Residential PEEPs are here. What managing agents actually need to do now.

The rules changed on 6 April 2026, and a lot of buildings still aren't on top of them.

The Fire Safety (Residential Evacuation Plans) (England) Regulations 2025 are now law. They place real duties on whoever holds the Responsible Person role for a building, and in most cases that's the managing agent, the freeholder, or the management company. If you look after residential blocks, the chances are this lands on you, and the chances are it's been sitting somewhere near the bottom of a very long list.

This isn't a "get ready" article. The deadline has passed. So the question isn't whether you're prepared, it's whether you're behind, and if you are, how to catch up without making a meal of it.

What actually changed

The regulations introduce Residential Personal Emergency Evacuation Plans, usually shortened to Residential PEEPs or RPEEPs. The idea is simple, even if the delivery isn't: buildings now have to actively plan for residents who would struggle to get out on their own in a fire, rather than quietly assuming everyone can manage.

That means identifying residents whose ability to evacuate is impaired, whether through mobility, sensory or cognitive conditions, offering them a person-centred fire risk assessment, and agreeing an emergency evacuation statement that sets out what support they'd need. Where the resident consents, the relevant information is shared with the local Fire and Rescue Service so they arrive knowing who might need help and where they are.

It's a shift from passive to active. It's no longer enough to note in a fire risk assessment that vulnerable residents may be present. You now have to go and find out, plan for it, and be able to show you did.

Whether it applies to you

The regulations apply to residential buildings in England with two or more domestic premises that meet the height criteria. That's buildings of 18 metres or more, and crucially also buildings over 11 metres where the strategy is simultaneous evacuation rather than stay put.

That 11 metre line catches more buildings than people expect. If your block isn't a high-rise but doesn't operate a stay put policy, don't assume you're outside the scope. The first job is working out, honestly, which of your buildings are actually caught, because getting that wrong in either direction costs you.

What the Responsible Person now has to do

Stripped back, the duty runs in a sequence. You make reasonable efforts to identify the residents who may need help. You offer those residents a person-centred fire risk assessment. Where appropriate you agree an emergency evacuation statement with them. With their explicit consent, you share the prescribed information with the Fire and Rescue Service. And then you keep it under review, at least every twelve months, and sooner if the building or the resident's circumstances change.

None of those steps is enormous on its own. The difficulty is doing all of them, across every relevant resident, in every in-scope building, with the consent handled properly and the records kept in a way that would stand up if anyone asked to see them.

The trap worth avoiding

Here's where we see people go wrong, and it tends to be in one of two directions.

Some treat it as a box-tick. A blanket letter goes out, nobody really engages, no proper records are kept, and the building is "compliant" on paper but would fall apart under any scrutiny. That's not compliance, it's exposure with a tidy cover sheet.

Others over-scope it and try to build a full plan for every resident in the building, drowning themselves in administration and consent issues that the regulations never required. The skill is proportion: identifying who is genuinely a relevant resident, engaging them properly and with consent, and documenting the whole process so it holds up, without turning a sensible duty into a paperwork machine.

The thing that's easy to underestimate is consent. This is sensitive personal information about people's health and mobility, gathered in their own homes. Get the engagement and the data handling wrong and you've created a different problem while solving the first one.

How to catch up calmly

If you've not started, the order is straightforward. Work out which buildings are in scope. Run an honest gap analysis on where your current arrangements fall short. Update your policies and, where relevant, your safety case assumptions to reflect the new duties. Then get the engagement moving, properly and with consent, and keep the evidence straight as you go.

It's very doable. It just needs someone to own it and run it methodically, rather than letting it drift for another quarter.

That's the part we handle. Residential PEEPs sit within our resident engagement work, and because we carry out none of the physical remediation and have nothing to sell on the back of it, the advice you get is simply about meeting the duty properly and proportionately. No more than the building needs, and no less than the law requires.

If you're not sure which of your buildings are caught, or you know you're behind and want it sorted without the drama, that's exactly the kind of thing worth a short conversation.