This year will see significant progress towards wider adoption of the building safety agenda if we remember to focus on the bigger picture, says BESA’s director of specialist knowledge Rachel Davidson.
Arup chief executive Jerome Frost recently told the press that the global consultancy’s core value was “social usefulness”. He said the firm would not lose sight of the philosophy of its famous founder Sir Ove Arup who felt a built environment business should pursue “reasonable prosperity” for its people but not focus too closely on financial profit.
He also believed in what he called “total architecture” which involved all the separate disciplines working together to achieve the greater purpose of improving people’s lives through a well-designed built environment.
Social usefulness seems especially apt at a time when construction and its related disciplines are struggling to get to grips with a more heavily regulated process. It reminds us that the intense focus on professional licensing, qualifications, and certification in the wake of the Grenfell disaster isn’t just about compliance with legislation. It is also about ensuring we meet our ultimate aim of delivering a built environment that supports and enriches lives.
One that is socially useful.
Ethics
Interim chief construction advisor Thouria Istephan, who was a member of the Grenfell Tower public inquiry panel, said ‘curiosity’ would be an important component of the culture change necessary to embed better ethics into construction.
“If we are not professionally curious, we will not become technically competent,” she said. “If you work in the construction industry and do not feel the weight of the responsibility you have for keeping people safe, you are in the wrong job.”
In other words, we need to look beyond everyday details and remind ourselves why we are doing this work. That doesn’t mean we should be coy about aiming for Arup’s “reasonable prosperity”. We need to be able to attract the best and brightest and they should expect to receive a fair reward for their efforts. It’s simply a question of balance.
This issue has clearly been grasped by the former London Fire Brigade chief commissioner Andy Roe who was appointed as the new chair of the Building Safety Regulator last summer.
He immediately set about updating the organisation’s internal systems which he described as “not viable,”, pointing out that much of the bureaucracy involved in regulating building safety had “nothing to do with safety”.
Radically improving an outdated system would enable “more houses to get built, more applications to be processed without ever compromising the ideology of the Building Safety Act”, but he also made no apology for preventing “bad and unsafe buildings” being built. And, ultimately, isn’t that what we should all be aiming for? A better, safer built environment.
He also made it clear that a big part of the faster moving system relied on the support of sector bodies like BESA. We recognised from the start that we had a key role to play – in both identifying the problems our members and their supply chains were having with the legislation and then providing at least some of the solutions.
Our second annual piece of comprehensive research gauging adoption of the safety culture, which is free to download here, confirmed that the industry continues to struggle with the practical requirements of the Act. There remains an alarming gap between what people say about compliance and what they are actually doing to achieve it.
Closing that gap between vision and action is a key priority for us in 2026 because it’s the best way to contribute to a better world.
Producing targeted, sector-specific guidance remains vital to help our members and the wider sector break their roles and responsibilities down into easily digestible elements. We launched this with our widely welcomed Play it Safe campaign in 2024 and have continued to build on that foundation responding to the clear calls for help in our annual industry surveys.
BESA’s ‘Clients’ Guide to the Building Safety Act’ is also due to be published in March and follows our Guidance Framework for Principal Contractor Competence (PAS 8672) which was published late last year.
Compliant
The Clients’ Guide will emphasise the key role clients play in ensuring only competent and compliant companies and individuals are appointed to deliver their projects, and the long-term benefits to their businesses and reputations of safe and sustainable buildings.
The Principal Contractor (PC) framework seeks to address the lack of a consistent industry approach to assessing the competence of one of the key professions charged with delivering the requirements of the Act. PCs themselves are also coming under increasing pressure to provide evidence of competence throughout their supply chains but previously lacked a recognised and standard format for doing this.
However, we recognised that we needed to go further and so, at our annual conference last year, we launched our Member Pledge initiative when several prominent members signed an agreement to put professional and technical competence at the heart of their operations and mandate their supply chains to do the same.
They represent the leading MEP contractors in the country and recognise that they should be leading. So, they can change what they do and, in turn, challenge the rest of the industry to follow.
Their supply chain firms are now being required to apply for BESA membership so they can prove their competence and compliance through our independent technical audit process, which is also aligned with the Build UK Common Assessment Standard.
Building engineering services now represent at least 50% of construction cost and a high proportion of the operational cost of the built environment. They are increasingly complex, integrated systems that deliver an environment and services that make buildings work.
The social benefit of buildings that work is enormous, in terms of mental and physical health, wellbeing, productivity – all rely on a good working and living environment.
Competence is not a tick box exercise. It is in every decision we make and every question we ask and, if we are truly going to be socially useful, we all need to think long and hard about our own decision making and professional conscience.
So, let’s make 2026 the Year of Being Useful.