Meeting fire safety requirements when building with timber

Thinking about fire safety from the outset is essential. Sequencing temperature‑based degradation, compartment performance, façade detailing, and construction sequencing is critical to ensure both life safety and long‑term resilience of timber structures. This guide provides standardised details, proven test data, a five‑level fire protection strategy, and requirements for project‑specific fire engineering.

Fire safety must be designed‑in from concept stage. This includes appointing experienced fire engineers, planning encapsulation/compartmentation, treating voids/risers, considering hybrid cores and ground floors, and engaging insurers early with a clear, test‑backed risk‑mitigation narrative. This Timber Accelerator Hub report is essential for experts who need the full picture of fire safety, regulation, and insurance around mass timber in the UK.

This Playbook demonstrates robust fire safety in a material that behaves fundamentally differently from steel or concrete, and therefore requires more than standard compliance to be insurable. By integrating fire‑risk thinking with water‑management strategies, digital quality control, and insurer engagement, it provides a roadmap for designing mass‑timber buildings that are not only climate‑positive but also safe, resilient, and insurable.

This guide gives designers, engineers, contractors, and insurers a structured, risk‑based framework they can use immediately in real projects, helping them understand how exposed timber influences fire dynamics, structural performance, and fire‑spread pathways, and how to mitigate these effects. It empowers experts to make informed decisions, justify design choices to regulators and insurers, and apply consistent, defensible fire‑safety strategies in buildings.