Phoenix Journal · Fire Safety
In most buildings a fire alarm means everyone leaves. In a care home, many residents cannot, so the whole fire strategy is built on holding a fire back rather than getting people out, and the rules have just become stricter.
Fire safety in a care home starts from an uncomfortable fact: many of the people inside cannot get themselves out. Residents may be frail, immobile, living with dementia or dependent on oxygen, and a strategy that assumes everyone hears an alarm and walks to an exit does not fit. That single reality reshapes everything, from how the building is compartmented to how the kitchen is run, and it is why the sector carries some of the strictest fire duties in the country.
The dominant strategy in care settings is progressive horizontal evacuation: rather than emptying the building, staff move residents through fire doors into an adjacent compartment on the same floor, away from the fire but not out into the night. That buys time for a controlled, staged evacuation and depends entirely on the building's compartmentation holding. Every resident who needs help is expected to have a Personal Emergency Evacuation Plan, a document that records exactly how that individual will be moved, with what equipment, and by whom. Fire drills should be run at least twice a year, with at least one at night when staffing is lowest and evacuation is hardest. In some layouts a delayed or defend-in-place approach is used instead, but only as an exception, and only where the fire prevention and compartmentation are strong enough to justify it.
What changed, and why
The underlying law is the Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005, which makes a responsible person accountable for a suitable and sufficient fire risk assessment and for managing fire safety day to day. What changed recently is the standard of protection expected of new buildings. From 2 March 2025, all newly built care homes in England must be fitted with sprinklers regardless of height or size, a response to the recognition that residents rely on others to escape. Alongside this, BS 9991 was updated in 2024 and now covers residential care homes explicitly, setting out frameworks for progressive horizontal evacuation and sprinkler coverage.
The stakes behind these changes are not abstract. A care home fire can be catastrophic precisely because evacuation is slow, and the consequences for an operator who falls short are severe: the fire and rescue authority can serve enforcement or prohibition notices, and prosecution under the Fire Safety Order can bring unlimited fines and up to two years in prison for the responsible person. The Care Quality Commission can also act on its own account, up to and including conditions on, or cancellation of, a provider's registration. Getting fire safety wrong in a care home is both a human tragedy and a business-ending event.
This guidance is general and does not replace advice from a competent fire risk assessor or the specific requirements of your registration; a care home's fire strategy should always be built around its own building, residents and staffing. But the direction of travel is clear. The regime assumes vulnerability, designs for containment, and expects the paperwork, the drills and the maintenance to prove that the strategy is real rather than theoretical.
The risk the strategy is built around
Progressive horizontal evacuation only works if the building keeps a fire small and contained long enough to move people, and the most likely place for that fire to begin is the kitchen. Commercial catering in a care home carries the same ignition sources as any restaurant, hot oil, gas and grease in the extract, in a building full of people who cannot leave quickly. That is why the fire doors and compartment walls the strategy relies on matter so much, and why issues like fire doors and the failures inspectors find are not a paperwork detail but the difference between a contained incident and a spreading one.
Practising the plan
A plan that has never been rehearsed at night, with real residents and real equipment, is a plan that will fail under pressure. The same discipline that goes into evacuation planning for a busy premises applies here with far higher stakes: staff need to know their roles, the routes need to be clear, and the compartments people are moved into need to be genuinely protected. In a care home the plan is not about getting everyone outside in two minutes; it is about moving the right people to the right protected space in the right order, and proving through drills and records that it works.
Questions
It is a strategy where, instead of evacuating the whole building at once, staff move residents through fire doors into an adjacent fire compartment on the same floor, away from the fire. It buys time for a controlled, staged evacuation and relies on the building's compartmentation and fire doors performing as designed.
From 2 March 2025, all newly built care homes in England must have sprinklers, regardless of height or size. The requirement applies to new buildings; existing care homes are not automatically required to retrofit, but their fire risk assessment must still show fire safety is being managed adequately.
The responsible person under the Fire Safety Order, usually the operator, owner or whoever has control of the premises. They must ensure a suitable and sufficient fire risk assessment is in place and kept up to date, and that day-to-day fire safety, including drills, records and maintenance, is managed. This is general guidance, not a substitute for professional advice.
Phoenix Duct Clean · by the numbers
Progressive evacuation buys time; a clean extract system helps stop the fire that starts it. Phoenix cleans care home kitchen extract to TR19 Grease and documents it, UK-wide.