An opinion piece article by the British Board of Agrément

Building on Dame Judith Hackitt’s Review of Building Regulations and Fire Safety, the centre piece of this new regime is a requirement for higher risk buildings to have a Safety Case owned by an Accountable Person. In practice this means Accountable Persons, normally the landlord or freeholder, will need to be able to demonstrate that risks have been identified and assessed, and a credible plan is in place to reduce or control them to an appropriate level. This all needs to be documented, kept up to date and submitted to the Building Safety Regulator via Safety Case Reports.

The industry must not slip into a compliance mindset
The construction industry’s response to these new legal and regulatory demands could all too easily slip into a compliance mindset, missing the opportunity for serious reflection on what Grenfell revealed about the sector’s practices and ethics.

That would be a missed opportunity. This is after all an industry that too often disappoints its clients and users. Countless government-industry improvement initiatives have identified similar underlying causes, being low levels of integration between design, specification and construction, a fractured, fractious supply chain, a culture of risk allocation that too often leaves responsibility dangerously ambiguous. Unfortunately, these initiatives have not led to significant change.

Read the full opinion piece here.