Case study: CABE Built Environment 2024 winner ONE Engage

CABE Built Environment 2024 winner ONE Engage links building safety teams with residents and fire and rescue services to herald a new era in building safety.

Of all the various failings, recommendations and legislation requirements that have come in the wake of Dame Judith Hackitt’s report following the Grenfell Tower fire, one of the most important is improved communication and greater engagement with residents.

“We now know there was a big gap in communication and information flow between the residents, the fire and rescue service [FRS] and landlords,” says Jason Whittall, Director of ONE Creative Environments. “The FRS called in the middle of the night and they didn’t have access to the latest fire safety information. They didn’t know which residents were vulnerable and needed assistance to escape. They didn’t know which fire-critical systems were and were not working within the building. There was a whole host of things that aligned to create the perfect storm of lack of communication and awareness.

“Since then, we have had the new Building Safety Act (BSA), with its purpose of putting residents’ safety at the heart of operating higher-risk buildings. But it became clear to us that there really was a gap. We saw the majority of industry focusing on the Act in relation to assets and managing physical things like fire door compliance and smoke detectors – all extremely important things – but nobody was focusing on how we communicate that with residents.”

Whittall and his team came up with a potential answer and pitched the idea to Innovate UK, which helped to fund the creation of ONE Engage: a unique online platform that enables information to be more easily shared between landlords’ building safety teams, FRS and residents. “The customer is the dutyholder’s building safety team. They can use this platform to onboard all of their residents, then the residents can use the platform as a place to go to review and receive information all about building safety.

“Crucially, residents can also report issues – say, damage to fire doors or behavioural issues that might be a safety concern – and that allows the landlord to manage all of the safety concerns in one place. Then, as those safety concerns are dealt with, or escalated if needs be, these are then visible to FRS in one single platform.”

ONE Engage enables the residents to become a safety asset for the landlord, not just an annoyance in terms of reporting things – they effectively become the eyes and ears to improve building safety, allowing landlords to provide live updates to residents about their safety concerns.

Whittall says: “The landlord can use the platform to communicate how they’re addressing the issue, how long it will take to fix and what they are doing in the meantime to allay concerns and mitigate risk. With regard to the BSA, ONE Engage can offer a further benefit. When it comes to providing a building safety case report to the Building Safety Regulator, ONE Engage can then provide statistics in terms of that types of issues are being raised; how quickly they are being addressed; and how that is being communicated back to residents.”

Three key areas of building safety

ONE Engage’s pioneering approach offers the following benefits:

• fire safety – the platform provides a standardised approach for the 43 FRSs in the UK, letting landlords share updated safety information with the FRS and aiding emergency planning and response

• resident engagement – the platform allows residents to access and give feedback on safety information, such as fire concerns, evacuation strategies and safety ratings. It empowers residents to participate in building safety and hold landlords responsible; and

• information management – the platform streamlines the information exchange between the FRS, residents and landlords, using a secure and user-friendly cloud-based system to reduce workload. For example, a housing association with 70 in-scope buildings will generate about 840 exchanges with the FRS and 9,930 exchanges with residents per year. ONE Engage handles all of this within one platform.

Whittall and his team are offering 30-day free trials of the software. If successful, the full adoption, integration and roll-out is phased so that safety teams can be trained and residents engaged properly.

Cultural shift

The potential impact of the ONE Engage system has been acknowledged with early engagement with National Fire Chiefs Council (NFCC) Phase 3 Golden Thread Pilot Scheme and a series of awards, not least Product of the Year at the ASCP 2023 Awards and the Building Safety Award at the 2024 CABE Built Environment Awards.

CABE’s judging panel said: “The engagement with NFCC, collaborations with FRS and the potential to feed into national guidance give this project considerable kudos. There is great potential for this to expand to form part of a national database of information.”

For Whittall, the feedback he is seeing from the sector is all hugely positive, but still more needs to be done. “It is seven years since Grenfell and the legislation has been in place 18 months, but we’re still assisting people to understand the requirements of the legislation, not just around resident engagement but across all areas. So you can see the scale of the challenge ahead and the time it will take.

“We created ONE Engage to place the health and wellbeing of all residents at the forefront of the landlord’s priorities; to leverage the concept of ‘data for the public good’; and to ensure that all dutyholders are accountable for implementing appropriate safety measures in higher-risk buildings. But we know it is a massive cultural shift in how people deal with building safety and associated information.” 

For more information, visit one-engage.io