Building a safer future

Government & Politics

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can confirm that there is a systemic failure here that needs to be addressed by a significant culture change and will need to involve a wide range of people who are part of the system.”

Dame Judith Hackitt was speaking to the Communities and Local Government Select Committee on the day that her interim report was published.

That systemic failure led to the deaths of 71 people in the Grenfell Tower fire on June 14, 2017.

While the inquiry into the fire itself is the subject of a separate process led by Sir Martin Moore-Bick, it is Dame Judith who shines the spotlight on the regulatory regime with her Independent Review of Building Regulations and Fire Safety (the Review). She was asked by the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government to conduct the Review with particular focus on application to high-rise residential buildings.

In the last edition of FIRE, the review of the Grenfell Congress concluded that there was no point looking for solutions until the problem had been identified. Citing the impending interim report by Dame Judith, the article called for a collective approach to demonstrate to the government that the fire sector is a voice that needs to be heard to create the solutions together.

Many in the fire sector took advantage of the call for evidence for the Review; 250 respondents provided the review team with over 1,000 recommendations. In addition to this, there was a series of roundtable discussions with building and fire sector representatives and some further bilateral meetings with Dame Judith herself. As a result of this, the Review was widened to embrace complex and high-risk buildings in its scope.

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The Review aims ‘to make recommendations that will ensure there is a sufficiently robust regulatory system for the future and provide further assurance to residents that the buildings they live in are safe and will remain so’.

It is useful to think about this as a system that needs reforming; not just about changes to the regulatory regime, but to all aspects of the system and how they interact, as well as the culture within it. Dame Judith regularly refers to the building life cycle throughout the report and it is a good way to think about the system.

One look at the map of the building and fire safety regulatory system for high-rise residential buildings (p114) is enough to make anyone’s head spin. This is a complex space, with the interim report coming in at a hefty 121 pages.

‘The work of the review to date has found that the current regulatory system for ensuring fire safety in highrise and complex buildings is not fit for purpose’. This is a damning conclusion and is explained through a number of separate but related reasons: • Regulations and guidance are too complex • Clarity of roles and responsibilities is poor • Assessment of competence is inadequate • Compliance, enforcement and sanctions are too weak • Routes for escalating complaints are unclear • Product testing, marketing and assurance are not clear.

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Building a safer future

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FIRE Correspondent Catherine Levin reports on how Dame Judith Hackitt is shining the spotlight on the regulatory regime with her Independent Review of Building Regulations and Fire Safety

This list of reasons goes on to form the structure of the interim report and the second phase of work of the Review that started in mid-December. Within each of the six areas, the interim report sets out its findings, the direction of travel and recommendations. It is worth looking at each of these in turn to understand the enormity of the task at hand.

Regulation and Guidance Post Grenfell, Approved Document B (or AD B as it is commonly known) got more attention than ever before. It is critical to the Review as it is all about fire safety. Volumes 1 and 2 total over 250 pages.

On page 6, the current version (with amendments made in 2013) explains that its purpose is to provide practical guidance, ‘With respect to the requirements of Schedule

“I can confirm that there is a systemic failure here that needs to be addressed by a significant culture change and will need to involve a wide range of people who are part of the system” www.fire–magazine.com | February 2018 | 11

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Safety Order) 2005 (the FSO) and how they are often not identified when a building is handed over on completion.

The interim report also refers to the Housing Act 2004 and the Housing Health and Safety Rating System. It recognises the blurring between this and the FSO once the building is handed over and occupied. ‘The overlap and mismatch across these two regulatory frameworks make it significantly more challenging for government to ensure that there is a sufficient holistic focus on the fire safety of all occupied buildings’. Any clarification here will certainly be welcome as this is a long-standing issue that simply has not been adequately addressed.

There is no specific recommendation under this heading in the interim report. However, the overall intention to further refine the mapping of the regulatory system and design a more effective and simpler alternative is highly likely to involve a change in this area.

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Competence The competence of those involved at all stages of the system is called into question in the interim report.

It includes the way that competence is assessed, the registration and accreditation regimes and the differences between the way that Approved Inspectors in the private sector are treated and their counterparts in local authorities. Looking specifically at complex and high-risk buildings, the interim report is interested in how higher levels of competence should be required at all stages of the building life cycle.

There are a number of professional bodies in the building and fire safety space that already perform much of these activities, but Dame Judith says there is a need to raise competence levels and to join up the professional bodies to get a whole life cycle approach to competence.

This is the subject of a summit that she hosted in January with the relevant organisations to determine how this joining up could work in practice. It makes sense and is more likely to succeed, asking those involved in the process of assessing and accrediting competence to help work out the solution rather than imposing something on them.

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1 and Regulation 7 of the Building Regulations 2010 for England and Wales’. It goes on: ‘There is no obligation to adopt any particular solution contained in an Approved Document if you prefer to meet the relevant requirement in some other way’.

Alongside the Building Regulations sits an advisory nondepartmental public body sponsored by the Department for Communities and Local Government (which became the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government on January 8 after the Cabinet reshuffle). The Building Regulations Advisory Committee (BRAC) advises the Secretary of State in England on making building regulations and setting standards for the design and construction of buildings. Among its 18 members is one fire and rescue service representative, Gary Ferrand, Assistant Chief Fire Officer for East Sussex Fire and Rescue Service.

Responding to the questions from the Select Committee, Dame Judith had this to say about regulations and guidance: “I was told when I started out on this exercise that our regulatory system was goals-based.

What I found is a great deal of confusion between what regulation is and what guidance is. Many people refer to the guidance as the regulations when it clearly isn’t. For the future, I would want to see a system that was simpler, streamlined, risk based and proportionate.”

Dame Judith is looking for “a more streamlined, holistic view while retaining the right level of relevant technical detail, with input from the Building Regulations Advisory Committee”. Reviewing a suite of documents that comprises parts A-R is no small undertaking and with a pragmatic eye to seeing a more speedy change, she asks the government, “To consider any presentational changes that will improve the clarity of Approved Document B as an interim measure”.

The obvious place to look to pursue this work is the Programme team that delivered the National Operational Guidance. As the NOG Programme transitions into the Central Programme Office for the NFCC from April 2018, it is ideally placed to undertake, subject to funding being in place, the review work both as an interim and longer term solution.

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Roles and Responsibilities If one aspect of building regulations takes 250 pages to set out guidance that may or may not be regarded, then imagine how much guidance someone has to trawl through to see a building through from an idea to occupation.

Dame Judith finds the current system full of ambiguity and “people to point to it and say ‘well, that’s their job, not mine’”, as she described it to the Select Committee.

In her continued refrain about the building life cycle, she highlights how difficult it is to pinpoint who is responsible at each stage of the system.

In the interim report, it talks specifically about the Responsible Person under the Regulatory Reform (Fire

Process, Compliance and Enforcement There is so much in this part of the interim report, but of particular interest is the role of the Fire and Rescue Service and the FSO. There is a recommendation here about the early phase of the building life cycle, ‘Consultation by building control bodies and by those commissioning or designing buildings should take place early in the process and fire and rescue service advice should be fully taken into account’.

Once that building is handed over, the responsible person under the FSO needs to be better informed about the fire safety information for a building; that information

“The work of the review to date has found that the current regulatory system for ensuring fire safety in high-rise and complex buildings is not fit for purpose” 12 | February 2018 | www.fire–magazine.com

Government & Politics

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Phase 2 Now that the interim report has been published and Dame Judith has appeared in front of the Select Committee, work continues into its second phase. This phase of work is focused on defining the regulatory system ‘which will be simpler, clearer to all involved and deliver better overall outcomes’. The revised system needs to balance the requirement to be risk-based with proportionality, so that it doesn’t over burden simpler projects with requirements intended for complex and high-risk buildings.

Changing a system sounds very mechanistic, but the interim report tempers this with a call to engineer a major cultural shift. ‘The focus must shift from achieving lowest cost to providing buildings which are safe and fit for people to live in for years to come’. That will not be achieved by legislation alone.

There is a desire to move things along quickly and the interim report gives some direction by setting out seven areas of particular interest: 1. Improve clarity of AD B now 2. Bring professional bodies together (via the summit) 3. Make sure fire and rescue services have input early in the design process 4. Formal review and handover of building ahead of occupation 5. Fire safety information for a building handed to be over to the Responsible Person 6. Fire risk assessments to be carried out annually 7. Restrict desktop studies.

There is also recognition that some change will inevitably take longer, especially if it involves changes to legislation in any form. In addition to the design of a revised regulatory system, the Review will also provide more detailed recommendations for change. This work will be done in partnership with the building and fire sectors and the summit is an important part of the process.

The interim report and the oral evidence provided by Dame Judith at the Select Committee on December 18 demonstrate the vast amount of work that has gone on since the Review was commissioned in the summer of 2017.

What it shows is how a complex regulatory system developed over time has weaknesses and no one knows what the consequences will be until something goes wrong.

Grenfell was the catalyst that forced this examination.

It should not take a tragedy to shine a spotlight on the effectiveness of a fire safety regime.

There should be checks and balances in the system to ensure that weaknesses are probed and designed out; whether that is for government, professional bodies, regulators or others does not really matter, the point is that regular scrutiny and questioning should be a continual process and not a reaction.

Seeking to redesign an entire regulatory system is a huge challenge but necessary. It will take everyone in the building and fire sector to get this right. The Secretary of State has already confirmed in his statement to Parliament that the government accepts all the recommendations in the interim report and will need a lot of help to do the work. The Grenfell Congress looked for solutions without clearly identifying the problem. Now we have evidence of the problem, let us help with the solution.

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should be provided by the person completing the building work. The interim report says that building control bodies should do more to assure this process.

Responding to the Select Committee about how integral the Fire and Rescue Service should be to the decision made about fire safety in high-rise buildings, Dame Judith said: “I heard from the fire and rescue services that their advice is often not listened to. It seems strange to me that the experts who ultimately may have to fight fires in these buildings offer their advice and then it is not taken on board. It is very clear in this interim report that that process needs to be strengthened so that their advice is listened to and taken on board at the earliest possible stage in a building proposal.”

The existing system whereby the responsible person should have a suitable and sufficient fire risk assessment also comes under scrutiny. There are no frequency requirements for this in the FSO, but the interim report thinks otherwise and recommends that a fire risk assessment on complex buildings should be carried out at least annually and when any significant alterations are made to the building.

“It [the fire risk assessment] also doesn’t have to be reported to anyone, which I find rather strange,” said Dame Judith. The interim report suggests that this should change and should in some way involve the fire and rescue service.

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Residents’ Voices and Raising Concerns This section of the interim report feels considerably different; it’s not about a regulatory system or technicalities of building control but about residents. Dame Judith discovered through her discussions with residents that complex ownership and management arrangements for some buildings make it difficult to know where to address complaints about fire safety. Even knowing that, the fear of eviction and the reaction of neighbours’ complaints present further barriers to getting anything done.

There is no specific recommendation in the interim report; in the narrative the direction of travel is clear and also involves the fire and rescue service. “There should be a clear, quick and effective route established for residents’ concerns on fire safety to be raised and addressed with an external enforcement body.” Who that enforcement body should be is not discussed, but there is a desire for it to at least include the Fire and Rescue Service.

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Quality Assurance and Products Here the interim report focuses on the testing regime for products involved in the building life cycle and how they work together. This is where the cladding of high-rise buildings comes into sharp focus. There is some discussion about the use of desktop studies as part of the testing process and how the results of those and other product tests are made available.

“The government should significantly restrict the use of desktop studies to approve changes to cladding and other systems to ensure that they are only used where appropriate and with sufficient, relevant test evidence.” The Secretary of State, Sajid Javid, spoke in Parliament on the same day the interim report was published. He confirmed that he will commission work to produce a new British Standard on how such assessments can be used.

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