Fire Safety Strategies and Plans Consultations

A fire safety strategy documents the critical fire safety provision within the fabric of a building, the means of escape, means of giving warning in the event of a fire, fire service access and fire safety management considerations. It is a fire safety ‘bible’ for the building and is used to benchmark the fire safety features of a building at the time of construction.

A fire safety strategy is a vital document, which must be kept and referenced when any future alterations or extensions to the building are made or when making other significant changes to its use. The document should also be reviewed when significant changes are made to a building’s occupancy profile or when undertaking FRAs. Often, when works are carried out on buildings, the critical fire safety features are unintentionally altered because the original design principles at the time of construction were not considered.

Our fire engineers produce fire safety strategies, which not only demonstrate compliance with Building Regulations, but offer cost-effective, risk-based and practical engineered solutions.

Our fire safety strategies are code compliant, based on the complexity of design and use the following three-tiered structure:

We not only produce fire safety strategies for new builds, but also write strategies for clients undertaking property acquisitions where no previous paperwork is available, and the original fire strategy is not known.

For many of our clients we consult on plans during refurbishment programmes and fit-out projects; whether that’s looking at compartmentation, travel distances, fire alarm specifications, occupancy or portable firefighting equipment.

For many of our clients for whom we produce fire safety strategies, we carry out pre-occupation fire safety assessments.

This pre-occupation fire safety assessment considers the fire safety features of a new or refurbished building; it highlights areas of deficiency prior to (or during the latter stage of) the final fit-out. There is no legal requirement to undertake a pre-occupation fire safety assessment; however, completing the recommended actions in this assessment should satisfy the primary legislative fire requirements so that buildings can be occupied safetly. On handover of the building to the landlord or management company (i.e. the Responsible Person) and once occupied, a full fire risk assessment must still be carried out by a competent person.