Competence Matters: Navigating Building Safety & Professionalism in Construction
Hello and welcome to the spring edition our Education Bulletin
Why Competence Matters?
Competence or lack of it has been central to the many high profile disasters that have beset our industry. Competence is something that the CIOB has always been passionate about given our Royal Charter commits us to the advancement of public education in the field of building and construction. We also dream of a time when construction is seen as a respected profession such as medicine or aviation for example. It is worth stating that the Building Safety Act 2022 which applies to all buildings under building regulations, places a legal requirement on all those commissioning work to ensure the competence of those who carry out the works.
CIOB work on Quality and Safety
In 2016, following the Edinburgh schools disaster in January that year, the CIOB set up a Quality Commission. A few months later the Grenfell fire happened killing 72 people and injuring more than 70 and Dame Judith Hackitt identifies “patchy competence” as an issue. This became the catalyst for change in the industry and the Construction Industry Council set up competence steering groups tasked with developing competence frameworks for various key construction professionals. The CIOB having already begun work on quality and building safety were well placed to step up and contribute to this work which fitted nicely under our Corporate Plan theme of moral compass at the time and now under our overarching theme, in our 2023 Corporate plan of Modern Professionalism. Modern professionals are competent, ethical and embrace innovation.
Building Control as a regulated profession
CIOB were part of the working group that later became the Future of Building Control Group looking at the vital role of building inspectors to safeguard users and creators of the built environment. With the impending 6th April deadline for Building Control professionals to register on the Building Inspector Competence Framework (BICoF), the industry and CIOB have been working hard with industry stakeholders to support the industry with the key challenges around competence. The CIOB played a key role in developing a suite of qualifications and an apprenticeship route into Building Control which now feed into the registration process. You can read more about our qualifications at the link below
Building control qualifications | LABC
You may have also noticed that Lorna Stimpson FCIOB and CEO of LABC gave an interview to Construction Management magazine in the February issue to discuss the challenges in upskilling and developing new pathways into the profession to build capacity into the system and Building Control Inspectors on to the register.
Site Supervision - a key to quality and safety
The CIOB chaired and led on the work of the CIC Competence Steering group for Site Supervision which is specifically mentioned in Professor John Cole’s report into the Edinburgh Schools disaster. John said :
“The primary cause of the wall collapse was poor quality construction by a bricklayer and failure by that bricklayer’s boss to see what he was doing, and failure by the contractor employing that subcontractor to see what they were doing. So unless they are properly supervised and remembering that these bricklayers would go on to a different job in a few days’ time there is not the same loyalty to a particular building.”
This tells you that good on-site supervision is safety critical.
We began work developing a competency framework for site supervision which we published in September 2023 along with a blog at the link below:
Why Site Supervision matters - The Edinburgh Schools Disaster | CIOB
This framework is for a designated person to be the eyes and ears on site for the new duty holders, Principal Designer and Principal Contractor to validate that the works have been carried out in accordance with the plans and with safety regulations. The competences cover those need for working on non-higher risk residential buildings as well as those for Higher Risk Residential Buildings.
The role of Project Management
It has been an exceptionally busy few years as we were also part of working group 10 which looked at project management competencies. This group was chaired by our past president Charles Egbu who recently stepped down. It included representatives from APM and the RICS and we recently published this framework and did a live webinar together which you can watch at the link below. We recognise that project managers are very often subject to cost and time pressures and that is why it is so essential to bring a rounder set of competences with a focus on building safety and quality to this role. For your information we also sat on working group 11 led by CIPS that looked at procurement in the built environment and watch this space for the next steps of that group that may indeed merge with working group 10.
Duty Holder Roles
The CIOB also headed up the BSI standards group on Principal Contractor (8672) and chaired that group as well as providing the technical author. From this work, in 2023 we developed a competence-based certification scheme for those in the duty holder role of principal contractor. We ran a pilot in 2023 and will be launching this scheme in April 2024. The scheme is designed to validate the competence of those acting in the role and is renewable. You will see plenty of communications on this in our April edition of Construction Management magazine and various other publications.
What does it mean for you?
With the Building Safety Act, competence is going to be the next big challenge of the industry. The competence frameworks we have developed as an industry give you a reference point for developing your graduate knowledge skills and behaviours. Do use them when developing your modules and your graduate skills and attributes and do of course, encourage your learners to access all the learning and development resources available to them. As a sector, we can all get behind the idea of being a modern professional who is competent, ethical and uses innovation to advance our field. Please do have these conversations with your learners and get involved. We need your support to make it happen.