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ROUND TABLE REVIEW
court, such as from solicitor Li Yen Lim of Freeths. She said that in the likely event that the BSR “won’t give us the granular transparency in terms of what good looks like,” it needed to provide “a point where they encourage applicants to explain the thought process; show how the solutions have been chosen.” She added that from a legal perspective, Gateway 2 was currently
SOCIAL HOUSING SUCCESS STRATEGIES
Louise Flower from MacConvilles said in order to make the approval process cheaper and faster, certain ‘emergency’ works should instead be labelled ‘essential’
manufacturers in terms of supplying less at that early design stage, and stopping the document dump at stage two.” Stewart Kerr said that with the resources that were needed for compliance with the Social Housing (Regulation) Act, and the expanded Awaab’s Law Phase 2, funding Gateway 2 submissions was becoming much harder. “The money is now being spread so thin that when it comes to things like Gateway 2 applications, [providers] are not as invested in it.”
He said this was being compounded by anecdotal issues such as lift contractors telling a client that “they didn’t need to do a Gateway 2 application for the lift renovations, even though one was for a fi refi ghting lift.” Kerr asserted that “people were being ill advised; a culture shift needs to happen on the client side, and an understanding shift on the contractor side.” Batchelor took this further, saying that the BSR needed to “move towards trusting the competencies, trust the accreditations, so they can focus on the specifi c projects we need to do.” He said that currently the “mitigators weren’t right,” explaining: “If I’ve got a lift that breaks down, the mitigation could be to decant property, or help people get up and down stairs – the right mitigator is to give people a working lift, quickly.” He said “everything else is a terrible waste of revenue, and if I need to spend revenue on that, I can’t start putting money into housebuilding.”
Batchelor gave some worrying testimony of costs being added to the process, partly due to the Regulator’s approach which was “very much about accreditations, and once you had them there was a lack of need for evidence.” And he added that the waking watch required in the example he gave “will cost me more than half a million pounds to keep there for that period of time.”
Solutions & sponsors’ questions Before our sponsors ‘took the fl oor’ to pose questions to our attendees, delegates raised some solutions for helping speed submissions, some of which put the ball back in the Regulator’s
“a fi rst line of defence,” and the fi nal responsibility was “way down the years to come.” This was a further reason why the industry needed “some encouragement and feedback” on why submissions had passed or failed, said Lim. Sara Dawes of Leviat echoed this, saying that the fi rm had a strategy of “not being a company doing the data dumping” – i.e. dumping huge amounts of product data on the Regulator as part of a submission. But a lack of feedback on submission quality, establishing what’s needed from submissions has necessarily led to submissions being a process of trial and error, she added. Kicking off sponsors’ question time, David Atkinson of Metsec asked what more manufacturers could do to support the design and application process, such as how information was disseminated. Stewart Kerr attempted to condense the answer, saying that what was needed was information on “how [a product] supports compliance of the overall project, fi ts in with the fi re strategy?” He also emphasised how information needed to be formatted to guide users and teams towards the relevant information – “taking out those grey areas, and walking them through – holding their hands.” Architect Michele Pecoraro said that suppliers should ensure “it’s clear which part [of the Building Regulations] they are referring to in documentation, as it is going to be easier for a Principal Designer to show compliance with that.” Fellow designer Jamie Chubb said the Regulator’s “utopia,” was that “to pick up a Building Regs compliance statement, understand it, and not have to go and look at anything else.” However, he added: “Sorry, but you’ve got to go look at the other 2000 drawings I’ve given you.” But the positive from requiring a far greater amount of information was that product suppliers adopted a far more ‘designer’-type role. Chubb went as far as to tell the sponsors around the table: “I don’t see you as suppliers, you are an extension of the design team, joining the process whilst it’s live.” Chubb said that this highlighted that “as an industry we haven’t taken on board the expertise that is available from the supply chain.” While suppliers taking more early design responsibility in HRB schemes might increase their input and infl uence, it could also potentially increase their exposure to risk. But it may be the necessary way to ensure that designs were capturing both functionality and the accredited quality that is needed, while submitting the required data to the Regulator to aid submissions. Louise Flower said that “tapping into that more would be really useful,” and it had been lacking previously. Sara Dawes wondered what the panel’s views were on the most common design coordination issues that were creating challenges at Gateway 2, and how these could be addressed earlier in the design process? She explained how Leviat had produced specifi c CPD materials designed to help designers create a “holistic slab edge detail, taking in components like fi re barriers, DPC, plenum vents and post-tension pockets,” in order to help submissions pass
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