8 December 2022
Building and fire safety: Preparing for new legislation
Alan Robson
Building Safety Manager, Your Homes Newcastle
This presentation was first delivered at the NFA building safety webinar in June 2022.
At Your Homes Newcastle, we have always striven to keep our residents and the structure they live in safe. Since the Grenfell Tower Fire in 2017, safe buildings have explicitly and consciously been a key priority for every member of staff.
What has this meant, in practice, for the way we manage homes and deliver on our responsibilities as landlords?
- Every quarter, our updated specific Building Safety Plan, including any reviews and changes, is now reported to our independent Board.
- In the last few years, we have fitted more than 12,000 fire doors in high-rise residential buildings with CCS pins. These are digital tags that give us a complete fire door management system, making it possible for us to track and record the full history and functionality of every door and to log full evidence of when it has been checked and tested by our dedicated maintenance and testing team.
- We have fitted new alarms or replaced old ones across every high-rise building we manage.
- We have carried out full external wall and structural surveys, and done any necessary work they revealed.
- Day to day, we continually review our compliance across all technical areas, and the target full compliance on the ‘big six’ factors that deliver the best possible safeguards for our residents.
- We make sure our people and their competences are always up to scratch; that our buildings meet all fire and structural safety requirements; that staff have every opportunity to expand their skills; that our teams work effectively. And, finally, and perhaps most important, that we learn from experience and are always ready to adapt when new lessons are learned.
Essentially, we have a mission statement that makes it clear to customers and staff that we will prioritise investment in building safety. Working closely with the government, we will go beyond minimum building safety requirements, trialling new approaches and developing best practice so that our customers can feel as safe as possible in their homes.
With all this mind, we began work on developing safety cases for each of our high-rise blocks some time ago, long before the 2024 deadline. A key aim for us was to get this information together and then find out how we could best communicate it in a way that made sense to residents, rather than thinking only of the technical mindsets of housing officers and firefighters.
We developed a format and then tested it with customers. This has been a process that we’ve taken time over, rolling out first and second versions, revising the messaging in response to wider feedback from customers, and keeping going until we had developed information plates that could be displayed in each block, individualised and unique to every building, and which everyone was happy with.
Format sample
The biggest customer ask was – keep it simple. Here is an example designed with customers in mind to tell them as clearly as possible what they need to know about the building they live in.
We still have much more to do – in all, there are more than 40 residential blocks that need similar information displays and safety cases.
We have learned that this can be done as an integral part of the process of developing a technical safety case for each building that still puts residents at the centre of the work. This is vital given that they are, after all, the principal stakeholders.
Our solution to the different needs of different stakeholders – the Regulator, for instance, needs more technical language and evidence than a customer is likely to want – has been to create a range of versions of each individual building safety case. While this has meant more work, it also means more transparency at every level.
Long-term, we are also encouraging customers to take on the role of building safety ambassadors – we aim eventually to have two or three in every building. We give them the training and the information they need to pass safety messages on to friends and neighbours – keeping fire doors closed, keeping emergency routes clear and so forth. Our ultimate aspiration is to have informed and educated customers in every high-rise block. As in any other field, the best customer engagement is built on positive input from other customers.
A short formula summarises the Your Homes Newcastle approach to fire and building safety: safe buildings + competent staff + tenant engagement = customers who are safe. But, just as importantly, customers who feel safe.