BIMinAM OPERATIONS WORKING GROUP MEETING 23-10-2024
GEORGE We were talking about what we should be covering at the moment and I thought what would be useful is just to share with you what Brent O’Halloran…for anybody that doesn’t know him he was head of asset management for Hyde, the housing association. I had an interesting chat with him a couple of weeks ago and he was saying that when he was head of asset management at Hyde he’d got pretty detailed information on certain aspects of the building across the whole of the estate. For example, if he’s got several hundred buildings he would know what the compliance with fire doors was or certain things across the whole of the estate, so he’d know 99% on the dashboard…but he said he knew very little about everything in one building.
And he was saying that as an organisation typically asset management…when you’re looking after a portfolio it’s spread quite thin the level of detail that you’ve got. And he was saying that the building safety manager, the role that for example Bex is doing, the one person in the organisation in many cases who knows a lot about an individual building. And that’s a bit counterintuitive as far as the organisation is concerned. I hadn’t understood that and he was saying that he’s now trained up, I think he said 230 building safety managers and it’s a very interesting different perspective. The reason I was mentioning that is that a lot of you have had some exposure to what we’re been doing in BIM In Asset Management which is the sister organisation of BIM4Housing, but we’re drilling into a lot more detail from an operations point of view.
And the way in which we’re doing that within BIM In Asset Management is rather than having the operations group and the design group and the manufacturing group and the development group, what we’ve done is we’ve broken it down functionally into the things that are needed for digital records. So things like interoperability and what should a digital record contain, and also how should we identify, for example, fire critical assets. And what i’d like to pose here as maybe a potential topic is what is it that the operations team needs from development to enable those digital records to be collected properly. And, as importantly, what do you produce, what is it that you’re producing that is then going to help the next person in the chain achieve what they need to do. And then obviously how do we then keep it all up-to-date.
I know that these are things that we talked about many times over the period, but I just thought it was a worthwhile thing because I’d not realised, you think that the head of asset management of a major portfolio would actually know the detail, but he says from an organisational point of view that’s not what they’re measured on. They’re actually measured on a much higher level.
BEX GIBSON Leading on from that, does anyone initially have any comments on what George has said that we can start this discussion with?
RICHARD BACON I certainly find in my sort of role, I actually audit for our firm so I tend to spend a week on different projects. A week on a project and type up a report the following week and it is literally if there is a something that exists within whatever the type of building happens to be I want to see records of it. Which the nature of the age of our places, 15 to 20 years old, the bulk of the information O&M manuals and things I come across in the first place are on paper. There is never anything written into contracts to say that they were going to be digital and amendable or whatever. Certainly from a maintenance records perspective the findings that I get onsite are remarkably different, even if it’s the same company looking after it.
I’ve a load of schools 2 weeks ago, absolutely cracking, and by no means an up-to-date modern electronic system, but a guy is running an Excel spreadsheet that has got literally every asset logged on it and a column saying whether a monthly, quarterly, bi-annual, whatever BPM is going to take place. What the BPM reference number is, what the SFG reference is for the tasks that are going to take place, actually keeping a record of everything. He’s running a Bolster system for maintaining of the tracking of the maintenance on fire doors, fire stopping etc, but has got that referenced back to his own Excel spreadsheet that he’s keeping.
Exactly the same company has also got a system that runs on their Sharepoint which is a dashboard that tells you how you’re doing on 10 different subjects. Which is good because you know if your lifts are being maintained because it will tell you whether the last insurance inspection took place or not, it will tell you whether your last fire door took place if somebody has bothered to put the records on. But the quality and the demonstrability of what people have been carrying out onsite varies literally even within the same company looking after different facilities. An example of a company that you’d know like Equans, on some sites they run dashboards, on other sites they haven’t even got a guy running a spreadsheet. It’s literally oh, all of our records are in a folder on the wall.
So trying to drag all of that into one system somewhere so that everybody can go and see it, at some sites some buildings that you go to, a nice large team, priced it well, can afford to run a team so that they’ve got that sort of records being kept. Other places, absolutely appalling and it’s in that pile of papers on the corner of somebody’s desk, if you’re lucky it’s been put in the folders on the wall. You’ve got a task on your hands, Bex.
BEX GIBSON Me! No pressure. But that’s kind of why we’re opening up these discussions really.
ALEX OLDMAN Just as a general thought I think it’s a good idea for organisations to try and benchmark their level of maturity with building information knowledge, with the level of information that they’ve got. By this point I’d expect most organisations involved in BIM4Housing to have a good idea of what their information requirements are, although that’s a process to evolve what additional information we need. George picked up on a couple of really important points, but what I would expect to be able to do quite easily would be able to run off a report showing what information that you’ve got and much more critically what information you don’t have against a defined framework. Bearing in mind that that might vary for the property types with a BIM4Housing hat on it’s relatively straight forward because we’re dealing with cookie-cutter properties, generally speaking houses are much the same.
You need to know information at the most basic level about the components for replacement and you need to know about the equipment that they have. More complex buildings like blocks, flats within those blocks, you will need a high level of information for which is what the new Regulator is all about. And the building information, the building safety systems are all about as well, about defining those greater requirements, knowing about compartmentation and having a permit to work process, knowing the what, the when, the where and the how of work that is being applied. You need to be able to demonstrate that for building safety accreditation for the certification process. So I would expect it to be relatively simple to produce a report of what you don’t have from most systems, then understanding the level of detail that you need for different property types is another level of maturity.
So you need to be able to define what your general information requirements are and then potentially break that down by different asset types. I think it’s important to recognise that the information will vary and that you’re probably have some site specific information, so just picking up on Richard’s comments I suspect your coming more from an FM facilities kind of world…I’m working in that area a bit myself the last year as well so I’m starting to realise that in that case every project, every 7 stages of RIBA, is specific to a location. You go through this entire process for a specific site, a building, it might be a couple of buildings and it might be hundreds of rooms or just a handful of rooms and plant and equipment that’s associated with that.
But you go through that process for a location and that’s cookie-cutter there but then that’s completely different to the project that’s being built by different architects, different engineers, different primary contractors, different servicing engineers, it’s totally different. Housing is more straightforward, by no means is it easier, it’s a matter of scale, but the process should be something that’s easier to wrap over. And if you’re a housing association or a local authority you’ve got complexities with the edge constraints, the exotic buildings, high-risk residential buildings for whatever reason. They might be sheltered schemes, for example, and you might have some specific tenant types that you're serving or residents or customers that you’re serving. So there are some housing associations that specialise in care for elderly or care for military veterans and therefore the systems that you put in place are different.
So to summarise, I think it’s interesting for organisations to think about what level of maturity they are on. Dare I say, if you’re on this call today then on a scale of 1 to 5 you’re probably already at a 3 because you’ve probably got awareness and you’re probably doing something with information management. You have an idea of what your’e collecting and how you need to manage and process that, you’ll be a minimum of a level 3. To get to level 4 you’ve got to have and show that you can maintain that information going forward, so you can have all of the information in the world in an enormous spreadsheet, but it’s no good if Richard, that chap that you’re talking about with that incredible spreadsheet which sounds like a masterpiece to me. But if he retires next week or gets hit by a bus, god forbid, that information is going to go stale really quick.
RICHARD BACON Funnily enough, and this is from his mouth, on auditing him last year and going this is fantastic, it’s 28 different buildings all on one site, all a big student accommodation place. The reason that the guy set it up so good is I’m retiring in 5 years’ time and I want 5 years sat doing next to nothing. So I’ve made this as simple as it can be for me to run, anybody else coming in can do exactly the same as I do. And literally the guy has gone how do I make life easy for myself and he’s put questions out to all of the different teams that look after things so that he gets the right information in at the end of each month. So, it really is that’s what everyone needs to do, if you’re looking after a property ask people the right questions that you want in at the end of each month and at least your 30 days-ish from live information at any given point in time.
He really is at the bit of if anything happens I want to be able to do that before the curly rig 15mins 5secs, if I can do that before the curly rig then I’m alright. So he’s asked the right set of questions and that’s all anybody needs to do, that’s as mature as you need to get, ask the right questions and make sure you get a set of answers back. But if you can do it electronically so that everything lives in one place, even better still because it doesn’t matter what room I’m sat in, I could audit you from home.
RICHARD WHITTAKER I just wanted to add I absolutely endorse everything that’s being said about the information and the importance of information. One of my concerns really is about the accuracy of the information and the number of organisations that accept original information that’s produced through the design process as as-built records. That is of very little value to asset management teams, what asset management teams is as-built records and that’s why things like 360 degrees photographs of plant rooms that are tagged are so, so important. And the other point is we really need to get into the digitisation and access to information because if you look at CDM health & safety files they’ve come on such a long way, a terribly long journey to get there.
But now they are so much better because they’re monitored as they’re built through the construction process and that sort of thing and then when they get handed over they disappear into a black hole because it’s not easy to access that information for many organisations so people have to go looking for it. And it goes back to relying on a person that’s not been hit by a bus and there needs to be something that is actually very easy to access. And I think the way to encourage that is either through legislation or contract specification, putting requirements in your contract for as-built records. And the other one is getting boards, anybody responsible for governance the powers that be, again to understand the risk of not having that information easily accessible.
A perfect example is your pre-occupation fire risk assessment that will also sit with one person somewhere within an organisation, which is great up until a point - it’s not good at all, actually, it’s a terrible thing.
RICHARD BACON Funnily enough with what you're’ saying, we’re finding now the big issues we’re having where lots of our contracts are coming back to hand-back, so we’re going to be hading over to some local authority in the next 5 or 10 years, the inaccuracies that we’ve got in what was supposedly an as-built drawing that was nothing remotely like an as-built drawing, it was as-design. O&M manuals that are missing vast swathes of information about equipment that has been installed where someone has had a look through 15-20 years ago and gone oh yeah, that reflects what we’ve got onsite. And yeah, all right, it names one type of fire alarm system, but the block where we got the 28 different blocks of student accommodation have actually got 3 different types of alarm system in.
All the same manufacturer and it was all as they were being built and it was just that one they stopped making, so they put type 2 in, and they’d stopped making that by the time the full construction of all of the site, but all of their O&Ms have actually got the middle panel in. So we’ve got people dragging in information, but you get 20 years down the line and it ain’t half hard to get all of this stuff together. We’ve got CAD? 19mins 18secs engineers out working literally just going around and going let’s get all of these drawings up-to-date now because if we can get them up-to date now the last little bit of life cycle that we do won’t be to hard to reflect on drawings. In some places there has been a couple of sets of life cycle work take place.
RICHARD WHITTAKER And here’s something that I think should be a real encouragement for people as an example as to why this is important that everybody in this meeting is working towards and that is asbestos. It’s decades since we’ve been using asbestos in buildings and could you name a client who know where all the asbestos is in all of their buildings? No, you couldn’t. That on its own is really a measure of how important this is and the people in this group, absolutely.
BEX GIBSON I know us at Live West, we actually have a very, very good system for asbestos, we’ve sort of got a portal which we give to our contractors and it defines where the asbestos. And it’s not quite to the level of data standards but it is a very useful tool, so I think clients are getting a bit more savvy, especially housing associations because we need to know it for our own operatives as well, it’s quite important.
RICHARD WHITTAKER I get that, the problem with the asbestos is, and it’s a good example that you guys decided it was everything from window packers to limples? 20mins 54secs above fires to walls, ceiling finishers and all of that sort of thing. It was seen as such a versatile material back in the day until people found out its dark secret. There are people who have got great records, like yourself Bex, but it doesn’t change the principle that if you don’t know where it all is. And that’s the lesson to take forward through this group because what about MDF? Is that a future carcinogenic product? Who knows, the simple fact is that we don’t and that’s why record keeping is so important but equally, if not more important, is actually being able to access that and the legacy that you leave behind.
We do a 3-stage risk assessment, I’m not aware of anybody else that does a 3-stage one, the risk as you’re developing something, how much you minimise that risk because you don’t always get rid of all of the risk, but then is there a legacy risk? And an example is if you look at fire doors and under the Building Safety Act we’ve got the 18, 11 metre rule thing where it’s a one hour fire door above whichever height is agreed at the minute. But if you’re in a 4-storey building you only need a half hour fire check door because you are below that height. So if you do a risk assessment it says yes, that meets the current thought process, but really in principle, and we’re all intelligent people, look beyond that any complex building should reflect what the high-rise buildings are. So the legacy risk is there could be a time, or there should be a time more importantly, that you actually do the same thing for those customers for what you do in your high-rise.
RICHARD BACON In all honesty, Richard, it’s a question that we’ve asked where we’ve said if we’ve got a company carrying out maintenance activities for us that at the moment have got a high-risk building, which we have got contractors that are looking after high-risk buildings, not for us right this minute, but we’ve got complex buildings that they look after. if they’re looking after something to a standard in a high-risk building does that not effectively become the industry norm or best practice? So that should be what they reflect everywhere because if they happen to have a problem elsewhere it might not be a high-risk building, but any judge worth his salt is going to ask so if you are able to look after something to standard X why don’t you just do it everywhere?
That means that the standard T that you’ve done in this other complex building, or whatever you want to call the slightly lower standard, actually isn’t the best that you can do because you’ve already proven that you can do better elsewhere. So, we know anyway that it’s going to get filtered down to more and more and more buildings, but yeah, future proof things.
BEX GIBSON Yeah, absolutely, it’s the best practice real thing, Dame Judith Hackitt’s golden thread and we’re speaking to her recently and there was a comparison made interestingly with CDM. So, CDM has now been in place since 2015 which we all know and we all love and we’ve all got processes in. The Building Safety Act has only been in place since 2022 and you know how long CDM took to really embed itself. I think as long as we’re doing the right thing to hit those requirements of the Building Safety Act, so that golden thread, we’re all moving in the right direction so that information is available to the right person at the right time and it’s the right information. Those are the key things and I think that’s kind of what this group is, so it is a whole new thing, it’s not really new as BIM hs been around for ages, but in terms of the building safety element of it it’s how do we get that holistic view of that building. So it all has to be specific and hit that golden thread that is so important in legislation.
RICHARD WHITTAKER Yeah, I suppose the question to that is as a good asset management organisation, why does it have to be legislation? Why is it not good business practice? And part of that is cost because we work on capital rather than value in too many areas, but the Dame Judith Hackitt thing is a really good point because when that journey started her team wrote to all local authorities, housing associations, landlords, and said how many high-rise buildings have you got. The majority of them didn’t know.
There are now over 18,000 registered and that’s ignoring the complex buildings that are multi-occupancy, I suggest there’s three times as many buildings because of complexity than what there are high-rise. And morally we’d like to do it, capital cost wise people don’t see a need to do it unless they’re forced to and that’s where the change needs to come in, through this group.
BEX GIBSON Absolutely, the Regulator themselves have said that, not right now because they have not got the capacity, but they will look to decrease the minimum height to 11 metres. So it is something that actually if we do want to future proof, if we do want to do what your’e saying, Richard, there is no reason to not start looking at it in preparation. And also let\s not forget why building safety exists, it’s to keep people safe and if we think that people would be safer in these buildings while we work a particular way then there is no reason why we shouldn’t work towards that anyway, it’s a moral thing.
RICHARD WHITTAKER I delivered a £5 million job, multi-occupancy and that sort of thing, I just gave an instruction to sway all half hour fire check doors for one hour fire check doors. It was expensive, £80 a door, and I’ve put something in place on that building that is exceptional. The £5 million was a wider scheme than that, it was 30 flats, so that’s £2,400, that’s all I put on the price of that building to have one hour protection. What I didn’t do was tell anybody, the powers that be, until we’d done it, which is a terrible position to feel you have to be in to make those very simple improvements.
BEX GIBSON And something that was mentioned earlier, there was concerns about actually what in the terms of moving from handover form development operational you’re given this we’ve built this, but that’s not actually true. So where does that lie? Because we can send stock condition surveys out to get the data that you want after it’s built, but actually where is that link there?
RICHARD WHITTAKER I’m going to throw in key stage inspections as a contractual norm, or it should be a contractual norm. It’s something that we use for quality management and if anything to do with fire safety and fire regulation is inspected by the developer, it’s photographed, it becomes part of a quality report that’s issued and it’s validated by a third-party to do that. But it also runs through the normal construction process so that you know that you’ve got your cavity insulation in because we’ve had properties offered without cavity wall insulation, in this day and age how does somebody miss cavity wall insulation? But it’s a simple process, people do quality checks, they go onsite, it can be on a sampling basis, it doesn’t have to be every single one, but if something comes to light then you just do a deeper investigation into that area, particularly around fire safety and that sort of thing. So, it’s a very minor tweak to existing practices, in fact it’s probably not a tweak at all, it’s probably just recording the information and having it somewhere that people can access it, that’s the minor tweak.
BEX GIBSON Absolutely and as someone said it’s about the reliance on one person as a single point of failure as well, that needs to not be a thing.
MARK KEEBLE We’re safety case experts, we come from the military aviation industry, I came into this industry a couple of years ago, we got invited by Lewisham and now we’re helping 50-odd organisations to do safety cases etc. So, just getting back to that discussion about acceptance of a building, and excuse my ignorance of not knowing your industry particularly well. Where we resolve this issue that you talk about in aviation, it truly is coming into the industry where aviation was 20-30 years ago when I first joined it, is safety management systems. We’re going into councils, X, Y and Z, and where this is resolved is within a process called safety management system, it’s not the health & safety policy, it’s the safety management system and the developer should have a safety management system.
So all of the processes that you're proposing using your vast experience of the team, it’s not about having experienced people because, like you said, people move on, it’s having a robust safety management system as a building owner. It’s Barratt Homes having a robust safety management system. And when a contractor starts a new development and going through the gateway process, you as future owner of a building understand how the two safety management systems interact and that’s defined in an artefact before design even starts. That’s how aviation has resolved the issue that you’re talking about and that’s how we don’t get aeroplanes, stand by the Boeing 737 Max that’s a conversation over a beer.
But all of the issues that you’re talking about honestly are resolved by having robust SMSs and that is by far the weakest area of the three key elements needed in the safety case by regulation. And that is how you mitigate loss of experience as well.
BEX GIBSON That’s a really key point, that safety management system and that resilience.
DAVE WILLIAMS Going back to listening to what everyone has said, everyone is in agreement on a lot things. I think where organisations tend to have things slip through the gaps is taking ownership of that data and ownership of that documentation. Because invariably we have specific teams that deal with new developments, they are concentrating on delivering a building and then when it comes to the operational groups where people are looking at compliance, looking at stock condition, all of those sort of areas on the operational side, it’s almost development chuck it over the fence and say there you go, this is what we’ve got, get on with it. And I thin probably it’s an organisational failing that there isn’t that cohesiveness between the people delivering new buildings and the people then maintaining those buildings going forward.
And i don’t know how you fix that because obviously it’s unique to each individual organisations how they deal with that transition. But it does seem to me that that pre-occupation stage, that gateway 3 stage, is an ideal opportunity for all of those teams that are involved to pile into that building and find out for themselves whether the information that they’re receiving is accurate or not. And people don’t tend to take advantage of that and they tend to wait until after occupation and then they’re fighting getting access to flats and things like that because the tenants are either not there or unwilling to let them and that causes issues. And I think maybe as part of that development handover process because we process map everything as part of our safety management system in order to make sure that we’er consistent in the way we deal with things.
But overcoming that hurdle of getting the teams to all work together cohesively at that critical point is one of the major hurdles that we are struggling with and perhaps other organisations are struggling with as well.
BEX GINSON Absolutely. Lucy, you had your hand up.
LUCY CRAIG Yeah, it was related initially to the comment about aviation and Mark was talking about aviation, specifically around airplane design rather than the construction at airports. Because the construction at airports still have the same issues that everyone else does with seeking compliance and the process of getting there. But picking up on Dave’s point about handovers and the process of getting to handovers, I’m experiencing at Mace…where no one is willing to slow down the process to get it right and we’re still commercially still evaluating the cost of a building on the same methods and timescales that we did before. And actually to do things correctly and diligently is going to take a longer process, I don’t think the RIBA process is particularly, it needs more work, it needs more depth.
For example, stage 4 is still confusing in some respects because architects will do stage 4 but then the building services engineer will do part of it and the CDP element comes into it. Do main contractors really understand the responsibility of CDP? CDP shouldn’t be no design intent whatsoever, there should be design intent from somebody else. And I’m picking up on Dave’s point, someone had mentioned verification of third party, I think there is a lack of people in the industry that can provide that verification on if something is right. So, I guess my general comment was one about aviation construction habits, but then secondly the process hasn’t slowed down and people are still trying to do it and I don’t see how culturally that’s changed, to get the detail right.
DAVE WILLIAMS Yeah, funnily enough this is one of the things that the gateway process is going to make people make that time. I’m aware of new builds that have gone for certification pre-occupation and something has been found wrong with it by the Regulator and that basically puts another 6 months on the timeline before they can occupy the building. So they are losing money over that period because they didn’t do everything in the initial submission. So I think maybe that change in attitude and that change in process will end up being forced on people, rightly so, because of the fact that the Regulator isn’t going to roll over and go, oh well, they’re missing a few bits, but’s that’s all right we’ll give them a certificate anyway.
So, hearing from other people’s experiences of what happens, the turnaround, even if you’ve got everything right the turnaround with the Regulator before you can occupy the building is adding time to the development lifecycle anyway. And then the minute, once again you’ve got an incomplete submission, you can end up adding months to that timeline anyway. So it will force people to have an incentive to do things right first time, hopefully. I don’t know if anyone has already had experience of submitting stuff to the Regulator for new builds?
BEX GIBSON Not new builds, I had one for a works in an existing HRB and it was incredibly minor, it was basically replacing a non-fire resisting wall with a fire resisting wall. So, not a lot of question and it took about 8 weeks plus a month, because they asked for an extension and that’s where the industry is at the moment with that side of things. They’re just not until April next year going to have the capacity to really respond online with their legal timeline, but it’s complex. And i guess that going back to the operations side of things, has anybody in the group experienced submitting for a building assessment certificate yet? Or anything like that. I think that’s one of those things a lot of people are keen to know.
MARK KEEBLE Yes, we’ve got about 60 of them with the regulation at the moment and we probably had initial feedback on 20 of them, probably about 10 different clients.
DAVE WILLIAMS And what sort of timescales are you experiencing, Mark?
MARK KEEBLE It’s taking a while, end of April/the beginning of May, the first submitted tranche. And when you submit a report from our system it has your evidence in there and obviously a PDF report with live evidence in is a security issue, so we limited the permissions on the evidence being live for 90 days. At about day 95 we didn’t think that the Regulator would take 90 days to get to the report and look at the evidence, and by day 95 our clients snuck emails from the Regulator saying that we can’t access the evidence, where is it? The link is dead. And we didn’t think they would take that long to get to it. So, the initial feedback from the early May submission, clients got about 4 weeks ago. They don’t know quite what they’re asking for at the moment, the safety case is a persuasive argument of why this building should have people living in safely, it’s not about a review of all of the evidence.
I think the Regulator still doesn’t understand what a safety case is and they’re actually asking insanely to submit all of the evidence which for an average client is about 100 bits of data for each building. So we’re trying to work with them and through the bigger clients with 180-plus portfolios, to explain how our tech is helping them to review the report and doesn’t need all of the evidence to be uploaded which is working, actually. Because the first call we had was from a consultant who’s working for the Regulator saying that the BSR is like the Wild West at the moment, there is no consistency in there, there is no policy of understanding of how to review and what good looks like. So you’ve got a couple of people not willing to click on links and then you’ve got a few other people who are willing to click on links.
And we’ve educated them now that the link in our system is a snapshot in time because that link is the report, the piece of evidence at that time the report was generated. if it’s updated subsequently in the safety case it doesn’t change it in the report. So, what’s the bottom line? The Regulator still doesn’t quite understand what a safety case looks like, they’re taking a long time to get to reviewing safety case reports. And at the moment they’re going right, rather than saying is this a persuasive argument, is this organisation competent to look after this building and are they trustworthy, have they got our confidence, that’s good enough. No, they’re actually wanting to review, take in all of the evidence and upload all 100+ documents which is absolutely insane.
What I’m doing actually is I’m trying to connect Tim Galloway with the military aviation authority regulator and other regulators to say this is how we do it and this is how we regulate it, this is proportionate regulation. That’s not what they’re doing at the moment, so we’re trying our best. So, if anybody on the call has got some good contracts at the Regulator please let me know because we’re working with them at the right level, but the more input that we have the better.
BEX GIBSON That’s really interesting because it’s the spirit of the law isn’t lets go through every piece of evidence, it’s keeping people safe, is this building safe. And that’s actually really interesting, so I guess linking back to what BIM4Housing is all about that evidence, if the Regulator is being that picky, quite focused on that then how in operations can we manage that? Because that’s huge.
MARK KEEBLE What we’re doing, we’ve just done an upgrade to our system to help them with that. So in our safety case summary as the evidence they can click on and look at, but now we’ve just done an output where we’re getting the annex the bibliography of all 100 pieces of evidence indexed. Which is a live A4 bit of a paper which they can click on any PDF and it sends them to that time and space when the report was written.
RICHARD BACON It’s basically you’re going this days MOT was fine, if the wheels have split the following day you can’t…
DAVE WILLIAMS It’s more of a snapshot and that’s the thing, the safety case report is a snapshot to prove that evidentially that you’re conforming to what you should be. And like you said, the thing is that if they’re taking 3 months before they even go to look at that evidence, particularly with say compliance and maintenance, you’re going to get a snapshot from 3 months ago. That evidence doesn’t necessarily prove that in the 3 months since you’ve submitted that you’re still carrying on that, admittedly you can show that you’ve got processes in place. But if they actually want to look at the actual data to prove that things have been done right that data is going to be held in an asset management system, it’s not going to he held in your system because that’s where the live data resides to prove that that maintenance is being carried out. So, it’s quite interesting that they’re being so diligent, but at the same token relying on evidence that was submitted 3 months ago.
MARK KEEBLE Yes, and I think also scary for organisations is that the Regulator has an open purchase order for at £144 per hour as well. So, we had an event in last month where we had 100-odd people and we had somebody from the Regulator, well, contracted to the Regulator from Bureau Veritas who is leading the structures…Ruth Haynes. She gave a very good presentation and her team are taking around 20-30 hours just to review this structural elements of the report. So if you add 20-30 hours in a fire, 20 hours on safety management system, you’re getting up to 60-80 hours, and you can do the maths at £144. So, they reckon anywhere between £5-20,000 per report to review, every 5 years.
So yeah, it’s challenging, I’ll be honest with you I don’t agree with the community’s thought that the Regulator should be telling us how to do things and they should be giving us more frameworks and templates, that’s what we get told often. A regulator isn’t meant to do that and thats not the intent of a regulator, it’s for us as a community to educate ourselves what safety is and what it looks like and how we convince ourselves that this building is safe enough, would we put our families in there etc. And the Regulator is never going to tell us.
LUCY CRAIG I think you’re absolutely right, my experience is that the behaviours are still just get it across the line for what the Building Regulator are looking for, particularly outside high-risk or anything to do with residential. And I think until potentially there are some levels of prosecutions in certain areas that those behaviours might not change. I think it has to be almost a telling off, until that happens and you can reference that. I’m struggling with it all of the time.
RICHARD BACON Sadly, it’s until people read their Barber Report each week and something comes up that says somebody has been fined a million pound for some sort of contravention, generally speaking companies don’t bother listening until they can put an amount of money against it. And Mark and the sort of work that Mark is doing, if that costs me a quarter of a million a year as opposed to that million pound, perhaps mark is a good investment, or Lucy, the individual that’s going to be doing that job is a good investment. Sadly, and it’s a shame the way the world works, until people can quantify things in financial terms they don’t actually understand risk. And sadly the bit that you should understand is that one life got lost and people see that as the risk, it’s never that’s the bit that the industry doesn’t pick up, the industry picks up pounds and pence. So that’s our battle, it’s getting people to recognise the value of a person as opposed to the value of a pound.
MARK KEEBLE One thing I would say, despite having the regulations and saying that every organisation was compliant to regulations and had a robust safety case, people will still die in HRBs we will still have fires in HRBs. Just like aeroplanes will crash and people will die. So, complete safety doesn’t mean that people won’t die.
ALEX OLDMAN A thought just occurred to me with my more strategic asset management hat on, we’re describing a situation where in order to collect digital information models i’ve heard customers, other people in these groups, reporting spending between £20-70,000 on a block to go in and do surveys on the building to capture all of the information so that they know about the state of that building in terms of its structure, organisation and components that have been used to build it, the ,materials and so and and so forth. Then this additional £5-20,000 to actually get through the regulation process to get that certificate. And reading news headlines that the new government want to be building 300,000 homes a year, to build at a level that we haven’t done since the 1960s, is it likely that we’re going to see more investments in low-rise buildings?
The limit is 18 metres or 7 storeys to residential buildings within that, so is it possible that housing associations, local authorities and other builders are going to be looking at 17 metres for the height of their buildings? Because if you’re going to that 7th storey, going to that 18th metre, you need to spend an extra £120,000 for nothing back.I said nothing back, clearly you’ve got a safer building potentially through that process, but just food for thought on there, how do we go about getting more houses built to the required standards? Volume and scale, hundreds and thousands of properties built every year, with all of these additional information requirements that we’ve got. Is there a role for modern technology in this? Are we doing things wrong? Because this sounds very spreadsheet based, very project based, very site based. Is there something that we can do as a group to try and improve things?
LUCY CRAIG I think there’s loads of things that can be modernised in the process of how we design and go and implement those designs on site etc. But I think the fundamentals, it would be a crying shame if everyone went and looked for the loopholes rather than a fix for the incompetences that are in design and construction. And that’s it, if people are so used to certain procurement methods, for example designers are so used to what they get paid for a certain level of design information. When it becomes people actually find holes in it they reference, oh, it was Ok before, and all that the Building Safety Act is actually asking for is actually for the process to be done correctly, but the problem is that I think you’ve got a whole generation, some of us included, that are used to not doing that and doing the minimum to get by. The danger is obviously of the new government and they’re trying to show that they can deliver the solution to the housing crisis is that some of this gets overlooked and the need to satisfy for politics rather than the appropriate amount of detail.
I think in line with that there is a a cultural issue, there is a lot of people running construction that are either from a commercial background that don’t understand the details and technical details of how to construct are making the decisions in line with constructions have to entice a lot of people into it that would normally not get paid some of the salaries that there are. There’s a lot of people in quite significant positions that aren’t maybe competent to lead those type of businesses either, when we’re talking about the technical complexities. Trying to deliver a project well you need to technically understand it and I think that’s where the strength and depth is missing in construction. But you know these are eat the elephant problems unfortunately, so I think you’re right politics will drive loopholes until more issues happen.
BEX GIBSON I think on the back of what you’re saying, I saw an interesting post on LinkedIn the other day and between October 2023 and this year there was 1,018 gateway 2 applications and only 146 were signed off by the Regulator. So it’s not just the construction side, it’s also the Regulator side and it’s a tricky situation.
CHRIS MILLING I’m coming more from the data side, I was data modeller over at L&Q previously so I’ve looked at handover sheets and things. So the discussion earlier was you had different parts of an organisation needing different information at different times, so what I’ve not really seen organisations do is almost like segregate what they need things for. Obviously you’ve got building systems, but where you need to supply things for the Regulator, so your fire walls, if you break down what types of component are we using which might need to be regulated. So you could have a list of say 10 types of walls, what regulations would apply to those, but then potentially when you go back to your BIM model you’ll say this is where this type of wall is. We can show that we’ve purchased this type of wall, these are the specifications which you need to see for that type of wall and we could potentially show you in a model where they are used.
If there’s any components which are different, so obviously when you’re further down the track and you’ve got people in the building, then you’ll have to start tracking if you need different replacements for types of things. But people need to figure out who needs what and segregate what needs to be attached to those types and then potentially show where those types are. Because again, it’s not just getting new builds over the wall, if you’ve got to go and do building safety cases for other things, at some point you’ve got to know what you need to collect potentially to have somewhere in it so that when people do surveys and they come back to say oh, we haven’t found this particular fire door, it’s been replaced, so that they’ve actually got a place to update that stuff. But it’s almost syncing that upfront for maintenance and repairs which building systems have we got, which do we need to know are in warranty and then you have those groups of things together because then you can see what’s been swapped in or out of the system and so forth.
But if everyone is just doing it reactively, not planning what groups they need so that if there is an impact they can track it later on, does that make sense? I haven’t got the practical experience, but I do look at the data and again it’s with the legacy systems, you don’t have that flexibility but then everyone is scared to touch anything because that system is as it was set up, but if you think of that upfront then you potentially have got that flexibility to say this particular system, we know what’s in it, if somebody finds something else in it at a later date we can update what we’ve got and it’s always there.
BEX GIBSON It’s a very relevant point because this is kind of what this group is all about is that information management side and it’s something that we all struggle with, different types of information in different places, all of those things there is no consistency. So I guess opening up the floor again, if anyone wants to talk about that side of things in relevance to the operational side of the buildings.
LUCY CRAIG It should be mandatory for every building that’s new to have a fully, to a certain level, BIM model that’s useable. That’s not necessarily been procured in every building that’s bene built and that’s part, if legislation was to come in to support that, that you have to procure a certain level of BIM and that was delivered throughout the lifecycle from the trade contractors, not just the designers, I think then you could start having appropriate data for buildings going forward. And at the moment it’s not mandatory to do that because it’s just as-built information.
RICHARD BACON It should be written into construction contracts that that’s what is going to be delivered.
LUCY CRAIG And if you look back through the history of BIM, if it wasn’t for government led projects BIM wouldn’t be where it was today because certainly the consultants weren’t investing in BIM. The contractors started to invest in it because they wanted to get on the government frameworks for schools and hospitals and that’s why BIM progressed. And that’s why then architects, engineers, started getting training, you couldn’t work on these projects and because residential sits in the private sector that’s not happening. The only way it can happen if it sits within a requirement and that’s what’s needed.
At the moment, BIM is not contractual, 2D information is contractual, that will never change I think from a legal point of view. But obviously we all know that in this day and age most people do cut from the BIM model so therefore there is a source of data. But it should be a mandatory level of LOI and LOD that an operations team should receive at the end of the project and that means upskilling the supply chains to provide modelling which is still quite weak in the fit-out side of things, so that it goes all the way through. And I think that’s a game changer and that’s when you’ll start seeing where the detail gaps are. And that does mean then maybe the Regulator needs to be tracking that as-builts more than what they are doing, is this data available part of this whole process.
CHRIS MILLING I think organisations still need to take responsibility figuring out how they want that model. It’s no point saying that a contractor is going to hand that over and you’ve got nowhere to put it two months into a building going live doors will be fixed, something will be broken and replaced and it will be at the same point and you’re going to have to look at plans or look at old BIM models. So I think if organisations could think of what they want essentially and then drive towards saying you're going to replace that data or you're going to replace that door, what type is it, scan it. We know what type it is and we know what spec it is and we know it got swapped for that component.
LUCY CRAIG I think that it needs to be, you need to bring in a consistency or otherwise people don’t invest, so i feel like you’ll get that. The operations, if it’s mandatory for the operations team to maintain a model when they do any alterations to a building that contains people that live in it then you’ll start getting consistency. But there is nothing mandatory and we won’t get the drive…what I’m saying is you had government investment at the birth of BIM because they were doing it in schools and investment in hospitals. If you don’t get some sort of legislation that you should procure a detailed BIM model form your designers and supply chain and that should be maintained through the life of the building, then you won’t get any change.
CHRIS MILLING It’s back to the asset management system a bit, you don’t necessarily need a model, you just need to know which components that you’re monitoring. I know somebody has talked about the aviation industry and I missed that bit, I briefly worked in the automotive industry and it was factory of breaking and airbag systems. So yeah, you could track your stock but anything which went into an airbag or a breaking system had a whole completely separate safety system which you knew what components went into that breaking system. So obviously when you see the recalls on something they could say we know these sub-assembly was built in this factory, we know it’s got a faulty component and they could actually send it out because that date was always there, obviously that’s static for that unit in time.
But essentially they identified what their safety system was and that they had to keep track of where those components were placed and they knew what to do if something went wrong with it. They could tell you right away, but you have to identify what your system is and store it. They might have had one plan of an airbag unit and they might highlight that piece, but that’s it, they knew where all of their instances were and they knew what the tolerances of the important components were and I think you need to decide what that is and have somewhere to store it. It would be nice to have a model so it would just show people where to go, but you need to know which components are important for safety, what types you're using and what’s applying to those. I think that’s your first step and then you can identify where your instances are.
JACK WHITE A couple of comments, someone said about mandatory things through operations and I think it’s perhaps there’s a lot of mandatory things for operation that either don’t happen or people find a way to tick a box, but the intention of it is missed. I would like to think what we’re doing here is beyond just ticking boxes to have the KPIs to make it look like we’re doing something. I find a bit of frustration is that a lot of what we’re doing and even talking about here is about the handover from development into operations and actually the majority of buildings that the operations team will have are buildings that already exist and we will have a building come across and very quickly it will change and it’s no longer what it was. So, this focus on the development stage hampers our progress and what we want to do is understand how we want to work and then we can go back and ask for certain information.
But again, should we not be doing…to go out and see what’s been handed over, is that as-built drawing as-built? And if we’re going out and doing checks should we not gather some of the information that’s specific to us and then we can say this information was incorrect when handed over. But it should be like that for anything, any asset that’s handed over to us whether it’s a new fire alarm system, a new fire door, a new building, we should be in operations we want what we want and highlighting where we don’t. But first we need to know what, but a lot of the time all we do is step away…we don’t have it, we didn’t know that we needed it, it’s just when something goes wrong and we then ask for it and then jump up and down when we don’t have it and blame someone else.
BEX GIBSON I think absolutely we should focus, if we can bring the focus on to that operations element. We’ve covered the handover thing and we know that’s a place where things get lost or maybe inaccuracies? 1hr 10mins 24secs, but maybe how are people in the industry managing their existing buildings? For us, we undertook measured surveys for all of our buildings, a long time ago we undertook structural surveys for our buildings. How is everyone else doing that? How are they managing their data? How are they modelling that? Has anyone come across any really good, or really bad, stuff in the process?
JACK WHITE We go out and laser scan our buildings, effectively measure several really, and then…
KIERAN DOWNES I just wanted to pitch in here because the majority of what we do is manage existing assets and existing portfolios. The long and the short of it is we have to take on board additional costs to do extensive surveys of varying specifications, very bespoke to the client and to the building requirements. We put together data management plans and have long extensive discussions about how we’re going to manage the data ongoingly, what it’s being used for and how we’re going to model that data. We put together example models, stuff that we’ve used previously, and find what fits for the client. We use various technologies to host them on the cloud so you don’t have lots of different bodies, so we’ve got the operations teams on site that can view and use the data. We have ways ingrained into their training of how to update assets and which change forms do you use and how to go through it.
The point I’m trying to make is that it’s not one answer, it’s a long string of lots of different processes that all need to come together that need to be discussed with all of the teams involved. So a lot of what we do is take on facilities management contracts from other facility manager providers. There’s a lot of tenacity that goes between these groups sometimes and it might be difficult to get information quality data, sometimes it’s purposefully delayed. So, it’s about collaboration and having a clear plan an early enough stage and then a lot of expense goes into gathering the data and managing that data going forwards. There’s no standard, as far as we can tell, to say you must have exactly all of these things in place, so it depends on what the client’s needs are, how we can do it together.
LUCY CRAIG I couldn’t agree more with that, it’s lots of things, but I’m predominantly about delivery rather than the operations and I think that it’s all the investment by the clients. What you get say at the end of handover is quite a testament to the quality and therefore can influence all of those different things that Kieran is discussing.
DAVE WILLIAMS Yeah, if you’re involved in that sort of delivery side, Lucy, one of the things that we’ve found is we in the past took on a lot of Section 106 properties and I think there’s now a lot less of an appetite for those sort of schemes because you’re even getting worse information from Section 106 ones than you are when you’ve got full control of your own developments.
LUCY CRAIG Yeah, I think someone put in the chat that BIM Level 2 is a requirement. It is, but you can be satisfied in many different ways. Just having the detail provides assurance, not having that detail you don’t know how all of these components goes together. The same for refurbs, even more of a nightmare.
BEX GIBSON And that’s actually a huge thing for housing associations, we have existing buildings more than we are building, especially the HRBs and managing that information and having those EIRs ready and all of that good stuff is tricky because we’re in a position where we don’t have it already. And so defining it to a contractor is tricky and I guess that’s the point of this whole group is how do we manage that, maintaining that golden thread through the operation and including refurbishment because that’s all about operations as well. I know that the BSR are asking for very detailed stuff about fire safety plans during building control applications and all of that feeds into that what’s your fire strategy, where is that information held, is it consistent, can people use it productively and that side of things.
KIERAN DOWNES I just wanted to say about the housing associations, I used to work for a housing association a long, long time ago, but to me it always seems like you have the development side of things and then you have the maintenance side of things. And there was always a very big gap there, for housing associations particularly, from what I’ve seen. I feel like you need a data management team, somebody who’s working with that group of asset managers who are really sat there who have got the responsibility of keeping the data. And they need to draw in all of the other teams which you might have, for example, a capital projects team, you’ve got your reactive maintenance, you’ve maybe got somebody doing SFG20 separately, but all of these people are tying into asset changes, updates that all need to come back to a central system.
So, I feel like you need to have that person or that team sitting in the centre there that does pull these threads together. I’ve never seen it work practically where everybody has had to feed in separately, it’s got to go through one funnel and get to that point.
DAVE WILLIAMS Interestingly Kieran, a lot of our compliance servicing inspections sits in a system and we could pull text-based spreadsheet-based CSV reports out of that. And then we actually involved our data management team and said, right, let’s see what you can do with it and they were able to extract the data into a data warehouse, drop in into a Power BI report which basically shocked everybody because all of a sudden you can see how compliant each component was. How are we going on this? Oh, we’re at 10%, and they hadn’t been inspected on time and things like that. I think that was because the contractors themselves weren’t supplying the data. Happy to supply the invoices, but trying to get the data out of them to prove that they inspected this or smoke alarms etc and being able to drop that into a system, pull it then out of that system into a meaningful visual report.
It was worth the effort of getting the data services team involved in that because all of a sudden that visual impact of seeing where they were on each different component for servicing hit home and we could use that as leverage to push people to conform more to the safety management system, conform more to processes, get contractors to realise that they needed to up their game. So yeah, I completely agree with you on that, the people that are managing contracts aren’t necessarily data gurus and therefore you need someone with those skills and strengths in order to bring a full picture to life.
RICHARD BACON The places that I audit, now that I’m getting to a point of most places now going back to me for a second time, some places for a third, I’m realising this is the level of information that I’m wanting to see every year. Being picky about what it is that I want to see, I want to see everything and I want to see your updated record drawing etc. We’ve gone from first year round places being on the Richard scale 60% compliant where some things they’ve got every document you could ever want to see, other things they haven’t. The places that have gone much better than that on the second visit and I’m sure on the third visit will be somewhere up in the 90% on the compliances is all of the places where there is an individual, or a little team of 2 or 3 people, that everyone is meant to get information to on a weekly, monthly, whatever it happens to be basis. And they do the tie up between the CAFM system, the guys that are looking after drawings, so someone is getting all of the pots of information and doing something useful with the whole lot.
So, places that I go into and visit one person to get all of my information tend to do much, much better than places where I walk through the door and they go Fred’s with you on Monday, Tracy’s with you on Tuesday. If it’s 3 or 4 people that I need to see to get the information, generally speaking it’s because it’s really siloed and people aren’t talking to each other and know what the rest of the team do. One point of contact, and I actually get the information that I want to see. That one point of contact needs to be a system somewhere that if whoever it is that’s looking after that system isn’t in that week that there is a second or third person that does. So it’s always that little group, it’s got to be something that a group can manage.
KIERAN DOWNES Yeah, Dave made a good point about the visual impact of using something like Power BI and I think it’s just worth mentioning that those kind of tools are really, really useful to buy in the leadership of your company and to demonstrate to clients, even to maybe contractors, and to give that bit of representation you can really help people buy in and make a bit of an investment with it. Like you say, Richard, having the central point is paramount and if you have to go here, there and everywhere it’s because there isn’t a correct system in place, you’re already failing.
RICHARD BACON Yeah, and by far and away the bit that makes my boards, because all of my reports just go to our board meetings. When the board sits and reads my report it’s the three little pie charts that I’ve got in there that everyone goes Rich, one of those pie charts has a big block of red in it, what does that mean? They’re doing stuff wrong. Because it doesn’t matter that there is 50 pages or report, three pie charts are the bit that people ask me questions about. It's all in my report, but it’s that little dashboard piece that does it for people.
DAVE WILLIAMS I talk about the board reports that I write the power of red because they will look through the entire board report and go oh, what’s this red bit? What does that mean? And then they’ll concentrate on that bit, they won’t read the rest of the report.
BEX GIBSON We’ve had a really good discussion here and I think the key points that really have come out is that we do need that ownership. The safety management system I think really feeds into that, it’s quite an important thing, especially as the Regulator will apparently was spending 20 hours looking at the safety management system, so that’s a real big takeaway. And it’s all about the accuracy, we’ve talked about a lot of the stuff before. What I’d really like before we go is any really, really good practice that you’ve seen, anything that we as a group take away and from someone’s learned experience use that going forward.
RICHARD BACON I think Mark’s bit was really interesting, information or having learnt from a different industry, bringing it across.
MARK KEEBLE I’m going to go for one final quick point of feedback from the Regulator of what people aren’t doing. Generally fire is pretty good, if we just think about structure. say we’ve got a 1960s concrete core building that’s degraded and they say that we’re having a structural assessment done in 2 years’ time, because as we know structural engineers are really hard to come by. Fine, that’s what you’re saying, we’ve got a concrete core that’s degraded and we’ve got a structural assessment in 2 years’ time, OK. So what? Why is the building still safe to live in now? We’re in a pub together, Richard, you tell me why that building is safe, it’s so what that most people are missing. It’s not I can’t get it, OK, you can’t get it, I understand that, but what are your mitigations in the short time whilst you’re waiting, And that is very common as well, the SMS.
BEX GIBSON It’s a huge topic and ultimately we need to evidence to the Regulator that our buildings are safe and we need to be comfortable in that evidence, if we’re not comfortable with it we’re just ticking a box, it’s not going to be good enough for them either. Thank you all for your time, we’ll be sending a recording and a transcript out of what we’ve spoken about and if you’ve got any questions reach out to me or Dave or Richard or George.
CHAT
Alex Oldman (Unverified)10:34 am
Richard Whittaker (External) What do you mean by "key stage inspection". Are you referring to RIBA stages, or something that happens once in occupancy?
Richard Whittaker (External)10:37 am
It sits under the umbrella of RIBA stages and is utilised through the construction phase, I have listed a sample below for reference:
| Item Description |
| Foundations |
| DPC details |
| Slab |
| Masonry to first floor |
| First floor joists |
| Masonry to wall plate |
| Trusses |
| Inspect fire stopping party Walls |
| Inspect Fire Stopping in wall cavity |
| Inspect cavity closures and roof space fire stopping |
Alex Oldman (Unverified)10:39 am
Thank you Richard. So the elephant in the room is what to do with the 99% of houses that already exist. I dare not utter "RetroBIM".
Richard Whittaker (External)10:43 am
Retrobim is being adopted although slowly, I can make an introduction to a company if of interest who are helping accelerate that initiative
Chris(tine) Milling (Unverified)10:49 am
How much should the evidence change until you get a certificate?
Dave Williams (External)10:56 am
when it comes to servicing and inspection it will change constantly such as fire door inspections, fire alarm testing to name a couple
Alex Oldman (Unverified)11:00 am
I was not advocating for shortcuts, I was asking for ideas on how to tackle these problems at scale.
Downes, Kieran (External)11:03 am
Makes sense from my side - deal with a lot of site data
Alex Oldman (Unverified)11:06 am
BIM Level 2 is a minimum standard for all the UK's public construction projects. So any new SOCIAL HOUSING should have Level 2.
Chris(tine) Milling (Unverified)11:14 am
Where did you store your surveys data Bex?
Deciding on the data you need and managing it as Kieran said earlier.