Business Case Workstream Meeting, 12-09-2024

BUSINESS CASE WORKSTREAM MEETING 12-09-2024

RICHARD WHITTAKER …it’s in what order do we want to try and tackle this and this really is about persuading the powers that be. And if they understand they’ve got a problem in efficiency in delivering a service, otherwise they wouldn’t engage. What they need to understand is whether they can service that issue and whether they can invest in resolving it. And that’s where the business case should come in and promote the digitisation, interoperability and the standardisation within an organisation, which is my personaL view, within an organisation. Now, what really does reinforce that for me is a diagram or schematic that will shared and that’s worth looking at because that’s something that really should be an addendum to any business case. So, adding to the work that’s already been done behind it, you can see all of the parties that are effected and influenced by that piece of work which, as if by magic, Will has just shared.

WILLIAM BORTHEN (shares screen). So, this is kind of a quick and dirty attempt to try and show a list of the various different categories of things that asset managers are responsible for and then broken down into a bit more detail of what those issues might be within those categories. And I think that all of these things apply across the board to the full spectrum of properties that are represented in the wider working group across social housing through to PFIs and everything in-between. And then I think what we’re aiming to achieve is to kind of understand in a bit more detail what these challenges are and how good information management will solve those issues. And the way we’re planning to do that is through getting examples from people who have actually done this in the real world and solved these problems and demonstrating that through a case study or scenario.

And these scenarios can be put into the kind of input form which has been built within the BIM In Asset Management website. And here are the specific fields to be populated and some examples already in here, which is great. So, that’s what we’re trying to achieve and understanding who can contribute to this and really drill in some of these areas would be really good.

RICHARD WHITTAKER I think what helps inform that is the presentation that George made yesterday showing the digital link between the various information streams. The other thing is, it feels like we’ve got the structure of a business case document, but then that needs to be formatted or edited in a way that it would represent existing buildings and new build projects. And perhaps on the end of it influence how a soft landing should be instigated to minimise the risk and make it a smooth transition into the asset management which all forms part of the lifecycle of a building, from inception into design to construction, to occupation, to eventual demolition.

GEORGE Absolutely. Jamie, with your role, you’re with a residential landlord. Is producing business cases and things like that something that you’ve been exposed to?

JAMIE HALL Usually in the periphery, supporting my manager, inviting them and providing the details about data.

GEORGE And what sort of form would they take? Is this a business case for a particular investment, would that be?

JAMIE HALL A business case, normally it would be something that falls outside of planned maintenance, that was the latest one where they were carrying out unexpected works. That’s probably the latest one that comes to mind. I think that’s for fire safety works, a block of flats.

GEORGE And with that business case, what form did it take? Was it a multipage document?

JAMIE HALL Multiple pages, I think there’s a rationale behind it description of works, estimated costs, potential risks for not carrying out the works.

GEORGE The rationale is exactly what we’ve decided we’re going to concentrate on. So, just to example, Marc Bradfield from Bureau Veritas, he’s had to step back from this group temporarily because Bureau Veritas are providing people and resources to the Regulator to try and address the shortfall of people that the Regulator has got at the moment, so Marc is swamped a little bit. So basically Richard and Will are picking up the reins in terms of driving this forward. But Paul, I know you were an active contributor on the first session that we had so I’m keen to see what your take on this is….What I was also going to say is what we’ve decided to do…Richard, do you want to explain what we’re doing in terms of the rationale rather than looking at a full business case?

RICHARD FREER Basically a business case is not necessarily a hefty document, but includes an awful lot of stuff with one primary aim which is to make the financials add up, make sense. The business case is primarily about money. Now, it’s a huge undertaking, it would be great to be actually able to get some figures around something in this industry and if we can do that it would be a huge achievement. But it’s not going to happen in 4 or 5 meetings with this workstream. What we can do is look at the various rationale that go into a business case, the reasons why to do it as opposed to the financial implications of that.

Now, financial implications may come into it, but initially we’re not looking at that, we’re looking at what are the different rationales that need to be fed in that we’re providing for guidance for somebody who is going to do a business case. What are they and identifying what they are. As Will has just shown the page on the website where people can put on real life experiences…real world scenarios that identify those rationales.

GEORGE The principle idea here, Paul, is if we can get the community to come up with examples of issues that could be improved then that’s quite a good way to get the people engaged. And in fact when I shared this with Ben Evans from Albany he immediately came back with 2 examples of things that were causing him frustration. He didn’t follow this format, so I’m going to try and get them to do that because I don’t want us to have to keep reformatting things. The purpose of these questions is to get people to think through what the implication is, rather than just complaining about something, to actually say how does that turn into something that is manageable. But I think this is a good way of doing it, it’s going to be a way of getting people to engage because everybody has probably got examples of things that could be better if things were done better.

RICHARD FREER This identifies the rationales, but it does more than that because it actually provides evidence to support the reason why it is a rationale. It’s not just sitting in a meeting and saying, well, this is important or that’s important, this is coming from the coalface.

PAUL SHEEDY One of the last comments, it might have been from Marc, was I do think we should be looking at, on new builds, how do we deconstruct them? How do we take them apart at the end of the life? And I was in a meeting with Michael Minelli at the city planners 6-8 weeks ago and what absolutely shocked me was we’ve just embedded some of our technology into 8 Bishopsgate, but the architect there basically admitted that most of the buildings have now been designed for 60 years. And of course they look very beautiful, all of these glass facades and it’s all very clean, but the seals around the glass are only guaranteed for 25 years and I question why we’re building buildings 200 and something metres tall with seals on the glass that are only guaranteed for 25 years. It looks great, all of this beautiful glass exterior with no frames around it, but we seem to have lost toe plot a little bit, is my view.

I don’t quite get why these buildings are given the go-ahead purely on aesthetics which seems to be the case with most things right now. And how exactly are you taking that building apart in 60 years-time? Because as you can see in 22 Bishopsgate or 8 Bishopsgate, the amount of space around there to actually deconstruct a building is minimal. And I think there needs to be a lot more thinking about this going forward because I certainly wasn’t expecting, as I looked at the Guildhall which is 400-500 years old at these shiny glass buildings in the background, that’s the sort of lifetime that they’re expected to last.

GEORGE I think that’s absolutely right. One of the extraordinary things on this, you’re looking at the physical lifecycle on that, what is even more extraordinary is that the warranty on those seals might be 25 years, but the warranty on it will probably be with the contractor that installed them. It probably won’t have novated over to the client, so therefore those warranties don’t exist, which is amazing. And part of the issue here, this is one of the points I’ve made in one of these examples here, is that the contractors, there’s no arrangements in place (Richard is a contracts person, so you can probably say that this isn’t the case), but my impression is that when these contracts are being negotiated the asset management teams aren’t really engaged in them and as a result of that the novation of warranties isn’t actually practically considered.

And therefore you’ve got things like ironmongery that’s got a 25 year warranty, but it’s only a 1 year warranty for the client because it’s only the defects period. Nobody has really considered it because FM people don’t seem curious about the use of warranties, it’s just an inconvenience to try and deal with it.

WILLIAM BORTHEN It’s a massive challenge, so many times that conversation about warranties has come up and there’s preparatory meetings to try and solve it and then it just fizzles out when something else comes along because it’s just too difficult. And I think perhaps the only way to deal with warranties is prioritise them and only focus effort on the most expensive things that if they do fail then that’s going to have the biggest impact. But just going back to Paul’s point on the shiny new tower blocks in central London, I was in the City on Tuesday at Tower 42 which is a big tower block in central London, it was built in 1972 and they’re still refurbishing that and we’re doing lifecycle planning on that for the next 20 years. So, that building is continually being regenerated, improved and cyclical lifecycle renewals are happening on that building, and it will be the same on the buildings that are being built now.

Some components within that building will have shorter lifecycles than others. And it’s just important to make sure when you are designing that building you focus on the whole life costs and whole life carbon now as well, so you understand when those cycles are going to occur and how much it’s going to cost, so you’re making a decision based on the overall cost rather than the capital cost. And I think someone mentioned this on the call yesterday, and that’s important, but you need obviously to have the data on those products to be able to do that lifecycle cost, but it’s completely feasible. So, maybe that should be one of the scenarios within here. I asked Chris Bicknall if he could feed into this on that exact point. I think there are so many different areas that we could focus on and I guess it depends who we’ve got supporting this working group that have got knowledge in each of these areas who could feed into this.

GEORGE We’ve certainly got access to various different specialists, so if we can identify what those are. Chris Bicknall has joined our little community recently, he’s the former head of strategic asset management for AKON? And he’s been doing this for probably 30 years, so he’s very, very knowledgeable in this area. I think it’s also a matter of understanding, Will, what the group need in terms of other contacts because we’ve certainly got them and they can contribute.

RICHARD WHITTAKER How does this fit into the business case? Would a chief executive be interested in a conversation about seals? The asset team, maybe.

GEORGE I think probably it’s the implication of what happens if those seals fail, it’s not the detail.

JAMIE HALL From experience, it’s usually best to highlight the risks in any safety issues and coming from that angle.

RICHARD WHITTAKER I’d agree with that. We did a big piece of work when we went down the MMC route and how many Victorian properties are still around? And how many years is that? Ever such a lot and every such a lot. I know different construction methodology, that’s secondary to the point, but we now get BOPAS accreditation and things like that and it’s all based on a 60 year lifespan. That’s of a unit or a plot, whatever you want to call it. When you try and break into it and say, well, how long is it for, kitchen, bathroom etc, from the industry, it becomes very difficult and we ended up adopting Decent Home Standards to inform the future investment plan. So, in principle, if we’ve got a high-rise with those steels in in the investment plan there would be a sum of money allocated 25 years from now, allowing for inflation, that says right, we need to replace them seals. We couldn’t get it at a competent level that would allow us to build a library at that time and that’s probably about 7 years ago, so not too far in the distant past, I know it’s a fast moving industry.

But the other thing about the 60 year lifespan model is actually an accounting financial model. So it says based on your initial capital cost and your rental income you should be able to throw that away and build another one. Of course we don’t, we keep them going. So, there is a disconnect between our definition of what lifespan is when you get into various landlords and clients and that sort of thing, in my experience.

WILLIAM BORTHEN It’s kind of probabilistic, it’s dependent on influencing facts which are outside of your control. So, how that property is going to be used, you may have an idea of how that building is going to be used when its designed, but in 20 years-time it might have been repurposed and used for something else, or twice as many people occupying it, or climate change could have had an influence on it or whatever else. All of these things have impact on the lifecycles of the assets within that property and that’s I think why you have to continually monitor the condition of the assets. And that lifecycle plan becomes more accurate the more regularly that you assess the condition and at the outset it’s purely going to be based on kind of reference numbers.

GEORGE In my experience, people make decisions not based on opportunities and positive things, they make decisions based on threats and concerns. Sadly, I think that’s what tends to happen. And one of the challenges, I was on a call earlier with a couple of people and we were looking at how the Building Safety Act is being applied to PFI projects. And one of the things is that they don’t fall under the Regulator, but they do fall under the Building Safety Act. Now, that’s an important differentiator because people are thinking if they don’t fall under the Regulator because the Regulator, at the moment, because of their bandwidth is only focused on high-rise residential blocks. But that’s only because they’ve only got so much scope, and they haven’t even got enough bandwidth to do what they’ve got to do.

But the law requires everybody to be complying with the Building Safety Act and also building regs. So therefore in a years-time, 3 years-time, when more resource comes onboard whoever the Regulator might be, whether it’s the fire service or whether it continues to be the HSE, they’re going to be scrutinised. And if you’ve got a building and you haven’t been keeping records of what you’ve been doing, then you are legally exposed. So, I think that’s worthwhile…

RICHARD WHITTAKER There’s a little addition into that in relation to PFI. Remember the PFI of the early 2000s and late 90s that was particularly around school buildings. What they failed to do within the original development agreement was to have a clause in there which said you will maintain the quality of the product. What they had was you will maintain the building. So, when it were built it might have had a door handle on it that cost £2, by the time it was handed back into the lease they’d put an 80 pence or 40 pence door handle on it, it would fall off in three seeks because they didn’t have to maintain the quality of the product.

And that theme fits in exactly with what you’re saying now in terms of the Building Safety Act, that’s what its driving because if you look at fire safety it’s a given that you have to maintain the quality of the product from handover until the end of its life. But you don’t see that, what you see is just specifications around air tightness, compartmentalisation and things like that and the discrepancy within it are there are so many certifying bodies that don’t necessarily have the same standard. Whereas if you’ve got your original standard, whatever that is, 8 out of 10, then you have to maintain 8 out of 10 for whatever it is. That’s the principle.

GEORGE Yeah, it depends on the PFI contract. In many PFI contracts, and I think probably more recent ones (maybe since the initial tranche), they do have to hand it back in the condition it was when they received it. So, that’s what a lot of PFI people are trying to tackle at the moment, PFI handback.

RICHARD WHITTAKER Often that is dictated by British Standards and the 80 pence handle might have a British Standard, but the value and its lifespan is less than a £2 handle that is also a British Standard. So, that’s why the point comes from about maintaining the quality of the product in relation to the original specification. It’s like a performance standard, really, you can put something else on but it’s got to perform as well if not better than what was fitted in the first place.

PAUL SHEEDY But in terms of who made that decision, is this back to what I was trying to make the point yesterday, it is culture, it’s just a culture in the sector where people don’t care. If you look at the way the Germans work and their standards etc, it’s different. And again if you look at how the US do building safety, it’s a far higher standard than we have, it’s built into the model. And I just think from what I’m seeing at the coalface there is a general culture of it just doesn’t matter, get way with what you can. And I think that’s the issue, if we change our narrative from getting away with what you can to actually let’s do this correctly then we wouldn’t be having half of these conversations.

RICHARD WHITTAKER And that gets down to procurement on value rather than capital cost, but it also gets down to the management of the information. Information gets lost because it’s a disparate thing that happens currently and that’s where the digitisation comes in. Marry those two things together and you’ve got a eureka moment for construction, as far as I’m concerned.

PAUL SHEEDY Exactly, and…now there is no excuse for us not to be changing. Digital twins should just be standard, we build a digital twin of everything and that digital twin is then constantly updated. I think this is a changing point. I was on a briefing call on Tuesday and the narrative of this person was…time when the amateurs are going to be sifted out of the industry. Those who do things correctly will survive and those amateurs who’ve been getting away with because it’s been a nice sector to make money won’t last.

GEORGE I’d love to support your view on that Paul. Like Richard, I’ve been involved in industry improvement initiatives for probably 40 years and there’s a lot of aspiration for people to do things better, but when it actually comes down to it it invariably, lawyers can absolutely thwart things. On the call yesterday, and I don’t think we’re moving our topic here, but let me just talk through this, Jo Harris mentioned the integrated project insurance and it was interesting that you were just talking about Michael Mainelli. I met Michael Mainelli when I was starting this journey 25 years ago…we’re talking about the same guy, he’s Mayor of London. He was a guru in mutual insurance and he explained it to me, this was the way in which the health care in America that a lot of health care was becoming unaffordable for hospitals because of claims.

So they got together and they put together a mutual insurance fund where rather than going to an insurer to get cover they actually put all of the fees into a mutual insurance fund, but they had a code of practice to work against. And it removed the need for the claims because they just got it right. And they then applied that, and I think that Michael was involved in it, to something called the Housing Association Property Mutual, which did the same thing for housing associations and it was very successful. And it was tracking what products were being installed, and in fact Chris Bicknell that Will was talking about earlier, he’s the former director of whole life and asset management from ACOM, he just moved on from that, but he was responsible for that.

So, that concept we carried forward into something called integrated project insurance and we had a project, and this was funded by the government, for us to come up with a new way of procurement whereby the client was part of the team and when a project was initiated the team was put together based on the quality of workmanship or quality of their capability, rather than their price, because nobody knew what the price was. The price would be sorted when you actually knew what you were delivering. And the first client for that was the MOD. But the lawyers persuaded the MOD not to go for it because it removes the opportunity for the client to pass the risk on the supply chain.

Everybody in the team is a member of the team and their pain share gain share is done between them, which I think is a good way of doing it. But that can address some of the things that you're saying, so the client, for example, on that tower block, the equity in that, it’s not that the risk is going to be transferred to an FM company, the FM company is part of the team. So therefore if it means spending more on seals because it’s going to make it a lot easier to replace those seals in years to come, then overall the whole life cost is lower. But what invariably happens is the construction industry then will break it back up again.

I mean, the whole idea of PFI was exactly that, but it was actually tying together a unitary charge for delivering something that was quality and will be maintained as quality. But, of course, the industry then broke it up into work packages and transferred all of the risk.

PAUL SHEEDY If you look at City Bank right beside me where I am now, that’s been refurbished it’ an 800 million pound project. I think that the buildings are only valued about a billion. And we had the Rogers building…that got taken right back to its steel structure, expanded on, absolutely massive cost again. I think a lot of new thinking needs to happen where we go with high-rise especially. I don’t think the last few decades and sort of sprouting up from the late 80s and the Canary Wharf that really enough thinking has gone on about where do we go lifetime wise with these. I’m on Canada Square right now. It’s just colossal and when we do get to a stage where the lifetime is running out, it’s a big issue.

WILLIAM BORTHEN I was wondering if we could convert some of these conversations into scenarios that could be put into this document. So, you talk about insurance reductions through good information, George, so understanding exactly what’s been installed. And that allows the insure to understand the level fo risk and therefore potentially reduce the cost of the premiums based on their understanding, I presume.

GEORGE But the insurance is all about information, that’s my understanding.

PAUL SHEEDY I’ll give you a quick update. We are now saying to the insurance sector if we can give you a digital twin we can feed you 24 hours 7 days a week on what the occupancy looks like in the building, on what all the fire systems are doing, are they working when anything breaks. Both the insurance company and the maintenance person gets the same email at the same email at the same time that there’s an issue with the sprinkler system or the fan in the stairway, whatever it might be. And they can know that OK, this building has got 7 days to fix X, 30 days to fix Y or 24 hours to sort this out. And if it’s being done correctly the building is compliant.

When it starts dropping below a certain compliance, maybe 85% is no longer there, this is when the insurance is void≥ And we then inform the local council and the fire service that City Bank or HPC or Canada Square is no longer compliant and the building has to be evacuated until it is complaint. This is where the transparency gets in because what I’m trying to push here is that the head of the tenancy association or whoever it may be…Canada Square. They, along with the fire service and the insurance companies have a transparency that the building is being run to X, Y and Z compliance level.

WILLIAM BORTHEN Is that happening, Paul?

PAUL SHEEDY That is happening through me kicking down doors.

WLLIAM BORTHEN That sounds pretty amazing and it also sounds like you could…tangible values against it, or not necessarily pounds, but a saving of so much percent, by giving the insurance company this level of information could reduce your premiums by 20% which would really help someone build the business case the implement something like that.

GEORGE I’ve been following a similar route to Paul, but I’ve been getting pushback from brokers, they’ve told me…the point that I’m making is that if somebody is a principal designer or they’re a client, if they don’t have the right quality of information about the buildings and therefore they’re not compliant then surely they’re not insured. And they’ve said to me and insurance company will never withdraw the insurance from their customers. They only will act, even if there is a claim, even if there’s an action, even if there is a prosecution, they’ll only react if somebody dies. So, for example, one of the things that Will was just talking about Tower 42, they’ve been a client of ours for probably 20 years. So all of the cladding panels on Tower 42 are inspected every 5 years, in detail. People go up on window cleaning cradles to go and inspect them and that information has been recorded in our software.

So I was saying to the broker surely, if a cladding panel falls out of a block in the city then the risk to reputation and, obviously, the people below, is huge. But what they’ve told me, and it’s a broker that I think they were responsible for Tower 42, they said the idea of that is sound but the sanction of the building not being insured is extreme because that’s unlikely to happen. Now, I think probably you’ve articulated it much more effectively than I have and we ought to get to together and talk that through. But I think you’re absolutely right, I love the approach and it’s one that I believe in strongly.

PAUL SHEEDY I actually met up last night at an event I was at with the company that insured the building in Dagenham and I said, fairly robustly, why are we insuring a building that had cladding from Grenfell? How did you not k now that the entire fire system didn’t work? What do you do about knowing or not knowing that fire doors are padlocked? And it was just a general attitude of ah, we just ensure these criteria. I said and what if you knew all of this? That you were aware that the fire system wasn’t working, you wouldn’t insure the building, would you? We would just increase the fees. That’s the issue here, you fundamentally have a bottom line that says unless these things are right we’re not insuring. There has to be an insurance-wide, you’re not some sneaky company coming and going we’ll do your subprime.

GEORGE I agree with you. It’s interesting because you have the same feedback that I’ve got. But I think you’re right, I guess one of the challenges is that the more information you give them the more detail they’ve got. I’ve been told by other brokers that the actuaries want as much information as they can possibly get, so that’s where I was coming from, which is probably the same as you. What the broker said to me was that if one insurer won’t take it, then somebody else will always take it, that’s the problem.

PAUL SHEEDY This is where we get that kind of subprime situation where there is always something that is going to go on. This is why things go wrong.

WILLIAM BORTHEN It’s like the black box that you can have installed in your car, if it drives fast and break heavily it increases your premium. The digital twin is the building equivalent of that, it’s showing you real time how someone is managing that building. So, there is precedent for the insurance industry in cars, it just sounds like it just needs to be pushed a bit further on buildings maybe. But I think it’s a great example that we can put in here, it’s really interesting and could be of serious financial benefit to people.

GEORGE I think it’s really good and it’s something we definitely should do in BIM In Asset Management. But it’s a solution to the problem, rather than part of the business case, in my view.

RICHARD WHITTAKER What it’s suggesting to me, and I wouldn’t be able to write this, Paul, is I’ve scribbled down some of the categories that we’ve put in terms of the business case description description of what is estimated cost, potential risks. Perhaps there is a section around assurance and the assurance comes into quality and maintaining your insurance cover, around this conversation.

PAUL SHEEDY Yeah, the financial area here is that one, you end up with lower insurance premiums. I think, William, that it’s going to be around 8 to 12% lower, I was hoping for about 22% but it looks like it’s 8-12. But also your asset value increases, so if you’ve got a building with that much data knowledge on it then the value of that building is also higher. So, what we’re trying to do at the moment, and it’s a lot of work, is build out a sort of scenario in an equation of if XYZ are in place then you now are able to with that data lower your energy usage by about 21 to 30% in a building. What is all of this financial, the fact that you have really tight systems in place.

What is the ROI ? 45mins 52secs on all of those benefits, but also what is the asset value increase by having a really smart billing. And a lot of what I’ trying to do is make dumb buildings smart and not look at new buildings to make them smart because that’s the easy bit. It’s retrofitting of the 80% of stock that’s still going to be here in 2050.

GEORGE I think one of the things that we might put onto the Miro board is what are those fundamental risks. So, there’s some that are statutory n risks, in other words you can get sent to prison for, others are reputational risks and others are operational risks. Those are the ones off of the top of my head. I suppose financial risks as well because, as Paul is saying there, if you’ve got more effective buildings then your operating costs should be lower.

WILLIAM BORTHEN Yeah, I can think of someone who is going to ask to contribute to this in Sodexo who’s a kind of costing guy, he knows everything about costing and putting prices against things. So, they did an initiative where they trying to gather all of the data on how long it takes to do certain maintenance tasks across all of Sodexo’s buildings globally and then understand exactly how long it takes to do an inspection on a fire door, for example. And to then understand that actually how many times do we need to do that every year and how many doors,,,how much can we price within our bids to make sure that we’re competitive, but we’re not going to lose money, because at the moment, or previously, there was no understanding of that really.

So that wouldn’t necessarily be a risk, I suppose it would be a risk that you could underprice a contract as an FM provider which would be a financial risk, but it’s also an opportunity to be more competitive. So, that might be something…I guess it just demonstrates that there’s so much in here, but by doing what you just said there, George, assigning these to levels of priority. Is that what you’re thinking?

GEORGE Yeah, Richard is far more knowledgeable about risk than I am at that senior level, but I would think the risk of being prosecuted is one that’s probably important, but they probably don’t think it’s going to happen because there aren’t many prosecutions that take place. Whereas reputational risk, ironically, probably is more important because that’s more likely to happen. Operational risk, I suppose it depends on the building really as to what the criticality is of things failing. If the smoke system doesn’t work in a tower block then it probably doesn’t cause too much pain for the chief exec of the housing association. It should do, but it probably doesn’t because it probably doesn’t impact on their rental income. And unless that gets fed-back to the fire authorities and the fire authorities take action against them then it’s not effecting them. But, if that becomes known in the press that that building is now unsafe because of this happening, then that might have a bigger impact.

WILLIAM BORTHEN I think that things could spread across all areas of risk. Like it would be a statutory risk or a reputational risk and probably a financial risk if something went wrong in a building.

RICHARD WHITTAKER There’s personal accountability that sits within that, and George is right, the chief exec is often blinkered to this because they have a director or head of asset management who they think will carry the can. But it’s depending on the seriousness either does or doesn’t. They will sort it out, they are the responsible person, but the accountable person still sits with the chief exec when it gets proper serious and into court cases, legal, health & safety investigations and that sort of thing. So, I think they are waking up to it, to a point, because of the nature of what they do they don’t have the skill set to fix it, they have to rely on the team. As we all do, we all rely on teams and their individual expertise cause it all forms part of the machine. So, the sell is the efficiency for the team member that adds the protection for the chief exec in relation to accountability, which it should naturally do if it’s the right information that is going into the system.

GEORGE Yeah, I think it’s the visibility of the information as well. So being able to identify, for example, what are the key assets, I think that’s what Will was saying earlier. To understand what the key assets are and what the implication of those assets failing so that you can then concentrate on things like warranties and things like that, can be focused at things…we’re not trying to boil the ocean here, what we’re trying to do is look at what are the things that are really impactful and then how do we then ensure that we’ve got the right information. Because this is about better information management, we’re not trying to…I absolutely agree with Paul, but our remit isn’t to change the culture of the industry, that’s a bigger thing. We might be able to help the competency of the industry by providing better information for the people to learn, but there’s only so far we can probably go.

But if we can provide them with the right information then I think that’s what it’s about. That’s why the scenarios are really critical because it brings it to life for people. I think if people understood that they’ve got some kit in there that’s maybe £10,000 that has an impact of potentially taking the building out when it fails. And if they knew that they had no warranty against it, and they could have had a warranty…or they’re not maintaining it to the warranty. One of the things I’ve put in the example is the fact that it’s extremely difficult to get manufacturer’s warranty details. When I say warranty details I mean the recommended tasks that the organisations should be following, and that’s the sort of thing that should be made more visible.

WILLIAM BORTHEN I think we’ve kind of talked about a couple of these things individually. It would be nice to be able to have define what the issues are a bit more completely, maybe. And maybe some of these categories are irrelevant or something…and then see if we can get people to submit scenarios for each of the issues.

GEORGE OK, so we’ve got, for example, statutory compliance, let’s say that’s a motivator. I think the statutory compliance has probably got three hit points: one is prosecution, or risk of prosecution; another is reputational damage. I can’t remember the third…

WILLIAM BORTHEN Financial.

GEORGE Yeah, i think ti probably was. So, what do we want to do…remember, this is the business case rather than how you’re going to do it. One of the things that jumps out at me, it’s probably because of what we do, it’s the locations of things and what they’re connected to. So, the relationship between what elements are in place…I would put smoke down in that list as well because everybody keeps telling me fire doesn’t kill very many people, it’s smoke that kills people. Everybody aligns fire and smoke together, but they’re very different. I would also say air quality.

WILLIAM BORTHEN There’s literally dozens.

GEORGE I was just thinking the Awaab's law thing is well made and I think is worth putting in there.

RICHARD WHITTAKER If it’s around Awaab’s law humidity is significant as well, similar to the fir and smoke, when people talk about climate change they talk about temperature. But there are two pillars of climate change, temperature and humidity. Because as the air gets warmer it carries more moisture from the sea through a convection principle, so it doesn’t capture as much water as it goes around its cycle, which is why we’re seeing more incidents of damp and mould. Probably peaked through Covid, but this wet, early sort of spring that we had this year, we’re paying a price for it now as we get towards the end of residential build.

GEORGE Yeah, I was thinking more of just using air quality as a high level because you’re quite right, that could be CO2, it could be humidity. It’s just a shorthand, really, for environment, I guess is probably a better term for it.

RICHARD WHITTAKER I think that would be absolutely bang on.

WILLIAM BORTHEN If we were to give a scenario for Awaab’s law what would be the information that you would need? Or what would be the…

GEORGE Well, if you were going to make something up on Awaab’s law I was going to say that you’ve got mould growing. The impact of the issue is that people can die, certainly be infected. The information that you need would be certainly the humidity of the room, but also what are the specifications of the room. What is the room being used for, the activities in the room, in some cases it’s because of what people are doing in the room. Who is best placed to provide the information, that would be the asset managers.

JAMIE HA:L From experience, it would be a mixture of asset and housing. Half the time we’re finding issues around damp and mould its properties which have been hard to get into and the tenants haven’t been responsive and reporting things.

GEORGE Yeah, because often damp and mould isn’t necessarily the fault of the people that are in that particular apartment, it might be somebody that’s above it or on the other side.

JAMIE HALL Yeah, we’ve had some issues around blocks of flats lately, usually around a lack of air circulation, or maintaining the temperature of the property.

RICHARD WHITTAKER Yeah, we’ve got some of that, really focused on communal areas because they tend not to have a heating source and because the doors aren’t being used because they’re not occupied and the AOV is closed, as it should be, get ready. And black mould is 24-48 hours whilst humidity is above 55%, the average humidity in the UK is 71%.

WILLIAM BORTHEN You can predict that if you had a good level of information on that property, you could say right, we know this communal area has got no natural ventilation or mechanical ventilation. We know there is no heating in there. We know from temperature and relative humidity sensors that the dew point at this time based on our information about the outdoor air temperature and things like that. We can define when mould will occur and can almost predict it.

RICHARD WHITTAKER I’m in the middle of writing a mitigation policy for somebody and i cannot tell you how difficult it is because people think that it’s somebody else’s problem. It’s the developer’s problem, only until the point of handover, then it’s the EA’s problem. Well, not really, it’s the building and people don’t understand. So we’re trying to promote this understanding to help people manage it and it is the 55% trigger which will support the propagation of black mould. But it's the ongoing management and maintenance of any sort of building in that respect. I mean, external humidity is 58% at the minute. I live in a 1980s bungalow, I’m in the little room, and I’m at 61% because I’m obviously breathing too much. But I don’t have black mould because it’s managed through trickle vents, through heating, through things like that.

So, it is that getting people form each party to understand how they manage it. And particularly for landlords. housing associations and whatever, t understand that they need to provide something that’s a fit for purpose solution. And if you look at BME groups, there are BME groups whose typical culture is that they bungle? 1hr 3mins 56secs things. They get the cheapest piece of meat that money can buy and boil it until its tender. And people dry washing on radiators and things like that. And people used to blame lifestyle and ignore it all, which is why Awaab suffered as he did, it’s why there was a fatality because people ignored it because they all put it down to lifestyle, outrageous. It’s down to not understanding your customer base and not putting the relevant solutions in place.

Humidistat extractor fans instead of ones that switch on with a light switch. Well, my word, it’s another £3 for each fan, go tell Awaab’s parents you wouldn’t spend the £3. It’s a frustration, I’m trying to support people who don’t want support in a solution, what they want to do is point a finger at somebody else.

WILLIAM BORTHEN And I guess that’s the purpose of the real world example, the scenarios, demonstrating where it’s been done well, where you’ve built up that level of information: who the tenant is, what their lifestyle is, whether you’ve got trickle vents, whether you’ve got humidistats, whether you’ve got this, that and the other. Have you put in place everything that can mitigate the risk of mould growth and being able to demonstrate that. And if you haven’t done it, what actions can you take to minimise the risk further. If we’ve got an example of where that’s been done then that could be promoted as an example of how good information management leads to good outcomes for Awaab’s law.

RICHARD WHITTAKER We're part way down the journey of something that may be along the lines of what Will’s saying, with a bit of anonymising and it’s identifying the point of risk transfer. So, people understand the point of risk transfer and ongoing management which fits into asset management fits into digitalisation? 1hr 6mins 52 secs and that sort of thing. I reckon within two years we’ll be fitting sensors in properties.

PAUL SHEEDY The Home of the Future in Salford, I know the Professor up there. Going back to your point, I’d never heard until I went there a few months ago. There’s actually a thing called a wet house and a dry house, and Asians tend to boil stuff that creates extra humidity. So he’s saying until we start really analysing to the nth degree they hadn’t realised the thing between a wet house and a dry house. And it’s exactly what you said, it’s down to culture, how you actually cook and all of the rest, and that is what causes these humidity situations. And they’re building the House of the Future up there and they’re trying to take into account how do we build it for all different types of cultures we know have in the Uk. I’m actually here from Ireland, and we boil everything. But it’s very interesting to see, they bring the houses down to minus 30 or 40 degrees, up to 50 or 60 degrees, it’s fascinating. Let me see what I can do to try and get you guys on a trip.

GEORGE Who runs that?

PAUL SHEEDY Salford University, they built up an enormous what looks like a huge factory and build house inside those factories, and as I say they take it down to minus 20 to 30 degrees up to 50 to see how the house performs.

GEORGE So, coming back to the business case, I think one of the things we need to drive is to get as many of these scenarios as possible.

WILLIAM BORTHEN Yeah, and I think maybe understanding what the issues are to be able to maybe reach out to people beyond this group. People who have got expertise in these certain areas to try and populate those scenarios. So, I’m happy to try and create some issues out of these and I’m sure Richard and whoever else can help me with that.

RICHARD FREER Can I just suggest something. It’s a lot easier to get a scenario out of somebody if you’re asking them a question. If you say do you have an example of this you’re much more likely to get a yes than could you go on the website and fill in this box. So, is it possible for you guys to, at a high level, medium level, whatever, give some sort of direction for the person who you want to get a scenario from. I’m looking at what you’ve got on the screen, is it 5 on statutory, 5 on health & safety, 5 on this, that and the other, is it that that you’re looking for? Have you got some sort of rough idea of the 5 areas or 20 areas that you want scenarios in?

WILLIAM BORTHEN I suppose these categories, my knowledge is limited so this might not be correct, but i’ve thought about this and these are the categories…

RICHARD FREER Can I say does everybody agree with that? Does anybody disagree with that? Are there any more that should be on there? Are there some on there that you think are wrong? Has anybody got anything that should be added to that?

GEORGE One rich area for us is the quality of O&Ms and health & safety files which I think is covered in handover, but it’s possibly not as explicit. And also it doesn’t…

RICHARD FREER That’s the next stage, George, let’s just look at the headlines first. Does anybody disagree or want to add to what Will has put down? I’m going to take that a s a no. That being the case, we now need to split those 8-10 headings down into subheadings. And George, you’re saying for handover there needs to be one for O&M.

GEORGE Yeah.

RICHARD WHITTAKER I’ve got one to add, which is soft landings and customer engagement.

RICHARD FREER Let’s get O&M and soft landings put. Has anybody else got a subheading for these headings? That you think needs to be covered so we can just focus it down a little bit to ask the question, rather than leave it vague.

JAMIE HALL Handover, would that only be new builds? Or would it be acquisitions as well?

GEORGE THat’s a good point.

JAMIE HALL I’m just thinking a couple of years ago we took on some properties from another organisation and they provided very little information on their assets.

RICHARD WHITTAKER Yeah, it applies to both in my view, because there is so much acquisition going off nowadays. And when you go back to firer safety and its acquisition, where are the records of the compartmentalisation? Good luck with that one. So, we commissioned independent surveys with borescopes and things like that to check it which didn’t go down well with the finance people, but gave everybody else a sense of comfort. And these were new build properties.

GEORGE Where would safety cases fit in that?

RICHARD WHITTAKER Health & safety. And where it says asbestos deleterious materials that seems to be me managed quite well since the change of regs in 2012. But the Building Safety Act, does Awaab’s law come in that bit? Or does Awaab’s law come into handover? Social Regulation Act and Awaab’s law I think comes into handover, but I think the Building Safety Act would come into health & safety. And I think there is going to be a change to the measure of risk from high to complex buildings and people need to start preparing for that.

WILLIAM BORTHEN Do you think remove asbestos deleterious materials and put Building Safety Act…

RICAHRD WHITTAKER I don’t hear it as a big thing at the minute, asbestos, which suggests it’s being managed as well as electricity, which is just as dangerous if you don’t manage it right. Building Safety Act and digitisation, perhaps.

GEORGE I think using Building Safety Act is pretty specific because there is also the fire Safety Act. So…

RICHARD WHITTAKER Safety Acts, perhaps.

WILLIAM BORTHEN We talked earlier about quality of PFI…

RICHARD WHITTAKER Oh, quality of products, and that’s about maintaining it.

WILLIAM BORTHEN You talk about critical assets and single points of failure earlier, George, understanding if that asset fails what’s the downstream impact to the business or for the organisation. I’m just trying to think where that would…we’ve got critical systems, maybe I’ll just put in single point of failure in here. There’s some categories here, like soft FM, I don’t know a great deal about that subject, so I’m not sure if that’s represented anywhere or if it’s valid.

JAMIE HALL I think cleaning, catering, security, grounds keeping of communal areas. A badly kept communal area can lead to accidents.

GEORGE I think we’ve got the main drivers there.

WILLIAM BORTHEN So, potentially we could go out to people and ask the question on these.

RICHARD FREER You’re more likely to get an answer. Not exactly put somebody on the spot, but kind of. So, the first thing that needs to happen is everybody in this meeting at the end of this meeting needs to go on the website…onto the scenario page and fill out the form. And then we’ve got a good start.

GEORGE I’ve done the four that are on there at the moment, so I can attest to the fact that it takes about 15 minutes. But I think it’s a worthwhile thing to do because it makes you think. Because everybody comes up with, Ben Evans came up with the fact that he doesn’t get the right information about flat roofs or whatever. That might have been you, Will, flat roofs.

WILLIAM BORTHEN But if you’ve had feedback from others, George, pass it on to me if you want me to put it into the right format, or I can reach out to those people.

GEORGE Let me just look at what Ben Evans wrote. People love telling stories, this might be a way that we can get people engaged. (shares screen). A sample ceiling void inspection at a hospital well ahead of their actual site visit. That's it. So basically they don’t have ceiling plans and also they don’t have proper room references. There’s another one from Richard Bacon, who is his colleague. I’ll email them to you, Will.

WILLIAM BORTHEN So, hopefully we’ll tick off some of the ones in this list over the next few days.

GEORGE I think that all we’ve got to do to get this really full is to send it to Sharon from Avesta. Sharon is a fire stopping specialist and she’s a very rich source of examples of people doing things wrong.

RICHARD FREER And she’s very good at sharing it. And on our BIM blackbox site, which was more about incidents, she put about 4o or 50, so we must get her.

GEORGE This is worth showing, he’s given a couple of cracking examples here. They cut the mains water supply pipework because there was no as-built external areas in the O&Ms. And the same job almost took out 11 kilovolt cabling too. Having to do a complete revalidation of operating theatres. They’re quite good, but it’s a matter of then taking them and putting them into what the impact is of that.

WILLIAM BORTHEN Yeah, I can build on that, I expect.

GEORGE Jamie, if you can come up with some things that follow the same methodology of what is the issue, what’s the impact of it and then how is it resolved or who could resolve it.

RICHARD FREER Will, it would be helpful if everybody has got that Miro board.

WILLIAM BORTHEN Yeah, I pasted a screenshot of it into the meeting chat.

JAMIE HALL I should tell you the one about the asbestos sometime.

GEORGE That’s a point, asbestos is still a big risk with people, they’r just having to mange it, Richard. So I think we probably should, Will, have it on the list because it is something that’s a recognised risk. Is there anything else, Richard? Have we got some actions from that? I think we have.

RICHARD FREER Yeah, I think that’s great. Everybody in the meeting now has a task and we’ve got a route forward to actually get people doing this. So, when you’re out and about doing your day jobs, ask people. It’s as simple and as complicated as that.

GEORGE And if there is other people in your organisation that could contribute, or people that are clients or mates or whatever, get them to put it in as well.

CHAT

Dimitrios Theodorou (External) 12:12 pm

Hello to everyone. Apologies but cannot speak at the moment. I am new to you group and I am interested in integration of Information Requirements in the BIM as well as generating IDS files for validation the "handed over" model for FM/AM (not necesssarily CObie ) Thank you

George Stevenson (External) 12:19 pm

We have a specific group looking at that so if you send me your details, i will plug you in

William Borthen (External) 12:26 pm