Reports of the proceedings of the Grenfell Tower Inquiry continue to make sobering reading. The recent evidence of the overworked building control officer, under intolerable pressure and now the refusal of employees of the cladding manufacturer to give evidence are just the latest revelations that point to systemic failures that led to the catastrophic fire in 2017. In response the Government has introduced the Fire Safety Bill and the Building Safety Bill, both pieces of legislation will have important consequences for professionals, suppliers and contractors working in the built environment. 

The NLA Expert Panel on Technical Competency has met for the second time to review and discuss how to advise NLA’s Building Better programme on development and construction in London in the context of this forthcoming legislation as a part of industry wide initiatives to improve technical competence. 

Understanding the Building Safety Bill: this new piece of legislation is set to be a game changer for the industry when it becomes law in 2024 and sets out to define new roles and responsibilities and provide a framework for measuring professional competency. It is going to be a hugely important topic for all professionals and so the panel considers there could be ways to simplify the information contained in the Bill, to explain the application process and the responsibilities of the roles of duty holders and Building Safety Regulator. Already the NLA is planning a briefing event to inform members about the draft Bill.

Continuing Education: life-long professional training and Continued Professional Development (CPD) are ever more important across the built environment to ensure the long-term competence of the industry. In particular CPD has a vital role to play in the construction detailing of buildings, understanding and interpreting the Building Regulations, British and European Standards, the specification and design of proprietary materials, products and systems and building fire and life safety issues. 

Roles and Responsibilities: the role of education featured in all the discussions and in particular, how the role of academia could better equip graduates with an understanding of the different responsibilities of generalists and technical specialists, so that technical competency is not something that is left for young professionals to find out ‘on the job’. Alignment of roles and responsibilities with the RIBA Plan of Work 2020 by other professional institutes is already underway and further alignment with other specialist disciplines including, for example fire engineers and cladding consultants would be beneficial to reduce scope gaps in duties, leading to building defects and safety issues. 

Procurement of safe buildings: the panel noted design and build procurement has now become an industry standard, but it is more often seen as a mechanism for the transfer of risk from developers to contractors. The divided responsibilities between designers and executive/delivery teams has now become the norm too, because of the requirements contractors have for sound technical construction information aligned with specifications. Enlightened clients use two-stage design and build procurement in a sensible way, to allow supply chains to enter into pre-construction services agreements early in the procurement process, leading to early collaboration with designers which inform the delivery process. 

MMC (Modern Methods of Construction) and DfMA (Design for Manufacture and Assembly): these are widely seen as the way to move from traditional building techniques in order to improve and simplify the integration of design and delivery with procurement of components and integrated supply chains. Turning the building site into a factory, using prefabricated kits of parts and modular or flat pack components, and reducing waste, are now seen as attainable goals. The use of Building Information Modelling (BIM) is seen as having an important role to play in design and procurement. The fully coordinated ‘BIM model’ is already the way to sort out, in a virtual environment, complicated details and clash detection, long before these become issues for resolution on site. 

Sustainability: this is often reduced to a box ticking exercise by some clients eager to market a sustainable development. However, given the importance of reducing C02 emissions and reducing embodied energy in buildings, the Design for Performance (DfP) initiative is an industry backed project established to tackle the performance gap between design and reality and provide an approach, based on measurable performance outcomes, to ensure new developments deliver on their design intent.

Interestingly the timing of the second meeting coincided with the publication of the Construction Industry Council’s report “Setting the Bar’’ a new competence regime for building a safer future, prepared by a coalition of organisations from across the built environment and sets out a consolidated list of recommendations from key working groups. The report makes interesting reading and clearly demonstrates there is already a sea-change in the way the industry is seriously engaging to raise standards of technical competency. When the Building Safety Bill becomes law in 2024, technical competency in the built environment will be a legal requirement.