The Building Engineering Services Association (BESA) has produced the latest in its series of practical guides designed to help the building services industry demonstrate its competence and ability to comply with increasingly stringent building safety legislation.
‘Demonstrating Competence under the Building Safety Act’ sets out a pathway for employers to meet the strict competence requirements of the legislation even in professions where there is a lack of formal qualifications or fully developed competence frameworks.
The free to download ‘Toolkit’ offers practical support to individuals and organisations so they can better understand, evidence, and apply the principles of Skills, Knowledge, Experience and Behaviours (SKEB) that define competence in the post-Grenfell age.
The construction industry’s collective competence failure was identified as a critical contributor to the Grenfell Tower fire and national skills frameworks are now being developed in response to a key recommendation of the Hackitt Review which followed the disaster.
However, construction-related professions are still expected to have a system in place to demonstrate to the Building Safety Regulator that the people they appoint to carry out safety critical tasks are competent for those specific tasks – even where work on their sector’s framework is incomplete.
BESA’s guide shows organisations how to create a system that proves they approach competence, not as a one-off training or certification exercise, but as a dynamic, evolving part of their wider risk management process that is properly governed and continually reviewed, at every stage of project delivery.
This involves providing evidence of how work is allocated based on demonstrable competence; how competence is continually monitored and reviewed and, when gaps are identified, how they are addressed. The guide also explains how contractors can implement a simple, proportionate competence management system using the ‘SKEB model’ developed by BESA.
Measuring and assessing competence is a serious challenge for the industry, especially for building services SMEs and this guide has been produced in response to sector-wide requests for more plain, unambiguous guidance explaining what competence is, what ‘good’ looks like, and how to prove you have it to both regulators and clients.
The advice provided is also aligned with the work of the Engineering and Building Services Skills Authority (EBSSA) and the Industry Competence Steering Group (ICSG) who are developing the broader national competence frameworks.
“Employers have always been liable for ensuring the right competence is in the right roles at the right time,” said BESA’s director of specialist knowledge Rachel Davidson. “However, the Regulator has now tightened the alignment between legislation and the Building Regulations to explicitly impose competence requirements on both individuals and organisations. This gives more clarity and oversight around how competence is defined, demonstrated and governed – and our new guide shows employers how to comply.”
She added that competence should not be regarded as a “a tick box exercise” but as a continuous management discipline that blends technical rigour with good behaviour to achieve compliance.
“Many employers in this industry already have good systems in place and employ excellent people keen to do a good job,” said Davidson. “They don’t need to wait for the various industry committees to finish their work on formal competence frameworks. Our guide provides a method for establishing or verifying a system you can defend in the face of Regulator scrutiny now.”
BESA’s guidance is divided into ten sections that outline a clear compliance pathway including ways of defining competence, how to use assessment and evidence to satisfy the Regulator, addressing competence in supply chains and links to other tools and standards available.
Download ‘Demonstrating Competence under the Building Safety Act’ for free here.
theBESA.com