PAS 79-2:2020 — Fire risk assessment for housing (withdrawn)

Why this page exists

This document no longer stands. It is recorded here because fire risk assessments carried out between 2021 and 2025 frequently cite it, and anyone reading one of those reports today needs to know what its methodological basis was and what has replaced it. Removing the page would remove the answer for the reader most likely to need it.

What it was for

PAS 79-2 was the housing half of the split that turned the original PAS 79 into two parts at the end of 2020. Where PAS 79-1 addressed premises other than housing, PAS 79-2 addressed housing — principally purpose-built blocks of flats and converted residential buildings, where the assessment has to deal with the interaction between individual dwellings, common parts and the building's evacuation strategy.

Why it was withdrawn

BSI suspended the document and removed it from sale in March 2021, and confirmed in a statement in August 2021 that it had been withdrawn while a British Standard was developed to take its place. The trigger was the rapidly changing expectation around the evacuation of disabled and vulnerable residents in the period following evidence given to the Grenfell Tower Inquiry — an area where the document's treatment had been overtaken by events.

One point of caution for anyone tracing the history: BSI's own later publicity refers to the withdrawal as having taken place in 2020, which cannot be right, because the document was published in December 2020 and was suspended in March 2021. The date recorded on this page is the date of BSI's confirming statement.

What replaced it

BS 9792:2025, published in August 2025, is the code of practice for fire risk assessment in housing. It is a full revision rather than a reissue, and its status as a British Standard rather than a PAS carries more weight as an industry benchmark.

What this means for an existing assessment

A housing fire risk assessment that cites PAS 79-2 is not automatically invalid. The legal test under the Fire Safety Order has always been whether the assessment is suitable and sufficient, not which methodology it followed, and a competent assessment carried out in 2022 was a competent assessment at the time.

What does follow is that the methodology is no longer current, so the case for a review is stronger than the calendar alone would suggest — particularly on anything touching evacuation of disabled and vulnerable residents, which is precisely the ground on which the document was withdrawn. Treat the citation as a prompt to check the assessment against the current standard rather than as a defect in itself.