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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:

 

1. Claim
2. Sub-claims
3. Arguments that back that claim and sub-claims up
4. 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.

 

ed.mccullouch@atendco.com

 

07747 692535

Regulations governing building safety were steadily built over the course of the past century… and then dismantled. It’s a story of lost decades, but one that may, however, have a more positive next chapter

 

If the NHS is a political football, social housing is the game whose rules we’ve hurriedly had to rewrite after decades of neglect. New legislation is at last on the way, driven by the tragic events of Grenfell to ensure “that the buildings that we create, that we own and that we manage are safe for those who use them”, in the words of building safety expert Paul Nash. No doubt many of you are getting to grips with these regulations right now. But it didn’t have to be this way.

 

We often think of those red-brick and stone edifices during the Victorian and Edwardian periods as being the iconic form of social housing, Boundary Estate in Shoreditch is the UK’s oldest, opening in 1900. Its steep blocks of neo-Dutch Gable and tall chimneys reach high into the sky in this part of east London, offering people of the time an escape from the homelessness and deprivation all around them.

 

These pioneering buildings came hot on the heels of the Houses for the Working Classes Act in 1885, which gave local authorities the power to condemn slum housing. But this was a public health intervention, not a housing act. So there was no provision given to allow the purchase of land or financing of new housing on the part of councils.

 

Thus it was the Housing and Town Planning Act of 1919 that instigated new building. And boom time came after the Second World War. In the next 35 years that followed, 80% of the UK’s social housing stock went up, totalling 4.4m homes. Alex Whitwell, in his fascinating long essay on social housing in south London explains why: “World War II brought unprecedented structural devastation to Britain. With swathes of the country’s housing destroyed, a bold new attitude was needed to rebuild the nation and its capital”.

 

The rise of the high-rise

But safety regulation of the period had to catch up, especially as a new kind of housing was emerging: high-rise tower blocks. A Parliamentary committee report at the time concluded that current legislation was “too narrow both in the classes of premises to which they apply and in the precautions which they impose”. From a very basic approach to multi-occupancy, the government needed an advanced code of conduct to deal with these new glass-and-metal edifices. 

 

The British Standard Code of Practice in 1962 appeared as a result. It was the first national standard for tall residential buildings, requiring residents not to move around the building during fire. This is a guidance known as ‘stay put’, and is still in place today. “In the majority of fires in blocks of flats, residents of other flats never need to leave their flats”, according to the Code. It also required each dwelling to have a hazard-free entrance hall. Bedrooms had to open directly on to the hall and be built close to the front door. And the living room, dining room and kitchen doors should be resistant and self-closing. 

 

However, while that was a step forward, for many it wasn’t enough. Writing in the The Times, commentator Bernard Levin, insisted that ‘the fire regulations in Britain make Americans go pale and shudder. In all sorts of areas, the British are shockingly ill-protected.” Many shared his view, and The Fire Precautions Act in 1971 was given particular impetus by a fire at the Rose and Crown pub in Saffron Walden in which 11 people died. As a result of the Act, fire authorities were given the power to apply to the court to forbid occupation of premises if they believed a risk was present.

 

We can see where this is going: ever tighter legislation with increasingly stringent requirements on construction companies. But then as the political mood of the country changed, so did housing policy. The Right to buy scheme in 1980 gave people the ability to own their own local authority home, along with a depletion of local authority housing stock. And more was to follow.

 

De-regulation kicks in

The Building Regulations of 1985 removed the use of combustible materials such as aluminium composite material in housing, as part of a new law that swept away 300 pages of building regulation. Yet just a year later The Department of the Environment warned that: “Laboratory tests have shown that a fire within the cavity can melt the aluminium and burn through to the surface several storeys above the fire. These emergent flames could re-enter the block via windows.”

 

The response from leading members of the government was not to act. Instead the patent for aluminium composite material expired and during the 1990s other companies began production. As prices fell, the use of aluminium composite material became widespread. In 2005 the 1971 Act was repealed. And we all know what happened next.

 

One of the earliest findings of the Grenfell Inquiry was that cladding included a highly combustible core. It had been added to the building in 2016, long after the original construction. But the builders and housing teams were not in any breach of regulation – aluminium composite material was fully compliant with the standard requiring limited combustibility. “It was the principal reason why the flames spread so rapidly up, down and around the building,” according to the inquiry report in 2019.

 

The Building Safety Act 2022 is therefore a necessary next step, and what Allan Binns, Safety Director at Ryder Architecture calls “a seismic change for the industry”. 

 

New regulations make safety the central criterion of whether a residential building may be legally occupied. The Building Safety Regulator won’t even ask if a building is compliant, nor if it meets functional requirements – because these have been mandated. Further, the building owner must be able to demonstrate that safety, and they must be able to provide evidence of the safety of the building to the satisfaction of the Building Safety Regulator.

 

It’s a long way from where governments of the past 40 years have taken us – but it heralds the kind of future in social housing that we need to embrace. 

 

All software companies should be creating or reviewing their Cloud Marketplace Strategy to ensure they are at the top of their game.

Each of the large public cloud providers has their own version of a marketplace that allows customers to browse and purchase software products compatible with their cloud platforms. These providers include AWS, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), IBM, Microsoft Azure and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI).

 

Just like shopping for a new coat from an online store, where you search a site and see results by brand or by size, in a cloud marketplace you can search or use drop-down menus to quickly find software listings by publisher or by category for everything ranging from security to networking and automation. 

 

Combining a good cloud marketplace strategy with well-developed identity and access management (IAM) controls can typically get ahead of any issues and allow an organisation to confidently incorporate the cloud marketplace as part of their business.

 

Many public marketplaces have recognised the need to offer assisted sales resources, ranging from educational materials to sales consultants that can help you select the right cloud application for your needs. In other words, if you’re interested in the possibilities of a cloud marketplace but want a little more support, vendor-agnostic providers are putting the resources in place to make buying easier.

 

Today’s marketplaces offer help, from consulting on your specific questions to product resources. 

 

Developing the right cloud strategy for your organisation is a key component to keeping your technology effective. Buying from a public cloud marketplace gives customers more control, enabling them to access a wider range of products and services, and streamline the buying process.

 

To define your organisation’s cloud strategy, you’ll want to answer the following questions:

• Which products and services will you move into the cloud marketplace, and which will you provide via the more traditional IT infrastructure standpoint?
• Does the business have a mandate for keeping certain products or services internal?
• What products and services can be placed externally to the business’s infrastructure and operations?  
• What changes will you make to your current business policies, including security to accommodate your cloud strategy?  
• What metrics will you use to measure the success of your cloud marketplace initiative?

 

Once an organisation starts selling on a cloud marketplace, customers will begin to emerge. But when this happens, sellers should begin to gain visibility into who their ‘new customers’ are so that you can support them and make them use more features of your product.

 

The more you know about your customer base in the marketplace, the more you are equipped to serve customers and customise offerings to drive sales.

 

Winning large projects often stems from a cloud partner’s ability to create custom offers through the cloud marketplace. AWS Marketplace initially lets Independent Software Vendors (ISV) create private offers that feature custom pricing and end-user license agreements. But AWS has extended that capability to service providers through its Consulting Partner Private Offers (CPPO) program. Through CPPO, professional services providers can create bespoke offerings with client-specific pricing and statements of work.

 

The private marketplace’s ability to provide monthly variable billing presents an advantage to sellers. The CPPO also instills confidence among customers who can rely on AWS to manage the invoicing and billing process through its automated workflow. Finally, the private offers drive deeper “cloudiness” into services traditionally delivered through a multiyear, fixed-contract model, he noted.

 

In addition, the private offers allow companies to work directly with its vendor partners at scale, without having to rely on complex, local value-added reseller (VAR) agreements.

 

Consumers expect marketplaces to be just as seamless as any other e-commerce experience. Marketplaces are built around relationships, and the organisation’s support platform should be able to support these complex relationships. 

 

Whichever channel the customer contacts your business through, agents need to be able to view past history, order details and task status immediately. Customers can feel the friction that comes with being treated like a ticket. When support agents ask for information they’ve already provided, and confirm details the company already has on file, customers feel like a problem that needs to be resolved instead of a valued customer.