Building safety advice for building owners, including fire doors
Advice on the measures building owners should take to ensure their buildings are safe.
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Following the Grenfell Tower fire, on the advice of the Independent Expert Advisory Panel, the government published advice notes for building owners on the measures they should take to ensure their buildings were safe.
The document ‘Building safety advice for building owners, including fire doors’ (also known as the Consolidated Advice Note) brought these documents together. The Consolidated Advice Note provided guidance on how to assess a building’s external walls, smoke control systems and identified the types of short-term interim measures that could be put in place if significant risks to life safety were identified.
The Consolidated Advice Note and all subsequent documents here (including the Supplementary note to building safety advice for building owners) are now withdrawn and should be treated as historical reference documents.
Why are we withdrawing the Consolidated Advice Note?
The Consolidated Advice Note has in some circumstances been wrongly interpreted and has been used to justify instances of an excessively risk-averse approach to building safety. The Consolidated Advice Note has therefore been withdrawn to ensure that it is not used to justify disproportionate assessments.
Additional guidance with regards to other aspects of the CAN including fire doors and smoke control systems will be published in 2024 by the Home Office. Where a detailed assessment of external walls of existing multi-storey, multi-occupied residential building is deemed necessary it should now be carried out in accordance with the more comprehensive and holistic guidance included in Publicly Available Specification (PAS) 9980.
What is PAS 9980?
The PAS 9980 has been developed by the British Standards Institution drawing on expert advice from professionals across industry and followed a rigorous development process, including a public consultation.
PAS 9980 provides new guidance on how to assess the risk of fire via an external wall of an existing multi-storey, multi-occupied residential building. PAS 9980 sets out steps that can be taken to identify and assess risk factors as well as mitigation steps that might improve the risk rating of a building via a holistic and fact-based assessment of a building’s construction.
Where it is determined that a detailed assessment of an external wall is required, PAS 9980 should now be used for these assessments. It does not contain ‘off the peg’ solutions to specific wall types and materials but is intended to enable a consistent approach to evaluating the fire risk when considering the external walls of buildings.
PAS 9980 frequently asked questions
Will PAS 9980 require additional surveys to take place?
Whole building fire risk assessments are already required in England for residential premises including common parts under the Regulatory Reform Fire Safety Order 2005 (FSO). PAS 79 (which has been in existence for a number of years) sets out how to do a standard whole building fire risk assessment, which would apply to all blocks of flats. Buildings with cladding materials which could pose a fire risk should do a more detailed assessment of their external wall system, and PAS 9980 sets out how to do that and will complement best practice guidance for these whole building fire risk assessment (which are already covered by PAS 79).
Will every building require a PAS 9980 appraisal?
PAS 9980 is a methodology to carry out fire risk appraisals of the external wall of multi-storey, multi-occupied residential buildings.
Not all buildings require statutory fire risk assessments. For example, single private dwellings with no common parts are not within the scope of the Regulatory Reform Fire Safety Order 2005.
Of buildings that do require fire risk assessments, not all will require a detailed review of their external walls. In many cases it will be manifestly obvious to a competent fire risk assessor that the risk to life from external fire spread is not such as to warrant a PAS 9980 assessment. This is particularly true in buildings with brick or masonry external walls or low risk buildings which do not present any significant risk of fire spread. In these cases, the fire risk assessor will normally address compliance of external wall construction with the Fire Safety Order as part of the routine Fire Risk Assessment process.
Therefore, many buildings will not require a PAS 9980 appraisal.
Will PAS 9980 lead to expensive remediations?
Where a PAS 9980 assessment is needed the guidance will enable more proportionate assessments rather than the binary ones that have become prevalent since the Grenfell Tower tragedy in which any presence of combustible wall materials is thought to automatically need expensive replacement/remediation. PAS 9980 is clear that some combustible materials can be retained and managed safely in the external walls of existing buildings.
Updates to this page
Published 20 January 2020Last updated 21 November 2020 + show all updates
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Added summary note to January 2020 advice to building owners.
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First published.