Behind The Built Environment Episode 26

David: Hello and welcome to Behind the Built Environment, the podcast where we talk to the people shaping the places where we live, work, and spend our lives, and try to understand not just what they do, but what drives them. My guest today has spent more than 4 decades working in the part of the industry that most people use every day, but probably don't think very much about until it stops. Dave Cooper MBE is President of CIBSE, and unusually for someone occupying that role, Dave is a lift and escalator engineer.

And that gives us a rather interesting place to start, because lifts sit right at the intersection of engineering, safety, accessibility, building performance, and human behaviour. Dave, welcome to Behind the Built Environment.

Dave: Lovely, thank you for having me.

David: We always start with 5 quickfire questions just to let the audience know what we're going to be covering here. So, yes/no please.

Dave: Okay then.

David: Always more difficult than it looks. Is the lift one of the most important pieces of engineering in a modern building?

Dave: Yes.

David: Do we take lifts and escalators too much for granted?

Dave: Yes.

David: Has value engineering damaged the long-term performance of buildings?

Dave: Yes.

David: Is the built environment genuinely facing a competence crisis?

Dave: Yes.

David: If you were 16 again today, would you still become an engineer?

Dave: Yes.

David: Great. Note to production team, we need a no answer in there next time. The next one we always ask is, did you choose the career or did the career choose you?

Dave: So I joined the railway as an apprentice. I was a grammar school boy in Eastbourne. I wasn't terribly good. My careers master was horrified that I wanted to be an engineer and to join the railway. But nevertheless, I did. I took a craft apprenticeship. But during my first year off-the-job training, what was then an EITB centre, the training manager for the railway identified that he thought I'd be a good lift and escalator engineer, and I've never been anywhere since.

So I guess the answer to that, David, is it found me.

David: I'm curious to know why he thought, what were the attributes of a good lift and escalator engineer that he spotted?

Dave: That's probably a question for him rather than me, but the reality was the first year off-the-job training was spent in this training centre, and then you went out into the field afterwards. And the rolling stock engineers, as they became, were mixed in with the outdoor machinery engineers. So there was me, a young naive lad from Eastbourne, spent the first year of my apprenticeship in a training centre with some South London ruffians, shall we say.

And the decision was taken that I could be trusted out in the field rather than being holed up in the shed with the supervisor over my shoulders all day long.

David: It's quite a narrow specialism, I think, when we think about it, which has its advantages, I guess, as an industry. But once you get into it, as we said at the beginning, it kind of brings together mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, control software, fire safety, and human behaviour. How do you bring all that together?

Dave: Interestingly, I think they're silos, and as much as they end up on what I would call the heads of the valleys road, they're individual silos that feed into the lift industry. I mean, safety is something that I've got particularly interested in. I mean, incidentally, I became academic in my mid-20s, but I've become really interested in those silos and how those subsets feed into the industry.

MEP was always, well, it wasn't even known as MEP in those days. I always saw it as not the weak link, but the unregarded link. And what I noticed, that I was working with some really good engineers, contractors, consultants alike, and bringing those streams together and those skill sets, it takes collaboration. And that's still the case now for me, contractor with consultant with architect.

We need to collaborate to bring together a perfect building.

David: Do you get involved in projects early enough to be able to do that, or is it an afterthought, or when do you normally get involved?

Dave: As a business, we do get involved early. Sometimes we're called in to do a survey, maybe it's an acquisition survey, someone's buying a building. Sometimes we don't get called in to do a survey, and those clients who are buying the building suddenly find they've got a huge bill. You especially see that in hotels.

A couple might have this dream of owning their own hotel on the seaside, and they buy this lovely hotel only to discover that the lift needs £150,000 spent on it very quickly afterwards, which they could have negotiated had they had a survey done in the first place. Major clients tend to bring us in quite early, and we're managing projects from start to end.

Most of my role these days is expert witness work, which tends to be after someone's got injured or something's gone horribly wrong.

David: The importance of lifts and escalators, or lifts in particular, I think I read this in The Economist or something like that, saying that actually it was the, the one invention that enabled the growth of cities because you could go vertical in a way before. When did that happen and why is that so significant?

Dave: So in 1851, Otis invented the safety brake. So prior to that, people were hesitant about using lifts. Things have switched around in buildings. In the old days, the penthouse was the cheapest dwelling in a building.

David: Right.

Dave: Because you had to walk upstairs.

David: Right.

Dave: Yeah, but of course with the advent of lifts, that switched. So you might have to walk 20 floors with your shopping, but you did at least get stunning views. Now you carry your shopping in the lift or get someone to deliver it to your door, but you still get the stunning views. And that's how the economy of buildings, residential buildings in particular, has turned around.

David: That literally allowed the growth of, you know, massive increase in population, I guess, or accommodation within, or offices or whatever, within the same footprint.

Dave: Exactly that. I mean, you look at Hong Kong as an example of that, don't you? Everything would, you know, because it was land restricted, everything went upwards.

David: Is it an area where we've kind of reached the technological limit? There are only certain things you can do in the lift world, or is there something that's going to revolutionise the way lifts operate in the future?

Dave: The reality to that is that we are now building buildings that are so tall that you generally don't have lifts that serve from a traffic perspective. From a functional perspective and a fire perspective, you might have lifts that serve all the floors. But from a traffic perspective, you've, it's not an exact science, but you have to come up with the number of lifts in a group, the size they are, and the speed they are.

And so in doing that calculation, you have to understand how the building population works and what is the acceptability for a waiting time. So we know that after about 30 seconds, people start to get a bit scratchy, push the button again, and that sort of thing. So you'll see buildings where you'll have maybe 3 banks of lifts, one serving the lower part of the building, one serving the middle part of the building, and one serving the top part of the building, which means you only have to change once to get to where you're going. So effectively, it's rather like a vertical railway system. You know, you change trains at Reading to get a train to Mortimer, so as to speak.

David: It requires then clients to fully understand how they want to operate the building.

Dave: Yes.

David: Very early stage. And what happens then when you get a change of use? So it was an office, say, and then it becomes turned into flats or accommodation. Does that completely change it?

Dave: It does completely change it, but that way round is great because there's normally more offices, office lifts than you would have in a residential building.

David: Right.

Dave: So the great risk of buildings is being underlifted because it's very difficult to do it, to rectify that afterwards.

David: Yeah, or stick them on the outside.

Dave: Exactly that, if you can extend the footprint of the building.

David: Is AI going to play a significant part in the, shall we say, the logic of when the lift is here or safety or any of those features?

Dave: I think it will. We've already essentially got machine learning and control systems understanding how buildings work. So in its simplest form, at the end of the day, you'll find lifts parking towards the top of the lift shaft to pick people up on the way down, to drop them off going out. And in the mornings, the lifts will be hanging around at the bottom waiting for their traffic.

So we're already learning buildings. The older lift systems, like the collective systems where you have the buttons beside the lift car, the issue with those is when someone pushes that button and it lights up, you don't know whether that's one person or a coachload of 57 people that have just turned up.

David: Right.

Dave: So the lift system has got no more information other than it's needed at that floor. Whereas with a hall call destination, now we see as the current vogue, people come in, tell the lift system where they want to go, and they will group people together. So it's rather like sharing a taxi home.

If it's going in the same direction to the same, roughly the same place, you'll jump in a cab with someone. That's how the system works. Again, it's like, let me use the railway analogy again. You get to Paddington, there's a fast train to Reading, and there's another one that might stop at Hayes and Harlington and Slough.

So if you're going to Reading, you'll probably get on the fast one. So the control system will allocate you to a lift that's going straight to Reading, let's call that level 14.

David: So effectively, the lift is becoming far more integrated into the whole of the building operation, working on occupancy and prediction, presumably, of, well, we know when the peak periods are, as you would with hot water demand. You know when your peak points are, so you can boost during that time.

Dave: Yeah, exactly that. And we get things like conflicting traffic. A nice office block might stick a restaurant on the top floor, and the main exit floor is the ground floor. So at lunchtime, you've got people battling to go up and battling to right. So we have to take all of those little things into consideration.

And then on top of that now, of course, we've got issues with evacuation, not issues as such, but we're thinking about evacuation, we're thinking about firefighting and the use of the lifts in those environments.

David: You mentioned fairly early on that your main purpose now is expert witness things, and I guess that's around when things have gone wrong. And we talked at the beginning about it's, you know, it's a mix of technology and controls, mechanical, electrical engineering, and human behaviour. In your expert witness role, what's the major cause of incidents?

Is it just stupid people, or is it lack of maintenance, or is it poor design, or?

Dave: If I may, I'll take lifts and then I'll answer escalators because it's very different.

David: Yep.

Dave: Lifts tend to injure the engineers working on them.

David: Right.

Dave: Escalators, the accidents tend to involve the passengers. I think it's more people not understanding what the potential outcome could be. So on an escalator, for instance, we did a major research project a few years ago for a major escalator owner, and it was identified that they could reduce their accidents by 50% if they removed A, luggage, and B, alcohol from the scenario.

David: Yeah.

Dave: And there you go. But going back to, you might recall my research that published in 2011 was on children falling over the sides of escalators. So I did an MSc originally, and during that I kept finding accidents with children falling over the sides of escalators. So I printed those off, just in those days, put them in a box file, and afterwards I said to my supervisor, look what I found.

So he said, do some more research, keep going. So I ended up doing a Master of Philosophy degree. The escalator industry's point of view was, yeah, people do fall over the sides of escalators, but they're normally in their 20s, they've normally had a few drinks, and they sit on the handrail and they topple over.

So when I did my research over a 20-year period, I actually discovered that 44% of the accidents involved children under 10.

David: Right.

Dave: So alcohol wasn't a feature in the accidents at all. But when you now look at it, and this is where the standard hopefully will change, you're allowed an escalator handrail height between 900 and 1100mm. Whereas if you look at the balustrade around the atrium in a shopping centre or a building, whatever, that the ballast weight has to be a minimum of 1,100.

So why, where escalator handrails are allowed to be used as essentially the guard for stopping you falling over the side, well then it can be that low? And also, when you think about it, escalators in Europe can be 30 or 35 degrees. If you've got a very low 900mm handrail and it's 35 degrees and you're going down on it, if that escalator stops and you lose your balance, the likelihood is your hip will be above the handrail height, therefore you'll flip and go over the sides.

So it's been looked at now, the additional guards that you've probably seen. We've been to London Bridge Station this morning. You will see the guards on the sides of escalators there where major owners of escalators have gone, absolutely, we need to do something about this.

David: You've spoken in the past about what you've called an acceptability of failure in buildings where equipment is effectively allowed to run until it breaks. And only then does somebody decide something needs to be done about it. That seems to describe quite a lot of the built environment. Have we become too comfortable managing failure rather than engineering it out at the beginning?

And who ultimately should take responsibility for that?

Dave: I'm not sure it's about engineering it out in the beginning. It's about selecting the right product, certainly. If you see the classic example for me at the moment is RAC, the concrete in buildings, and everyone goes, oh my word, we've got buildings that are falling down. The issue there is engineers many years ago said this has only got a life expectancy of X years, I think it was 25 years.

So now, 40 years later, we're going, oh, actually, what's going on here? Well, actually, you were told. So I think that's part of the issue.

David: Yeah.

Dave: When I looked at failures in, certainly in the lift industry, you might get the same control panel on a smaller lift in an office block as you do in a residential building, but that control panel in the office block might be working 2, 3 times as much. So things like the brake contactor would be going in 2 times or 3 times as much.

What we don't look at in the lift industry, certainly, is mean time between failures. So if we know that that brake contactor has got a life cycle of a million operations, we don't actually measure how many operations it's done. And then we get a phone call saying, actually, the lift's not working. And when we get there, the brake contactor's gone open circuit.

Whereas a good maintenance regime would go, actually, we're getting to a point where we really need to think about replacing that contactor because it's going to break down. We don't do that. We just accept things break down, we call someone, it gets fixed.

David: Is that a role for AI then, that you can start to look at far more data points and start to anticipate failure earlier.

Dave: Do you know, I think it is. I've not thought of it in that way, but I think you're absolutely right.

David: Well, 10%, please. Similarly, we talked about, you know, commercial decisions were made on the rack, for example, that this building will only last 25 years. We talk a lot about value engineering in the industry, and it's rarely value and it's rarely really engineering. It's just cost cutting. At what point does that become a false economy, particularly around the lift market?

I guess there's a great temptation not to spend as much as you probably should spend on it.

Dave: When you're buying a lift or an escalator, I think you really need to think about the whole lifecycle. And it's true to say that a low-budget package lift, well installed, might last longer than a badly installed good product. So, it's a combination of selecting the right product and have it installed correctly, is the starting point.

There's an old adage in the lift industry, if the guides aren't right, the lift will never be right. So, that's your starting point. If you move on to, is the package that's been put together appropriate for this building? Well, if you can value engineer that back and find a lesser product, from an engineering perspective, that means you've over-specced it in the first place.

From a cost perspective, that is where the decision is generally made. But going forward, what you're going to end up with then is maybe replacing the package lift every 10, 15 years, whereas you might have got 45 years out of a really good quality, well-installed lift. So then you don't have the building interruption, which includes the noise, dust, you know, and all of those things.

Plus the traffic and the business interruption. You don't have the cost. There's the carbon argument if you build it 3 times rather than once. There's all of those arguments that come into it. So actually, good decision needs to be based on what do we want this to do.

David: So we're really talking about whole life cost versus capital cost at the beginning. Too much of a focus on the capital cost at the beginning. Causing an escalated whole-life cost.

Dave: Well, the problem I see there, David, is that we have issues with different types of contract. So design and build, where the contractor really wants to deliver a building but will not have an interest in it later on, is one thing. I mean, we're seeing PFI contracts at the moment where contractors are saying, we've been told we've got to replace our lifts, they're 25 years old.

You know, we've got this contract for 50 years. Well, yeah, lifts last generally around 25 years if they're a good quality product. Well, we didn't allow for that, you know, and so the type of contract is also coming back to bite people as well.

David: Different teams looking for it, different incentives.

Dave: Indeed.

David: Yeah, I guess the whole thing. You've also talked a lot about future-proofing through resilience. In fact, it's your theme for this year. We're very good as an industry at designing for the specification in front of us today. And I guess we've touched on this already, but buildings may be standing for 50, 75, 100 years.

How do you persuade a client to invest in that resilience?

Dave: That's interesting, isn't it? Because it's got to be worth it financially. It would be a very utopian client who says, well, I just want a really good stock of lovely buildings that people enjoy. The reality is they own businesses and they want to make money. So, I mean, part of that is having buildings that are occupied all the time, and therefore the rent is coming in.

Mike Burton gave a very good paper, sorry, Mike being president-elect at CIBSE, on the number of offices in London that were empty. And it turns out that a lot of them are empty because A, they're in the wrong place, and B, they don't meet the spec of a modern client who wants a lovely roof garden and, you know, those sorts of things.

So it's about making it attractive and kind of future-proofing it so they've always got an income.

David: You made a point there of saying it doesn't meet the modern requirement because it's not got a lovely roof garden. Clients will happily spend money on a nice roof garden, but if you said that actually you need to improve the building services, something that when it works you can't see it, hear it, you're just comfortable.

How do you make that argument that the real value is in the stuff you can't see, not in the, the stuff that's beautiful? I mean, I think we've all had to argue with architects over, you know, that marble reception desk that can't be replaced, but actually the stuff above the roof, the ceiling, don't need to do anything about that.

Dave: I think that's interesting, is it? When, when you find tenants moaning about it being cold in one corner and hot in the other on the same floor, I'm thinking of my wife when I'm saying this, in the building she works in, so the controls and the setup is wrong, the investment hasn't been there.

When you've got tenants who aren't happy. When you've got stuff continually breaking down and it becomes laughable that the lift engineer's in every 10 minutes, those, I think those are the parameters you need to be thinking about. And then there is the great bathtub graph of the initial problems with bedding in, then you steady down, and then you get to phase 3 where, due to obsolescence, you know, age, use, you start to see breakdowns.

The trick is to catch it towards the end of that phase 2 of the life of any asset, whether it's a lift or an escalator. But I imagine that that features with boilers, heating, ventilation, across the whole of the BESA world.

David: It certainly does, it certainly does. Another word that we're hearing far more of now since the advent of the Building Safety Act is competence and compliance. And that's sort of central to almost every conversation in the sector at the moment. You've spent a large part of your career either helping to set standards or training and professional registration.

Do we have a clear idea of the understanding of what competent engineer actually is now?

Dave: Competent for what is the question. So as you know, we've recently at CIBSE set up the Society for Vertical Transportation which came out of the old CIBSE Lift Group, and we had to get together and look at a matrix of what makes a competent lift engineer. Well, interestingly, lift engineers within themselves, as much as we're siloed, there's silos within the lift industry.

You might have someone who's a hydraulic valve expert, you might have someone who's a variable frequency drive expert, but they're not lift engineers. So it's being competent to do what? And you heard me at my CIBSE presidential theme say that competence isn't just about qualifications. You know, you can have a whole raft of very highly qualified people who, if they don't have the key skills, the knowledge, and more importantly, the behaviours as well, I think if you look at KSB, so knowledge, skills, and behaviours, if you've got someone who is not operating ethically within the industry, the rest of it falls to the wayside.

So the behaviours have got to be right. You've got to be able to call it out if you think something's not right. You've got to be able to say, and I think that's a competence thing as well. It's interesting, the only place I've really seen competence tested is in expert witness cases where under the Civil Procedures Rules, you know, a judge will want to be satisfied that actually you are an expert in the field to which you're assisting the court.

David: Do you think we have a skills shortage, or is it a capacity issue?

Dave: I think we have a skills shortage, and I think that skills shortage comes about because, well, let's take a step back. Children being born today, 65% of them, their jobs will not have been invented yet. So we are in a fast-moving world, and young engineers, certainly in my industry, face things that I didn't have to face as a young engineer on the tools.

We didn't think about energy efficiency, we just were worried about whether we had power in the first place. We weren't thinking about accessibility. In those days, if someone couldn't use a lift, it was kind of hard luck. So the world has moved on as well as technology has moved on. We need to be making building services attractive for young engineers, and I'm not sure we're very good at that.

When you look, when you walk through buildings, people don't appreciate it. You were talking about the marble reception area, you know, someone goes in and goes, oh, that's a very nice reception area. And you said about looking up, you know, what's going on up there? You know, and I think it's a really exciting time to be a building services engineer, but we as an industry have got to make it attractive for them to join and want to join.

David: I wouldn't mind betting you'd go to a lot of schools to find somebody who says, I want to be a lift engineer, but lots of people who said, I would like to be a train driver or something.

Dave: Yeah, exactly.

David: If we look at areas like private equity is pouring into building services engineering at the moment, and for good reason, because it's technically difficult. I would bet that actually there'll be lift engineers in 50 years' time. Still doing fairly similar things now. It's seen as AI-proof, I think, by both parents, which is really important, but also by new prospective entrants.

So is it more of a marketing issue we have? We need, so from our perspective, you know, defining a pipefitter, nobody knows what a pipefitter is. No, they know what an electrician is. Do we need to better define these careers? Is that the big issue?

Dave: I think we do, and I think we've got a real opportunity as well. And I don't know your views are, David. I was a little bit anti to start with, but now seeing T-Levels and the ability to attract younger people in schools who may not be huge academics, but the ability to get them onto a pathway, to get them an apprenticeship, to get them a job that pays good money, I find that quite attractive at the moment.

David: I think it's a very attractive career for somebody, you know, as opposed to student debt, you know, a very uncertain future, but you can be earning from the get-go. And through CIBSE, you can become a chartered engineer, you know, in that process.

Dave: Exactly. When I look back to my career and how I did it, so left school, not terribly bright, did my apprenticeship, then started to do qualifications after that. I wouldn't change that for the world, you know. And I think the model now, I mean, only yesterday morning on Sunday politics shows, they were talking about student debt.

For me, a good employer now will put someone through an apprenticeship, and if they then want to continue to be academic, you can keep funding that and keep putting them through, and then they don't get a student debt. I think that's the attractive way to do it. I think the government really need to look, I mean, I don't want to get political, but I think the government really need to look at the current regime where it's cheaper to poach than to train.

That has got to be broken.

David: We look at CIBSE and indeed BESA, we cover a huge range of engineering areas in effect, you know, mechanical, electrical, ventilation, there's lifts, there's water, water treatment, there's all kinds of areas. And I guess, and your career is highly specialised, so is the future actually specialism or is it those people who have a broad understanding of the whole picture, or do you need both?

Dave: I think you need both. So certainly from a consultancy perspective, I mean, I have an appreciation of building services and other skill sets within the built services industry outside being a lift engineer because I did a building services HNC many years ago. And in fact, it was the lecturer there that's responsible for me joining CIBSE.

So I think, again, as I was saying earlier about collaboration, I think having an understanding of other skill sets within the industry, including, you know, our allies in terms of structural engineers, you know, and architects as well. I mean, some architects make fantastically beautiful buildings. I couldn't do that, but I'm very happy...

David: You can't build them though.

Dave: No, but I'm very happy to put my lifts in those buildings.

David: Yeah.

Dave: That's where the architect needs an appreciation of what I need, both spatially, power-wise, and what I need to achieve, and me understanding what the architect needs to achieve in, in terms of net, you know, net lettable floor area and ratios and things like that. And, and then wanting that wonderful marble reception.

David: Can we talk a bit about legacy? So you've been, you've been an apprentice, engineer, safety manager, consultant, author, educator, you're just, well, the expert witness. You had an MBE for your services to the profession. When you look back in your career, and I'm thinking this is, this is up there probably towards the pinnacle of that, what would you most like to have changed?

Dave: My career, I don't think I would have wanted to change anything, but I would rather have been more successful at school than I was, but still follow the, the same career path that I did. As I said earlier, I think doing an apprenticeship, getting your skill set, getting to know your way around a building site, and then becoming academic.

Either doing those in parallel or, you know, one after the other, I think is really important. I think you need both. I've met some really good lift engineers who, they only have experience, they have no qualifications. I've met some really good lift engineers who are just academics. And they'll design systems and they'll do that very well.

So again, it's the skill sets. I've equally met some very bad engineers from both of those categories.

David: So, final question. You're king of the industry for the day. Is there one thing that you can change? What would it be?

Dave: Yeah, the one thing I would change, a lot of us sit on, say, the British Standards Committee, and we're, you know, influencing the way standards are developed and what they say. I'm conscious that a lot of us spend a lot of time doing that. I've been doing it since 1989, but those standards very rarely make it to the coalface.

If I stood in front of a class of apprentices and said to them, have you heard about BS 7255, which is safe working on lifts? I bet you now the vast majority would say never heard of it.

David: That's the thing we hear a lot. What, there's a standard for this?

Dave: Yeah. So what I would like would be to see a very simple way of, and I realise the standard in many respects you could call it the Road Traffic Act and all of us that know the Highway Code and Tufty, but if there was a very simple way of getting the contents of standards to the engineers at the coalface, that would make me very happy.

David: Dave Cooper, President of CIBSE, thank you very much.

Dave: Thank you.

David: Thank you for listening to Behind the Built Environment. If you enjoyed the conversation, please like, share, and subscribe on your preferred podcast platform. You can also leave us a review. Really important. It helps more people across the building engineering community discover the podcast. For more conversations with industry leaders and for the latest updates from BESA, stay connected and keep listening.

And until next time, I'm David Frise, and this has been Behind the Built Environment. Goodbye. Thank you.