Does Building Safety Need Its Own ISO Standard?

If the right management framework is already in place, the report should be the output of a process that has been operating all along.

That thought sits behind a question I think the sector should now be asking: does building safety need its own recognised management standard?

Most people in property management will have come across ISO 9001. It does not tell a business exactly how to operate. Instead, it requires the organisation to define what it does, monitor whether its processes are working, address failures and keep improving.

Plan. Do. Check. Act.

The principle is simple, but powerful. Good management is not about producing the right document at the last minute. It is about having a system that produces the right evidence as a matter of course.

Look at the Building Safety Act through that lens and the similarities are hard to ignore.

Mandatory occurrence reporting requires significant safety issues to be identified, reported, investigated and acted upon. Competence has to be demonstrated through Skills, Knowledge, Experience and Behaviours. Contractors and advisers need to be selected and monitored properly. Building information has to be accurate, current and capable of being relied upon. Safety cases must evolve as the building and its risks change.

Those are not just individual compliance tasks. They are the ingredients of a management system.

Some may ask whether ISO 45001, the occupational health and safety standard, already fills the gap. I do not think it does. ISO 45001 is principally concerned with protecting workers from risks arising from work. Building safety is concerned with risks arising from the building itself, particularly fire spread and structural failure, and it comes with its own framework of accountability, golden thread requirements, safety cases and regulatory reporting.

So what might a building safety standard look like?

It could bring together competence, contractor management, occurrence reporting, performance monitoring, internal review and continual improvement within one auditable framework. Crucially, it could also allow organisations to demonstrate that these arrangements are not merely written down, but are actually operating.

For managing agents, that could be commercially important.

A robust Building Safety Management System would not need to be reinvented for every new instruction. The same underlying framework could be adapted across a portfolio, giving each Principal Accountable Person access to a consistent approach from day one.

That has obvious appeal in a market where many clients remain anxious about whether their arrangements will stand up to regulatory scrutiny.

And if, in time, such a system could be independently assessed and certified, the implications would go further still. Insurers, lenders, residents and regulators are all likely to take an increasing interest in how building safety is governed, not simply in the existence of individual reports.

Whether the eventual standard were called ISO 75001 or something else is secondary.

The more important point is that much of the architecture already exists. The Building Safety Act has created the duties. The sector is building the processes.

The next step may be to bring them together and agree what good Building Safety Management actually looks like.

The organisations that do that first will not just be preparing for the regulator. They may help set the benchmark for everyone else.

For a copy of my full white paper, ‘ISO 75001’: The Missing Standard in Building Safety, please email ant@thedala.group.

Ant Attree FCCA, Group Managing Director, The DALA Group