Context
Regulation 38 of the Building Regulations requires that fire safety information about a completed building is handed to the Responsible Person, so that they or a competent person appointed by them can carry out the fire risk assessment the Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005 demands. It is a handover duty. When it is not discharged, or when a building predates the requirement, changes hands, or changes managing agent, the information simply is not there, and everything downstream is being written from guesswork.
That was the position across a business park in south Wales where one managing agent held three multi-occupied buildings. The oldest dates from around 1968 and gained a pitched roof and a fourth floor around 2009. Another was built around 1990. Between them they house offices, a gymnasium, a café, and a sixth-form college.
The brief
Apex was appointed by the managing agent to produce, for each building, a single document that explained how that building achieves life safety from fire: what the escape routes are and how many people they carry, where the compartment lines run, what the alarm does when it operates, and what the fire and rescue service will find on arrival.
It had to be usable by the Responsible Person, appendable to the building's fire risk assessment, and honest about the difference between what could be evidenced and what was being assumed. Three buildings, one agent, one method, so that the documents could be read against each other.
Our approach
Apex stated the method for the documentation gap in each strategy before stating any finding. Where Regulation 38 information is missing, the strategy gathers what evidence exists, historic operation and maintenance manuals, building plans, and observation and measurement on site, and uses it to support reasoned assumptions about the fire-resisting performance of the structure and the surface linings. The documents are equally clear about what that method does not do: a retrospective strategy is not the fire risk assessment, and it does not discharge the client's own Regulation 38 duty. It is the evidence base the assessment is written from.
Where a conclusion rests on inference, Apex wrote the inference down. On the 1990 building, the strategy records that no intrusive survey was carried out to verify the fire resistance of the structural elements, then gives three reasons for concluding that they meet the 30-minute minimum BS 9999:2017 requires for a building of that height and use, and probably exceed it: concrete-encased steel and reinforced concrete floors are inherently fire-resisting, the building was built to the regulations in force around 1990, and no structural modification is recorded that would compromise it.
On external fire spread the same discipline applies. No space separation calculations were undertaken, on the assumption that the building was subject to building control approval, and the strategy immediately notes that approval is not itself evidence of compliance with the regulations of the day. A duty holder reading either passage can see exactly which brick would have to be pulled out to change the answer.
Occupancy and escape were rebuilt from measurement. Under BS 9999:2017 Apex gave each building its risk profiles from actual use rather than a single label: A2 for the offices, B2 for the gymnasium and building guests in one building, B2 for the education occupier in another. Neither building has sprinklers, so no variation of the risk profile was applied, and the travel distances follow from that, 22 m one-way and 55 m two-way for A2, 20 m and 50 m for B2.
Every stair was measured and every storey exit counted. Because the stairs are not lobby-protected, the widest stair at each level was discounted before capacity was assessed. In the principal building this puts a cumulative first-floor load of 1,248 people against an effective capacity of 1,640, and it is the first-floor link bridge to the neighbouring building, a seventh route off that storey, that carries the margin.
Two findings needed judgement rather than a specification. The right-hand stair in the principal building measures 770 mm, below the 800 mm width current guidance references for new construction. Widening a 1968 concrete stair core is not a proportionate answer to that, and Apex did not ask for it: the strategy recommends management controls to keep the route clear, and operational awareness of the reduced width when tenant fit-outs or furniture placement are being planned. The second is the roof void created by the 2009 conversion, now holding plant and tenant archive storage. Apex named it as a specific hazard on account of the fire load, and recorded the detection installed within it.
On the façade, the strategy reports what a visual survey can support and no more: the external wall appears to include combustible materials which may support external fire spread. Apex routed the question to the fire risk assessment and to any further façade investigation, noted a 2025 planning approval for replacement of the cladding, and recorded that the strategy must be updated when that work happens.
Outcome
The agent holds a retrospective fire strategy for each of the three buildings, written to the same structure and the same method, each able to be appended to that building's fire risk assessment. Each carries the things a managing agent is asked for and rarely has to hand: measured stair widths and exit widths, design occupancy by floor, the cause and effect the alarm follows on activation, the fire and rescue service provisions, and a schedule of what is still outstanding.
Each also sets occupancy ceilings, with the point made explicitly that raising occupancy is not in itself a material change under the Building Regulations provided the numbers stay inside the capacities the strategy sets out. A change of layout may well be, and a change of risk profile or use should trigger a review of the strategy. The recommendations at the back are short and specific, beginning with completing the outstanding fire alarm schematic, fire brigade plans and fire plans so that the fire safety manual is a full record.
1,248 people modelled onto the busiest storey of the principal building against 1,640 of escape capacity, with the widest stair discounted.
What a duty holder can take from this
Missing Regulation 38 information is one of the most common things a managing agent inherits, and it is worth being precise about what can and cannot be done about it. A retrospective fire strategy does not recreate the handover pack that was never issued. What it does is assemble the evidence that still exists, operation and maintenance manuals, building plans, and what can be measured and seen on site, and set out how the building achieves life safety, marking clearly which parts are established and which are reasoned. That distinction is the whole value of the document. A strategy that reports an assumed 60-minute structural fire resistance as a verified one is worse than no strategy, because the next assessor believes it.
Three practical points follow. Assumptions belong in writing, next to the reasons for them, so that a later assessor can test them instead of inheriting them. Building control approval at the time of construction is not evidence of compliance, and a strategy that leans on it should say so. And where a strategy sets a limit that depends on how a building is run, an occupancy ceiling on a storey, or a stair kept clear because it is narrower than current guidance, that limit only does any work once it lands in the fire risk assessment the strategy is appended to.
Across a portfolio, writing every building to one structure is what makes the documents comparable, and comparability is what lets an agent see which building actually needs attention first.