FREP
Flood Risk Emergency Plan
Where a route in or out of a site floods before the building does, the authority will want to know what happens to the people inside. A Flood Risk Emergency Plan answers that in plain language: who is warned, when, and what they do next.
- When it is needed
- Where dry access cannot be achieved, for more vulnerable uses, or as a pre-commencement or pre-occupation planning condition
- Who asks for it
- Planning officers, the Environment Agency and council emergency planning teams
- Also known as
- Flood Warning and Evacuation Plan (FWEP); flood response plan
What an emergency plan can and cannot do
An emergency plan manages the risk that remains after the design is already safe. It is not a way of making an unsafe proposal acceptable, and it does not stand in for the Exception Test where that applies. Authorities have seen it used that way often enough to be alert to it.
Used properly, it is a genuinely useful document — the thing that tells whoever lives or works there what the warning means and what to do about it.
What makes a plan the authority will accept
Specific detail, mostly. Not “residents will evacuate to a place of safety”, but the route on a plan, the depth expected along it, the lead time the Environment Agency warning service actually gives for that reach, and the name of the role responsible for making the call.
We also cover the awkward cases the generic templates skip: occupants who cannot self-evacuate, what happens overnight, and what a safe refuge within the building would need to look like if leaving is not realistic.
Written to be used, not just submitted
The plan is submitted to a planning officer, but it is read — if it is ever read in earnest — by whoever is in the building at two in the morning. We write the occupant-facing part as a short, plain sheet that can be put on a wall, and keep the policy detail behind it for the case officer.
Often needed alongside
Other reports for the same application
Not sure what your application needs?
Send us the site address and a line about what you are proposing. We will tell you which reports the authority is likely to ask for, and what they will cost — usually within one working day.