I can't use the stairs. Whether I get out depends on a plan I've usually never seen.

Every time a fire alarm goes off, I have the same two thoughts in the same order.

Is this real, or is it a drill.

Then: where's the nearest refuge - and does anybody here know I'm in the building.

I'm a wheelchair user and I'm profoundly deaf. In a fire I can't use the stairs, and without a visual alarm I don't know there's a fire at all. That second half is its own subject, and I've written about what the auditory environment actually has to do. So whether I get out of your building isn't really about me. It's about whether somebody wrote something down, told the right people - and practised it.

That document is a PEEP. Most buildings I've worked in had one for somebody. Hardly any had one for me.

A PEEP is not a form. It's a plan somebody has agreed to.

Personal Emergency Evacuation Plan. One named person, one set of needs, one route, and the names of the people who are going to help.

It covers whether you'll know the alarm has gone off - which matters more than people think. It covers what you can actually do, because plenty of disabled people can use stairs and shouldn't be assumed into a refuge. It covers the route you'd take, and the one you'd take if the first is full of smoke. It covers who's helping, what equipment they need, and how anybody talks to you while it's happening.

And it gets written with you, not about you. That's the part that gets skipped. A PEEP produced by a fire safety officer who has never spoken to the person it names is a document - and a document doesn't get anybody down a staircase.

It isn't permanent either. Needs change, buildings get refurbished, fire wardens move on, the person who agreed to help leaves in March. A PEEP from four years ago is a historical record.

PEEP or GEEP, and which one you owe people

A PEEP is for somebody who's regularly there. An employee, a student, a resident. You know who they are - so you can plan around them specifically.

A GEEP is the general version, for everybody else. Customers, visitors, the person who came to a meeting, the audience. You can't know who's walking in - so instead you plan how your staff work out who needs help, and what they can offer.

Most places need both and have neither. The usual state of things is a folder with two PEEPs in it from a previous building manager, and nothing at all for the four hundred people coming through the front door every day.

If you run a public building with no GEEP, your plan for me is improvisation by whoever's on reception.

"They'll wait for the fire service" is not a plan

This is the one I hear most - and it isn't true.

The Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005 puts the duty on a responsible person, and article 14 is the one about escape. The wording at 14(2)(b) is that in the event of danger, it must be possible for persons to evacuate the premises as quickly and as safely as possible.

Read that again, because the Order never once says "disabled people". It says relevant persons - everybody lawfully in the building.

That's not a loophole. It's the opposite. Nobody has to be singled out for the duty to apply, so an evacuation that isn't possible for a wheelchair user isn't a partial pass. It's just not compliant.

Article 15 is the other half, and it's the one people skip. It requires procedures, including safety drills. Not a plan in a drawer - procedures that have been run.

Then the Equality Act makes it anticipatory. You were supposed to have thought about it before I arrived, rather than when I did. That word is doing more work than people realise, and I've unpicked it in what the law actually requires.

So "the fire service will get them" fails on its own terms. They might be fighting the fire. They might be on the wrong floor, or still outside. Their arrival time isn't yours to promise - and a plan whose central mechanism is somebody else's resource isn't one you control.

What a refuge has to actually be

A refuge is a protected space where somebody waits for assistance. It's temporary. It's a step in the evacuation - not a substitute for one.

It wants 900mm by 1400mm per wheelchair space, clear of the escape route, in fire-resisting construction behind fire doors. It needs signage. And it needs a two-way communication system, call button between 900mm and 1200mm, connected to somewhere a person is actually listening.

That communication system is the whole thing - and it's the part I check hardest. Not because of coordination. Because of what it's like to sit in a stairwell lobby while an alarm sounds, with no way of knowing whether anybody's coming, whether they've forgotten you, or whether the building's empty and you're on your own.

The failures are always the same three. The refuge is full of stacked chairs and a floor polisher. The call point has never been tested and nobody can produce a log. Or the refuge is fine and the staff don't know it's there - which is the same as not having one.

The chair, and why the training is the whole thing

An evacuation chair gets somebody down a staircase. Tracked ones run on the nosings and the operator controls the descent, roughly a step a second. It needs two people, and it needs practice.

I've been taken down stairs in one, during a drill. It's frightening when it's a drill. You're strapped in, facing backwards, going down a flight of concrete with no control over any of it. Trusting entirely that the person behind you has done this before.

If they panic, or go too fast, or lose the brake, I'm injured at the bottom. That's the whole reason training isn't paperwork.

What I find instead: a chair bought three years ago, mounted on a bracket, with nobody currently employed who's been trained to use it. Or a chair in a locked room, where the key lives with facilities - who go home at five. Or a chair at the bottom of the stairs, which is exactly where it can't help anybody.

Evacuation lifts solve a lot of this, and they're rare here. Most buildings are stairs, a refuge, and a plan.

If it's a block of flats, the law changed in April

This is the part worth being careful about - the regime is completely different, and a lot of advice online hasn't caught up.

Everything above is workplaces and public buildings. Housing is now governed separately. The Fire Safety (Residential Evacuation Plans) (England) Regulations 2025 came into force on 6 April 2026. England only, and they deliver the last of the Grenfell Tower Inquiry's Phase 1 recommendations.

They apply to a building with two or more sets of domestic premises that's at least 18 metres tall, or has at least seven storeys, or is over 11 metres and runs a simultaneous evacuation strategy.

Where they apply, the responsible person has to identify residents who'd need help and carry out a person-centred fire risk assessment for each of them. Then take reasonable steps to reduce what it finds, give the resident a written emergency evacuation statement, keep it under review, and share the information with the local fire and rescue service. There's a building-level evacuation plan on top.

It took from 2019 to 2026 for that to become law - and it only covers taller buildings. If you live in a three-storey block, none of it reaches you.

So before anybody quotes legislation at you, the first question is which building you're in. Workplace duties and residential duties are different law, with different triggers - and advice written for one is wrong for the other.

A drill that leaves me at my desk is not a drill

The most common thing organisations tell me, usually quite proudly, is that they wouldn't evacuate disabled people during a practice. They'd do it properly if it were real.

Which means the first time the plan is ever run is during an actual fire. With smoke, with people shouting, with the person who was going to help somewhere else in the building.

Drills are not performances. They're where you find out that the buddy was in a meeting on the third floor, the route is blocked by a delivery, the chair key is with somebody on leave, and nobody told the new fire warden I exist.

Every one of those is cheap to find on a Tuesday morning - and catastrophic to find once.

If your drill doesn't include the disabled people in your building, you don't have a tested plan. You have an untested one, and a belief.

What it comes down to

Access work gets talked about as dignity and participation, and mostly it is. This part isn't.

A building I can enter, move around, work in and use the toilet in, but can't get out of, isn't an accessible building with one gap in it. The whole thing is conditional on nothing going wrong.

I know my plan in the buildings I work in. I know where the refuge is, I know who's coming, and I've practised it. That knowledge is the only reason I'll take a meeting on a fourth floor.

Take it away and the honest version of your access statement is that disabled people are welcome here - as long as there isn't a fire.