When buildings can’t do what they are meant to do

The image that’s stayed with me this week isn’t smoke pouring from a burning warehouse or the skeletal remains of a logistics hub after a major fire. Instead, it’s a photograph of a brand new multi-storey industrial building that looks at first glance to be the kind of flexible, high-value workspace our planning system actively promotes. Offering tall ceilings, roller shutters and vehicle access to the upper levels, this flagship scheme in Barking has been described as a ‘pioneer project’ but two years on, most of it is empty writes Tom Roche, Secretary of the Business Sprinkler Alliance.

The reason isn’t market collapse or lack of demand. It’s a fire strategy. The development in question has been designed as a multi-storey industrial and warehousing scheme, part of a drive to maximise land use to free up other areas for housing. On paper, it achieved remarkable land efficiency. The units were large, airy and perhaps tall enough to accommodate mezzanines. The kind of space you would reasonably expect to store goods, materials and products at scale for a local logistics hub.

However, despite those apparent credentials, the completed building has struggled to attract occupiers. Only a small fraction of the available space has been let. The issue, it transpired, is that while the building resembles a collection of small warehouse units, it cannot operate as one in any meaningful sense.

The sprinkler system had been designed for industrial use, not for storage. As a result, flammable materials can only be stored to a height of around 1.2 metres. In units that were otherwise capable of accommodating storage many times that height, the commercial reality became immediately obvious. What should have been flexible, lettable space became highly constrained accommodation suitable only for a limited range of occupiers.

The sprinkler system was described by Barking and Dagenham Council as having been ‘value engineered’ to ‘balance cost, compliance and anticipated use’. It complied with fire safety regulations, and the council has said it went beyond the guidance in fitting the sprinklers. It passed the checks. It was signed off. Unfortunately, the outcome has been a building that does not do what it was built to do.

This is not a story about sprinklers failing, rather a story about assumptions going unchallenged and then meeting the reality of enforcement which spotlights the limitations of the design.

Fire engineering strategies are sadly often treated as static technical documents, agreed early and rarely revisited. They can determine what can be stored, how space can be used, how easily it can be adapted and, ultimately, how commercially viable it is. When those strategies are developed around the minimum anticipated for compliance, rather than the likely or marketed use, the consequences can be severe. Even when they are updated, further value engineering can quietly redefine the future life of a building. In this case, it is reported that an additional £2.2 million is needed to put the property back in a position so that it can be used in the way intended.

The parallels with other parts of the sector are uncomfortably familiar. We have seen schools designed with atria only to find they cannot hold events in them. Large-scale warehouses designed with impressive clear heights, only for it to emerge later that the structure will not be protectable with ceiling-only automatic sprinklers. In these cases occupiers are faced with decisions over layouts and perhaps compromises over the use of their premises. Retrofitting becomes complex, expensive or simply unviable. Once again, the building technically complies, but practically fails.

What links these examples is not poor intent or a lack of regulation. It is a culture that can misread compliance as success, limiting future use and unfortunately outcomes which miss the needs of occupiers/owners.

At the Business Sprinkler Alliance, we often talk about outcomes because outcomes are what owners, occupiers and communities actually experience. A building that cannot be let because its fire strategy restricts its use is not a success. A development that requires millions of pounds of remedial work shortly after completion is not a success. A scheme that looks right, feels right, but functions incorrectly has failed at a fundamental level.

The uncomfortable question is whether we are too willing to accept these outcomes because the paperwork says everything is fine. As multi-storey industrial and warehousing developments become more common, this matters more, not less. These buildings are long-term assets. They are expected to adapt, to support different occupiers over time and to respond to changing patterns of production and storage. Designing fire protection systems that lock them into a narrow operational envelope undermines that flexibility from day one.

If a building looks like a warehouse, is marketed as a warehouse and is priced as a warehouse, then it should be able to operate as one. Anything else is not regulatory success. It is a warning sign.

At the Business Sprinkler Alliance, we will continue to argue for fire safety approaches that value protection, resilience and continuity alongside life safety. When compliance delivers buildings that don’t work, it’s not just a technical issue. It’s a failure of outcome.