BIMinAM FIRE SMOKE AND ACCESS STRATEGIES WORKSTREAM GROUP MEETING 24-11-2024
GEORGE STEVENSON I’ll explain where we’re coming at from this. It’s in the PFI working group, under that not because it’s particular to PFI, it’s just that PFI has got a particular interest in this and that’s where it was triggered. One of the Special Purpose Vehicles (SPVs) at Albany told me probably a month ago that they were conducting retrospective fires strategies on some of their projects. And I was intrigued as to why they were investing that money because, with the greatest respect Ann. Ann is from Resolis so she’s an SPV.
The SPVs don’t tend to spend the money that they don’t need to. So I was intrigued as to why they were doing it. And that came at the same sort of time that in the BIM4Housing design working group meeting we were discussing how the building regs PD role is operating. And what emerged from that was the importance of having an up to date fire strategy. And what the PDs were saying was that often that’s a big problem because the fire strategy that they are working with is either insufficiently complete or it was done two stages before the period that they were at.
So I think from that point of view is quite interesting. The whole process of getting that information up to date is relevant in terms of design, but more importantly the retrospective aspect of things is doing it for existing buildings. And when I probed it a little bit more I came to realise that actually if you do a fire risk assessment and you don’t have an up to date fire strategy, there’s all sorts of question marks as to the validity of that. Is that right, Kevin?
KEVIN BAYLISS Yeah, definitely from my point of view. We’ve got an element with Wolverhampton Homes at the moment where we’re looking at a number of properties where from a fire strategy point of view. The building was done in the 60s, so trying to understand what was the original fire strategy to what we’ve got now. And there’s, I wouldn’t say a disagreement, but there’s a line with our fire engineer and it’s at a point that thinks it’s this.
And the client might think it’s slightly different so they want to do this type of scope, which there’s a bit of crossover around that. Which from a PD point of view put’s you in a very difficult position to understand actually should we be doing that or should we be doing that. And the risks are a lot worse because now we’ve got more electrical equipment and so on in those areas, which you wouldn’t originally have had. So then trying to get some clarity around that, if you had a recognised fire strategy there, done dusted, then the conversation with the client, the tenants, all of that stuff.
And knowing what you can do and more confidence of that evidence is a lot easier than it is actually this is what we think and then this is what fire engineers…the current regs is what this should look like, this is how we perceive it to be. So without that information that gives you that evidence it’s very difficult to have. So we’re trying to have conversations around that with the client around what their scope is and their process against what the concerns of our engineer has and stuff like that.
So this is exactly what we’re finding and then we’re doing the PD role as an organisation on it. So then that’s quite difficult to be able to demonstrate evidence, so there’s a lot of talking around that at the moment.
GEORGE STEVENSON Yeah, and the other thing is that some of the work that is then spinning out of maybe a fire risk assessment, like replacing fire doors and things like that, may actually be unnecessary in some cases because it’s not reflecting back to the fire strategy. Karl, you’ve got a lot of experience in this area, could I ask you to contribute your thinking on it?
KARL GASSON This touches broadly on what we discussed at the last meeting. I agree entirely that the fire strategy document is an essential document. You’ll recall that I work primarily in social housing. And even in new build a fire strategy document is a rare thing. I absolutely share your concern about Regulation 38 packs. In fact I’m sitting here this morning working on a fire strategy for a very simple block of flats that’s under construction. And your comment about the Reg pack resonates really quite strongly because it’s not part of my remit to come up with that pack.
But it’s my firm belief that without that pack the fire strategy document is less effective than it might otherwise be. As we talked about last time…and primarily my background is as a fire risk assessor. It’s my view that in a simple building a fire risk assessor can assume a fire strategy. There should be sufficient information from inspecting the building to be able to work out what the intended fire strategy was. And as part of the fire risk assessment to ensure that the provisions made as part of the design and construction and still in place and still effective and so on Article 17 stuff.
In a more complex building I don’t believe that’s the case, or should not be the case. As others have said here this morning there should be a fire strategy document. Because the problem is as the complexity increases the ability to rebuild that complexity as part of a fire risk assessment becomes much more difficult. Somebody mentioned fire doors. It’s a classic example, I have a client, a housing association who’s head office, the fire doors were inspected by somebody else. And they were instructed to replace 7 or 8 doors, each of which appears to be a fire door, it has fire seals and labels identifying it as a fire door.
But actually the glazed walls either side are not fire resistant. It’s not a line of compartmentation and therefore to have replaced those doors would be nonsensical and a waste of money. A fire strategy document showing the lines of compartmentation and fire resisting constructions and so on, reviewed first by the fire door inspector, would have removed that risk of the client spending lots of money unnecessarily. So in summary, a fire strategy document is essential. The Reg 38 pack is essential. How on earth do we get everyone else in this chain to agree that that’s the case and spend the money required to put that right?
GEORGE STEVENSON Has anybody else got any examples to contribute here?
PAUL WHITE I don’t know whether I can add much, but just a couple of comments. I don’t know whether people realise that before Building Regulation 38 we had exactly the same requirements in Building Regulation 16. So this goes back a long, long way. The other thing that I have seen on quite a lot of smaller buildings is actually on the drawings of the building, if you can find those or course, that the fire strategy is written around the outside edge of the drawing. So it takes the Approved Document B and says this is this and this is this.
And it’s those compartmentation drawings that you can’t do an inspection unless you have those. And that’s what life makes vyer difficult because you’ve got people going in who don’t really realise what a compartmentation is, and yet they’re inspecting things that maintain compartmentation. And as I think Karl said, you find something with fire door written on it because somebody thinks it is, but it’s got glass all the way around it, so it couldn’t possibly be, But somebody at some point has labelled it up as that. Or they used a piece of wood that would have been used in a fire door, is usually the most common thing they’ve done.
So, if you do have some old drawings of buildings you may well find that the fire strategy is written around the outside of some large AO drawings for each floor, because I have seen that.
GEORGE STEVENSON Paul’s expertise is in smoke ventilation. And one of the reasons I’ve asked Paul to be part of this group is that what’s become clear. When I discussed this with Matt Wilkie who runs the PFI group, that’s where this kicked off initially. What Matt was saying is that he’s got schemes where the fire strategy actually conflicts with the access strategy. So what actually happened on that hospital where a local authority is a subtenant, so they’ve got some spaces. And what they’ve done is they’ve put maglocks on their doors.
And in this particular example one of the doors is actually part of the fire escape. So what we’ve actually got there is a combination of the access strategy, which is there to keep people out, conflicting to some extent with the fire strategy which is looking to get people out. Now part of the problem, he told me, was that often a subtenant may not want to tell the landlord or the main responsible person what they’re actually using spaces for. Because people are nervous of a landlord charging them more or stopping them from doing things. Or it may be that they don’t realise the importance of doing that.
So therefore you get a situation where the responsible person, because it’s not down to an FM to provide the fire strategy, it’s down to the controller of those spaces, the landlord. But if they’ve got subtenants who aren’t providing them with the information then there’s obviously holes in the overall strategy. So at the last meeting, we’ve also got in this group Assa Abloy helping us. So we’ve got the means to draw these things together. Chun, you’re an architect, have you considered this in terms of what you’re doing?
CHUN QING LI Yes, I have, but mostly we’re doing residential. So we’re building the software, obviously trying to automate this process, anything can be captured knowledge based. This is what we’re working on in the background slowly. I’m not an expert in the fire which is very, very complicated. But what we’re trying to achieve in the near future is capture knowledge and use those engineering templates, while the designers doing on the design. So it prevents people making mistakes. It’s exactly the same workflow in the aerospace automotive industry.
PAUL SHEEDY I had a meeting last week with a particular very large high end club in London. And he said his big problem now is trying to work out exactly what he’s supposed to do between Martyn’s Law and fire evacuation, He’s got a high risk club and he’s sitting there thinking if I’m not here when something does go on, who in the organisation is going to make all of those right critical decisions. I think Martyn’s Law and fire evacuation are going to cause some big issues for companies going forward because of what they actually have to do in complex situations. So, it’s one thing we should look at as well.
The other thing is getting these regulations correct are one thing, it’s the ongoing assessment of what’s happening in these buildings. One of the biggest high rise buildings in the City of London right now hasn’t had a sprinkler system working for probably 8 months. Most of the sprinkler system has been down for 8 months yet that’s OK, and I just don’t get where this is going. We really have to start digitalising all of these assets and having real time alerts when things go wrong to…the fire service of that city or the regulators. I think there’s too many risks being taken and we are a fraction away from another Grenfell-type situation happening, that’s for sure.
PIERRE VENTER I’ve made contact with the guys from Dubai about the BIM mandate. And principally we’re talking about digital, but it’s more than that. In some ways the BIM part is actually just a thin little layer depending on what the requirements were for the models to deliver. And so part of this is there’s actually a hands on kind of thing. How do you stop a fire door being changed if there’s maintenance taking place etc? And that’s in the outside shell. We’re not talking about inside private tenancies.
And I think that’s something that we really do need to focus on and say how do you implement a reasonably robust methodology that the maglocks don’t get changed without it being recorded? And in this case I’m going to stand on the side of technology, is that if there is a maglock the maglock must come with a set of criteria that just says beep, beep, beep, this is the problem. And we can automate it as far as we like, but in reality is the tenant is the owner the developer going to pay for that to support it?
And it’s the same issue about asset management is unless there is a real driver it’s just seen as an overhead and will be one of those, likely air conditioning or the sprinkler system, park it on one side, it won’t happen until there is a calamity. And so it’s trying to be predictive in a way that’s robust enough to try and identify that. And that’s where the asset management CAFM system start doing that because the moment that anything gets done it gets recorded. And that must be a mandatory thing.
PAUL WHITE The issue with something like the sprinkler system not working. Theoretically that should now be being advised to the local fire brigade, on a complex building. Now, there’s two issues with that. One is you have now provided evidence that you haven’t done something which you have to do. And the point is that you’re absolutely right, if it’s not working for 8 months somebody is at fault. But the problem that you’ve got going forward is if there’s complete and utter evidence that this has been the case. And if something goes wrong in that building that needed that thing to be working, it’s not going to be hidden for very long. And I think that people need to be aware of that to go forward.
I had a similar thing in a relatively small building, there was a fire in the plant room, they couldn’t decide who’s fault it was so they didn’t decide to fix anything. The smoke control system was in there. So there was no smoke control system for well over a year, during which time there probably should have been a fire risk assessment being done by somebody which should have highlighted that fact etc. And they finally when they got the insurance sorted out and it wasn’t our fault, we got an order to go and fix it. But what you’ve got is if you’ve got a whole series of evidence of people not doing stuff and you really need to be aware of that.
Because in the Grenfell Tower enquiry on the last day of the smoke control I went in to download the last report from Barbara Lane, only to discover there was an email from me and an attachment to an email that suddenly appeared in evidence. Which I’d sent in 2009 for a company that I hadn’t worked for 10 years. So nothing is hidden, that’s what I’m saying to you. Luckily in that email I said pretty much what I would say today, so I wasn’t worried about it. But what people have got to realise is that if you don’t do anything about something there is huge amounts of evidence that you haven’t.
GEORGE STEVENSON I think that’s really helpful and the example is very telling there as well.
CHRIS JEFFERS It’s a fascinating conversation. It’s an observation, the majority of my time is spent with or trying to help people who manage facilities. And the observation being is that the level of skills and expertise that we’ve talked about already on the call is not something that I recognise immediately in terms of the people that I work with. They are superb and wonderful people don’t have this expertise, do need to be aware where to look for and how to reach out for that expertise. And Pierre you mentioned about the CAFM system, I completely agree.
But a lot of the work we do is try to help people use those CAFM systems in an optimum manner, which is true I suppose, but sometimes it’s just get the basics right. And I think, in terms of the comment, is there’s just a significant gap between the level of expertise on this call and the conversations that we’re having and the information that is actually already out there, and the ability of a cohort of people who are responsible for managing these buildings to actually implement that information. And I fully agree, and I know George you’re saying that’s what we’re here for, I totally get that.
But it’s still very prevalent and it’s really concerning. And sometimes when you talk to the people who are doing these sorts of jobs across all different sectors, you think well, where do you start with this? And of course, you start with compliance, you start with what keeps us out of jail. And some people are very good at that. The people that are really good at that I think are still not having the conversations that we’re having here. So, it’s just an observation that that gap is quite significant.
GEORGE STEVENSON So hold that thought, Chris, about compliance, because that’s certainly something that we discussed last week at London Build on a couple of the panels. And I want to come back to that because that’s one of our big challenges. But the other point is I think a misunderstanding about what normally goes into a CAFM system. Now, part of the challenge there is that CAFM is Computer Aided Facilities Management, which is quite wide.
Most CAFM systems are actually implemented…to produce work constructions for planned maintenance work. And that planned maintenance work is either statutory items that need maintaining, or operationally critical items. So a lot of the things we’re looking at in terms of fire strategy are passive. And therefore they wouldn’t be put into a CAFM system.
CHRIS JEFFERS It’s a massive problem, we’ve got exactly that on two projects right now, It’s where you have the assessments done by an independent, they say where are the assets on a CAFM system? They’re not even on there.
GEORGE STEVENSON That doesn’t mean that they couldn’t be put into a CAFM system, but there are very strong commercial reasons why people limit how many assets are put into a CAFM system. Because unless you can demonstrate that you’ve been doing the maintenance on cavity barriers or walls or penetration seals, then that comes up as a penalty, or could do. I think understanding what we mean by a CAFM system is quite important.
KEVIN BAYLISS I’m just back on Paul’s point and what we talking about. I’m very closely with what happened with Grenfell and some things connecting forward on it. And I just want to make a point about the compliance piece. The accountable person should have a system for MOR and what needs to be really thought about, which is a bit more tricky, is there needs to be that resident engagement, which was a big thing that was failing on Grenfell. And it’s understanding that it’s MOR and people need to know who are going to be in those buildings day in and day out that this is safe.
If they spot anything they know what they’re looking at, but it’s very difficult from a non-technical manner. So there’s a couple of things that the BSA came out of that that really need to be considered around how do you get that tenant engagement? How do you make sure there is enough information for them in a format for them to understand? In terms of sprinklers, for example, that should have been a thing raised straight away on an MOR if it was a high risk building. If it’s a high risk building there’s a responsibility for that ongoing to maintain that.
So for me, that would be something…MOR that they’d have to do that work straight away. So I don’t see why that should really delay those things from that point of view. But I think there’s a real element to how do you engage with tenants and how does that work, from my point of view.
GEORGE STEVENSON What you’ve actually brought things back to, Kevin, is something that I do want to cover here, and that’s how people are using spaces. Because the resident side of things, I’ve got a couple of observations that were made to me last week on resident engagement. And also that has a big impact on the fire strategy because if people are using spaces differently than they were originally designed to be used, therefore the strategy needs to change, it needs to be updated. And what’s the mechanisms that we’ve got to actually do that.
Coming back on the resident engagement one, I was with Neville who used to be the head of fire safety at Southampton Council. I was with him the other night and he was talking about Dame Judith and the conversations that he’s had with her. And he ended up being rather unpopular at one of the meetings because she was repeating here oft narrative about landlords need to engage properly with the residents. We were talking about this in relation to Awaab’s Law, the whole damp and mould side of things and fire and water safety as well.
But what he was saying was that when they try and engage with residents they really, really struggle to get them interested. He said the amount of effort that the council were doing to actually make people aware of the systems and technologies and things that they were putting in for fire safety, was very, very challenging. What he was saying is that the trouble is in a council it’s also political. So you’ve got a councillor, what that councillor does is he or she announces that they’re going to lobby for new kitchens or new bathrooms.
So what interests you more? Fire safety or a new kitchen? Understandably, people go for the new kitchen. And he was saying that that’s a constant problem that they’ve got in terms of getting engagement. And it’s also the case that certainly in terms of the damp and mould side of things, clearly there are problems with the buildings, clearly there are problems with maintenance. But a major part of the risk is actually coming down to how residents are using their spaces. And that’s not something that the council, even now by law, they are responsible for.
Well, they’re responsible for sorting out the impact of things, but there’s a real danger of it just becoming something that is the next PPI claims for lawyers to go around and rap up people. Because you’ve got to respond in 24 hours which is probably draconian. So, I think there’s nothing our community can do about that side of things, but what we can do is understand what the problem is and how can we try and fix it. And part of the activity I’d like this group to be looking at is how can we look at fire strategies and deal with the fact that there aren’t that many fire engineers around.
And those that are are reluctant to get involved in too much complexity. Because a lot f the things they need to be able to do a fire strategy, things like having compartmentation drawings, that work could be done more effectively through our community. And therefore when the fire engineer is carrying out the work he may be able to do that within two days rather than two weeks. So it means it becomes more affordable. We need to automate some of these things.
PAUL SHEEDY Just going back to the point Kevin was discussing, and one of the issues is that from what I can see there’s at least 4 if not 5 cooks in the kitchen here. You’ve got the building agents, operation agent, at least 2 or 3 independent people coming in on the sprinkler system. I was trying to get to the point of who actually signed off this piece of documentation 3 weeks before we arrived and said it was all working correctly. And 6 months later when we came back nobody had done anything about it.
And I think the problem is too many cooks spoil the broth, in this particular scenario with that particular building. Saying that where I am right now, I was here at half ten one night with a power cut, not one fire evacuation sign was working because nobody had changed the batteries for 12 years. None of the fire doors were open because it had changed from a manual system to a mobile phone system. And nobody knew there was me and 4 other people on the 39th floor of the building and they don’t know I’m here today and they won’t know that I’m here tomorrow.
And the same goes for 22 Bishopsgate. 64 floors, 13,000 people and nobody has a clue that anybody is in that building because convenience means the doors open when you leave, so you tap in but you don’t tap out. And to me that is the most basic, stupid mistake we’re all making in these high rise buildings. I think we’ve got to look at is there a way of digitalising this whole golden thread from design stage. I was with George at a conference and Dame Judith Hackitt was speaking and she was saying 69% of high rise buildings plans that get to Stage 1 are rejected because they haven’t got the basic fire solutions in place at Gateway 1.
Now I don’t know how the hell architects in 2025, years and years after Grenfell, are still submitting designs that 69% get rejected. There’s a lot of finger pointing to be done in this industry itself. But I do think we should from design right through to implementation to handover we need to digitalise the whole thing. So you are like a docusign handing over that you have done this point, this point. From what I can see there’s too much paperwork here. And I’ve certainly been in meetings where we were shocked someone said yeah, we just box tick if we haven’t had time to do it.
Maybe I’m just getting unlucky and hanging around with some really dodgy people who don’t give a damn. I just think we have to move forward and work out from start to finish how we digitalise this. And where you fall into fault you ask how much time am I doing behind bars and crack on with it,
GEORGE STEVENSON I think that’s right and one of the big challenges that we’ve got an opportunity to deal with is as an impartial group we should be able to produce some means the influence the people that are controlling the purse strings, or should be responsible, to make sure that they know they are responsible. And by doing that, if we can come up with some best practice examples, or case studies. I’ve been involved over the last 2 months with a group called Start With Smart. These are all people that are involved in BMS systems, controls, all of that sort of stuff.
And it’s been really enlightening for me because what I’ve come to learn is that what they’re doing actually complements what we’re doing in the BIM world very effectively. The problem8 is that in the BIM world we’re not actually thinking in the way that they think from a controls perspective. Excuse me Pierre, I don’t mean that as too much of a generalisation. But what we’re actually doing to some extent is producing information that’s compliant with ISO 19650 and all of these sorts of things. But we’re not engaging adequately with the building as a function, as it were.
Rather we’re looking at it as…the light came on for me, this weekend I was talking to some people. And in many ways what we’ve got with what we’re delivering, we’ve got the physical building. Whereas in the controls world to some extent they’re not bothered about the physical building. What they’re doing is they’re thinking of things as a logical building and therefore the network and relationships of what they’re doing and what conditions they are monitoring. There’s an opportunity if we bring those things together properly, then we can actually test things.
And the guy that’s leading this Start With Smart group is Justin Kirby. He’s been hammering us as a group for the last month or so to say we need testable cases. We need to say, Paul’s example there that scenario, if we could capture that as an example. And then we can work back up the line to say what did we actually need in terms of asset information. And why do we actually need it, because all too often we’re doing things because it’s in the spec or because it’s in the BIM execution plan. Whereas actually what we need to do is understand what happens if that is missing.
PAUL WHITE Putting all of this together and the other Paul saying I can’t believe that architects aren’t doing stuff properly. There’s another word for if, I call it space, the final frontier. Once we start to get some space back in to buildings so that we can put all the services in that actually people want and we’re not preoccupied by lettable space. And of course lettable space restricts the height of building you can do because if you can’t let it for a certain amount of money you can’t build it in the first place. But the point is that we’ve never been given any space to do it.
So you’ve ended up with a load of people solving problems that they shouldn’t have had in the first place, but therefore doing it wrong and therefore now it’s all being found out. I can’t go to a building and find anything right and I’m getting quite depressed about it, to be honest. We’re working to try and lead it from the front end. What we do about the legacy issue, I don’t know. And unfortunately I think that, if you do an inspection on fire dampers or the smoke control system and there’s a load of things wrong with it. Then the first thing you’ve got to do is put that report in and make sure that the fire risk assessor sees it so that they can assess the risk.
And I’m sure sometime in this midterm there’s not enough time, money or people to fix all of the problems that we’ve got. We can’t fix the problems to make it perfect, it’s never going to happen. So I think we need to look into how we do some more risk assessment, but we still need to know where everything is and I think that’s what we’re talking about here. But you cannot start without a fire strategy. If you’ve got a smoke control system and you don’t know how it’s supposed to work, then it’s wrong and the design needs to be checked, full stop.
Because people have done things that they say are co-compliant, but it’s not difficult to be co-compliant for smoke control in the basement. Extract from each area, 10 air changes an hour and 100 newtons on the door. It doesn’t tell you about what products you have to use to achieve that. So it can well be co-compliant, but it may not be compartmented and it may not be safe, but it’s co-compliant. So we need to do away with the co-compliancy, you have to go back to the building regulations which is protect escape routes and build a safe building from a fire point of view.
KARL GASSON I just wanted to come back to something that Paul Sheedy was talking about around the digitisation of building information and maintenance information and the Reg 38 stuff and so on, which I think is absolutely the right ambition. But I have some issues with it. I think largely the technology to make it possible is done, it’s here, we can use it. I can illustrate this again with a fire door story. It’s not unusual for me to find fire doors that have labels on them that appear to me to be intended to lead me to some digital data. And indeed it’s not unusual to see two such labels on a door.
And I have, with only one exception, I’ve not been able to find the data that’s connected via a QR code or a barcode or whatever it might be. So I think that making8 the data available for the lifespan of the building is challenging and I don’t believe that we have a solution for that currently. And then the other element of this…is that digital building information reminds me a great deal at the moment of the early days of the internet. Where all of the people putting money into it wanted to create what they referred to then as walled gardens, where they controlled the access to information that might be available via the World Wide Web.
And I see that very much now that those organisations that have built platforms for managing digital data do so as a commercial activity, they want to corral their clients, to restrict them to that platform. And I get that commercially entirely, of course they do. But I think that this is bigger than that and in the same way that the internet now is essentially open access, we need to arrive at the same situation with building data. Where the data exists in open formats that can be secured of course, but the client, the building owner, can choose how to access that data, what platform to use and so on.
I think those issues are probably key, ensuring sustainable longterm access to the data that has been expensively put together and ensuring that commercial providers don’t turn this into a way to make money. George, the example I gave you when we talked about this is that I had to have my dog putdown 18 months ago. The reason being I couldn’t afford the vet fees. And the reason I can’t afford the vet fees is because venture capitalist s have bought all of the veterinary surgeries in this county and increasingly own the insurance companies as well.
And I fear that we will create a similar situation with digital data for buildings in that the service providers own access to our data. And they’ll say hey, the data is yours, it’s all good, it’s always your data. We’ve got it safe on our servers here, you can access it through our platform, it will cost you £50,000 a year, or pick a number. And I think we need to fix those issues.
GEORGE STEVENSON What you’re saying there, I’m passionately supporting that. I’ve been involved in what’s now called the golden thread since when it was first mentioned, back in 2020. And one of the things that I’ve been preaching is exactly the example that you’ve said there, where you’ve got maybe a specialist door DNA system, as it were. Somebody sighs up for that and then the only way you find out anything about the door is by going through that particular portal. It’s the same with inspections of fire stopping, for example.
The only way you can see where the product or that particular item is, is by going through that portal. Now, the encouraging thing, this group is a task and finish group, so we’re not here to just moan about things. What we’re actually here to do is share our ways or solving that particular problem. So I’ve got something hopefully that’s encouraging for people. And that is about 5 years ago when I started on this golden thread journey, when I was talking to different software companies, they really, although they said they were interested in collaboration and integration, they actually weren’t, they just put barriers in place.
Over this last year I’ve seen a big change. I was down at Digital Construction Week in June and everybody I was speaking to was saying we’ve got API access to our data. Now, the only thing with that is consistency of information about how their clients are actually using the software. Just before I came on here, we’re doing some work with Plan Radar. And one of the problems that Plan Radar have got, it’s not really a problem for them but it’s a problem for us all, is that everybody that uses Plan Radar they can set up their own templates. Now that’s seen as being very flexible and great, which is true.
But unless people are using a common classification and taxonomy and a common method of working, then we’ve just got chaos. So part of what I’m trying to do here is encourage the use of standardisation in terms of taxonomy, classification and they way that FM is being structured. And there’s some really good stuff coming out that we, Active Plan, are now part of. And it’s called the ADS Alliance which is bringing together Uniclass, NRM and SFG20 which I think is going to be quite interesting. So that’s maybe a step in the right direction.
And what we’re also trying to do is bring in FMS002 which is a standard through CIBSE. And also GovS 004 which again is another standard for the way buildings…certainly a lot of this is coming down the line. And if we can draw that together so that we can simplify and standardise what information is being created, then we can start to give the experts, in this case maybe fire engineers. Or access strategy people or Paul’s expertise which is ventilation and smoke control. If we can get all of this information together it means that we can get something that’s joined up.
KEVIN BAYLISS Yeah, completely on the page on having something that is open to people. We’ve had the same issue around what Karl mentioned regarding information such as photographs that had been done on, I won’t say the company’s website and like you to see around support and so on. Then it’s a case of actually the client doesn’t want to keep on paying for that upgrade per year, per month, whatever the agreement is because it’s costing them. So then we’re saying the design team, they still need to finish those things off, need that information.
So it’s a case of they’re not going to have that information, rather than in a format that’s open. So I completely agree it’s necessary to have that standardisation. Or this goes back to the original comment I was going to make on the basis of, because I get involved in writing golden thread and things like that for some clients. And as part of that obviously from an HRB point of view the accountable person really should have a golden thread policy. And to me that necessarily is all the digital things of everything on a building.
It’s not golden thread is about, golden thread is very much about compliance only, it’s not about actually that’s not a compliant but I need to do that to maintain my building, that’s a separate element. And it’s a question of understanding these are the minimum requirements we need for compliance for the design team, for a process construction or whatever. Then there’s another one in terms of occupation. So that whole policy needs to be, and then the roles and responsibilities of individuals within that to make sure it’s maintained.
And that also has to link then closely to what we’re saying…you might have something in an AR or an asset requirements to say this is what we need to do. Some of that could be golden thread and some of it could be just general maintenance that has no relevance to compliance. The other point is how do we find that information that everyone can have access to that information? And not just a few individuals when they want to know these things. So, whether it be somebody is managing a building and you’ve got a private apartment that somebody has bought and they can do things to them.
Then how do they get that information in a way that they know if they’re doing something they’re impacting it? If it’s a social housing point of view, how do you engage with them to a point that they know what’s going on in their building and so on. But you need to separate out for me what is golden thread and what is maintenance so people clearly understand the difference between those two things. Because I think it can get confused that everything is golden thread and it’s not.
GEORGE STEVENSON Can I just challenge that a little bit. I appreciate that golden thread is mentioned in the legislation. One of the things that I think we need to move away from is simply looking at things from a compliance perspective. And although I think you’re quite right that we have to make sure that that aspect of the golden thread. But the way I look at the golden thread, it’s like DNA. So it’s starting right at the beginning of the process and it’s the information set that’s going through all of the different stages.
And the definition of what should be in the golden thread should be determined in a reasonably agile way according to what is it that you’re monitoring and how do we achieve what’s needed. So, I’m not saying that we’re challenging the regulations, but I think what we need to be doing is looking at this from a point of view of making sure that we know the information that is needed for managing any system. It’s the relationship, perhaps, between the space, spaces. What is going on in the spaces, because I think that’s part of the golden thread as well. Because unless you know what space is being used for and what the impact is on the systems.
KEVIN BAYLISS Can I just come back on that. For me it’s a case of you have different mechanisms for different things. There’s an element of compliance and there’s an element this is where it becomes, you can have all the…process that’s great, but the accountable person has to feed into what says that golden thread is on that site because they’re responsible for what’s on site.
So that’s what I’m trying to say, the golden thread can be this in terms of compliance, but if the accountable person says actually I want this to be added as part of that because it’s specific to the building, it’s not necessarily standardised. However, you could pick standard processes and say well, this needs to be included and that needs to be included. So that for me is where all of that lines in. It’s the fact that that accountable person has got to be integral to what is included on the golden thread for that specific site.
GEORGE STEVENSON Agreed, and the other challenge with that is that term responsible person is something that very few people in the industry really understand what that means, and it varies. It depends on what the role is. You understand this much better than me, you’ve spent months mapping it out, you’ve shown me your processes. But it’s got to be something that, on the sprinkler system for example. The event that Paul was talking about was one we were at that was organised by the universities group, USHA.
And Dame Judith spoke at that, she brought up an example of a sprinkler system that had been installed. And the pump that was installed to service a 20-storey block could only have the power to pump up to the 13th floor. And apparently the person that installed it was aware of that, but they didn’t say anything. And she was understandably castigating that installer for not being competent or not being responsible. And I thought about it afterwards and thought well, how would they actually raise that as an issue?
Because if they’ve gone in there at the lowest price, which is almost certainly true. They won the contract, they’d been told by a designer that that is the right thing to install. Who would they report it to? And I asked that question after the event and actually the Regulator, there’s only two people that can report things apparently to the Regulator. There’s a resident and there’s the principal accountable person. That contractor has not mechanism to report anything to anybody. I think that should be CROSS or something like that.
PIERRE VENTER One of the key things here is about ownership. Absolutely everything that we’ve spoken about is ownership, ownership, ownership. I’ll repeat this about the Dubai BIM mandate. The idea of shared data, the digitisation of things. If that starts from day 1, remember what Dubai metro is versus every one of the property owners. Their layer is the base layer, but what they’re doing is they’re using the data to act as future infrastructure development capabilities, so predictive stuff. It’s looking at portfolios, big buildings etc. So it’s a very, very broad system.
But one of the things about the ownership, and from a digitisation point of view it’s about the issue of confidentiality. And one of the things in our industry is we don’t share information. If I’m looking at doing a high rise building I don’t share that information with anybody else other than the design team. And what we’re doing is we’re losing a huge data set capability of good practice, bad practice, all of the wrong things that are being done, no lessons learnt etc. And that’s a very, very big powerful capability.
The other part about the ownership thing comes to standards. Now, having been on a couple of these global teams in the Middle East, you’ve got AIA, you’ve got RIBA, you’ve got people from San Francisco to Sydney with all different standards. Guess what? It’s a melange of bullshit because nobody actually submits something. The actual standard needs to be the standard of language. Not the spoken language, but the technical language. Because then it means that we’ve got a consistency over everything.
Now one of the things we spoke about here in the discussion was about in the method. We’ve got API access but you need ownership. You can have the API, somebody’s got to own that data, somebody’s got to nurture that data, somebody has got to develop that data. And having access to the data is OK, as long as it’s being used in a responsible way. And what’s the first thing that’s going to come out of this is follow the money. So what’s going to happen is that data will get taken out and used for commercial reasons and the moment that happens there’s no responsibility. We just use it, we make money in business and that’s it.
On the other side, and it’s an important one from the Middle East again, was CapEx versus OpEx. And having worked in a mall developer, they’re not worried about the OpEx. Why? Because it’s the tenants, it’s a deferred future price. And those points all just resonate that how do you make this a business case? Because unless we make it a business case we’re not going to improve things. But I think we need to really get down onto the lowest level. Everything you said was about we’re looking at compliance. What we’re not looking at is the added benefit that we can get from having data.
We can start doing predictive things, we can start doing preemptive things. And that could be going back to the insurers and saying look at how we’re saving the potential risks. Until somebody dies we’re not going to get any interest in it, that’s the closest that we’ll get. But you can see from Thames Water, they’re down 20 billion in the tubes, the director has signed away a whole bunch of money for their dividends with no accountability There’s the problem, that if we can’t even get the accountability in big organisations what do you think we’re going to get on social housing where the local council involvement is not competent at that level.
GEORGE STEVENSON I know that Richard will hammer me in a moment because this is a workstream to try and deal with task and finish. So we need to be thinking what is the next step? What are we doing about…we’re all violently agreeing that something has got to be done.
RICHARD FREER Sorry, what’s the task?
GEORGE STEVENSON The task is to be able to find solutions for delivering retrospective fire strategies. That’s my objective with this, given the fact that there are few fire engineers and how can we make it easier for those fire engineers to deliver what we need. And I’m thinking that we have more standardisation so that we also have better ways of structuring the information. So pulling together the key information that’s needed, to identify what information fire engineers need to be able to carry out that.
And then mechanisms to then see it kept up to date. Because I think the fire strategy is a statuary thing to do, the health & safety file is a statutory thing to do. They’re both supposed to be kept up to date. Therefore the information that is needed to do those, which is both the fire strategy and also the documentation, we should try and figure out a way that that is tied into the statutory requirements. Does that make sense to you, Chris?
CHRIS JEFFERS Absolutely, and those three key principles you just mentioned there. For me in my world of more predominantly FM, AM and FM, those three key principles you mentioned, absolutely essential. If we don’t do those I don’t think we’ll be successful in what we’re trying to do, so that’s absolutely key.
GEORGE STEVENSON It was interesting talking to Neville about the importance of fire. Fire, as far as his experience is concerned, he went from a situation where the budget was 6 million a year that he could work with. And that was reduced to 1.75 million, so it was dropped by over two-thirds because of different priorities. So I guess the next step with this is to say, what I think we need is more fire engineers involved in this group. Because what we want to do is find ways that they can do the work more easily.
Ron Hedger was on the first meeting, and he’s already using a lot of standardisation in the way that he’s following things through. And also he’s using 360 photography which is one of the things that I’m quite passionate about. And I think a combination of 360 photography and more standardisation could make a bit difference. And Pierre is saying as well, also responsibility, people understanding. So if you’ve got anybody that you know that’s a fire engineer let us know who they are.
MUSTAPHA MUNIR I just wanted to comment on the discussion that we’re having around the challenges in terms of the fire strategy. And from the comments I could see that there were two parts to it. First there’s the compliance issue and then there’s also a resource problem as well. But I think it could be worthwhile if we do explore the resource issue. And that’s because there is some economic element to this. Yes, digitalisation can help, it’s a good first step to help us to maintain that data, but the challenge still remains which is the continuous maintenance of that data.
And I liked your analogy of the DNA. The DNA is quite efficient, but because it’s a self-maintaining. If we’re going to apply that similar approach to the building system, then there is the challenge of that continuous maintenance. And one of the root causes in terms of why we have this challenge, it’s because most of the reporting and most of the problems that we’re talking about today, they don’t really make money, they cost money. And because of some of the limitations in terms of enforcement, you could say that the drivers aren’t really there to make sure that people do invest in things like these.
And what Karl actually said I really found it interesting, but from a different perspective. Because Karl was actually presenting concerns that people could actually make money off this. But playing the devil’s advocate here, I would say that could actually be the solution. Because if there is money in it then there would be the resource to do it. So, I’m sort of thinking would it be worthwhile if we explored the business case across all fragmented levels in terms of being able to drive this as an enabler to look at the challenges that we could have. And also to look at case studies of the not so good practices as well as the good practices.
GEORGE STEVENSON I think that’s where I’m going with this as well Mustapha, having use cases. So one of the things that I would like to do is if people are willing to come together for another meeting on examples and scenarios, so we can share stories and things like that. And to a great extent, the Golden Thread Taskforce that we’ve set up is intended to bring together people that have got solutions with people that have got problems. And then we use that as a mechanism to pay for it.
Because if we can come together with some joined up solutions, which are covering different technologies, different ways of using data standards and also processes, then we can bring together something that can be charged for and then be part of that. I think most of you are aware of the Golden Thread Taskforce, but we need to empower it with some examples. So, all of you, I imagine, have got lots of examples of things that have gone wrong. If you could contribute some of those, just write a couple of paragraphs on 2 or 3 maybe anonymised situations, then we may be able to use that to leverage investment. Could you put ‘use case’ into the chat if you’re willing to put together something as examples, as experiences.
PAUL SHEEDY I was going to suggest, would it be an idea to maybe bring on the guys in Shanghai who over the last decade have basically been at the forefront of digitalising all of the fire regulations in Shanghai from where they were before. Maybe have them on for 20 minutes on how they did it, what they did over the last decade to change the whole Shanghai fire regulations. Because I think they’re probably furthest ahead of anybody that I know.
GEORGE STEVENSON OK, we can set that up.
KARL GASSON I just wanted to come back on what Mustapha mentioned. You’d got the impression, Mustapha that I object to people making money out of digitalisation. I don’t, I’m not a charity either, I like to make as much money as I possibly can out of what I do for a living. My concern is about ensuring that data is long term and sustainable, so it can always be accessed in the future. And that people using the platforms to access their data are not unreasonably tied in to paying a service provider for that service.
I gave the example of walled gardens in the early days of the web. I spend a lot of money one way or another on web access, software, subscriptions and so on because I see the benefits. So I’m much happier paying a service provider for benefits and not so that I can access my data. And for me that’s a key distinction. I don’t mind anybody making money for what they do, provided that the client is free to go elsewhere if they choose to.
JULIE CARRICK Just the use cases. I’m in a position where I work within a transport company within the property and estates department. Unfortunately at corporate level they tend to have slippy shoulders with regards to fire and how to implement the right measures. And it’s been left to property as well as operations, but it’s quite disjointed. Whilst we have a fire engineer onsite who carries out our responsibilities throughout the network, operations for their own and corporate really don’t pull us all together. And that’s what my frustration is.
We’re trying to digitise everything now to our CAFM system and having that integrated with links to share a point with all of the certification and all of the PPMs that are being carried out. I’m just frustrated and what I’m trying to get out of this is to make sure that we’re compliant with what we’re responsible to hold. But overall check within the company to ensure that there’s joined up thinking between operations and property because it’s very disjointed at the moment. So I’m just looking for ideas about how we do that.
GEORGE STEVENSON An aspect that I’d like to suggest is whether there is appetite to do something as examples of how we could actually create a fire strategy that is sustainable and how that can be applied. Coming back to it, is anybody interested in working collaboratively around an example, maybe suggesting an example that we could look at in terms of bringing together a means by which we could standardise some of these things. Would you be up for doing a workshop on that? OK, I’ve got enough now to move forward with that. Sorry, Teams has once again let me down.
RICHARD FREER This is happening all of the time with Teams. We do a lot of meetings and it’s been a nightmare, one thing or another. Does anybody know of another system of platform that works? That you can send out invites like we do and get responses. Because we’ve looked and tried and absolutely nothing.
BERNARD HORNUNG I came in to this very much from the point of view of toxicity and during Covid. And what drew me towards the subject that we’re discussing at the moment was the way in which the airborne virus enveloped articulate matter in a building. and we were studying hospitals, we were studying internal flow paths through hospitals, trying to mitigate the spread of this airborne infection. And there’s a category of person that I was collaborating with who profoundly impressed me. And those were the authorised engineers working in collaboration with certain NHS hospitals.
And I found that this was a talent pool which I had never heard of before. And I think if anybody knows authorised engineers…I did find some very knowledgeable individuals who really understood all of the different aspects that they were trying to grasp. And they were considering noise, they were considering smell, they were considering light pollution. They were considering obviously fire safety. And above all they were considering the spread of infection.
And so when you look at solutions, when you look at commercialising solutions, unfortunately, as we have all agreed, people live in the hope that we will never have a fire so I couldn’t care a damn and I’m not going to spend any money on fire safety. But if you touch on the pain points that really irritate individuals, if you consider thermal containment and energy efficiency. If you consider acoustic installation for the prevention of excessive noise, if you consider light pollution. if you consider living with all of the smells that you don’t want to live with. And if you can take a much broader view you can commercialise fire safety.
GEORGE STEVENSON I think you’re right. As a group, I hope you think it’s been worthwhile. I think this is a really important area. If you could suggest, I’ve notice that there’s no fire engineers been put into the list, but if you would give that some thought. I don’t know, Kevin, if Jacob’s you’ve got some contacts.
KEVIN BAYLISS Yeah, I’ll ask Graham. I run the architecture studio in Birmingham, he runs the fire department, he’s a doctor of fire engineering. So I’ll ask him whether he’s available to attend.
GEORGE STEVENSON Ann from Resolis, have you got any contacts at all?
ANN ALLEN Yeah, I’m thinking of somebody I used to work with at Equans as well, so I’ll ask around and see if I can find somebody.
GEORGE STEVENSON I want to keep this moving, so my plan is that we have another one of thees meetings. Do you think it’s worthwhile to have another meeting? Because I don’t want to be arranging these things if people aren’t enthusiastic about it. I’m prepared to organise another one in a couple of weeks’ time if that’s something that you’d like to do.
KEVIN BAYLISS I’m happy. What I thought might be useful, especially talking to Graham, it’s like literally one A4 or even half a page saying this is what we want to do, this is the aim. Maybe one paragraph or a few subheadings or something. And then I can say to Graham this is what the workshop is doing and the outputs that are likely to come and we need your input on that. Is that something we could do potentially?
GEORGE STEVENSON Yeah, we can do that. I think what we need to do is to identify how we can draw in a number of people. As Bernard was saying, authorising engineers. The trouble is with authorising engineers in my experience is that there’s very few of them and a lot of them are retiring, which is a common problem.
BERNARD HORNUNG Your point on authorised engineers is absolutely correct. I hope they follow my example and that is work beyond retirement age. Because individuals like myself who have been privileged are able to work beyond retirement age, have the time, can give it. Why waste 50 years of experience if you can still make a difference, by being invited into these meetings, learning and, above all, giving.
CHAT
bernard hornung (External)…… I believe that our task must include assuring performance and safety. We should align ourselves with the UN Mission, Safe Buildings Save Lives.
Taylor Hammond (External)…. Use case. Very happy to contribute in the workshop to produce a fire strategy, I am an active PDBR for safety re-cladding projects. I scope and appoint FE's for FRAEW's and assess Fire strategies regularly.
Pierre Venter (External)…. Id like people to add their needs to the nodes where the stumbling takes place. The digital stream can hold stuff. and it gets some common areas.
Taylor Hammond (External)…. Re Fire engineers, I struggle to get their time on live projects, so not sure they will volunteer easily for this forum.
Paul Sheedy (External)… Lets plan it as how we build out the bones of what we could deliver together
Chris Jeffers (External)… Yes agreed, with some ToRs / agreed outputs possibly
Karl Gasson (External).. yes, but keen to document what the output will be from this group
Fire, Smoke & Access Strategies Workstream – Structured Academic Summary & Key Insights
STRUCTURED ACADEMIC SUMMARY
1. Purpose and Context of the Workstream
The session examined the challenges of producing retrospective fire strategies for existing buildings amid fragmented information, outdated documentation, and limited fire-engineering resources. The group aims to create task-and-finish outputs that standardise information requirements, support fire engineers, and improve the maintainability of fire strategies.
2. Key Drivers for Retrospective Fire Strategies
- Many buildings lack current fire strategy documents, undermining Fire Risk Assessments.
- Regulation 38/16 handover documentation is often incomplete or non-existent.
- Access strategies (e.g., security maglocks) can conflict with escape routes.
- Changes in how residents or occupants use spaces frequently invalidate original strategies.
3. Systemic Industry Issues
- Facilities managers often lack fire-safety competence.
- CAFM systems rarely include passive fire-protection assets.
- Building data is fragmented, held in commercial “walled gardens,” and difficult to access long‑term.
- Clear reporting channels for safety concerns are lacking across industry.
- Market forces disincentivise investment in fire-safety measures.
4. Digitalisation, Standards & the Golden Thread
- Strong consensus that digitalisation is essential for maintaining living fire strategies.
- Challenges include inconsistent taxonomies, lack of data interoperability, and over‑reliance on proprietary platforms.
- Improvements include increasing API availability, emerging standardisation (Uniclass, NRM, SFG20, FMS002), and the use of 360° photography.
5. Cross‑Sector and International Lessons
- Shanghai’s digital fire‑regulation modernisation was highlighted as a benchmark.
- NHS Authorised Engineers were noted as a model of interdisciplinary safety leadership.
6. Strategic Needs Identified
- Standardised fire‑strategy templates.
- Jointly developed use cases documenting real‑world failures and examples.
- Scalable methods to update fire strategies via structured data, automation, and integrated FM systems.
KEY INSIGHTS
1. FRAs are unreliable without up‑to‑date fire strategies.
2. Complexity of buildings is rising faster than fire‑engineering capacity.
3. Digital data fragmentation is a major barrier to safety.
4. Occupant behaviour strongly influences fire‑strategy validity.
5. Conflicting regulatory regimes (BSA, Martyn’s Law, Building Regs) confuse duty holders.
6. Severe FM skills gap persists.
7. Legacy buildings show widespread safety‑critical non‑compliance.
8. Commercial incentives undermine long‑term safety investments.
9. Classification and taxonomy standardisation is essential.
10. Real‑time monitoring needs to link with the Golden Thread.
KEY RISKS
1. Outdated fire strategies give false assurance.
2. Financial waste from unnecessary interventions.
3. Subtenant modifications compromising escape routes.
4. Silent failure of critical systems (sprinklers, smoke control).
5. Loss of safety data due to proprietary platforms.
6. Poor resident engagement obstructing risk controls.
7. No clear reporting pathway for contractors.
8. Incomplete CAFM asset registers.
9. Misinterpretation of fire strategies by FM personnel.
10. Budget cuts reducing core safety activities.
ACTION POINTS
Immediate Actions
- Produce a one‑page ToR/summary to recruit fire engineers.
- Collect anonymised use cases from participants.
- Plan a collaborative fire‑strategy workshop.
- Invite international speakers (e.g., Shanghai regulators).
Medium‑Term Actions
- Develop a standardised retrospective fire‑strategy template.
- Define mandatory information sets from design, FM, and subtenants.
- Map integrations between CAFM, BMS, and Golden Thread requirements.
- Pilot 360° building capture to support fire‑engineering workflows.
Long‑Term Actions
- Create open‑access, non‑proprietary digital ecosystems.
- Develop competency guidance for FM and Responsible Persons.
- Build resident‑engagement models that work.
- Establish sustainable business models for long‑term fire‑strategy maintenance.