This call comes in response to a wide-ranging consultation from the government on ‘Building a Safer Future’.
The government must acknowledge there is no short cut to securing a safer future for the UK building industry, and work with businesses to develop a robust and comprehensive safety system that can ‘flex’ to regulate industry and protect residents as the construction sector evolves.
This was the message the CBI took to government in response to a Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government consultation. As well as working with the CBI on our key messages, many CBI members – from businesses to trade associations and professional bodies – responded directly to the consultation themselves, underlining how important this issue is for members, and how determined they are to support government.
While the momentum and weight of expectation behind achieving decisive and long-lasting change in the wake of the Grenfell tragedy must not be wasted, the scale of the challenge is reflected in the length and complexity of the government’s 200-page consultation document. To create a “radically new building and fire safety system” will require overhauling a vast number of processes, standards and behaviours that have been established and embedded right across the industry over many years.
Our recommendations
To get this right, the CBI’s recommendations focused on why a new building and fire safety system will require harmonisation of:
- Comprehensive levels of safety across different risks associated with buildings
- A rigorous approach to compliance and inspection
- A comprehensive understanding and assessment of competency
This does not mean more red tape. Dame Judith Hackitt’s report into building and fire safety after the Grenfell tower fire did not find that there was too little regulation and bureaucracy, but suggested a new framework must be “simpler and more effective”.
The CBI echoes this. It is vital that a new framework for safety – and the regulatory regime to implement it – avoids adding onerous restrictions on businesses. This will enable the construction and housing sectors to continue to support UK economic growth by delivering transport and digital infrastructure and meeting the government’s housing ambitions, allowing investment in more environmentally friendly and innovative methods of construction. Government should work with business to define the parameters of what constitutes ‘building safety’ so that a new regime does not need to be regularly revised, which would lead to repeated confusion for businesses, organisations and residents.
The CBI agreed that the idea of a ‘golden thread’ of digital information in Dame Judith’s report should be built upon, but CBI members argued that such a system must avoid, as much as possible, the need for multiple and/or specialist software to guarantee ease of accessibility and use for the widest range of industry participants.
Making these calls to government a reality
All this ambition will require money. Without doubt, a new industry regulator of the scope that the government has laid out must, to be successfully, receive significant resource and funding in order to oversee effective enforcement and compliance of what needs to be wide-ranging changes to the safety system.
The starting point, however, is competency and training. Members believe it will be essential that all relevant disciplines, roles and responsibilities within the building industry are within scope of the regulator, with clear minimum levels of competency and an unambiguous framework for assessment and certification. This requires a major overhaul of the sector’s approach to training and qualification, which will not be easy. The Industry Response Group’s task force for competency, the Competence Steering Group, has taken up this challenge in its report ‘Raising the Bar’, which the CBI recommends is the starting point for developing the new environment for competency.