BIMinAM ADVISORY AND CONSULTANCY WORKING GROUP MEETING 13-11-2025
GEORGE This is obviously the advisory group and although we’ve got a range of different people here t may well be that we are being asked to advise on the Building Safety Act. And therefore it is useful if we can have a commons sort of message where we’re giving people our interpretation of what needs to be done, a degree of consistency. So, that’s part of that we’re doing to do here, isn’t it Debbie?
DEBBIE Yeah, correct, and I thought we’d just start with a few updates and perspectives. Some people may be aware of this, but CLC published the golden thread guidance. I don’t know whether in the context of BIM4Housing we made any comment on that, George, but I think it was also very clear from the enquiry report that there was this need for what I call the golden thread of responsibility which I don’t think is really in the golden thread mindset at the moment.
GEORGE In answer to your question we contributed quite a lot, just about two months ago as well. We were asked to provide a lot of the stuff that we’d done before, so yes, we did contribute. I think, they’ve not expressly said so, but a lot of what we came up with I think is in there.
DEBBIE OK, it’s going to be interesting to see how that embeds down and I’d be curious to see how much clients take that onboard. And then just this week ARAP have produced quite a nice change framework around fire safety, for people who haven’t looked at that I think that’s something to consider., it’s quite a nice model and making some recommendations. But that’s only just come out, so I just thought I’d mention that> In terms of my domain and expertise there’s been a lot going on. I think it was very unclear, particularly in the inquiry panel sort of video, that competency development is to be continuous, it’s not be event or time based. And I’m afraid most of the systems being put in place are more of the later, at the moment, so that’s going to be another challenge to overcome.
The other thing I’ve put down here is we’ve now got, and it will become I think a PAS standard. an organisational capability management standard that was work driven by the Building Safety Alliance. That’s very much something that every client should be aware of and those involved in advisory. The Building Safety Alliance have also set up another working group called SIG 4 which is to look at client-side requirements for competence, so how the clients demand and make it clear what they expect and what they expect to see as evidence. That’s work that’s started in progress. In addition to this Building Safety Alliance organisational capability management standard there’s also a lot of organisations are going through the common assessment standard to be organisationally competent.
And in many other related sectors like rail and some of the energy utilities, they already use the UKAS TPS 69 competence management standard that I actually think is a better standard that the one they just recently produced. We’re also seeing a lot of registers appearing, but just being on a register is not going to satisfy the Building Regulator, you’ve still got to have a mechanism for ensuring full evidence of what somebody has done, can do, knows how to do, or is qualified to do is available as well. And then really the two other sort of elements to keep abreast of is that if you want to see what’s going on in terms of all of the competence frameworks that’s the link on the CLC website, obviously they’ve got a big competence and skills stream. And then more at the technical technician operator level, CITB are producing hundreds of competence frameworks which they all overlap. So we’re going to be in the hundreds of competence frameworks and standards very shortly, to address, and no system to deal with it. Any questions? It would be interesting to know how many people are aware of these things.
GEORGE I’m not.
RICHARD Is there anybody in the meeting actually aware of any of those on that list?
PAUL WHITE Yeah, I’m working on some of the fire damper and the ductwork installer competency areas. Were just starting up again this afternoon because we got railroaded because fire resistant ducts sits under a different part to ordinary ventilation duct and it came out to a different organisation. So, we’re having a first combined meeting today. But this is the issue and a lot of this is addressing the competency of people doing the work, the operatives, none of it is addressing anything to do with design. And I’m trying to work on that separately with just individually, but I’m struggling for time to write the framework that I would think I would need to meet.
DEBBIE I’ll maybe follow up with you on this, Paul. But I think also we have this industry competence committee which really its job should be communicating all of this, which it ain’t. And secondly these issues of these missing bits like the design element and all of the rest, I think we have to be feeding back into.
PAUL WHITE I think so and the key bit that’s getting me is still there is the threat of responsibility. And almost for a laugh now, whenever I go into a meeting I say who’s the principal designer? And everybody gets whiplashed because they all look over they should trying to see who it is. And it’s not sorted yet because there’s insurance issues because it’s a massive job because responsibility sits there, but actually you’re going to be herding together a load of people who are competent to work for you as that principal designer. And you’ve got to do it sooner rather than later. And I also laugh because BS 7346 Part 8 is the standard for the process of designing smoke control systems, and the very first part of that says work out who is responsible, work out what the contractual side of this is, this may involve more than one organisation. And it’s all there and it’s been there for years, but nobody has done it.
RICHARD Cliff, did you say that you knew some of these?
CLIFF KNEALE Just the top one, the others are all new to me.
DEBBIE I’m catching up with John Vanstone again, I do make my points clear on this. I know that they’re strapped for resources and all of the rest, but there is no point all of this work going on without it being disseminated, used, applied, feedback on.
RICHARD Is there a place where all of this stuff is?
DEBBIE No.
RICHARD Could we make a place, George, where all of this stuff is?
GEORGE Yes.
DEBBIE I know that there was talk at one point that the Building Safety Regulator were going to do something here, but I think that has changed. I’m catching up with John on Monday, so I’ll check with him.
RICHARD Check with him and get back to us because we don’t talk in BIMinAM, we get on with it. So, pending you getting back, we’ll take that on.
PAUL WHITE Well, just be careful because I don’t think you realise the size of the problem.
DEBBIE Yes, but we have a technical solution. I’m not here to promote what I do, but we’ve already had innovation funding and we can take in any competence framework or occupational standard and make them more machine-readable. It’s entirely proven to do this. It needs the will and it needs a bit of funding to keep it going, but if it’s all in there and somebody can make sense of it and they get charged a small amount per year it would be peanuts compared to anybody else doing it. So, we’ll see.
PAUL WHITE Debbie, you know I was talking to you about three years ago, I was trying to throttle ADCAS into doing something and I gave up in the end. But, on the fire safety side, ASFP have set up a massive database already. But again, they’re still waiting for how people report themselves into that database. And from the point of view of somebody like myself, what do I do? If I’m going to write the requirements I’m probably going to be at least one of the people that’s writing them. And yet unless I do it it’s not going to happen because at the moment everybody is still frightened of this.
DEBBIE It goes on really to my next slide, this is work that I’ve done, at the moment there’s all of these registers appearing, but they’re not necessarily going to cut the mustard because they’re not open to query and interrogation. Because again there is no digital vision here, and this is me giving you a digital vision of what all of the elements and blocks are and what a digital compliance platform with a registry should actually have in it. This is all comes out of ISO 7 hundreds, so a lot of people don’t even, I can give you a picture with all of those standards to reference if you want, but this is what we need to be moving to and we don’t have anybody leading on this either at the moment in the sector.
PAUL WHITE I strongly suggest you have a chat with the ASFP…
DEBBIE OK, could you facilitate that, Paul, because I don’t have a direct contact there.
PAUL WHITE Yeah, I’ll do that after the meeting.
DEBBIE So, this is for information, just so that people know, and I think it’s a fairly clear visual diagram and deals with the authority, the trust issues etc. I don’t see that again BSR aren’t going to put up a digital compliance platform themselves, so something is going to have to move at some point to move towards this. And then this is going back to the problem and just reinforcing that we’ve not only got all of these standards coming, a lot of them reference other standards. They all have their own bodies for knowledge associated with them with evolve, so this isn’t a landscape that once a framework of competence standard is done it stays still. So, when we’ve got three core models that we have to work with as well, we’ve got the 5flexed? model, the SKEL? model 13mins 23secs which is a flawed model because experience is a different level of dimension of competence to skills, knowledge and behaviour and that it’s about what you’ve done, when and where.
And then most of these competence frameworks they’re producing based on SKEL don’t actually start with what the duty and responsibilities are, there is no D there. Whereas all of these other models have very clear Ds, very clear duties. So, we not only have all of the chaos of the frameworks, we actually have different models that have to interoperate if we’re going to do this effectively. And so the solution here is you put in a competence knowledge base to manage ti which is AI enabled, clever semantic technology which is entirely possible. So, I don’t think people are understanding that this is what we are dealing with as a challenge. And then jumping on a little bit more to George’s call to action at the beginning, this was on LinkedIn, I think I found it yesterday, just saying how many applications are just not going through or stuck.
There does seem to be a lot fo what’s happening is people not knowing what they’re meant to evidence or what they’re meant to do. So, there is definitely, the knowhow isn’t there yet, otherwise the progress should be better. I may be wrong, and I’m entirely open to be challenged on that, but these are quite shocking numbers, really. And so this is just coming…this is work that George is doing already, do we need to develop our own answer to these questions? Our own knowledge base that can be disseminated, we could even put that knowledge assessment tests and all of the rest around these questions, and they may not be all of the questions. And shall we just go through that George and discuss that? Do you want to give a little bit of context of how you got to these core questions?
PAUL WHITE Can I just come back to the previous bit before we get into this. One of the issues that we’ve got is that the whole process now, particularly for HRBs, has been reversed. So the start of the process was very, very quick before, planning permission, off you go, sort out all of the problems as we go. And the problem is that was easy for the people at the front end because they didn’t have to solve any of the problems and therefore they lost all of the people who knew how to solve all of the problems. And what we’ve done is it’s now reversed and we’re back to actually design it and then build it, it’s been reversed in that way. But contractually, it’s still trying to work the other way, so it’s getting too far through. So, now we’ve got this gateway 2 check and the Building Safety Regulator has just said, well, you haven’t done it right, off you go and sort it out.
We’re not going to give you, ideas of how to pass it anymore, you’ve got to now and you’ve got to do it properly. That’s why it’s failing, because people haven’t been doing what they should have been doing for years and years and they’ve become a bit surprised when somebody has actually asked them to do it properly and they’ve got to actually do some work, rather than regurgitating pointless specifications.
DEBBIE That’s a big cultural change piece.
GEORGE I think that’s a really good point. So, I’m gonna have to leave at 12 because I’ve got to do this event where a client, it’s an SPV (Special Purpose Vehicle) manager (this is in PFII), so effectively the client is asking those sorts of questions, tell us about what do we need to do under the Building Safety Act. So, I’ve pulled together two people who know a lot more about this that I do to run the session with me. And this is the agenda that we put together and I think there is value in us having, collectively, within BIM4Housing and also BIM In Asset Management, some sort of coordinated view as to what these things are.
So, for example, in-scope buildings and in-scope works is what I keep hearing and I was on a call with the Design Group this morning and Das was saying that the only difference, from his perspective, between HRBs and non-HRBs is that one has got to go through gateways and do mandatory reporting and the other doesn’t. All of the things that he has to do in terms of keeping digital records he sees that he’s got to do on both because to try and do it differently on different projects would be a nightmare for them. And I thought that was a really strong take on it. He wants to be in a position where if in 2-3 years’ time he’s asked how was that done and how does that comply with building regs, because they’re moving to be principal designer building regs. So, I think standardising this sort of stuff is important. What do you think?
PAUL WHITE I think you’re absolutely right and the point is that this is the correct way to work, it’s just the fact that you get caught out earlier with the HRBs. But eventually, when they get that sorted, they’re just going to say that everything is the same. So, you might as well start now and think that you’ve got a gateway to go through and it’s actually the best way of working because there is an ancient graph which says if you start on any project you put a lot of money in at the start and you develop all of the information and you do your designs, and then the amount of money that you put in decreases over time. But, of course, what happens is when somebody changes their mind it starts again and you go up the upward slope and then back down again. So, in theory, if you were to do it right, you would save a hell of a lot of money.
RICHARD George, Debbie was saying when she was going through this slide about we discussed whether to BIM4Housing or BIM In Asset Management should have answers to this in our repertoire. How would we go about doing that?
GEORGE These are complicated questions and the answers are definitely complicated. I think the point is having a list of things like this, even as a prompt for people to do. I mean, who have we got on the call? Will Franks, when you are advising people on safety cases is there some sort of mechanism that you verify what type of information is needed?
WILL FRANKS Good question, we’ve got a couple of different things that we can refer to that we’ve already mentioned. The golden thread guidance definitely does overlap in a lot of ways with the evidence for the case. It’s not, obviously, one to one, but that’s a good starting point. We don’t often start with the evidence, the evidence comes to back up your argument, so you need to define your claims and then how you are going to evidence those. But I do agree with some of the chat that’s gone on throughout, it’s really interesting stuff that we need to be building in as the regulatory regime matures. So, definitely competency is something that I’m very interested in.
So yeah, it’s a really good question and you’ve kind of put me on the spot a bit. It’s a two-way street, it’s a conversation, so we need to see what claims that people are making about the safety of their buildings and how are they going to make a convincing, structured argument around that to define what evidence is required.
GEORGE I read something yesterday that was posted by ARK…
WILL FRANKS Yes, that’s one of the reasons that I was interested to join this meeting and see what insights people have got into feedback because we’re starting to see little bits filter down. So, I think if we’ve seen the same post, George, it was all about feedback from the Regulator and some insights that people have had. And it definitely points towards competency as one of one of them, so it’s good that there is a lot of resource out there for people to focus on.
GEORGE The other thing I found was interesting was, I don’t know how tailored it was what they put, but they said that it’s critical that you show that you’ve got a safety management system in place, a working safety management system. Now, I found that interesting because I’ve also heard other people say that the principle thing, the safety management system is less important, it’s the safety case that you’ve got to have in place. I didn’t really understand adequately the difference between those comments, could you explain what those are?
WILL FRANKS Without having seen, from the horse’s mouth, comments from the Regulator, obviously I’ve seen this passed through ARK’s interpretation, it does seem to match our interpretation of this which is that the safety management system is a key part of the safety case. So, you’re right, the safety case report is the key deliverable, that’s what you have to put together and have to present to the Regulator. The safety management system is the how of the story, so if the safety case is the what and the why, so it’s what are we trying to argue and why are we doing this? Well, to keep people safe blah, blah, blah. The safety management system is the practical side, so it is policies, procedures, implementation.
So, it’s definitely been something that we’ve seen people have to put quite a lot of time into and it’s something that I don’t want to say has been neglected, but the Regulator to date hasn’t published too much detailed guidance around it. There is some guidance that was published about a year ago, but it’s quite light touch. So, what we’ve been doing is pointing people towards guidance from other sectors and guidance from other regulated industries, as a starting point. So, SMS safety management system, it’s good to see that pulled out because that’s something that we’ve been emphasising quite a lot.
RICHARD You’ve mentioned a few times ARK, who is ARK?
WILL FRANKS It’s just a consultancy and they have a client that has received their safety case back from the BSR, so they have some insights. I’ll put the link in the chat. So, I think that we will see this filter down through the industry. We have clients who are starting to get HRB’s called up for submission, so I think other people like us, other people who are helping write safety cases, they will start to see feedback come from the Regulator over the coming months. And I think we’ll get an indication of where their putting the most scrutiny, where they want to see the most evidence, the most developed parts of the case. But it’s all just useful context, really, at this stage.
GEORGE So, just to clarify from my perspective, with the safety management system, that’s the holistic system that is in place that makes sure that the building is safe.
WILL FRANKS It would encompass different levels of policy making, it would encompass how you make safety policy. So, for example, all the way from the top, like health & safety, national legislation, all the way through down to individual buildings. It would also encompass you writing your safety case, so if the safety case is telling the story, the safety management system is how we get to that story. So, it’s a really integral part, it’s a practical part of this.
GEORGE So, would that include making sure that the AOV is working? Or being told that it isn’t working?
WILL FRANKS I think that would probably come under part of the safety management system which would be operational checks and what’s going on at the individual buildings, how often are we checking things. Again, it would encompass things like are the people doing those checks competent.
GEORGE It’s not just procedural, is it? Surely, if for example you’ve got sensors in the building that are telling you when the emergency lighting isn’t working, that’s something that should be informing the safety management system, surely?
WILL FRANKS Yes. So, it needs to be real world, practical, it’s not just a collection of policies.
PAUL WHITE From what you’re describing, it sounds as though if you look at it as what I would call an old style quality management system, I don’t like the word quality management because I think it’s business management system. But you have your policies and then they go down to who does what.
WILL FRANKS Sort of, yeah.
PAUL WHITE And those become the work instructions that are part of that management system. And I think that’s the point. And then from the point that we’re looking at it in digital record then maybe you’re looking at a task and if you open up that task it tells you what to do when you tick it to say that you’ve done it, and upload some photographs. And then that goes into the asset register against the asset. It sounds easy for me to say, and you guys who manage data I think can do it, but everything’s different now.
GEORGE But that’s part of the evidence, isn’t it?
WILL FRANKS Yes, it’s usually part of the claim that the building is safe going forwards, so that it’s managed safely, and you’re backing that up with your safety management system. And I think I agree with the comments from Paul about it can be framed in a really simple way, and that’s a really useful analogies. So yeah, identifying individuals who are responsible, definitely really important, and what they need to do. And I agree with you, it then becomes about record keeping. We are quite hands-off on that, so again for a case it’s all about how is the client recording things, how are they going to evidence this in their case. There definitely is a big interplay between the safety management system and then storage of data, keeping that in useable format, all of these sorts of big concepts.
PATRICK WILSON I’m sitting in listening because I felt that I had missed out on quite a lot over the last few months. So, it’s more a case of paying attention to what everybody else’s contributions and the state of play. So I can’t contribute anything right at the moment, but obviously my interest is both as an architect and actually I’ve got a community housing project that I’m leading on as the client. It’s not a big scheme, it’s not a high profile scheme, but it still matters.
The quote you made from Das earlier on about you develop a system to do it for the high-risk buildings, but it’s got to be the same system that you apply to everything else. It doesn’t really matter the hoops that you’ve got to jump through, but there’s no commercial sense in developing two systems that you have to split and remember which you are operating under. You do it once and you get it right. For the worst case scenario and apply it straight across the board, and all projects then have the same quality of data information.
GEORGE Well, there is absolutely that, but the other thing is that all projects are actually built by supply chains. And if different organisations have got different methods, how does an electrical contractor know when they’re working on an HRB, or a non-HRB, what they’ve got to do?
PATRICK WILSON Yeah, you’re reducing the chance for human error, through perhaps for genuine errors rather than negligence. It's the same thing all of the time, the same discipline. And at that point you begin to get it embedded into everybody’s culture.
GEORGE OK, so in terms of what I was suggesting here, we probably don’t have the right cohort of advisers on this particular one, but it’s something that we, if you agree with it, we can push out there.
PATRICK WILSON Yes, looking at what you’ve got on the screen it’s certainly an excellent starting point and it’s more or less the basics for it. I think there is also a great tendency for people with particular agendas to overcomplicate and add in their own interpretations.
It’a rather like Debbie’s comments about lots and lots of registers, everybody wants to have their own register because they have a particular reason, but they’re not actually going to be totally honest as to why they want to do it. As an observation of my own professional institute, I suppose after doing this for a long time there is a degree of cynicism as well.
DEBBIE Yeah, and I think even if you see some of the ChatGPT type tools that I brought to the table before, there’s a couple that are there to tell you what the Building Safety Act is about. But most of the time they’re not up-to-date and you can put the same question into two different systems and you’ll get a slightly indifferent interpretation.
GEORGE Or you can put it into the same system the following day and it will be different.
PATRICK WILSON Yeah, just change the criteria of your question, very, very slightly change the words and it will react. And also the thing about ChatGPT is it seems to be very good at avoiding making a decision and accessing information that’s really immaterial. I use it only occasionally to find out why I don’t know something and then realise that I’d be better looking for it directly, finding a book, even if it’s a bit out-of-date.
DEBBIE In terms of call to action, are we saying we think this is a good idea, we need to find the right cohort to do this and then start that work. And then the other thing we had on the agenda was your sort of thoughts more about realtime data capture to help close the training workforce gap issues. I don’t know whether you want to put that idea on the table as well?
GEORGE One of the things that we’re finding, and this is as Active Plan rather than as BIM4Housing, but more widely. We’re using 360 photos to great effect, being able to take 360 [photos of either an existing building or a building that’s just been completed, or one that’s in progress and we use that to produce asset information. Now, what’s occurred to me is that this could be a really very simple and powerful way of training the next generation, and even the existing generation who don’t have the expert knowledge. So, what we’re doing is we’re trying to set this up with the Construction Sustainability School. They’re funded by all of the big Tier 1 contractors, but they provide free training for SMEs, which is very interesting because they can put professional training material together.
So, what we’re trying to do is to use this to say if we’ve got an expert in M&E, for example, we can have a series of 360 photos of a plant room. The experienced person can go through and either identify what the asset is or identify what it’s doing, the same with fire doors. And they can have a cohort of trainees. When I say trainees, they may be people who are just less knowledgeable than they are, to actually pick it up. And the beauty of that is that you’ve got people effectively, or virtually going to site, and learning and then being tested afterwards. So, that was the idea and I’d be interested to know whether you think that’s a good idea or not.
DEBBIE George, I think the other point is that the size of the pool of the workforce is only decreasing, so that is reality, and ageing. So we have to find ways of speedily upskilling people and making sure that we retain people.
GEORGE Absolutely. What about you, Paul? I think you’d be a mentor, wouldn’t you?
PAUL WHITE I’m hoping to complete my assessor training, I was supposed to do it yesterday, but it got postponed. So, I shall hopefully be an assessor before Christmas, but at this rate it seems to be dragging on.
GEORGE Debbie, is there anything anybody else wants to cover?
DEBBIE I’m fine with that and there’s a couple of actions I will follow up with Paul. I’m going to check with John Vanstone on whether there’s going to be a central place for all of the competency information. I don’t think there is, but I’ll come back on that. It’s just such a moving landscape, maybe we just put up something so that at least people know where all of this stuff is.
GEORGE I think having a webpage on the…if you could help Richard know what to put up, you probably got it on that slide, then we could just create a page.
RICHARD Absolutely, we can source links or whatever, or where it’s appropriate to actually upload a document, we can do all of that. If you give me a semi-definitive list, Debbie, then I can get my guys to do that.
DEBBIE OK, it may not happen until early October because a big project is kicking off next week. The other thing I’d like to ask the group is how many of you have heard of an Innovate initiative called BridgeAI? BridgeAI is about getting AI into four lagging sectors, of which construction built environment is one. And it has people like the Turing Institute, Hartree and all of the rest. There’s lots of free resources in terms of upskilling around understanding AI, there is new AI competence framework for business. I sit on the advisory group, but again it seems that the sector is not very aware of it. i do think that there needs to be some better comms from the BridgeAI lot than there is, but there is funding there and there is a lot of good resource.
GEORGE Well, we might be able to do something collectively on that.
DEBBIE I’ll just put the link in the chat. If you’re with other groups, or you’ve got young bucks in your organisation who are wanting to know more about this, then there is a lot of good stuff.
RICHARD We’ve talked about having some sort of grouping whereby discussing the latest moves and initiatives and stuff so that we’re keeping vaguely up-to-date, we’ve just not actually pushed forward with it.
DEBBIE Yeah, I inform some of the leadership groups in the sector and they genuinely don’t seem to do anything about it. There seems to be a very anti-AI movement, if I can put it that way.
CHAT
Will Franks (Unverified)
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/ark-workplace-risk-ltd_buildingsafetyact-safetycasereport-residentengagement-activity-7241767635917447168-ir1L?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop
Debbie (Unverified)
https://iuk.ktn-uk.org/programme/bridgeai/
