Are you ready?

Andrew Gordon, Founder and Regional Director of PartB Fire Engineering, is speaking at CABE Built Environment Wales about the fire safety agenda.

With 11 years as a firefighter at Cardiff Airport, as well as 12 years of experience in fire engineering, it’s fair to say that Andrew Gordon’s presentation to Built Environment Wales will be informed by unique insight. And, he says, there’s a lot to talk about.

“The key things we’ll be covering are the changes to legislation in Wales and how that’s going to impact various disciplines within the construction industry,” he says. “Many contractors aren’t used to following things like the digital Golden Thread of Information or they aren’t recording things correctly or taking photographic evidence, and people aren’t reviewing what has been installed. It’s a huge culture change for those people to understand they’ve got far more liability set against them.” 

While Wales retains its independence, it is influenced by what goes on in England. Gordon says: “Usually in Wales, we wait for a couple of years before we make any drastic changes to our own legislation. We’re a couple of years on from the introduction of the Building Safety Regulator [BSR] and the Building Safety Act in England, so now Wales is in a position to introduce its own methodologies and systems. These will offer a similar structure to the regulator in England, although it will involve local authority building control rather than introducing a new independent body.” [While the BSR is the ‘regulator’ of registered building inspectors in Wales, it is not the same role as in England and work on higher-risk buildings is lead by local authorities.]

Three-tier system

One key difference when it comes to fire (and structural) safety is that Wales categorises residential buildings according to a three-tier height system (there is also an ‘in occupation’ regime, which applies to all three categories, and a building control process for 18m+ buildings). He says: “We have <11m, 11-18m and 18m+. Each is introducing its own restrictions and limitations on how to develop the designs for new builds and relevant competencies. That’s due to go live this July.

“We’ve also got legislation from the Welsh government that all [residential] buildings over 11m with combustible cladding has to be reviewed by a competent person and then any remediation needs to be implemented. That’s about 400 buildings just across the public sector; the private sector will have to do their own work.

“So, with the new added demands, I’m not sure how local authorities are going to cope with it all. That’s one of our key reservations: can they manage the workload on top of their already busy schedules through local authority building control?” 

Gordon concludes: “Wales is very limited in terms of fire engineers. We don’t have education for fire engineering in Wales anymore, as that was pulled from the universities. We want all this improvement work to be done, but do we have the people to actually do it?

“I think there needs to be more training made available for all the different disciplines. At the conference, we’ll be looking at how what has been implemented in England is now landing here in Wales. I just don’t know whether we are quite ready for those changes.” 

For more information, visit partb.co.uk 
Join Built Environment Wales on 24 June – register at b.link/BES_Wales

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