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FEATURE ARTICLE

05 May 2026

Resident’s Corner: The human cost of evacuation

On 10 June 2025, around 3pm, a letter was slid under my front door. It told residents that our building needed to be vacated. Following investigations into fire protection issues with the steel frame structure, we were told there was an increased potential risk associated with fire and that the building had to be emptied as a precautionary measure while those issues were investigated and remediated. We were asked to be ready to leave six days later, with everyone out by 22 June.

 In disbelief that our homes were no longer considered safe enough to live in, we had six days to work out where we were going. Six days to think about work, pets, belongings, storage, access, family responsibilities, parking, bills - all the ordinary things that suddenly become urgent when someone tells you to leave your home. We were given a phone number for a company that was meant to help us find alternative accommodation. That was it.

The biggest question here is not whether the building needed remediating. It is why we were being told a week before we had to move, when it was understood that the same structural issues existed when our neighbours’ block was evacuated four months earlier.

 This article is not about arguing that unsafe buildings should remain occupied. If a building is unsafe, life safety must come first. It is about what happens when organisations treat evacuation as a logistical exercise rather than the beginning of a major human disruption.

Risk and disruption

In fire safety, everyone focuses on the building - structural issues, fire protection, remediation, risk, compliance, funding, programme, procurement. All the while, residents are the ones who have to live with the consequences of each decision.

Being evacuated is not the same as being temporarily inconvenienced. It’s the sudden removal of the place where your life is organised. Your home is where your routine lives and where you feel some sense of control. This is what gets underestimated.

A project team may see a successful evacuation as residents being moved out within the required timeframe. But for the resident, that is only the first disruption. Who’s tracking what happens after that? Where are they living? Can they work properly? Can they sleep? Can they cook? Can they access their belongings? Are they being updated? Do they know who is accountable?

Ignoring those questions means the risk moves from the building into people’s lives. Once that happens, the consequences are not just emotional. They become practical, operational, and commercial. Residents who feel aggrieved or ignored are more likely to complain, escalate, disengage, challenge decisions, and lose trust completely.

Residents who are supported early are more likely to cooperate, share information and issues, and stay engaged through what is often a long and uncertain remediation process.

This is why resident support has to be built into the evacuation process from the beginning. Not through the same engagement and liaison systems that already exist, but through specialist support designed around displacement, behaviour, trust, and wellbeing.

Silence is not a strategy

The issues that triggered my evacuation had already been identified in a neighbouring building at the end of February 2025. The decision to vacate our block did not appear out of nowhere, yet residents were told nothing until the letter arrived in June.

I understand why organisations hold back information. They worry about creating panic and partial findings being shared before they are verified. They worry about legal exposure and questions they cannot yet answer. But silence has a cost, and it is residents who pay.

Late notification meant residents had days to make decisions that should have been planned over weeks or months. It meant household needs, such as health conditions, caring responsibilities, work-from-home needs, mobility issues, and school runs are made under pressure. That is not safer, it is just more comfortable for the organisations managing the message.

If evacuation is a realistic possibility, residents should be brought into the process earlier. Not alarmed or overwhelmed with technical detail, but properly engaged. People should be told what is being investigated and what the possible outcomes are.

Building an understanding of who lives in the building before you have to move them is not a wellbeing add-on, it is basic operational planning.

 The instinct to control information until the last possible moment may avoid difficult conversations in the short term. But it creates deeper mistrust and more friction when the process actually needs to work.

If someone is living in a building, seeing the risk, and trying to report it, their voice should matter.

Tenure should not decide whose voice matters

I had lived in the penthouse of my block for five years and had raised legitimate building safety concerns before: life-threatening debris falling from the roof, nesting seagulls, and terrace leaks affecting the apartments below. Each time, the response from the managing agent was effectively the same: I was not the leaseholder.

As someone who has supported leaseholders for years, I understand why ownership matters legally, but tenure should not determine whether safety concerns are taken seriously. If someone is living in a building, seeing the risk, and trying to report it, their voice should matter.

When our evacuation came, the same attitude continued. I have not received direct communication about what is happening to the flat I am still paying for, and the process continues to overlook the people living in the flats, packing their belongings, and being displaced. And a displaced person is displaced regardless of tenure.

This matters because tenants are less likely to challenge and know what they can ask for, and more likely to go quiet when something is unsuitable. That silence should not be mistaken for compliance and it is often a sign that people do not feel they have enough standing to speak, even though they are living with the consequences.

Psychological safety is an operational issue

Psychological safety can sound like a workplace phrase, but in an evacuation it becomes very practical. Do residents feel able to say they do not understand what is happening, or that they need it explained differently? Do they feel safe enough to say the accommodation does not work for them? Does someone with anxiety, trauma, neurodivergence, or a health condition feel able to say they are not coping? Or do they stay quiet because they do not want to be seen as difficult?

People do not always tell you what they need when they are stressed, confused, or distrustful. A resident may not say they cannot manage stairs. A parent may not say the school run has become impossible. Someone may keep missing emails because they are overwhelmed. Someone else may ask the same question again and again, simply because the answer hasn’t been understood, is too technical, or they do not trust it. This is where resident support becomes operational, not emotional. If people do not feel heard, they disengage and if residents are not properly engaged, the technical work itself can slow down.

I believe we are already seeing that in my own development. Ten months on, my understanding is that around 15–20% of leaseholders still have not signed the access forms needed for works to begin. Whatever the individual reasons, that should concern everyone. It shows that engagement is not separate from remediation and can affect whether remediation can happen at all.

This is why behavioural and wellbeing support needs to be built into evacuation planning and remediation from the start. Practical support that keeps people informed, picks up risks early, and helps residents stay steady, will help give the project team a much clearer picture.

The accommodation model needs scrutiny

One of the reasons evacuation is so destabilising is that so much control is taken away at once. You do not choose the timing. You do not choose the reason. You often do not choose the process. And you may not get much choice over where you are expected to live.

When residents are decanted at scale, third-party relocation providers are often brought in to source temporary accommodation. On paper, this looks like a solution. In practice, the model has a structural problem the industry does not discuss openly enough.

Where relocation providers are paid through commission or margin on accommodation rates, their financial incentive is not automatically aligned with finding the most appropriate solution for the resident. It is aligned with placing residents through routes that generate margin. As the resident is not the customer, too often they become the thing being moved.

In our decant, the nightly rate being charged for serviced accommodation exceeded £235 per night – more than £7,000 per month. At the same time, residents exploring cash-in-lieu options were being offered significantly less – around £2,000 to £2,500 per month. I was not initially offered that option and had to ask for it, understand what I was entitled to, and push for it myself. Most residents will not do that or know they can. They are stressed, time-poor, and being managed by organisations whose interests may not align with theirs.

The result is that people can end up in accommodation that technically meets a standard but does not reflect the needs of their actual lives – their commute, their children’s school, their pet, their routine. Premium nightly rates do not automatically produce considered, appropriate placements. They can simply produce volume and margin.

A cash-in-lieu option – or at minimum a genuine, clearly communicated choice - should be a standard offer in every decant process. It restores agency at a time when residents have almost none. It is often cheaper for the paying party, and produces better outcomes for those the process is supposed to serve.

The test should be straightforward: is the arrangement safe, suitable, fairly costed, and properly documented? If yes, resident choice should not be treated as an inconvenience.

Planning better decants

None of this requires organisations to care less about the building. It requires them to understand that residents are part of the building safety system too.

Before a planned decant, organisations should know who lives in the building, what each household needs, what could make the move harder, and what support would make it safer. That includes the obvious things - household size, pets, mobility needs, medical requirements, school runs, work patterns, caring responsibilities, and storage needs. But it also includes trust, anxiety, conflict, communication preferences, and whether people feel safe enough to be honest about their needs. This cannot be gathered properly through a rushed form sent after the decision has already been made. It needs early, structured engagement with residents before the move becomes urgent.

Planned decants should also have clear choices built in from the start: direct accommodation support for those who need it, cash in lieu for those who can manage their own arrangements, proper access to belongings, named contacts, regular updates, and a clear route for concerns before they become complaints.

This is the gap I saw when I founded KindStay. It was not a shortage of technical expertise, it was the missing human layer around the process. Residents need structured support, clearer communication, trusted advocates, regular check-ins, and practical escalation routes before trust breaks down and avoidable harm is done. Once residents are anxious, angry, or disengaged, the project becomes harder for everyone.

A successful evacuation is not just one where everyone leaves the building.

The real measure of safety

A successful evacuation is not just one where everyone leaves the building. It is one where residents have somewhere genuinely suitable to go, retain meaningful choice, can access their belongings, know who to contact, and receive honest communication throughout, even when progress is slow or the timeline keeps moving.

Moving people out of physical risk of fire can still lead to increased psychological, financial, and practical risks, and that is the industry’s blind spot.

Building safety has rightly become more serious about evidence, competence, compliance, and accountability. The same seriousness now needs to be applied to what happens to residents.

I, and many others, have experienced the gap first-hand as I saw residents become secondary to process. We saw how quickly choice disappears, how little structured support exists once people are no longer physically in the building, and how much money can move through the system without translating into a better resident experience.

Planned decants are going to continue. The question is whether the industry starts treating resident stability as part of the safety plan. Evacuation does not end when the door closes behind you. For residents, that is when the long uncertainty begins.

Melisa White

Article written by
Melisa White
Founder KindStay

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