When Security Locks People In: The Dagenham Fire and Escape Route Conflicts
In the early hours of 26 August 2024, a bank holiday Monday, a fire broke out at the Spectrum Building on Freshwater Road in Dagenham. The building had been converted from its original use as a DuPont chemicals office block into sixty residential flats, and on the night of the fire it was occupied by around a hundred residents. Forty fire engines attended, along with approximately 225 firefighters from the London Fire Brigade, and the incident took more than eight hours to bring under control. Every resident escaped, which given the sequence of events that unfolded in the first minutes of the fire was considerably less certain an outcome than the phrase makes it sound. Twenty residents had to be rescued by firefighters. Two were taken to hospital. The building was so severely damaged that it was subsequently demolished. A joint investigation by the London Fire Brigade, the Health and Safety Executive in its capacity as Building Safety Regulator, and the Metropolitan Police was launched in the aftermath.
The Spectrum Building fire has since become one of the more thoroughly documented residential fire incidents in post-Grenfell Britain, with London Fire Brigade investigation documents, external wall fire review reports, and fire risk assessments all entering the public domain and revealing a catalogue of problems that had been known, in some form, to various parties for years before the building caught fire. This article is not primarily about the cladding, or the scaffolding, or the conversion history of the building, though all of those things matter and are part of the context. It is about one specific detail that emerged in the immediate aftermath and that deserves to be examined on its own terms, because it illustrates a problem that is by no means confined to the Spectrum Building or to residential high-rises in east London: a padlocked fire gate that blocked residents' escape route and came close to turning a dangerous fire into a fatal one.
Cydney Parker, a 26-year-old resident, told Sky News in an interview that has been widely watched since the night of the fire that when she ran through smoke-filled corridors and reached what she understood to be an escape route from the building, she found the exterior gate padlocked shut. She and her companions were forced to climb the fence, screaming at police officers on the other side to help them down. Her question — "How can they cut off a fire escape?" — is the one this article attempts to answer, and to frame in terms of what it means in practice for any responsible person managing access to a building where security and fire safety share the same physical infrastructure.
Sky News interview — Cydney Parker describes finding the fire gate padlocked
Watch: "It felt like I was going to die then and there" — Sky NewsSky News, August 2024. Opens in a new tab on the Sky News website.
What happened at Spectrum House
The fire started in the early hours when flaming objects fell onto the play area of a private nursery occupying the ground floor of the building. The fire spread upward through the scaffolding that had been erected around the building for cladding remediation works, before penetrating the sixth and seventh floors, which had been added during the conversion from offices to residential use in 2013 using a timber-frame construction. Once the fire reached that timber-frame structure, it became extremely difficult for firefighters to tackle because the flames were shielded from their hoses by the solar panels and the roof garden, which was fitted with timber decking, that occupied the upper floors of the building.
What made the initial minutes particularly dangerous for residents was the combination of two failures that London Fire Brigade investigation documents subsequently confirmed had been present in the building for some time before the fire. First, the communal areas of the building were fitted with red break-glass fire alarm activation points, but a fire risk assessment carried out in 2023 had noted that these were not, in fact, connected to any alarm system. The report stated that the call points achieved no obvious purpose. Residents were not woken by a fire alarm on the night of the fire; they were alerted by neighbours banging on doors, which is a far slower and less reliable warning mechanism, particularly in a seven-storey building in the early hours of a bank holiday morning. Second, when those residents who had been alerted attempted to evacuate through what they understood to be an escape route, they found the exterior gate padlocked shut.
The residents' spokesperson Philippa René described the situation in a statement: the fire escape route that should have been their lifeline was padlocked shut, the alarm system had failed to provide the warning they needed, and the building lacked sprinklers. Every resident eventually escaped, but the margin between that outcome and a very different one was narrow enough that the London Fire Brigade's deputy commissioner described the incident as one of the most extreme fires seen in a residential block in recent years, and residents reported that the experience of breathing toxic smoke and being trapped against a locked gate while burning debris fell around them continued to affect them long after the physical danger had passed.
The building's history: The Spectrum Building had been the subject of a 2020 external wall survey which confirmed that it did not fully comply with building regulations at the time of construction. Residents had reported broken fire doors and concerns about cladding to the building management company. A 2022 parliamentary inquiry heard evidence from the Spectrum Residents' Association about the building's compliance failures. Planning permission to remove the non-compliant high-pressure laminate cladding was granted in May 2023, but the remediation work had not been completed by the time of the fire in August 2024. The London Fire Brigade had known fire safety issues at the building on record. The building was owned by Arinium Limited and managed by Block Management UK, neither of which responded publicly to residents' accounts of management failures in the aftermath of the fire.
The conflict between security and fire safety: why it happens and why it matters
The padlocked gate at Spectrum House was not, in all likelihood, the product of malice or of deliberate indifference to fire safety. It was almost certainly the product of a familiar and understandable management impulse: the desire to secure the building against unauthorised access, anti-social behaviour, or theft. Padlocking gates and restricting access to external areas of residential buildings is something that building managers do routinely, for reasons that are entirely legitimate when considered in isolation. The problem is that the moment a physical barrier is introduced to control access to or from a building, it becomes, in a fire scenario, a potential obstacle to escape — and the responsible person for the building has a legal duty to ensure that escape routes are available, unobstructed, and usable at all times, not merely during business hours or when a caretaker happens to be on site.
This is the tension that the Spectrum Building case illustrates with particular clarity, but it is a tension that exists in a very wide range of building types and management arrangements, and it is one that comes up regularly in the fire risk assessments we carry out across our region. In residential blocks, it manifests most obviously in the management of communal gates, bin store access, and external staircase exits. In commercial and office premises, it appears in the use of coded access systems on stairwell doors, in the positioning of security desk checkpoints that control exit from the building, and in the common practice of locking certain exit doors during out-of-hours periods to prevent unauthorised entry. In care homes and healthcare settings, it takes the form of secure units where the restriction of movement is a clinical and safeguarding requirement that is in direct tension with the need for rapid evacuation. In schools, it is present in the management of perimeter gates and in the access control arrangements for pupil safety that can, if not properly thought through, impede the evacuation of a building in an emergency.
The law on this point is clear and unambiguous. Under the Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005, the responsible person has a duty to ensure that routes to emergency exits from premises and the exits themselves are kept clear at all times and that it is possible to open emergency exit doors from the inside without a key, card, code, or any other form of credential. The duty does not have a qualifier that makes it conditional on the time of day, the level of occupancy, or the security requirements of the building. An escape route that is usable during office hours but blocked at night, or usable from the front but not the rear of a building, is not an adequate escape route under the Order, and the responsible person who has allowed that situation to develop is in breach of their legal duties regardless of how understandable the security reasons for the arrangement might be.
The specific problem of push bars, panic hardware, and the padlock
The technical solution to the security-versus-escape conflict, for doors and gates that form part of the escape route from a building, has been well established for decades and is reflected in the relevant British Standards and in the guidance documents produced under the Fire Safety Order. Emergency exit doors and gates should be fitted with panic hardware, which is to say push bars or push pads that allow the door to be opened from the inside by a single movement without any prior knowledge of a code, the location of a key, or the operation of a latch. The push bar requires no familiarity with the building, no manual dexterity beyond the ability to push against a door, and no prior instruction — it works for a child who has never used it before, for a resident half-asleep and disoriented by smoke inhalation, and for a contractor who has been in the building for only a few hours. These are precisely the categories of person who need an escape route to work under emergency conditions, and the design of panic hardware reflects that requirement directly.
A padlock on a gate that forms part of the escape route from a building is not a security measure that has been incompletely or carelessly applied to a fire exit. It is a fundamental negation of the fire exit's purpose, because it converts a door or gate that is designed to open under pressure into one that requires the holder of a key to be present and available. In a fire at 2.44 in the morning, on a bank holiday, in a building where the alarm system is not functioning, the probability that a key holder will be on hand at the right place within the right time is approximately zero. The residents of the Spectrum Building who found themselves at that gate, with thick black smoke in the corridors behind them and burning debris falling around the building above them, had no key and no realistic prospect of obtaining one, which is exactly why Cydney Parker and her companions were forced to climb a fence while shouting for help from police officers on the other side.
This is not a new problem and it is not a subtle one. The Fire Safety Order's requirement that emergency exits can be opened from the inside without a key is one of the most straightforward provisions in the entire legislative framework, and its purpose is self-evident. The persistence of padlocked fire gates in managed residential buildings — years after Grenfell, with a Building Safety Act that has strengthened the accountability framework considerably, and with HSE and fire authority enforcement activity at a level that has not been seen for a generation — reflects something about the way in which security decisions are made and implemented in buildings without adequate oversight of their fire safety implications. As we discussed in our article on the Building Safety Act 2022 for managing agents, the direction of travel in building safety regulation is towards greater individual accountability for the people who make these decisions, and the Spectrum Building case may yet test the extent to which that accountability can be enforced in practice.
Access control technology and the false sense of security
The padlock is the most visible and unambiguous form of the security-versus-escape conflict, but it is not the only one, and in some respects the more technologically sophisticated versions of the same problem are harder to identify and address because they are less obviously incompatible with fire safety requirements. Electronic access control systems, which use proximity cards, PIN codes, or biometric readers to restrict movement through a building, are now ubiquitous in commercial premises and increasingly common in residential blocks, and they present a more complex challenge for fire risk management than a padlocked gate because the failure mode is less predictable and less visible.
The standard approach to integrating electronic access control with fire safety is to ensure that the system is connected to the building's fire alarm, so that when the alarm activates all electronically controlled doors on escape routes release to the open position and remain open until the alarm is reset. This is sometimes described as fail-safe or fail-open operation, and it is the configuration that the relevant standards require for doors on escape routes. The problem in practice is that access control systems are specified, installed, and maintained by security contractors whose primary interest is in the security performance of the system, while the fire safety implications of how those systems are configured on escape routes are the responsibility of the building's responsible person and its fire risk assessors. Where those two parties are not actively coordinating, it is entirely possible for a system to be installed that does not meet the fail-safe requirement, or that meets it on some doors but not others, or that was correctly configured on installation but has since been altered or impaired without anyone with fire safety knowledge being informed.
The fire risk assessment for any building with electronic access control on escape routes should specifically address the integration between those systems and the fire alarm, confirm that escape route doors will open automatically on alarm activation, verify that the fail-safe configuration has been tested and confirmed to work, and identify any doors or gates that are not covered by the automatic release mechanism and that therefore require a different solution, such as panic hardware, a break-glass override, or a management procedure that is reliably deliverable under emergency conditions. As we explored in our article on managing long-term fire alarm faults, the integrity of the interface between the alarm system and other building safety systems is one of the areas where management failures most commonly go undetected for extended periods, and access control integration is a particularly common gap.
The care home and secure setting problem
The tension between security and fire safety is at its most acute in settings where the restriction of movement is not merely a property management preference but a legal and clinical obligation. Secure dementia units in care homes must prevent residents from leaving unattended for their own safety, which means that the doors through which those residents would need to evacuate in the event of a fire are, by design, locked against their use. The resolution to this tension in those settings is not a technical one but a procedural one: the evacuation of residents from a secure unit requires trained staff to be present in sufficient numbers to assist every resident who cannot self-evacuate, and the fire risk assessment must address whether those staff numbers and that training are reliably available at every time of day and night when the building is occupied, including overnight when staffing levels are typically at their lowest. Personal Emergency Evacuation Plans for every resident who cannot evacuate independently are a legal requirement that follows directly from this, and the failure to have them in place is one of the most common significant findings in fire risk assessments for care settings.
The school setting presents a related but distinct version of the same problem. Perimeter gates that are secured during the school day for safeguarding reasons — to prevent unauthorised adults from entering the site and to prevent pupils from leaving without authorisation — are entirely appropriate as a safeguarding measure and entirely incompatible with fire safety if they cannot be rapidly opened in an emergency. The solution, as with any security measure on an escape route, is to ensure that the means of opening the gate quickly and reliably in an emergency is available to the people who will need to use it, that those people are trained in its use, and that the arrangement is tested through evacuation drills that reflect realistic conditions rather than the convenient scenarios that tend to feature in drills where the primary aim is to produce a clean record rather than to test the system genuinely.
What the responsible person must do
The practical implications of the security-versus-escape tension for responsible persons managing buildings of any type are straightforward to state, even if they sometimes require careful thought and investment to implement correctly.
- Walk every escape route as if you were evacuating in an emergency The most direct way to identify a security measure that conflicts with fire safety is to physically follow every escape route from every part of the building to the final exit point, at a time of day when the building is in its normal operational state, and to test whether every door, gate, and barrier on that route can be opened quickly and without a key by someone who is not familiar with the building. A gate that a caretaker can open in thirty seconds with the right key is not an acceptable escape route if the caretaker is not on site at 3am. This test should be repeated after any change to the building's access control arrangements and should form a standard part of every fire risk assessment review.
- Ensure that all doors and gates on escape routes are fitted with panic hardware or a reliable automatic release mechanism Any door or gate on an escape route that cannot currently be opened from the inside by a single push movement, without a key, code, or credential, is non-compliant with the Fire Safety Order and should be remediated as a matter of priority. The appropriate solution will depend on the specific location and the security requirements of the building, but it will invariably involve either panic hardware, an automatic release linked to the fire alarm, or a combination of both. A padlock, a key-operated deadlock, or an electronic lock without an automatic fire alarm release is never an acceptable configuration for an escape route door or gate, regardless of the security rationale for its presence.
- Integrate access control systems with the fire alarm and verify that the integration works Every electronically controlled door on an escape route should be confirmed to release to the open position automatically when the building's fire alarm activates, and this should be tested as part of the regular maintenance programme for both the alarm system and the access control system. Where the two systems are maintained by different contractors, it is essential that someone with responsibility for the whole building's fire safety is aware of both maintenance programmes and ensures that the integration is tested together rather than each system in isolation. As we explored in our article on fire alarm grades and categories, the specification of the alarm system has direct implications for what the system can reliably do in terms of interfacing with other building systems, and a system that was adequately specified for the building's original use may not be adequate for its current configuration.
- Document security decisions that affect escape routes and obtain sign-off from the responsible person In buildings with multiple parties involved in management — freeholders, managing agents, facilities managers, security contractors — one of the most common routes by which padlocks and other barriers end up on escape routes is the absence of any formal process for evaluating the fire safety implications of security decisions before they are implemented. A gate is padlocked because the caretaker decides it is a reasonable security measure, or because a new security contractor recommends it, or because a tenant requests it, without anyone with fire safety knowledge being asked whether the gate is part of the escape route and what the consequences of locking it would be. Establishing a simple principle that any change to access control in the building requires sign-off from the responsible person, and that that sign-off includes a check against the building's fire risk assessment and evacuation plan, would prevent a significant proportion of the incidents where security measures compromise escape routes.
- Test escape routes under conditions that reflect the actual emergency scenario An evacuation drill that takes place during normal working hours, in good visibility, with all staff present and all gates propped open in advance, does not test whether the building's escape routes are actually usable under emergency conditions. The building whose escape routes are tested only in favourable conditions is the building whose responsible person does not actually know whether those routes would work at 3am on a bank holiday in August, and the Spectrum Building is a reminder of what that knowledge gap can mean in practice. Assembly points, evacuation routes, and the operation of gates and barriers should all be tested in conditions that are sufficiently realistic to reveal weaknesses, and the results should inform a genuine review of the building's escape strategy rather than simply providing documentation of a drill having taken place.
A failure that was already known
One of the most unsettling aspects of the Spectrum Building case, as more detail emerged in the months following the fire, was the extent to which the building's fire safety failures were not unknown to the parties responsible for managing it. The fire alarm call points that achieved no obvious purpose had been documented in a fire risk assessment in 2023. The broken fire doors had been reported to building management by residents. The non-compliant cladding had been the subject of surveys, parliamentary submissions, and planning applications stretching back years. The London Fire Brigade had known fire safety issues at the building on record. And yet, in the early hours of 26 August 2024, residents were woken not by an alarm but by neighbours banging on doors, and when they ran for their lives they found the escape route blocked by a padlock.
This is the pattern that the Swiss Cheese model of fire safety failure describes: not a single catastrophic error, but multiple layers of defence that each contain holes, and on a particular night those holes align. The alarm system that should have provided early warning was not functional. The escape route that should have provided a reliable exit was padlocked. The cladding and scaffolding that should not have been the configuration they were became the mechanism for a fire that spread with extraordinary speed to a building that had already been identified as unsafe. None of these failures occurred in isolation, and the resolution of any one of them might have been sufficient to prevent a near-catastrophe from becoming a catastrophe. The padlocked gate was perhaps the most avoidable of all of them, because it required no technical expertise to identify and no significant expenditure to resolve.
We work with managing agents, landlords, and responsible persons across the North West and North Wales in carrying out fire risk assessments that address the practical realities of how buildings are actually managed, including the ways in which security arrangements and fire safety obligations interact. If you manage a building where you are not certain that every escape route is usable without a key at any time of day, or where access control systems have been installed or modified without a fire safety review, we would welcome the opportunity to discuss what a proper assessment would involve. Please get in touch.
Is your building's security putting escape routes at risk?
We carry out fire risk assessments across the North West and North Wales that include a thorough review of escape routes, access control arrangements, and the interface between security systems and fire safety. If you have concerns about any of these areas, please get in touch.
Get in touch Fire Risk Assessments Managing Agents Fire Door InspectionsThis article draws on publicly reported information about the Spectrum Building fire in Dagenham on 26 August 2024, including reporting by Sky News, Inside Housing, Construction News, the London Centric newsletter, and statements from the London Fire Brigade, the Health and Safety Executive, and Cheshire Fire and Rescue Service. The fire risk management commentary is general guidance and does not constitute legal advice. Investigations into the fire by the HSE, London Fire Brigade, and Metropolitan Police were ongoing at the time of writing. Fletcher Risk Management Ltd is based in Chester and provides fire risk assessments, fire door inspections, and fire safety training across the North West and North Wales.