Progressive horizontal evacuation means moving residents sideways, not out. Instead of clearing the whole building in a fire, staff move people from the compartment where a fire is to the next compartment along — behind a fire door, on the same floor — and stop there unless the fire spreads further.
Why care homes use it instead of a full evacuation
A full simultaneous evacuation assumes everyone can get up, get moving, and get out within a few minutes. In a care home that assumption doesn't hold. Many residents have limited mobility, use wheelchairs or hoists, or have cognitive impairments that make a fire alarm confusing rather than a clear instruction to leave. For a home with residents like this, trying to evacuate the whole building at once is often slower and riskier than moving people a short, protected distance to safety.
Progressive horizontal evacuation is the strategy built around that reality. It doesn't get residents out of the building immediately — it gets them away from the fire immediately, into a space designed to hold against it while staff assess whether further movement is needed.
The compartmentation this depends on
None of this works without the building fabric behind it. Each storey used for residents needs to be divided into protected compartments by fire-resisting walls and doors, so that a fire in one compartment can be contained while the others stay safe. That's a structural requirement, not a procedural one — Approved Document B sets it out for new-build and refurbished care premises, and BS 9991:2024, the current standard for fire safety in the design of residential buildings, addresses care homes specifically — including PHE and sprinkler provision — and applies to existing buildings under review as well as new construction, so it's the standard most often used to judge whether an existing home's compartmentation still does its job.
This is exactly why a fire risk assessment has to look at the building, not just the fire drill. A care home can have excellent staff training and still be relying on a strategy the building can't support — a fire door that doesn't close properly, a wall breached by later building work, a cavity that isn't fire-stopped. The assessment has to check the compartmentation is real, not assumed.
What "good" looks like in practice
Staff need to know the plan, not just the theory: which compartment residents move to, who's responsible for which residents, and how mobility equipment gets used under pressure. Personal Emergency Evacuation Plans (PEEPs) for individual residents sit alongside this — they're specific to the resident, not the building, and worth their own explanation elsewhere. Here, the point is simpler: a PHE strategy only works if the people carrying it out know exactly what it asks of them.
Where this shows up in an assessment report
When SimplyNeat assesses a care home, the compartmentation behind a PHE strategy is checked directly — fire doors, wall integrity, cavity barriers — not taken on trust because the strategy is named in an old policy document. The finding is specific to what's actually in the building, not a generic statement that "PHE is in place." That's the same standard of evidence a CQC inspector expects to see behind the "Safe" key question, not just the name of a strategy in a policy document.