Two Staircases, One Strategy: What Building Managers Need to Know

The National Fire Chiefs Council made exactly this case when it first pushed for the change, arguing that a properly designed second staircase closes off that single point of failure and buys firefighting crews valuable extra time. A second and independent staircase affords a given building genuine redundancy.

The rule doesn’t simply divide the market into new buildings and existing ones. There’s a transitional test that determines which schemes are affected. A building can still proceed under the old single-staircase guidance if a Building Control application was submitted before 30 September and construction has genuinely started, with foundations physically going in either before that date or within 18 months after it has passed.

Planning permission and design work alone don’t count. That means a meaningful number of schemes still sitting at design or early planning stage, with single-staircase layouts already worked up, are going to need a redesign in order to keep moving. Existing and completed buildings are not affected either way. There’s no requirement to retrofit a second staircase into a block that already has one.

Talk to any facilities manager and the more pressing question isn’t to be found in the regulations at all. It’s about how you run a building safely once you have two staircases in place, whether that’s because the building was designed that way from the outset or due to the fact that it’s now subject to the new rule.

Adding a second staircase is a straightforward design decision. Making it work in practice is an operational one. That responsibility resides with those individuals who manage the building day to day, not the ones who designed it.

Changing scenario

When a building had a single staircase, the job was comparatively simple. One route in, one route out and a set of systems designed around that single path. Two independent staircases change that completely.

Each one now needs to be treated and managed as its own compartment, with detection, emergency lighting and alert systems all functioning correctly within it. Treating them separately isn’t enough, though. Those systems need to be co-ordinated across both staircases so that the building responds as one coherent whole, not two systems operating side by side without reference to each other.

This is where the operational challenge really resides. If detection in one staircase picks up a problem, the alert and lighting response across the entire building needs to reflect that, duly directing people towards the staircase that’s safe to use. That only works if the systems have been specified, installed and maintained with this co-ordination in mind from the outset rather than being added as an afterthought once both staircases are in place.

Any building manager overseeing this kind of set-up needs to be filled with confidence that the design behind their systems has kept that co-ordination in mind from Day One (and that it can be tested and demonstrated as a whole, not just system by system).

Building Safety Act expectations

The Building Safety Act 2022 sets out what this looks like in practice, and none of it is optional for buildings of this kind. Both staircases need regular inspection, not just one. Systems need integrated testing, being checked together rather than in isolation from each other.

On-site teams need ongoing training so that they understand how the systems interact and not simply how to operate each one individually. The golden thread – the digital record of a building’s safety information – needs to start from Day One of a build programme. Retrofitting it once a building is occupied is far harder than building it in from the start.

If you’re taking on a new building with two staircases, the practical starting point is asking your fire system provider how detection, lighting and alerts are co-ordinated across both routes, not just how each performs on its own. If you’re managing an existing building, the same questions still apply under the Building Safety Act 2022, even without a second staircase to think about.

Either way, the inspection and testing regime, the training your team receives and the golden thread record all need to reflect two systems working as one, not two systems working alongside each other.

Two staircases without co-ordinated systems isn’t redundancy. It’s two single points of failure standing next to each other. The physical change is the easy part. The strategy behind it (tested, trained for and recorded properly from the outset) is what keeps people safe.

Martin Green is Commercial Training and Support Manager at Hochiki Europe (www.hochikieurope.com)