The Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005 requires that people at a premises are given adequate fire safety training and know what to do in an emergency. It does not name a drill frequency, and it does not prescribe a record format. Both are left to the responsible person to judge.
How often
Common practice across most premises is at least one drill a year. More frequently where there is high turnover of staff or volunteers, shift working, sleeping accommodation, or a layout that makes evacuation difficult.
For a venue with a rotating cast of volunteers and regular hirers, once a year is thin. Anyone who joined in February has waited eleven months to be shown what to do. Two a year, timed so that most people catch one, is a more defensible position.
What the record should contain
There is no statutory template. A record that answers these questions will satisfy most inspectors and every insurer:
| Field | Why it matters |
|---|---|
| Date and time | Establishes frequency and pattern over years. |
| Who was present | Names, not a headcount. Shows who has actually practised it. |
| How the alarm was raised | Tests the detection system as well as the people. |
| Evacuation time | A comparison point between drills, not a pass mark. |
| Assembly point reached | Whether everyone actually got to the right place. |
| Problems found | The most valuable line in the record. See below. |
| Action taken | Closes the loop, and shows the drill changed something. |
| Who ran it, who reviewed it | Separates doing from checking. |
The problems are the point
Venues often treat a clean drill as a good drill. It is the opposite. A drill that finds nothing has usually told you nothing, and the ones worth having are the ones that surface something.
The things drills reliably find in community buildings:
- A fire exit blocked by stacked chairs or a delivery
- A gate to the assembly point padlocked, with nobody knowing who holds the key
- An assembly point directly outside the main entrance, too close to the building
- A door that sticks and needs a shoulder
- Nobody knowing who is meant to check the toilets and the kitchen
- The one person who knows the procedure being the one who was away that day
Record what you found and what you did about it. An inspector reading a drill log that shows a problem found in April and fixed in May is looking at a venue that takes it seriously. A log of five consecutive flawless drills reads as a form being filled in.
Have someone else sign it off
Whoever ran the drill should not be the only person who signs the record. A second named person reviewing and approving it is a small thing that changes the quality of what gets written down, and it means the record reflects more than one view of what happened.
For a trustee-run venue this can be the caretaker running it and a trustee reviewing it, or the other way round.
Hirers and out-of-hours users
The hardest group to include and often the largest. A hall used by six regular hirers and hired out most Saturdays has more people in the building who have never done a drill than people who have.
You are unlikely to get a Saturday wedding party to practise an evacuation. What is achievable is that whoever runs the event has read the evacuation procedure before the booking goes ahead, knows where the exits and assembly point are, and knows they are the person who would give the instruction. Record that they were told.
Drills and Martyn's Law
Martyn's Law does not mandate drills for standard tier premises. But a public protection procedure that has never been walked through is a guess, and the same walkthrough that tests your fire evacuation can test whether your invacuation and lockdown procedures are realistic.
In practice most venues will get more value from one combined walkthrough covering both than from treating them as separate exercises. See the four procedures guide for what to test.