Fire safety in an indoor play centre has a property that no office, shop or warehouse shares: in an evacuation, most of the people in your building are children who arrived attached to an adult and are currently nowhere near them. The child is three levels up a padded frame. The adult is at a table with a coffee and a phone. Your fire strategy either accounts for that separation or it isn't a strategy.
The law here is the Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005, usually just called the Fire Safety Order, and it works differently from most of the regulation we've covered on this blog. It names a responsible person (for a play venue, almost always the employer or whoever controls the premises) and makes them personally accountable for fire precautions. The Order itself is at legislation.gov.uk, and the government's plain-language guidance on your duties is at gov.uk/workplace-fire-safety-your-responsibilities. Enforcement isn't the HSE; it's your local fire and rescue authority, who can and do inspect leisure venues.
The fire risk assessment stands on its own
Your general risk assessment and your fire risk assessment are legally separate documents, and the fire one recently got stricter. Since October 2023, under changes made by the Building Safety Act, the responsible person must record the fire risk assessment in full, regardless of how many people you employ. The old five-employee threshold for written findings no longer applies to fire. If your fire risk assessment is a paragraph inside your general assessment, or lives only in your head, that stopped being lawful before most venues noticed.
You can do the assessment yourself if you're competent and the premises are straightforward, but a multi-level padded structure with one staircase, a café kitchen and a hundred occupants is not most assessors' idea of straightforward. This is one of the places we'd actually recommend paying a specialist fire risk assessor, then owning the actions that come out of it. Either way, review it annually and after any layout change, and date every version.
Children hide. Plan for it.
The single most play-specific fact in fire evacuation: frightened children do not head for exits. They head into the frame, into the corners of ball pits, under the toddler slide, behind the party room door. An alarm that empties an office fills your hiding spots.
So the evacuation plan needs a sweep procedure with names on it. Which staff member sweeps which zone of the frame, in which order, and who confirms each zone clear to whoever is coordinating. Your tallest team member can't reach the top tube nest; the sweep allocation should already know that. And the tag-in system at your front desk, the one that exists so children can't leave unaccompanied, quietly doubles as your roll call: the count of tagged-in children is the number that must be standing at the assembly point. If your entry system can't tell you how many children are in the building right now, that's a finding for the fire risk assessment all by itself.
The other party in the room is the adults. Parents will move toward the frame to find their own child, against the flow, exactly when staff are sweeping it. The briefing that prevents chaos is thirty seconds long and delivered at every party host's induction: adults go to the assembly point, staff bring the children, and the host says so clearly and keeps saying it.
The everyday failures that make fires deadly
Fire and rescue inspectors who visit play venues report the same handful of findings on repeat. Buggies and pram parking migrating in front of the secondary exit, because that corner is conveniently empty. The fire door to the storeroom wedged open with a mop bucket in August because the corridor gets hot. Stock deliveries (balls, paper towels, party consumables) stacked in the escape corridor “just until Thursday”. Party room décor and helium balloon bundles drifting against ceiling heat detectors. And the kitchen, where most venue fires actually start, treated as the café's problem rather than the building's.
Every one of these is a daily-checks item, not an annual-audit item. Exits clear, doors closed and closing properly, corridors empty, extinguishers in place and in date. It's precisely the kind of drift that a signed morning daily checklist catches while it's still a mop bucket and not a finding.
The frame itself is the fuel load
Be honest about what a play frame is made of. Foam. Vinyl. Netting. Plastic balls by the tens of thousands. It's a carefully padded mountain of combustible material, and when foam burns it burns fast and produces smoke you cannot see through or breathe. This isn't a reason to panic. It's a reason to be serious about ignition sources, because the strategy for a fuel load you can't remove is keeping flame away from it entirely.
In practice that means a few hard lines. No smoking or vaping anywhere near the building's air intakes or doorways, enforced, not just signed. Portable heaters nowhere near the frame, ever, including the party room in December. Electrical work on or around the structure (the lights threaded through netting, the blower for the ball pit) done properly and inspected, because a cheap extension lead inside a foam structure is exactly the wrong place for one. And bins and pallets stored away from external walls, since fire services consistently flag outside bins as a common ignition point for out-of-hours fires that spread into buildings. The venue that burns at 2am didn't have an evacuation problem. It had a storage problem.
What gets tested, and how often
| What | Rhythm | Record |
|---|---|---|
| Fire alarm (a different call point each time) | Weekly | Log book entry with the point tested |
| Emergency lighting function test | Monthly | Log book entry |
| Fire doors: closing, seals, no wedges | Monthly, plus daily glance | Checklist entry |
| Extinguishers: in place, in date, unobstructed | Daily glance, annual service | Service certificate |
| Full evacuation drill with staff | At least annually, ideally each new-starter cohort | Drill log with timings and lessons |
| Fire risk assessment review | Annually and on any change | Dated revision |
The drill deserves a defence, because venues skip it for a reason that sounds sensible: you can't evacuate a building full of paying customers for practice. True, and not the point. A staff-only walk-through before opening, with someone playing the missing child in zone three, teaches your team the sweep in fifteen minutes and costs nothing. The drill log then does what every record on this blog does: proves the system is real. It's the same evidence logic our inspection preparation guide is built on, and a fire officer will ask for the log book before anything else.
Quick answers
Candles on the birthday cake? Your call, made as policy rather than per-party. Plenty of venues allow them in the party room only, lit by the host, lighter kept on the host, nowhere near the frame. Some have moved to reusable LED candles and report zero complaints from five-year-olds. Decide once, write it down, brief every host.
Do we need illuminated exit signs? Escape routes need signage and enough light to use them if the power fails. Your fire risk assessor will specify what your building needs; the monthly emergency lighting test is you keeping that promise.
Can the assembly point be the car park? It can, if the route to it doesn't cross the fire appliance access and children can wait there without standing among reversing cars. Walk it with a buggy once and you'll know.
Where SafePlay fits
The fire regime is a rhythm of small dated proofs, which is exactly what SafePlay is for: the weekly alarm test and monthly lighting checks scheduled in Daily Checks with named sign-offs, the fire risk assessment and service certificates versioned in the Document Vault, drill dates and host briefings tracked in Staff Compliance, and reminders that start chasing the annual items weeks before they lapse. When the fire officer asks for the log book, it's a screen, it's current, and nobody is flicking through a binder hoping.