Building Safety Act Archives - Page 23 of 23

FIS releases new competency framework

by Clair Mooney | 25 Jan, 2021 | Building Safety Act, Skills

FIS has launched Career and Competency Pathways ways as the first in a structured approach to defining competency and career paths within the Finishes and Interiors Sector.

The new Framework is built on the principles of the FIS Competency Skill, Attitude, Knowledge and Experience (SAKE) Framework and provides an example of how an individual can progress in a finishes and interiors occupation. It is designed to help companies manage competency in the face of intense scrutiny and new requirements coming into force through the Building Safety Bill. The Framework provides some standardisation and lays down clear criteria to assess and prove competence at every level of the workforce.

Commenting on the launch of the Pathways, FIS Skills and Training Lead George Swann said: “The Pathways brings a structured approach to career management based on the development of skills, knowledge and building experience. It aims to support and encourage career progression by passing defining competency gateways based on measured outcomes and linking this back to qualifications and training available. Our hope is that this makes it easier for everybody – new entrants, experienced workers, supervisors and managers – to follow how individuals progress within our sector and understand how to nurture and demonstrate competence.”

The Pathways looks at both formal and informal training requirements. Whilst formally recognised qualifications form the bedrock of progression through an occupation and are the criteria for CSCS card registration, these are not the only measure of competence. At each step in a career progression, the matrix suggests informal training that may support individual and organisational needs.

For new entrants to the sector, embedded in the matrix are details of apprenticeships delivered in each of the home nations. All listed training, qualifications and apprenticeships are available through the FIS Approved Training Provider Network.

“As a guide the matrix proposes ‘normal time frames’ based on the maximum formal qualification completion times or Total Qualification Times, but recognises individuals learn at different rates, so these may not always be applicable. Attitude and opportunity may move people through a career faster than others, but at each stage proof of competency is vital,” added George Swann.

Initial work has taken place on Drylining and Ceiling Fixing Pathways and FIS aims to launch further frameworks to cover the core occupational areas within the £10 billion finishes and interiors sector workforce in the coming months.

For more information and to view the Career and Competency Path click here

For more information on FIS Skills and Competency Work visit our the FIS Skills Hub

FIS welcomes new regulator established to ensure construction materials are safe

by Iain McIlwee | 19 Jan, 2021 | Building Safety Act, Main News Feed

Residents will be protected through the establishment of a national regulator which will ensure materials used to build homes will be made safer, the Housing Secretary Robert Jenrick has announced today (19 January 2021).

The regulator for construction products will have the power to remove any product from the market that presents a significant safety risk and prosecute any companies who flout the rules on product safety. This follows recent testimony to the Grenfell Inquiry that shone a light on the dishonest practice by some manufacturers of construction products, including deliberate attempts to game the system and rig the results of safety tests.

The regulator will have strong enforcement powers including the ability to conduct its own product-testing when investigating concerns. Businesses must ensure that their products are safe before being sold in addition to testing products against safety standards.

This marks the next major chapter in the government’s fundamental overhaul of regulatory systems. The progress on regulatory reform includes the publication of an ambitious draft Building Safety Bill, representing the biggest improvements to regulations in 40 years, and a new Building Safety Regulator that is already up and running in shadow form.

Housing Secretary Rt Hon Robert Jenrick MP said:

The Grenfell Inquiry has heard deeply disturbing allegations of malpractice by some construction product manufacturers and their employees, and of the weaknesses of the present product testing regime.

We are establishing a national regulator to address these concerns and a review into testing to ensure our national approach is fit for purpose. We will continue to listen to the evidence emerging in the Inquiry, and await the judge’s ultimate recommendation – but it is already clear that action is required now and that is what we are doing.

Business Minister and Minister for London Paul Scully said:

We all remember the tragic scenes at Grenfell Tower, and the entirely justified anger which so many of us in London and throughout the UK continue to feel at the failings it exposed.

This must never happen again, which is why we are launching a new national regulator for construction materials, informed by the expertise that already exists within the Office for Product Safety and Standards.

Chair of the Independent Review of Building Regulations and Fire Safety Dame Judith Hackitt said:

This is another really important step in delivering the new regulatory system for building safety. The evidence of poor practice and lack of enforcement in the past has been laid bare. As the industry itself starts to address its shortcomings I see a real opportunity to make great progress in conjunction with the national regulator.

Iain McIlwee, CEO of Finishes and Interiors Sector (FIS) stated:

Bad enforcement is worse than bad regulation as it tilts the market in the favour of the unscrupulous. At the heart of FIS strategy is the FIS Product Process People (PPP) Quality framework, it is no coincidence that the first P is Product. We welcome the new regulator and the principles set down in the Building Safety Bill and look forward to working with all involved in helping to lead improvements in quality and safety in the market.

The regulator will operate within the Office for Product Safety and Standards (OPSS) which will be expanded and given up to £10 million in funding to establish the new function. It will work with the Building Safety Regulator and Trading Standards to encourage and enforce compliance.

The government has also commissioned an independent review to examine weaknesses in previous testing regimes for construction products, and to recommend how abuse of the testing system can be prevented.

It will be led by a panel of experts with regulatory, technical and construction industry experience and will report later this year with recommendations.

Firestopping of service penetrations: a new best practice guide

Welsh Consultation – Safer Buildings in Wales

by Clair Mooney | 15 Jan, 2021 | Building Safety Act, Main News Feed

The Welsh Government has published its long awaited consultation on Safer Buildings in Wales. The documentation can be viewed here.

The White Paper sets out proposals for the comprehensive freeform of legislation that contributes to building safety in Wales. It focuses on legislative changes across the lifecycle of buildings aimed improving safety and minimising the risk of fire as well as setting out aspirations for cultural change in the way buildings are designed, constructed and managed.

The consultation proposes clear lines of accountability by creating new roles and responsibilities to those who own and manage relevant buildings. It will also provide a stronger regulatory system to hold those responsible to account. Residents will have enhanced rights and a stronger voice on matters affecting their homes.

The consultation closes on 12 April 2021. FIS will be responding to this consulation via the Construction Products Association, therefore members are encouraged to send their responses to joecilia@thefis.org by Monday 22 March 2021. We will then collate the feedback and submit a response to CPA.

FIS launches new career and competency pathways to support drylining and ceiling fixers

by Clair Mooney | 14 Jan, 2021 | Building Safety Act, Drylining, Membership, Skills

FIS has launched two new Career and Competency Pathway documents for drylining and ceiling fixing occupations. With a focus on quality and safety within the sector, the pathways show how individuals can show proof of competence by the achievement of training and qualifications.

Through the FIS Skills Board and support for the ongoing competence work as part of the Grenfell Industry Response Group activities, FIS has a renewed focus on developing the principles outlined in the FIS Competency Framework (SAKE) which measures competency through a combination of skills, attitude, knowledge, experience.

The new career and competency pathways map the qualifications and training available against the critical stages of a career in drylining and ceiling fixing occupations. It provides a spine of information to help individuals and organisations to understand which steps to take and whether an individual is ready to progress through a better defined “gateway” to the next stage of their career. The pathway is aligning trained and assessed outcomes that support progression within the occupation, through to supervisory and management roles.

Commenting on the launch of the pathway, FIS Skills Board Chair, Paul Leach of Stortford Interiors said: “The aim of this work is to provide a better-defined pathway built around clear job roles and the stages within a career in key occupations within our sector. It will remain fluid and we can adapt it as new competency standards, qualifications and guidance emerges, but we felt it important to make a start to both support companies in managing competencies and help to present careers within the sector. The publishing of these pathways is a vital and clear rally call to the sector as we seek to improve competence within the workforce and address any skills shortages.”

FIS Skills and Training Lead, George Swann added: “Many are already well on this journey and undoubtedly there will be subtle differences within individual companies. But, by providing this standard pathway we can help all contractors and employers to understand what good looks like, benchmark where they are at and hopefully support a better culture of training and development through the sector. We often talk about skills and competency and default to a conversation about card colour, but a genuine focus on competency is much more than this and involves ongoing learning as well as effective supervision and management and providing support and encouragement for individuals. Having an organisational training plan supports social value requirements which are now prominent in contracts.”

The pathways are designed to be adapted by individual companies in-line with roles within organisations. FIS is working to provide more detailed standardised job descriptions to further support a consistent approach to career management within the industry, and developing pathways to cover all the core occupational areas associated with the Finishes and Interiors sector.

You can download the Career and Competency Pathway documents for Drylining and Ceiling Fixing occupations here

For further information or for any questions and comments please contact the FIS by email at info@thefis.org or call 0121 707 0077.

New competency standard – have your say

by Clair Mooney | 5 Jan, 2021 | Building Safety Act, Main News Feed, Skills

We would like to hear your comments on a new competency standard that will be published this spring.

Government through the Ministry of Housing Community and local Government (MHCLG) have commissioned the production of a new competency standard (BSI Flex 8670 Built environment – overarching framework for building safety competence of individuals – specification).

This new standard will be used to produce specific standards for new roles listed in the Building Safety Bill and will form an overarching standard that will allow organisations such as FIS to produce competency standards for operatives in our sector. We see this as an opportunity to ensure that operatives installing safety critical products can measure their own competency, be recognised for their competency and have training available to progress their careers.

Objectives
This BSI Flex is intended to achieve four overarching objectives:

Set core requirements for behavioural and building safety competence for all persons working in the built environment in order to improve industry culture and safety outcomes throughout the building life cycle.
Drive adoption of consistent good practice in the development and use of competence assessment frameworks across the built environment.
Enable consistent and objective evaluation of different sector-specific competence frameworks against common criteria by regulators, clients and employers.
Support development of suitable mechanisms to provide robust assessment of individual competence.

The draft standard can be downloaded here.

Please send your questions and any comments to JoeCilia@thefis.org no later than midday on Thursday 28 January 2021 to be included within the FIS response.

Mapping out the road to competency and compliance

by Iain McIlwee | 30 Nov, 2020 | Building Safety Act, Main News Feed, Skills

Joe Cilia Technical Director FIS

Dame Judith Hackett was clear in her interim report of Building Regulations and Fire Safety that there has been a lack of evidence of compliance and competency and even clearer that the industry needed to address this. So, what has happened since February 2018 and do we have a clear roadmap?

A complex problem has been broken up into its constituent parts and addressed by over a hundred organisations, including FIS dedicating cumulative thousands of hours to interrogate information and advice and propose on a better way of working. With work led by the Industry Response Group (IRG) and the Technical Expert Panel (TEP), the work of these groups and the draft Building safety Bill and Fire Safety Bill, are all coalescing to provide a clear direction of travel addressing the linked issues of Competency and Compliance.

To help structure our efforts and uncover how a number of new initiatives will lead to tangible changes to the way we market performance products, the words we use to describe them and the Skill, Attitude Knowledge and Experience needed to specify, purchase, supervise, install and maintain them; we have pulled together this new Map that starts to identify the initiatives are linked and give us an idea of where this will lead in the next year.

It’s about competency…

A Competency Steering Group was established to oversee the issue and twelve working groups were established to address the issue across the supply chain with one overarching group to coordinate the results and a Mar ket Integrity Group (MIG) who would look specifically at how performance products were described and the performance verified.

The twelve working groups are:

Overarching Competence Body (WG0)
Engineers (WG1)
Installers (WG2)
Fire engineers (WG3)
Fire risk assessors (WG4)
Fire safety enforcing officers (WG5)
Building standards professionals (WG6)
Building designers, including architects (WG7)
Building safety managers (WG8)
Site supervisors (WG9)
Project managers (WG10)
Procurement professionals (WG11)
Products competence (WG12)

The first output from the group is a document called Raising the Bar which was presented at a conference in October 2019 HERE

The report represents twelve months’ work by more than 150 organisations from across the construction, built environment, fire safety and owner/manager sectors, which have come together to improve the competence of those procuring, designing, constructing, inspecting, assessing, managing, and maintaining Higher Risk Residential Buildings (HRRBs). The work is in response to recommendations in the Independent Review of Building Regulations and Fire Safety, conducted by Dame Judith Hackitt.

Setting the Bar is the second and final report of the Competency Steering Group (CSG) and is an update of the Interim Report, Raising the Bar, published in August 2019.

Feeding into this report, for example, is the work I’ve been involved in from WG12 on Products Competence is the development of a Construction products Matrix, which will help manufacturers define the level of expected competence to specify, procure, supervise and install their products. Based on Skill, Knowledge and Experience it will help ensure the correct products are used alongside all products they interact with to create building systems.

The Built Environment competency standard group (BECS) The industry-led programme sponsored by MHCLG will deliver an overarching competence framework standard for everyone working on a building. This is intended to be used by key professions and trades including designers, contractors, fire risk assessors, building managers and others in specialist technical or corporate roles. The framework will provide a set of core principles of competence, including leading and managing safety, communicating safety, delivering safety, risk management, regulations & processes, building systems, ethics, and fire/life safety. The competence framework is being developed using an iterative and dynamic process, in line with our new flexible route to standardization, called BSI Flex.

BSI Flex 8670 v1.0 Built environment – Overarching framework for competence of individuals – Specification is designed to provide a framework for the development of three new PAS documents to describe the competency levels for the three new positions described in the (Draft) Building Safety Bill:

Building Safety Manager
Principle Designer
Principle Contractor

The competency of these people will be overseen by the new Building Safety Regulator (HSE). There will also be an overarching publicly available Specification (PAS) that can be used by industry and trade bodies to develop competency schemes in a consistent way specific to their sector.

Building a safer future Charter In April 2020, the UK Government encouraged industry-wide commitment to sign-up to the Charter, in its response to the ‘Building a Safer Future’ consultation ‘A reformed building safety regulatory system’. In early 2020, the Considerate Constructors Scheme (CCS) was appointed to develop and manage the Charter and FIS is proud to be amongst the first signatories.

It’s about compliance…

Looking beyond competency to other elements of compliance, another new group formed is the Construction Products Standards Committee. This Committee will be comprised of technical experts and academics and it will advise the Secretary of State for Housing on whether voluntary industry standards for construction products should also become UK regulatory standards, a role currently undertaken by the European Commission. The Construction Products Standards Committee will also provide advice and recommendations on the conformity assessment process and product test standards. In particular the Construction Products Standards Committee will advise on:

the assumptions and weaknesses within the current testing regime, including the effectiveness and accuracy of current tests;
ways to improve the testing regime and new tests to address the weaknesses; and
innovation in how construction products are tested.

Organisations, such as FIS will be feeding into this group (via the Construction Products Association), helping to deliver a new rigorous and proportionate process for proving compliance.

Alongside this work the Market Integrity Group (MIG) published their initial findings ahead of developing a Code for Construction Product Information (CCIP). The CCIP will provide a code for all construction product manufacturers (including distributors) to ensure that consistent terminology is used and performance claims are evidence based and have been signed off by the competent technical person in the organisation.

A new body (also formed under the auspices of the CCS) will provide a verification scheme for suppliers wishing to sign up to the code. Its clear that we are reaching a stage where the wind of change is coming and the framework for measuring competence and compliance is being constructed using new overarching legislation that will be built on rapidly over the next months and years.

It’s about collaboration…

In this Map I have attempted to show how these committees, working groups, legislative changes standards, documents, reports and bodies come together and how they will start to lead to a more compliant built environment in the months and years ahead. An encouraging start has been the spirit of collaboration across the sector, bringing us into contact with new individuals, organisation and perspectives on some age-old problems.

I am sure this map will evolve, but as the structures start to settle and the next stage of this huge change begins, if you see anything missing or want to discuss how it all fits together, please don’t hesitate to get in touch.

You can download a copy of the Competence and Compliance landscape map here

About Joe

Joe is the Technical Director at FIS which represents the Finishes and Interior Sector, he is responsible for Standards guides and legislation, environmental and sustainability issues. Joe works closely with BSI where he chairs a mirror group and a major review of the drylining standard.

He Co-Chaired the production of Fire-stopping of service penetrations – best practice in design and installation and has been pivotal in developing the FIS Product Process People (PPP) Quality Management Framework.

Joe is the immediate past Chair of the Construction products Association Technical committee and represents the finishes and interior sector on the CPA Technical panel as part of the MHCLG Industry Response Group to the Grenfell inquiry alongside Build UK and CIC.

Contact details

joecilia@thefis.org