INDUSTRY VIEWFINDER: REVISITING FIRE SAFETY & PROJECT ACCOUNTABILITY 35
What are the major challenges posed by the Building Safety Act’s requirements?
“identifying who is responsible for each design element,” and “the separation of responsibility between the parties,” in the words of two commenters. This could be part of the reason why another concern was expressed of the likelihood of “finding the wrong people liable just because of their perceived role when fault may lie elsewhere.”
The Golden Thread The Golden Thread concept aims to ensure that building safety information is consistently captured and retained throughout the entire lifecycle of a building, and is available and accessible to the relevant parties, beyond the design team to building owners, managers, regulators, and emergency responders. It is partly intended to prevent contractors from value engineering products to produce last-minute cost savings using inferior and potentially compromised options. However, views from our survey were somewhat cynical as to the likelihood of this. In our initial 2022 study 53% believed that value engineering of this sort would still take place, while 27% believed it could be prevented. In 2024’s study we added some qualification to the question; we asked if the Golden Thread and the CCPI would make value engineering to cheaper options less likely, and unfortunately the answers were less hopeful than two years ago. Only 39% said they thought it would be less likely, but a similar number (35%) said it would not be.
In 2024 we asked the question about what level of detail the
‘Accountable Person’ at the client side would require for the Golden Thread of project data to be useful for them on an ongoing basis. However, our cohort generally believed (62%) that the nature of the buildings meant that the design team would need to handover data at a ‘very detailed’ level.
Approved Document B
The controversial Class O for materials within Part B (narrowly focused on surface spread of flame and smoke) was removed in
ADF NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2024
2021, but allegedly can still be used for specifications. We asked our survey if they were aware that Class O was still being used on a ‘legacy basis’ on projects, and only 23%, either demonstrating a lack of awareness, or that the practice may not be as prevalent as some fear. The former may be suggested by the large number (55%) saying they were unsure.
In 2022 70% supported a full overhaul of Part B including “removing ambiguities.” This year’s study saw a somewhat confusing response of only 38% saying that Part B required a full overhaul, given the fact that the 2024 update did not go far to address the wide range of issues.
Product performance & test data
‘Classification of materials’ was cited as a key concern in our earlier question around legal liability for architects in higher-risk projects. This speaks to the clear issue that clarity on materials’ performance, and the classification of such, is at the root of the credibility required to make for robust specifications, essentially, specifiers are relying on manufacturers, third-party testing houses, and product information sources to provide this.
Another commenter on the subject of liability gave a damning verdict on the flexibility and ambiguity within current building Regs enabled a wide range of solutions to be employed, making the ‘rightness’ or ‘wrongness’ of a design decision hard to quantify. They said the “design discretion allowed in the preamble to the Approved Documents is an incitation to opinion engineering.” The situation had been allowed to occur, they said, as “Building Control has been weakened ever since the Statutory Instrument procedure lapsed.” We asked our survey cohort whether they believed that testing and certification should be based on assemblies, i.e. sets of ‘details’ for cladding build-ups, rather than just for individual products?’ The result was one of the most comprehensive findings in the whole study, namely 79% said that this should be done on such projects, while only 4% said it shouldn’t.
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