As the call for demonstrable competency continues, Nicola John, Managing Director of Fire Door Maintenance (FDM) Training and Development, discusses what this means for the fire door industry, how we must stop working in silos and how, with Section 35 of the Building Safety Act, the government is offering us all an opportunity to rise to excellence.
The Building Safety Act (BSA) has raised the bar on competency and operational and professional standards; yet much confusion around what this looks like in practice continues throughout the industry.
Safer Environments Through Shared Commitment
Eight years after Dame Judith Hackitt’s pioneering report and amid the ongoing implementation of the BSA, the construction sector stands at a key moment of opportunity, as many professionals have yet to fully understand how the BSA shapes their responsibilities. 85% of respondents in a recent Constructionline survey revealed that many industry professionals misunderstand the legislation. This current ambiguity offers an opportunity to promote better understanding and encourage shared accountability across the industry.
The fact is, everyone involved in a building project has an essential role to play in upholding compliance and safety. Regulators also now have new means to sustain these standards, signalling a shift from simply meeting minimum requirements to embracing a culture of proactive safety leadership. By embedding safety as a core value, businesses can transform operations in ways that help protect people and improve reputations.
Together, the construction sector can turn this moment into lasting progress, building safer environments through shared values and innovation.
Building Industry Values
Much of the lack of clarity and current confusion around the BSA comes from the fact that it doesn’t provide prescriptive, step-by-step instructions and instead offers a goal-setting framework. And while this approach may allow for uncertainty, we need to view it as an invitation.
Rather than waiting for a regulator to hand us a checklist, we have the opportunity to help write the rules. Rather than rigid guidelines stifling innovation, we can help create the standards as experts and professionals in the industry. Section 35 asks us to think about buildings as complex, interconnected systems rather than a series of isolated trades and insists that our buildings are safe and that we can prove it.
Dame Judith Hackitt referenced other high-risk sectors as the model to follow. In oil and gas, it was industry that led the charge, not government. ‘They sorted themselves out and then went back to government,’ she said. ‘That's how systemic change happens.’ The construction and fire safety sectors should learn from the post-Piper Alpha reforms and adapt those principles to the sector’s fragmentation and existing building regulation regimes.
This is our chance to build a commercial environment where quality wins contracts, making competency a distinct competitive advantage.
Untangling the Thread
For fire doors, this requires provable competence and confidence around specification, installation, and maintenance. Not only installers, everyone involved in the lifecycle of a fire door holds a piece of the puzzle, and competency must start at the very beginning.
The BSA requires a ‘golden thread’ of digital information, which creates an accurate, up-to-date, and secure record of a building’s safety data across its entire lifecycle. With fire doors, the building owner needs to know exactly what the door is, who installed it, what components it uses, and how to maintain it. Unfortunately, the golden thread is currently tangled, as the market remains fragmented and disconnected. This working in silos was part of Dame Judith Hackitt's criticism of the pre-Grenfell construction landscape, and it must change to allow the golden thread of information to become the brilliant safety concept it was intended to be.
Creating a Legacy of Safety
To achieve industry excellence, we must stop operating in silos. Manufacturers, specifiers, and installers should work together in a way that proves competence, helping ensure that everyone who walks onto a site knows exactly who’s accountable and can trust they have the necessary skills to do the job right . If we take the lead with this now, we’ll help to shape the future of our sector and start building a legacy of genuine safety.
Individuals and organisations now have a duty to demonstrate competence across the construction supply chain. This means having the appropriate skills, knowledge, experience and behaviours needed for the role, and organisations must ensure their teams have the right support, capacity, skills and resources to meet the requirements of the BSA.
For the fire door industry, demonstrable competence is required from everyone involved in the lifecycle of the door, from specifiers and buyers to installers and responsible persons. The British Standards Institution (BSI) has a defined framework to outline what competency looks like through its four core pillars of skills, knowledge, experience and behaviours (SKEBs), demonstrating how each can be evidenced in practice. However, published in February this year, the Government’s Construction Products Reform Whitepaper stated there’s still a widespread lack of competence across the supply chain from product design through to installation, highlighting a continued lack of clarity around what competency actually means.
Demonstrable Competence is Key
For fire door installers, maintainers and responsible persons, competency must come from practical, hands-on learning and assessments, along with vital up-to-date theory . While installation qualifications can be gained from online or exclusively classroom-based courses with no product-handling element at all, let alone the real-world experience of installing or inspecting a fire door in actual site conditions, we need to ask: does this really deliver the competence the BSA demands?
Being competent to fit a life-saving piece of engineering simply can’t be achieved by clicking through a multiple-choice test on a tablet. A computer can’t teach a fitter or maintenance worker how to deal with a warped frame, an uneven floor, or a non-standard wall structure. Real competency requires practical proof, and those who deal with fire doors need to get their hands on the materials. They need to feel the tolerances, understand the hardware, and physically work with the systems they are signing off on. Unfortunately, theoretical knowledge doesn’t stop fires.
A Driver for Change
The continued call for demonstrable competency offers a powerful leadership opportunity for large contractors, who have the ability to steer substantial change and establish new standards for the entire supply chain. By advocating accredited practical training and regulated qualifications, industry leaders can establish a culture of safety in which every site requires provable expertise. As this new benchmark ripples throughout the sector, professionalism, quality and trust will be strengthened across the industry.
With Section 35 of the BSA, the government is giving us the space to help define what excellence looks like, and the industry needs to take on this task as true experts and thought leaders. We have an important chance as a collective to set standards high for the built environment of the future and an opportunity to rise to excellence.
