New plans for Beechmere but the sprinkler gap remains open

Nearly seven years after fire gutted the Beechmere Retirement Village in Crewe, new plans have been submitted to rebuild on the site, and this time sprinklers are part of the design from the outset, writes Iain Cox, Chair of Business Sprinkler Alliance.

In August 2019, fire tore through the building, a timber-framed, unsprinklered extra care facility housing 132 apartments for elderly and disabled residents. No lives were lost thanks to a swift evacuation, but more than 150 people lost their homes, and with them, their independence and sense of community.

This week an application was lodged with Cheshire East Council by developer Avantage, with plans for a 75-apartment extra care building, designed by Cassidy & Ashton to replace the original complex. The site has stood empty since the fire.

The replacement proposal is smaller in scale than the building it replaces, three storeys in a U-shape with a mix of one and two-bedroom apartments, communal lounges, a dining area, a wellbeing suite and other shared facilities. It will be brick built with timber-effect cladding, and the application includes a 30-page fire strategy confirming that sprinklers will be installed throughout. In fact those sprinklers are part of the thinking for a defend in place approach for this building.

The provision of sprinklers is genuinely good news, and a sign that the lessons of 2019 have shaped this design. But it is worth being clear about why sprinklers are in this particular building: they are there because the owner has chosen to include them, not because they are required by regulatory guidance. Despite this, and other similar blazes in extra-care facilities, the guidance still hasn’t changed for these types of buildings.

Beechmere remains an unusual case precisely because it sits in a regulatory grey area. It is specialised housing destined to be marketed to older, often less mobile residents, yet because it does not meet the legal definition of a care home, it falls outside the recent changes to Approved Document B that made sprinklers mandatory in new care home developments. It would also remain outside of the recent 2026 consultation on Approved Document B only requiring additional detection systems.

After the 2019 fire, Cheshire Fire and Rescue Service called for sprinklers to be fitted across care facilities of this kind. ADB guidance, however, only requires generic fire protection measures for buildings like Beechmere, not sprinklers specifically. The two are not the same thing, and the gap between them is exactly where this latest development sits.

The Business Sprinkler Alliance has made this argument before and will keep making it. Vulnerability does not stop at the threshold or change because of a name. A resident of an extra care scheme may well face challenges in terms of mobility, age or ability to evacuate quickly in a fire. Classification should not be the deciding factor in whether a building gets the protection that could save lives.

Iain Cox, Chair of the Business Sprinkler Alliance, said: "It's encouraging to see sprinklers built into the new Beechmere facility from the start, and credit to the developer for that. But this building is still going up in a regulatory gap that we've been highlighting for years. Extra care housing is not legally required to have sprinklers, only generic fire protection. Beechmere shows what can go wrong without them, and it shouldn't take individual developers doing the right thing voluntarily for that risk to be addressed. It should be a requirement."

Seven years on from the fire, the site is finally moving towards redevelopment. But until extra care housing is brought within the scope of sprinkler requirements, the vulnerability will remain and we will continue to question why there is a difference.