Building the safety case event summary part 2

This post follows on from part one summary.

At our SafetyNet event on the Building the Safety Case on 20^th October, we heard from David Stevens, Interim Head of Building Safety from Southwark Council. David talked through Southwark’s building safety programme which has 12 Workstreams, involves 4 Council Departments, has ownership from all senior stakeholders from across the Council. Importantly, it has also been developed in partnerships with LFB, DLUHC and the HSE.

Southwark have 174 buildings in scope so they have a big task ahead building a tailored safety case and safety case report for each of them. They have developed a structure for their safety case report which is based on presenting arguments and providing evidence. It covers:

Description of the block
Overview of the Management System (MS)
Includes Safety Critical Elements and Risk Analysis Studies
Presents Emergency, Evacuation and Rescue Plans
Demonstrates resident engagement
Exhibits that risks have been reduced to as low as reasonably practicable (ALARP)

One of the key lessons from the session was to understand the data you have, the date you need and what the gaps are. Then it is important to cerate a plan for how you address these gaps. They also found dialogue with the BSR to help shape their safety case reports so they have been able to learn the lessons from the drafts before producing the final reports from April 2024.

Following on from David, Mark Williams, Founder and CEO of Deeo who provide digital solutions for the engineering and built environment. Since 2018, they have been working with the social housing sector to create an affordable and scalable digital solution to capture, create and collate information on high rise buildings. The solution TwinnedIt creates a comprehensive digital twin which can be accessed by the landlord, fire services and residents. The platform hosts information including: