Fire Strategies Explained: What They Are and When You Need One

Published 2026-06-11 · Black Mountain Fire Safety

"Do we need a fire strategy or a fire risk assessment?" It is one of the questions we hear most often from developers, designers and building owners — and the two are routinely confused. They are different documents, produced at different stages, for different purposes. Getting this right early can save a project significant time and money; getting it wrong can mean redesign, delay and difficult conversations with Building Control.

What a fire strategy actually is

A fire strategy is a design-stage document. It sets out, for a specific building, how fire safety will be achieved — the design intent against which the building is constructed and approved. A competent fire strategy typically addresses:

• Means of escape — occupancy assumptions, travel distances, stair and exit capacity, evacuation strategy (simultaneous, phased, or stay put);
• Compartmentation — how the building is divided to contain fire and smoke, and the fire resistance of those divisions;
• Structural fire protection — the fire resistance of the load-bearing frame;
• Fire detection and alarm — the category of system and its coverage;
• Smoke control — ventilation of stairs, corridors and other spaces where required;
• External fire spread — wall construction, separation distances and boundary conditions;
• Firefighting access and facilities — vehicle access, fire mains, firefighting shafts;
• Management assumptions — what the design assumes about how the building will be run.

Strategy versus fire risk assessment

The simplest way to hold the distinction: a fire strategy defines how a building is designed to be safe; a fire risk assessment checks whether it actually is, in use. The strategy comes first, at design stage, and is a creature of the Building Regulations. The fire risk assessment is a duty under the Fire Safety Order once the building is occupied, repeated and reviewed throughout the building's life. The two should talk to each other — a good fire risk assessor wants to see the fire strategy, because it tells them what the building's protective measures were designed to do. When the strategy is missing (as it often is in older buildings), the assessor is reconstructing design intent from what they can observe.

When you need a fire strategy

• New buildings — any building work requiring Building Regulations approval needs to demonstrate compliance with Part B, and for anything beyond the simplest buildings a fire strategy is how that is done;
• Material alterations and extensions — changing layouts, adding storeys or bedrooms, or altering escape routes;
• Change of use — converting a house to an HMO, offices to flats, a barn to holiday accommodation: the fire safety expectations change with the use;
• Complex, heritage or non-standard buildings — where prescriptive guidance does not fit and a reasoned, building-specific approach is required;
• Higher-risk buildings — with the new gateway regime for higher-risk buildings coming into force in Wales from July 2026, robust fire safety design information is now a regulatory gateway requirement, not an optional extra;
• Existing buildings without one — a retrospective fire strategy is increasingly commissioned for existing buildings to establish a clear record of the protective measures and the basis on which they are managed.

Routes to compliance

In Wales, the standard route is the guidance in Approved Document B (Wales) — noting that Wales has its own edition, with requirements that differ from England's, most famously the requirement for automatic fire suppression in new and converted dwellings. For more complex buildings, BS 9999 offers a more flexible, risk-based framework, and BS 9991:2024 is the current code for residential design. Where none of these fit, a fire-engineered approach under BS 7974 allows a building-specific solution to be justified from first principles. The right route depends on the building — and choosing it early is precisely the value a fire strategy adds.

Why early input pays for itself

A real example of the kind we see regularly: a developer converting a building to a six-bedroom HMO decides mid-construction to add a seventh bedroom. That single change can alter licensing requirements, escape provision, detection category and suppression expectations — and resolving it on paper at design stage costs a fraction of resolving it on site after Building Control raises it. Fire strategy input at RIBA Stage 2–3, before layouts are frozen, is consistently the cheapest fire safety money a project ever spends.

Who should prepare one?

Fire strategies should be prepared by someone with demonstrable fire safety design competence — and reviewed whenever the design changes. We provide fire strategy support and design-stage consultancy across South Wales, from HMO conversions and holiday accommodation through to commercial and specialist premises, alongside our fire risk assessment services for occupied buildings.