Your Building Safety Case: a Helpful Guide
The deadline is approaching fast: the last chance for you to get your submission into the Regulator to ensure compliance with the new building safety requirements.
As they used to say in the legendary BBC TV series Dad’s Army, ‘don’t panic!’ There’s still time – so long as you know where to look and what to look for.
That’s why we’ve produced this quick summary or guide. It’s a rundown of key requirements to help you put together your report. Read on for some key takeaways, and to potentially feel an enormous sense of relief at having dealt with a looming issue!
First up, many of you will have ‘higher-risk buildings’ in your portfolio. These need to be registered in the Building Safety Register, with the requisite Key Building Information included. Higher risk buildings are those over 18m, or 7 storeys, and contain two or more residential units.
Frame your submission through the lens of safety
Moving onto the Building Safety Case Report itself, a useful way to look at both is how Dame Judith Hackitt, who produced the post-Grenfell report, framed it: focus on safety.
This applies, as she said, “to buildings at all levels and all heights”. In other words, across the board for your properties.
A three-storey care home with no working lifts is not safe. A two-storey building that is subsiding is definitely not safe – that’s a bit easier to spot! But even a one-storey building where residents charge their e-scooter near the exit isn’t safe either.
In thinking about this submission, safety is the way in. It should guide initial responses from you and your team. And it can lead your report in the right direction.
When you get to structure, it’s best done on the basis of claims you make about the safety of each building. For each claim there will be a number of sub-claims, so we recommend you take the following approach:
- Claim
- Sub-claims
- Arguments that back that claim and sub-claims up
- Supporting evidence for the arguments
Another helpful way of thinking about this is to see the BSC as a safety management tool – a guide for those who are responsible for building safety use as they go about their day-to-day work.
How to claim your buildings are safe
Many things determine safety. Height and the number of storeys are the metrics most often used.
But other criteria matter. For example, the structure, the materials used in the external wall are key – let’s mention cladding here as well. The overall condition of the building is important to be signed off as safe. Even the utilities should be included.
The regulator will want you to see that you are looking beyond the generic safety requirements we’ve been talking about – height, materials, utilities. Are you using your team’s expertise to demonstrate safety?
You’ll also need to include a ‘Fire Risk Appraisal for External Walls’. This is about the materials used on the outside of a building. The legislation (Approved Document B) divides materials into classes of combustibility.
We now know about the damage that aluminum composite can cause. This material was covering the tower at Grenfell. But this ‘sandwich’-type cladding is not always considered to have high combustibility. You can have materials of limited combustibility on two sides and a combustible material in between, and it can be marked down as safe.
That doesn’t mean you should mark it down as safe, however. What the regulator views as actually being safe is now more important than what the rules say. So report any flaws or potential hazards. And include an explanation of how you’re planning to address these safety issues – along with a timeline.
Accounting for potential safety issues has been around for a while. The Reporting of Injuries, Diseases and Dangerous Occurrences Regulations were published in 2013. You may have heard ‘RIDDOR’ used in conversation – that’s what this refers to. Don’t forget to include any hazards as part of the ‘Mandatory Occurrence Reporting’.
Provide a real picture of safety
To avoid getting caught up in a head-scratching list of compliance data or fine definitions of legal terminology, we recommend bringing in people that have good knowledge of your buildings. The definitions might list buildings as ‘high risk’, ‘high rise’, ‘tall’. But what’s really important is having people around you that know how these apply in reality, and therefore the actual safety of your buildings.
Look at it this way: every building needs to be safe, and all people involved with those buildings need to be safe. That’s administrators, accountants and senior managers as well as residents and contractors.
We hope this has been a useful, quick guide to submitting your Building Safety Case. It’s so easy when submitting reports for things to become muddled – especially with such wide-ranging scope as is the case here. But we hope our thinking around framing and key areas give you the focus you need. We wish you the best of luck in completing and submitting.
Please do contact us if you have further questions. And if you would like more detailed guidance, we’re here to help – do get in touch.
07747 692535