Dame Judith Hackitt's independent review of Building Safety and Fire Regulations, in the wake of the tragic fire at Grenfell Tower, led to the government asking HSE to establish a new building safety regulator. In her latest contribution to our regular series of updates, Dame Judith offers her thoughts on recent developments...
In last month’s newsletter I spoke about the many balances to be struck in establishing the Building Safety Regulator, driving industry culture change and rebuilding trust with residents.
This month I want to focus on one of those balances that I mentioned:
Setting new standards for what we expect of new build in the future whilst maintaining a proportionate and affordable approach to existing buildings to achieve an acceptable level of safety.
For those who have been close to HSE’s approach to regulation for many years the principle of reasonable practicability is so well understood that it is easy to forget that others are not at all familiar with the need for proportionality.
When I became Chair almost 14 years ago, HSE was in the middle of a storm of publicity about “elf n safety” which was trivialising the importance of real health and safety – the risks which exist in workplaces which can lead to death, serious injury and ill health. Jobsworths were misusing health and safety as an excuse for stopping people getting on with their daily lives and so we established Mythbusters to call out some of this overzealous and risk averse behaviour and to reclaim that sense of proportion.
Back even more years to the introduction of major hazard regulation in chemical and oil and gas industries and here again HSE applied a sense of proportion and pragmatism to what was required to make existing plants safe enough whilst looking at new facilities through a lens of how to design out and minimise inherent risk.
We now need to do this all over again in relation to buildings in scope of the new Building Safety Regulator.
I am sure that we are going to see a significant step change in the standards to which new buildings are delivered and we also need to ensure that existing buildings are safe. But we also have to avoid the sort of risk averse behaviour which is already affecting the market and leaving residents facing potentially high financial penalties.
I know that the BSR will bring that sense of what is proportionate and reasonable to the way that it will assess existing buildings.
We must make that clear to all those who currently fear that it will be otherwise and we must also ensure that others do not exaggerate what measures will be required – either because it creates business for them or because they lack the confidence to exercise judgment and proportional assessment themselves.
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