Richard White, commercial director from the UK’s leading smoke ventilation manufacturer, Sertus, explores some of the main reasons why you should take building fire safety planning seriously in early-stage design
It’s easy to think of building fire safety as a late-stage issue. To assume that once other factors, such as aesthetics, structure, and functionality, have been prioritised, the safety measures can be considered and added.
The truth is that by focusing on safety earlier in the design process, architects, designers and all stakeholders in the construction project are much more likely to retain the design features they have worked hard to achieve.
The risks of not considering fire safety in the early design stages include project delays, increased costs, and compromises to design features to meet compliance requirements.
When fire safety considerations are integrated early, from concept stage and onwards, these risks can be mitigated, and potential hurdles can be avoided.
Bringing building fire safety into early design programmes
It’s no secret that fire safety is vital, and being compliant with regulations is a must for all construction projects. It is never going to be the most exciting aspect of any design project, which can lead to fire safety essentially being treated as just a tick-box exercise among many other tasks that designers and developers are managing.
The problem, then, is that retrofitting safety measures can throw plans off course and dramatically increase costs. If fire safety is only considered at the “tick-box” stage, the chances of delays and challenges increase significantly.
The Building Safety Act 2022 brought fire safety to the forefront of building designers’ minds, with the concept of ‘Gateways’ for high-risk buildings:
- Gateway 1 (Planning Stage): This requires developers to submit a fire statement to the Health & Safety Executive (HSE) at the planning permission stage.
- Gateway 2 (Pre-construction): Building work is not permitted to begin until the Building Safety Regulator has approved the design.
- Gateway 3 (Completion): All “golden thread” information (digital records of how the building was built) must be handed over before residents move in.
These three gateways mitigate the risk of high-risk buildings being built without robust fire safety solutions put in place from the planning stage.
Typical late-stage building fire safety issues
The types of fire safety issues that often get left too late in design projects include:
Compartmentation
Ensuring that construction projects are designed with passive fire prevention strategies that limit the spread of fire and smoke. These involve barriers such as compartment walls, smoke-control dampers, and fire doors, as well as clear plans for cavity barriers that reduce the risk of fire spreading between walls.
If a design has not taken fire prevention into account, for example, with large open plan areas and no preventative barriers and inadequate smoke ventilation in place, it will be non-compliant with safety regulations. Discovering this at a late stage could cause substantial problems, leading to design compromises and additional costs to rectify the issue.
If, however, it is considered in the concept phase, compartmentation can be included in the design process from the start.
Materials
The use of unsafe materials in construction should really no longer be an issue in 21st-century projects. When fire safety is not considered throughout the design process, the proposed material combination may pose a fire risk. Identifying this early and finding compliant alternatives will be much cheaper than addressing it later, especially if materials are already installed and in use by the time the issue is identified.
Means of escape
Ensuring that your protected routes and means of escape are fully compliant will always be important. When these have not been clearly planned in the concept phase, adding them later can fundamentally change layouts and designs.
While not a fire design failure, the Manchester Arena Inquiry highlights how late-stage and operational changes can undermine safety strategies in ways directly comparable to fire safety management failures. The inquiry found issues with means of escape and crowd movement/emergency planning, leading to late-stage design changes.
MEP conflicts
Mechanical, engineering and plumbing aspects in a building need to be planned in line with fire prevention and fire safety measures. For example, ensuring that sprinkler systems are not obstructed or that pipes and conduits don’t block access to smoke-control dampers and smoke vents.
Involving fire safety at the earliest planning stage ensures that these factors are taken into consideration throughout the process, rather than only assessed once the construction is well underway.
Structural changes
It’s common to see structural changes required later in the project due to improper coordination of fire safety requirements. When changes to the building’s structure are required, they can be time-consuming and cause significant delays in the project’s completion.
To avoid this, it’s essential that critical fire safety design decisions are made earlier in the project, and plans are followed through at the build stage.
How late-stage design changes can have real-world consequences
The last thing anyone involved in a construction project wants to deal with is a costly delay. But that is exactly what is at risk when fire safety is brought into the process at a late stage.
The worst consequence, of course, would be an unsafe building, where there is a risk to life from fire. With fire safety compliance a clear priority before a project is signed off, the costs of rectifying non-compliance can be substantial.
Taking an example from the list of typical issues above, imagine a scenario in which escape routes are not adequate. Depending on when the issue is identified, the knock-on effects on all other aspects of the design could escalate into problems that cost a lot not only to redesign but especially to rework if construction is already underway.
According to the latest figures on fire safety audits from GOV.UK, 42% of the premises audited in 2024/25 were deemed ‘unsatisfactory’. This further highlights just how important it is for new buildings to consider fire safety from the design stage, with fire auditors increasingly scrutinising buildings following the Grenfell disaster and implementation of the Building Safety Act 2022 and Fire Safety Act 2021.
Equally, imagine an open-plan design that does not meet compartmentation requirements. As well as cost, there will end up being design compromises that materially alter what the architect and designers have set out to achieve. The costs of rework and significant delays to completion dates go hand in hand with the risk of compromises that alter the final design in ways that stakeholders are unhappy with.
Decision points after which fire safety options become severely limited
The stages of the design process when fire safety options become limited, and cause risks to completion include:
- The finalisation of architectural layout, when floor plans, escape routes and staircase locations are decided
- Structural design and material selection, when structural materials are chosen, and compartmentation strategies should be settled upon
Beyond these, once construction has started, any required changes to become fire-safe compliant will immediately incur rework and delay costs. Whether it is at the start of construction, during the erection of the primary structure and envelope, during the installation of first-fix services, or at the fit-out and finishing stages, anyone involved in the construction process will know how disruptive and expensive it is to amend plans and rework construction.
Best-practice approach: Integrating fire safety from concept stage
All of these challenges and risks can be mitigated by including fire safety in the project from the concept stage.
Safety cannot be retrofitted without compromise and at a cost, so it’s well worth engaging with safety requirements from the very first project stages, right from when an idea for how a space will be used is being discussed.
Stakeholders may not realise just how costly non-compliance can be, so making sure they are informed of the importance of early-stage fire safety focus can help ensure projects stay on track in terms of cost, timeline, and the likelihood that the architectural vision is brought to life.
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