The gap between “stay put” and getting out alive

A BBC story featuring a disabled teenager campaigning to change the law on evacuation planning should make uncomfortable reading for anyone involved in fire safety design, not because it is unusual, but because it is entirely predictable. A young person being told they may have to remain upstairs during an evacuation is not an anomaly; it is the logical outcome of a system that has quietly normalised a fundamental contradiction. We design buildings to be evacuated, but not for everyone.

At the centre of this case is a push to make evacuation plans for disabled occupants a legal requirement in more buildings. On the surface, that feels like a compliance gap, something procedural that can be resolved with better documentation or more robust management systems. It is not. This is a design problem masquerading as a management issue. For years, the industry has relied on a familiar hierarchy of assumptions: compartmentation will hold, fire service intervention will arrive, and refuge spaces provide temporary safety. In many circumstances, those assumptions are reasonable. The problem is not when they work, but when they do not, because when those layers degrade, delay, or fail, the reality becomes stark. A refuge is not a place of safety in its own right; it is a place of waiting within a system that still depends on something else happening.

What this story exposes is not simply the absence of a Personal Emergency Evacuation Plan. It reveals a deeper discomfort in how we approach inclusive fire safety. We have built a system that is technically defensible in regulatory terms, but operationally incomplete when tested against real conditions. Disabled evacuation is still too often treated as an exception, a managed deviation from a standard strategy that assumes independent egress. In practice, it should be a baseline design condition, considered from the outset rather than appended later. Alongside this sits a persistent over-reliance on fire service rescue, with strategies that depend on intervention rather than self-evacuation. That introduces a level of fragility that is rarely acknowledged, because it assumes availability, timing, and access that cannot be guaranteed in a developing incident. The role of refuges then becomes confused; they are presented as a solution, yet in reality they are only one component of a wider evacuation strategy. Where that wider system is absent or underdeveloped, the refuge effectively becomes the endpoint rather than a temporary measure.

The legal debate will inevitably follow, with increased focus on Personal Emergency Evacuation Plans, evacuation equipment, and the duties placed on those responsible for buildings. Those are necessary conversations, but they risk focusing attention at the wrong point in the process. Legislation can mandate plans, but it cannot by itself resolve the underlying issue if the building has not been designed to support evacuation for all occupants. The more fundamental question sits earlier, at concept stage, and it is one the profession has not fully confronted. Are we designing buildings that can be evacuated by everyone, or are we designing buildings that assume some people will wait? That is not a matter of procedure or paperwork; it is a design choice, and one that carries real consequences when the assumptions underpinning it are tested.

This insight is based on publicly reported information at the time of writing. The intention is not to critique individual decisions, but to highlight recurring systemic issues in evacuation strategy and inclusive fire safety design.