Plans, photographs and the secure information box

When a fire and rescue crew arrives at a high-rise residential building, the first minutes are spent working out what they are dealing with. Where are the stairs, the firefighting lift, the risers, the shut-offs. Who is the responsible person and how do they reach them. The secure information box exists to answer those questions at the door, so the crew is not learning the building while it is on fire. It is one of the smaller duties in the post-Grenfell regime, and one of the most directly practical.

What the regulations actually require

The Fire Safety (England) Regulations 2022, in force 23 January 2023, were made under Article 24 of the Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005 and implement recommendations from the first phase of the Grenfell Tower Inquiry. For high-rise residential buildings, defined as at least 18 metres tall or at least seven storeys with at least two domestic premises, the responsible person must, according to the National Fire Chiefs Council and gov.uk, keep a secure information box on site. Inside it go hard-copy floor plans, a single-page orientation plan, and the responsible person's contact details, so a firefighter can find them without a key to the management office.

The same regulations require the responsible person to share external wall system information and floor and building plans electronically with the local fire and rescue service, and to carry out monthly checks of firefighters' lifts and key firefighting equipment. The box is the physical, on-site half of that information duty. The electronic share is the half the service holds in advance. Both have to describe the same building.

The single-page orientation plan earns its place

Of everything in the box, the single-page orientation plan is the document under the most pressure, because it has to be read fast. It is not a detailed floor plan. It is the overview that tells a crew how the building is laid out before they go in: where the cores are, how the floors are numbered, where the firefighting shaft sits, where the inlets and isolation points are. A good orientation plan answers the questions a crew asks in the first thirty seconds, and it answers them on one sheet without a legend the size of a novel.

Getting it right is a discipline of leaving things out. Everything that is not needed in the first minutes is clutter, and clutter slows the read. We have written separately about that balance in the single-page orientation plan, and why it matters. The detailed plans behind it can carry the rest.

Where photographs fit

Plans show layout, but photographs show condition and reality, and the two together are stronger than either alone. A photograph of the actual riser cupboard, the actual lift control, the actual external wall build-up, removes ambiguity that a drawing can leave. For the responsible person managing the building day to day, photographs tied to locations on the plan also make the fire risk assessment easier to act on, because a finding comes with a picture of exactly what was found.

The contents of a well-kept information set tend to fall into a few groups:

The box holds the urgent essentials. The wider record holds the depth. The mistake is to confuse the two and stuff the box so full that the orientation plan is hard to find.

Keeping the box and the record consistent

The risk with a physical box is that it goes stale. The building changes, the electronic plans get updated, and the hard copies in the box keep showing last year's layout. A crew that trusts the box and finds it wrong is worse off than a crew that knew to check, because the wrong plan sends them in the wrong direction. Keeping the box current is the same problem as keeping any plan current: it needs an owner, a trigger and a habit, which we cover in keeping plans in step with the building as it changes.

The practical answer is to treat the box as an output of the live record rather than a separate artefact. When the master plans are revised, the box copies are reprinted as part of the same job, and the electronic share to the fire and rescue service is updated at the same time. That way the three versions of the truth, the box, the service's copy and the management record, are all drawn from one source instead of drifting apart.

A small box that does a large job

It is easy to treat the secure information box as a tick on a checklist, a thing that exists because the regulations say it must. That underrates it. The box is a promise to the people who will enter your building in the worst circumstances that the information they need is where they expect it and that it is true. Honouring that promise is mostly about consistency: one source for the plans, a clear orientation sheet, and a habit of updating the box whenever the building changes.

In SAMRISK, plans, photographs and the fire record sit together against the building, so the documents that go into the box are drawn from the same place that the responsible person and the fire and rescue service rely on. You can see how plans are held on the building plans page. The next time your building changes, reprint the box. It is a five-minute job that could matter more than almost anything else you do that week.