Conjuring up images of Dickensian London or the Blitz era, the term ‘waking watch’ is the historical phrase that emerged in the immediate post-Grenfell Tower disaster era. A verbal reference from another time to mark our systemic failure to construct and maintain buildings that are inherently safe for residents.
Not quite the last resort of a full building evacuation, but the penultimate measure devised to protect residents from an unsafe building. The waking watch has brought back the reality of an unregulated watchperson, with no formal certification or competency assessment, making endless loops of a building physically looking out for smoke and fire and then manually raising the alarm.
This ‘sticking plaster’ solution was envisaged as a short-term measure, but eight years on from Grenfell, the unbelievable truth is that not only do some buildings continue to have a waking watch presence, but more worryingly, landlords are actively considering implementing waking watches on their buildings today.
The case for waking watches seemingly hasn’t been fundamentally undermined by high-profile incidents, including the Plymouth Fire Marshall discovered hiding in a cupboard on his phone instead of patrolling the Latitude 52 building. Or at Vallea Court in Manchester, where waking watch staff failed to fully evacuate the building following a fire in a lift shaft, as many residents slept through shouted warnings, air horns and banging on doors.
High-profile voices in the housing and fire safety sector have cast doubt on the efficacy of the waking watch. The National Fire Chiefs Council has been explicit in its guidance, stating that prolonged reliance on waking watches should be actively discouraged in favour of more robust technical solutions. Peter Apps, Contributing Editor at Inside Housing, has been one of its most vocal critics, highlighting repeated failures and the financial burden on leaseholders since as early as 2020.
Prominent fire engineers, including Professor Luke Bisby, who gave expert testimony at the Grenfell Inquiry, and Professor Steve Gwynne, a leading authority on evacuation modelling, have both stressed the need for evidence-based, reliable alternatives to temporary human patrols. The Fire Protection Association has gone further in describing waking watches as unsuitable for long-term use, warning that they offer little more than a costly illusion of safety.
The financial cost of waking watches is highly significant. A council in the north of England was paying around £3,000 per day for services covering just two housing blocks. Waking watch costs for a single block in London for two and a half years totalled over £1.6 million. Arriving at a true cost for waking watch services is complex, but the bill runs into the tens of millions of pounds, with just one Local Authority in London spending £4 million since 2022, consuming budgets that were never designed for this purpose.
It’s important to recognise that a waking watch is a classic budget trap. This service does not improve conditions for residents, it traps everyone in a perpetual status-quo loop. The budget allocated to the waking watch cannot be deployed towards a more sustainable interim technology-based solution or allocated for a comprehensive fire safety strategy action plan. In the £1.6 million London example, the eventual solution was the installation of a new fire alarm system in the building at a cost of circa £185K. So, the temporary waking watch solution had cost nearly nine times as much as the permanent alarm system, which would have negated the need for a waking watch in the first instance.
A less well explored issue is the reputational damage that waking watches are causing to organisations across the UK. In an era of citizen journalism, the 24/7 news cycle and algorithms that prioritise the negative, the stigma attached to a waking watch order is so great and toxic to an organisation’s reputation that it seems inexplicable that alternative technology-based solutions are not prioritised.
A recent conversation I had with a Registered Provider was somewhat more succinct on this point. From their perspective, a waking watch order is the badge of failure that no landlord ever wants on their watch.
The government is in full agreement. The Waking Watch Replacement Fund was set up in 2022 to transition landlords away from this costly measure and towards alternative solutions, for example a BS 5839-1, Category L5 common fire alarm system. Whether temporary or permanent fire alarm systems, remote monitoring systems or sprinkler retrofits, the fund recognises 21st century fire safety solutions that are superior in every aspect.
A recent extension to the fund through to March 2026, with an additional £21.11 million allocation, shows consensus between the UK’s two largest political parties on this issue. Calling time on the waking watch sector may seem an extreme proposal, but the housing sector must wean itself off this sticking plaster approach, which provides the illusion of safety for residents. Today, landlords have a legal duty to understand the condition of their buildings and how this impacts resident safety, which should eliminate the need for knee-jerk responses.
If urgent remedial action is required there are now more options than ever before to utilise expertise and technological innovations to protect residents, and these always-on fire safety solutions are not only more robust and reliable, but are a one-off investment that stops the budget draining cycle of waking watch providers. The evidence is clear and unambiguous that far from being an immediate safety blanket, a waking watch represents the worst of all situations for residents and organisations – an ineffectual drain on resources that damages reputations and distracts from the serious work of making residents safer in their homes. We need to put waking watches on notice and consign their activities to history once and for all.
