How I Set Up the Fire Exit Check Template with Customers in Pilla

I'm Liam Jones, NEBOSH-qualified health and safety consultant and founder of Pilla. This is how I approach fire exit checks with customers, based on close to twenty years in frontline operations and advising hundreds of businesses on compliance. You can email me directly; I read every email.

Escape routes are the part of fire safety that fails quietly. I've walked through hundreds of buildings where the fire risk assessment is up to date, the extinguishers are serviced, and the alarm is tested weekly. Then you open the back fire exit and it sticks so badly you need both hands and a shoulder. Or there's a stack of delivery boxes in the corridor that's been there since Tuesday.

The problem is rarely that people don't care. It's that escape routes look fine until someone actually walks them and tests every door. That's what this check is for. I'll explain what you're looking for, give you a ready-made template you can schedule as a recurring work activity in Pilla, and cover the bits that actually matter when someone needs to get out of the building in a hurry.

Key Takeaways

  • What is a fire exit check? A weekly walk-through of all escape routes, fire exit doors, signage, and external areas to confirm that people can evacuate safely in an emergency
  • Why do you need to do it? The Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005 requires escape routes and exits to be kept clear and usable at all times during occupied hours. An HSE or fire authority inspector will check this
  • How do you set it up in Pilla? Use the work template below, set it as a recurring weekly activity, and assign it to the person responsible for fire safety at your premises
  • How do you automate the follow-up? Set up Poppi to chase the person responsible if the check isn't completed on time and flag any failed results to management

Article Content

Understanding Fire Exit Checks

Fire exit checks exist because escape routes degrade between formal fire risk assessments. Not through neglect, usually, but through normal operations. Deliveries arrive and boxes sit in corridors. Furniture gets moved for events and doesn't go back. A door swells in damp weather and nobody reports it because it still opens if you push hard enough.

The check itself is a systematic walk-through of every escape route in your building, from occupied areas to the assembly point outside. You're testing whether someone unfamiliar with the building, in darkness and smoke, could follow the signs and get out without hitting a locked door, a blocked corridor, or a dead end.

The legal basis is the Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005. It requires the responsible person to ensure escape routes and exits can be used as quickly and safely as possible, and that they're kept clear at all times. A fire authority inspector will look at this. So will an HSE inspector if they're on site for another reason. Blocked escape routes and locked fire exits are among the most common enforcement actions I've seen, and they're among the easiest to prevent.

Weekly is the standard frequency. Most businesses run fire exit checks alongside their weekly fire alarm test. But escape route clearance isn't a once-a-week concern. Staff should be reporting obstructions whenever they see them. The weekly check is the formal record that proves the system is working.

I'd walk the routes as an evacuee would. Start from the furthest occupied point, follow the signs, test every door, check every corridor, and finish at the assembly point. If you can't do that walk without encountering a single problem, the check has done its job. If you find something, you've caught it before an emergency did.

Setting It Up as a Work Activity

I've built a fire exit check template in Pilla covering escape route clearance, door operation, push bar function, signage, external areas, assembly points, locked exits, and lighting. It gives you a structured checklist, but you should edit it to match your premises.

In work activities, create a new activity using this template and set it to recur weekly. Assign it to the person responsible for fire safety checks, or rotate it across your duty managers. Tag it with "Health and Safety Checks" so it groups with your other safety inspections and Poppi can track completion across the set.

The template is designed to be edited. If you have more fire exits than the template covers, add them. If you have specific routes through kitchens or back-of-house areas, note them. The person doing the check should be able to follow the template and know exactly which routes to walk and which doors to test without guessing.

What I'd want to see when reviewing this:

The escape route inspection is the core of the check. Every item on that list needs physically verifying, not just glancing at. "All fire exit doors open freely" means you've pushed every push bar and opened every door fully. I've reviewed check records where someone has ticked every box in two minutes for a building with eight fire exits on three floors. That's not a check. That's a signature.

The most important items are door operation and route clearance. A stiff door or a partially blocked corridor might seem minor during a calm walk-through. In an evacuation with smoke and 200 people moving at once, that stiff door becomes a bottleneck and that half-blocked corridor becomes a crush point.

Common mistakes I see:

Only checking the route you personally use. If your building has four escape routes, all four need walking. The one you skip is the one that's been blocked since last Wednesday.

Recording a pass after clearing an obstruction. If you found delivery boxes blocking a corridor, the check result is a fail, even if you moved them immediately. The fail documents that the problem occurred. Passing because you fixed it hides the pattern, and if the same corridor is blocked three weeks running, you need that data to fix the root cause.

Not physically testing doors. I've seen fire exits that looked fine from five metres away but hadn't been opened in months. The push bar was seized. Weather seals had bonded the door shut. The only way to know is to push it open and walk through. Every door, every week.

Ignoring external areas. Escape doesn't end at the door. Bins placed outside fire exits, delivery vehicles blocking the path, gates locked on external routes. I once found a fire exit that opened onto a yard where a skip had been positioned directly against the door. The door opened about 15 centimetres. Enough to see daylight, not enough to get a person through.

Automate the Follow-Up with Poppi

Scheduling the check is one thing. Making sure it actually gets done, and that failures get acted on, is another. Poppi can handle the chasing so you don't have to.

If you set the work activity to recur weekly, Poppi will track whether it's been completed on time. You can set up automations to chase the assigned person if they're late, notify management when a check fails, and get a regular report showing completion rates across all your safety checks.

Here are three automations I'd set up for any recurring safety check:

Overdue training reminders

Automatically chase team members who have mandatory policies they haven't read yet. Poppi sends the reminder so you don't have to.

Poppi
Poppi

Tom, you have 2 overdue policies to read and acknowledge

Video completion alerts

Get notified when a team member finishes reading or watching a policy, so you can track progress without chasing.

Poppi
Poppi

Emma has completed a mandatory policy

Training gap analysis

Get a regular AI report showing which team members are behind on mandatory policies and where the gaps are across your team.

Poppi
Poppi

Training Report: 87% team completion. Tom and Sarah behind on 2 mandatory policies, due 3 days ago.