Fire statements at Gateway 1: what planning now demands

What is a fire statement, and when is one required?

Since August 2021, a planning application for a relevant high-rise residential building has needed to arrive with a fire statement: a structured account of how the scheme deals with the fire safety matters that planning decisions can still influence. Site layout and access for fire appliances, water supplies for firefighting, the space between buildings, and the principles of the evacuation and fire safety approach, set out at a planning level of detail on the government's standard form.

The regulator acts as statutory consultee on fire safety to the local planning authority, reviewing the statement and advising on the application. One definitional quirk catches teams out: hospitals and care homes fall outside the Gateway 1 relevant-building definition even though they count as higher-risk buildings at Gateways 2 and 3, so a hospital scheme meets the regulator later than a residential tower of the same height.

What does a good fire statement cover?

The content is deliberately strategic rather than detailed design. The matters that cannot be fixed later are exactly the ones planning determines: whether an appliance can reach the building, whether water is where firefighting needs it, whether the massing leaves room for the access the strategy assumes, and what evacuation philosophy the design is committing to. A competent statement addresses each at the level planning can act on, and flags the fire engineering positions the detailed design will develop.

The discipline it rewards is early competence: a fire engineer engaged at concept stage, writing down positions the team has actually coordinated, rather than a form completed from optimism the week the application is submitted.

Why does Gateway 1 echo through the rest of the project?

Because the fire statement is the first written commitment in what becomes a continuous evidence chain. The positions taken at planning, evacuation approach, access strategy, staircase philosophy, constrain the design that Gateway 2 must later prove in full, and from 30 September 2026 any new scheme over 18m is making those commitments against the second staircase mandate. A team that changes philosophy between planning and building control approval is volunteering for redesign, re-consultation and, if the change is large enough, a fresh planning conversation.

Gateway 1 is not a hard stop; permission can be granted against consultee advice. But the regime remembers. The regulator reviewing your Gateway 2 submission is the same institution that commented at planning, and concerns brushed past at Gateway 1 return at determination with statutory force behind them. The cheapest time to resolve a fire strategy problem is before the planning boundary is drawn, which is the entire logic of putting a gateway there.