The idea of the Building Safety Manager role has rather snowballed since it was first suggested by Dame Judith Hackitt’s review into the Grenfell fire disaster. It seems the role will be all-encompassing but who does it affect, what it is intended to achieve, who will be suitable for the role and what will they be accountable for?

What is the role?
The role of the Building Safety Manager will be to look after the day-to-day management of fire and structural safety in higher risk buildings and establish a clear point of contact for residents for fire and safety related issues.

The (statutory) function and role of the building safety manager is expected to support the Accountable Person (AP), who will appoint them, in fulfilling their duties to manage life safety risks and would include:

• Ensuring and assessing that those employed to maintain and manage the building have the necessary skills, knowledge and experience.

• Maintaining and operating information management systems to facilitate safe management of the building.

• Maintaining and managing the safety case for the building so that risks are proactively identified, and mitigating measures put in place and maintained.

• Identifying and ensuring that necessary and appropriate building remediation is undertaken to ensure that the conditions set out in the building registration certificate are met.

• Engaging residents in the safe management of their building through a Resident Engagement Strategy that includes routes of escalation for resident concerns.

• Demonstrating that fire risk assessments for the whole building are undertaken and reviewed regularly and any recommendations are undertaken in a timely manner.

• Reporting mandatory occurrences to the building safety regulator.

The BSM role can be undertaken by a legal entity (organisation) or individual; however, in both cases there is a need for a named individual who is competent to be appointed to undertake the role and manage implementation within an organisation.

Why is it needed?
The concept of the Building Safety Manager role was recommended by Dame Judith Hackitt in her Building a Safer Future review of fire safety, in the wake of the Grenfell Fire, published in 2018.

Now, over two years since the recommendations, the UK Government has published its Building Safety Bill. The Bill is intended to respond to long-standing concerns surrounding fire safety, quality and competence, and to bring about systemic change within the construction industry to ensure that tragedies like Grenfell do not happen again.

Under the draft Building Safety Bill published in July 2020, those deemed responsible in law for the safety of higher-risk buildings, such as the landlord, will be required to appoint a Building Safety Manager.

Named by the Accountable Person, another new role, the Building Safety Manager will support the Accountable Person by carrying out the day-to-day functions of ensuring that the building is safely managed. The role will promote openness, trust and collaboration with residents, which is fundamental to keeping buildings safe.

What buildings will it apply to?
It will be a requirement for a Building Safety Manager to be appointed at higher-risk buildings, such as multi-occupancy residential buildings of 18 metres or higher, or six or more storeys in height.

One of the complexities of residential property management is the wide range of ownership models, some of which can overlap in a single whole building. It is common to have ‘mixed use’ properties with residential spaces above retail units, or residential interspersed with retail/leisure or hotels in a single tower.

It is equally common to have a freehold building, within which a number of demises will have been leased, potentially on terms of anything from six months to 99 years or more. There are also ownership models such as Right to Manage, Residential Management Companies and Commonhold, all of which can give rise to a potential hierarchy of organisation BSMs and named individual BSMs, all responsible for different areas within one whole building.

Dame Judith Hackitt’s recommendations indicate that a competent named individual BSM must have a direct relationship with the buildings and occupiers for whom they are responsible.

Working Group 8 (WG8), which was established to realise the competence related recommendations in the Hackitt Review, specifically focusing on the competency framework for the Building Safety Manager, also recommends that competent named individual BSMs should not be made responsible for too many buildings – there should be a ratio of one named individual BSM to ‘a few’ buildings (which is still a vague and loose definition).

Under the proposed legislation a BSM has to be appointed before a building is occupied. However, for existing buildings, the Accountable Person will be required to register the building and then apply to Building Safety Regulator (BSR) to obtain a Building Assurance Certificate (BAC), which is a requirement for a building to be occupied. Given the number of existing buildings there will be a staged transition period during which the BSR will take into account the information available to the AP at the time of the application.

It is thought that the Bill will touch on every building in the future – including workplaces.

Is it a new role?
The role of the Building Safety Manager is a new designated one created under the Building Safety Bill. It is the first statutory role within the building sector.

It is thought that the suitable person can come from a number of routes but will require upskilling. For example, FM professionals should be in prime position to take on the new role of Building Safety Manager with some training.

The nominated named Building Safety Manager must have the relevant skills, knowledge and expertise to be responsible for the day-to-day management of the building and act as a point of contact for residents. The Building Safety Manager’s name and contact information must be notified to a new Joint Competent Authority (JCA), comprising Local Authority Building Standards, fire and rescue authorities and the Health and Safety Executive to oversee better management of safety risks in these buildings.

The BSM’s details should also be made available to residents and should be displayed in the building.

The Building Safety Manager role should:

• be a role with statutory duties and functions, responsible for life safety in whole buildings and for engagement with residents/occupiers; and
• ideally sit within a wider organisational structure, the organisation BSM, so that sufficient support and resources are available to enable each named individual BSM to fully exercise their responsibility and duty of care.

The Building Safety Manager has to work from within the building – not remotely.

What training will be needed?
There is a question over whether the BSM will need formal qualifications to demonstrate competence or whether it will be based on experience.

It will be important for a Building Safety Manager to have appropriate building and fire safety qualifications. The Chartered Institute of Building is introducing two new qualifications – the Fire Safety Certificate for Construction and the Diploma in Building Safety Management. These will enable the competence standards that a Building Safety Manager needs to carry out their role to be met and may well be something that organisations will require a prospective candidate to have in future.

The WG8 report, Safer people, safer homes: Building Safety Management recommends a competence framework for the named individual BSM covering the core knowledge, skills, experience and behaviours required for the role to be adopted for higher risk residential buildings, and beyond.

WG8 will work with government and the BSI to develop the BSI BSM Competence standard, which will take the format of a PAS- publicly approved standard, which BSMs will be expected to meet.

It is thought that a national system of accreditation and registration for building safety managers will be critical if stakeholders, particularly accountable persons, are to have confidence in the competence of persons undertaking that role, and that any accreditation should be done to agreed common standards.

How will that training be carried out?
This is yet to be determined, but professional bodies such as the Chartered Institute of Building and RICS will be looking at how they can provide pathways to support professionals to achieve the skills needed to become a Building Safety Manager.

More will be understood once the British Standards Institute develop the standard that Building Safety Managers are expected to meet and the Health and Safety Executive in its role as Regulator sets out their approach to recognising qualifications.

How will a BSM prove their competency?
The British Standards Institute will develop a national standard that Building Safety Managers will be expected to meet. The competence framework, known as a Publicly Available Specification (PAS) will be developed over the next few months and the British Standards Institute are in the process of setting up a Steering Group to provide suitable expertise on the PAS.

Whether the BSM role is undertaken by a legal entity (organisation) or individual, the competence required to deliver this role will be the same.

WG8 is passing its full report to the BSI Built Environment Competence Standards Group so that the skills, knowledge, experience and behaviours outlined by WG8 become the de facto competence requirements for a fully-fledged named individual Building Safety Manager. The final delivery of the BSI competence standards will take time, but it is likely that the PAS will be ready for publication by early December 2021.

It is also envisioned that a named individual BSM will require a career path, and that they will need to gain knowledge and experience in the field. It is therefore recommended that there are levels of competence, which will relate to the complexity of the buildings they are required to manage, or they may be a subordinate to a ‘senior’ named individual BSM who is responsible for a very complex/large building, while they progress their career.

Recommendations made by WG8 suggested that named individual BSMs will have to hold a ‘card’, akin to a driving licence, to evidence their level of competence. Such card would be issued once the BSM has been certified against the competence standard.

The national competence framework developed by WG8 sets the minimum competence standard that should apply to BSMs for in scope buildings. The framework has been designed to accommodate assessing an individual’s competence as well as the competences necessary within the wider organisation, and it intends to align with the benchmarking framework, which will be developed by the BSI.

How will a BSM be accountable?
The draft Bill explains the role of duty-holders, as the previous regulations did not make clear who had responsibility for a safety risk. According to the draft Bill, the client, the designer, the contractor, a newly appointed Accountable Person and the Building Safety Manager are all duty-holders. The Accountable Person is the duty-holder during occupation and will be responsible for obtaining a building assurance certificate. The Building Safety Manager will have a support role and will assist with the day-to-day management of structural and fire safety issues for buildings in occupation.

The Bill establishes a sanctions regime for Accountable Persons and Building Safety Managers and makes the regulator responsible for enforcement through the issuing of compliance notices. Under clause 91, an Accountable Person or Building Safety Manager who, without reasonable excuse, breaches a compliance notice is liable to a fine and/or up to two years’ imprisonment. By clause 94, if an Accountable Person fails without reasonable excuse to comply with a requirement under Part 4 and this places one or more people at significant risk of death or serious injury, they commit an offence attracting the same range of sentence.

However, there have been concerns raised around the lack of clarity around the respective responsibilities and liabilities of Accountable Persons and Building Safety Managers. The insurance industry, in particular, said the lack of detail in the Bill risked causing confusion. Others agreed about the potential confusion and said that whilst the explanatory notes were clear that the Building Safety Manager would assume responsibility for the day-to-day management of building safety risks, the Bill itself was less precise.

It is recommended that the government publish statutory guidance alongside the Bill outlining the respective responsibilities of Accountable Persons and Building Safety Managers. It is has also been recommended that government work with the insurance industry to ensure that Building Safety Managers will be able to be suitably insured for their role.

Critically, enforcement will be by the Building Safety Regulator with a range of powers including the issue of 'stop', 'compliance' or 'improvement' notices. Breach of any of these notices will be a criminal offence. Revocation of the Building Registration Certificate and prosecution of duty-holders and/or the Accountable Person is also envisaged.

What will the benefits of this be?
One of the key issues that has been raised since the tragic fire at Grenfell Tower was the concerns of residents not being heard or addressed. With the introduction of the Building Safety Manager and engagement of residents in the safety of their building, resident concerns will have a clearly defined pathway and a designated person responsible for addressing building safety, creating greater accountability.

Graham Watts, Chairman of the Competence Steering Group and Chief Executive of the Construction Industry Council, said:

“This is a ground-breaking piece of work that will help raise the standards of people who own and manage residential blocks, and provide assurance for those that live in them.”

The Government also estimates that introducing the measures will result in economic benefits of between £190m and £380m, in part through the savings gained from the overall package of additional checking and information-gathering reducing defects both during and at the end of the construction period.