What is a fire strategy, and what has to be in it?

The short definition

A fire strategy is the document that explains, for one specific building, how that building satisfies Requirements B1 to B5 of Schedule 1 to the Building Regulations 2010. It sets out the fire safety design as a whole, not a list of products, but the reasoning that ties occupancy, layout, construction and systems together into something that works.

Everything else follows from it. The architect lays out cores to suit the escape distances it states. The structural engineer designs to the fire resistance periods it sets. The services engineer sizes the smoke system it specifies. The contractor buys the doors it schedules. If the strategy is wrong, or silent, or contradicts the drawings, that error propagates through every one of those packages.

The five functional requirements

Part B of Schedule 1 sets five functional requirements. A complete strategy addresses all five explicitly, in order, and says so. Packages that cover B1 in great detail and treat B2 to B5 as an afterthought are one of the most common reasons for a review comment.

What a complete strategy actually contains

There is no statutory table of contents, but a strategy that survives review generally has all of the following. Missing items are where review comments come from.

1. Building description. Use, height, number of storeys, area per storey, basements, structure, and the occupancy characteristics, not just numbers of people, but whether they are awake, familiar with the building, and able to self-evacuate.
2. Design basis. Which document you have designed to, which edition and amendment, and why that document is appropriate for this building. Silence here forces a request for information.
3. Requirement-by-requirement design. B1 through B5, each with the derivation, not just the answer. A travel distance is a conclusion; the occupancy and layout that produce it are the design.
4. Schedule of assumptions. Everything you have taken as true but not verified: management arrangements, future fit-out, the fire service response, the client's operational intent. Each one is a risk transferred to somebody, so name them.
5. Schedule of departures. Every deviation from the guidance you named as your design basis, with the justification for each. This is dealt with separately below because it is the single most consequential section.
6. Fire strategy drawings. Compartment lines, fire resistance periods, escape routes and directions, exit capacities, door types and ratings, firefighting provisions. Drawn at a scale a reviewer can measure.
7. Information for handover. What has to pass to the responsible person under Regulation 38, and, for a higher-risk building, what goes into the golden thread.

Departures are the part that gets read hardest

Prescriptive guidance is a set of packages that have been accepted as satisfying the requirements. Depart from one and you have not broken a rule (the guidance is not the law, the functional requirement is), but you have taken on the burden of showing that your alternative meets the requirement.

A departure that is declared and justified is engineering. A departure that is undeclared is, to a reviewer, indistinguishable from an error, and will be treated as one. The practical rule is simple: if you have gone outside the guidance anywhere, say so in a schedule, in the strategy, at the point you do it.

A justification that holds up normally does at least one of these: shows a comparative analysis against a compliant baseline; provides a quantified analysis under BS 7974 and its supporting PD 7974 parts; or points to an equivalent provision in a different recognised standard and explains why that transfer is valid for this building.

Who writes it, and who can

There is no protected title for a fire engineer in the UK, which is precisely why competence has become the live issue. Under the Building Safety Act regime, competence has to be evidenced: the Building Safety Regulator wants to know who did the work and what qualifies them to have done it for this building type at this height, not which company sent the invoice.

In practice a fire strategy for anything non-trivial is written by a chartered fire engineer or someone working under one, and for higher-risk buildings the competence declaration is a submission requirement in its own right.

When you need one

• New build, anything but the simplest house. Building control will expect one, and for a higher-risk building it is a Gateway 2 submission requirement.
• Material alteration or change of use. The strategy has to address the building as it will be, not as it was.
• Refurbishment of an existing building. Usually the hardest case, because the record information is incomplete and the assumptions have to carry more weight.
• Existing buildings with no strategy. Increasingly commissioned to support a fire risk assessment, a safety case report, or a remediation scheme, often reconstructed from survey rather than from records.

The failures that recur

Across review work, the same handful of problems come up again and again:

• The strategy and the strategy drawings are at different revisions and disagree.
• Occupancy is stated once, then a different implied occupancy is used to size the stairs.
• The design basis is not named, or a mix of Approved Document B and BS 9999 provisions is used without acknowledging that they are different packages.
• Departures appear in the drawings but not in any schedule.
• B2 and B5 are covered in a paragraph each.
• Provision for occupants who cannot use stairs is asserted rather than designed.
• The external wall build-up is described in the architectural package and not reconciled with what the strategy assumes.

Last reviewed 25 July 2026 against the editions named above. Standards are revised; check the current published edition before relying on anything here in a design.