The investigative journalist who raised concerns about combustible cladding and high-rise buildings before the Grenfell Tower fire has warned the building services sector not to ignore new building safety regulations ‘despite growing frustration over project delays and rising costs’.
During his keynote address to a conference hosted by the Building Engineering Services Association (BESA), Peter Apps dubbed the Building Safety Act ‘unwieldy’, and said there were widespread reports of projects being held up by new planning restrictions. He told the BESA Annual Conference: “People are finding the new regulations frustrating. They say ‘Why can’t we just get on and build?’, but there are long-term consequences if you do that. Every change, every decision, affects someone somewhere.”
He also said the Prime Minister’s promise to ‘back builders, not blockers’ by tearing up ‘red tape’ was concerning, because of its implications for the new safety regime. Peter Apps, whose book about the Grenfell disaster, Show Me The Bodies, won the 2023 Orwell Prize for Political Writing, warned the conference there would always be people ‘who just want to make money out of you’, and were prepared to ignore safety warnings. “Beneath the surface there is a lot of work that is not changing,” he said.
Peter Apps says the industry continues to rely on the ‘Swiss cheese’ model, ‘which involves multiple safety layers, but each one has holes, and project teams simply hope that one will prevent a fire spreading’.
He added: “We can’t keep relying on luck. We are still counting a lot of near misses…and the world is getting hotter, so there will be more building fires.” However, he told the conference construction was ‘a great industry’, and people working in it now had the opportunity to reform it ‘by ensuring every building we work on is safe’.
This would though require people ‘to be brave and ask the difficult questions that weren’t asked before the Grenfell fire’. “There are people who were involved in that refurbishment project who would give anything to go back and do it properly again…their lives are now consumed by it,” he told delegates. “Don’t let that happen to you.”
Following his keynote, he took part in a wide-ranging debate on the impact of the legislation with members of BESA’s Building Safety Act advisory group. The Association says the session identified ‘considerable confusion among contractors about their specific responsibilities, and a worrying lack of engagement from clients’.
BESA explained: “Contractors also said they felt under pressure to provide better evidence of their organisational competence and compliance with the new safety regime, and to ensure their engineers were also technically competent. While many reported that they were ‘on the journey’ towards that goal, they said more specific guidance and support was needed.”
In his welcome speech to the conference, which was attended by over 350 delegates, BESA President, Adrian Hurley, said there was a ‘common thread’ running through the content focused on the importance of technical and professional competence and compliance – ‘because this has implications for us all’.
He highlighted the success of the Association’s Play it Safe guidance, which is available online to help contractors identify their specific responsibilities under the Act. This was also the subject of a virtual reality demonstration during the conference.
