Building Regulations 2010 regulation 38, UK wide
Regulation 38 Fire Safety Information
Regulation 38 is the point where a building's fire design is handed to the people who have to live with it. It is also the duty most often skipped, which is why so many responsible persons manage a building they have never been told how to operate. AL23 Safety compiles, reviews and reconstructs regulation 38 fire safety information for clients UK wide.
What is regulation 38 fire safety information?
The building explaining itself to whoever runs it next
Regulation 38 of the Building Regulations 2010 requires the person carrying out building work to give the responsible person information about the fire safety design of the building. The regulation defines it as information relating to the design and construction of the building and to the services, fittings and equipment in it, which will assist the responsible person to operate and maintain the building with reasonable safety.
In practice that is a pack. As-built plans marked with escape routes and compartment lines, the fire strategy and its assumptions, equipment specifications and commissioning records and the management arrangements the design relied upon. It is the difference between running a building and guessing at one.
Who needs one
Anyone completing work on a building the Fire Safety Order touches
- New build of any relevant building, meaning one the Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005 applies to or will apply to once the work is finished.
- Extensions to existing offices, schools, care homes, hotels, retail units and industrial buildings.
- Blocks of flats, where the Fire Safety Order reaches the common parts, the structure and the external walls.
- A relevant change of use, for example an office converted to residential or a house converted to an HMO.
- Purpose-built student accommodation, care homes and hotels, all of which sit squarely in scope.
- Clients taking handover who suspect the pack they were given is a box of operation and maintenance manuals with no fire content.
- Responsible persons of existing buildings who have discovered at the fire risk assessment stage that no pack exists.
Regulation 38 does not apply to a single private dwellinghouse. The Fire Safety Order does not apply to domestic premises occupied as a private dwelling. Everything else that the Order touches is in scope.
The regulations that apply
Your legal framework, in plain terms
Regulation 38 sits in the Building Regulations 2010, SI 2010/2214. It bites where building work consists of or includes the erection or extension of a relevant building or involves a relevant change of use and where Part B of Schedule 1 imposes a requirement in relation to that work. The England version was amended with effect from 2 March 2025 to add an acknowledgement and a notification. The responsible person is the person defined by article 3 of the Fire Safety Order, which is usually the employer, the owner or whoever has control of the premises.
Building Regulations 2010 regulation 38(1)
Establishes when the duty applies, by reference to relevant buildings and relevant changes of use under Part B.
Building Regulations 2010 regulation 38(2)
Sets the timing. Where the building is not occupied during the work, information must be given no later than completion or occupation, whichever is earlier. In all other cases, the date of completion.
Building Regulations 2010 regulation 38, as amended from 2 March 2025
The responsible person must give the person carrying out the work a notice acknowledging receipt and confirming the information is sufficient to understand, operate and maintain the building. The relevant authority must then be notified.
Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005 article 9
The fire risk assessment must be suitable and sufficient. Since 1 October 2023 it must be recorded in full whatever the size of the premises.
Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005 article 17
Fire safety measures must be maintained in efficient working order and good repair, which cannot be done sensibly without equipment schedules and commissioning records.
It is not Appendix G any more
This trips up experienced people so it is worth being direct. In the current Approved Document B, the 2019 edition incorporating the 2020, 2022 and 2025 amendments published on 11 March 2025, the fire safety information guidance sits at Section 17 of Volume 1 for dwellings and Section 19 of Volume 2 for buildings other than dwellings.
Appendix G of Volume 1 is "Documents referred to". It is not fire safety information. In the pre-2019 editions of Approved Document B the guidance genuinely was at Appendix G, which is where the habit comes from. If a consultant's report or a contractor's handover certificate still cites Appendix G for regulation 38, treat it as a sign the document was copied forward rather than written for your building.
What the service covers
From a simple pack to a full reconstruction
- A scope check establishing whether regulation 38 applies at all and to which parts of a phased or partly occupied project.
- Compilation of the basic pack for simple buildings: as-built plans showing escape routes and exit capacity, fire-resisting construction and separating elements, fire doorsets, detection and alarm devices, signage, emergency lighting, extinguishers, firefighting equipment and hydrants.
- Compilation of the complex building pack: the full fire strategy with design assumptions, occupant loads and escape route capacities, all passive measures including compartmentation, cavity barriers, fire dampers and shutters and all active systems including suppression, smoke control and communications.
- High risk areas, particular hazards, power supplies and secure information box locations.
- Equipment specifications with operational details, manuals, software, zoning and maintenance schedules.
- Collation and gap analysis of commissioning records, which is where most packs fail.
- The management assumptions the fire design depended on, written down rather than implied.
- Provisions for evacuating disabled people, cross-referenced to the evacuation strategy.
- The acknowledgement and notification chain introduced in March 2025 so the transaction is closed rather than left open.
- Retrospective reconstruction of the pack for existing buildings where none was ever produced.
- Handover briefing for the incoming responsible person and the facilities team so somebody in the building understands the document.
Our process
Find the receiver then build the pack
- 01
Establish who receives it
The responsible person often does not exist at practical completion. We identify the receiving party early because the duty has a deadline attached to it.
- 02
Audit what exists
We list what the design team, contractor and specialists actually hold against what the pack has to contain, then issue a single consolidated request.
- 03
Compile and structure
We build an indexed pack organised around the fire strategy rather than around the trade packages, with as-built drawings verified against site.
- 04
Verify by inspection
Where compartmentation, dampers or door specification cannot be evidenced from records, we survey it. An as-built drawing that nobody has checked is not an as-built drawing.
- 05
Hand over and close the loop
We manage the acknowledgement, the notification to the relevant authority and the briefing of the receiving team.
What you get
An indexed pack you can maintain, not archive
- An indexed regulation 38 fire safety information pack, issued electronically in a structure that can be maintained rather than archived.
- Marked-up as-built fire plans showing compartment lines, escape routes, doorsets, detection and firefighting provision.
- A fire strategy document stating the design assumptions and the management arrangements they depend on.
- A commissioning and equipment schedule listing what was installed, what was commissioned and what is outstanding.
- A gap register naming every missing item, who holds it and what the consequence of never getting it is.
- A handover certificate with the acknowledgement and notification evidence attached.
What we need from you
The team, the records and site access
- Access to the design team, principal contractor and specialist subcontractors before they demobilise.
- The Building Regulations application route used because it determines the notification timescale.
- Any existing operation and maintenance manuals, commissioning certificates and as-built drawings, no matter how incomplete.
- The identity of the responsible person or the party who will hold that role at occupation.
- Site access for verification survey where records are missing.
Why AL23 Safety
The people who write the fire strategy build the pack
Accountable
If the pack cannot be completed because a subcontractor never commissioned a system, we write that in the gap register rather than quietly leaving a blank page.
Expert and chartered
The pack is built by people who write fire strategies so the document reflects how the building is meant to work rather than what was bought.
One team, three disciplines
The same team that compiles the pack carries out fire risk assessments and compartmentation surveys, which is why the gaps get found rather than inherited.
UK wide
We deliver handover packs and retrospective reconstructions on projects across the UK.
Handover is a deadline, not an aspiration
Tell us where you are in the programme
If you are approaching practical completion, we can still get this right. If you completed three years ago and have just been asked for the pack by an insurer or a purchaser, we can rebuild it. Both conversations start the same way.
Common questions
Answers, up front
Cannot see your question? Get in touch and we will answer it directly.
Contact usRegulation 38 places the duty on the person carrying out the work, which in practice means the contractor. That is exactly why it fails. The contractor leaves site, the responsible person may not have been appointed and historically nobody checked. Clients who want the pack should write it into the contract as a named deliverable with payment attached rather than relying on the regulation alone.
The England version of regulation 38 was amended to add an acknowledgement and a notification. The responsible person must give the person carrying out the work a notice confirming receipt and confirming the information is sufficient to understand, operate and maintain the building. The relevant authority is then notified, with different timescales depending on whether the work went through standard building control, a competent person self-certification scheme or third-party certification. Confirm the exact day counts for your route with your building control body before you rely on them.
You reconstruct it. That means gathering whatever records exist, then closing the remaining gaps by survey rather than assumption. Compartmentation, cavity barriers, fire dampers and door specification are the usual unknowns. The output is not technically a regulation 38 pack because the moment for that has passed. It performs the same function and it is what a fire risk assessor, an insurer or a purchaser will accept.
Regulation 38 information is the fire safety component of what feeds the golden thread. The two are not the same. Regulation 38 applies to all relevant buildings. The golden thread applies to higher-risk buildings and requires the information to be electronic, structured, accurate, accessible and secure throughout the building's life. If you are delivering a higher-risk building, build the pack to golden thread structure from the start. Assembling it retrospectively usually means invasive survey.
No. The dependency runs the other way. The regulation 38 pack is the evidential base for the fire risk assessment. Without it the assessor is reverse-engineering the fire strategy from what can be seen on a walk round, which is precisely how compartmentation and damper defects stay unrecorded for years. Article 17 maintenance regimes built without the equipment schedules are guesswork dressed up as a planned programme.
The drivers are building size and complexity, whether the project team is still contactable, how complete the commissioning records are and how much verification survey is needed to close the gaps. A pack compiled at handover on a live project with a co-operative contractor is a fraction of the cost of a retrospective reconstruction on an occupied building. Tell us the building type, the floor area and whether the contractor is still on site and we will price it properly.
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