© 2025 News On The Block. All rights reserved.
News on the Block is a trading name of Premier Property Media Ltd.
© 2025 News On The Block. All rights reserved.
News on the Block is a trading name of Premier Property Media Ltd.
The last five years have seen a tumultuous shift to the landscape of fire safety regulations in the UK. Following the catastrophic fire at Grenfell Tower, the government announced an independent review of the existing fire and building regulatory framework. This review highlighted the clear lack of enforcement and repercussions to those responsible for buildings that didn’t comply with the mandatory requirements, which were minimal at best. Since the mid-1980s, building regulations in the UK have been contingent of a ‘performance-based’ system. This means that instead of defining prescriptive protocols or lists of prohibited materials, the regulations outlined broad outcomes which buildings should meet. Consequently, it has theoretically been up to the industry to decide how to meet these standards.
Now here we are in 2022, and the commitment to overhauling the building safety regulatory system to make new and existing buildings safer and to minimise the risk of fire in high-rise buildings is starting to take form.
Commencement of the Fire Safety Act 2021 on 16 May 2022 made crucial amendments to the Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005, most importantly, ensuring that fire risk assessments and overall fire strategies covered the building structure, external walls, and common parts. The Act clarifies that a ‘Responsible Person’ must be assigned, with a duty of care to ensure that all components are safe and at low risk from fire. This ought to allow more effective enforcement action around non-compliance.
More recently, the Building Safety Act 2022 achieved Royal Assent in April this year, bringing a set of reforms to the way residential buildings are built and maintained and new protections around liability for cladding and non-cladding remediation costs. The 262-page document aims to minimise safety risks related to fire spread and structural failure through greater planning scrutiny, increased regulation of professional competence and the establishment of new statutory roles during the design and construction of ‘higher-risk’ buildings.
The passage of the Building Safety Act is a key moment for the UK, but only some aspects of primary legislation have been implemented; much of its secondary regulation is undefined and expected to come into force by the end of 2023.
“There is no doubt at all that competence and accreditation is going to be a major feature of the future.” – Dame Judith Hackitt
While the Fire Safety Act does not introduce anything remarkably new to our sector, it puts a blinding spotlight on the fundamentally important area of competence. Both acts require that higher-risk buildings have clearly appointed ‘Responsible Persons’, who will in turn appoint ‘competent’ duty-holders to oversee the crucial aspects of fire safety, life-critical safety risks and building structural risks.
Just last month, we saw the UK national standard body, the BSI, publish three new standards setting out competence requirements for building safety management that support industry reform in line with the Building Safety Act.
Both PAS 8671, which refers to individual principal designers, and 8672, which refers to individual principal contractors, specify the competence requirements around the skills, knowledge, experience, and behaviours to those individuals undertaking the roles on higher-risk buildings.
PAS 8673 specifies the competence requirements for managing safety in residential buildings and most importantly, covers the commitment that these duty-holders must take ownership of in regard to building structures and building systems. These new standards are intended to minimise safety risks and improve protection to consumers and occupants, including residents, in and about buildings, and as Scott Steedman, Director-General of Standards at BSI, says, they will “provide an agreed, common approach for industry to embed building safety competence for design, construction and building management at a senior level”.
The big question is, how do we define ‘competence’ in our sector? Simply recommending competence is not enough and we would seek for competence to be properly defined, agreed, and then mandated in law.
Shapes are starting to form with the newly established Building Safety Regulator, which will be responsible for promoting and encouraging competence with all individuals across the built environment. Currently, the Building Safety Regulator is working with local authorities and the private sector to develop standards and a competency framework to regulate the profession.
What we can be sure of right now is that it has never been more important for duty-holders to have access to skilled and competent professionals to assist with identifying, evidencing, remediating, and managing their buildings risks.