Fire escape: how new regulations offer a way out for vulnerable residents
“Hundreds of thousands of vulnerable high-rise residents are being left with no evacuation plan in the event of a fire,” Matt Wrack, general secretary of the Fire Brigade’s Union recently opined when questioned about improvements since Grenfell.
Will new regulations being brought in by the government change all that? The laws will require local authorities and private landlords to account for vulnerable residents should a blaze occur in their building. The ‘Personal Emergency Evacuation Plan’ will be a definite requirement for those with cognitive or physical impairments. It should benefit many residents, but how many of us have the data to deliver?
A history of light-touch legislation – and data
It was the pandemic that alerted local authorities to the need for more accurate information about their residents. Some qualified as vulnerable, but were not covered by the NHS Shielding Programme. They needed the allocation of preventative measures, but for many councils, without adequate systems in place, it was a challenge. “There have been instances of inconsistent, poor quality and duplicated data along with issues of delays in providing updates,” admitted a local government official in written evidence to Parliament about data flows at the time.
This was partly due to a light-touch approach, which had been going on for years. The Disability Discrimination Act 1995 is the basis for current fire safety legislation in England and Wales. But it wasn’t until the Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005 that organisations providing services to the public had to ensure that anyone could leave their building safely in the event of a fire. Last updated in 2023 government guidance is just that – not regulation. But now at least residents must be identified; actions to mitigate risk should be discussed with them, a ‘Personal Evacuation Statement’ written and information sent to the local fire and rescue authority. According to the Chief Fire Officers Association, it should have been included in the 2011 Local Government Association fire guidance, and not doing so was “a fundamental error”.
However, there’s a catch. Where is that list of vulnerable residents? What about the accompanying risks? Most housing organisations store resident data in multiple locations, across social care, education and housing. Each has departmental IT systems with multiple spreadsheets. So someone receiving housing support might not automatically be flagged as vulnerable in the adult social care database. That means cross-referencing isn’t taking place and will be difficult to initiate quickly to comply with the new regulation.
There are other factors. Some residents aren’t willing to share their details. Records might be out of date due to lack of updates, or the way that data has been shared. Key indicators might be missing, such as health conditions, living arrangements or support needs. Duplication can also occur. After publishing its Safeguarding Adults report in August last year, NHS England subsequently found that Derby City Council had mis-recorded activity as individuals – double counting in other words.
Data sharing is essential
Above all, there are real life outcomes of data failings where housing and social care departments haven’t communicating properly. A severely disabled child called Mia couldn’t fit her wheelchair through her front door and it took Lambeth Council 11 months to admit her living conditions needed altering. It was another 14 months passed before the Council agreed to an alternative and three-and-a-half years in total of living in unsuitable accommodation, which concluded in 2022 with the child having suffered irreparable harm.
And all because of an absence of accessible housing records. Which is why there’s an urgency about improving data storage, to say the least. The Unique Property Reference Number is not always fully utilised by local authorities. But it’s a key tool in connecting data from different sources on different systems, whether council tax collection, social rent and social care interactions. That is “fundamental to all data matching and, therefore, to all data analysis”, according to the Local Government Association, and ensures “that disparate data sets and innovative applications of data can be blended to provide insight and understanding about residents and businesses, which is needed to deliver area-based services effectively on the ground,” the organisation adds.
There’s also another overlooked approach to data collection: face-to-face. Disabled people can share what they are capable of in an emergency situation, while landlords explain the limits of their building escape routes in a way that takes account of the person they’re speaking to.
Using data to anticipate rather than react
The National Housing Federation outlined the benefits of such an approach in ‘Make Every Contact Count’. This 2024 report highlighted maintenance or repair visits as good times to check resident information – although for a gas engineer to enquire about ethnicity or sexuality is not what they have in mind. The report’s authors acknowledge that visiting residents costs time and money – but a sensitive, appropriate approach can pay off in the long run.
Which bursts through the dams built up by departmental silos. Barking and Dagenham Council have done it by opening up access to wider data to their frontline teams – from non-statutory such as Community Hubs, to the Multi-Agency Safeguarding Hub statutory example. Over 300 staff now interact with residents about their finances and often carry out budgeting exercises or a check of eligibility for benefits. According to Council Leader Dominic Twomey: “We are saving officer time by creating a single system for this so that staff that work with finances across the council to access previous assessments done by other teams.”
This builds a model that is preventative rather than reactive. “Using data is about ensuring that you are clear about who your most vulnerable residents are and working with them accordingly,” says Twomey. “For example, legacy casework systems are good at presenting data about a particular individual but inadequate for questions like: what are the population risks? Is that changing over time? Are there factors that are correlated to particular risks? How much more provision of service is needed next year?”
Data isn’t static, so the emergency evacuation plan PEEP should be reviewed annually as part of a protocol. This will help anticipate problems. If you’re putting together a PEEP plan, rather than being a document created from a standing start, it can flow from research already undertaken. This makes the writing of any plans far easier, and delivers for those in need.
