Fire Statements & The London Plan 2021

New requirements for planning applications in England

Fire Safety Act 2021 (“The Act”)

It has been 4 years since the devastating fire at Grenfell Tower which not only claimed 72 lives but also exposed serious failings in the construction of, and fire safety in, high rise residential buildings. The Building Safety Bill and the Fire Safety Act 2021 are key to improving safety standards in buildings and ensuring there is adequate protection of lives and property.

Fire & Life Safety Information gathered throughout the project delivery phase is required to be stored and retained for the life cycle of the building. It has been designed to ensure people can feel safe in their homes, and that a tragedy like the Grenfell Tower fire never happens again.

Fire & Emergency File

The Fire & Emergency File (FEF) is a set of documentation to ensure that anyone carrying out design, construction or refurbishment work on a building can provide a clear and comprehensive record of the fire strategy for the building and its residents (including those who are vulnerable). This will help to ensure that the future building owner has a proper record of key building safety aspects so that they can understand why the fire and other safety precautions have been provided.

The FEF must be kept available for inspection by any person who may need information in the file for the purpose of complying with the requirements and prohibitions imposed on him by or under the relevant statutory provisions.

The FEF should be made available for any persons who need to work on or operate any building related tasks. Any future works carried out at the building, or its services should be documented and recorded in the FEF.

Gateways & The Golden Thread of Information

The government have created a new gateway system to ensure that building safety risks are considered at each stage of a buildings planning, design, construction, and pre-occupation. Information gathered at each gateway will be stored and retained for the life cycle of the building.

All three Gateways are intended to create a ‘golden thread’ of safety information about a building, ensuring the right information is available to the right people, at the right time.

Fire+ is a secure, web-based platform that is designed to author, review and host the information and data within the Fire & Emergency File required for the Gateway approvals whilst providing a digital audit trail of tracked changes that upholds the Golden Thread from design, through construction into the occupation phase of the building.

The ‘Duty Holders’ for existing buildings must demonstrate compliance and also introduce a golden thread of information. AESG can assist ‘Duty Holders’ to achieve this by introducing Retrospective Fire Strategies and/or a Fire Safety Management Plan, that covers:

Fire+ ensures that all building safety information is placed into a central, secure web-based data management system so that the nominated ‘Responsible Person/s’ can access the relevant data and keep track of all issues relating to Fire and Building safety.

AESG’s Fire+ upholds the golden thread of building data management

An Integrated Approach

A key differentiator in AESG’s strategy is to maintain a multi-disciplinary approach that ensures our solutions are integrated across all disciplines.

Through Fire+, we’re able to share the information that exists within the Fire Emergency File to build Commissioning trackers, O&M Manuals, Asset Registers, Logbooks, H&S files etc., that ultimately provides a central access to all your key information while eliminating the duplication of effort in producing data.

For further information relating to Fire+ and our specialist consultancy engineering services, feel free to contact us directly via info@aesg.com