Evacuation planning, and the people who need it most

Most evacuation plans are written for the people who least need them: able-bodied residents who can hear an alarm, find a stair and walk down it unaided. The people the plan exists to protect are the ones for whom none of that is true. A resident who uses a wheelchair, a tenant recovering from surgery, an older person on the fourteenth floor who cannot manage twelve flights at speed. Evacuation planning that does not start from those residents is not really a plan. It is a description of what the lucky majority would do.

Why residential evacuation is different

Evacuating an office is a known quantity. The people are broadly mobile, they are awake, they are present for a limited number of hours, and they leave together when the alarm sounds. A residential block is none of those things. Residents are there overnight, asleep, in varying states of health and mobility, and they include children and people who live with disabilities or long-term conditions. The strategy in many purpose-built blocks has historically been to stay put, relying on the compartmentation that is meant to contain a fire in the flat where it starts. Where that strategy holds, it works well. Where it cannot be relied upon, the building needs a credible way to get people out, and that is where the gap usually sits.

The Grenfell Tower Inquiry put a hard light on this. Residents with disabilities were disproportionately among those who died, and the absence of personal plans for them was a recurring theme. Whatever the final shape of national policy, the moral and practical case is settled: a building's evacuation strategy has to confront the question of who cannot simply walk out.

The information the plan depends on

A plan for the people who need it most depends on knowing who they are, where they are and what they need. That information is sensitive and it changes, which is why it is so often missing or stale. The building manager who keeps it current is doing quiet, unglamorous work that matters more than almost anything else in the fire file. The information worth holding includes:

• Which residents may need assistance to evacuate, recorded with their consent and kept confidential.
• Where in the building they are, so that responders are not searching floor by floor.
• What kind of assistance each person is likely to need, in plain terms.
• The equipment available in the building, such as evacuation chairs, and who is trained to use it.
• A route for getting that information to the fire and rescue service quickly when it is needed.

This is the human counterpart to the building information the Fire Safety (England) Regulations 2022 already require responsible persons of high-rise residential buildings to hold and share, such as floor plans and the single-page orientation plan kept in the secure information box. The plans tell firefighters how the building is laid out. The personal information tells them where the urgent priorities are.

Plans and people belong in the same picture

An evacuation strategy is only as good as the building information underneath it. A stay-put policy assumes compartmentation that has actually been maintained, fire doors that still self-close, and protected routes that have not been quietly compromised by alterations. When the fire risk assessment finds that those assumptions no longer hold, the evacuation strategy has to change with it, and the people who would struggle to self-evacuate are the first who are affected.

That is why the evacuation plan should not live apart from the rest of the fire file. The strategy, the floor plans, the fire risk assessment and the record of who needs help are facets of one question: if this building had to be cleared tonight, what would actually happen. Marking up a floor plan with the location of residents who need assistance, evacuation equipment and protected routes turns an abstract policy into something a responder could use, a point we develop in marking up a floor plan for a fire risk assessment.

Keeping it current is the hard part

The reason personal evacuation information is so often wrong is that people move, recover, decline and leave, and the plan does not move with them. A list drawn up two years ago and never revisited can be worse than none, because it lends false confidence. Currency is the whole game.

That means a named owner for the information, a routine to review it, consent handled properly, and the data held somewhere secure rather than in a folder anyone can open. It also means that when a fire risk assessment changes the evacuation strategy, the personal plans are reviewed in the same breath rather than left to drift. For the surrounding obligations on equipment and checks, our note on monthly checks that keep a high-rise compliant covers the recurring side of the same picture.

What good looks like

Good evacuation planning is undramatic. It is a current understanding of who lives in the building and who would need help, held with their consent, mapped onto plans that match the building as it stands today, reviewed when anything changes, and reachable in the moment it matters. It does not depend on the manager being present, because the information is recorded rather than carried around in one person's head.

In SAMRISK, the evacuation picture sits alongside the building's building plans, fire risk assessments and compliance calendar, so the strategy, the people it protects and the building it describes stay in step rather than drifting apart. The review of personal plans can be scheduled and owned like any other recurring duty, which is what keeps the information honest.

This is general guidance rather than legal advice, and you should confirm the current requirements and good-practice guidance for your building. The principle holds regardless. Plan for the people who cannot simply walk out, keep the information about them current and secure, and tie it to a building record that reflects the place as it really is.