The new building safety regime

design or building work mustn’t accept an appointment if they aren’t

competent to do the work.

• The missing element here is sufficient guidance as to precisely define what

competencies the new duty holders require and how to assess competency.

Whilst various institutions are implementing training to ensure their members

are up-to-speed, our current feeling is that there is definitely a knowledge

gap here which needs to be filled with:

practical examples of the roles;

o

o advice on how competency can be demonstrated; and

o for those (almost lay) people acting as clients, how competency

can be assessed.

We await these examples from the regulator, hopefully in the very near future.

• The Government repeatedly encourage, recommend and often require early

engagement with the regulator and it’s clear that much more ‘front end’ work

will be required from the industry in order to meet the gateways and timelines

proposed.

Interestingly, Government expect that the appointment of the principal contractor and

the principal designer will happen before the building control application for higher

risk work is sent to the regulator (i.e. before gateway 2). The obvious question is

what this might mean for ‘design and build’ procurement?

And the reaction from the insurers?

Whilst there is considerable debate in the insurance market about the impact of the

new regime, we are aware of no insurers taking any firm position at this early

juncture. There is a general feeling that providing that the culture change put forward

by Government can take place then, over the medium term, the upshot of the

legislation will generally be positive. There is some serious concern about the short

term impact of certain aspects, such as the extended liability periods under

the Defective Premises Act, but in the absence of significant claims activity, the

market has not yet reacted.