Does Building Safety Need Its Own ISO Standard?

Yet despite the growing body of legislation, guidance and regulation, something fundamental may still be missing.

Not another law. Not another guidance document. But a recognised management framework that treats building safety in the same way other industries treat quality, environmental management and information security.

In short, could building safety benefit from its own ISO standard?

Most readers will be familiar with ISO 9001, the international standard for quality management systems. It does not prescribe how an organisation should operate. Instead, it provides a framework for documenting processes, measuring performance, identifying failures, implementing corrective actions and continually improving over time.

Certification is not awarded because an organisation is perfect. It is awarded because it can demonstrate that it has a robust, auditable system for managing quality and improving performance.

Sound familiar?

Many of the principles underpinning ISO 9001 already exist within the Building Safety Act framework. Unlike occupational health and safety standards such as ISO 45001, which focus on risks arising from workplace activities, the Building Safety Act is concerned with risks arising from the building itself.

Take mandatory occurrence reporting. When a significant safety event occurs, organisations are expected to identify it, investigate it, implement corrective actions and record lessons learned. In quality management terminology, this closely resembles the management of non-conformances.

The same parallels can be seen elsewhere.

The Building Safety Act requires PAPs to maintain accurate records relating to the building, its risks and the people responsible for managing them. Contractors and suppliers must be selected, monitored and assessed appropriately. Competence must be demonstrated and evidenced.

Skills, Knowledge, Experience and Behaviours (SKEB) have become central to the competence agenda. Organisations must be able to demonstrate that those carrying out building safety functions are suitably qualified and capable. Again, this closely mirrors the competence requirements found within established management systems.

Even the safety case regime shares many characteristics with a management system approach. Much of what the Building Safety Act now requires is already consistent with the disciplines found within established management systems.

A safety case report should not be viewed as a one-off document produced solely to satisfy the regulator. It is a point-in-time summary of the evidence demonstrating that an underlying Building Safety Management System exists and is functioning effectively.

If that framework is robust, producing evidence for the regulator becomes a natural outcome rather than a last-minute exercise.

This distinction matters because building safety is increasingly becoming about systems rather than individual documents.

For managing agents, this presents a significant opportunity.

The organisations that invest today in documented procedures, competence frameworks, contractor oversight, performance monitoring and internal review processes are not simply preparing for compliance. They are creating an infrastructure that can be applied consistently across their entire portfolio.

Every new instruction benefits from the same framework. Every PAP client gains access to the same structured approach. Every safety case report becomes easier to produce because the underlying Building Safety Management System is already operating.

The commercial implications are significant.

Many PAPs remain understandably anxious about their obligations under the Building Safety Act. They face increasing scrutiny from regulators, fire and rescue services, residents, insurers and lenders. A managing agent that can demonstrate a structured, auditable and repeatable approach to building safety offers something more valuable than compliance alone.

It offers confidence.

Whether the industry eventually calls it ISO 75001 or something else is almost beside the point.

The architecture is already there.

The Building Safety Act has already introduced many of the component parts of a Building Safety Management System. Competence management, mandatory occurrence reporting, safety cases, contractor oversight performance monitoring and continual review are no longer isolated compliance activities. Together, they form the foundations of a more structured approach to managing building safety risk.

The organisations that recognise this first will not simply be responding to regulation. They will be helping to shape the standards by which the rest of the industry is judged.

In a sector undergoing its biggest transformation for a generation, that is a position worth occupying.

This article provides only a summary of the issues discussed. For a copy of Ant's full white paper, ‘ISO 75001’: The Missing Standard in Building Safety, please click here.

Ant Attree FCCA, Group Managing Director, DALA Group