Let’s Raise the Bar for Health and Safety Training in Block Management
Almost everyone I speak to who understands the subject agrees with the basic problem. Block managers are routinely expected to make, influence and oversee important safety decisions without enough specific training.
Many do not have even an entry-level health and safety certification under their belt.
I think that needs to change.
TPI qualifications should be the beginning
For years, property managers have worked towards professional qualifications through The Property Institute.
Let me be clear. As a Fellow of The Property Institute, I believe it is an essential professional body that does fantastic work for our sector. The same applies to the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors and its professional standards.
But neither organisation can be expected to provide every qualification a block manager will ever need.
It should not stop there.
Block managers are generalists. We deal with leases, service charges, maintenance, major works, contractors, insurance, residents and countless competing demands.
But if there is one area in which we need to become more specialist, it is block and building safety.
Grenfell was year zero for block management
The Grenfell tragedy was year zero for our profession.
The Grenfell Tower Inquiry exposed a chain of people and organisations making safety-critical decisions without the necessary training, experience or competence.
The Inquiry found that the senior management team responsible for managing Grenfell Tower lacked essential training in health and safety and fire-safety management.
It also identified failures in the selection and oversight of the fire-risk assessor. Fire-risk-assessment actions accumulated without adequate senior control. The council’s building-control surveyor was overworked, inadequately trained and had a very limited understanding of the risks associated with aluminium composite cladding panels.
Elsewhere, people lacked relevant experience, misunderstood fire-safety guidance or assumed that somebody else would check whether the work was safe.
Grenfell was not the product of one untrained person making one poor decision.
It exposed a chain of competence failures.
The wider training picture
This is not solely a property management problem.
The United Kingdom Employer Skills Survey 2024 found that only 59 per cent of employers had funded or arranged any training during the previous 12 months.
That means 41 per cent had arranged no staff training at all.
Among employers that did provide training, 74 per cent included health and safety. Taken together, those figures suggest that around 44 per cent of all employers provided formal health and safety training during the year.
That is a calculated estimate rather than a separately published government statistic, but it indicates the potential scale of the gap.
A separate Department for Work and Pensions survey found that 70 per cent of employers provided health and safety “training or guidance” in 2024, down from 75 per cent in 2022.
Sources:
Property managers assess risk every day
There is a misconception that risk assessment is something completed by a specialist once a year or once every two years.
The consultant visits, produces a report and sends it to the property manager. The actions go onto a tracker and everyone assumes the risk-assessment duty has been dealt with.
But that is not how managing risk works.
Property managers make smaller risk judgements every day.
A fire door is damaged. Belongings obstruct an escape route. A paving slab becomes loose. A lift repeatedly fails. Water leaks near electrical equipment. An access-control system stops working. A fire-risk-assessment action remains unresolved.
The property manager must decide what happens next.
How likely is the hazard to cause harm? How serious could the consequences be? Is immediate action required? Can temporary controls be introduced? Does the matter require specialist advice? Who needs to be informed?
These are risk assessments, even if they are not recorded on a document with “Risk Assessment” written across the top.
Why IOSH Managing Safely matters
This is why I believe IOSH Managing Safely should become a baseline expectation for block managers.
It provides a practical, common-sense framework for identifying hazards and controlling risk.
Crucially, it teaches managers to assess both the likelihood of an incident and the severity of its possible consequences. Bringing those factors together through a risk matrix helps people prioritise action based on risk rather than instinct, noise or whoever complains most loudly. A hazard may be unlikely to cause an incident, but the possible consequences could be catastrophic. Another may occur regularly but have limited consequences. They should not automatically be treated in the same way.
Understanding that relationship helps property managers decide what must be addressed immediately, what requires specialist advice, what can be controlled temporarily and what can reasonably be programmed.
It also enables them to explain and defend their decisions.
Without that foundation, property managers may rely too heavily on periodic reports, accept recommendations without properly understanding them or prioritise actions according to deadlines rather than actual risk.
Other sectors already expect this
Office and workshop managers and operational managers in many sectors undertake IOSH Managing Safely so they can assess risks in ordinary workplaces.
If an office manager is expected to understand how to assess risk in an office, why should a property manager responsible for residential buildings not meet at least the same standard?
Block managers oversee fire-safety systems, lifts, electrical installations, plant rooms, asbestos risks, roof access, contractors and potentially hundreds of residents.
The consequences of getting a decision wrong can be severe.
Yet many property managers handle these responsibilities without an independent foundation-level health and safety qualification.
That does not make sense to me.
Combining IOSH with block-specific training
IOSH Managing Safely provides an excellent foundation, but it cannot cover every peculiarity of residential block management.
Property managers also need to understand fire and general risk assessments in blocks, building safety legislation, asset testing, asbestos, lifts, contractor management, safety-action tracking and demonstrating reasonable progress.
This is why I developed Block Safety Essentials through The Block Coach. It combines IOSH Managing Safely with training focused specifically on block and building safety.
The intention is to connect an independently recognised health and safety framework with the practical problems property managers encounter every day.
Other providers may develop different approaches, and I hope they do. This should be bigger than one course or one training company.
A new professional expectation
My belief is simple.
Every block manager should undertake IOSH Managing Safely, or an equivalent independently recognised foundation-level health and safety certification.
That would not make every property manager a health and safety specialist. It would give them a proper foundation for identifying hazards, assessing risk, challenging advice and escalating concerns.
Property managers are already making risk assessments every day. The question is whether we are giving them the right framework within which to make those decisions.
Grenfell showed us the consequences of unclear competence, weak challenge and reliance on somebody else to check.
It is time to raise the bar.
For more information on Block Safety Essentials please click here.
Joe Mallon MRICS FTPI
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