Higher-risk buildings: what the gateway regime does to a programme

For most projects, building control is a process that runs alongside the work. For a higher-risk building it is a series of points at which the work cannot proceed until somebody else has decided it may, and that is a different thing to plan around.

Approval for higher-risk building work goes to the Building Safety Regulator rather than to a local authority or an approved inspector, and the regime brings its own dutyholders, its own change control and its own information requirements.

The shape of it

• –Approval has to be obtained before the relevant work starts. It is a gate, not a notification.
• –Changes during construction are controlled rather than absorbed — some require notice, some require further approval.
• –Information has to be kept and handed over in a defined form, which is where the golden thread expectation bites.
• –Completion has its own certificate, and occupation before it is not available in the way it sometimes is elsewhere.

None of those duties is conceptually new to a principal contractor. What is new is that each one is a point where the programme can stop, held by a body with no commercial interest in it not stopping.

Where it meets CDM rather than replaces it

The regime sits alongside CDM 2015 rather than on top of it. The principal contractor and principal designer duties still apply, and the construction phase plan is still the construction phase plan.

The overlap people get wrong is the information one. The health and safety file is a CDM product with a CDM purpose, and it is not the same artefact as the information the building safety regime expects to be kept and handed on. Treating one as satisfying the other produces a handover that fails twice.

The golden thread is a handover problem in disguise

The expectation that building information is captured, kept and handed on in a usable form is usually discussed as a technology question. On site it is a behaviour question, and the behaviour it tests is whether information is produced as the work happens or assembled at the end of it.

Most projects assemble at the end. That is how a health and safety file arrives three months after practical completion with gaps in it that nobody can now fill, and it is the habit this regime is least tolerant of.

• –Decide at mobilisation what has to be captured, by whom, and in what form — and then check in month two whether it is being captured.
• –Treat a subcontractor's information obligations as a procurement matter, priced and specified, not as something requested at the end.
• –Keep the record of changes with the change, because a change approved and not recorded is indistinguishable later from one that was never approved.
• –Expect to hand over to somebody who will have to maintain the building for decades and who was not in any of the meetings.

A contractor that already runs site records properly will find this mostly a matter of scope. One that reconstructs at handover will find it is the regime's sharpest edge.

What to do at bid stage, not at mobilisation

• –Establish whether the building is in scope before pricing the programme. The definition is specific and a building near the threshold needs checking rather than assuming.
• –Price the gate, not just the work. Approval takes time that belongs in the programme as a duration rather than as a risk line.
• –Agree how change will be handled contractually, because a change that needs further approval is a change with a float cost nobody has allowed for.
• –Settle who produces and holds the information through the job. If that is unresolved at mobilisation it will be unresolved at handover.
• –Check the competence expectations for the dutyholder roles, which are explicit under this regime rather than assumed.

The practical risk for a contractor here is not non-compliance. It is a programme built on the assumption that building control can be worked with in parallel, meeting a regime in which it cannot.

Scope, process and timescales are the Regulator's and have been revised more than once. Work from the current guidance below rather than from a summary — including this one.