The newly created not-for-profit organisation, the Building Safety Alliance will deliver a publicly accessible register of certified Building Safety Managers in a move that will increase confidence in the competence of these new duty holders prescribed in the Building Safety Bill.
Emerging from the working group activity of the Competence Steering Group, the Building Safety Alliance marks a significant step forward for establishing the role of a Building Safety Manager in higher risk buildings. This is one of three new duty holder roles set out in the Building Safety Bill and will be required once a higher risk building is handed over for occupation.
The creation of the Building Safety Manager role is one of the recommendations from Dame Judith Hackitt’s building fire safety report.
Initially, the Building Safety Alliance will deliver two functions:
- The certification of individual Building Safety Managers
- A publicly accessible register of those certified by the scheme
In due course, the Building Safety Alliance will work with others to evaluate how organisations who wish to deliver the function of the Building Safety Manager can be assessed as having the organisational capability to do so.
Anthony Taylor, Proprietor of Resolve Risk Ltd, chaired the Competence Steering Group’s working group 8 that was responsible for developing the competence requirements for the Building Safety Manager role. The group published a report of its work, Safer people, safer homes: Building Safety Management in June 2020.
Mr Taylor is also leading the British Standards activity to create PAS 8673 Framework for competence of Building Safety Managers. He is the interim Chair of the Building Safety Alliance.
“When we were initially asked to develop the competence requirements for the new statutory role of Building Safety Manager, we recognised that for the framework to work, we also needed to set up wider structures that would support the development of and drive for a recognised and uniform standard of competence,” he said.
“One of our key recommendations was the need for a register that would allow residents and accountable persons to check if the Building Safety Manager for their building meets the minimum competence requirements. Government is looking at industry to deliver this, so we stepped forward with our wide consortium from across both the private and public sectors.”
The FPA is one of many organisations supporting the Building Safety Alliance. Other organisations include the National Fire Chiefs Council, the National Housing Federation and the Institute of Workplace and Facilities Management.
The FPA's Head of Training, Claire Wright, welcomed the launch of the Building Safety Alliance and said: "This is a great first step to providing a tangible benchmarking for this important role. End users and building owners require a clear path forward to be confident they are not only meeting statutory requirements, but providing the right level of support to their staff and the right level of safety to their occupants. We look forward to seeing how this develops and how we can provide support to the Alliance's aims."
