What the Building Safety Regulator asks of a fire statement

The Building Safety Regulator, which sits inside the Health and Safety Executive, is a statutory consultee on planning applications for relevant high-rise residential buildings. It does not grant or refuse anything. What it does is tell the local planning authority whether the fire statement shows that fire safety has shaped the design rather than been bolted on afterwards, and authorities take that advice seriously because they have no in-house capability to second-guess it.

The duty comes from Article 9A of the Town and Country Planning (Development Management Procedure) (England) Order 2015, inserted in 2021, and it sits alongside the gateway regime created by the Building Safety Act 2022. Planning Gateway One is the planning stage of that regime.

The Regulator's role at Gateway One

Gateway One is a consultation, not a consent. The authority must consult the Regulator on a qualifying application and must have regard to the response, and the Regulator provides substantive comments on the fire statement and the accompanying drawings.

Three things follow from that structure. The Regulator's comments are advice, so an authority can grant permission over an unfavourable response, though in practice very few do. The comments go on the public file, so an objector or a future purchaser can read them. And because the comments are about design rather than compliance, a response that says the submission is insufficient to allow an opinion is the worst outcome available: it stalls the determination without telling you what to change.

When the duty bites

The duty applies to development involving one or more relevant buildings. A relevant building is one containing two or more dwellings or educational accommodation, and which has at least seven storeys or is at least 18 m in height.

Height is measured from ground level to the floor surface of the top storey, excluding any storey that consists exclusively of plant rooms. That definition catches schemes that feel below the threshold. A six-storey block on a sloping site measured from the lower ground level can exceed 18 m on one elevation, and a rooftop plant enclosure does not save it if the top occupied floor is already above the line.

Work through the measurement before you assume the duty does not apply. An application that should have been consulted on and was not is vulnerable, and the remedy is a fresh consultation that costs you the time you were trying to save.

The questions a Gateway One review asks

The review is structured around whether the fire safety principles have constrained the design. In practice the questions reduce to a small number of themes.

How does the fire and rescue service get to the building, and can an appliance reach the hardstanding positions the strategy relies on. What is the water supply for firefighting, and where is it. What is the means of escape strategy, and does the plan form support it. What is the external wall construction, in principle, and how do balconies and openings interact with it. Where are the firefighting shafts and how are they accessed. What constraints does the site impose that the strategy has to work around, such as a single point of vehicular access, a level difference, a railway boundary or a basement.

That last theme is the one developers underestimate. A site constraint that forces an unusual fire strategy needs to be named and addressed in the statement, because the Regulator will see it on the site plan whether you mention it or not. Basement light wells are a recurring example, and the interaction between escape from a basement and flood risk is exactly the sort of combined constraint that attracts comment.

Information the Regulator expects at planning stage

The fire statement must be submitted on the form published for the purpose, and the form is a framework rather than the whole submission. What makes a statement work is the drawing package behind it.

• A site layout showing appliance access routes, turning and hardstanding positions, with dimensions and gradients.
• Hydrant and water supply positions, with the available flow where known, and the proposed arrangement where it is not.
• Floor plans at a scale that shows core arrangement, stair and lift positions, lobby arrangements and escape routes.
• Sections showing the storey heights used in the height measurement and the position of any plant storey.
• A statement of the principles of the external wall construction, identified by materials and reaction to fire classification at a level of detail appropriate to planning stage.
• An account of the site constraints and how the strategy responds to them.

Say what is settled and what is not. A statement that commits to a principle and flags the detail for Gateway Two is more credible than one that implies the whole strategy is fixed at planning stage, because the Regulator knows it is not.

Where the structure is mass timber or another material with a fire performance that raises questions, deal with it head on. The design questions that mass timber schemes attract from planners overlap heavily with the ones the Regulator asks.

Where submitted statements fall short

The pattern of weak submissions is consistent, and none of the gaps is expensive to close.

The last row matters more than it looks. The statement is expected to be prepared by someone with the fire engineering competence to stand behind it, and naming the author and their basis of competence removes an easy reason for the Regulator to discount the document.

How comments reach the authority and what they mean

The Regulator responds to the authority, which places the response on the application file. The case officer then has to weigh it alongside the other consultee responses.

A response raising specific design points usually generates a request from the case officer for a revised statement or an addendum, and the application sits still until that arrives. A response saying the submission does not contain enough information to comment produces the same stall with less direction. Either way the fix is an addendum that answers the points in the order they were raised, cross-referenced to revised drawings.

Resist the urge to argue. The Regulator's comments are about whether the design has been shaped by fire safety considerations, and a reply that defends the original submission rather than improving it reads badly on a file that a planning inspector may later see.

Timing inside the determination period

Statutory consultees work to a 21-day period, and the practical effect on a major application with a 13-week determination period is that the Gateway One round has to start in the first fortnight to leave room for a revision.

Three habits save time. Submit the fire statement and the fire drawings as a complete package at validation rather than following them up later. Ask the case officer to confirm when the consultation was issued, because consultation sometimes slips behind validation. And agree an extension of time early if an addendum is needed, rather than letting the authority refuse at week 13 for want of information.

Responding to a request for further information

Treat the response as a short, structured document rather than a redrafted statement. Number the Regulator's points, answer each one directly, and say which drawing has changed and how.

Where a point cannot be resolved at planning stage, say so and explain which gateway will resolve it. That is a legitimate answer for detailed external wall specification and for the full fire engineering strategy, which belongs in the fire safety strategy prepared under BS 9991 or BS 9999 rather than in a planning-stage statement. It is not a legitimate answer for appliance access or water supply, because those depend on site layout and site layout is what the planning permission fixes.

The documents the regime expects are set out on the fire statement page, which covers what the statement contains and who can prepare it. A Fire Statement is a report type where a professional with the necessary fire engineering competence is legally required, and PlanScope's draft is a starting point for that professional rather than a substitute for them.

PlanScope provides AI-assisted draft reports for planning applications. Reports should be reviewed before submission. We do not guarantee planning approval. For specialist technical reports, qualified professional input may be required. You can enter the site postcode to see which fire and structural reports a scheme is likely to need.