MHCLG updates residential PEEPs guidance to match the new duties

The Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government updated Residential PEEPs: Guidance for Responsible Persons on 6 April 2026 — the day the Fire Safety (Residential Evacuation Plans) (England) Regulations 2025 came into force. The guidance was first published on 2 December 2024.

What it asks responsible persons to do

The guidance sets out a sequence rather than a checklist, and the order matters.

Identify residents whose ability to evacuate would be compromised. Offer person-centred assessments to discuss their specific needs. Put proportionate mitigations in place based on what those assessments find. Record a written emergency evacuation statement for each relevant resident. Share flat locations and basic information about the degree of assistance needed with the fire and rescue authority, with the resident's consent. Prepare and maintain a building-wide evacuation plan as a separate document. Then review annually, or sooner when circumstances change.

The two parts that are harder than they look

Consent. Information-sharing with the fire and rescue authority is conditioned on it. A resident who declines does not thereby remove the duty to assess and mitigate — it removes one route by which the mitigation would otherwise have worked, and the plan has to account for that rather than treat the refusal as an end to the matter.

"Relevant resident" is not a fixed list. The guidance expects annual review or sooner on change, and in a block with normal turnover the population it describes changes continuously. A one-off exercise completed in April will be inaccurate by autumn unless something in the letting or housing-management process keeps it current.

How this sits with the fire risk assessment

The building evacuation plan and the fire risk assessment are separate documents doing different jobs, and the guidance keeps them separate. The assessment establishes whether the building's fire protection supports its evacuation strategy at all; the evacuation plan sets out how that strategy is executed for the people actually living there. A plan built on a strategy the building cannot support is the failure this pairing is designed to surface.

We reported the Regulations themselves when they were made in July 2025.