We held a workshop with Camden Council to talk about our approaches to building safety regulation and what we can learn from each other.
Initially set up in April 2020 in response to the Grenfell Tower tragedy our building safety team ensures the fire safety of our buildings – in particular high-rise blocks of seven storeys/18m or higher.
Our building safety regulation team is always looking for ways we can learn and improve. The issues we’re dealing with are sector-wide and being experienced by all local authorities and housing providers. The way we have responded to the regulations may be very different from others so it’s good to see what others are doing and if we can learn from them.
We’ve worked closely with Camden Council throughout the years and thought we’d take the opportunity to hold a workshop to see how they do things. The session included an overview of our building safety teams, how we tell people what we do and putting residents first.
Camden Council took us through the various building safety cases they’ve submitted, hazard identification (HAZID) and their resident engagement strategy. They then talked about what they’re doing about the fire safety regulations RPEEPS – that is making sure all residents who need help in an emergency due to mobility or cognitive issues are known so the London Fire Brigade can help them in an emergency.
We talked about our work on building safety cases, the systems we’ve used and their challenges. We also touched on the recent EWS1 issue and what we’ve been doing in response to that.
As part of group work we talked about what we should be reporting to hold ourselves accountable. We then looked at the entire cost of the work we’re doing and put ourselves in the residents’ shoes to see how’d they feel receiving the bill, and what we could do better to manage expectations and justify the cost.
One of our building safety managers, Freya Jewett said:
“Meeting with Camden’s building safety team was a really good experience as it gave us a chance to share our achievements, talk about our different operating models and discuss similar pain points particularly around requests for information from the regulator we had both experienced. We had a really good discussion around resident perception of building safety and Camden gave us insight into some of their resident engagement activities around PEEPs which was interesting to learn.”
It was a great session looking at how different organisations do building safety and how we can work together. It was a really useful learning for all of us and we’ll definitely be doing more workshops in future. We’re all navigating the new regulations together so the more we can understand from each other the better.
