What is a personal emergency evacuation plan?
A personal emergency evacuation plan, or PEEP, is an individual plan setting out how a named person who cannot evacuate unaided will leave the building in a fire, and who is responsible for helping them.
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<img src="https://fireoptix.co.uk/glossary/peep/diagram.svg" alt="personal emergency evacuation plan — diagram from FireOptix" width="880" height="620" loading="lazy">
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<a href="https://fireoptix.co.uk/glossary/peep">What is a personal emergency evacuation plan?</a> — diagram by
<a href="https://fireoptix.co.uk">FireOptix</a>
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</figure>It exists because a general evacuation strategy assumes an average occupant, and a building always contains people that assumption does not fit — permanently, temporarily after an injury, or on a single visit.
A plan is specific: the route, the assistance required, the equipment involved and the named people responsible. A statement that somebody will be helped is not a plan.
For visitors rather than staff, the equivalent is usually a standard plan for the building applied at the point someone identifies a need, which needs to be arranged before it is needed rather than at the time.
In practice
A wheelchair user whose plan names one colleague.
The arrangement works and has been tested. The colleague is on leave for a fortnight in August.
An assistance arrangement with one name in it fails on the day that person is away, and the person it fails is the one who cannot leave without them.
The deputy is the field that turns a plan into a provision.
What goes wrong in practice
- A plan written once and never revisited after the person's circumstances or the building changed.
- Assistance assigned to a role that is not always on site, so the plan depends on somebody who may be absent.
- No provision at all for visitors, on the assumption the duty only covers employees.