From 6 April 2026, a significant shift in residential fire safety regulation came into force in England. The Fire Safety (Residential Evacuation Plans) (England) Regulations 2025 introduce a new framework aimed at protecting some of the most vulnerable residents in high-rise buildings.
For organisations managing social housing, residential portfolios, or mixed-use developments, this is not a marginal update. It is a new layer of operational, legal and compliance responsibility that requires structured implementation.
What are RPEEPs and why do they matter?
The new regime centres on Residential Personal Emergency Evacuation Plans (RPEEPs). These are designed to ensure that residents who cannot safely evacuate a building on their own are identified and supported.
The regulations are a direct response to the Grenfell Tower fire and its subsequent inquiry, which exposed systemic failures in evacuation planning for disabled and vulnerable residents.
Unlike workplace evacuation plans, which assume trained staff and structured oversight, residential settings are more complex. The government has therefore adopted a “reasonable and proportionate” model rather than mandating full evacuation support for every individual.
The result is a hybrid approach: part risk assessment, part resident engagement, part operational planning.
Who the regulations apply to
The rules apply to multi-occupied residential buildings in England that meet either of the following criteria:
- 18 metres or at least 7 storeys high
- Over 11 metres where a simultaneous evacuation strategy is in place
This captures a wide range of buildings, including:
- Social housing blocks
- Private residential developments
- Mixed-tenure buildings
- Some short-term rental properties where structural thresholds are met
The core legal duties
At the centre of the framework is the “Responsible Person”. This is typically the building owner, landlord, housing provider or managing agent.
From 6 April 2026, they must:
Identify residents who may need assistance
Responsible Persons must take reasonable steps to identify individuals whose ability to evacuate is impaired due to physical or cognitive conditions.
Offer a person-centred fire risk assessment
This is a tailored conversation with the resident to understand:
- Barriers to evacuation
- Specific risks linked to their condition
- Practical measures to improve safety
This is not supposed to be a duplication of the building fire risk assessment as it should be focused on the individual and their specific situation.
Agree an emergency evacuation statement
Where the resident consents, the outcome is a simple written plan setting out what they should do in a fire.
Implement reasonable and proportionate measures
These might include:
- Equipment such as evacuation chairs
- Adjustments to alarms or signage
- Informal support arrangements
The key constraint is proportionality. Measures must balance safety, practicality and cost.
Share limited information with fire services
With explicit resident consent, certain data must be shared with the local fire and rescue authority, including:
- Flat location
- Level of assistance required
- Whether an evacuation statement exists
Maintain a building-wide evacuation plan
This sits alongside individual RPEEPs and must:
- Set out the building’s evacuation strategy
- Include instructions to residents
- Be shared with fire services and reviewed annually
A consent-driven framework, with a question on cost
A defining feature of the regulations is that resident participation is voluntary.
Residents can:
- Decline to engage
- Refuse an evacuation plan
- Withhold consent for data sharing
This creates a complex compliance dynamic. Responsible Persons must demonstrate that they have taken reasonable steps, even where residents opt out. From a compliance perspective, this means responsible persons will need a process driven focus. The obligations can be achieved by demonstrating a documented process of engaging with relevant residents, even if some of them don’t wish to engage.
The regulations deliberately avoid prescribing who pays for safety measures. Instead, costs are determined through the same “reasonable and proportionate” lens.
Potential outcomes include:
- The building owner absorbing the cost
- The resident paying where the benefit is individual
- Costs shared across residents where there is wider benefit
For social housing providers, there is a clear policy direction that tenants should not bear these costs, with government funding expected to support implementation.
Data protection and privacy considerations
RPEEPs introduce a requirement to handle sensitive personal data, particularly information that may reveal a resident’s disability or impairment. That immediately brings the process within the stricter boundaries of UK GDPR and associated data protection law.
Information can only be shared where the resident has given explicit, informed consent, and even then the scope is tightly limited to what is operationally necessary. In practice, that means basic, functional details such as location and the level of assistance required, rather than any medical or diagnostic information.
This creates a structural tension that will need proper consideration of data protection obligations. On one hand, there is a clear life safety objective in ensuring that fire and rescue services have access to accurate, usable information in an emergency. On the other hand, there is a legal obligation to avoid over-collection, over-sharing or any processing that cannot be justified under data protection law.
Organisations will need clear consent mechanisms, well-defined data minimisation standards, and disciplined record-keeping to demonstrate that information has been handled appropriately at every stage. Staff training will be central, particularly for those conducting assessments and engaging directly with residents, where the line between helpful detail and excessive data collection can easily be crossed.
What should housing providers and property managers do now?
With the regulations now in force, this is now an operational compliance requirement that needs to be embedded.
The starting point is clarity on scope and accountability. Organisations should identify which buildings fall within the regime and formally designate the Responsible Person for each one. That responsibility cannot be diluted through outsourcing or delegation, even where third parties are involved in delivery.
From there, providers need a structured and repeatable way to identify residents who may require support, recognising that this is not a one-off exercise. It requires ongoing communication, accessible channels for disclosure, and records that demonstrate reasonable efforts have been made, even where residents choose not to participate.
Staff must be equipped to carry out person-centred fire risk assessments in a consistent and defensible way, capturing outcomes clearly and handling conversations that may involve sensitive personal circumstances. This is not purely a technical fire safety task. It sits at the intersection of safeguarding, compliance and resident trust.
Documentation will be central. Regulators are unlikely to focus solely on whether an outcome was achieved. They will look at whether the process was robust. That means maintaining a clear audit trail of who was contacted, what assessments were carried out, how decisions were reached on what is “reasonable and proportionate”, and how often those decisions are reviewed.
RPEEPs should not sit in isolation. They need to be integrated into existing fire risk assessments, building safety frameworks, and resident engagement processes. Fragmented approaches will create gaps, and those gaps will become points of regulatory exposure.
In practical terms, organisations should now be building or refining a structured framework that includes a consistent method for identifying relevant residents, a standard approach to person-centred assessments, clear templates for evacuation statements, and well-defined processes for consent and data handling. Review cycles should be built in from the outset, with systems in place to ensure information remains current and usable.
For social housing providers, there is an additional financial dimension. Early engagement with funding arrangements and a clear internal position on cost allocation will help avoid disputes later, particularly where measures could otherwise fall on residents or service charges.
