How will the Building Safety Regulator make sure competence matters?

Government & Politics

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How will the Building Safety Regulator make sure competence matters?

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As the Select Committee’s scrutiny of the Building Safety Bill comes to a close, FIRE Correspondent Catherine Levin looks at the issue of competence and how it will be crucial to the success of the new Building Safety Regulator

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any more witnesses gave evidence to the HCLG Select Committee as it carried out pre-legislative scrutiny of the Building Safety Bill during September and October. The transcripts provide a wealth of detail and while reading through them is a not inconsiderable task, it is worth it to get under the skin of this incredibly important Bill. Graham Watts from the Construction Industry Council said: “It is probably the most complex Bill, I would imagine, that MHCLG will bring to parliament.” He may well be right.

Here FIRE takes a deeper look at the issues of competence and how the Building Safety Regulator will operate.

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Competence Deficit Sir Ken Knight, Chair of the Independent Expert Advisory Panel to the Grenfell Inquiry, and Roy Wilsher, Chair of the NFCC, made a good start during the first evidence session and this is well covered in last month’s issue of FIRE. They both bemoaned the scarcity of people with fire engineering skills to support the work of the new Building Safety Regulator.

Dr Nigel Glen, CEO at the Association of Residential Management Agents, expanded on their complaint. “There

Graham Watts, Chair of the Competence Steering Group, said: “We are really keen to see the government’s competence committee set up quickly, as part of the shadow building safety regulator”

are only so many cladders, scaffolders or fire engineers.

There are 93 fire engineers on the IFE registered website.

Money is important, but that is not the problem here. The capacity to do this remediation is also a big, big issue.”

The design, construction and management of buildings involves many different trades, each of which needs to be competent at what it does in order to ensure the building is safe. During the evidence sessions, witnesses picked up on different aspects of competence.

Adrian Dobson, Executive Director of Professional Services at the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors (RICS), made a timely reference to external wall fire review certificates, more commonly known as EWS1. These are intended to show what assessment has been carried out for the external wall construction of residential apartment buildings over 18 metres in height.

“Will there be people with sufficient competency in sufficient numbers?” he asked. “We are already beginning to see that problem in the issue of the so-called EWS1 certificates, with the lack of professionals to carry out mortgage-based surveys. That is a slight concern. It is right that we are trying to raise this competence level, but we

“Will there be people with sufficient competency in sufficient numbers?”

Adrian Dobson, Executive Director of Professional Services at RICS

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Setting the Bar It is the culmination of two year’s work by the Competence Steering Group chaired by Watts. Of the 12 working groups established to develop competence frameworks, three are fire specific: fire engineers, fire risk assessors and fire safety enforcing officers.

This systems-based approach is made up of four parts: 1. A new competence committee within the Building Safety Regulator 2. A national suite of competence standards 3. A system for independent assessment and reassessment against the competence standards 4. A mechanism to ensure those assessing and certifying against the standards have appropriate levels of oversight.

This approach was reinforced by Dr Steedman during his evidence session: “Treating the built environment and higher risk buildings as systems, increasingly complex systems in the modern world, is something that we have to skill up, particularly at the higher levels of the community.”

Setting the Bar includes 59 recommendations that span the work of the 12 committees. The first recommendation is to create a strategic industry-led building safety competence committee. Watts responded to the Select Committee on this point: “We are really keen to see the government’s competence committee set up quickly, as part of the shadow building safety regulator.”

Sir Ken spoke about the three regulated roles that have primary responsibility for building and life safety at each stage of a building’s lifecycle: principal designer, principal contractor and building safety manager. This is in line with recommendation three in Setting the Bar.

Given all the discussion about the importance of competence during the various evidence sessions, it was no surprise that it would also form part of the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) evidence and inform how the Building Safety Regulator will be developed.

The Building Safety Regulator will exist within the HSE. During her evidence to the Committee, Sarah Albon, Chief Executive of the HSE, said: “The fundamental reason to choose HSE is our knowledge and experience of dealing with and successfully managing risks, particularly complex risks.” She was backed up by her predecessor, Dame Judith Hackitt, who also provided evidence to the Select Committee on that day.

She said there were many advantages of establishing the regulator within the HSE: “[It is] very experienced in delivering a regulatory system that is outcomes-based and proportionate”.

To do this, the HSE needs a lot of new staff. Rachel Hopkins MP asked whether the Building Safety Regulator would be able to find enough suitably qualified staff to do the job. Albon explained that the HSE expects to transfer in some of its existing staff to provide a ‘seed corn’ of regulatory and inspection experience. She spoke of the need to recruit significant numbers of new people, those with substantial experience and to grow, train and recruit other staff over time. Recognising the difficulties that the HSE faces, she admitted: “It is no secret that there are some areas of this where, in the UK, we are somewhat short of the necessary skills and experience.”

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then have to get the supply through and that may be quite a challenge.”

Graham Watts highlighted another area of competence that has long been an issue in the fire protection world.

“I would much prefer that there is a proper registration scheme, and you are able to go to the regulator and realise that Freda Smith or Joe Bloggs has the qualification as a fire risk assessor to work on higher risk buildings in scope of the legislation. At the moment, it stops well short of that.”

Summing up the importance of competence, Dr Scott Steedman, Director of Standards at the BSI, said: “The fact that competence is woven through this whole Bill seems to be a real breakthrough. It is a transformational opportunity to tackle the question of competence at a strategic and tactical level.”

All of this explains why it has taken over 300 people drawn from 150 different organisations across the spectrum of the built environment to work out a new systems-based approach to building safety. This is described in Setting the Bar: a new competence regime for building a safer future that was published in October 2020 (see pg 60 for more on the Setting the Bar report).

Chief Inspector of Buildings And of course, the Building Safety Regulator will need someone to be in charge: the Chief Inspector of Buildings is a new role and was advertised as a senior civil service post at director level. The advertisement confirms that as Chief Inspector: ‘You will be the face and voice of

“There are 93 fire engineers on the IFE registered website. Money is important, but that is not the problem here. The capacity to do this remediation is also a big, big issue.”

Dr Nigel Glen, CEO Association of Residential Management Agents

26 | November 2020 | www.fire–magazine.com

Government & Politics

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“The fact that competence is woven through this whole Bill seems to be a real breakthrough. It is a transformational opportunity to tackle the question of competence at a strategic and tactical level”

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and Construction at the HSE, chairs the Joint Regulators Group, where fire and rescue services, local authorities and the HSE come together to develop ways in which, for example, the new proposed gateways and safety cases will work in practice.

“We have also had a programme of inspection aligned to the cladding remediation programme, where inspectors from our construction division have been visiting remediation projects wearing our ‘health and safety at work’ hat, for two main reasons. One is to make sure that workplaces are safe, and the remediation is being done safely, because clearly nobody wants a major incident occurring when ACM cladding is being removed from buildings. It has also given us an opportunity to do joint visits with fire and rescue and, in some cases, building control bodies, so we can test the relationships and information flows, and start to think about how our relationship with local regulators will work more effectively in the future.”

With the evidence sessions now complete, the Committee will spend time drafting its report and providing any recommendations on the Bill to the government. The Minister said that the Bill would take more than a year to go through its parliamentary processes and that is not a surprise; the push by the Committee to make sure as much of the secondary legislation is available alongside the Bill makes this task even greater.

Looking ahead to Royal Assent, the Minister was vague about how a phased implementation might work and equally evasive about how it might be reviewed along the way. The time for discussing implementation and subsequent review is far enough away to get away with this kind of response for now, but as the Bill progresses through parliament, clarity on both issues will matter.

Addressing the myriad areas of competence that affect building safety is critical for the successful transition to a new regime centred on the Building Safety Regulator.

The Competence Steering Group has made a massive contribution to shaping the transformational change that needs to take place: the publication of Setting the Bar is a significant milestone. The Competence Steering Group should remain in place to make sure that its recommendations do not get lost or forgotten as the Bill makes its way through parliament. Competence does not just matter, it is crucial.

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the new regulator’ and ‘Unsurprisingly, this new role will be seriously challenging and extremely rewarding’.

It is a massive and daunting job. With a closing date of November 6, the appointee is likely to be announced before Christmas.

This new organisation is not going to be cheap to run.

Questioned about how it will be funded, Albon referred to the spending review process and the HSE’s work with various sponsoring government departments to put funding bids together. She confirmed that MHCLG provided just over £16 million to help the regulator get under way in shadow form.

Lord Greenhalgh provided some further detail on the funding plans. “We want to make sure that the funding bid for the regulator is separate from the rest of the HSE’s funding; that it is ringfenced for its intended purpose.”

While Albon could not be any more specific about the long-term cost of operating the Regulator, she was very positive about the government’s commitment. “I am genuinely confident that government see this as a real priority, that we will be given the resources we need to set up a regulator that the country can be proud of and that we will make a real difference to the safety of housing stock in the country as a result.”

Albon confirmed that the HSE has been working closely with MHCLG to create the draft Bill and wider policy: “Bringing to that Bill and policy process our experience as a regulator in high-hazard and other environments, to help them create a new legislative framework that we feel will really work.”

Moving on to the subject of secondary legislation, Albon provided reassurance to the Committee that some would be published in draft alongside the Bill. “The really key things that set out the fundamental aspects of the Bill”. This was echoed by Lord Greenhalgh. “Obviously, our main focus is on the primary legislation. We will consider what secondary legislation we can make available before introducing the Bill. We want to get as much as we can to be scrutinised by parliament alongside the primary legislation.”

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Dr Scott Steedman, Director of Standards at the BSI

Inspection Programme As part of its shadow activity, the HSE has been working with industry and other stakeholders to test out the regulatory process. Peter Bacon, Director of Building Safety

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