The Building Safety Bill was published on 5 July, giving residents of higher-risk buildings more power to hold builders and developers to account and toughening sanctions against those who threaten their safety.

One key development of the Bill is the introduction of the role of the Building Safety Manager, which has been designed 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.

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. It 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.

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 Building Safety Manager will be in charge of a building, or up to ten buildings, and it will be their role to assist in the management and oversight of the blocks they are responsible for and ensure they meet obligations. This is expected to be one of the biggest changes for responsible persons managing blocks, with many building owners already trying to recruit for these new roles. In some cases this is proving difficult, due to a lack of clarity on exactly what type of competencies these managers will need and the salaries for these roles costing anywhere between £55,000 and £100,000.

IWFM now reports that, to address these blurred lines, the Government has decided to remove statutory duties from the BSM, while still introducing the BSM as a statutory role, to carry out such duties relating to the planning, managing, and monitoring of Part 4 functions as may be specified in the appointment. Responsibility and accountability for building safety duties will therefore lie solely with the Accountable Person who will be required to appoint a competent BSM to assist them.

To encourage industry to prepare now for the new BSM role, the Government has endorsed the BSM competence framework developed by Working Group 8 (for which IWFM provided the Secretariat) published in its final report Safer people, safer homes: Building Safety Management. The development of a BSI competence standard for the BSM role in a Publicly Available Specification (PAS) 8673 is now being undertaken by a steering group . Once completed, in early 2022, the PAS will then become the formal competence framework for the BSM.

For more information on the role of the BSM:

New Bill published to overhaul building safety
The competent Building Safety Manager: what is it and how is it achieved?
The Building Safety Manager: an all-encompassing new role