ABSTRACT

The fire safety strategy has become a crucial component of modern fire safety engineering discourse. It forms a core part of the recommendations from Phase 2 of the Grenfell Tower Inquiry and has been referenced in the fire safety engineering literature and in recent reforms in many countries. However, it has never been formally defined. This creates a significant risk to the successful implementation of these recommendations. Through a review of past uses of the term, this paper explores its conceptual grounding, functional scope, regulatory considerations, and resulting implications for design. A formalized definition is introduced, and implications of this new definition on the fire safety engineering process and its implementation in existing regulatory environments is discussed. The definition is formulated from an understanding of optimum implementation of fire safety which has evolved over the past 50+ years and focusses on the narrative of how systems and features both define and deliver the required level of performance of a building in the event of a fire. The result reinforces the role of the fire safety engineer whilst integrating regulatory compliance into the design, offering a robust approach to fire safety engineering that can overcome many limitations associated with current practice.