A Practical Guide for Responsible Persons Sourcing Evacuation Equipment
Our legal and compliance pages cover what the law requires; this page covers the equipment side, what’s actually available, how it’s evolved, and what to consider when equipping a building for PEEPs. This isn’t a product recommendation, it’s a practical overview to help Responsible Persons ask the right questions when speaking to suppliers and fire risk assessors.
Evacuation Chairs: The Core Equipment for Stair Descent
Evacuation chairs remain the most common piece of dedicated PEEP equipment, used to move a person who cannot walk down a staircase safely, with one or two trained assistants controlling the descent.
How the Technology Has Evolved
Older evacuation methods often required two to four people to physically lift and carry someone down stairs, a genuinely dangerous approach for both the person being moved and the assistants. Current-generation evacuation chairs generally use a track or roller system on the chair’s base, which converts the descent into a controlled glide down the stair edges rather than a lift-and-carry motion. This reduces physical strain on assistants and produces a smoother, more stable ride for the person being evacuated, an important consideration for residents with cardiac or respiratory conditions, where a jarring descent carries its own risk.
What to Check When Sourcing a Chair
- Weight capacity against your building’s actual resident population, not just a standard assumption
- Stairwell width and turning circles in your specific building, particularly in older buildings with narrower or more winding stairs
- Number of trained operators required, some designs need two people, others are built for single-operator use
- Storage location that’s accessible 24/7 and close enough to relevant residents to be useful in the first few minutes of an evacuation
- Maintenance schedule, chairs need regular checks like any safety equipment, not just a one-off purchase and forget
Evacuation Lifts: Increasingly Part of the Conversation
Evacuation lifts, purpose-built lifts with independent power supplies and fire-resistant shafts designed to keep operating during a fire, have historically been rare in UK residential buildings, which have generally relied on a stay-put strategy rather than lift evacuation. That’s changing. As covered in our piece on the 2026 Approved Document B consultation, evacuation lifts are now proposed as standard guidance for new residential buildings above 18 metres, and lift industry commentary has already flagged 2026 as a pivotal year for evacuation lift compliance and maintenance standards.
For existing buildings, retrofitting a genuine evacuation lift is a significant undertaking, well beyond routine PEEP implementation, and is more realistically a building-wide capital project than something addressed through the PEEP process alone. Where a building already has a firefighting lift, it’s worth checking with a fire engineer whether it meets the specification needed to also function as an evacuation lift, rather than assuming either that it does or that a separate installation is automatically required.
Refuge Areas and Communication Equipment
Where a building doesn’t have an evacuation lift, refuge areas remain a core part of most evacuation strategies, fire-resistant spaces adjacent to stairwells where a resident can wait safely for assistance. Refuges work best when paired with two-way communication equipment connecting the refuge to a staffed control point, so a waiting resident isn’t simply hoping to be remembered, and so building staff have real-time knowledge of who’s still waiting and where.
Alerting Equipment for Sensory Impairments
Standard audible fire alarms don’t reach every resident. Visual Alarm Devices (VADs), vibrating pagers, and pillow alarms are all established, relatively low-cost ways to alert deaf or hard-of-hearing residents, and are specifically referenced in the government’s Residential PEEPs guidance as part of what buildings should have in place to support relevant residents.
Personal Descent and Portable Equipment
Beyond building-integrated systems, a smaller category of personal, portable escape equipment exists, controlled descent devices, personal escape ladders, and similar products designed for individual or household use rather than building-wide deployment. These are more commonly relevant to individual PEEPs (created by a resident for their own use) than to the Residential PEEPs a Responsible Person is obliged to provide, and any resident considering this kind of equipment should discuss it with a fire risk assessor first, since incorrect use of personal descent equipment carries its own risks.
Training Is Not Optional
Whatever equipment a building holds, it’s only as good as the training behind it. Every case study we’ve covered on this site, from residential to workplace to educational settings, points to the same lesson: equipment without trained staff creates a false sense of security. Evacuation chair training, VAD and alarm system familiarity, and refresher sessions after any staff turnover all need to be built into a building’s ongoing PEEP process, not treated as a one-off box to tick when equipment is first purchased.
Further Reading
For the full legal detail on what buildings are required to provide, see the “Building Provisions and Equipment” section of our Residential PEEPs compliance guide.
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