New digital hubs to support professional competence

There are huge benefits to a centralised repository, or hub, of all information, standards and regulations relating to professional competence, as Denise Chevin discovers.

A new digital hub went live at the end of January 2026, aiming to help change how the built environment sector approaches the issue of competence. It has been designed as a one-stop-shop resource, bringing together standards, competence frameworks, guidance and industry insight to help safety-critical trades and professions work more skilfully, act with greater knowledge and raise overall professionalism. It promises to be more than a repository of documents, signalling a cultural shift by encouraging education, collaboration and consistent practice across roles and disciplines as the industry adapts to the post-Grenfell Tower fire regulatory landscape.

The ‘Built Environment Competence Hub’ is a collaboration between the British Standards Institution (BSI), the Industry Competence Steering Group (ICSG) and the Building Safety Regulator. It emerges from a regulatory environment reshaped by Dame Judith Hackitt’s Independent Review of Building Regulations and Fire Safety and the Building Safety Act 2022, which places a legal responsibility on dutyholders to demonstrate appropriate skills, knowledge, experience and behaviour. This applies not just to those working on higher-risk buildings (HRBs), but to any project subject to the building regulations.

Work to develop competence standards across the industry – from engineers and passive fire installers to project managers and procurement specialists – began in 2019 under the Competence Steering Group (CSG), a cross-sector body established after Grenfell and forerunner to the ICSG. While progress has been significant, it has not always been widely visible.

“There are a huge number of competence frameworks out there now,” says Ian Richardson, Sector Lead for the built environment at BSI. “The issue hasn’t been a lack of work – it has been fragmented. Information has been scattered and hard to navigate. The Hub is about bringing clarity and confidence to that landscape.”

The Hub is managed and funded by the BSI; the plan is for it to bring together publicly available British Standards and PAS documents alongside competence frameworks developed under the purview of the ICSG, which co-ordinates work across multiple sector-led groups. Unsurprisingly, more than 1,500 users had signed up within its first week.

“Compared with a few years ago, progress on competence has been enormous,” Richardson says. “Frameworks have been published for many roles, with more in development, but what has been missing is a way to see them all and understand how they fit together.”

Ease of use

The Hub is organised around design, construction, products in use and cross-delivery functions, each with dedicated spaces for resources, discussion and updates.

Tom Stack, Lead Standards Development Manager at BSI and Committee Manager for CPB/1, says: “There is already a significant body of material out there. The Hub is about making it usable – helping people find what’s relevant and stay informed as things develop.”

CPB/1, chaired by CABE Chief Executive Richard Harral, is BSI’s technical committee focused on competence in the built environment. It defines, develops and delivers standards – such as the BS 8670 suite, which includes competence for Principal Designers – and was the driver behind the Hub.

Ongoing work to the Hub, alongside documents, is the inclusion of a shared calendar of consultations, draft standards open for public comment and a competence glossary to promote consistent terminology. It plans for a defining feature to be its emphasis on insight and engagement with blogs, case studies and explanatory articles sitting alongside formal documents. “Publishing a framework isn’t the end of the journey,” Richardson says. “People need to understand why it matters, how it links to regulation and what good looks like in practice.”

The next phase of competence reform will increasingly focus on organisational capability, including behavioural and cultural expectations, rather than solely individual qualifications. “Competence isn’t just about training records,” Richardson says. “The legislation is clear that behaviour and culture matter too.” The Hub is also designed to support SMEs, which make up the majority of the sector. He continues: “Large organisations can commission advice and interpretation – others can’t. Free access to authoritative information and a shared learning space is a big step forward.”

As competence moves from principle to enforceable requirement, the Hub positions itself as both a practical tool and a signal that raising competence across the built environment is fundamental to safety.

Scottish Building Standards Hub

The Scottish Building Standards Hub was formally launched in May 2024, after a two-year pilot, marking the start of a new national support model for Scotland’s building standards profession – broadly equivalent to registered building inspectors in England. The Hub was created to strengthen local authority teams by providing expertise, consistency and training as the profession responds to the more demanding post-Grenfell regulatory environment.

“The reason for the Hub in Scotland is to help local authorities in their work of implementing building standards across the country,” says Russell Watson, the Hub’s Learning and Development Manager. Those standards are set out in the Building (Scotland) Act 2003. In the wake of Grenfell and other high-profile failures – including the structural failures of Edinburgh schools – the legislation has been amended several times, introducing enhanced fire safety measures broadly comparable with those elsewhere in the UK.

Scotland’s building standards system covers familiar territory – structure, fire safety, energy, accessibility and dangerous buildings – but differs in delivery. Unlike England and Wales, building standards functions cannot be carried out by private companies. Another key difference is the pre-emptive system where consent is required before works commence. And rather than Approved Documents, Scotland uses technical handbooks – split into domestic and non-domestic volumes – with compliance judged against functional outcomes. While this offers flexibility, it places greater reliance on professional judgement, particularly for innovative products or complex fire strategies. This sometimes leads to differing interpretations between authorities.

For many years, national co-ordination sat with Local Authority Building Standards Scotland (LABSS), a membership organisation representing Scotland’s local authorities, that spearheaded the drive to improve consistency and quality in the profession. “Previously we had 32 local authorities that dealt with things in 32 different ways – and we still have that to some extent,” says Watson.

Much of LABSS’ work was delivered on a voluntary basis. “It was widely acknowledged that there wasn’t capacity to deliver everything they needed to on that basis,” he says. Reviews of the Scottish system in 2017 and 2018 concluded that while it was fundamentally sound, it could be strengthened through specialist hubs of expertise – becoming the catalyst for the Scottish Building Standards Hub.

Much of the Hub’s role involves taking on work and services previously managed and administered by LABSS and delivering it on LABSS’ behalf with greater capacity and consistency. “We do their heavy lifting,” says Watson. This includes chairing LABSS consortia technical working groups, which bring together representatives from across Scotland to discuss common interpretative challenges.

Outcomes feed into information papers written by the Hub, providing additional national guidance to support consistent application of the technical handbooks. Dispute resolution is another core function. Where a designer and verifier – the term used for local authority building standards departments – disagree on compliance, the process provides a formal mechanism to test issues locally and, if necessary, nationally. In complex cases, this can involve input from the Scottish government or the Scottish Fire and Rescue Service. Outcomes are published online, thereby building a growing body of shared precedent.

The Hub also provides peer review for complex or innovative proposals, particularly where authorities lack specialist in-house expertise, notably for fire strategies and HRBs.

The Hub is a ten-person national team, hosted by Fife Council and funded through a share of nationally set building warrant fees. Key outcomes are delivered through working with government and local authorities. Watson says: “Central government are the legislators and local authorities apply the regulations. The Hub provides support services to verifiers in applying those regulations.” The team is fully remote and geographically dispersed across Scotland. Watson sees this as a strength. “It gives a far broader view,” he says.

It comes back to competence

A significant strand of the Hub’s work relates to competence. In August 2024, the Scottish government launched a new professional competence framework for verifiers (local authority building standards departments), with the Hub responsible for delivering a full range of supporting tools, systems and training.

“All local authority verifiers and individuals in the team go through a competence assessment process,” says Watson. Rather than a pass-fail model, the approach is explicitly developmental. “It is about acknowledging where people are with competence and allowing them to put in place a development plan that addresses any gaps.” Managers – along with a sample of the wider workforce – also undergo peer review by managers from other authorities, adding independence and consistency through a process administered by LABSS.

While the initial phase runs to 2027, its longer-term value lies in the national data it generates. “Once the workforce has gone through that process, we’ll have data on real-time gaps in competence,” he explains. “That allows us to target training where skills gaps actually lie, rather than where we think they lie.”

Alongside competence assessment, the Hub commissions and co-ordinates national training that would be difficult for individual authorities to deliver alone. This includes specialist investigation training for prosecutions under the Building Act (Scotland), principles of fire engineering training and support for modern apprentices, which it funds. The Hub, with help from Local Authority Building Control, is also developing formal qualifications for building standards managers, including a Level 6 qualification aimed at upskilling existing managers and building future leadership capacity in an ageing profession.

Watson is pleased by the Hub’s progress to date. “Over the past 18 months it has been really encouraging to see how local authorities have embraced the Hub – particularly using us for peer review and specialist training,” he says. “We’re able to provide national support that simply wouldn’t be viable at a local level.” The Hub is working hard to establish the competence of the country’s 500-strong building standards workforce.

The Built Environment Competence Hub
The Scottish Building Standards Hub

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