Sharing plans with the fire service

When firefighters arrive at a burning high-rise, they arrive into a building they may never have entered, under the worst conditions it will ever experience. What they know about the layout in those first minutes comes largely from plans someone prepared in advance — the floor plans, the orientation plan, the information left ready for exactly this moment. Sharing those plans with the fire and rescue service is not a courtesy. For high-rise residential buildings it is a legal duty, and the plans only earn their place if they are current, clear and findable under pressure.

This is one of the more concrete obligations in the post-Grenfell regime, and one where the gap between compliance on paper and usefulness in fact is wide. A plan that technically exists but is out of date, unclear or buried is a failure waiting for the night it is needed.

What the regulations require

The duty is specific. The Fire Safety (England) Regulations 2022, in force 23 January 2023 and made under Article 24 of the Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005, implement recommendations from the first phase of the Grenfell Tower Inquiry (NFCC; Designing Buildings). For high-rise residential buildings — at least 18m or 7 storeys with at least two domestic premises — the responsible person must:

• Share information about the external wall system with the local fire and rescue service.
• Share floor plans and building plans with the service electronically.
• Keep hard-copy floor plans and a single-page orientation plan, together with the responsible person's contact details, in a secure information box for firefighters.
• Carry out monthly checks of firefighters' lifts and key firefighting equipment.

(NFCC; gov.uk.) The electronic share and the physical box are complementary: one supports planning and pre-attendance, the other supports the crew at the door on the night.

The plan in the box has to work on the worst night

A secure information box is only as useful as what is inside it, and the inside is where compliance and usefulness part company. A box containing plans from before the last refurbishment, or drawings too cluttered to read at speed, or an orientation plan that does not actually orient, satisfies the letter of the duty while failing its purpose. The crew opening it under pressure cannot use what is wrong or unclear.

The single-page orientation plan is the part that earns the most attention for a reason. It is the first thing a crew reads, and it has to do a specific job: show how the building is arranged, where the access points and risers and firefighting provisions are, and how to make sense of the rest. We have written separately about the single-page orientation plan and why it matters, because it is the document that turns a stack of plans into something usable in the first ninety seconds.

Plans drawn for firefighters, not for architects

A plan that reads beautifully to a designer can be the wrong tool for an incident. Firefighters reading a plan in poor conditions need clarity over completeness: the things that matter for fighting a fire and getting people out, shown plainly, without the visual noise of a full architectural drawing.

The features that matter to a crew are consistent — the layout and unit numbering, the protected stairs and escape routes, the location of firefighting lifts and dry or wet risers, the position of isolation points, and anything unusual about the building's construction or access. A plan that foregrounds these, in a consistent and legible style across the floors, is worth far more than a detailed drawing that hides them. We have written more about this in drawing a building plan that firefighters can use.

Currency is the obligation that quietly lapses

The hardest part of this duty is not creating the plans. It is keeping them current. Buildings change — a refurbishment moves a wall, a riser is altered, an access route is reconfigured — and the plan in the box and the file shared with the service have to change with them. A plan that was correct at installation and wrong after the next refit is a trap, because the crew will trust it.

This is where the duty meets the golden thread. The Building Safety Act 2022 frames that thread as an accurate, up-to-date digital record held through occupation (ICE), and the plans shared with the fire service are part of it. If alterations feed back into the building's plans as they happen, the electronic share and the box stay current as a by-product. If they do not, the plans drift, and nobody notices until the night they matter. Keeping plans current after a refit is the discipline that protects this whole obligation.

Two channels, one record

It helps to remember that the electronic share and the secure information box are two outputs of one underlying record, not two separate exercises. The service receives an electronic set for planning; the crew finds a hard-copy set and orientation plan in the box on arrival. Both should derive from the same maintained plans, so that updating once updates both, rather than leaving the box and the shared file to drift apart over time.

When the two channels come from separate, manually maintained copies, they diverge — and a divergence here means firefighters planning from one version and arriving to another. A single source of truth for the plans is what keeps the two channels honest.

Ready before it is needed

The whole point of sharing plans with the fire service is that the work is done in advance, in calm conditions, so that it pays off in the worst ones. The plans have to be there, current, clear and findable, before anyone needs them, because there is no opportunity to prepare them once the alarm has sounded.

In SAMRISK, the building plans that satisfy the electronic share and feed the secure information box are maintained against the building and the compliance calendar that schedules the monthly firefighting-equipment checks, so the obligation stays current rather than slipping out of date between refits. The firefighters arrive once, on the worst night. The plans have to be ready every night before it.