Development Working Group Meeting 28-11-2024

BIM4HOUSING DEVELOPMENT WORKING GROUP MEETING 28-11-2024

RICHARD FREER David Poat, who ably chairs these meetings is unavoidably elsewhere, so it’s going to be very collaborative because you’re going to have to help us. we’ve got an agenda and we know what it all means, but in terms of putting it all together you’re going to have to be very patient. We’ll go straight into the first element of today. This is about new building safety gateways experiences, are any of you experiencing gateway delays? And how are you managing the risks of those delays?

JOHN WAINES Just to clarify, you’re talking about if you’ve got an existing building, we’re not talking about gateway 1, we don’t have any new buildings, we’re following the principles of gateway 1, 2 and 3. Gateway 2, we’ve submitted two buildings to date of which the first one took us 9 months before we got approval. Some minor tweaking, not much, but it was all around the technical specification rather than anything else. And the second one took us about six months to get approval for. And what I’ve been told is we’re ready to go for our next two schemes, that should be a lot quicker, but the rest of the network that you get involved with they’re actually telling me something totally different.

RICHARD FREER Is that quicker because you know what they are after now?

JOHN WAINES Yeah, Glastonbury is a £7 million refurbishment of which kitchens, bathrooms, asbestos removal, new detection, new sprinklers, new fire doors. So yes, we now know that we need to put a series of documents in and I mean everything, the advice we got was don’t put that in and don’t put that in and when we put all the stuff that just related to fire, in fairness the building safety said we no, we need a little bit more than that. We won’t charge you, just put all of the specifications, so 2-3 weeks later we put everything in and it took them 9 months to approve all of the works.

RICHARD FREER So, what about the risks, the implications of that to you?

JOHN WAINES I think from our point of view it was fairly Ok because all that we were doing was upgrading, other than the sprinklers which were new, everything else was just getting upgraded. It’s coming to the end of its life and the fire risk assessments were saying you need to get these replaced, they’re coming to the end of life and all of the rest. So, it didn’t really cause too much angst because we were just programming it in. We already allowed for 3 or 4 months, so actually in the end it was just another 4 or 5 months on top of that. So, it didn’t really cause us much issues really and we started 2 weeks ago onsite. It will be interesting to see if the Building Safety Regulator comes down and spot checks us or checks that we’re saying that we’re going to do works we were going to do and how we were going to do it.

RICHARD FREER So a 4 or 5 month delay, but that wasn’t any kind of issue for you.

JOHN WAINES Not really, no, because I think that we were suspecting that this new system was going to take us, it probably took us longer than…the only risk it cost us is we couldn’t pay for the works out of our 23-24 budget, but our clever people in finance managed to wangle it and transfer it into 24-25 budget. That was the only very contentious issue was the financials and how we can make sure that it gets funded out of the 23-24 budget. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t have the answer, they did some magic wizardry in the background but it’s all in this year's budget.

GEORGE STEVENSON Where are you from, John?

JOHN WAINES 13 Group, we’re based in Middlesborough, we don’t have a lot of high-rises, we literally have 11 which we’ve registered. The second one was Welton House which was literally where our old concierge monitoring station used to be and it was putting 2 walls up, a fire door and an extractor fan in. That one came back fairly quickly. We did ask a technical question on it and I’m still waiting to this day about the technical question, the Building Safety Regulator didn’t reply back on that. So, we thought sod ‘em, we’ll just go and get on with it then.

GEORGE STEVENSON I was at an event about a month ago and one of the things that one of the landlords was saying was that they had to replace a fire door because it had been damaged. And to replace the fire door, because it’s in an HRB, they’ve got to have a principal designer and a principal contractor. And the cost of the fire door was £1,500 and if the cost to get if they could actually get somebody, it was going to cost £2,000 for the principal designer.

JOHN WAINES We rang them up about that because someone told me, I think it was on this group, so I rang the Building Safety Regulator and I said where does it say that we’ve got to do a change of fire door and we have to look for approval. They said fill the form n and we’ll give you a reply back and I’ve got to be honest, I thought flaming heck, I’m not doing that. So, I just changed the fire door and I thought, well, let them come and prosecute me.

SARAH TATE I was just coming in just to get a flavour of the gateways because I’ve got a number of schemes that we’re just looking at, at the minute, just in the appraisal stage. So, we’ll be looking to get onsite probably in 26-27 with then because it’s a bit of a regen project that we’re doing.

RICHARD FREER Right, so you’re just preparing now.

SARAH TATE I’m preparing, I’m just fact finding, yes. I’m from Manchester, I work for an RP, so we have a number of high-rises and we’ve been doing refurbs on them. But yeah, we’re just looking at a regen project at the moment, there will be a number of high-rise buildings involved in that.

JOHN WAINES I can tell you what documents they ask for: specifications, the emergency and fire file, control management, how you’re going to do your mandatory occurrence reporting and if you’ve got a strategy to the building, a fire evacuation strategy. I think ultimately, they were the 5 documents that we put in, all of them were fairly substantial, they weren’t just single pieces of paper saying we’ve got one, you have to give them what you’ve got.

SARAH TATE I think because I’m in the appraisal stage at the moment we’re just interested in, obviously you’re allocating time, how long these things are going to take. With you saying you’re getting approval quite quickly, that’s good to know.

RICHARD FREER Well, hopefully, the last one was 9 months and they were reckoning on 4 or 5. It certainly seems to be a question of learn as you go along.

TOBY GILDEN I’m safe homes manager for Dacorum Borough Council. John, I’ve got a quick question for you. For the application that you did, did you proceed as a client as the building safety work principal designer? Or did you appoint a…

JOHN WAINES We have our own design team here, so part of the documentation we had to send in was the competence 11 and it was Dominic Marshall who did all of the specifications. So, behind the specification was Dominic’s profile as in this is his level of qualifications, this is his level of experience, he’s worked in these type of buildings before. So, it wasn’t just him there’s the spec, but we also had to put in his competency levels to prove that he co8ld design whatever we put in there. 13 was the client, but where we’re struggling is principal designer role, we still haven’t boxed that up, but we never got challenged on it from the Building Safety Regulator either.

TOBY GILDEN Yeah, it’s really difficult because for a lot of projects that we’ve done CDM regs, we as the client have used ourselves, buildings under that fall outside of the HRB specification, with the new Building Safety Act you still have to appoint a principal designer for the building safety side. So, we’ve got our CDM principal designer, but for the smaller jobs I’ve appointed myself and for really minor jobs, minor works, but for the building control sign-off. But for the HRBs I’m getting real reluctance from consultants to take on the role of principal designer. They will be a principal designer advisor, but fundamentally the responsibility will lay with me as the client. I’ve got a couple who have said yes, we’ll assume that role, but their capacity is quite small for the size of the projects that we’ve got.

The one that I spoke with George about it at length was about the individual door replacement. And then I’ve got one HRB where I need to replace 72 doors, so it’s not on an individual basis, it’s not like it’s an emergency, I can’t retrospectively apply it. It’s a building that is registered with the Building Safety Regulator. It’s a like for like swap, we’re just going to fit better quality doors. The doors that went in from our development team were just cheap and nasty. Although they are certified fire doors the way that they’ve been installed, it’s going to be a nightmare to do any remedial work on them. The block that they’re in, they’ve just been abused, so we need to fit new doors, but there’s no way of getting away from putting that through the gateway 2 application.

LUCY KEAN We’re doing the same at the moment, putting in a gateway application for a very similar project, fire doors, there’s a couple of other things we’re doing as well, we’ve put it all together and going through the gateway. Although actually to get through the gateway we’ve got to do all of the fire strategies for these particular buildings. So, before we even get to the gateway, we’ve got a 16-week lead-in on fire strategies because they’re so difficult as well. I’m from Abri Group. We’ve also got gateway applications for lift replacements too.

MANDEEP SINGH GILL I’m from Hydrock…just in terms of exemptions on the gateway to the building control application, you get exemption free circumstances. The first circumstance is if it’s scheme work and that’s obviously classified under Regulation 20 and 20A and the building regs under Table 3A. The second scenario is if it’s works which are listed in a schedule 2 of the high-risk building procedure. That’s little stuff like replacing basins and existing sinks and stuff like that. And the third exemption is emergency works.

What you were saying about those doors, you won’t be able to do them on emergency works because essentially, it’s obviously works which are affecting the active and passive fire measures and that’s listed as the category of…If you’re replacing something of a similar quality it will be known as Category B works rather than Category A works, but you will still need to make an application for that as well.

TOBY GILDEN Yeah, that’s been my understanding. If we had a red key entry fire service or police had gone through a door, absolutely we’d just get the door done, make sure that people are safe and we’d retrospectively apply. But very much the stance that we’ve been taking is that if it’s known it’s a tolerable risk and it’s part of our program, there is no way that we you can say it’s emergency works.

GEORGE STEVENSON Mandeep, you’re far more knowledgeable about this stuff that me, so I’m just flagging up there that I may be saying something wrong here. But I was at the Devonshire’s conference in September and Andrew Mellor of PRP, who’s also very knowledgeable in this area, he’d done a lot of work on the scheme work point that you just made. And what they actually identified is that although there are things that are under scheme work, you have to have an organisation that is represented within one of the scheme work schemes. And one of them, apparently, at that time were approving work in HRBs, so I think that’s an interesting thing.

You may have different information about that, Mandeep, it was quite shocking really because obviously people were thinking of scheme work as being something that, scheme work could be replacing fire doors, for example. But unless you’ve got somebody that is supported by an organisation BM Trada, for example, wasn’t considered to be an adequately authorised organisation to do that scheme work.

MANDEEP SINGH GILL I was looking at this a little while ago for a few things that I’m doing. The scheme works that you mention, it’s a particular set of works basically…

GEORGE STEVENSON I think I went to it the day after I met Toby and that’s why I was really interested because scheme works seem to be an answer to what Toby was saying there.

MANDEEP SINGH GILL There’s two kinds of categories of the scheme works. (shares screen). This is under Schedule 1 under table 3. This is the installation, but then the person has to have the relevant certification which is on the right-hand side of the building regs. So, it says person carrying out the work, to be best of my knowledge I think it should be registered with these schemes, even if they’re carrying out that kind of scheme work. So, you’ve got the general kind of scheme work…depending on the profession there will be a different kind of competence person scheme. This is a general kind of scheme work, but then obviously under table 3A as well you’ve got self-certification scheme.

So, fire doors, for example, aren’t under scheme works, so you can’t replace a fire door under scheme works. For example, installation as a replacement, if it’s a replacement of roof light or roof window in an existing dwelling that would be scheme work, but the person has to have their relevant certification and stuff like that, if that makes sense.

GEORGE STEVENSON It does, but what I’m saying is Andrew said, and there was a panel talking about it, and they said that they’d been in touch with all of these organisations and asked them if working on HRBs was something that was covered under what they were doing and apparently, they’ve all said no.

MANDEEP SINGH GILL No, it is, because if you look at the high-risk buildings, procedures, regulations, basically it gives you the exemptions for what's exactly exempt.

GEORGE STEVENSON Yeah, I know what’s in the legislation, but what I’m saying is the organisations themselves which are the accreditation bodies, they are saying that they are not covering HRBs.

MANDEEP SINGH GILL Maybe they’re doing it for, the only thing I can say is it’s for an insurance purpose or from risk perspective, which we’re seeing a lot of.

GEORGE STEVENSON Yeah, but the effect of that is it’s actually undermining what we’re trying to do.

MANDEEP SINGH GILL Yeah, it just seems that they’re not confident in their own work, basically.

JOHN WAINES The other scheme we got approved was Welton House which was to build two walls in a room with a fire door, an additional detector of an existing system in an HRB. The level of information provided wasn’t as robust as Glastonbury, I think the project was something like £15,000 to do the work. We still had to say who the client was, in this case it was the building support team for their system. We gave them a specification, gave them a drawing, we gave them the method statement of the contractor and the only thing they came back and asked us was how will the detectors work in relation to within the room, to the whole system. We answered that query and within 2 weeks we got approval to go ahead with the works.

So, the level of the information that you need is reflective of the work that you’re going to do. So, it wasn’t as robust as what we for Glastonbury where you’re spending £7 million where you needed an E&F file and you had to check everyone’s competencies. In fairness, we did a sanction log of the contractor, we also attached that, we checked the health & safety, we checked the local authority and we checked a couple of other sites to make sure that the builder was going in which was 3Flex and Vision, did they have any sanction logs against them from any other statutory regulators. That was the one that took less time, but clearly they still had queries, but it was always around the technical stuff, didn’t seem to be about the subsidiary information that we put in.

I think we’re at that stage of I think you’ve got to make your own risk assessment, complete what you think was necessary and then send it in and go (John crosses his fingers for luck). I think that someone made a comment, I think they are learning just as much as we are.

RICHARD FREER I’m interested to hear how people are mitigating the risks of these kind of delays. A 5 or 6 month delay from what you’re expecting can be significant in a number of cases.

PAUL WOMACK I’m a building safety manager for MTBH, so I’m writing the building safety cases and I’m just earwigging to hear what issues that I might come across and see how the different teams are coping with it.

GEORGE STEVENSON Have you had any experience on this at all?

PAUL WOMACK No, I’m going to be honest, I don’t think that the organisation is fully complying and understanding the different gateways for these works which has prompted me during this meeting to email the team which are doing fire door replacements.

GEORGE STEVENSON Yeah, I’m fairly confident that most RPs are really finding their way with things, to be honest.

PAUL WOMACK We’re honest and you’ll know what’s going on, tap the right people on the shoulder and say have you thought about this, are you doing this.

GEORGE STEVENSON Yeah, and I think that’s the point really. The Regulator, my impression is that they’re not trying to catch people out, they’re trying to get people to do these things in a more organised way so that it is auditable. One thing that is interesting that you probably should be aware of is since April this year on any project you have to sign a declaration to say that you’ve got all of the information that you need for the building to be delivered safely.

PAUL WOMACK I’m aware, but I don’t know if the organisation is and it’s a case of who should be leading the horse to water on that. It’s been mentioned and I think it needs to be taken more seriously. Going on what you said earlier on, George, is that the Regulator is also learning from us.

RICHARD FREER Has anybody got anymore examples of delays they’ve had in the gateways?

DEBBIE SCOTT We haven’t actually gone through the gateways. I’ve jumped into this because I was interested in what’s happening, I don’t really know that much about it, I was more trying to gather information. I’m a compliance manager at Cotsway Housing.

TOBY GILDEN I’ve got another quick question for John. When you did that £7 million project at what point did you make the gateway 2 application? Because I’ve got a couple of projects planned for the next financial year and essentially the position that I’m in, I’m not going to be able to start the gateway 2 applications until I know who the contractor is. It’s going to be a massive procurement process, that’s going to take me a really long period of time. I’m conscious though if I’ve got a 6 to potentially 8-month lead time for the Building Safety Regulator and I’ve got to go through that whole procurement process, I’m potentially going to miss my window.

Because I cannot make the application until I know who the contractor is, but I’m not going to know who the contractor is yet because I’ve got this huge procurement exercise to go through. So, I was just wondering how you managed that, or did you have a contractor lined up prior to making the application?

JOHN WAINES My first answer would be badly, but ultimately we were, it’s a strange place, we already have contractors in place for our major schemes, what they do is they do a little min comp between themselves. So, we’ve got Regens, Equans and ESH, we didn’t submit anything until we’d got the method statement off Regens, so the tendering process had already been gone through. The only caveat is we originally were going to start in August but then they said you’ve missed the boat, we’re going to have to start in November for our resources. So, you may as well add another couple of months on to the 9 months because the contractor then turned around and said because there had been such a delay we can’t start on the day that you want, so we started 2-3 weeks ago.

TOBY GILDEN And contractually do you write anything into the contract to protect yourselves from uplifts?

JOHN WAINES Good god, no, is there such a contract?

TOBY GILDEN Yeah, my fear is I’m anticipating this to be a 12-month process and we know labour, materials are fluctuating at the moment. So, I’m just interested what other people are doing to protect themselves against potential, because you know what it’s like, once you award that contract it’s going to be an absolute nightmare to try and go anywhere else. And then you’re at the mercy of the contractors to say you know what, it’s a 12% increase here because you’ve waited 12 months, something along those lines. And I’m trying to protect…

RICHARD FREER It would be very interesting to actually learn about any mitigation that’s going on.

LUCY KEAN Just another question for people that have submitted gateways on the refurbishment side of things. Have you given your contractors the permission to do the gateway? Or have you done the process yourself, have you submitted it yourselves?

JOHN WAINES We’ve done it ourselves. We have a design team and a project manager for that scheme, Clare Atkinson is the one that became the focal point for all of the information, rather than tie down the designers, Clare became the project manager who then coordinated us from a building safety, coordinated the contractor for the method statements, coordinated anything that needed to be done. We literally just went on the webpage, we need one of these, we need one of these, and she’s the one that then cleared it all and said right, we’ve got all of that information they say that they want, let’s send it off. And again, we went right, let’s see if that’s what they want, fingers crossed and it went up. The only thing that Clare got was technical, around the specification, rather than anything else.

RICHARD WHITTAKER It was just in relation to contractors and risk and the contract and the contract in use. We've had particular difficulties in the past using JCT, for two reasons: you get a fixed price you go insolvent and you can pay up to 70% fo your contract sub recovering that job in order to complete it.so we moved away from JCT, we had a look at enhanced retentions, increased retention by 2%, that’s not going to go very far if it all goes pear-shaped. So, we started using partnering contracts like the NEC because it’s based on an activity schedule and it’s also a requirement to submit a priced risk register as part of the procurement process. At current rates, and of course rates do change and things like that, but an increase in material and labour costs by 5 or 10% is bit different than not knowing what the increase is at all.

And the biggest risk I see is trying to tie contractors down to a fixed price in the market that we’re working in now. In many areas a good activity schedule will reduce risk for both the contractor and the client and you could even accelerate your cashflow payments to fortnightly to help with the cashflow and make you more attractive as a client.

RICHARD FREER What do you do then? What do you do if they won't guarantee the price, what do you do? Build it into the price at a 10% rise or something? How do you manage that?

RICHARD WHITTAKER You just manage your own contingency, your contingency is not declared…because people see it as a target for variation if you declare it, so we don’t. But it depends on the type of work and what it is and I’ve worked on contingency ranging from 3% up to 30%, depending on the type of works. Typically, refurbishment and the type of work we talk about in HRBs and I’d be going to the powers that be saying I want a 30% contingency and I’ll report expenditure against that contingency. Because that’s another area where for your own governance and your own sort of leaders and things like that, they don’t tend to hear anything until the thing is broke. Whereas if you’re reporting on contingency spend alongside contract spend internally you can actually manage that message much better.

TOBY GILDEN It’s a question on PI insurance, assuming the role client being the PD for BSR, is that something that you guys have considered, John?

JOHN WAINES We have assurance and risk here, so what we’ve done is explain what we’re doing and then passed that on to our insurance and risk people who are happy to fo follow our lead. I don’t know if that costs us any money or if we’ve had to change our insurances, I don’t know. Ultimately, we’ve always had the designers here, to be honest I can’t answer that because I don’t know. I can find out for you, I can ask Karen did the new BST process change our insurance liabilities.

RICHARD WHITTAKER After, we use carry us own? 36mins 36secs insurance on some schemes because the difficulty in getting our own Pi insurance as a client was actual evidence of competency that’s accepted by the insurance industry. So, we used to do a mixture of both things, we didn’t have personal PI as a client, we’d either go through a consultant or an architect or a contractor or whatever, or we’d carry the risk ourselves. And with the number of PI claims we made, £120 million budget, not a single PI claim and you look at how much you’re paying PI, £2.8 million, you think hmm, I’m paying a lot out for PI here and I’m not making claims, So, there is an argument from that perspective.

GEORGE STEVENSON That insurance bit is a really, really important one. And there is something called mutual insurance or integrated project insurance and the principle of that is that nobody has got any PI on the job. The project has got the PI and an insurance company takes the risk on the whole project and everybody then is committed to deliver the project. So, if anybody is interested in that let me know and I’ll let you know. I spent several years on it as an R&D project and it’s now delivered several schemes, that methodology. I think it’s going to be the way of the future.

RICHARD FREER Well, you’ve done a lot, George, over the years and particularly recently in looking at the best ways of managing the insurance issue, haven’t you?

GEORGE STEVENSON Oh yeah, there is no question that there’s some significant ways that the insurance actually is going to drive a lot of the better behaviour that we’re anticipating.

RICHARD FREER Let’s move on; we’re looking at O&M documentations standardisation. So, what processes and procedures are you developing for improving the standardisation of O&M documentation? Oe are you even improving the standardisation of O&M documentation?

RICHARD WHITTAKER We went down the digitisation route because we used to get things on memory sticks, and anything else that you can think of, that wasn’t even alphabetical so that made it an unusable document. So, we produced our own filing structure and we either adopted propriety systems for the full digitisation process and meeting the golden thread, or we had a SharePoint where we just had a filing structure and everything went into that filing structure in the relevant folder which are quite easy to validate and monitor.

And the important thing about that filing structure was it matched the existing filing structure of the client of the asset management team, so they didn’t have to learn anything over to use it, they could just go into it and they’d got that normalisation. So, standardisation for me is not the same thing across the industry, it’s the same information that’s put into placeholders, or data containers, that sort of thing.

GEORGE STEVENSON We’re actually doing an exercise in this in BIM In Asset Management, so it’s one of the workstreams that we’ve got some momentum behind now. Origin Housing are doing some work in this area and if anybody is interested in it then please just put your name in the chat and we’ll include you in it. We’re talking with, Waites are involved, Barclay Homes are involved, so if you’re interested as a client or as a construction company, then there is a means by which we can do that. It’s the O&M, health & safety and technical submittal workstream.

SIMON COLLERY I can’t say a huge amount about operations and maintenance manuals. What I would say is that at Camden the ones that they have which is only for relatively recent buildings, it’s quite a small proportion of their buildings, and they’ve had to create their own indexing system. And they’ve created about 6 major groups, so within those groups there can still be thousands or even tens of thousands of documents, so you’d still need to have a fair bit of expertise to use them.

So, the building safety managers, compliance managers and people like now are hoping to be able to use operations & maintenance manuals still find that they’re missing for most buildings. But the ones for which we have them, they’re not really indexed, they’re not easy to use and there is no standard way of setting out operations & maintenance manuals. So, it would be a huge task for most people.

RICHARD FREER Are you doing anything towards that, Simon?

SIMON COLLERY Personally, no. CIP, which is the development programme, the community investment programme, they build new buildings. And they have their operations & maintenance manuals for buildings that they’ve commissioned and built, so they’re the ones that organise the documentation. But the building safety managers are not part of CIP, they’re completely separate, and in fact other business areas that use the operations & maintenance manuals, they just don’t have the expertise that will be required to be able to use a lot of it.

So, they need health & safety documentation, for example, but health & safety documentation is not everything that’s in what they call the health & safety files. There is too much in there and there is health & safety documentation throughout the operations & maintenance manuals that’s not explicitly called health & safety. So yeah, there isn’t a clear resolution to that yet.

TOBY GILDEN Just on a point that Simon made there, the development team and the building safety managers don’t talk to each other, that’s something that we’ve had on all our development schemes. I think the O&Ms traditionally used to be, you got given a massive stack of folders and it got hidden in the plant room somewhere. And within our organisation it’s still very much that case, it’s just digitally. What we’ve been doing recently though is we’re getting our building safety managers to sit in on the joint application development meetings with the development team to specify exactly the file naming formats, the file saving conventions, how they want that information to maintain that golden thread.

Because they’re going to be the team once the development team take on, or after that 12-month period, it’s the safe homes team in our organisation that then manage that building. So, we are now making a point of getting involved at a really, really early stage to say this is how we want the information, it’s been built into the contract and everything.

GEORGE STEVENSON It would be worth whoever is doing that to sit on one of the meetings that we’ve got because that’s exactly what we’re trying to do. We’ve also been talking with the health & safety executive about how they expect to see the information as well. Because since I’ve looked at this over the last couple of years there’s lots of different people want different information for different purposes. And if you’ve got just a folder structure then you don’t know which folder to go and look in because generally O&Ms are delivered by work package.

TOBY GILDEN The thing that’s crazy about all of this, this isn’t new, Regulation 38 building regs, we should be getting this stuff, you’ve got CDM regulations 2015. The builders should be giving us all of this information, but because we as clients haven’t been proactively pursuing them for it they’ve just been getting away with not giving it to us. It’s not necessarily new, but I think what’s so good about the new legislation is it becomes the client’s responsibility to have it readily available. So, we’re now putting the pressure on, but yeah, it’s a real challenge.

PENCHO STUDENKOV Until you make it contractually exactly what we need in terms of documentation and also the structure and the way that it’s been presented, in what format. Developers, I don’t think they’re keen to provide that or go to subcontractors to get all of the packages, to be honest with you it’s a legal requirement to provide that, as you said it’s part of the Regulation 39 package. But I don’t think the developers I have come across in the past 5 years really understood Regulation 38 until we actually engaged with them.

TOBY GILDEN Trying to get as-built drawings out of a developer is like blood from a stone.

CLIFF KNEALE I’ve got a couple of things to say about the question of the insurance, whether that would be increased from the Building Safety Regulator. This question came up when BIM was introduced and Bill & Co? 46mins 26secs looked at Level 2 BIM because clients were asking whether or not if they followed Level 2 BIM would it affect their insurance. And they wrote a report on that, they didn’t go so far to say that it wouldn’t, but they say that following Level 2 BIM doesn’t add any risk to the project.

And they’ve written a few reports on what happened about the Grenfell disaster, but unfortunately I wasn’t able to paste the link into the chat because I’m not a member of the chat group. But there is some information out there and Bill & Co, they specialise in construction law and they’ve written about 6 different reports on the Grenfell disaster. Toby, you mentioned you guys are following some information management, or trying to put some folder construction and naming conventions in place. Can I ask what standards you’re using for that because I’m a BIM manager, so it pricked my interest.

TOBY GILDEN So, it’s very much just an internal process, we’ve started using MRI Asset to track loads of stuff that we’ve been doing internally. And the naming format that we’ve been using is unique property reference number, the name of the property, the type of document that it is and then the date. So that’s how we’ve set up using MRI and we’ve just replicated that because it has been working, but in terms of a standard we’re not necessarily following a standard.

GEORGE STEVENSON Cliff, rather than talk about it now, I think this is exactly the sort of thing that Toby would benefit from in the workstream.

CLIFF KNEALE Toby, there are some standards, ISO 19650, that have gained an awful lot of traction and they’re used across the world now. And they came from the UK and a lot of contractors are using that, so i think we’re discussing that in our groups.

RICHARD FREER we’re going to talk about the workstreams that we’ve set up. It’s been a very hectic rollercoaster journey this year since we set up BIM In Asset Management to work with the existing BIM4Housing. Now, we’ve got a number of new workgroups, workstreams which I’m going to run through. George, Fire & Safety Critical workgroup.

GEORGE STEVENSON What we’re trying to do there is just identify exactly what information is needed for, for example, Regulation 38. So, we’ve had a couple of meetings on that and if anybody is interested in participating in that please let us know.

RICHARD FREER Working groups identify issues, our workstreams look to solve those issues. Digital Records, George.

GEORGE STEVENSON We’ve had a couple of sessions on that and we’ve identified what a digital record is. So, broadly, what we’re trying to do is take out ambiguity and debate about things. Interoperability, that’s something that’s talked about quite a lot, so we’ve got some specialists in that area. So, if you want to contribute to or understand more about how systems talk to each other, how data can talk to each other, put your name in the there and we can share with you what we’ve already done and also you can contribute to taking that forward.

Business case, the principle there, what we’re trying to do is get examples of why better information management is needed. So, there’s some interesting things already on the BIM In Asset Management website where we’ve got an example of something going wrong and then how can we obviate it going forward.

RICHARD FREER O&M and H&S and Technical Submission workstream which obviously feeds from some of what we’ve been doing today.

GEORGE STEVENSON Waites and Origin Housing are leading on that one, so we’ve got a meeting scheduled in a week or so. What we’d like to do is if you’re interested in simplifying and automating some of that process then please join that meeting.

RICHARD FREER Digital Asset Capture, George.

GEORGE STEVENSON we did some examples of this in the BIM In Asset Management forum, so if you’re interested we can send you a link so that you can see how that is going about. But the critical thing there is to be able to do asset capture in probably 6 times the speed than you would otherwise do it. So, that’s something that is worth you taking a look at if you need to know what assets are in your buildings because that’s one of the big challenges.

RICHARD FREER And that’s not hypothetical, we’ve done it.

GEORGE STEVENSON The principle on that as far as the housing’s concerned is taking 360 photos of your existing, building safety managers can do this, and that becomes the source of the ability to capture the asset data. So, it’s a very low-cost way of getting asset data.

RICHARD FREER OK, Golden Thread.

GEORGE STEVENSON What we’re doing with that is actually showing and working through what’s needed to actually flow the information through from specification through the design, construction and working that through with a range of different software applications that are able to do that, but more importantly specialists who are actually doing it. So, anybody who’s interested in that area, if you sign up to that we’ll include you.

RICHARD FREER And there’s another one, Existing Build.

GEORGE STEVENSON Basically what we’ve done is broken down existing building and new builds into two groups. We’ve not started the meetings on that yet and really we want to understand whether people want support and collaboration around how they are managing information about existing buildings and what we need on new builds. So, for example, one of the things that we want to really try and draw out is if you’ve got projects where you’ve had information delivered that doesn’t really inform the asset management side of things, then it would be good to know that because it may be possible to fix it.

RICHARD FREER And the last one.

GEORGE STEVENSON PFI, Private Finance Initiative, public sector partnerships, public private partnerships. If you’re involved in any of those projects, I don’t think anybody is here at the moment, but certainly in other parts of the organisation. I don’t think we’ve got anybody in BIM4housing that’s doing PFI, but that’s that other working group.

RICHARD FREER Moving swiftly on, we have two very intrepid members of BIM4Housing and BIM IN Asset Management, Jarek and Das, who have put together quite an astonishing piece of work with a lot of help and a lot of collaboration from members.

JAREK WITYK I just wanted to have a word from an organisational word because obviously we’re all volunteering in here and I’m the facilitator of the Miro board. And I receive a lot of requests to add to the Miro group, but the way the Miro works, they ask me to either accept the request by adding to my monthly subscription or cancel the subscription. What I do in that instance, I copy the email address and I add you as a guest, so I don’t want you to feel that I have refused or anyone refuses your access to the Miro board.

This is just I don’t want to pay for your monthly fee. But when I add you whoever wants access to it, then you add as a guest with full edit rights and comments. So, I don’t want you to feel that when you’re actually trying to help and volunteer and then you’re being refused access, this is not what’s happening. It’s a lot of people which are registered and I would have to pay an astronomical bill for it.

RICHARD FREER Well, you’ve had a lot of input into this.

JAREK WITYK I did, we’ve had a lot of meeting with various people and mainly with Das we’ve coordinated all of it and all of the information. We’ve put this workflow in place which is easy to follow, there is a lot of valuable links, everything based on data. There’s lots of links to government websites and there was a lot of discussions about it. This is the second or third published revision.

RICHARD FREER We should actually say what it is, it’s a process map on the emerging Building Safety Act procedures and responsibilities.

GEORGE STEVENSON Das, before you start can I just say why we’ve done this to an extent. The fact is that nobody knows everything, the regulators don’t even know how to interpret the legislation fully. So therefore, we’ve got a community who are passionate and also everybody is working hard to understand things from their perspective. I spoke to Das a year or 18 months ago on this because Das was putting together a cheat sheet, a document, that was really dumping down his interpretation of what was needed. And Jarek was doing the same and a few other people were doing the same and it just seemed to make sense to do that collaboratively. And that really leads into what we’ve done here.

ANDREW DE SILVA ‘DAS’ This is basically the Miro board, it’s essentially just an unlimited space and what Jarek and I and the team have done is create this 6 or 7 pages with the information that we’re aware of at the moment. So, if you did want to comment on it you can come in here, click on this, write something and then the only thing you’ve got to make sure is you click on this blue button to save that comment. I’ve done that in the past where I’ve written things, forgot to press the blue thing and it disappeared. So, once you do that then it comes up with a V for visitor. So, then the idea is that Jarek and I or others can amend the document accordingly to capture the comment once we’re happy that it’s OK. That’s just an interface thing.

In terms of what the contributors, on the left-hand side we’ve tried to capture all of those that have inputted into it. As you can see there is a lot of people who’ve commented or been in the sessions etc, but the reality is the community is growing more and more. So, we’re hoping that there will be more input from others because actually what is really interesting and important is yourselves are going through the processes and therefore we’re learning as we go through on an iterative basis, as George was saying. What we’ve done here is just scrolled through, we try to give a little bit of a one-page crib as to the history behind the Building Safety Act, what it is, a couple of key definitions and then identify what is applicable for all buildings or high-risk buildings, for example.

So, this is like a one-page overview and then what we’ve tried to do is just to map out the key legislation. Again, some of these things will become out-of-date and as Jarek was saying what we tried to do is put hyperlinks into the document. And those hyperlinks we’ve chosen only to be the gov.uk websites, so you can click on this and it will take you to the actual website, or the HSE website. So, we tried to keep it just to those two and to ensure that our sources are essentially from the horse’s mouth, as such. So, what we’ve tried to do here is to identify the key legislation changes and some things will come in, for example you have the Building Safety Regulator, building control authority, then there is the construction products which is a bit behind, I think, plan. The new homes ombudsman and then we put a link into if you wanted to find, for example, registered architects in this case.

And so, this page this page is really about identifying some of the key legislation changes. The main part of this document are these process diagrams. Each of these workflows is there to help whoever may come into it and go OK, if you’re a client or a designer or a facilities manager. The first thing we felt to understand is if the new buildings or existing buildings must undergo the gateway process. I think some of those discussions today about if you’re going to change the doors does that kick in the gateway process, for example. So, we tried to start from the very beginning. i won’t go through the whole workflow, but the idea is that you can it’s a new building, so you know whether it’s a new building or an existing building, that’s fairly straightforward to understand.

If it’s a new building then the height and the number of storeys is the next thing that obviously determines whether it falls into the HRC category. And again, we’ve tried to put a couple of links into here which are in more detail about how to maybe define what a building is. Which sounds quite an unusual thing to say, but there are quite explicit definitions of what a building is, or building work is. And we’ve tried to put in a couple of things about caution. For example, I think a lot of people would have come across the idea of when you’ve got buildings which are attached to each other does it then trigger 7-storeys or the 18 metres or whatever. So, we just put a couple of things in there which are about prompts or just look out for these because it’s not as straightforward as measuring 7 storeys, for example.

The first process diagram is about understanding whether your building would fall into the high-risk building or whether the works that you’re doing to that existing would then trigger the gateway process. Again, I’ve added, for example, this after Jarek and I did it because one of my colleagues was looking at a document and she’s like I don’t think you’ve got these diagrams in your workflow, so we need to add that into this version. So, in the same way it would be great to get real life input as to you don’t understand what you’re doing here, it doesn’t make sense or this symbol doesn’t make sense. It doesn’t matter what the comment is, we just want to hear back from you. And the idea is that the following pages are OK, if your building is an HRB then this is about gateway 1, so page one is about gateway 1.

Trying to put in some links about what the fire statement needs to include, some links to the templates that we’re aware of that can be used. And then the process diagram 2 is now you’ve got the gateway 1 approval or you’ve gone through it, then you’re getting into gateway 2. Again, some documentations, some information about maybe the cost of the applications in terms of when you do the application itself and then you get to the end of the approval of gateway 2. So therefore, you move on to leading up to gateway 3, what is the process to that, and then there’s a couple of questions, I’ve just put in these 2 new ones here which were one’s that George, you talked about, from Pete Patton. These were his comments about his experience of going through the gateway process and safety cases etc. We need to embed that into the diagrams.

And then the idea is that you get through gateway 3 and then what do you need to do to register the building before it can be occupied because getting gateway 3 isn’t the end of the story. That’s the overview, as you can see it’s essentially a series of workflow diagrams. We’ve tried to use only the two main sources, the HSE and the government websites, but what would be really useful, as you had before already, is people commenting on whether they can understand, whether these workflow diagrams are accurate, whether the links are accurate. Anything on these which either doesn’t make sense or has got some incorrect information or links. There’s additional guidance that’s out now that we need to incorporate in here.

That’s the overview, any questions share ideally on the Miro board because then we can see, we get notified when people make comments. Jarek, maybe you want to share the link and the password. Any immediate comments would great, otherwise just have a look, see if it makes sense and then add to it because a lot of that gateways are to do with new builds, we’re mindful that we really need to do one with existing and whether there is a huge difference, what the differences are if you’ve got an existing building and the processes that you need to go through that. I’m coming from an architectural point of view from David Miller Architects and we are at the beginning of actually being appointed as a Building Safety Act Principal Designer, so we’re taking the view that we’ve got to get involved.

We’ve also appointed an advisor for us to act as someone just to kind of double check whether we’ve misunderstood, forgotten something, because I don’t think we could hold our hand up and say if you did miss something that we have all of the experience to be a PD, but everyone has got to start somewhere and it’s great because there is a lot of experience already in this community, in this group, as well as the others. So, that’s the kind of way that we’re approaching it and I think the reality is that we’ll continue, as e did with CDM, as we did with BIM, to kind of just learn on the job and take the necessary precautions, but keep going forward.

RICHARD FREER The first comment to be made is what an incredibly impressive piece of work that is, well done, really well done. Everybody else I’ve spoken to on this feels exactly the same. Has anybody got any questions for Das or Jarek on this? Lucy, would that help you? You’re in the early stages.

LUCY KEAN Yeah, I just opened it up to have a look at it and go through it. It’s already got me hooked…

JAREK WITYK This version, you can see how many internal revisions there was when Das was presenting. The document has been reduced in size to simplify it and you know yourselves how difficult it is to explain a complex problem in a simple way. And i think we’ve got there because there was a lot of improvement done and it’s reduced as much as it can to keep the clarity and you basically have a step-by-step instruction. And so far, it worked for everyone, but there is always room for improvements so please contribute.

RICHARD FREER Can I just ask you guys, Das, you mentioned at the end that this is primarily for new builds. Are you looking to do an existing one?

ANDREW DE SILVA ‘DAS’ Yeah because the first page was there to kind of define where the work that you’re looking to do, if you’re building a new building the height criteria and the use criteria are the predominant factors. On the right-hand side of that initial page was about if you’re doing refurb works or you’re doing an extension to an existing building which may trigger it becoming a high-risk building. And then the following gateway processes are as a new build, but i’m mindful that a lot of them may be the same for an existing building, but there will no doubt be some nuances. As again a part of it will probably, a page could be on clarifying some of the works that we’ve talked about today in terms of the emergency works, the schema works or the self-certified. So, there’s probably room for a bit more of a deep dive or a zooming in of the refurb scenarios.

I guess the idea is to try and present some scenarios which are visualised and therefore people can use, it’s almost like having a cheat card or kind of prompts. Jarek, do you have a PDF version of that one? Again, that might be useful to put on, ideally we’d like people to comment using the Miro, but we’re conscious that not everyone will necessarily get their head around it, so you might want to share just a PDF which retains, I believe, the links and the hyperlinks. So then if you want to just scribble on a printed version or add comments on using Acrobat and then send it back to us. Whichever way, we’re trying to make it as simple as possible for people to feedback and then we can then do the revisions and collation from there.

GEORGE STEVENSON Richard, I’m wondering…I think the importance of retrofit is significant, I think there is going to be a lot of retrofit. And the way of interpreting, most of the guidance that I’ve seen has been around new build, but obviously the Act covers retrofit as well. Tom from Withenshaw, you’ve got quite an established estate, haven’t you?

TOM PORTER We’re not doing a lot of retrofit I don’t think at the moment, but we are quite high up on other things, we’re prepared for the building safety cases etc. But retrofits, not really.

GEORGE STEVENSON What about work on existing buildings though, what would you call that, refurbishments?

TOM PORTER Yeah, probably the same as retrofit. So, we’ve done like sprinklers, heat detectors, smoke detectors, new doors and everything, so yeah, we have done a lot of that type of work. I’m the building safety officer.

GEORGE STEVENSON So, is this whole area of the Building Safety Act and things, is that something that you’re giving any personal effort to?

TOM PORTER Yeah, mainly backing up the building safety manager and giving other teams a breakdown of what they should be looking for, how they do things, compartmentation and so on.

GEORGE STEVENSON I’m just wondering whether, if we had maybe a few people like you that are actively trying to do this and interpret what you’ve got to do, exactly the same as Toby was talking about earlier. If we could pull together a small group to say OK, you’re at the moment trying to interpret what you’ve got to do and I think everybody is finding their way on it. We could create a similar copy of what Jarek and Das have done, but make it more specific to existing buildings.

TOM PORTER Yeah, that’s fine, I’m up for that.

GEORGE STEVENSON What about you Toby, would you get involved in that?

TOBY GILDEN Yeah, absolutely, that’s literally my day-to-day life, so absolutely.

NEVILLE TOMBLIN I’ve just done three gateway 2 submissions for a local authority on retrofitting sprinklers and interestingly it is a different process to new build. And the guidance on the government website doesn’t really fit for retrofit and refurbishment.

GEORGE STEVENSON So if we could pull a few people together, Neville, that have got an interest in this, is that something that you’d be interested in?

NEVILLE TOMBLIN Yeah, I’d be interested in it. I’m about to embark on some more gateway 2s as well, so it would be useful. And obviously the feedback that I’m getting from the Regulator would be useful to feed into the group as well.

RICHARD FREER OK, so Toby, Neville, and Tom, could you write your name in the chat with the word retro. Afam, put your name in the chat.

GEORGE STEVENSON Paul Womack, you’re Metropolitan, is this an area that you’re interested in or are you more on new build? We’ve got a bit of a group there. Does anybody else want to contribute? Because, believe me, when you get in these little working groups you learn a hell of a lot because people are questioning and challenging and learning together.

RICHARD FREER And surprisingly open and honest, actually, we’ve had many situations where people are not just working together, they’re actually competitors but being open about their products and their services. Any other comments on the Miro board, the process map? OK, we met Richard earlier on with some incisive comments. He is one of the leads of the business case workstream. Now, what he and his people are pulling together are examples of where a lack of building information data cause problems and how they solve that issue. I’m sure that all of you have got examples of that, but we only want one each. A lack of good building information causing problems.

GEORGE STEVENSON Afam gave us some already.

TOBY GILDEN A prime example I’ve had, it goes back to the quality of the O&M pack. So, we’ve got a new build it was finished in 2019, we didn’t get a fire strategy with it so I’ve just commissioned a fire strategy. As part of the fire strategy the fire engineer wanted the sprinkler system designs, we don’t have it. So, in terms of the cause and effect we don’t truly understand how that system has been installed, how it’s been designed and that's causing me massive problems. And now we’re having to go out to M&E consultants and sort of reverse engineer the installation. And I think that’s a perfect example of where the failures of our team our team not adhering to Regulation 38, they haven’t done the CDM as comprehensively as they should. And now a few years down the line it’s had a real knock-on effect on our ability to fully understand that building.

JAREK WITYK I don’t want to stir the pot, but I will. I’m specialising in delivery, not operation, but I wanted to point out that almost on every project what’s missing is the organisational information requirements and project information requirements. Which leads to the delivery of information which is either wasted, not needed, or the information that’s actually needed and could be helpful is not provided because the requirements have not been clarified at the beginning or throughout the project. With this it’s endemic on every single project. So, just food for thought, because that then has an impact on the next phase.

JOHN WAINES We’ve installed a load of composite FD30S’s doors through many years and when this new regulation came out and they were asking for certificates we went back to the contractor and said have you got your certificates for these? Never seen a single certificate for a composite fire door ever. So, if anyone has actually got a copy of a composite door, before the new testing regime came out, I’m quite happy to look at an old one, it would be interesting to see if anyone has actually got any because out of the 2 companies that we use we’ve got none.

TOBY GILDEN John, the problem that you’re going to find with a composite door is it’s almost certainly only been tested on one side. So, for the regulations for it to be a flat entry door it needs to be tested on both sides, it’s almost certainly not certified.

JOHN WAINES Before Grenfell anyone who’s got a certificate, what it used to look like before Grenfell came along, has anyone got a composite door fire safety certificate to say that this is complying to an FD30S and been tested by a fire station. I’ve never seen one, we fitted 3,500 doors and I haven’t got one certificate for one of them.

GEORGE STEVENSON Don’t simply replace the doors because I’ve been told by fire specialists that it’s a risk-based exercise and therefore if it’s a flat entrance door it doesn’t necessarily mean that you’ve got to replace them, it will be down to the fire engineer. I know that some people are replacing things because they don’t have the certificates and apparently that’s the wrong strategy.

AFAM UNAKA If you don’t have a certificate for a door how do you maintain the golden thread with regards to your asset? Saying this door is compliant or not. If you said a composite door that has just been replaced which I know that it has some fire stopping capabilities, but it’s not certified as a fire door, it’s not a fire rated door. How do you maintain the golden thread of information that you have a door that can stop fire getting into the communal means of escape?

GEORGE STEVENSON As far as the golden thread is concerned, clearly you need as good information as you can get, but we’re on a journey, that’s the thing. So really as John was saying there, we just need to get as much as we can.

PENCHO STUDENKOV Just to add on that point, with fire doors in some cases they can be assessed technically, there are third-party accredited contractors, fire door specialists who can assess to a certain extent the fire doors and a replacement programme is not needed. But in some cases, it might be a case where we need to send a sample of a door to be tested to confirm that. So, it’s really on a case-by-case scenario to establish that and depending on the specialists and the cases.

JOHN WAINES I think from a golden thread, where we do change a door, we get the fire door certified for the location that it’s in and then we put it on our compliance database so people can then see Tommy, Fred and Joseph worked on the door and this is the fire stopping.

GEORGE STEVENSON We’ve got a fire door inspection standard if you’re interested in that, it’s on the BIM4Housing website. It’s been put together by over a hundred subject matter experts and people have said that it’s excellent.