The taboo status of the inner inner room comes from an era when few premises had any automatic detection in the building and even manual alarms were not universal. An occupant of an inner inner room was generally just too remote from everyone else in the building.
If a sweep of the building was part of the evacuation procedure, for example, some one would have to go into that inner inner room to check that the occupant had saved their email or finished their telephone conversation and left. This still holds true.
Remember that travel distance in itself is of limited importance but it is a reasonably good measure of the amount of risk that a person is exposed to. But in being used to assess risk exposure, it is important to also consider visibility. Inner inner rooms do not tend to lend themselves to situations where visibility is good.
Standards are there for a good reason and should not be discarded just because they have been "getting away with it" for a number of years.
At the end of the day, there is just one question that has to be satisfactorily answered: with the current layout could any fire in the building compromise the means of escape of any person in the building (including an occupant of the inner inner and any person conducting a sweep of that area)?
Stu
