The Building Safety Act 2022
What should you ask when performing safety assessments under the Building Safety Act 2022?
The Building Safety Act 2022 is a legislation frequently overlooked by businesses. For example, some believe it only applies to high-rise buildings. In contrast, others are overwhelmed by the required details, timeframes, and scale of the competencies and need more organisational structure to manage them.
However, complacency could have serious consequences, ranging from increased enforcement to severe health and safety risks in the future. Companies that have yet to make an effort to prepare for the new safety regime are putting themselves at risk. To satisfy a safety claim, the principal account person must provide evidence of what they are doing with their building to ensure the safety of their residents.
Organisations must ensure that the principal accountable person can demonstrate how they adequately manage risk to comply with the Building Safety Act. First, they must determine whether anything undermines the presumption that the building is safe to occupy, demonstrating what is required to keep the building and its occupants safe. Then they must demonstrate how the building’s risks will be managed and maintained.
The Grenfell Tower Fire and fire safety
The Grenfell Tower Inquiry identified the combustibility of the cladding, the structure’s ability to withstand breaches, and the fire doors along communal routes to safely support evacuation as the main flaws, along with several human and social failings.
The first principles outlined in the Building Safety Act and the Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005 address these primary tangible assets as safety principles. In terms of the safety case, the absence of evidence that the asset is safe truly is evidence of absence. In high-risk buildings, this creates a fundamental problem in that the evacuation time increases to an unacceptable life-critical level in the event of a fire.
Putting together the thread of what ‘good’ (or ‘golden’) looks like necessitates a strategy for getting there. This gap analysis isn’t just about identifying gaps in building safety assets; it should also help improve existing organisational strength.
There is no conclusive claim that building a safety asset responsibility hierarchy is a good idea. Still, it does provide accountable and responsible individuals with some of the detail required to reduce and mitigate risk to the greatest extent reasonably practicable. Any building safety assets will be specific to the building, but each will have proportionate attributes to support the safety case.
How to Evaluate Fire Safety
Different information must be considered when assessing a building for fire safety. The required detail level may vary depending on who is accessing the data and the organisation. This person could be the contractor, safety manager, building occupant, insurer, or someone else, but the information must be securely stored, considered, documented, updated, and evidenced when called upon digitally.
Using a fire door as an example, we have compiled a list of six questions you should consider. The questions and why they are essential to consider when assessing are listed below.
What dangers does the fire door set protect against?
The assessment is critical to the fire risk strategy and any management plan, and it must be documented and updated if there is any uncertainty or future change.
What dangers does the fire door expose itself to?
Can the root causes of current problems be identified to reduce risk and potentially reduce the frequency of initial checks, or is there another solution or method that could reduce vandalism or tampering with door closers, for example?
What information about the fire door set is required to ensure that it performs appropriately?
A performance-certified technical specification specifying how fire doors should be maintained is required. This is the point at which the possibility of tagging the asset begins to make sense; this means that its position can be located in 2D or 3D, but it avoids ambiguity in areas with different door types, for example.
What tasks/method statements/procedures must be followed to ensure the fire door set is properly installed, commissioned, inspected, and maintained, and what is its life cycle?
This demonstrates the safety case, competency, how and when this is achieved, and when the door must be replaced. These are quality control measures for contractor work.
What level of competency/training is required?
Competency and training must be up to date, checked, and documented. In the case of fire doors, it is necessary to specify which third-party accreditations are acceptable (Trada, FIRAS, BM Trada, IFC, etc.).
Why should product modifications be documented?
So that compliance with the specification and performance is maintained or improved over time.
In short, some of the analysis’s gaps will be things that should already be happening, while others may be fillable with existing and historical data. For example, the requirements of duty holders have been in the Construction (Design and Management) Regulations for some time. You may be fortunate not to look far to see what ‘good’ looks like with existing staff, contractors, or structure.
Imposing this level of safety culture in the built environment will require a transition period, and yes, this is a front-ended challenge. We must ensure that the safety case report is detailed enough to obtain the assurance certificate and sufficiently sufficient to address historical flaws safely, resulting in a single source of truth.