Personal Emergency Evacuation Plans: 7 Questions Offices Get Wrong
Every office has a fire evacuation procedure. Assembly point, marshals, quarterly drill, a notice by the lift saying not to use it.
That procedure is written for people who can use stairs quickly, without assistance, having heard an alarm, in a building they know. For everyone else it is not a plan, and the gap is not obvious until the alarm sounds. Employers discover it during a drill, or worse, and the discovery is invariably that nobody had thought about it rather than that somebody had thought about it and got it wrong.
Personal emergency evacuation plans exist to close that gap. Seven questions settle what your organisation actually needs.
1. Is a PEEP a legal requirement or good practice?
The duty is real, though the term itself is a practice convention rather than a phrase in the legislation.
Under the fire safety framework in England and Wales, Article 9 of the Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005 requires the responsible person to make a suitable and sufficient assessment of the risks to which relevant persons are exposed. Relevant persons means anyone lawfully on the premises, not the average occupant. Article 15 then requires procedures to be established and given effect for serious and imminent danger.
A procedure that cannot safely evacuate a person you know to be present does not satisfy either. Separately, the reasonable adjustments duty under section 20 of the Equality Act 2010 applies to provisions, criteria and practices that put a disabled person at a substantial disadvantage, and an evacuation procedure is a practice.
So the plan is the mechanism, not the obligation. The obligation is that your procedure works for the people actually in the building. Government guidance on workplace fire safety responsibilities sets out the wider framework.
2. Who needs one?
A wider group than most organisations assume, and the assumption is where the failures start.
Mobility impairment is the obvious case. Beyond that: people with visual or hearing impairment, who may not perceive the alarm or the signage; people with cognitive or neurological conditions, for whom a chaotic evacuation is a different experience; people with temporary conditions, including injury, recent surgery and pregnancy; people with conditions that are not visible at all, including cardiac and respiratory conditions and some medication effects.
Two consequences follow. The population is not static, so this cannot be a list compiled once at fit-out. And a substantial proportion of it is not apparent to anyone who has not asked.
3. How do you identify people without putting them in an impossible position?
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The genuinely difficult part, and the reason many organisations quietly do nothing.
The workable approach is to ask everyone, routinely, without requiring disclosure of a diagnosis. A question at induction and repeated periodically, phrased around whether the person would need any assistance or adjustment to evacuate quickly, gets you what you need. You do not need to know why. You need to know what help is required.
Make the route confidential and make clear what the information will and will not be used for. HSE's guidance on disabled workers is a reasonable starting point for the wider principle. Handled well, this is a normal part of onboarding. Handled as an exception, it becomes something people avoid.
4. Who writes it, and who is responsible when you do not control the building?
The question that becomes complicated in leased, multi-tenant and serviced buildings, which is most offices.
The building operator or landlord holds the premises fire risk assessment and runs the alarm and drills. They do not know your people. A plan for a specific individual requires knowledge of that individual, which means it is yours to produce even though the evacuation infrastructure is theirs.
Where more than one responsible person has duties in respect of the same premises, they are required to co-operate and co-ordinate. In practice that means agreeing three things in advance: whether refuge areas exist and where, whether an evacuation lift is available and who may authorise its use, and how the fire and rescue service will be informed that someone is waiting in a refuge. None of these can be worked out during an alarm.
5. What does a workable plan actually contain?
Short, specific and known to the people who have to act on it.
The individual and their usual work location. What assistance is required and what equipment, if any. The route, including refuge points. Who is designated to assist, and importantly who covers when that person is absent, because single-point designation fails on the day someone is on leave. How the person raises an alarm if they cannot reach a call point. How the fire and rescue service is told they are there. What happens if the person is working elsewhere in the building, which is normal in flexible offices.
Two pages at most. A plan nobody has read is not a plan, and length is the main reason plans go unread.
6. Does it survive contact with how people actually work?
The question that catches modern offices, and the one that has changed most in the last five years.
Hot desking means the person is not where the plan says. Hybrid working means designated assistants may be absent on any given day. Coworking and serviced buildings mean the layout, the refuge arrangements and the operator's staff all differ between locations. Late and weekend working means the assumed density of colleagues is not there. Visitors and contractors are covered by your duty toward relevant persons but appear in nobody's list.
Test against reality rather than the floor plan. If your organisation uses flexible workspace across several sites, a plan written for one building is not a plan for the others, and the premises fire risk assessment will differ at each.
7. What about your other countries?
Requirements differ, and the assumption that a group standard travels is unsafe.
Each jurisdiction imposes its own emergency procedure obligations on the employer, and several are more prescriptive than the position in England and Wales. Where a group operates across Europe, the same underlying EU Framework Directive 89/391/EEC obligation to establish first aid, firefighting and evacuation arrangements has been implemented differently in each member state, with different documentation and different roles.
The practical answer is a single group standard describing what good looks like, with a local layer confirming what each country actually requires and who holds it. Keeping that in one register rather than in a document per office is what makes it answerable, which is where health and safety consultants and software are worth more together than either alone.
The checklist
| Question | A weak answer | A strong answer | |---|---|---| | Who needs a plan? | "Nobody has told us" | Everyone asked at induction and periodically | | How do you ask? | Only when someone volunteers | Routine, confidential, no diagnosis required | | Who writes it? | "The landlord handles fire" | You, using the operator's infrastructure | | Refuge and lifts | Not established | Locations known, authority for lift use agreed | | Assistance | One named person | Named person plus cover arrangement | | Fire service notification | Assumed | Agreed route, documented | | Hot desking and hybrid | Plan assumes a fixed desk | Plan works wherever the person is | | Other countries | Group standard translated | Local requirement confirmed per country |
If the honest answer to the first row is "nobody has told us", the arrangement is not that you have no one who needs a plan. It is that you have not asked.
Where Arinite fits
Arinite helps organisations build evacuation arrangements that work for everyone in the building, including in premises they do not control. We support 1,500+ businesses across 50+ countries and protect 100,000+ employees, with 95%+ client retention over 15+ years. Our health and safety consultants work extensively with legal, finance and banking and IT and software organisations occupying leased and multi-tenant offices, and our fire safety work covers the assessment as well as the plan.
Where offices span several countries, our global health and safety consultants confirm what each jurisdiction requires, and our international health and safety consultants keep that current as you add locations. Periodic health and safety audits then test the arrangements against how the building is actually used.
If you are not confident that everyone in your office could leave it safely, a free gap analysis is the right place to start.
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Arinite Health & Safety Consultants
Health & Safety Expert at Arinite
