directly at the outset, in writing, and keep the answer on file.

You are outside that group if any of the following is true. The building meets the higher-risk definition and falls into the regime introduced by the Building Safety Act 2022. In England a higher-risk building during occupation is one that is at least 18 metres in height or has at least 7 storeys, and contains at least 2 residential units. Wales sets its own criteria: for the design and construction phase, a building at least 18 metres in height or with at least 7 storeys that contains at least one residential unit, a hospital with at least one overnight bed, a care home or a children’s home. It has more than one storey with any complexity in the escape arrangements. It has a basement or a car park. It involves a change of use, particularly to residential. It has an atrium, an open-plan layout beyond the guidance limits, or a single stair. It relies on stay put, phased evacuation or progressive horizontal evacuation. It has sleeping accommodation. Or the design departs from guidance anywhere.

In those cases the document is not a formality, and filling in a template will cost you more time than commissioning the work, because the comments will come back and you will still need somebody to answer them.

What happens when a templated document is submitted

The pattern is consistent. The document goes in. Building control returns a request for further information listing the missing analysis: travel distances, compartmentation extents, justification for the departure they spotted. The applicant then either engages a consultant under time pressure with the design already fixed, or the project waits.

The second-order cost is worse than the fee. A compartment line that has to move after the frame is up, or a stair that has to widen after the shell is complete, is a serious sum. Caught at design stage it is a redrawn line.

What to do instead

If you have already downloaded a template, keep it as a scoping checklist. Then take three steps.

Ask your building control body, in writing, what level of fire safety documentation they expect for this specific project, and keep the reply.

Assemble your drawings, the intended use of every space and the occupancy you expect. That is what any competent assessor will ask for first, and having it ready shortens the whole process.

Then get the analysis done by somebody who will put their name on it. That is what a fire strategy consultant does, and it produces a fire strategy report that survives assessment. If you also need the marked-up drawing set, see fire strategy drawings. If the building already exists and nothing was ever documented, the route is a retrospective fire strategy. Work is arranged across England and Wales.

PAS 911:2007, the Publicly Available Specification that set out a framework for formulating fire strategies, has been withdrawn by BSI. It is no longer a current document and should not be specified in new briefs. There is no like-for-like successor. Fire strategy documents are now governed by the Building Regulations, statutory guidance and British Standards.

If you have arrived here because PAS 911 appears in a specification you have been sent, that is the answer you needed, and it is not the one most sources will give you. The rest of this page explains what the document was, why the reference keeps circulating years after withdrawal, what actually applies now, and how to handle a live tender that still names it.

What PAS 911 was, and what withdrawal means

A Publicly Available Specification is a fast-track standardisation document published by BSI. It is developed with a sponsor and a steering group, goes through consultation, and is then reviewed and either revised, converted into a full British Standard, or withdrawn.

PAS 911:2007 was titled “Fire strategies. Guidance and framework for their formulation”, and the BSI publication index now carries it with the status “Withdrawn”. It set out what a fire strategy document should contain, how it should be structured, how it should be developed through the design process, and how it should be maintained across the life of the building. At the time it was a reasonable attempt to bring order to documents that varied wildly in scope and quality.

It has since been withdrawn. Withdrawal in BSI terms means the document is no longer maintained, no longer reviewed and no longer part of the current catalogue. It can still be bought as a historic record in some places, which is part of why the confusion persists, but it is not a live specification.

Withdrawal is not the same as a standard being superseded. When a standard is superseded there is a named replacement to move to. PAS 911 was not replaced by a successor PAS carrying the same scope. That gap is exactly why people keep reaching for the old reference.

Why people are still referencing it

Four reasons, all of them mundane.

Specifications get copied. A client standard or an employer’s requirements document written years ago gets reused on the next project, and the standards schedule is the section nobody rereads. PAS 911 travels forward inside documents that were never re-checked.

Search results have not caught up. Articles, consultancy pages and forum threads written while the specification was live are still indexed and still rank. Several read as though the document is current. Nothing corrects them.

The problem it addressed is still real. Fire strategies still vary in scope and structure between authors. People who remember a framework that tried to fix that reach for it again, without checking its status.

Nobody was told. A withdrawal is a quiet administrative act. There is no notification to everyone who ever cited the document in a contract.

None of those reasons make it current. If you are writing a brief now, naming a withdrawn specification creates a contractual obligation to a document that nobody maintains, and it will surface as a dispute at handover when somebody asks what conformity was actually assessed against.

What actually governs a fire strategy document now

There is no single replacement framework. The obligations are spread across legislation, statutory guidance, British Standards and competence requirements. This is the set that matters in England and Wales.

The documents that govern fire strategy work in England and Wales, and what each one actually does.

The practical point is that the useful parts of what PAS 911 tried to do have been absorbed elsewhere. Structure and content expectations now come from the standard you are designing to. Lifecycle and maintenance expectations come from the golden thread duties for higher-risk buildings and from Regulation 38 handover for everything else. Author competence, which the specification never addressed properly, now sits under BS 8670-1:2024, which superseded BSI Flex 8670 v3.0:2021.

If a brief or tender still specifies PAS 911

Do not simply ignore it, and do not silently price for it either. Handle it in writing, before you commit.

Raise it as a query, not a criticism. Send a short note stating that PAS 911:2007 has been withdrawn by BSI and asking the client what they want to happen. Most clients do not know, and most are grateful.

Offer a substitute wording. The usual replacement is a clause naming the design standard the strategy will follow, meaning Approved Document B, BS 9991:2024, BS 9999:2017 or a BS 7974:2019 performance-based approach, plus the competence framework the author works to, plus an explicit statement of the review and update arrangement after handover. That covers everything the old specification was reaching for.

Never write conformity you cannot evidence. A statement that a document is “PAS 911 compliant” is not assessable against a withdrawn specification. If a client insists on the phrase, record in the appointment exactly what it is taken to mean.

Get the answer in the contract, not the email chain. Standards schedules are read at handover and in disputes. That is when a withdrawn reference becomes expensive.

If you are on the receiving end, and the tender is already out, the same three questions apply that would have applied when the specification was live: which edition or standard, what conformity actually means here, and who maintains the document afterwards.

What this means for your appointment

The removal of PAS 911 does not lower the bar. In practice it has risen, because the Building Safety Act 2022 regime and the competence framework are considerably more demanding than a voluntary specification ever was.

When you appoint, ask three things. Which design standard the strategy will be written to, and why that route suits this building. What the author’s competence position is under BS 8670-1:2024. And what happens to the document after handover, meaning who updates it and on what trigger.

A fire strategy consultant should answer all three without hesitation. For the deliverable itself and what each section covers, see the fire strategy report page. Where an existing building has no documentation to update, the starting point is a retrospective fire strategy. Reports are arranged across England and Wales through a network of chartered fire engineers.