If you manage a building, you need to have a detailed fire strategy in place for that building.
Alex MacArthur, director at North West Fire Solutions, explains why a fire strategy is so important and what it should include.
In this article
What is included in a fire strategy?
Why is a fire strategy important?
How can a fire strategy be pulled together?
How long does a fire strategy last for?
Ask us about your fire strategy
What is a fire strategy?
I’ll explain this in layman’s terms because it’s easy to Google ‘what is a fire strategy’, read the blurb that’s out there, and feel like you’re clear on what it is.
But sometimes, how you apply that to your building or actually use a fire strategy is different in real life.
A fire strategy often gets confused with an evacuation strategy or anything else you’re trying to do within a building.
When we talk about a fire strategy, what we’re talking about is part of the design of a building.
As someone once said to me, it’s like the fire safety blueprint for your building.
A fire strategy is a document that details all the built-in fire safety measures for your building.
What is included in a fire strategy?
A fire strategy will cover the following:
- Compartmentation lines: These are your walls, ceilings, and floors. A fire strategy will detail where the compartmentation lines are and the level of fire resistance they should have.
- Fire doors: It will stipulate where each fire door is and what type of fire door it needs to be.
- External walls: Specifically, the fire classification of your external wall’s materials.
- Means of escape: Specifically, your protected escape routes, fire detection and alarm systems, emergency lighting, fire doors and escape signage.
- Types of alarm systems
- Travel distances
- Evacuation strategy: Specifically, whether you have a stay-put or all-out strategy or something else.
- Fire performance: Specifically, the performance of internal wall and ceiling linings and external walls in limiting the spread of flame and heat release
- Compartmentation (e.g., fire-resisting walls, floors)
- Cavity barriers
- Roof coverings
- Proximity to boundaries and other buildings
- Vehicle access for fire appliances
- Access routes within buildings for firefighters
- Provision of firefighting shafts, risers, and water supplies
When we go to buildings that have been in existence for some time, we often find there’s a lack of clarity around these areas. Some buildings have never had a strategy in place.
It’s not clear what type of alarm system they should have, if the walls are supposed to be fire-resistant, or if there should be a fire door in a specific part of the building.
If you own or manage a building, you need to know the answers to these questions, which is where a fire strategy comes in.
Why is a fire strategy important?
When we carry out fire risk assessments or do any other kind of survey, we’re always asking to see its fire strategy because this gives us all the answers. It tells us what should be on-site.
If we’re carrying out a fire risk assessment, we can say, ‘Let’s look at the strategy. What have you got?’ We can then compare and contrast what should be in place versus what’s currently in place, and this helps us form an extremely accurate risk assessment.
Although a fire strategy is not a mandatory document, it’s an important document. It provides complete clarity on what you should have in your building from a fire safety perspective.
For older, larger buildings in particular, sometimes it’s a good idea to have a retrospective fire strategy pulled together so that you know what to do moving forward.
It’s very easy for buildings to move away from how they were originally designed over time. Sometimes, that building’s managing agents have good intentions, but they may actually be creating problems for themselves. They may build a new room or make what they deem to be a relatively small change, which could ultimately make their building more unsafe.
What is Regulation 38, and why is it so important?
Regulation 38 is part of The Building Regulations 2010.
The idea behind this regulation is that whoever the constructor is—or whoever’s in charge of a construction or conversion project—must hand over an information pack containing all of the safety information for their building, which includes fire safety.
They’re legally obliged to do this when they’re ready to hand over to the client or sell on to a new body or person.
There’s no set way of doing this, but it’s become the norm to produce a fire strategy over the years.
Typically, if you lead a construction project, you should work with the architects and construction team to produce marked-up drawings and an accompanying report that clearly states, ‘This is what we’re building, and this is what we’re doing.’
You may hit some snags along the way and need to make small changes, but by the end of the project, you should have a document stating:
- What you’ve built
- The fire safety measures you’ve put in place
- How the fire safety measures are managed
- What the person you’re handing over to needs to do going forward
This person then has all the information they need and knows their building inside out. There should be no confusion or questions left unanswered.
Unfortunately, Regulation 38 quite often isn’t followed properly, but we’re now seeing more people clocking on to the fact they have to follow this process.
The people who do this and engage fire engineers and companies like us are in a great position when they hand over to the clients, and the clients are really happy moving forward because they know what they need to do.
How can a fire strategy be pulled together?
A fire strategy should be produced at the design stage of a construction project.
This is often a remote task. It’s theoretical because you’ve got your proposed building plans, and it’s easy to pull together. The engineer is able to look at everything and apply the Building Regulations as required.
Even as your project progresses, you should continue to engage the fire engineer, as you may need to make further changes. This could involve a couple of site visits to check that things have been built as planned.
We’ve encountered situations where a building’s been finished for 20 years but all sorts have happened within the building in that time. We often get asked the question, ‘Are we still able to get a fire strategy?’ The answer is yes, you absolutely can.
We refer to this as a retrospective fire strategy. The engineer would look at the plans that you have and make sure those plans correspond to what’s actually on-site.
This process would probably involve a site visit. During the site visit, the engineer will look at the usage of the building, making sure that everything you’re doing corresponds with how it was originally constructed.
You could manage a building that was initially built as an office block, but if its usage changes—if suddenly you convert those offices into shops, for instance—the whole safety requirements for that building could potentially change, as it wasn’t built to have shops in the first place.
Getting a retrospective fire strategy is a great way of resetting and understanding your fire safety requirements in this respect.
You may have to make some changes and compromises. If you’re not sure which changes to make—particularly if you manage a larger building with a lot of people and a higher risk of fire—a retrospective fire strategy allows you to catch up with those knowledge gaps.
How long does a fire strategy last for?
If you own a block of flats for 30, 40, or even 50 years, provided you’ve got that strategy and nothing significant changes within the building, then your strategy will last for that length of time.
People tend to gasp at the price when they receive a quote for a fire strategy, as it usually comes to four figures or even more for large sites.
But you have to remember this fire strategy will live with your building until it changes.
If you average out the cost of a fire strategy over 30 or more years, it’s very good value.
A fire strategy isn’t the cheapest of documents because you need a highly qualified, experienced fire engineer to pull it together.
I can’t emphasise enough just how good the reports are and how helpful they are—not just to you, the responsible person, but also to any contractors, future risk assessors, the fire service, and any building control specialists.
If you have a fire strategy, anyone who’s got anything to do with that building in the future can refer to it when they need to.
They can look at it and assess how certain changes will affect the building.
Even if you make changes to your building, you can review your strategy and update it accordingly. You don’t have to start again from scratch.
How a fire strategy can save you money
We recently carried out numerous fire strategies for local schools in the region on behalf of a large contractor.
This contractor soon realised they’d overspent by £3 million.
They’d carried out works based on what they thought was correct, but they’d overspec’d it.
When the fire strategy was placed in front of them, it gave them complete clarity over what they needed to do to meet the regulations and keep their building safe.
The actual work required was a lot less work than they’d been doing.
This was a real head-in-hand moment for them because, if they’d had this strategy from the outset, they wouldn’t have needed to spend as much money as they had on materials, time, and other resources.
This is just one example of how much money a fire strategy can save you.
Sometimes, you need to spend money to save money, as proven in this instance.
Invest in complete clarity and long-term cost savings
Not having a fire strategy carried out by a qualified, knowledgeable professional could be making your building more unsafe and costing you a lot more money than you think, as explained in this article.
You can avoid this by reaching out to us for a free quote today.
Backed by decades of experience in fire safety, North West Fire Solutions is perfectly placed to provide a comprehensive fire strategy report for your building.
As this article demonstrates, we’ve been there, done it, and got the t-shirt when it comes to ensuring fire safety within commercial and residential buildings.
Not only do our fire risk assessments cover the pre-installation, installation, and post-installation stages of a project, but they’re also carried out by seasoned professionals. Our team has a combined industry experience of approximately 250 years at the time of writing.
To book your assessment or ask us any questions, feel free to reach out to us at 0151 665 0124 or email info@nwfiresolutions.co.uk.