Fire Fatalities beyond the dwelling of fire origin in Scotland

Executive Summary

The Building Standards Division (BSD) of Scottish Government requested that the Building Research Establishment (BRE) scrutinise data, which is held by the Scottish Fire and Rescue Service (SFRS), in order to determine specific fire death events and any correlations relating to external cladding. The data that the SFRS holds comes from its own Incident Recording System, to which the BRE was given access, in order to conduct this work. This report builds on a first phase of work which was reported on 09 June 2023 – see P119828 Issue: 1 Fire fatalities beyond the dwelling of fire origin in Scotland (Draft Interim Report).

The study covered a 14-year period of incident record data, from April 2009 to April 2023. For the draft interim report, BRE Global was asked to identify, from the record data, instances where fatalities were recorded as having occurred beyond the dwelling of fire origin in certain types of residential premises that could have external cladding (houses were excluded from this study). The principal correlation under consideration relates to cladding – specifically whether it was recorded on the Incident Recording System as being involved during any of these fatal fire events. The findings, detailed in the draft interim report, for this period were:

• there were no instances recorded in the complete dataset where cladding was involved in a fatal fire event
• it could not be determined from the complete dataset whether cladding contributed towards any injury(ies), so these could not be further assessed
• there were 291 fire fatalities recorded in the relevant dataset
• of the 291 fatalities, 186 were excluded, for various reasons, for example, where an incident record was limited to a description of the item first ignited
• of the remaining 105 fatalities, whilst their exact location was not known, it was possible to conclude seven fatalities occurred beyond the floor of fire origin, 82 fatalities occurred on the floor of fire origin and 16 fatalities remained unclear.

This final report builds on the findings of the draft interim report, which considered the 14-year period of incident record data, from April 2009 to April 2023, as well as fire investigation reports for fatalities over this period. To build on the draft interim report, the BSD requested that the BRE conduct a second phase of work involving a more detailed examination of 99 Fire Investigation reports (also held by the SFRS) of the 105 fatalities detailed above.

The SFRS were requested to provide 99 fire investigation (FI) reports for the 105 fatalities noted.

Not all 99 FI reports could be provided by SFRS and, during the study, BRE was asked to consider five additional FI reports (covering five fatalities) and discount seven FI reports (covering seven fatalities).

Thus, the study is focused on 75 reports covering 81 fire fatalities. The key findings from the second phase of work are shown below:

• In 80% of these (65 fire fatalities) the room of fire origin was determined to be - the bedroom, kitchen or living room.
• Most fatalities occurred in the bedroom (42%).
• There was only one case of a fire fatality occurring beyond the flat of fire origin; the death resulted from smoke inhalation. The SFRS investigation, concluded that, in their professional opinion, had the occupant been in, and / or remained within their own flat for the entire duration of the fire event and followed SFRS advice to open windows and to ‘stay put’’, this individual would likely not have died. The SFRS personnel further reported that there was no failure of the compartmentation – BRE Global noted the floor of the flat did collapse to the flat below at a later stage of the fire.
• No mention was made by the SFRS, in any of the 75 FI reports, that cladding had either:

a) been involved in any of these fires, or

b) contributed to the spread of fire beyond the flat of fire origin, or

c) contributed to the single fire fatality, beyond the flat of fire origin.