Something happened in the fire safety sector last year, which largely went unnoticed. In July 2020, the government published a new draft bill titled the “Building Safety Bill”. In this bill the government:
Proposed regulatory reform on the back of the report produced by Dame Judith Hackitt
Introduces new requirements in the building fire safety sector, potentially affecting owner-operators, contractors, architects, and specialists in fire engineering
Ensures the safety of people who occupy our buildings by improving the transparency of information.
Introduces accountability, making responsibility for managing safety risk throughout the design, construction, and occupation process of buildings clear. This includes the responsibility to provide information in a manner that can be reviewed and understood consistently.
This of course is the basis of good Information Management.
The bill requires a “golden thread” of building information to be digitally created, stored and updated, and critically this needs to occur throughout the building life-cycle process, not just on completion. It is not the role of the bill to provide us with the configuration to meet this requirement, however, we expect we will see the development of British standards over the next year or two to provide this key missing piece of the jigsaw. Indeed, there is a notable standard in development, BS 8644, the “Digital Management of Fire Safety Information for Design, Construction, Handover, and Emergency Response. Code of practice”. We have not seen this standard yet, but we expect it to outline the way digital information should be collated and handled. We also expect it to reference the information management and exchange standards we have got used to with “BIM Level 2” or “BIM Certification” as defined within the ISO 19650 standard. I am expecting the standard to become available to us in the latter part of 2021, so it is a good one to keep an eye out for.
ISO 19650 already provides us with a structured business framework for digital information management, and a lot of organisations have already changed their internal configuration to align with it. This includes quality management procedures to meet the requirements that are now regularly deployed on projects that utilise this standard to form the information handover requirements. Symetrioffers a gap analysis services which help you identify areas of improvement, allowing organisations to put task plans together with the aim of improving their business practices to meet ISO 19650 needs. Organisations have also started to look at technologies to deliver the information digitally including using Building Information Models (BIM) as their source of data for the production of fire protection systems drawings, specification, and performance analysis. We have been working closely with solution providers such Briab over in Sweden, who provide very innovative tools that allow architects and fire safety engineers to start producing their documentation in this way. We are already running several exciting proofs of concept with our customer base.
While of course, we cannot make a statement to say this will make organisations compliant without fully documented future requirements, improving business processes and technical solutions in this way can only be a step in the right direction in my opinion. While the Building Safety Bill may well be the push that is needed, there is plenty of opportunities for organisations to improve beyond simply meeting regulatory requirements. By producing information within the BIM process, a well-established and understood technique elsewhere in the construction industry, we can of course take advantage of the capability to coordinate and analyse much more efficiently using connected data than we have been able to previously. This makes us more competitive in our marketplace.
