Fire Evacuation Plan: What to Include

A fire evacuation plan is the written record of how people get out of your building safely: how the alarm is raised, which routes are used, who does what, how anyone needing assistance is helped, and how you know everyone is out. It is the document that turns a fire risk assessment's conclusions into instructions somebody can follow at 2am.

The Fire Safety Order never uses the phrase "evacuation plan", which is why people ask whether they legally need one. The honest answer is that the duty arrives through Article 15 — appropriate procedures for serious and imminent danger, including drills, and enough competent people nominated to carry them out — and that since October 2023 the fire safety arrangements have to be recorded in full in all circumstances. So the plan is not named in law, but for anything beyond a single small workspace, an unwritten one is close to impossible to evidence.

This article summarises UK fire safety law for educational purposes and is not legal advice. The responsible person carries the legal liability for fire safety in the premises. For specific compliance questions, consult a competent fire risk assessor or your local fire and rescue authority.

Where the Duty Actually Comes From

Three provisions of the Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005 do the work.

Article 15(1) is the core. The responsible person must:

"establish and, where necessary, give effect to appropriate procedures, including safety drills"

and must nominate a sufficient number of competent persons to implement those evacuation procedures. Article 15(2) adds that the procedures must inform affected people "of the nature of the hazard and of the steps taken or to be taken to protect them", and must enable people facing unavoidable danger to "stop work and immediately proceed to a place of safety".

Article 9(1) is what tells you what the procedures have to deal with:

"The responsible person must make a suitable and sufficient assessment of the risks to which relevant persons are exposed..."

Article 21 closes the loop by requiring employees to be given adequate safety training, "repeated periodically where appropriate" and "provided in a manner appropriate to the risk identified by the risk assessment". A plan nobody has been trained on is not a plan that has been given effect. Note the scope: Article 21 is an express duty owed to employees. For everyone else in the building, the equivalent follows from Article 15's requirement that the procedures be "appropriate", not from Article 21.

Read together: the assessment identifies who is at risk and how, the procedures say what happens, competent people are nominated to run them, and training makes the whole thing real. The written plan is simply where all of that lives.

The recording position changed on 1 October 2023. Under section 156 of the Building Safety Act 2022, GOV.UK guidance states plainly:

"You must now record the fire risk assessment in full (including all the findings) and the fire safety arrangements for your premises in all circumstances."

The old "five or more employees" threshold is gone. If you have been working from guidance that mentions it, that guidance is out of date.

What GOV.UK Expects a Plan to Show

The government's workplace fire safety guidance sets out what a plan must demonstrate. In its own words, the plan must show you have:

"a clear passageway to all escape routes"

"clearly marked escape routes that are as short and direct as possible"

"enough exits and routes for all people to escape"

"emergency doors that open easily"

"emergency lighting where needed"

"training for all employees to know and use the escape routes"

"a safe meeting point for staff"

And on people who cannot simply walk out, the same guidance says:

"You should also make special arrangements for people with mobility needs, for example make sure there are people to help wheelchair users get downstairs if there's a fire."

That last line is the one most plans handle badly, and it is the bridge to individual planning — see the section further down.

The Sections to Work Through

There is no statutory template, so what follows is the ground a workable plan covers rather than a prescribed form. Adapt the headings to your premises; the point is that nothing in this list is left implicit.

Premises and scope. Address, use, occupancy, hours, and exactly which parts of the building the plan covers. In a multi-tenant building, say where your demise ends and the landlord's shared areas begin.

Raising the alarm. How a fire is detected and how the alarm is raised — automatic detection, manual call points, or shouted warning in very small premises. Who and where the alarm reaches, and whether it is a single-stage or phased signal.

Calling the fire service. Who calls 999, from where, and who does it if that person is absent. Whether the alarm is monitored and automatically transmitted.

Escape routes and exits. Primary and alternative routes from each area, final exit points, and the route to the assembly point. Note anything route-specific: doors that need a key, gates that are locked out of hours, routes through another occupier's space.

Assembly point. Where it is, why it is safe there (clear of the building, clear of the fire service approach), and the wet-weather alternative — because a plan whose assembly point is unusable in February will not be followed in February.

Roles and responsibilities. Who sweeps which areas, who takes the roll, who meets the fire service, who controls re-entry. Name roles rather than individuals wherever you can, and state the deputy arrangement. This is the Article 15 "sufficient number of competent persons" duty, written down.

People needing assistance. How anyone who cannot evacuate unaided will get out, what equipment is involved, who provides the help and what happens when that person is off site. If any individual is identified, they need their own plan.

Visitors, contractors and the public. How they are made aware of the procedure, who is responsible for them, and how they are accounted for.

Accounting for people. The method — roll call, sign-in system, area sweep sign-off — and who confirms the building is clear.

Specific risks and shutdowns. Anything that must be isolated or made safe: gas supplies, plant, hot works. Also anything that changes the strategy, such as a lift that must not be used.

Drills, training and records. When the plan was last tested, how long evacuation took, what failed, what changed as a result. When training is delivered and to whom.

Review. The date of this version, who wrote it, and when it will be reviewed.

That is twelve areas, and none of them is optional in a building of any complexity. What varies is depth: a single-occupier ground-floor office might cover all twelve in two pages, while a multi-tenant building with sleeping risk will need considerably more.

The Plan Is Not the Fire Action Notice

These get conflated, and it matters because each does a job the other cannot.

If you only have the notice, you have told occupants what to do without establishing the procedures behind it. If you only have the plan, nobody in the building knows what to do. Both.

Where Individual Plans Come In

A general evacuation plan works on the assumption that people can use the escape routes as designed. Where somebody cannot — mobility, sight, hearing, cognitive impairment, or a condition that fluctuates — the general plan needs an individual one alongside it, recording what that specific person needs and who provides it.

In residential buildings in England this is now explicit rather than inferred. The Fire Safety (Residential Evacuation Plans) (England) Regulations 2025 came into force on 6 April 2026 and require the responsible person for a specified residential building to prepare a building emergency evacuation plan, provide it to the local fire and rescue authority, and review it every 12 months — alongside a separate set of duties owed to individual residents who would have difficulty evacuating. Our guide to PEEPs and who needs one covers that regime in full, including which buildings fall inside it.

For non-domestic premises the position is unchanged and derived: Article 9 requires you to assess risk to all relevant persons, and Article 15 requires appropriate procedures, which cannot mean procedures that only work for people who can walk out.

Keeping It Current

A plan goes stale quietly. The triggers to watch for are a change of layout or occupancy, a change of use, new plant or processes, a change in who holds a warden role, a drill that did not go to plan, and any change to the escape routes — including temporary ones during building works, which are exactly when plans are least likely to be updated and most likely to be needed.

Article 9(3) requires the fire risk assessment itself to be reviewed regularly and particularly where there is reason to suspect it is no longer valid or there has been a significant change. The evacuation plan should move with it. Our guide to how often a fire risk assessment should be reviewed covers the trigger events, and the free FRA review date calculator will set a review date from the last assessment.

If you want to sanity-check the assessment your plan sits on top of, the free FRA report quality scorer flags common gaps, and our 30-point fire risk assessment checklist covers the on-site ground that feeds the plan.

Summary

A fire evacuation plan is not named in the Fire Safety Order, but Article 15 requires appropriate procedures including drills and enough nominated competent people to run them, Article 9 defines who those procedures must protect, and Article 21 requires the training that makes them real. Since 1 October 2023 the fire safety arrangements must be recorded in full in all circumstances, so the plan needs to be written.

Cover the twelve areas above, keep the fire action notice as the occupant-facing summary rather than a substitute, deal with people needing assistance explicitly rather than by omission, and review the plan whenever the building, its use or its people change. A plan that has never been tested is a document, not a procedure.

For assessors producing the assessments these plans are built on, AssessKit structures every assessment to a recognised methodology (PAS 79-1 for non-domestic premises, BS 9792:2025 for housing), tracks remedial actions through to completion, and holds review dates per site so nothing lapses unnoticed. Start free — the Free plan covers two assessments a month, no card required. See pricing or read about who is building it.

Sources

• Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005 (legislation.gov.uk)
• Article 9 — Risk assessment (legislation.gov.uk)
• Article 15 — Procedures for serious and imminent danger and for danger areas (legislation.gov.uk)
• Article 21 — Training (legislation.gov.uk)
• Fire safety and evacuation plans — workplace fire safety responsibilities (GOV.UK)
• Fire safety responsibilities under section 156 of the Building Safety Act 2022 (GOV.UK)
• Fire Safety (Residential Evacuation Plans) (England) Regulations 2025, Regulation 13 — Building emergency evacuation plan (legislation.gov.uk)