BIM4HOUSING DEVELOPMENT WORKING GROUP MEETING 24-09-2024
DAVID POAT There’s some notes circulated beforehand about what the topics of conversation might be this morning. Before we get into that, we kind of stumbled across the topics where myself, George, Richard and Jiss, we had a meeting about 10 days ago and we’re very keen to open the agenda up for anyone that attends this meeting. So, if there are topics or discussion points that you would like to raise in this forum then please let us know because we’re always interested in new ideas and new thoughts. I’m the technical and cost manager at Notting Hill Genesis, so working very much client side in the industry. I’ll be honest, I’m not entirely sure what the profile of the people are that we’ve got on the all today, but when you contribute if you’d like to just introduce yourselves and where your from that would be useful.
The first topic that we wanted to talk about, and it’s a little bit of a selfish one, and I’m looking for people’s thoughts and their help with the issue of management of risk versus management of regulation. Just to give you a bit of background, obviously we’re all aware of the kind of culture change that Dame Judith Hackitt was heading towards as part of her report and her thinking. And I think part of that culture change was trying to encourage people to think more broadly about risk, rather than being necessarily over reliant on regulation. And regulation has always been heralded as the minimum standard. And there has been a few things that have happened in my working life recently that made me curious as to how far as a sector we’ve come in rethinking how we consider risk and how reliant we continue to be on either regulations that already exist, or regulations that we’re anticipating in the future.
And I just wanted to give you a couple of examples. So, as and end client, obviously as part of the Building Safety Act we have to produce building safety cases. And building safety cases are, at their core, risk-based studies and so they encourage building safety managers and clients to very much focus on risk. And one of the things that I’ve tried to introduce as part of the development process is to start to get pre-contract design teams, but also contractors, to kind of complete building safety risk registers. And obviously primarily they’re focused on fire safety and structural safety. But I really wanted to try and promote risk-based conversations much earlier in the process, and it seemed like a good idea at the time. And we’ve had a couple of goes at it, but what’s quite interesting is particularly where we’ve asked contractors to do it, their focus still seems to remain about using regulation as a piece of evidence as to how risk is being managed.
And I’m just curious as to whether just meeting regulations will actually give us the answers in terms of how risks are being mitigated in our buildings. I guess some of the topics that are about at the moment, things like the redundancy of lifts. How many lifts do high-rise buildings need? Not only to kind of deal with the day-to-day, but to deal with redundancy issues. And we’re finding those conversations quite challenging and quite difficult to have with contractors, who are very focused on the basic need and the regulatory need. And it’s very much us as the client, through our employer’s requirements and suchlike that are driving those conversations and driving those requirements. So, how contractors are responding to risk conversations, this doesn’t give us the feeling that everyone is thinking about risk in the same way that we are as a client.
The other example is the QDR process, it’s a building control requirement to run a Quality Design Review meeting, or series of meetings in order to consider fire safety risk in our buildings over 50 metres tall. The QDR process, at its core is about getting all of the relevant stakeholders together, including client, designers, contractors, fire engineers and having a conversation about fire safety objectives and then how those fire safety objectives are going to be met. So, from a client point of view, and I guess from everyone’s point of view, that seems like a very sensible conversation to have from the outset of a meeting. What we’re finding though, and not universally, but on occasions as a client we’re discovering that QDR processes have been run, but the people participating in those QDR processes have very much just been designers and contractors. And on occasions us as a client, we don’t get invited, rightly or wrongly, to participate in those conversations. So, I’m curious as to whether the process is well rounded enough, again in terms of considering risk more broadly.
So, that’s the kind of backdrop to why I was looking for some help, some thoughts, as to what other people’s experiences are, whether you think it is a topic of conversation and how far you think that we’ve come. So, a long introduction, as always with these conversations they’re only as good as people are prepared to participate in them, so I’d be very interested if anyone has got any views.
RICHARD WHITTAKER The thing about the industry, everybody’ll know this, we work to minimum standards because they're driven by legislation and statutory requirements. And because of clients we drive a competitive environment, typically based on cost rather than based on value, it keeps us at that minimum standard. Now, there are clients out there who’ve taken an approach to procurement based on value. So, they’ve procured on value and they’ve gone we appreciate this will cost more, but the whole lifecycle costing things like that, we’ll join that up and look at the overall savings. And then they get onsite and the developer turns around and starts delivering to the minimum standard that they’ve always done and the resource requirement in terms of getting your specification met when its out of the norm is significant. And it falls by the wayside because of the priorities and the workloads that everybody has.
And there has to be something that incorporates an early warning system that actually promotes these issues and forecasts what’s going to happen earlier in the process, they need to be further up the decision making tree, for want of a better value. And the other side of it, for me working as a client, I was at a meeting that Judith Hackitt was presenting at and I asked her about a measure of risk being on height and whether it were likely to change from the 18 metres. Because we had multi-occupancy of low-rise buildings in residential, they’re complex buildings in my mind. And her answer was really good, because she said well, you have to accept that this is a blunt proxy of risk because we’ve been such a big thing to tackle. If, in principle, you think this applies to other buildings you should apply it and not wait for us to tell you what buildings to apply it to.
That is a message for all clients and specifiers and procurement teams. In relation to that the people that need persuading are the people who have the purse strings, and control because they’re managing a complex business, but recently when you look at the social housing regulation act and you look at Awaab’s law in relation to domestic construction, there are two massive levers there that say you have to look beyond the minimum statutory requirement in order to leave a legacy when that building is complete, or that refurbishment is complete. So, it really does sit within a client’s remit to steer this, but the support has to come from the purse holders on the client side, but also from the contracting business where they can find efficiency, share some of that efficiency from reinvestment in team. Now, that’s a holy grail in many ways.
GEORGE I’m going to have to leave shortly because I’m going to a safety case conference that Risk Flag are running today. And the reason I’m mentioning that is that the risk safety case is in itself seen as a compliance process and what I’m discovering is that people are looking at that as another potential silo. In other words, they’re just looking at the information that’s needed for the safety case, which is understandable, but if people aren’t considering where that information is coming from then you end up collecting information just for one purpose which then isn’t going to get kept up-to-date. And if we look at it from a compliance perspective, I can understand people wanting to do that because that’s something that they need to be able to demonstrate, but you need to come at it from a risk perspective.
I went back to the recent update to the golden thread that we all contributed to, it very much says that you’ve got to look at the building as a whole, the systems as a whole. The Regulation 38 requires you to actually state that you’ve got enough information to keep the people safe. It’s not asking you to make sure that you’ve got fire door inspections, they’re not being prescriptive in that way. So therefore I do think very much that we need to be in a situation where we’re looking at things from a risk perspective, but looking at the evidence that’s needed to support that.
DAVID POAT Thanks for that context, and you’re right, the approach to safety cases absolutely is risk-based and needs to be broad in its application, rather than just a tick box exercise.
VICTORIA FINN I work for Wythenshawe Community Housing Group, I’m the health & safety manager. I was just considering what you were saying earlier about managing the risks and getting together a pre-construction team. It’s always been done and people are taking the risk as part of the meeting…they’ve looked at the risk and they’ve gone on doing the design. But again, taking each of those risks in isolation. And it still happens, it’\s part and parcel of that agenda now, you’ve got a risk register you have to look at and each individual risk, but we need to get cracking on those risks. So, we need to take each one of those risks and expand it and so if we do this piece of work to look at that risk, as we caused another risk down the line. And often that is the case, if you start taking in isolation and expanding on them. We don’t do that and I think that’s one are that people need to look at with a bit more thought.
Apart from that as well, a big issue on the client side. I have been here, I’ve come into the building safety role, it seems to be the role that expands out onto all of those other teams…so, this is what we’ve needed. We’ve had teams working in isolation, so a development team will work in isolation to an investment team, perhaps. But it’s the investment team that sees the problems that go wrong from the build. It’s the investment team generally that sees what’s not been done, what’s missing, what’s caused another risk. So, I think it’s making sure as well those teams work together, it’s not just getting a pre-construction team being all of the new build team around, it needs to be people who deal with the maintenance thereafter as well.
DAVID POAT So, do you very much see that kind of risk management process as a collaborative process where kind of internal stakeholders are engaged? Or is that a kind of work in progress?
VICTORIA FINN I do see that. I think it needs to be, so many stakeholders are involved and I know it’s very difficult to look at that straight off and get everybody around the table from word go. So I think people work needs doing first, looking at those major issues and risks in construction, expanding further out to see where they go and then checking the ones that are still a risk off, they’ve still got a problem with that that’s not been solved. And they’re taking that out for the further team, the wider team. INCOMPREHENSIBLE AUDIO…see where the sticky bits are and if they’ve not got over at design stage it’s going to come back on us down the line, like the cladding did.
DAVID POAT Agreed, and it’s always very interesting when we get our asset management colleagues together with the constructors, developers. It makes for quite interesting conversations because quite often they’ll come at things from a very different perspective.
MANDEEP SINGH GILL I’m based at Hydrock…mainly consulting on the Building Safety Act for the last year and a half. What George said earlier about the legislation being outcome based. I think this is highlighted in one of the BSR webinars where there was a question asked more like a complaint about the legislation being ambiguous or open. But the person who answered the question answered it in a really nice way, they said just because the words are light it doesn’t mean they’re ambiguous, they are specific, but they’re just light. And the fact that it’s outcome based is what basically they’re really looking for. They just want the solution and as kind of competent individuals, the job of engineers and the like to provide the answers and the solutions.
In terms of the other the point about the minimum compliance, obviously we’ve got the duty holder regime now as well, but I think also there is a bit of misunderstanding in the market. We’ve been approached by a client, an NHS trust, and they’ve asked us to check their design to see if it complies with the Building Safety Act. It made us chuckle a little bit because there is no, although you’ve got the duty holder regime and all of that compliance, in fact all that the Building Safety act is doing is just asking you to make sure that your design complies with the building regulations. So it’s still a bit of a misunderstanding there in the market.
DAVID POAT It’s a bit of a cliche, but it is representative of the journey that we’re on. People will inevitably be moving at different paces and we’ll have different understandings of what’s going on.
MANDEEP SINGH GILL Similarly as well, we had a client ask for a fire emergency file to be produced just for the design and construction phase. But I immediately went back and said what you need to understand is the requirements of the fire emergency file, they overlap into the occupation and inevitably that information has to evolve from design and construction to be available in occupation. You can’t just reduce the scope and say make it for design and construction, the scope is going to go on and there is going to be that. So, we’ve kind of got a few clients being a bit cheeky trying to get a few things done.
DAVID POAT Yeah, clients can be a bit cheeky, Mandeep. I just wanted to come back to something that Richard said, because what I took from what Richard said is essentially if clients don’t lead this then it’s probably not going to happen. So it’s very much clients that will set the standard. Now, I don’t know if that’s a fair thing to say or not, and if there are contractors or designers in the room I’m very happy to hear what you’ve got to say about that. Certainly from our point of view, we introduced non-combustible materials in walls a long time before the regulations here. We introduced sprinklers into low-rise buildings long before it was a regulatory requirement because as the client we wanted to het ahead of this stuff and we wanted to set that higher standard.
Now, as Richard said, that comes at a price, there is a cost to pay for that, but we very much wanted to be at the forefront of that stuff. So, do people agree? Is this clients having to lead this process through their employer’s requirements, if we’re going to set standards beyond building regs? or is there a sense that contractors are equally coming to the table and pushing a higher quality agenda?
MANDEEP SINGH GILL I think if a client, if you want to go above and beyond the bar, ultimately that would be down to the client. But in terms of reaching a minimum standard…the principal designer role applies to all construction projects (and all building works) now, so as part of the duty holder regime I think if there is not suitable arrangements in place, there is not enough time and resource allocated by the client, the principal designer and principal contractor have a duty to question that and challenge that. I think it goes to as far as saying reject the work if there is no suitable arrangements in place. In terms of minimum standard, although the client has to initiate…everybody has a duty to make sure, in terms of principal designer principal contractor, to decline the work if they feel that that’s not there.
DAVID POAT That’s still about meeting building regs, though, isn’t it? At the core of it it’s just about achieving that minimum standard of building regs.
MANDEEP SINGH GILL Yeah, exactly, and that’s why I said for the minimum standard the client would have to initiate. So if they want to go above and beyond the client, we have to initiate it, but in terms of the minimum baseline standard, that is down to everybody.
DAVID POAT Yeah, it’s interesting. We, as a client, not only do we develop, but we operate as well. So, we operate both sides of the divide. There are many developers out there that don’t do that, they simply build for onward sale. Again, I don’t know if we’ve got any people in the call in that situation. If we want to set a higher standard, if we want to get the sector to think more in a risk way rather than a regulatory way, what needs to happen? Is it as simple as clients need to behave in a different way? Or do we feel that there’s other stuff that needs to happen in order to facilitate that change of thinking?
GEORGE One suggestion that I’d make is to bring it to life a little bit, because a lot of this sounds very technical to decision makers. But if we can take some scenarios, some examples, of things going wrong, because people have looked in isolation to what their requirements are. The common one I come across is compartmentation, the fact that there’s half a dozen or so asset types, each of which would have its own compliance check, perhaps, maybe by a different organisation. But then the following day somebody carries out some small works and goes through a wall. If that’s not been fire-stopped properly afterwards then there is no point in you having excellent fire doors there because the overall risk has been basically undermined, or the measure has been undermined.
That’s just one example. If we could get people to start contributing examples of things that go wrong because we’re not looking at things from a holistic point of view which is really what should be being done. I think that might help with doing the business case properly,
STEPHEN COPPIN The point you’re rightly making, George, is about selection of the project team and ensuring their behaviours. Those are the sort of questions the client, or the project team for the client, should be asking those individuals. Those scenarios where have you made a difference? How would you deal with this situation if this came on your project? And that would be walking the walk rather than talking the talk, demonstrating they are there as a team player rather than, oh, it’s someone else’s problem and ignoring these situation. It’s about honesty and integrity in practice and it’s a big ask to say, hang on. We need to stop this project because we haven’t done it right.
GEORGE David, is that something we could ask the group? I imagine everybody on this call will have at least one or two experiences of things that have gone wrong, or would have gone wrong, because they didn’t know something. Is that something we could ask everybody to just put something in the chat, an example that we can maybe flesh out into a scenario. Because that’s the sort of thing, looking at the safety case feedback that we’ve seen, I think people are starting to see this now, actually having ways of demonstrating that your building is safe needs scenarios. It needs something to lift it to this is how we’re managing those risks.
STEPHEN COPPIN Do you want to add, George…about the information on CROSS, on the collaborating for safer structures. The amount of information that’s fortunately now being provided by anonymous regarding situations and alerts from that regarding fire and structural at this moment in time, which is a good port of call. But not everyone knows about it.
DAVID POAT Stephen, is there something you can put in the chat, a link to CROSS?
STEPHEN COPPIN Yes, I can, I use it on my courses.
CLIFF KNEALE I might have something small to contribute to the conversation. As an architectural technician, I was working on a project down in Ireland and it was the 6th Office that they were building for Intel. And obviously it had to be the same as the previous office, so there was office IR 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and we were working on 6. So I was trying to work out what cladding we’d be using and it said on the drawing to look at IR5. So I looked on that and it said look at IR4, and I looked on that and it said look at IR3, 2, 1. Go all of the way back and it was like, OK, this cladding isn’t actually suitable for its purpose. I got it changed, but I was just surprised at the lack of rigour around something that’s so important.
I think that what hasn’t helped is the fact that nowadays you can cut and paste using CAD. So, nobody reads anything anymore, they just cut and paste library information across. Whereas in the good old days you actually had to have an ink pen in your hand and if you got it wrong you had to scratch it out, you really had to think about things more. And I think that that’s a massive contributor to the mess that we’re in is computers, they helped us get it wrong faster instead of helping us to get it right. I think that’s actually one of the root cause problems that architects used to walk down the office and see drawings on their boards. And they could see the building emerging and have conversations with people about what they were drawing and designing. And people were more collaborative, even in the design stage.
But moving on from there, I also noticed that there was more emphasis on the acoustics of the meeting rooms than on the fire shaft, the shaft walls. So, that was my first experience and when I was working at Hampshire County Council we had a health & safety consultant come in to explain to us about risks on site. Because I was working as a clerk of works at that stage, going out onsite everyday, so obviously if I injured myself Hampshire County Council would be asking why wasn’t he trained. This consultant came in and he explained to use the legal framework that we were in and if something went wrong the finger would be pointed at everybody. And if we saw some bricks onsite on palettes that were about to fall over and we didn’t say anything, and the next day somebody got injured, it was like you’re partly culpable because you didn’t say anything. So, there’s a register onsite and you have to register near misses.
Once it’s registered and you go into the site office and say to the site manager I need to register a near risk you think, oh, OK, I’m going to have go and do something about that now. But if that same principle could be adopted for the safety of the building once it’s built and you could say going back now as an architect or technician I would have said that I think that this needs to be changed. We can’t go for this kind anymore because of the likelihood if there’s a fire it’s full of phenolic foam that’s going to go up quite quickly. So, if there was some way of…that’s not about filling in forms and documents really, although you have to fill one in, but I found it very useful the way that this health & safety consultant came in and made us all feel that wearing a high vis vest and boots and goggles was a good idea. And you weren’t seen as a wimp.
DAVID POAT But that’s just part of a learning process.
CLIFF KNEALE Culture change.
DAVID POAT Yeah, culture change doesn’t happen overnight, it takes a series of steps. In the chat Victoria asked the question about mandatory occurrence reporting and whether anyone has got any experience of submitting any details around mandatory occurrence reporting. It’s made me curious as to what extent mandatory occurrence reporting might be part of the, solution is the wrong word, but one of the bits of the puzzle that may drive different behaviour. I guess the problem is that it is still very much focused on building regs compliance, it doesn’t really go beyond. But again, if anyone has got experience of submitting anything as part of that process, or has got any views on that, that would be interesting.
MANDEEP SINGH GILL Just on the two things that Cliff was saying. In terms of…I don’t know if you’re alluding to the MOORS? MORES? 33mins 55secs system. So, once you report the MORES, I think the BSR by legislation, one of their responsibilities is to compile those MORES and do a report on an annual basis, just to discuss the lessons learnt. And then in terms of the first point that Cliff mentioned about the non-compliance…and the design going through all of those stages and not being picked up. Obviously that’s where we need to have our BIM processes in place, you know when we do the approval for the BIM design. So how we used to do it on HS2 was when the design used to come up we used to have a mid-up? 34mins 40secs to map against and those properties…
So, if we know we have to release X amount of information, say 5 parameters, we would check those 5 parameters in the mid-up, make sure they’re right in the model and then that would be a crosscheck and only those bits of information would come through into the model to issue. And all of the other bits of information, even though…if there’s not time for it according to the program the information will not be issued out to see. So that’s one way, and the other way is putting suitability codes, the ISO has the BIM suitability codes products. So if it’s for design or tendering or as-built basically, each product would have a suitability code. And I think if we went to adopting that more, you’re responsible…I understand it’s a copy and paste thing, but you’ll still have some repsonsibilty if you put suitability codes against an object saying, OK, that’s ready for planning? 35mins 48secs now.
And I think that helps manage those kind of processes and ensure that the wrong information doesn’t get out and the information is checked. It gives some kind of accountability to the person who has approved that information.
RICHARD FREER Anybody who's coming up with scenarios or examples, obviously you share them verbally in the meeting, but could you please put them in the chat as well so that we don't miss them.
STEPHEN COPPIN I’ve just done that. I’ve sent you a link to what the Building Safety Regulator put on their guidance, their latest guidance, because they keep changing it. That’s in the chat, regarding examples of what we just talked about.
RICHARD FREER And Jiss will also put in the chat the link to the BIMinAM page where we’ve already started collecting scenarios for that, so have a look at that.
DAVID POAT I’ve got something going in the back of my head based on what Cliff said. According to Cliff, computers are the problem, which might be a challenge for us all. I’m wondering, and this probably is a philosophical debate as much as anything else, I’m wondering to what extent Artificial Intelligence software is going to start to play a part in reviewing CAD-based designs. So will we ever get to a point, and this is philosophical, where through a CAD process you can overlay some Artificial Intelligence software and that software will be able to determine whether there is enough information in that design to be able to demonstrate that a building is compliant with regs or not. I don’t know why I brought that up in the conversation, to be honest, but it was just a thought.
CLIFF KNEALE I’m pretty sure that’s already the case in Singapore. And when you submit your drawings to the building control office it is actually checked, not necessarily by AI, but they have programs that check the compliance. And that was at least 5 years ago and with the introduction of AI that might become an even better process.
DAVID POAT So, cladding as per the previous building wouldn’t pass? To use your example.
CLIFF KNEALE I don’t think so, but what you should put what it actually is. I said it very quickly, but it took me about a week to find those drawings, and each time I got to the previous building it took me a week to find the previous building to that, it was in the archives. In the end, just had to redesign it.
DAVID POAT IN the interests of sharing, I can maybe off up an example of where we’ve got a particular problem where risk is coming intο to conflict with regulation. We’ve got a situation where we had a building that’s now in occupation, it’s been occupied for a couple of years, and we’ve had a fire risk assessment organisation go in and do a post-occupation fire risk assessment. And they have observed that none of the riser doors that we have got smoke seals. And they’ve queried it as to why the riser doors haven’t got smoke seals. And we went back the the fire strategy document and we went back to the consultants who wrote the fire strategy document and it was clear in the fire strategy that smoke seals were a requirement for riser doors.
So we’re in a situation where we’ve got a fire risk assessor who’s done a fire risk assessment and says they’re necessary from a regulatory point of view. So, we’ve got a whole bunch of actions that are now sat on our risk register that need to be completed and we’ve got an original fire consultant who’s saying they’re not a regulatory requirement. I then spoke to a third fire consultant who said it’s not clear in the regulations whether they’re necessary or whether they’re not, it kind of depends on where the location is. If we were writing a fife strategy today we would probably recommend that you put them in, but if we were doing a risk assessment of a legacy building we wouldn’t recommend putting in smoke seals because the amount of fire safety benefits is significantly outweighed by the cost and the disruption of having to retrospectively fit smoke seals to hundreds of riser covered doors.
So, I’m not expecting you to respond to that at all, but as a client we’re now sat with three fire consultants at the table all saying something slightly different about one, a regulatory position, but also a risk position. So for me, that’s just an area where if we’d have thought about risk from the front end, maybe the original fire strategy would have said something different, I don’t know. But that was just in the interests of sharing something, I don’t know if anyone else has verbally got anything that they can share.
STEPHEN COPPIN It comes down to everyone’s interpretation, as you rightly shared there. And risk assessment has always been subjective based on experience on experience and knowledge or whatever. And the point your rightly raising here is the terms in the legislation are as reasonably practical as so far as reasonably practical, and as we all know it’s written everywhere on all of the duty holder is all reasonable steps need to be…so, it’s all about that collaboration in practice of demonstrating have they gone through that risk analysis…and determined what that is. And as you pointed out, it’s from the start, and it’s about encouraging, as we’ve all been shouting about for years, is early appointment of the right people and getting around the table to actually go through those items collectively and agree the way forward with the client. And it’s easier said than done, it’s having that leadership, really.
DAVID POAT Yeah, you’re absolutely right. This has been a decent conversation, I sense we’re mostly on the same page here in terms of the issues that we’re trying to address. I’m not sure we really know, other than probably clients have got to take the lead in some of this stuff, whether it’s through their competency assessments, whether it’s through their process and procedure, whether it’s through them setting higher standards (if they deem those to be appropriate). That’s my take which I’m not entirely surprised by. Is there anything else on this topic that people think is worthy of sharing?
STEPHEN COPPIN What I’ve experienced, and no doubt you all have by other means, I’ve had various workshops with clients over the last 2 years about requirements and the majority of the clients that I’ve been dealing with until 6 months ago deal with non high-risk buildings. So they don’t have to go through all and demonstrate documentation at the gateways as such. But what’s been coming out is that they believe it should be mandatory on all projects what’s happening on HRBs, all respectively on theirs because of the legacy that they’re finding of lack of information that we all know in all the real estate and their properties together for their refurbs and alteration work.
Which is a constant legacy problem with CDM health & safety files, I call them, because they’re riddled with lack of information due to one contractor going in there, no requirements for a PD under CDM, therefore now requirement for health & safety file information except the design work, not what they actually have built it to. So unless a client is savvy and puts it in the contract for all those retrospectively one contractor work. So what I’m finding, and what contractors that I’m dealing with as well, they want to basically follow in practice what’s required on HRBs, not just generally, oh, it’sHRBs, we don’t have to do it for non-HRBs. No, we do it, because we want to demonstrate we’re actually compliant, how else can you do it. That is starting to happen which is great to see, there is some ownership happening. I know it’s very slowly, but it is starting to creep in.
DAVID POAT We’re taking a similar approach to the QDR thing that I spoke about earlier. From a building regs point of view yo only need QDR for buildings over 50 metres. We’re very much saying look, this is a good process, it’s a robust process, it’s a collaborative process, this is something that we should be deploying on all of our projects, not just the over 50 meters stuff. And it’s just a way of getting all of the right stakeholders together and having the right conversations.
STEPHEN COPPIN Yes, exactly, it’s back to audit trails we’ve all been talking about, it should be the norm on everything.
DAVID POAT I’m going to move this along. In the background there is a young man called Jiss who’s recording all of this and he’s going to put some notes together and that will get circulated to you guys. If when you go away and you reflect on this, then please just respond to that email if you’ve got any thoughts, any examples that don’t come to mind here and now, but maybe are worthy of sharing in the future. There were tow other things on the agenda, the people that were going to lead those conversations are no longer here. George was going to lead a conversation and Paul White, who wanted to talk about people’s experiences of amending their contract documents in line with the requirements of the Building Safety Act. And what people were experiencing in terms of what was going well, what wasn’t going so well etc. I’m going to park that conversation for next time and allow Paul to share his experiences.
George wanted to have a conversation with us about our experiences of the new building control process. Not with a view of getting into the technicalities of what it is and what we need to be doing, but just whether there was enough evidence out there now from various sources as to what our experience of that process has been. What has gone well, what are the pitfalls, what do we need to be doing differently. So, even though George isn’t here, I think it’s a conversation that we can have and we can record and feedback to George. First and foremost, are we experiencing the new building control and what are we finding?
STEPHEN COPPIN I think it’s a mixed bag, from my experiences out there. It depends on where they are on their learning curve, what they’re asking for, what they’re looking at and understanding what everyone is supposed to be doing other than themselves. I’ve actually delivered various 2-day principal designer course the building regs, and the amount of Class 4 individuals, I’ve said to them you should be standing up here and presenting this. And they were no, we don’t know, we haven’t been told who should be doing what, that’s why we’re here. And it’s great to have those people in the room to go through scenarios, but they don’t know how to navigate through this legislation and what forms they should be using. It’s all over the shop, there is no consistency as well.
DAVID POAT What else needs to happen? Does there need to be more guidance? Or is there guidance there that people aren’t quite yet understanding it?
STEPHEN COPPIN What guidance there is comes out in dribs and drabs and we’re not notified of it. By default we find it, but it’s not what you know it’s who you know. So we’ve already seen this and I’ve had to send word to and direct other institutions because they haven’t seen it and to send it out to their members. But what we’re clear is about the Building Safety Regulator and the local…are not issuing, and this is what we want. Certain other ones around the country, they’re saying it’s got to be in this format, while projects are coming out with their own because they’ve got no choice, whether it’s right or not. And the wording in there regarding declaration that they’re complying with the building regs or relevant requirements is another term, whether their role is principal designer or principal contractor, and the wording of that as such is all over the shop.
So there is no consistency as there should be and despite the number of times I’ve had to go with the building safety reg they will not give advice, they’re just sitting on the fence. They’ll not give what should be a template for whether constructor control plan, a control log and plan until they actually come across it. It’s the blind leading the blind in most cases which is not right.
DAVID POAT They all seem to have taken the view that they want us to think about it rather than them telling us the answers, that seems to be the kind of culture they’re trying to drive.
STEPHEN COPPIN Exactly, so everyone is going through a learning and developing their own interpretation of what’s right and hoping it gets through. Some are getting through, and then the same documentations for the same type of project, would you believe, specification, is not getting through to another…for example, Leeds and Bristol, that’s a classic one that I’ve come across. Both HRBs, the same dimensions, specifications, everything like for like, and Bristol rejected it while Leeds accepted it. It’σ a joke, it really is.
JOHN WAINES I just thought I’d share our experience on going through the building control process. We’ve done two buildings to date, a very minor job and a major investment scheme to one of our high-rises. Both took in excess of 6 months for approval, it was quite embarrassing a little bit. We put the first lot in and they said we won’t charge you, you need to put this that and the other in. We’ve got it all together, but their portal couldn’t take the volume of information that we wanted to put in for the major investment, so then we had to cut and paste and move things around and it just went on and on.
DAVID POAT And is this with the local authority? Or is this with the Regulator?
JOHN WAINES This was with the Building Safety Regulator, which is Newcastle for us. And I got the feeling they were learning just as much as what we were learning from the experience. It was interesting, I like to put my hand up when we make a cockup. On the smaller one, we’ve now established, we sent a little specification, we were putting a wall up with a fire door on, that was it, nothing much more that that in a high-rise. They sent us back Sent the specification, sent the program on and he said, right, don’t deviate from the specification, don’t deviate from your program and if you do follow the control plan.
We forgot to go on the portal and inform them, you have to go on the portal to give them within 5 days. We didn’t do that because we just assumed the program and the spec told them everything. So you know when you make a big cockup on a little building, I’d rather make a big cockup on a little building rather that it was on the Glastonbury. So please, if anyone is going to put them in go on the portal and report it, there’s a time scale within 5 days.
DAVID POAT Listen, you avoided prison time, so that’s a good thing.
JOHN WAINES Well, at this moment in time. I’ve emailed them, this was 2 months ago, answer me please, we’ve made a cockup. Please advise, tell us what we can do, it was a genuine mistake. That was 2 months ago and I still haven’t got an answer back yet.
ADEY BADMOS I’m from Hexagon Housing. In response to your question we have two over 18 metres cladding replacement projects very close to completion. And the experience on both of them from two different local authorities…kind of identical, one is better than the other. Building control is rally slow and I think they’re just being cautious. In one case we had to volunteer to pay for CAD 3? 55mins 54secs before we can get that…it’s still not been signed-off, we’re waiting…we have leaseholders who want to sell and they’re struggling to sell because they need sign off and they need EWS1 to follow. OS I think the atmosphere right now is they’re very cautious, they’re not sure what they’re doing. At one point they were saying that they were short staffed, they didn’t have the right person there to carry out the necessary inspections and the sign-off. So, that’s our experience.
DAVID POAT There are some themes emerging from the conversation. One, and I guess the most important one, is everyone is still learning as they’re going forward. Whatever side of the fence you are on it’s still a learning process for everyone, that’s the first thing. The second interesting one is something John said that there are still some inconsistencies in terms of what people consider to be regulatory compliant and not. It sounds like you start with two different authorities on the same building and had two different answers. It’s inevitably slow and people remain cautious, I think people are in a bit of a risk averse place. The stakes are quite high, in fact the stakes are extremely high, and so I guess people do generally err on the side of caution in those situations.
We had an interesting experience, again I guess that we could put our hands up and say we made the mistake, but we had a cladding remediation project on a series of high-rise blocks. There were probably about six blocks and they were all connected, but they’d been operational so they’d been occupied for a number of years. And we had to make a building control application for the remediation work to the cladding and we only made one submission. Because we regarded it as one building because it was all connected. But because the building was already operational then the rules of the operational phase applied. So that because the blocks, even though they were connected physically the cores weren’t connected, so you couldn’t get from one core block to another.
The submission got rejected because they said no, you need to make an application for every core because every core needs to stand or fail on its own rights, rather than just being one application. Obviously if it had been a new build then it would have been different because the requirements of a new build is different. In hindsight we probably should have worked that out for ourselves, to be honest, but it was a nuance that we missed. So yeah, if you’ve got remediation projects on multiple blocks that are occupied you need to do an application for each core, something to bear in mind.
Thank you for everyone’s contributions. As I said in the background Jiss will be producing a bunch of notes that we can circulate. Also we need to lift the stuff that you guys have put into the chat and we can put those into the notes as well. If you do have thoughts about topics of conversation that you would like to have in these forums then please let us know. I don’t get the sense out of today we’ve got any actions per se, things that we can physically go and do, sometimes we do, sometimes we don’t. But for me it’s useful to get together and just get likeminded people having these sorts of conversations because it raises everyone’s awareness of what’s going on and what’s working and what isn’t.
CHAT
Neville Tomblin (External)11:14 am
I think that as a client there are 2 considerations, High Rise and High Risk and there should be more concentration on High Risk and not just duck this by saying that the block sits outside of the 18m rule.
Adey Badmos (External)11:25 am
Clients will definitely always need to lead. It will be a bit challenging to rely on the contractors, due to cost issues.
Victoria Finn (External)11:27 am
yes agree with George, lessons learnt are important to show progression, many of these maybe reduced though if those risks were properly considered from the outset and more holistically
if anyone has reported an MOR, this would be good to review
Simon Collery (External)11:31 am
https://www.cross-safety.org/uk
John Waines (External)11:36 am
just submitted a MOR to a High Rise due to the Smoke Control System been defective
Stephen Coppin (External)11:37 am
What to report to BSR
You must submit a mandatory occurrence notice and report when a safety occurrence has caused, or is likely to cause:
- the death of a significant number of people
- serious injury of a significant number of people
A safety occurrence is an incident involving, or a risk that could cause:
- structural failure of the building
- the spread of fire or smoke in the building
A safety occurrence is something which if not remedied, could cause serious harm to people when the building is in use.
You must submit a report even if the safety occurrence is remedied immediately. The only exception is when a principal contractor remedies issues to ongoing building work, which are unlikely to risk significant numbers of death or serious injury.
Failing to report
You’re committing an offence if you do not make a report and could face enforcement action, including prosecution.
If you know that a mandatory occurrence report has already been submitted to BSR, you do not need to submit a report for the same safety occurrence. You should obtain a copy of the report submitted to BSR to support your decision not to make the report yourself.
Reporting incidents to the fire service
If you report an incident to the fire service, you must also submit a mandatory occurrence notice and report if it meets the criteria of what to report to BSR.
Submitting mandatory occurrence notices and reports
A guide for principal designers, principal contractors and accountable persons to report incidents or risks of structural failure, or the spread of fire to the Building Safety Regulator.
Safety occurrence examples
Some examples that could meet the criteria of what to report to BSR,
include:
- defective building work, including defective competent person scheme work which is part of the wider building work
- fire safety issues likely to result in the spread of fire
- the use of non-compliant products or incompatible compliant products in the construction of the building
- inappropriate or incorrect installation of construction products
- product failure against specification and claimed performance
- faults in the design plans, caused by either design software or human error
Submitting mandatory occurrence notices and reports
A guide for principal designers, principal contractors and accountable persons to report incidents or risks of structural failure, or the spread of fire to the Building Safety Regulator.
John Waines (External)11:38 am
RRO has always stated that any system down and cannot be repaired within a 24 hour period we need to report to the local Fire Brigade / Fire Rescue Service
Simon Collery (External)11:40 am
The term 'significant' number of deaths might be misleading; one injury or death should be enough, especially if it's a near miss, where you can't tell how many people may have been injured or killed, or how badly injured.
Stephen Coppin (External)11:41 am
Change control applications
If you submit a mandatory occurrence report, you may also need to make a change control application.
For example, during construction you discover the load points in the design plans have been miscalculated. If this is not remedied, it could cause structural failure and risks death or serious injury to a significant number of people when the building is in use. This meets the criteria of what to report to BSR and you must submit a mandatory occurrence notice and report.
To correct the plans, the principal contractor must also submit a change control application and request a major change to the building control application.
Malcolm Gregorczyk (External)11:45 am
That's a good example you give David. At the end of the day, it is for the client to receive the assured advice and make their decision.
Adey Badmos (External)11:53 am
They are slow with caution. Having to rely on Cat 3 certs
Cliff Kneale (External)11:53 am
Scenario, I was working for a large well known global engineering company designing the 6th office block (IR6) for a large well known blue chip company. The cladding needed to look the same as IR5 (block 5) which had been built a few years before, so I looked at the cladding note on the elevation for IR5 which read 'refer to IR4', when I looked at IR4 it said to refer to IR3 and so on. The cladding no longer met the building regulation and it is likely that the previous buildings were also non-compliant. The cut and paste culture from one project to the next can lead to non-compliant materials being specified, the specifications need to be checked against building regulations in use at the time of design.
Malcolm Gregorczyk (External)12:03 pm
Interesting gathering, and good to hear that other individuals have issues, understandings and concerns to overcome. Thanks.