The incoming Building Safety Act was the impetus for our Build Back Safer panel discussion chaired by Jane Duncan and hosted at Schüco’s London showroom. Find out what speakers from Foster + Partners, Enfield Council, PRP Architects contributed to the conversation on building and fire safety.

Speakers (from left to right): Benjamin Ralph, partner & head of fire safety, Foster + Partners; Joanne Drew, director of regeneration and housing, Enfield Council; Scott Sanderson, partner, PRP Architects; Panel Chair, Jane Duncan, founder, Jane Duncan Architects & PP RIBA

Set to unpick the incoming Building Safety Act (BSA) a panel comprising Chair Jane Duncan, founder of Jane Duncan Architects and PP RIBA; Scott Sanderson, partner at PRP Architects; Joanne Drew, director of regeneration and housing at Enfield Council and Benjamin Ralph, partner and head of fire safety at Foster + Partners, fielded questions from an audience of professionals amid a conversation on the challenges of building safely in the 21^st Century.

Kicking off the discussion, Jane Duncan talked about the responsibility of the built environment sector to react to the tragedy of Grenfell and the new regime by reconsidering the sector’s legacy in terms of quality, and the obvious loss of quality when profits are considered ahead of people. Adding on to this, Duncan remarked on the skills required to provide specialist and key services to clients to meet the needs of the BSA. These will include, said Duncan, upskilling the profession regarding site inspections, and the role of principal designers (PDs).

From this arose a question: will industry make that jump, and even if they do will insurer’s provide cover? The consensus in the room was that the BSA will be extremely difficult to grapple without the right insurance particularly so regarding the fact that very few practices put in the adequate paperwork to insurers to describe how they are mitigating risks.

Addressing the topic at hand from a different perspective was Joanne Drew, who was on hand to elaborate on the roles of a local authority on building safety. “We need good architects to design good solutions but also to communicate how and why those solutions are safe,” she said.

Drew also mentioned the skills and capacity available to a local authority, noting the complex relationships that arise when regulating safety aspects. The many stakeholders involving the local planning authority, building control, master developer, the commissioner of development, those involved with the direct delivery of development, regulation of the private sector, those managing council housing and mixed tenure estates — and of course architects, engineers, fire safety consultants, contractors and sub-contractors.

Naturally, this fed into a conversation on how to deal with such complexity. A way of addressing this is access to information, argued Benjamin Ralph.

“There is a culture of being scared to share information because that makes someone liable, whereas information needs to be empowering,” he said. “The golden thread of information needs to be passed down to those who are maintaining the buildings: the cleaners and caretakers for example. And they need to be told what it means for them and have some things explained as they won’t know the acronyms per se.”

“I think we face a fundamental conundrum at the moment,” added Scott Sanderson. “We are on the hunt for very simple answers: for questions like ‘Is it safe? Yes or no?’”

“If I am the principal designer, I am not liable to give that answer — even if I thought it could be safe. So there’s a conundrum regarding how we balance high volumes of information with the hunger for simple answers.”

The audience also responded to this, noting (with dismay) at how inaccessible safety legislation is. “We are the only country in Europe which makes the core legislation inaccessible to the vast majority of people,” said one audience member. “If we really want to improve standards of building in this country — which is mostly carried out by small- to medium-sized firms — you have to have that core legislation as accessible. Building Standards are still priced as if Caxton was printing them, they’re almost £300.”

Using the US as an example, Ralph cited a company called UpCodes that aims to democratise building codes through an openly accessible website where practitioners can search for them using the help of AI, allowed users to ask semantic questions but get the right answers. “You didn’t have to use the exact correct terminology to find what you needed,” said Ralph.

Responding to this, Drew tabled the notion of prescriptive design, a methodology which can lower costs while ensuring safety. Indeed, the airline industry and surgeons use checklists to ensure safety standards are met. Perhaps architects could use a similar process to guide them through increasingly complex legislation?

Ralph then compared prescription-based design with performance-based design.

“Such a checklist system has some great advantages in that it’s clear, consistent, repeatable, quick, all those sorts of things,” he said. “On the other side is performance-based design where you have buildings regs where it says in lay persons terms ‘make it safe’ and it’s up to you how you do it. And that’s really difficult because it leans very heavily on the competency, morals and ethics of the professionals carrying it out, as well as the checks and balances in place. But the proponents of performance-based design say it’s fantastic because it enables innovation and it doesn’t stifle business and that’s why people have gone with it.”

“On the flip side you have the US and Australia system which is extremely prescriptive. It’s different there though because the prescription is deemed to satisfy whereas in the UK it only equates to statutory guidance. So in the US and Australia, if you tick the box, that’s it, you don’t need to worry about the intent — the rulebook told you what to do and you did it. And that’s the dark side of prescription in that you turn your brain off and you just follow it.”

Drew meanwhile mentioned how such solutions need to go hand-in-hand with client needs. We will have to be mindful of the future, for regulations that could later come into play and have buildings that can continue to be updated, she argued. “As an authority, we ask ourselves: will this be a stranded asset in the future?” Pointedly, Drew also added: “Retrofit often involves decanting residents from their homes – so how can we do all this without destroying their quality of life?”

In the midst of a conversation on complexity, Duncan identified herself as a champion of low-tech solutions. “We are heading into an era where we may not have water. We need to think broadly, beyond technical solutions and embrace passive solutions,” she said.

“The legacy of all this is people, not technology,” Duncan reminded everyone.