Episode 35 – Part 3 – Navigating New Fire Safety Regulations: Insights & Future Trends with Jay Ridings TFT Consultants

The following transcript is autogenerated so may contain errors.

Matt Nally: Welcome to our final and third part of this fire safety episode. And we’re looking at in this part of regulations and the future of fire safety. Think we’ve, we touched on this very briefly in, in either the first or second part around the fact that there’s been, new regulations bought in since Grenfell and how people look at things.

What are the I suppose the more recent regulations that have come in. And what changes is that bought in best practice?

Jay Ridings: Oh, you’re testing me now, Matt. This is, I do think this is actually a challenge for us as building surveyors and the industry more widely, cause there’ve been so many changes since Grenfell, so you had changes and updates to the building regulations relating to combustible materials, no longer being.

Accepted in buildings over 80 meters. Then you had an update with the fire safety act. And so obligations on duty holders with fire risk assessments, and then incorporating the the external walls. And then most recently, I think maybe I’ve missed some there. I think maybe the building regulations were then updated again, possibly with some further changes.

And then more recently, you’ve had the Building Safety Act 2022, and you’ve had the High Building the High Risk Buildings Regulations 2023. So there’ve all sorts of changes have happened. It’s and then in conjunction with that, and arguably in response to that you can also see that practices are changing in terms of the construction of buildings and the, Management of buildings and Yeah.

And it’s all positive. It’s positive changes. And if you revisit building safer futures by in the Hackett review, you can see it’s positive stuff. You can see that it’s maybe not absolutely. Point by point prescriptively matching what the recommendations are, but actually in it very much in the spirit of it, and it’s not too far away either the points about addressing the culture, about having clearer regulations, about having.

A regulator enforce the regulator regulations. What has come in is very much addressing those points from what I can, from what I can see. And yeah. And so it is, it’s good. It’s good stuff.

Matt Nally: You mentioned something that’s caught my interest, which is. So some of it’s focused on construction.

Some of it’s focused on the management aspects. Has that been quite evenly split? Do you think, or is it slightly more focused on the management aspects? So that I know that had a quite a lot of airtime because maybe sprinkler systems hadn’t been put in or certain things that have been raised.

Hadn’t been dealt with, or is it more focused on the construction side where, potentially the wrong materials have been. Sold used or procured or whatever. Yeah. Yeah. You’re seeing it focused, more focused on one area than another, or is it quite balanced? That’s a

Jay Ridings: really good point.

No, it’s it. The whole, one of the absolute key recommendations is. From the Hackett review was to have an audit trail for a building. So you could follow through that building through its construction, then any variations that happen in its construction, then you have a record of the actual as built, what has been built.

If you’re showing cavity barriers and fire stops, or you’re showing an internal fire stopping detail, if you’re showing. 60 minute compartmentation there, 90 minute there, or whatever the structure gives you, however, that is an absolute correct record of what has been built. And then that is then used throughout the life of a building until the use of that building ends.

And that’s what was turned the golden or is turned the golden thread of information. And I, there’s probably no one who bears witness to that more than a building surveyor. Going to an existing asset and then trying to understand that building, what the fire strategy is and what’s being constructed and has it been constructed in accordance with design?

And if you’re monitoring if you’re monitoring a build, which is also one of the things that we do at TFT and I do personally, I probably am a greater voice within the beyond the project team focused on the quality of the record information and making sure that when the development team’s gone and people are going to be coming to me to say, have you seen the O and M’s?

What’s the fire strategy? Can you point me in the right direction for this? And, you’ve got that property management team in place that is absolutely. that information is available and that has got that has got a lot better. And you, we tend to see now electronic information that’s available rather than these kind of lever arch files, which are all over the place, missing pages, coffee stains on them.

It’s get we’re getting there. But it we’re still not in entirely there. I’d say the coffee stains are good though. It shows that the

Matt Nally: documents are read.

Jay Ridings: You like this sort of dog eared pages to show that they’ve been, pages have been turned and looked at. Yeah, absolutely.

So there’s, there is that balance. There is that balance, in. And the Building Safety Act looks at both. It’s looking at the construction and making sure that the design is really progressed to a satisfactory stage before you get to that, the gateway where you can actually then start building the building.

And then there’s a requirement further down the line, once you have a building, an existing building, you then need to, that building, for high risk buildings anyway, then needs to be registered and there needs to be a safety case report assessing the risk for that building. Structurally fire safety perspective.

So I would say it’s been fairly evenly handled. So you’re looking at new construction and existing buildings and that comes out of the hacker view.

Matt Nally: Awesome. I’ve got a couple of questions off the back of that. Finding this really interesting. So is there a regulation around how often.

These sort of fire safety reviews should be carried out because obviously you mentioned it’s not just a case of buildings built correctly in the first place, then it stays perfect. Obviously, changes get made to the building over time. So are there requirements over how often checks are done to ensure the building still complies or is it up to the property owner?

or management team to decide what they think is appropriate. Oh, that’s a good

Jay Ridings: one. It’s probably it’s slightly complicated. So if you look at the safety case report, once you’ve got an existing building, that is essentially an overview of all the individual risk assessments. So in terms of frequency of risk assessments, for that building.

It’s not covered in what is quite a high level legislation. It would then go down further to those individual risk assessments. If you then look at the fire risk assessments, they then need to be renewed in accordance with the reform order and then the fire safety act, which typically, expressly stated, but you typically see those updated annually.

To make sure all the shortfalls are being actioned in a relatively short term period and nothing’s being left to develop over longer periods. Then in terms of kind of alterations to the buildings, I don’t know where it’s stipulated that you need to have that, but it, In the spirit of the legislation, the point is, during the construction period, you need to be recording all of the variations, and you need to have that as built documentation at the end, and then the logic is With an existing building as alterations as undertaken the same applies essentially.

Matt Nally: Awesome. Okay. So what, there’s a really interesting point you’ve raised there around the protecting the information as different construction stages are carried out and post completion and so on, ongoing changes. And you nicely touched on the fact that you’ve historically had big thick lever arch files, and now it’s becoming more electronic.

Do you envisage that we’ll get to a point? We’ve discussed on other episodes, digital twins and so on. And obviously at the moment, that’s probably too complicated for most buildings, because it’s one thing to build the model in the first place, which is quite an expensive process anyway. And then the other point entirely is taking what’s happened on site and updating the fact that.

Particular, all this change slightly and keeping that model up to date. So is there, yeah, I suppose where’s the happy medium between sort of the one extreme of paper files, which are really hard to obviously go through and find the relevant information quickly to digital twins where fine, it might be very quick to find the information, but it’s really hard to keep up to date in a simple way because the amount of software development that goes into that.

So what do you think is the best level of record keeping that It makes it useful information without being too onerous

Jay Ridings: in my personal opinion. And I think this is my experience just working in an office. We’re going paperless. So yes, a digital twin. Maybe maybe we’re not there straight away.

And maybe it is difficult to produce that. And also you’ve got different complexity types of, complexities with buildings. So some buildings lend themselves more readily than that, than others to that type of information. But I do think ultimately we’re going to, we’re going digital. It needs to all be digital.

The paper copies in the construction and the property management worlds are they’re not the way, the best way of managing a building. What I would say is that it does need to be suitable. So if you take asbestos information, for example, so an asbestos management plan that you need for a building, the purpose there is that if someone’s coming to work at a building.

As well as occupying the building you have that there to manage risks. So you’re not going to get someone who’s going to come in and put a hole through, asbestos insulating board, or, or remove a gasket or whatever it may be with asbestos in it. So paper copies of information is still useful up to a degree, because if you have a subcontractor turning up to site, It may be that paper copies, hard copies are the most suitable form of communication to say, look, here’s this, you need to be, you need to be aware of that and don’t touch it.

So there is a certain use for hard copies, but I’d say generally we should be going electronic as quickly as possible, and that is the best way. That is the best way to manage your property.

Matt Nally: Yeah. I think I personally, I think that I agree with you. And I think that’s because where records are electronic it’s so much quicker to be able to look stuff up and relate different aspects together rather than it’s a big leverage file and see appendix D and file three, and yeah, you can find stuff instantly and make those decisions much more quickly.

Jay Ridings: Yeah. Yeah. It’s much more user friendly for everyone. And there’s nothing. Holding us back from that being reality. And if you think of all the opportunities there are with electronic information with BIM and, and even what I’m trying to say, the camera and the sense technology that we have, the scanning technology, it is all there to actually.

Shoot us forward to record information in the absolute best way. So not just theoretical, lines on a black background, but actually virtual surveys of a building linked to other information relating to conditioned fire, whatever. So it’s all there. I can’t see.

anything other than it coming on leaps and bounds in a fairly short period of time, but we’ll see. I might be proven completely wrong, but it’s hard to see otherwise.

Matt Nally: No, I agree the rate of technology change. I wouldn’t be surprised if one day you can walk into a building, hold your phone camera up and it somehow, can sense through the layers that it’s got these types of materials based on how they’ve sent a sonar thingy back or whatever it might be.

That might be all tech by then. Yeah. Yeah. So yeah, that’d be all sorts. Yeah just tying back to the, then the fact that we started off the episode talking about how it was ultimately, The issues we’ve seen in the past are driven by cultural mindsets throughout different areas.

Have you seen a shift then since new legislation has been brought in and people are starting to look at things differently? Where are you seeing positive change over the last few years around fire safety and and what’s been going on?

Jay Ridings: Yeah, absolutely. So I think we can see real positive.

change from the top. The legislation, the response to legislation moving away from combustible materials. So using non combustible materials in the external walls, using non combustible cladding, but also insulation. So you can see that sort of change, but also on the ground with Property managers with contractors, subcontractors there’s definitely, I think, a sort of joint purpose, unifying people, where maybe at one point, people thought things didn’t matter.

It didn’t matter if you put the cavity barrier, presumably, there aren’t many people who would have omitted a cavity barrier. if they thought it was going to lead to people dying. But I do think people maybe didn’t appreciate what certain components do. It, in a developed society, maybe it’s easy to become slightly blasé about what our, what each of us do, what our role is, what the role of different components are.

Don’t think there’s there’s been malevolence, if you like, with certainly people building buildings and managing buildings. But I, so I think we’ve, we’re now seeing this positive change and awareness of what components do. When building a building and, forming compartment walls, building, building external walls, but also in terms of property management, the importance of the fire strategy, the importance of the fire risk assessment what to various, what do those fire shutters do?

What’s the evacuation policy? If that alarm goes off, what happens? It’s very much, in the forefront of everyone’s minds, from my experience, and people are really getting it that needs to be done properly. That said, I’m not sure everyone quite is quite, as we’ve covered, it can be quite complicated.

And I’m not sure everyone fully understands that, that or maybe they understand it’s complicated, but don’t actually understand what the details are. So there’s still room for improvement, but there’s definitely positive change.

Matt Nally: Oh, that’s really, it’s really good to hear. I think I completely agree. It’s difficult to potentially be motivated is the wrong word or, but to comply with certain things when you don’t necessarily understand, so what does it matter if I put that in or not?

Because I suppose pre, pre going forward, I can’t think of a. Fire sort of incident like it, in terms of that, there hasn’t been that that type of big incident to to drive the, this is why we need to have these things in place. It’s are we just worrying a bit too much?

Because nothing’s ever

Jay Ridings: happened.

Matt Nally: Yeah.

Jay Ridings: Yeah. I think that’s absolutely it. Yeah. And you look at, even, we tend to like not always actually think of some examples where this isn’t the case, but we tend to over engineer. We get things into a very safe place. And as I think I said, maybe there’s a complacency there that we, of course it’s safe.

We do everything like, to, to the nth degree. And then actually things, I think what’s happened with the fire safety. World is that there’s a way there’s a way there’s been a wake up that actually things haven’t been, they haven’t been great. They haven’t been over engineered. In fact, that they’re actually pretty dangerous.

It’s been a sort of an awakening almost. And That. Then I think if you look at the number of legislative changes the changes in prac, the way people have are practicing. You get people who you meet professionals and people on site who, it’s not everyone’s on board.

But I would say on the whole it’s been a very positive reaction and a common purpose in the industry.

Matt Nally: Yeah. And on that note, hopefully the recent Dum fire, which luckily no one was injured in, hopefully that acts as a, the reminder that’s needed. It’s not just a, an unlucky one off it can happen at any time.

And therefore the importance of pushing on with that legislation and those changes and mindset yeah, culture changes that are important and the need to happen. So hopefully that gives us a positive push of, reinforcing that. Yeah the culture changes that has been happening.

Jay Ridings: Absolutely.

Matt Nally: One question I wanted to ask before we finish this, the final topic is we’ve covered regulations and I think we’ve covered that quite nicely. But one of the big drivers has been, materials like cladding that we, we discussed earlier. So I imagine there’s new materials coming to market to try and replace things that have been used in the past.

Is there a risk with, New materials that they might not be trying to test in the right way or other issues they bring in. Cause I’m thinking back to like rat concrete where, you know, that was introduced in 30 years on week, we find out that it’s got issues. So is that it’d be seeing things like that happening already in the, in sort of materials for fire safety, or is that a potential that you think could come up?

Jay Ridings: I do think we need to be careful on this one because historically there’s always, there’ve always been problematic. Materials building surveyors get excited about them. And. combustible insulation, combustible external wall materials is the big one at the moment, but it hasn’t, it’s not the only one that there’s ever been.

And what I think that we do need to be careful about is as we’re addressing fire safety concerns, we’re not introducing other problems and creating problems for the future. And I think we just need to be mindful of that and probably a good example of that. And again, I probably need to be careful with this one because there are advocates of this material, but what one that has come under scrutiny is magnesium oxide boards, which turns out that those are, they’re not, they’re completely non combustible and are used as a lining board.

So great, been really attractive in terms of building non combustible external wall systems, but they’re hygroscopic, which means that they absorb moisture. Yeah. The thing that they then do is, at a later date, is then release that moisture, which can then In, in, in quite large quantities, potentially depending on the environment that they’re in and that can then lead to a real problem with damaging, let’s say a timber frame, damaging plasterboard causing corrosion to metal components in the external walls.

And it can actually be quite disruptive to actually then fix that problem. How do you get rid of it? If you’ve then basically built the building and the external walls out of it. But there’ll be other examples as well, just general quality of workmanship, that that’s something that I’ve seen a lot of recently, we’re quickly trying to remedy all of the cladding fire safety problems, and then, external wall systems are being, Put up pretty quickly modern systems often, ones that click into place.

So it’s about the quality of those systems. So they secure our panels, rain screen panels. We see a lot of rain screen systems in place now. Are they secure? Are any of them going to come off? And, there have been some sort of tragic instances of that. Yeah, really good point.

I think that, yes we need to address fire safety and we’re doing a good job. There’s always an eye on potential. other issues that are that maybe we’re introducing or we’re not focusing on.

Matt Nally: Oh, yeah. That’s a fascinating point because it’s, it ties back in again to why things might take time to, to resolve on the basis that you’re trying to avoid unintended consequences.

There’s many factors to consider. And yeah, as you say, what was on the face of things that that material solves the combustion issue actually. What we need to check before we rush into things and cover every building in something else, it doesn’t introduce something else. And you can see that even with wildlife projects, we’ve introduced a one time animal and it’s wiped out everything else.

And the unintended consequence of doing something. So yeah, it just adds again to the complexity of the whole thing.

Jay Ridings: Yeah,

Matt Nally: for sure. Thank you very much for coming on today. It’s been really interesting covering all the different bits and it’s a lot more detailed than than I initially imagined.

Yeah, thanks for covering it all. You’re welcome. Thanks Matt. No problem. If anyone wants to get in touch with you or TFT to learn a bit more, learn about your services. So how do they get in touch?

Jay Ridings: Please do. Yeah, absolutely. You can go on the website go to there’s a route there to, to, for inquiries or queries but more than happy for anyone to contact me directly as well.

And my details are on the website, so just look me up.

Matt Nally: Awesome. But yeah, thanks again for coming on and potentially we’ll catch up again in the future and see how things have changed post the recent events, but that’d be great. That’d be speaking.

Jay Ridings: Thanks Matt. Cheers.