The Building Safety Act (BSA) is a crucial piece of legislation that imposes specific requirements on duty holders (building owners, managers, designers, contractors and occupants) regarding the safety and integrity of buildings from their inception to end of life and/ or reuse. The Act has implications for all building types but focuses on safeguarding higher-risk buildings (HRBs).
The BSA places more responsibilities on individuals as duty holders. Many of these requirements are outside the specification scope, but for many aspects the specification is a critical document. Specifications are developed through the design stages of the RIBA Plan of Work and are vital documents to control the construction quality. The Building Safety Act sets out an overarching framework and philosophy to be followed; it is vital that these principles are reflected in the specification’s development and use.
This article defines the key areas in which the Building Safety Act may impact specification and where the NBS Technical Team is reviewing its content to provide further guidance and awareness of the Act for specifiers.
The duty holders
Some duty holder roles were already established through the Construction (Design and Management) (CDM) Regulations, but the Building Safety Act has now increased responsibilities for existing duty holders. [Note: a project may have different duty holders for the CDM duty holder role and the BSA duty holder role.] These include the following:
- Client – the organization or person responsible for ensuring that the requirements and Building Safety Act are met, including where a project involves more than one contractor/ designer, thus requiring a competent principal designer and principal contractor to be appointed.
- Principal designer (PD) – the organization or person that has overall responsibility for planning, designing and managing the BSA requirements during the design phase.
- Principal contractor (PC) – the organization or person that has overall responsibility for planning, managing and monitoring the work during the construction phase.
These roles currently exist in NBS CAWS and Uniclass Preliminaries libraries, and NBS is reviewing and improving the guidance for these accordingly. The Joint Contracts Tribunal (JCT) is currently reviewing its contracts to determine what changes it needs to make1, and the results are expected to be published sometime in 2024 (exact date to be confirmed). The New Engineering Contract (NEC) has not indicated at this stage whether it is looking to update any of its contracts, but its contracts align with the construction playbook, which has been updated to include references to the Act2.
New duty holder roles have been created as part of the Building Safety Act:
- Accountable person (AP) or principal accountable person (PAP) – the organization or person that is responsible for, or owns, a residential high-risk building (HRB).
These new roles are being reviewed in NBS content and added where applicable, making sure that any differences from existing CDM roles are made clear. Although these new roles have not yet been added to NBS content libraries, specifiers using Chorus can add ‘user-created’ clauses to accommodate these roles and any others they wish to include.
Gateways and change control
The Building Safety Act has introduced a requirement for the control of information at three stages within a project with additional requirements for HRBs:
- Gateway one – deals with planning permission.
- Gateway two – deals with the building control approval application.
- Gateway three – deals with the application for a completion certificate and registration before occupation.
The specification is an integral part of these gateways as early-stage decisions may impact design and system/ product selections. The risk to the specifier/ client and contractor can impact a project when any amendments to the material or design compromise safety, durability or fire integrity. Changes deemed to be ‘major’ or ‘notifiable’ (major changes will require approval before they can proceed on site, and notifiable changes must be reviewed to confirm they are not major changes) can have significant cost and time implications for a project. Therefore, the timing of fire strategy decisions and submissions should be considered at an early stage.
NBS will be adding guidance to highlight these risks to the specifier when making a change in the specification. A key area for the technical team’s focus for guidance will be around systems and products that, if altered, may impact HRBs.
The Health and Safety Executive (HSE) has been appointed as a statutory consultee for planning applications and is the building control authority for all applicable HRBs.
Within the NBS CAWS specification platforms, B05 content provides general guidance on fire performance, regulatory fulfilment, testing and classification. [Guidance on planning gateway one is already included within B05. Updated guidance on gateways two and three has been created and is expected to go live at the end of 2023.]
Within NBS Uniclass content, reference to the BSA was added following publication of the initial legislation in relevant sections, but this is being reviewed to ensure that specifiers receive consistent guidance and references. NBS is also reviewing the secondary legislation and is looking to add guidance and/ or relevant references in early 2024.
The golden thread of information
The Building Safety Act notes specific requirements on record keeping between gateways two and three and after each of these gateways.
At gateway two, the information includes: an outline of the work; information about the building; details of the duty holders; and building set-out information – including a location plan, a fire and emergency file, a construction control plan, a Building Regulations compliance statement and a change control plan with details of any partial completion strategies (if going to be implemented).
At gateway three, all of the information submitted as part of the ‘as built’ information is reviewed to ensure that what is built matches the proposals agreed at the previous gateways (or as amended with approval) and, ultimately, meets Building Regulations requirements.
NBS specifications contain clauses with guidance regarding the need to include fire safety information within the builder's manual, which will be provided at project completion. This is required by Regulation 38 of The Building Regulations 2010, and the Building Safety Act has emphasized this need. NBS will be providing additional guidance on what to include in the manual to support BSA compliance and HRB applications.
As a specification develops through the gateways, and when a performance specification (also known as a descriptive specification) becomes a record of ‘as built’ works, it requires the detail of specification decisions and all amendments approved by the Building Safety Regulator (BSR) since gateway two to be recorded as the completed project.
A record of changes to the specification using the ‘revisions’ functionality already exists within Chorus, and a final ‘record specification’ can be created to support this need. Chorus allows the specification to be a living document that can evolve throughout the project and be used throughout the timeline from concept to completion.
Additional information on specification, the golden thread and compliance with the BSA can be found in the NBS article Why specification is more important than ever.
In summary – what is NBS doing?
NBS is currently appraising the implications of the Building Safety Act 2022 and subsequent secondary legislation introducing the new regime for HRBs. HSE has provided an overview of the new regime, and NBS product users are encouraged to follow best professional practice and check the latest government legislation according to the jurisdiction applicable to their work.
The NBS website hosts a collated list of industry guidance and key publications and a series of BSA-related articles that may be of interest.
It is currently anticipated that the Joint Contracts Tribunal (JCT) will begin to publish the next editions of its contracts from spring 2024, partly due to the changes introduced by the BSA. These will be prioritized in our content update programme as soon as they become available, along with any other amendments or new editions from the various contract publishers on which NBS content is based.
Notes
2 https://www.neccontract.com/news/introducing-the-refreshed-version-of-the-construction-playbook)
More on the Building Safety Act
NBS has several articles providing more information on the Building Safety Act. These include:
