Disagreement has broken out over the role of personal emergency evacuation plans for people with disabilities or limited mobility in high rise residential blocks.
The report of phase 1 of the Grenfell Tower inquiry recommended that personal emergency evacuation plans (PEEPs) are required for all vulnerable residents of high rise blocks. In its response to its own fire safety consultation, the Government proposed to have details of any residents requiring assistance to evacuate made available to their local fire and rescue service and to place such information in a premises information box, but limited the requirement of PEEPs to residents only of higher risk buildings with a waking watch in place.
In a legal challenge to the Government’s failure to implement the inquiry’s recommendation for all those needing assistance to evacuate, the family of Sakina Afrasehabi, a disabled woman who along with her sister Fatemeh Afrasiabi was killed in the fire, forced the Government to agree to run a further consultation specifically on PEEPs, to pay the family’s legal costs, and to disclose notes and minutes of a special interest group meeting held under the auspices of the Fire Industry Association (FIA) on 22 April 2020. The cross-industry group was set up to advise the Home Office on the implementation of the inquiry’s recommendations.
The notes of the meeting, chaired by a Home Office representative and seen by IFSEC Global, make clear that participants were sceptical on the wholesale use of PEEPs for people with disabilities in high rise residential blocks. They said this was “completely impracticable and not doable,” as such buildings do not have the staff available to assist with evacuation.
Participants also pointed out that it would be difficult to keep up-to-date records of people needing assistance, for example where a disabled visitor stayed overnight or a resident broke a leg. And, problems could occur if someone was registered as deaf but was out for the night, for example, leaving firefighters searching for someone who is not there.
The FIA said the recommendation was “totally impracticable, as there are no staff within a high-rise residential building to carry out a PEEP. It would also be extremely difficult to keep any such PEEPs up-to-date in a building with a dynamically changing occupancy and sub-let flats (in which there is little or no interaction between the building owner and the residents). Consideration might be given to person-centred risk assessments, telecare enabled smoke alarms, etc. for disabled residents who seek such support.”
Stay put?
Participants in the meeting also appear to have backed a continuation of the ‘say put’ principle, which is based on the assumption that a building is properly built and compartmented so that it is safer for residents unaffected by fire or smoke to stay in their flats, until the fire and rescue service has suppressed the fire and/or evacuated them. As the notes from the meeting said: “The best thing is to build safe buildings where people can stay put.”
Those taking part also questioned the inquiry’s recommendation that there should be national guidelines for carrying out evacuations of high rise buildings, saying it would be difficult to have such standard guidance because such evacuation plans would need to be “building-specific”.
If an evacuation plan for a tall block is not difficult as claimed, why have all the other expert parties been unable to formulate one?
PEEPs are for 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. If someone needs assistance evacuating their apartment and the building, where is that support coming from? Who is going to fund that assistance? It isn’t the Fire and Rescue Services job to evacuate people, that’s fundamentally the purpose of a PEEP. General needs and evacuation is a massive issue that must be addressed with a reasonably practicable approach! The Beechmere Retirement complex fire, is an example of a property which wouldn’t come under this proposal; therefore residents wouldn’t have PEEPs. Look at the photos of… Read more »