Let’s have a crack at it and see what happens!

This is the latest in a series of articles that I’ve been writing, mainly about the new Gateway 2 and 3 regulations and other associated issues, in particular how they affect fire engineers. The previous articles are still available on LinkedIn if you want to read them.

I was at the Building Safety Regulator (BSR) Conference on Tuesday last week at the NEC. It was a very good event and I listened to some interesting presentations and had some very useful discussions with a number of people.

One thing that I’ve been seeing, both at that event and in other discussions, is that various people are really not sure what’s going to be acceptable under the new regulations, so they’re just going to have a try with a particular approach and see whether it’s accepted or not.

One particular example of this is in relation to how detailed the information needs to be for Gateway 2. I’ve discussed this previously, so the following text is just a brief overview of the issue.

The BSR have produced a guide to the regulations (“Building Control: An overview of the new regime. Gateways 2 and 3 – application to completion certificate”). But that document just says that the Gateway 2 submission needs to be detailed enough to demonstrate compliance with Building Regulations, but then leaves it to the design team to decide exactly what that means.

Once the design has been approved, you have to build to the approved design. Any design changes that happen after that have to be dealt with by a Change Control process which is clearly only intended for a very limited number of changes.

So that would all imply that the design that’s submitted has to be the design that is intended to be built – i.e. ‘Construction Stage’ design. Submissions that include earlier stage designs aren’t going to work, because those designs aren’t intended for construction. No-one intends to build to a ‘For Tender’ design. They’re intended for tender, not construction. The clue’s in the name.

The regulations do allow an application to be broken down into Stages, and some people have interpreted that as allowing a “Stage 2A” application to initially just include the structural frame. The BSR Guide clearly states that Stages are not for work packages, so that approach is very unlikely to be allowed. But when I’ve discussed that with developers they’ve said that whilst they agree that I might be right, they don’t know for sure so they’re going to give it a go and see whether it is accepted.

Another approach I’ve heard is to make a Gateway 2 submission at RIBA Stage 3. At that stage, the design is nowhere near finalised, so it obviously won’t give evidence of what they actually intend to build. The design team appreciate that the Gateway 2 application will probably be rejected, but they take the opportunity to maybe get parts of it approved, such as the fire strategy. So they’re hoping that, whilst the Gateway 2 application as a whole won’t be accepted, it might form the first part of an approval process where over subsequent months, further design details are submitted. If the BSR accept that approach, it would be a huge benefit, because it means that the design team can at least be confident that strategic issues are approved before they start on the detailed design.

In meetings, the BSR has also previously mentioned that they would be prepared to consider an approach based on "approval with requirements" which I've discussed in a previous article. But there the BSR Guide doesn't mention that approach at all, so it is really not clear what that process would involve.

Obviously, the fact that the industry are planning on “having a crack at it to see if it works” is really not ideal (understatement of the year). But in a situation where even the regulator doesn’t seem to know what they’ll accept, then maybe that’s all we’re left with. The alternative approach (i.e. to do a fully detailed, construction stage design for absolutely every aspect of the building and then submit it in one massive bundle for approval, which will almost certainly receive so many comments that it will require major redesign) is so horrendous that it’s not surprising that design teams are going to try something else, even if they appreciate that it might not work.

All of this is on top of the fact that large chunks of the industry are still either largely unaware of the new regulations, or have misunderstood major parts of it. In one of the presentations at the BSR Conference, one Tier 1 contractor stated that in his view, the Tier 1 contractors were largely making the time and effort to understand the new regulations, but that the Tier 2 contractors and below were really not.

I saw that in practice a few weeks ago when a was in a meeting with various senior people who work in the external wall remediation industry. One person from a large contractor announced proudly that his team had just obtained Gateway 2 approval for a remedial scheme. I congratulated him, and then pointed out that he now just needed to make sure that his team built exactly to the design that had been approved. He looked a bit shocked. Someone else then queried how that would work with the value engineering that his team was about to do. Someone else asked what would happen if they decided to switch the cavity barriers for another similar product. I pointed out that that would require a Major Change application and approval from the BSR and if they started work without that approval, they’d be committing a criminal offence. I pointed to the various bits of the BSR Guide to prove that to him.

Most people in the meeting hadn’t even heard of the BSR Guide and all of this was very unpleasant news to them. I really don’t know how they’ll react. Will they actually read the BSR Guide and get their teams to take it all on board, introducing Change Control procedures and all the other requirements? Or will they just ignore it, carry on with the value engineering and material substitution, and cross their fingers that it will all be OK?

So I can really see the industry’s reaction to the new regulations will include quite a lot of “Let’s have a crack at it and see what happens”. In some cases those approaches are just the industry trying to work out how to deal with the new Gateway regulations. But in others, they’re absolutely, clearly wrong and risk criminal proceedings.

It will be vital that the industry do share learnings on these issues. If a company gets prosecuted because they got Gateway 2 approval for their design and then built something totally different, then that needs to be publicised to try and discourage others from doing the same. But if a simplified approach for Gateway 2 approval works, and the BSR are happy with it, then that approach needs to be described and circulated so that the industry as a whole can learn from it. Will that happen? The organisations involved will pass it around within their organisations. Informal discussions will also happen within the industry, so the news will get around, but probably with a loss of detail. Over time, there will be an understanding within the industry of what’s required, but that could take years.

In the meantime, we’ll just have to hope that our clients appreciate the difficulties and uncertainties that we will all face with these new regulations. That means minimising contentious design issues, allowing enough time and budget to deal with the approval challenges and not assuming that the design will be approved first time.

And as many of my clients do read these articles, I’m talking to you. Pretty please. With a cherry on top.