Building Safety Alliance to become a charity

The Building Safety Alliance – a collaborative group of stakeholders from the occupation phase with more than 70 declared supporters, including CABE, has announced its intention to become a charity.

The alliance, formed in March 2021, the Building Safety Alliance aims to drive culture change and competence across the occupation phase. It initially worked on implementing the recommendations from Working Group 8 of the Competence Steering Group, which was tasked to develop a competence framework for the building safety manager as per the recommendations in Dame Judith Hackitt’s report. It has since evolved to become the pre-eminent forum for all those organisations providing support, services and products to the occupied residential sector.

The group includes owners, residents, insurers, facility and property managers, representatives from professional and trade bodies and a wide number of professional services providers such as engineering, installing and maintenance.

"In alignment with our ambition to drive change, the Building Safety Alliance has a growing number of special interest working groups (SIGs) to deliver practical solutions to the sector supporting best practice compliance with the Building Safety Act 2022’s through voluntary collaboration," the Alliance said in a statement. "The broad-church forum discussions have helped to inform policy, legislation and guidance, all to meet Dame Judith’s vision for safer housing, and for residents to feel safe in their homes."

The Building Safety Alliance will soon release guidance to the sector and dutyholders to support them towards meeting the 'golden thread' requirements, guidance on competence expectations that ‘Owners/Clients’ (Principal/Accountable Persons) and those who contract works should be considering, and guidance as to how an organisation may evidence that it
has the ‘organisational capability’ to deliver the services it is contracted to deliver.

Anthony Taylor, Interim Chair of the Building Safety Alliance, said: "This extremely welcome and timely development, after two years’ very hard work by many volunteer supporters, will provide us with an appropriately transparent governance regime to ensure that the Building Safety Alliance has a sustainable future for the longer-term.

"It will also provide a valuable platform for our supporters to be able to continue their collaboration to deliver the work needed to implement the new building safety regime. Our group continues to grow as the wider sector agrees that collaboration and co-ordination of effort to drive competence and culture change is achieved better, faster and more consistently, together."