Article 9A fire statements: when your application needs one

A planning application for development involving a relevant building has to arrive with a fire statement. Article 9A of the Town and Country Planning (Development Management Procedure) (England) Order 2015 places that duty on the applicant, and it has applied since 1 August 2021. A relevant building is one containing two or more dwellings or educational accommodation that also meets the height condition: 18 metres or more, or seven or more storeys. Leave the statement out and the council can decline to validate, which burns weeks before a single consultee has looked at the scheme.

Developers tend to meet article 9A late, when the planning submission is being assembled and the fire engineer has not yet been appointed. That is the wrong order.

What article 9A requires

The article requires the application to be accompanied by a fire statement made on a form published by the Secretary of State, or in a form substantially to the same effect. This is a planning document rather than a Building Regulations one. It sets out the fire safety principles the design has adopted and explains how those principles have shaped the things planning can control: the position of the building on the plot, the routes a fire appliance would take, the space for it to stand and work, and the water supply available to firefighters.

The duty attaches to applications for planning permission. The order carves out some application types, so read the current text of article 9A before assuming that a reserved matters submission or a prior approval needs one.

Buildings caught by the requirement

Two tests have to be met together. The building must contain two or more dwellings, or educational accommodation, and it must reach the height threshold. Height is measured as the regulations describe, to the floor surface of the top storey rather than to the top of any roof plant, and below-ground storeys are treated separately. A six-storey block that reaches 18 metres because of generous floor-to-ceiling heights is caught. A seven-storey block at 17 metres is caught too, because either limb does it.

Works to an existing building count if the development involves a relevant building, so a roof extension taking a 16-metre block over the threshold pulls the whole scheme into scope. The same threshold governs whether a building is a higher-risk building for later stages, and our note on what the higher-risk building threshold changes at planning sets out the consequences that follow the site through construction.

What the statement has to cover

The form asks for the fire safety design principles, concepts and standards applied, and then for specifics that a planning officer can actually assess.

• The siting of the development and its relationship to neighbouring buildings and to the boundary.
• Access and space for fire appliances, including turning, standing and the route from the adopted highway.
• Water supplies for firefighting, including hydrant provision and any agreement needed with the water undertaker.
• The means of escape strategy at the level of principle, including evacuation approach and any evacuation lift provision.
• How the proposed construction, cladding and external wall materials affect fire spread.
• Any residual matters left to be resolved at the Building Regulations stage.

The depth expected is greater than most applicants assume. A statement that recites the standards and says the detail will follow under Building Regulations is the version that comes back with an objection. Our section-by-section walk through of a gateway one submission goes through what each heading needs.

The Health and Safety Executive as consultee

For applications involving relevant buildings the local planning authority must consult the Health and Safety Executive, acting through the Building Safety Regulator. That consultation is Planning Gateway One. The Executive reviews the fire statement and responds to the council, and its response carries real weight because the authority has to take it into account before deciding.

Three outcomes recur. The first is no comment or support. The second is support subject to matters being addressed, which usually converts into a condition or a revised statement before determination. The third is an objection, which in practice stalls the application until the design changes. Objections cluster around appliance access that cannot physically work, water supply that has not been evidenced with the undertaker, and single-stair arrangements described without any supporting rationale.

Budget for the review period in the programme. The consultation runs alongside the statutory determination period and is one of the common reasons a major application needs an extension of time rather than going to a non-determination appeal.

Validation and the cost of omitting it

Councils treat the fire statement as a validation requirement, because article 9A makes it a requirement of the application itself. The practical effect is that the clock does not start. The application sits in the validation queue, the case officer sends a holding email, and the eight or thirteen week period only begins once the statement lands.

A second trap is the form. Some applicants submit a fire strategy prepared for another purpose and assume it will serve. It will not, unless it covers the matters the published form asks about in the order the form asks about them. Put the strategy in as an appendix and complete the form properly.

Where gateway one sits against the later gateways

Planning Gateway One is the first of three checkpoints created around the Building Safety Act 2022. Gateway two comes before building work starts on a higher-risk building and is a hard stop: the Building Safety Regulator must approve the control application. Gateway three comes at completion, before occupation.

The three are not sequential versions of the same document. Gateway one is about the planning matters listed above and is judged against what a planning permission can fix. Gateways two and three are about the detailed design and the built reality under the Building Regulations. What connects them is that a poor fire statement builds in a site layout that the later gateways cannot easily rescue. Appliance access and hydrant positions are hard to change once the footprint is fixed by permission.

Who is competent to write it

A fire statement is a fire engineering document and needs an author with the relevant fire engineering competence. In practice that means a chartered or incorporated fire engineer, or a fire engineering practice, instructed early enough to influence the site layout rather than to describe it after the fact. Membership of the Institution of Fire Engineers is the usual marker, and for a relevant building the Building Safety Regulator will be reading the statement as a technical document.

This is one of the report types where professional input is legally required rather than advisable. PlanScope can draft the Fire Statement structure, pull the site and constraint data into it and flag where facts are missing, but that draft is the starting point for a competent fire engineer to complete, verify and own. For specialist technical reports, qualified professional input may be required.

An illustrative example of the sequencing problem: a developer with a nine-storey residential block on a tight urban plot fixes the footprint with the architect, wins pre-application support on design, then discovers at gateway one that a pumping appliance cannot reach within the required distance of the furthest point of the building without losing two ground-floor flats. The fire engineer would have caught that at sketch stage for a fraction of the cost.

If you are scoping the evidence base for a tall residential scheme, enter the postcode on PlanScope to see which reports the site triggers before you commission any of them.

This is general guidance, not legal advice. Check the position with your local planning authority or a qualified professional before relying on it.

PlanScope provides AI-assisted draft reports for planning applications. Reports should be reviewed before submission. We do not guarantee planning approval.