Balcony fire safety as the weather warms

Balconies are the part of a block that comes alive in summer, and the part fire safety quietly worries about most. London Fire Brigade data for 2021 to 2025 shows private balcony fires averaging 42 a month across April to September against 17 a month from October to March, a rise of 151 per cent over the warmer half of the year (London Fire Brigade, balcony fire data 2021 to 2025, published April 2026). Smoking materials were behind 877 of those fires on private balconies and other external structures over the five years. The Brigade's advice is blunt: no barbecues on a balcony, and dispose of cigarettes properly, because flames and embers spread to cladding, decking and the flat above faster than people expect.

What changed in the rules

The harder shift is in what a balcony is allowed to be made of. An amendment to Approved Document B took effect in England on 1 December 2022 and extended the ban on combustible materials to balconies on residential buildings with a floor more than 11 metres above ground, where the previous threshold had been 18 metres. In practice, balconies on those buildings now have to be built from materials achieving a European fire classification of A2-s1, d0 or A1, the standards for limited combustibility and non-combustibility. The change matters most to managers of buildings between 11 and 18 metres, the height band that was outside the original ban and holds a large share of the stock.

That leaves two questions for anyone running a portfolio. Do you know which of your buildings sit above 11 metres, and do you know what the balconies on them are actually made of. For a building built or refurbished since the change, the answer should be in the handover information. For an older building, it is a survey question, and the kind that tends to surface only when a fire risk assessment looks closely or a resident asks.

Why it is a records problem

Combustible balcony material is a fixed risk you assess once and then manage. Summer ignition is a recurring risk you manage every year. Both fail in the same way: not because nobody knew, but because the knowledge was not written down where the next manager could find it.

A working fire safety register keeps the balcony detail against the building it belongs to, so the material rating, the last inspection and any remedial action sit in one place rather than in a surveyor's report nobody has opened since handover. The seasonal side belongs on a compliance calendar: a pre-summer check of communal balconies, a reminder to renew resident guidance on barbecues and smoking, each a dated and owned task that chains to the next rather than living in someone's memory. We have written before about why planned maintenance beats reactive every time, and balconies are a clean example. The cost of getting ahead of it is a survey and a calendar entry. The cost of not is measured in the figures above.

None of this asks a manager to do anything heroic. It asks them to know what their balconies are made of, to keep that knowledge current, and to treat the warm months as the predictable risk they are rather than a surprise that arrives every June.