Behind The Built Environment

David Frise: My name is David Frise and this is the Behind the Built Environment podcast episode three. Our guest today is Dr. Philip Webb. Welcome, Philip. 

Dr. Phil Webb: Thank you very much. 

David: Philip or Phil? 

Phil: Phil. 

David: Welcome, Phil. Not Dr. Phil? 

Phil: No, just Phil. 

David: Just Phil. Great. Phil is Chief Executive of Health & Wellbeing 360, who recently became BESA affiliate member. Congratulations and welcome to the BESA community. 

Phil: Thank you very much. 

David: Dr. Webb is an experienced healthcare professional with extensive knowledge of academia, healthcare industry and the public sector. He's currently the industry representative of the Promoting Awareness of Air Pollution Delivery Group for the Welsh Government. Dr. Webb has a PhD in cell and molecular biology. His postgraduate academic work interests include health economics, prioritisation and advanced physical and digital engineering, including 3D printing and artificial intelligence. 

His experience includes a 10 year career in industry with two major pharmaceutical companies within sales, marketing, R&D and medical and regulatory affairs. 20 years experience within UK National Health Service in national commissioning, specialised services, regional cancer delivery, innovation and value based healthcare. A firm believer in user-centric design and in understanding the importance of socialisation and the human machine interface in the development of technology and committed to net zero, smart and intelligent technology development and importance of making work and workplace fun. Thank you for coming today. 

Phil: It's a pleasure being here. 

David: We always kick off with a few quick-fire questions. The idea is yes or no to these. 

Phil: Okay. 

David: The first one, is indoor air quality a major health issue for the whole population? 

Phil: Yes. 

David: Do engineers hold the solution to the problem? 

Phil: Yes. 

David: Will filtration, purification and airflow technologies play a part in this? 

Phil: Yes, as well as monitoring. 

David: Is the state of our indoor air quality a public awareness issue? 

Phil: Yes. 

David: Finally, is the Net Zero agenda an obstacle to good indoor air quality? 

Phil: Possibly. 

David: Yes or no? 

Phil: Yes. 

David: Okay. You did better than most actually. It's very difficult just to say yes or no. We should turn it into a quiz game. We're going to kick off, if we may, with very little public money and resources are being spent on this issue, but you think that air quality is responsible for a very high number of excess deaths. More than the COVID pandemic, is your view, and cancer and heart disease and mental health combined. Where do the figures come for this? How do you justify that? 

Phil: The figures come from nationally available statistics from public health bodies. The numbers that I usually quote, when I quote numbers, are all from verified, factual statements made by accredited and regulated bodies like NHS Public Health Wales, NHS Public Health England. It's quite astounding when you start talking about some of the impact of the figures. I usually talk too, in terms of numbers, in terms of deaths per 100,000 that are statistically adjusted for populations. 

If you look at the COVID issue, and everyone knows that COVID was an international pandemic and a horrible time period in people's lives, really, it saw the biggest changes to our civil liberties with lockdown. Things that are unprecedented didn't happen since the Second World War. Really severe political measures to reduce infection rates for COVID. COVID death rates were around 34.8 in Wales per 100,000 population. If you can put that into context for major chronic diseases, cancers are about 278 per 100,000, cardiovascular diseases, heart attacks and strokes are about 290,000. The biggest killer per 100,000 is mental health, which reaches about 1,000 per 100,000, okay? 

When you look at the statistics which are verified from national data on the impact of air quality, they range from about 1,500 per 100,000 in Wales to estimates around 10,000 per 100,000 in parts of London. In fact, if you combine all the other diseases together, they don't reach the same mortality rates that poor air quality actually reaches and attains. In fact, WHO just had a publication today to say that 1,800 people die every day in Europe just from poor air quality. 

David: 1,800 people a day? 

Phil: A day. 

David: That's a staggering figure, isn't it? Before we get back onto that, what are the solutions that engineers offer that can help particularly with indoor air quality? 

Phil: I think, Dave, the way that governments have tended to look at this is that they tend to concentrate their activities and their available resources on ambient air quality or outdoor air quality. It's the things that you see on all sustainability reviews and programmes. It's associated with pollution, vehicle pollution, agricultural pollution, et cetera, yet very little attention has been placed on actual exposure risks to our populations. 

If you look at some of the statistics, Western populations spend over 90% of their time indoors. Even on a maths basis, exposure time for populations that we're involved with are all about indoor environmental quality. It's probably the indoor environmental quality, which has been an unrecognised and very silent killer in those statistics that I just mentioned at the beginning of this interview. 

David: What sort of systems can we, as engineers, install that mitigate that problem, mitigate the risk? 

Phil: If we believe that we're spending 90% of our time indoors, engineers and architects build buildings. They design buildings. They look at the materials around buildings. They look at planning around infrastructure. They look at the standards and specifications for the building themselves. 

Engineering facilities management and building management systems, in my opinion, have a tremendous potential to improve the overall health and well-being of populations, bearing in mind, we're spending 90% of the time in buildings, our homes, our places of work, public spaces, schools. If we have the ability to design think our way through better buildings, we will end up with better health and well-being for our populations. 

David: One of the things we often say is that we install products, we stick them in and don't really check that they work. A critical feature of this is the actual long-term operation and maintenance, isn't it? It's no good having a fantastic air filtration system, ventilation system, purification systems, if you're only concerned about where they've been installed, but they don't work. How do we ensure that? 

Phil: I think it's the regulation around facilities management. I think that apart from a legal responsibility to ensure buildings are maintained to a certain quality and standards, and that includes all the technology within the building, including ventilation systems, filtration systems, purification systems, sensors, meter and monitoring, which we don't do enough of, and hopefully we'll cover a little bit about how we actually know that particular environments have got particular concentrations in there. 

I think there's a social and an ethical responsibility on us as engineers to be able to do this in a way that not only puts innovation at the beginning and at the centre of any building design, but maintains it for the longevity of the building. We're talking of the fact that actually from a building's perspective, we're probably reaping the health and well-being benefits or disbenefits for really poor planning in the 1970s around buildings. 

If we are very interested, and I think we should be in the well-being of our future generations and our children and their children, we really need to focus on the 60-year life cycle and lifetime of a building. That's how long they last for, that's how long we should be maintaining them at a particular standard and a particular level. 

David: I don't think anyone would disagree with that, but there is a problem of perception, is there not, with air quality? People are rightly outraged by pollution of our rivers and the beaches, but you can see it and it has a direct impact. Whereas air quality issues tend to take much longer, often only appear at post-mortem as the cause of death. How do you educate the NHS, clients, that actually you need to invest in this now for long-term prevention of disease in the future? 

Phil: That's a really good question. I'll use a medical anecdote to illustrate this. Hypertension never used to be measured, but it's a leading because of cardiovascular death, and people just didn't bother measuring it until they realised the consequences of very high blood pressure on the human system, and particularly cardiovascular events like heart attacks and strokes. 

We now routinely measure your blood pressure when you go into a GP's. If there's anything wrong with you, they usually take a blood pressure check. They usually check your heart rhythm, okay? It's exactly the same with buildings. If you're not measuring anything, and this goes back to the conversation that we might go into about sensoring, metering and monitoring, you actually don't know what the problem is, but you need to know what's happening in a building and in various different parts of a building in any given time. 

Because as we'll see, and we'll talk a little bit about the British Standard, which is BSI 4102, that mandates you to be able to meter and measure what's happening in your environment and in your building, and then look at rectification around how you use your ventilation systems, how you use advanced digital technologies like artificial intelligence to tell a building, don't open the windows outside because the outdoor monitor is saying that there are high levels of pollution for PM2.5 and nitric oxide. Keep the windows closed. 

The BMS system will kick in. It will ventilate, purify and take it down to levels that are consistent with BSI 4102. It's the advancement of the combination of different technologies and smarter technologies that I believe is the future for buildings in the next 5 to 10 years. 

David: Again, I don't think I'd disagree with any of that. I've been in buildings that have advanced BMS controls and the windows open automatically when you're in a room and people didn't like that, they don't feel there's a control. The point I'm getting to is, how do you inform people that the air quality in this building is bad, is poor? Because they might get a headache eventually from high CO2 levels, say, but how do you immediately inform people you're going into a space that is not good for you and these are the consequences of that in a way that doesn't scare them to death but just informs them? 

Phil: I'll take the scare them to death bit first because people get less afraid when they become familiar with information and the familiarisation of the information that surrounds us, bearing in mind that we're inundated with information on a day-to-day basis; on your phone, on TV screens, on monitors that exist everywhere. I came through the tube, there's monitors everywhere. 

There's nothing stopping us informing the public of the air or environmental quality in a particular space because we're already used to monitors being around everywhere. We're already used to be told on the TV that the temperature today is going to be 18 degrees centigrade. The pollen count is going to be high or low if you're allergic to pollen. What we're trying to say is part of that information dialogue needs to become mainstream to people. 

People should be getting used to the fact that actually, weather reports should say your temperature today is this, it's going to be a bit cloudy, it's going to be a bit humid, the pollen count is this. By the way, your local pollution level in your surrounding area is going to be this today. If you're thinking of going out on a picnic, the best places to go out to picnic for pollution for outdoors is going to be this area or this area. 

On an indoor basis, you should be able to walk into a building and it should be able to tell you on a large iPad on the side of the wall exactly what the environmental conditions are in that particular building based on the good quality sensors that that building has and an interpretation that allows you to have health and impact interpretations for you so you don't have to worry too much about it. You should be able to form a choice about where you go. 

Part of the choice agenda is the bit that we think is going to change human behaviours. If you're faced with information and a choice about which shopping mall you want to go, because the indoor environment in St David's Centre in Cardiff is at such and such a level, but if you went to another shopping mall, the indoor environment is better, most people would act on the information given to them and choose to do one or the other, which then derives the issue around commercialisation. Commercial advantage for people who own buildings is to ensure that their buildings provide the best environment and the best experience for anyone using their buildings. 

David: How advanced are we in that link between good air quality and say, productivity, something that has commercial value to clients? The reason I would say that is it's fine doing the temperature report every day, the weather report, because I can't do anything about that. The moment you tell somebody who I'm asking to come and work in a building that I own and occupy that actually the air quality is rubbish, I have a duty to do something about it. I can see that actually better off if I don't know, then I don't have to do anything about it. It's there a link between the commercial value of giving people clean air. 

Phil: Dave, let's unpick this. If you're an employer, you employ people and you'd like them to come back to the place of employment post-COVID now because people feel that productivity has dropped slightly because people are working at home. You want to positively incentivise your workforce for coming and working in your office now. You run a sickness and absence rate, and there's already good evidence linking high sickness and absence rates with poor quality environments that we're talking. If you talk about the NHS, their sickness and absence rate is about 7.2% to 8% of a workforce that's multi-hundreds of thousands of people. 

Even if you look at government policy, there's a commitment manifesto for people to put more professionals and train more professionals for the NHS. Surely you'd be better off creating better environments for them so when they went to work, they didn't get ill. Actually if you do the maths on that, that creates more people returning to work than you would ever be able to employ and train in a short space of time. 

My retort back to somebody who has an organisation that has people is that the best way to get the best people is to prove that you care for them and you prove that you care for them for creating the best environment for them to work in, number one. You retain them from creating the best environment to work in, number two. They don't go off as sick if you create the best environment for them to work in as well. Actually, your conversation with your staff would be, "Come to work. It's a better place for you to work. You'll be more productive and you will be weller and healthier than you would be at home." 

David: Actually, that conversation came up today. We invested in air quality products for our office and the air is cleaner and it's cooler. Both Claire and I came in today because it was better in there than at home, as they say. We touched on the development of a new British Standard 40102 Part 1, which you were heavily involved in the development of. Can you tell us a bit about that and what drove you to get involved in that? 

Phil: That's part of our story about how we became Health & Wellbeing 360, really, Dave. Originally, BSI 4102 was driven by EFT Consult, which is part of the group that we now work for. Their perception at the time, this goes back pre-COVID when this actually kicked off, originally as a PAS, they looked at the health and wellbeing impacts that were happening in and around built environments. They went through a process of looking at international standards to see what the measures and the parameters would be to measure and to be able to do something about indoor environmental quality in buildings. 

What they actually found was, is that the international standards all disagreed with each other. WHO doesn't relate to what the UN said, doesn't relate to what different countries said, doesn't relate to what different sectors said. They thought having a unified PAS at the time to be able to be consistently measuring the same thing across geographical areas would be a really good thing to do. 

What actually happened was COVID came. They had to wait until COVID finished from a British standards perspective, but then there was an unprecedented speed of accelerating the PAS to a British standard. Literally it went through in record time because there was an acknowledgement from British standards that this type of standard was critical in moving us forward on the built environment engineering agenda. 

Now, that went through EFT consult. At that time, my company was called Respiratory Innovation Wales Limited, which was a company funded by Welsh Government specifically to look at the population impacts of innovation in the respiratory space. We were working on exactly the same thing but from a very different perspective. We were taking a health and wellbeing, health and social care perspective around this, EFT consult were taking a technical building engineering perspective around this. 

Then on the 29th of February at midnight, our natural progression was to go to a limited private company from Welsh Government, which we completed with EFT and we became Health & Wellbeing 360, combining the health and social care approaches that we had adopted on population level health and wellbeing, together with a technical building and services engineering perspective that was promoted and developed by EFT resulting in the British standard. 

David: We're talking about whole building solutions to this. There's been a big problem with the quality of metering and monitoring devices for airborne contaminants. What do you think needs to be done about that? 

Phil: I think there's been largely a positive response, particularly in the low-cost sensor area. What we're really talking about is low cost, but reliable sensors that can be deployed at scales. If you compare these, and I don't know whether you're familiar with them, with the government funded big URLs that exist dotted around through DEFRA, those sensors are very sensitive, very specific, but they cost in the hundreds of thousands. You're talking about £50,000 to £100,000 for a unit like that. 

We know in the buildings environment that is unaffordable on infrastructure. Nobody can afford to put that type of level sensor in place in buildings at scale. We're talking about trying to scale these up across all buildings. 

In the low-cost sensor sector, we're probably talking about sensor array. If you talk about the British standard, we're trying to work towards a British standard array that covers about the 11 variables in the British standard; heat, light, humidity, gases, particulates. We're talking about the £400 to £600 per sensor, not the £100,000 sensors. There are key issues around this though. 

Firstly is, the British standard advocates concentrations measurements, not derivatives. We would not want people to invest in sensors that derived a calculation based on voltages that didn't actually measure concentrations at all. We think that they are largely unreliable. In the sector that we're in, poor quality data and information leads to poor quality decisions made on people, which, as I've said to you, results in massive amounts of mortality rates per 100,000. 

We want good quality data based on good quality sensors that measure concentrations, that come in an affordable price to deploy, whether it's your home-- The British standard on domestic has started, as you may be aware. We want them in commercial buildings, public spaces, et cetera. We need to be able to independently verify that the sensors work to existing parameters when they're tested. We are looking for the development of an independent testing sensor for low quality sensors. We're already having conversations with some university partners about where we set this up and how we do it. 

Actually not to make price of testing a barrier to the industry. This also is going to be at low cost and reasonable. Then we're looking at how do you actually get this in a place where we can scale this up? Does this need to be about infrastructure development at the point of architectural development and planning stage for buildings? Does it then gets absorbed in the cost of the building? How are we looking at retrofitting? This requires an industry-think about how best to embed some of these technologies at low cost, but still reliable and deployable in the way that we look at buildings, both new buildings and retrofitting. 

David: It is the key, is it? Not that until you've measured it, you can tell what the air quality is. You can't do anything about it. 

Phil: Yes, and I'd go back to the medical analogy. You never sit in front of a doctor and he says, "I know what's right for you" just by looking at you. There's usually a set of diagnostics that are done and we're saying exactly the same for buildings. You have to be able to identify in order to rectify. 

David: Makes the invisible visible to people. How long before you think that every building will have air quality-- Well, just environmental meters and monitoring devices, just as standard. It's just a thing we all have. 

Phil: I think this should become-- there's two ways of looking at it. The first one is, if we collectively believe that this is the correct thing to do for buildings, then we have a collective responsibility to ensure that the standards that apply are basically maintained and embedded in the way that we design thinking buildings. That's the first thing. BSI 4101 came into being in April last year, and we've deliberately spent time trying to make people aware of it so as they don't get a surprise when your insurance company gets a notification to say that your building's not compliant with BSI 4102. 

We don't want to make an enemy of the partners that we need to work with. There's a process of awareness that people become familiar and aware of the standards and what is required to implement them at affordable cost. 

The other way of looking at it is competition. Industry thrives on competition. It's a conversation that we've had with hoteliers. If you really want an advantage on TripAdvisor, rather than just price, advertise that your entire hotel chain and every single room in it is equipped with a way of telling the person who's booked that room exactly what the environmental quality is in their room and in their hotel, and actually positively promote it as you will get your best health and wellbeing experience because we have state-of-the-art technology that ensures that your stay at the Celtic Manor or at the Hilton Hotel is protected and you know what the environmental quality is in your stay, a positive experience. 

There's the legislative bit that you have to do it, and then there's a competitive bit, which is can people make a competitive advantage, which affects their price point on how they sell environmental quality to people using their services. 

Hotels, cruise liners, I've been on Great Western Railway and the Tube, yes? How do you positively use the fact that you spent money to improve your environmental quality to get a commercial advantage and a return on investment by promoting it? We believe that actually results in several pounds on your price point, if you're a Costa Coffee, for example, or several pounds on your booking rate on booking.com. 

David: That requires a complete flip on the current status though, because people don't value building engineering services until they haven't got it. If you get it right, they don't notice because they're not hot, they're not cold, and they can't hear it, can't see it or smell it. Therefore, it's not something that impacts until it doesn't work and they're suddenly hot, or they're in the dark or whatever. 

This still requires you to be able to say, hey, look, the air quality is good in here to promote that. I completely get that. Can we move on to a topical thing, which is about black mould and the impact of black mould, which we've seen, I think, nationally in some pretty awful cases in homes. Do you think there's another scandal heading our way through mechanical ventilation with heat recovery that's been badly installed and is not effective, not working, and therefore we effectively have a sealed building, but not correctly ventilated? 

Phil: I think it goes back to design principles, if I'm being honest, Dave, okay? If we have a conversation with the industry about what we're trying to create in reality-- I was delighted to present to SIBC patrons group, and we had a conversation about this. There are fundamental questions for the building and engineering services industry. Why are you building buildings in the first place? Are you building them in a way that just stops you being sued for poor design, which is the minimum, very conservative way of building a building? 

I'm building this, but I'm only building it so I can't be sued as a consequence of it legally or are you building a good quality building? If you're building a good quality building, in reality, what's the difference in the price point for how much it costs to actually build it? The difference of building a poor building and a good quality building is actually negligible, particularly if you're looking at some of the suggestions we're making on the embedding of technology as part of the infrastructure of the building. 

I don't think it's a big jump to move away from building adequate quality, defensible buildings to actually building good quality buildings based around the design principle of the health and wellbeing of the users of that building at the center of it. There's a bit that my chair, Dave Keefe, always said, which is, "If you look at it and design a building from a net zero decarbonization perspective, you end up with a hermetically sealed, well-performing box, which is horrible to actually be in there as a human being." We're not trying to build unlivable buildings and unworkable buildings, we're trying to build good buildings. 

David: I think the same could be true of the Building Safety Act, where we seal them for fire safety, but neglect the ventilation. We're still buying it at the cheapest price. All these products are perfectly good. Mechanical ventilation heat recoveries are fantastic products, but when poorly installed causes problems. Do we have a skills and training problem in the UK that we need to address? 

Phil: It depends. I always look at the definition of a problem. I don't see it as a problem, I see it as an opportunity. I think that there's an opportunity to address skills and training. There's an opportunity to look at good design thinking, both architecturally and in terms of designing buildings, period. 

I think that there's plenty of evidence about things we can learn from previous failings in the past. We've gone through decades of different types of buildings being developed, all of which have got recorded deficiencies against the design of the building. I don't think it's too far a push for us to learn from the failures of the future, to design better for the future. The past should light our way to build better buildings for our future generations. 

I don't think it's a huge step to do it. I think there's an opportunity to train people to think differently when they're designing buildings, as well as the ability to then install and develop the installation of new technologies in buildings. It comes all back to design thinking. I used to do a lot of work with IBM, and the first thing that IBM would say on any given problem, is "Take as much time as possible to design think what you think you're dealing with, and then get as many views into how you're dealing with it as possible." 

David: Somebody, I think-- Well, a couple of European associations around this area issued a manifesto recently calling for good air quality to become a basic human right in European law. Do we need a new Clean Air Act? 

Phil: NHS, well, not the NHS, Welsh government have just produced a Clean Air and Soundscapes Act for Wales for 2024. It's quite interesting because there's certain devolved powers for Wales that has got direct control, particularly around buildings. Now, the dialogue with Welsh government, as with all governments, has largely been around ambient air quality to begin with, but because of certain lobbying and a consideration of the actual facts around exposure times and risk, they've started to think about the impact of indoor air quality, actually, on the population. That's an emerging thing coming from Wales. They've already got a new Act. I was at the Senate when it got passed. 

Legislation is one thing, human behaviours are another. I'll put a different spin on this. If Mrs. Jones talked to Mrs. Williams and liked Mrs. Williams' new house, and Mrs. Williams said, "You know what? My house has got ventilation in there, it's got purification in there. I go into my front room as soon as I walk through the door and there's my little keypad for my security system. There's a little iPad on there that tells me every single room's environmental quality, and Little Johnny, he's got asthma, he hasn't had an asthma attack since we moved into this new house. Temperature's fantastic. My energy bill's actually reduced." 

We'll talk about the relationship between energy and air quality in a minute. Mrs. Jones turns around and says, "How much does that cost you, Mrs. Williams?" "Same as it cost you, Mrs. Jones." Mrs. Jones as a consumer starts to want what Mrs. Williams has got. I would say legislation's one thing. Legislative bodies are one thing. The real thing we need to get to is how you drive human behaviours to want the benefits of environmental quality. Why they want it, whether they want it for themselves or whether they want it for their families or their children, why people would want something like this. 

I think the consumer side of this and the consumer advantage around this is the thing that will actually change and drive human behaviours, not the legislation. The legislation is about organisations who would want to build in a specific way. The driver commercially comes from demand from people and demand from people is about an awareness programme of why you would want this for yourself and your family. 

David: Okay, so that ends my formal questions on this. I'd like to really try and summarise what we've learned today from you. 90% of us spend 90% of our time in a building, therefore there's significant social value to getting the environment correct within those buildings. The solution to the problem is that you first identify the air quality by good monitoring, good metering of the air quality within buildings. 

Phil: Yes, I would broaden it to environmental quality because you have to include heat, humidity, temperature. 

David: It's not a single thing, it's a range of things that you need to monitor that improve wellbeing, shall we say. 

Phil: Yes. 

David: The benefits of a good environment, as we said, are a huge social benefit, but actually, if we invested more in the environment of our buildings, we would be able to reduce the NHS bill through prevention of ill health rather than waiting for people to get ill and treat. 

Phil: Massively. 

David: In fact, the poor air quality in particular is killing more people than a range of other diseases in this world. The building engineering services sector has the ability to massively influence this agenda and to deliver buildings that actually work. In BESA, we describe it as the heart and the lungs of the building, the stuff that makes a building work. The benefits of that are clearly there and what we have to do as an industry is work out, have value proposition that people start to value the air they breathe in a different way than they currently do. 

Phil: Absolutely correct. 

David: They should use the British Standard as a template to how we are going to take part in this journey to improve everybody's mental health, physical health and wellbeing. 

Phil: I think that's a brilliant summary. 

David: Oh, thank you very much, Phil. You can come again. Final, final question. Are you up to mystic about the future or pessimistic about the future? 

Phil: I'm very optimistic about the future, actually because I think there are certain moments in time that we can actually positively, in reality, do something about a problem. One of the reasons why I moved away from the NHS and went into the job that I'm doing currently is because the NHS doesn't tackle population level wellness and disease prevention well because it can't affect change in the areas that it needs to. It can't look at energy. It's not involved in food. It's not involved in buildings. It's not involved in environmental controls. 

Those are the biggest key determinants of health that actually work out whether you're going to end up in hospital in the first place and what stage of your life you are going to end up in front of a doctor anyway. 

As I said to Claire, there's a calculation that I'd like to end on. You are going to spend 7,256 times the amount that you're going to see your doctor in a building that you're going to be in, whether it's a public space, your home or a place of work. Even if these interventions were 17,256 as good as seeing a doctor, we'd still be in front of the NHS in providing good health and good wellbeing. The opportunity to change things for the population, for the UK as a whole, for Europe and global is massive just through changing the way that we think about buildings. 

David: Dr. Phil Webb, Chief Executive of Health & Wellbeing 360. Thank you very much for coming to the Behind the Built Environment podcast. Thank you very much, it's been a pleasure. 

[music] 

Now for the BESA news. This week sees World Refrigeration Day and to tie in with the coolest day of the year, we have launched a new technical bulletin, TB57R290 in Air Conditioning and Heat Pump Equipment. That rolls off the tongue, that's a really catchy marketing title, which is available to download for free on the BESA Knowledge Shop. Also, we offer a range of refrigeration and FGAS courses via the BESA Academy. If you are looking to subcontract FGAS work, then look no further than the UK's leading FGAS register, REFCOM, which has over 8,000 FGAS approved companies on it. 

To tie in with today's podcast talking about air quality, last week we celebrated Clean Air Day at The Wave in Bristol. We want to remind everyone that we have a suite of award-winning free IAQ and mould guidance available to download, again on the BESA Knowledge Shop. We've launched the BESA Manifesto with our range of policy proposals for the next UK government, which includes fair payment, building safety, IAQ, Net Zero and skills, all the burning issues which affect our members daily. 

The digital SKILLcard is now live for both Apple and Android users, enabling contractors to assess sites quicker via the SKILLcard QR code on your mobile. Plus, it reduces the amount of plastic use, so we're all playing our part in reaching our Net Zero targets. Visit the SKILLcard website to find out more. Whether or not you like it, our footy fever is sweeping the nations, not with England's performances to date and Scotland's untimely exit, but with the kickoff of UEFA Euro 2024, we've been working on something exciting, which we can't wait to share exclusively with BESA members next month. 

We know the Building Safety Act can be challenging to grasp, which is why we've developed a very straightforward interactive guide that uses football analogy, making it easier for you to understand what your role or position is and what your responsibilities are for meeting organisational capabilities and individual competencies in the Building Safety Act. The Building Safety Act applies from everything from a shed to the shard. 

The Building Safety Advisory Group met last week to review the content, so we're making our final tweaks before our mid-July launch of the BESA Building Safety Act "Play it Safe" campaign, so watch this space. 

Finally, the deadline is fast approaching for submitting your entries in this year's BESA Industry Awards taking place at The Brewery, London, on the 17th of October. Entries are coming in thick and fast, so make sure you, your employees, colleagues, apprentices and businesses get the recognition they so well deserve. Deadline, Friday the 12th of July, so visit thebesa.com/thebesaaawards to submit your entries for free. Thank you for watching and listening to the Behind the Built Environment podcast. Join us for the next episode in about a month's time. Thank you. 

David: Today we're joined by Remi Suzan, MD of Gratte Brothers Limited. Gratte Brothers, one of the UK's leading independent building services companies, set up by Derrick and André Gratte as an electrical contractor in 1946 in Knebworth with £100 of share capital. Three generations later, they are still family-owned with a turnover of over £250 million. Remi took over in April after 20 years in the business. He's been design director, engineering director, as well as deputy managing director. Remi, congratulations on your appointment, and welcome to Behind the Built Environment.

Remi Suzan: Thank you. Pleasure.

David: Now, we like to kick off with just some quickfire questions just to set the thing up. Yes, no, if you possibly can. Building Safety Act, do good companies have anything to fear from the Building Safety Act?

Remi: No.

David: Is offsite the future for the industry?

Remi: Completely, yes.

David: Should M&E contractors do more principal contractor work?

Remi: That's not an easy yes-no. It depends.

David: I'm going to press you.

Remi: If they can, yes.

David: If they can, yes. Great. Does BIM work for the contractors?

Remi: No.

David: How would you describe the current building services market in the UK?

Remi: I think it's very varied for different companies that are operating in different elements of the environment. At Gratte's, we're very focused on the commercial work rather than we don't work in the public sector. I don't really have a view as to what's going on there. We don't really do domestic either, but we commercially work on office blocks, data centers. Data centers has been the big thing for us over the last 20 years. At the moment for us, it's very busy.

David: Very promising then.

Remi: Yes.

David: I think you described in a recent interview we did for the Top 30, you described Gratte Brothers as being in a very stable place. What are your business priorities for Gratte Brothers?

Remi: Most of our work is repeat business. 80% of our turnover is with existing clients. The focus is to keep the existing clients happy so that they want to keep coming back to you. Obviously, we do look to expand our client base, and we will tender work that comes in from those avenues. Generally, it's about repeat business, keeping your client base very happy.

David: You've had a focus on, shall we say, operational improvements like digitalization and those areas. Are they key to you?

Remi: Oh, completely. You've got to move forward. The world is changing very quickly. The industry has moved into BIM and 3D coordination, which is the obvious thing that people think about when it comes to digitalization, but there's so much more to it. There's now the automating programming packages you can use, the dashboards that feed into the management teams from automatically taking data from programmes, from logs such as RFIs, information, all sorts of things.

David: It's essentially the medical jargon, do no harm, first of all, but improve the operational efficiency of the business as you do that?

Remi: Completely. We've taken an operational director that was very IT-based, and we basically gave him that role in the business. He's no longer operational in terms of project work. He's got the title strategic director, and his role is completely looking at new technologies, how we can integrate them into the business and delivering of projects. I think we've always had that, but it always used to be a job for a director that was busy doing his day job. Therefore, it always took forever to bring anything new in because the day job always took over and the improvement things got dropped. By actually taking a director and saying, "Right, you are responsible, and that's all you're going to do," we've ensured that that has progressed continuously.

David: You're using things offsite increasingly to help combat your skill shortage, but also improve quality?

Remi: We've got two offsite facilities. We've got Worthing, and we've got Chelmsford. Worthing is a welding facility, and Chelmsford is what I would call offsite pre-assembly. We're making all sorts of things in Chelmsford, from full electrical risers to distribution boards, to mechanical pipework, pump skids, but we do it all with our own labour. It's actually skilled electricians building it or skilled pipe fitters. There's no de-skilling. People have argued that you could save money, but then that's where you drop off on the quality side of things.

Just the act of how you build in that controlled environment is so much better. They've got, all their tools are all bolted to benches. There's none of this balancing on the edge of a toolbox with a chainsaw or whatever. All of the materials are to hand. You can go to lunch break, and you can just leave your tools next to what you're working. Go to lunch break, come back, rather than having to pack them all up and get them out of the stores or whatever, and you waste hours on a building site. At the moment, I would say that on some of our bigger projects, we're building between 30% and 40% of the projects in Chelmsford, and just delivering it and bolting it into place. The vision is eventually 70% to 80% of the projects.

David: This also helps one of your other challenges, I guess, around sustainability, and your carbon footprint reducing that.

Remi: There's an argument that you're increasing your double handling things because you're having stuff delivered to Chelmsford, you're building it, and then you're moving it again to the site. That petrol or diesel offset is far reduced when you look at the significant reduction in waste because every bit of off-cut is kept at Chelmsford. Then when you need 400 millimetres of a piece of pipe or a piece of conduit, you just go to the rack and you get that 500 millimetres that was an off-cut, where, on-site, it would have ended up in a building site skip.

No, the amount of waste is reduced massively. Like I said, the improvement in production is huge as well. My team at Chelmsford could build an entire electrical distribution board, pre-loom it, pre-test it in a day, where if you were doing it on-site with electricians, you're looking at four or five days' work.

David: It's a significant savings then.

Remi: Significant.

David: An improvement in quality presumably.

Remi: Quality, but also from a client point of view, if you've got an electrical switch room, then I can't start until the builder's build the room, and often painted the floor, put a lock on the door. I'm landlocked, I'm locked, I can't move forward until that room is ready, where, if I build all that off-site, I've disconnected the programme, and then when the room is ready, it takes me three days to fit the room out when it could have been four, five weeks' work.

David: In a sense, it also allows you to take control of the elements that were out of your control in the conventional way of vetting.

Remi: Oh, completely. It decouples the programme, so you can get on with your work, even if you can't get on on-site.

David: Presumably that's where the greatest risk to you is financially, is the programme.

Remi: From the client as well.

David: Yes. Now I'm going to take you right back to the very start now. What drew you to engineering in the first place?

Remi: Absolutely nothing. I knew nothing about what this job is. My father was a chef, he was French, obviously, with a name like Remi there.

David: Certainly, you should be a chef, a famous chef. You said he worked for the Roux brothers, didn't he?

Remi: No, he knew the Roux brothers.

David: He knew?

Remi: He was the head chef of the Savoy Hotel. He came from Paris, he was headhunted, brought over to Paris. He worked in a lot of the West End restaurants and stuff like that. At 16, I was under threat, "You either find a job or you're going to come and work in my kitchen." I would have done absolutely anything than be my father's apprentice. I ended up going to the careers office, which I know you'll have to explain to your viewers what that is because it doesn't exist these days. Basically, at 16, you went to the careers office, you filled in a multiple choice list of questions, they fed it into some very basic computer, and it spat out what jobs you were most suited for.

Mine said either engineering or a policeman. They looked through their Rolodex, which I guess is the old version [crosstalk]

David: [unintelligible 00:09:21]

Remi: An old version of the database, paper version of a database. This lady pulled out a job opportunity for a local company called Benham Building Services. All she said was, "I think it's the tool makers." I had no idea what a tool makers was or what Benham Building Services was. Anyway, I had an interview, my father drove me there, made me take my earrings out and comb my hair. I was packed off in, I did the interview, I had no idea what I was being interviewed for. The guy halfway through it, started talking about plumbing. I'm like, "Oh, plumbing. Yes, I could do that. Yes, that's a trade. It's a good thing to get into." Then he said, "You'd be expected to wear a suit," and I thought that's weird, like it's pretty like posh plumbing. At the end of it, he said, "You've got the job, I'll take you, I'll show you where you work." He brought me up into the drawing office. I had no idea what I'd been interviewed for. I got the job, I started and ended up on-site for six months, strangling pipes and generally being a dog's body to all the tradesmen on-site. Then I was in the office for five years doing an apprenticeship.

David: Now we need a picture of you as a 16-year-old with your earrings.

Remi: I could furnish you with one, but I won't. [laughter] After that, the recession hit, and everyone was being made redundant, so I decided to hide it out at university. I did the traditional way and the academic and came out, and the rest is history.

David: With the knowledge of the tools to help you through the process.

Remi: Exactly.

David: I've got to ask, is the chef skills in the DNA? Are you a cook yourself?

Remi: Oh, yes. I do all the cooking at home.

David: It must have been touch and go there. Was your father not disappointed?

Remi: No, I don't think so. I really enjoy cooking, and ultimately, if I hadn't got that job, I would have been a chef.

David: Well, there we go.

Remi: That's right, yes. One of life's junctions.

David: We talked a bit there about the development of skills and how you develop your skills by doing a bit of on the kit and then at university. As a company, Gratte's has always had a great reputation for training both engineers and apprentices. What do you think has gone wrong with the way we recruit and do our training nowadays?

Remi: Competitive tendering.

David: Competitive tendering.

Remi: The drive to reduce costs. The first thing that gets slashed is training budgets. I did my day release when I was at Benham's at Vauxhall College. I believe that's gone now. There's literally only three colleges in London that you can send people to. I think the industry didn't help itself by focusing entirely on the academic. You can't become a chartered engineer. CIBSE will argue, yes, there is a route for the unqualified, as it were, without a degree, but it's so difficult to navigate that route. Basically, if you want a career in this industry now, you have to have, well, it was an engineering degree, now it's a master's degree.

Therefore, all of the training has come via the academic route. When they come out of university, these graduates, they're more focused to design because that's what the courses are for. I guess, in my generation, all of the trainees came from 16-year-olds joining contractors, doing their time in contracting. Then when they qualified, then they would move into consultancy and bring that practical knowledge to the design side of things. It switched. Basically, all the graduates now go into consultancy, and they don't come back to contracting because why would they?

David: What are you doing at Gratte's to try and overcome that?

Remi: About three years ago, when I first became deputy MD, I introduced, we call it a graduate trainee programme. Basically, what we've done is we've created a full training scheme, which runs all the way from Day 1 over four years. The whole idea is that they work in every section of the business. We've got different entry points. Up until now, what we do is we take our blue-collar apprentices, so the ones that are doing the electricians and the pipework and the plumbing, and our labour manager will basically speak to them when they're in their fourth year, and say, "Are you interested in coming out of the tools and going into the office?"

If we feel that they're made of the right stuff, then we'll bring them in at that point and start them on the four or five-year training programme to bring them through. Again, it means sending them to college, HNC route, rather than a degree route. If they want to after that, then we would be interested in that as well. From my point of view, I think that them coming in at that point with that five years of site knowledge is so valuable to an engineer manager because you can't teach that in a classroom, can't teach somebody how a building site works, how a piece of duct is actually hung up in the air.

David: It gives them those buildability skills that they wouldn't have if they only did the design side.

Remi: Management of labour and all sorts of stuff that academia misses.

David: That's really interesting on the skills side. We talked briefly about off-site before. I know you've got the two facilities at Chelmsford and Worthing. Out of that, what do you think needs to improve to encourage more of that? You see, you hear a lot of off-site specialists, they go bust because it's, they've either got too much work or too little work.

Remi: The reason why I try to avoid the word prefabrication is because that sounds like you're making a product. In order to get your productivity, you want to make a standardized product. If you take someone who makes bathroom pods, then you buy a bathroom pod, and you then have to change the design of the building to fit the pod into it. You can't do that in UK building. Every building is bespoke. It always amazes me, like, you have an architectural consultancy team client, they build a building, they go through all the problems of coordination, getting it right.

Then they build the next building, and they throw everything that they've done away and start from scratch. It's madness. There's nothing standardized in UK building. Every core is different. Every riser is different. Every bathroom is different. What we look to do is to take the unique riser and build that offsite rather than saying we're going to build a range of electrical risers and you pick something that suits your building because it just wouldn't work.

David: You're effectively doing offsite for yourself in that it's all your teams doing it.

Remi: Yes.

David: That has advantages.

Remi: Definitely. Going back to what we were talking about, decoupling it from the programme, improvement of productivity in terms of time, the quality. The original concept was that the electricians would come to Chelmsford, build what they were going to build, and then they would take it back to site and install it themselves. That way you've got none of the finger-pointing. It hasn't quite worked out like that because of logistic reasons. We've got people that live and work near Chelmsford, and it makes sense for them to stay at Chelmsford. One of the things I'm very conscious of is to stop that finger-pointing, the site going, "Oh, Chelmsford mucked it up," and Chelmsford going, "They didn't give me the right information."

David: Moving on to the other big changes in the industry that are coming up and the Building Safety Act is probably the major piece of legislation, and as I was reminded recently, and all the other regulation change that's coming with it, that's a huge change for everyone. Do you see that as a threat or an opportunity?

Remi: I think the industry should hang its head in shame that we've had to have this legislation hoisted upon us because basically, what it's meant is we've been caught doing it so badly that the politicians have had to step in, and actually tell us how to build things, which is terrible. We shouldn't be in that situation. It's obviously going to have a massive change. You've now got to prove your entire supply chain is competent. That sounds stupid, doesn't it? If you're buying something, a piece of kit, then you would expect the people building that bit of kit to be competent to build that bit of kit.

You should be competent that the installer, the subcontractor is competent to install it. We're in a terrible state where you can't, hand on heart, say that that bit of kit has been competently built and that the installer isn't competent to install it, or the architect isn't competent to know that it shouldn't go in that position. It's awful.

David: Are you starting to see the impact of the Building Safety Act, though, in the requirements for Gratte's on projects? Is that starting to bleed through?

Remi: We're principal contractor on a lot of our jobs now, like, 90% of our work, we're principal contractor. I think you'll see it more when you're tendering, in terms of all of the competency statements and [unintelligible 00:20:15] to prove that your supply chain and your staff are competent. You'll see, it'll be interesting, a lot of the changes are to do with building regulations and planning.

I'm not sure how the clients are going to react to it because, in theory, you should have all of the design sorted before you go to planning permission. That means that D&B doesn't work. I can't see the industry wanting to let go of D&B, so I'm not sure how they're going to square that circle.

David: Yes, I would agree on that. Most of the time, though, it's build and design rather than design and build, isn't it?

Remi: Yes. I think you've got that element to it. Then you've got the changes to Building Control because, obviously, Building Control were quite friendly previously, in that they would take a fee to help the design team, and the architect would trundle off to Building Control, show him his designs, and Building Control would go, "I don't think that's right, I don't think that's right, and I don't think that's right. You need to do this, you need to do that." Then they'd go away and rework the scheme, come back and show him again, and so forth.

You'd have this iterative process. Now Building Control aren't offering that service because they haven't got enough staff to do now what they need to do. They've said, "We're not going to do that. As professionals, you should know what you need to do to achieve Building Control sign-off. We're not going to help you." I think that'll be interesting as well.

David: You mentioned that majority of your work is now as principal contractor, presumably working directly for clients. I think you described why that's a really good-- Closer to the money as well, I guess.

Remi: Oh, yes. All day.

David: Does that bring other pressures and risks that you don't get as a Tier 2 or Tier 3?

Remi: I think you need to find the staff that can understand the principal contracting role. That was a bit of a lesson for us in that you've got some very good M&E project managers, but that doesn't necessarily mean that they can build staircases and decoration, and stuff like that. Over the last four or five years, we've had to bring in a lot of what I would call CSA, so, construction, structural and architectural engineering. We've taken on a director now responsible for the CSA element, and that team that we're building. That was a step change for us, and actually taking ownership of that.

In terms of risk, as long as you're managing the process and you're not making any mistakes in that side of things, the risk is the same. If I'm main contractor and you're working as a subcontractor, if that job goes off the rails, then you're all in the lifeboats together. It's no different.

David: Yes, and design liability and responsibility gets pushed down the supply chain regardless.

Remi: Exactly, yes.

David: I get that completely. One final question I had. This is the equivalent. I'm going to take the pin out the hand grenade now, and I guess we've only got three hours left or whatever. BIM, one of your favourite topics, do you think that's been a good thing or a bad thing for the industry as a whole?

Remi: I think the concept is brilliant. The idea to digitally build something before you actually take it to site is a brilliant idea, but it doesn't work. Where I think when it was first trumpeted by government that you needed to do this and it would save 30% on projects, absolute rubbish. It costs an absolute fortune. That's because people don't put the real level of detail that they need to. As M&E contractors, because we've been drawing in 3D for a lot longer than all the other trades, and we have much more mature libraries, so you can actually get a fan coil unit and put it in the model, and you can take individual pipes to it, and everything else, but the builders don't have that same information.

They literally rely on the architects and the structural design models. That's given to the M&E contractor, and you spend an absolute fortune coordinating to it. Then they go out and procure the steelwork. That steelwork contractor comes up with a completely different idea of how he's going to put the building up. The steelwork model changes and then there's clashes everywhere and everyone looks at you and go, "You're rubbish." You go, "Well, you just changed the goalposts." You then have to re-coordinate it again. Then all of the secondary trades start coming in and windposts suddenly start appearing where there were no windposts in the structural model.

Then there's door lintels, and there's all these things that aren't in the architectural and structural models. When they do appear on-site, they clash, and so you don't solve anything. Until the rest of the industry catches up with the M&E and they really do model what they're going to install, then you'll see the benefit.

David: I think what you were describing there is what we were talking about earlier, which is build and design rather than design and build. Whilst you're starting on-site before you finish the design, BIM, how can it possibly work?

Remi: It can't. You have to have that time upfront. If you're going to build a building digitally, then you have to be given the time to build that building digitally. Also, you've got to look at the people that are doing it. The guys, the BIM operators, whilst they're super clever, IT-wise and being able to use the programme, they don't actually know how to install M&E because, otherwise, they would be engineers. Therefore, it's very difficult for them to actually get that. We try and get round that by bringing our site managers into the office to sit with our CAD operators to let the CAD operators have a go.

Then the engineers and site managers will come in and look at the model. We do model reviews and they go, "You can't do that, you can't do that, and that doesn't exist in reality." We'd have a go, but like I say when you get to site and all of these things come out of the woodwork, which aren't shown in anybody else's model, and there's clashes everywhere, you're still doing exactly what BIM set out to do, which is not have that redesign, re-coordination on-site, but it still happens.

David: I think we've discussed this before about how you have so much design time is spent on designing a building that the client can't afford or won't pay up for. It comes back to you as the contractor to make it for the buildability bit. All the stuff you've been talking about, about having people with the skills to know how to build it, the site savvy, as well as the design, is the thing that you bring to the party to make it happen, but your programme is compressed all the way through. That's another reason to take it off-site so that you take out that risk. It sounds like a strategy, really.

Remi: I think you still need that. If you want to take something like a riser and fully prefabricate that or pre-assemble it off-site, then you actually need the time in that coordination process to be able to model it completely. That needs to be built into the programme. That's where the PCSA arrangements really come into their own, where you sign up on a fee to work with the design team prior to the actual pricing of the projects. That can give you real advantages. On a traditional way, you'll literally price it, appoint it, and you're meant to be on-site in a couple of weeks time, then clearly, you can't do everything you'd like to do, pre-assemble, pre-fabricated.

There are still elements you can look at it and go, "Right, we'll do that in Chelmsford, we'll do that in Chelmsford, or we'll do that in Chelmsford," because you're literally taking a room and you're going, "That's how I would install that. Let's go and do that on a still frame in Chelmsford, and then we'll bring it to site."

David: Great. Final question. After 20 years at Gratte's, years in the building, are you now an optimist or a pessimist about the future?

Remi: I think an optimist. I think from our point of view, we've moved into the principal contracting world. We're taking on projects that we would never have taken on 10, 15 years ago in terms of build content. We've learned our lessons along the way. We seem to have quite happy clients behind us. That's reiterated with the repeat business that we keep getting asked to price and deliver. No, as I said I'm quite optimistic for GBL anyway.

David: That's great to hear. Remi Suzan, MD of Gratte Brothers, thank you very much.

Remi: Okay. Thank you. Pleasure.

[music]

David: Now for industry news, a big week, of course, with the announcement of the general election in early July. We'll be looking to talk to both parties about their growth plans, which are so important. Net Zero, which seems to have gone off the agenda for both parties at the moment. Skills and training are obviously a big area of focus for us. Finally, around payments and onerous contract clauses, and the old favourite, retentions. We are optimistic that both parties are beginning to get a better understanding of how damaging retentions are for our sector. In other news, we understand that industry accreditation or grandfather rights changes is really the number one issue on the doorstep, as politicians would say, particularly, those who have relied on grandfather rights for the validity of their skill cards. It's important to us that you have the support and resources necessary to navigate this transition effectively.

To assist you, BESA Academy's skills advisory service is available to address any enquiries you may have regarding accessing the requisite training, but there's little doubt that the deadline set by the CLC at the end of this year will not move, and therefore, it's only adaption that we could hope for. In other news, our annual conference is back on the 17th of October at the brewery in London, and it's the premier event for industry professionals. We've got visionary speakers, leading industry exhibitors, and aspiring leaders. It's a perfect place to connect with a trusted community and help shape the future of the industry.

Early bird tickets are available till the 2nd of July, so book now for your place. Also, on the same day, 17th of October, at the brewery, the BESA Industry Awards, which recognises excellence in building engineering services, you should get your entry in now. They're coming in thick and fast, get yours in before the deadline of the 12th of July. If you haven't already downloaded the Top 30 M&E Contractors Report, you can do so. It features the latest industry trends, insights, and key players, such as Gratte Brothers Limited, which we heard from earlier.

If you're watching this, then scan the QR code on your screen now, or visit thebesa.com.top30m&econtractorsreport. We also have a webinar coming up with myself and Gokhan Hassan on the 13th of June, where we'll discuss the report in greater detail. Register for your free place now. We recently launched our BESA NextGen network, which inspires and connects the next generation of building services professionals. If you'd like to join or know someone who wants to provide new innovative ideas and make a difference in our industry, visit thebesa.com/nextgen to find out more. That's the roundup of the news. Join us again for the next in this series of Behind the Built Environment podcast. Thank you, and goodbye.

David: Hello, I'm David Frise, Chief Executive of BESA, and welcome to our new podcast, Behind the Built Environment. The podcast where we will delve into the industry's latest news in the building engineering services sector. With leading industry experts, we'll explore the trends and innovation shaping the future of the built environment and the impact they will have on you and your business. Today, I'm delighted to welcome our first-ever guest, Lorna Stimpson, Chief Executive at LABC.

Lorna: Thank you.

David: Lorna's career in public service building control spans over 30 years in roles from building control surveyor up to senior managerial positions. Lorna joined LABC in 2008 as Business Development Director, advancing to Deputy Managing Director in 2015, and Chief Executive in 2019. Lorna has a proven track record in delivering complex projects and strategic reform. She works with DLUHC, HSE, the National Fire Chiefs Council, and Local Government Association as a member of the Joint Regulators Group, defining, piloting, and testing the new regulatory approaches.

She sits on the Industry Competence Committee and the Fire Protection Board. Lorna is a Board Director of LABC, the Construction Industry Council, and the Building Safety Competence Foundation. It's a wonder you've got time to come and see us today, to be honest, with all of that on a busy life.

Lorna: It's a busy time. Busy time for the construction industry generally. Yes, and I think we're all feeling the same at the moment.

David: How did you come into the industry? What was your entry point into this?

Lorna: I became a trainee building control surveyor at 16 and I've never looked back. It's the best career choice. We've just been taking on trainee building control surveyors, and I can honestly say to them that I wouldn't change a thing about my career. The 30 years in building control surveying, probably not quite 30 years, but in building control surveying was just fantastic. Fantastic. I would do it all again.

David: That's good. If you get so senior in your career and you do it all again, then you must have made the right choice.

Lorna: Yes.

David: We'd like to start off all these podcasts with a quick-fire question. Yes or no, if possible to this.

Lorna: Okay, I'll try.

David: Building Safety Act is clearly the dominant thing for you over the recent the last few years. Quite a few of these will be around Building Safety Act. Is the Building Safety Act the most important change in construction in your career?

Lorna: Absolutely. That wasn't yes, was it? I'm sorry. Yes.

David: Even more affirmatively, yes. Does it cover all buildings?

Lorna: Yes.

David: Is everyone in construction impacted?

Lorna: Yes.

David: Will the Building Safety Act result in behavioural change in the industry?

Lorna: It should. Yes.

David: Will the industry be better because of it in five years?

Lorna: Yes.

David: Do good companies, those who are competent and compliant, have anything to fear from the change?

Lorna: No.

David: Great. Thank you. All yes and nos. That was good. An absolutely. That's a huge boost. Could you just start off by just describing what you understand the Building Safety Act is about and why it's so important for the industry?

Lorna: That's a difficult question. Why is it so important and what is it about? It's about putting right the wrongs that we've had for so many years in construction, I think. It is fundamentally about cultural change. I know that is seen as quite a fluffy thing. It's not. It's not something that you can pin down, but it is about people doing the right thing for the right reasons, and consciously doing that. It's about competence. It's about culture. It's about putting safety before profit and a legislative process and framework by which that is the driving force. I truly believe that the Building Safety Act, if implemented appropriately, will do all of those things.

David: To make the building process safer, more certain, would you say, over that period of time?

Lorna: Yes.

David: To drive, we talked earlier, or you answered yes, to behavioural change. It's not just process. It's not a tickbox exercise. It requires people to change the way they operate and view the operations.

Lorna: Without a doubt. I'm obviously heavily involved in building control, and we are at the sharp end of that. Building control is becoming a regulated profession or has become a regulated profession. We're leading that change. I think the work that I do on the Industry Competence Committee as well is about driving cultural change across the whole industry. That's about attitudes. That's about people understanding what the legislation is trying to achieve, and the fact that that legislation is trying to drive safer buildings.

David: I guess with all change of that nature, you get we always divide them into threes. You get 33% immediately get it and change. 33% wait for something to happen and then change. You get 33% who never change. Where do you see us on that spectrum at the moment? I see quite a lot of the top third really going for it. Are we really getting into that second segment yet?

Lorna: In building control, we certainly are because we've had a deadline and we've had to work to it. In terms of construction, I think it will take a long time and a long time to filter down. The driver for this change was Grenfell, the Grenfell tragedy. That was what? Seven years ago now. Dare I say it, the impact fades from people's memories. If it's not something that's in your mind all of the time. It is obviously in ours because I'm working closely with the building safety regulator and DLUHC as part of this programme. We live and breathe it every day. Other people can be forgiven for not having been touched by the implementation yet.

I think the whole idea is that, gradually, over the years, this new way of working, the cultural change that we've talked about, the behaviours will start to trickle down throughout the industry. Construction is an unusual industry, and I think it will take some time. It's also a massive spanned industry, isn't it? I think we were talking earlier and you said something about from the shard to the shed. That is construction, isn't it? That is the massive breadth of construction. How long is it going to take for these new behaviours to come down to those people working on the shed?

It's going to take a long number of years, but it will happen. I'm very sure it will happen, whether it will be in my lifetime or career. I don't know, but it will happen. Or [crosstalk] determined.

David: I guess my career will end roughly the same time as yours. I would really like to have seen something happen by then. I was at an event last night at the Tower of London from the mechanical contractors, Vonterio. They held their conference in London, and their president said that they counted the number of cranes in London alone. It was over 100. They were staggered by the amount of work going on. Are you concerned about the resources available to planning and building control departments to actually deliver that, so they're not delaying the whole process?

Lorna: I don't think there will be any further delay than there ever would have been. capacity and local authority building control. Will we ever have enough people? I don't know how many is enough. I don't know, but certainly not impacting on delays to construction. The registration of building control professionals has now gone through that process, and we continue to work towards full implementation. What we're also doing within LABC, with massive support from English and Welsh governments, is to bring new recruits into building control. We know that we were an ageing profession. We know that there was a lot of people in the latter end of their career at this moment in time in building control.

We've been very, very conscious to bring in as many new starters and trainees into building control as we possibly can. We've done that over the last 12 months. We've taken on about 130 building control surveyors, and we continue to do that with government funding. Whilst we're losing people at the top end of their careers to retirement, as we would naturally, we're bringing people in at the bottom end to replace them, and to backfill those more experienced people that we're losing. It's all about the training. It's all about competence and building that professional network again, which is something that's very much part of our strategic direction.

David: The press will always focus on negative stories because that's what people want to read, by and large, you don't need to hear the good news stories. How useful is the three-month delay announced by government to building control officers complete that registration process. I'm assuming you agree with that decision to delay?

Lorna: I wrote to the building safety regulator and Welsh Government to request not a delay but an extension and that's what we've been given an extension to the deadline. Just to allow people to go through the process. I think what perhaps industry don't generally understand is it isn't just a registration process. Building control surveyors have got to prove their competence as part of that registration so through an independent company organisation. LABC's organisation that we set up some time ago the Building Safety Competence Foundation is gaining UCAS accreditation in 17-024 to be able to assess the competence of building control surveyors.

The surveyors have got to go through that really rigorous process to get their proof of competence before they're able to register. It's not a simple registration process and that three-month extension to the deadline that the BSR Welsh Government gave six months extension to the deadline. Very much welcomed by the industry and by LABC because it has given us that opportunity to get more professionals through this process. The building control professionals, they're willing they are ready and able, and going through that programme as we speak.

I think come July and in October for Wales, we will have the vast majority of current building control professionals registered in the system and practicing as registered building inspectors.

David: We represent mainly tier two contractors although they typically can now do more than half the work on a project but tier twos and below. They're very time-strapped there's I think still a lot of confusion in the industry about what's covered and how it's going to impact them. As a tier two contractor, what do you think they need to know and what should they prioritise in the way they operate in the future?

Lorna: I think it's fair to say that many people who aren't involved necessarily directly in HRBs so higher-risk buildings think that maybe the Building Safety Act doesn't impact on them. It does and the legislation has changed, and anybody who has an impact on a building whether it be a subcontractor the main contractor, they're what is now called duty holders. They have a duty to do their work in a certain way, and most of that is about competence and knowing their abilities. Whilst that might not necessarily have filtered down to your members yet, they are duty holders. That duty holder role doesn't just apply to HRBs the tall residential buildings it applies to every piece of construction.

Whether it be a kitchen extension or the shards, there are duty holders, and that duty holder isn't just the main contractor or the principal designer. The principal contractor principal designer it's everybody who has an impact on that building, or on that design. They are dutyholders, and they have responsibilities. Part of that responsibility is to understand their competence. Now, maybe at this moment in time, there isn't a requirement for them to prove that competence or be on a register. They are expected to understand their competence and their sphere of competence. The grey areas around what they are competent to work on what they have.

Competence, let's forget is about skills, knowledge, experience, and behaviours, and so it's not just about what you learnt in a book. Have you worked on that type of building before? Are there things that you don't quite understand, and it's your responsibility as a duty holder to understand where your skills, knowledge, experience, and behaviours lie.

David: Interestingly today, we've got a meeting in Rotherwick House which is where our offices are to discuss competence and the apprenticeship for ductwork. We've got 40 ductwork contractors coming in to do that. I guess the point I'm getting across here many of those competencies haven't really been fully defined yet. How long do you think the industry has to get that in place so that there's something to define competence against so someone who has a duty of care can understand what competence looks like?

Lorna: I think that many professional bodies, many organisations are already going down that route that you're starting to go down now. I think it's absolutely the perfect time for these disciplines, quite unique disciplines to start to understand what good looks like. I think what you're doing is what needs to happen, but that can only be done by the industries themselves. You can't tell building control what good looks like in building control if you're not from a building control profession. It's the same with your members.

It's for them to decide what good looks like and start to as you say develop the newcomers into that industry with that blueprint of what good looks like in a competent person in your industry. That can't be done to you that is for industry to do it themselves and that shows a mature industry.

David: Well, that's what we're trying to develop. We've operated competence assessment standard for 25 years, and it's only now just beginning to come into its own. That's because it's third-party accredited. Crucially also ask the question that many PQ processes done this, is that can you do the job? Which seems bizarre that we've never. We've asked, "Have they got insurance, have they got policies in place?" The question about, "Are you actually competent to do the job?" Never comes into question.

Lorna: No, and that's the difficult question, isn't it? That's where culture comes in, that's where behaviors and ethics comes in. Have you done this before? If you haven't can you find out how to do it? Are you competent to work on that scheme, so absolutely, your question is perfect. Can you do the job, not just do you want to do the job?

David: Is the price right?

Lorna: Is the price right, yes.

David: Many people have suggested that it's the end of value engineering as it currently exists, which is a euphemism for I need the price cut. Do you see that ending with the Building Safety Act really beginning to bite?

Lorna: I think it depends the extent that you're going to go with value engineering. If you're impacting on safety, then yes, it's the end of value engineering, but that should have never have been a thing. Value engineering shouldn't be to reduce something from compliance to non-compliance by using substandard materials or substandard labor that should not be a thing. It's about quality, isn't it? Value engineering no, I don't see personally, there's no reason why you can't do things just as safely or compliant or as compliant, but maybe a little bit cheaper, but not when you're compromising safety and standards. Absolutely not.

David: Many people have also questions about when it will really start. I think I use the term when will it really bite, and many people are suggesting that we need some prosecutions, and then people will go. Now we'll take some notice. How long do you think we are away from-- The industry fully understanding the consequences of the Building Safety Act.

Lorna: I think as you say until people start to be prosecuted, people don't sit up and notice. I don't think the HSE who obviously the building safety regulator is formed within the HSE. I think we all know that they don't stand off from prosecuting when they need to. If it needs to happen they will serve their notices.

David: Pre-Grenfell, I guess I'm pre the Building Safety Act. There was always I felt the perception in the industry that if building control didn't spot something or Clarkworks, for example, then we've got away with it. Actually, the building I live in that was the response of the developer that well, building control signed it off. There was always the perception that building control was somehow fully responsible for things and not able to do things properly. How is the industry responded to that?

Lorna: That was absolutely the perception before. It was never a fact. It was always the responsibility of the person carrying out the work to comply with the legislation. Building Control are there to secure compliance, if they see non-compliance, to do something about that. Things haven't changed, but now what has changed across the industry is that there will be an expectation for that principal contractor to say that they have complied with the legislation. That is their application for completion. Entirely changed, turned on its head.

The perception was wrong before, but what the legislation has done is made it clearer that it is the duty holder's responsibility to comply. Just because Building Control didn't happen to pop onto site when they were doing something inappropriate doesn't mean to say that they could continue to do something inappropriate. Again, it comes back to culture and behaviours. Why is that okay? Just one, we've been interviewing recently, and I have said this before, but we were interviewing recently for trainee Building Control surveyor. One of the questions was about integrity. What does integrity mean? Obviously, that question is because for Building Control or anybody in our industry, you've got to have integrity.

One young person, their answer to me was integrity is doing the right thing even when no one's watching. That was absolutely perfect. I think if the whole of the construction industry used that or just kept that in the back of their mind, then we would have a safer construction industry, we would have a safer built environment. Integrity and ethics is the thing for me.

David: Would you advise our members to have evidence, a full bank of evidence of how they have complied with the package of work they've done at the time?

Lorna: This isn't meant to be something that is difficult or hard to do or an imposition. This is just proving that you've done what you should do. In the same way, with Building Control surveyors now having to prove competence and register with the regulator, that's not about doing something different than they've done before. Dame Judith, in her report, was really clear. She wanted proven, measured competence, not just I say, "I'm competent or I passed an exam 30 years ago and therefore," this is not anymore. The construction industry is not, pass an exam once, practice for life.

I think that that's got to be the same for every part of our industry. You've got to keep up to date. We know that construction products alone change so often. It's such a massively innovative, area that how can you stand still? That constantly keeping yourself up-to-date is part of being a built environment professional and so very important.

David: Lorna, just to summarise what we've heard today to make sure that I've fully grasped this. The Building Safety Act is the key legislative change over the last few years. It affects the whole industry. I think we said the shard to a shed, everything and everybody. It requires cultural change, ethical behaviours on a scale that we haven't seen before and people need to do the right thing. I think we say even when people aren't watching you, it's for the industry to decide competence, what competence is, and indeed, I guess, what compliance is from that.

That tier two contractors or our members should always evidence their compliance, have a record of it for the future. It's your responsibility to provide that evidence. Nobody else is going to do it for you. Certainly, not building control.

Lorna: No.

David: I think we've reached the end of our time. I've got one final question and that is really, do you leave or are you currently optimistic or pessimistic about the future of the industry?

Lorna: Optimistic, but that's because it's Thursday. If it was Monday, maybe not. No, I'm definitely optimistic because I can only see good things. It's been difficult. There have been some hard decisions. There will be hard times coming for the whole industry. We've got to be better as an industry. We've got to be better. I think that we will be.

David: Lorna Stimson, Chief Executive at LABC. Thank you very much for joining us this morning.

Lorna: Thank you

David: Now to industry news. This is the week that T. Clark were acquired by Regent Acquisitions for £90.56 million, taking them from a public company back into private ownership. Interesting comparison with the failure of MJ Lonsdale recently. There's still plenty of flux in the market and some consolidation, no doubt, to come. Having just interviewed Lorna Stimpson from LABC, it's interesting to note as well that the Grenfell inquiry has been further delayed, and we will see when that finally gets published, and the impact that has.

In BESA news, BESA are very proud to be the competition partner for refrigeration and air conditioning, along with Mitsubishi and Refcom. The national finals will be held in November, with the WorldSkills finals being held in Shanghai, China. BESA have also launched TR19 Air, along with complementary courses from our approved suppliers. That is an opportunity to evidence your competence and compliance, as we discussed earlier in the podcast. In Scotland, new build heat standards have been introduced, which came into force on the 1st of April.

Finally, I had a letter published in the Financial Times, which you've no doubt all read, about boiler pricing strategies and the consequences of government consistently changing policy at the last minute. A quick reminder that we operate, as BESA, the competence assessment standard, a three-part standard business management review, a technical audit, and organisational capability. Which is UCAS accredited, which is your opportunity to evidence to those duty care holders your competence and compliance. Crucially, we ask the question that many PQ processes don't, is can you do the job? On that note, thank you and goodbye.