Ian Abley, RISCAuthority Principal Consultant, considers the need for resilience in buildings that goes beyond the legal requirement for life safety.
The fatalities that occurred as a result of the Grenfell Tower fire on 14 June 2017, and at the Lakanal House fire on 3 July 2009, were a high price to pay to discover Class 0 as an egregious example of statutory guidance being insufficient for life safety.
It was not a weakness published in Approved Document Part B Fire Safety that fire engineers had identified to the wider construction industry, which is worth remembering when advocating fire safety engineering in pursuit of building resilience in addition to life safety. Nevertheless, the discipline of strategically thinking about resilience is to be encouraged beyond mere compliance with statutory guidance in the future.
The investor in, or client for, a new building or refurbishment must take a strategic decision that will determine the investment, even before they instruct consultants to make a planning application, and long before works are tendered with contractors. They must decide the resilience they want from the proposed building as an asset, either for themselves or to sell on.
If they seek no property protection, so that the entire asset may be lost in the event of a fire, then following statutory guidance may be sufficient to ensure life safety, provided the project remains a “common building situation”. This can be achieved through the choice of time-tested construction, the simplicity of form, and the use of the building as a single purpose group. Mixed use buildings can introduce complexities the statutory guidance does not consider for life safety.
Even limiting considerations to “common building situations” makes an assumption about the reliability of statutory guidance in pursuit of life safety, as expected in Regulation 8 of the Building Regulations 2010 – an assumption that the bitter experience of the fatal Grenfell Tower fire has shaken. ADB before that fire had expected national Class 0 cladding products in the external wall of high-rise buildings would achieve life safety. The Grenfell Tower Inquiry is showing that commitment to Class 0 was unreliable after 2000.
Investors as the original client therefore need to be aware of and agree on the level of resilience they wish their projects to meet, and should do so by considering three aspects to resilience:
- Susceptibility
- Vulnerability
- Recoverability
Resilience
Avoiding a fire starting (susceptibility) will always give a greater reward than measures designed to control a fire once it has started. Measures that limit fire spread (vulnerability) will always give greater reward than measures designed to recover what is lost (recoverability).
Susceptibility is addressed by reducing the probability of critical financial loss from a single fire event. Measures such as capability duplication or separation in other premises, continuity planning, and property protection can be invested in, though may never come to be relied upon in a fire situation. Property may be protected by reducing the probability of fire occurring through prevention, construction that maximises non-combustible materials, security measures, and fire safety management.
Vulnerability is addressed by reducing the financial impact of any fire that does start by adopting measures that enable continuity, which may mean moving activities to other premises prepared for such an eventuality. Property protection can be achieved by reducing the impact of any fire that does start through early and accurate detection, investment in the tested quality of passive fire protection (such as fire-resistant compartmentation), deployment of active fire protection measures (such as a suppression), and fire safety management that has committed to maintenance over the life of the building. Communication with the fire and rescue services in anticipation will assist them in attending to and extinguishing a fire, even though their duty is to the life safety of occupants, the public, and operational firefighters.
Recoverability is addressed by facilitating financial support through insurance measures, good customer or stakeholder relationships, and facilities management planning. Where damage to the property has been minimised, prompt recovery from fire will be more easily achieved.
The place of fire safety engineering
Since the 1984 Building Act, the law of the Building Regulations has been separated from the statutory guidance in the Approved Documents, where the aim is to provide one way of complying with the legal requirements for “common building situations.”
ADB (2019 as amended 2020) in both Volume 1 for dwellings (including flats) and Volume 2 for buildings other than dwellings recognises that fire safety engineering “… may be the only practical way to achieve a satisfactory standard of fire safety in some complex buildings and in buildings that contain different uses.” The classification of purpose groups in both volumes of ADB only considers single use buildings and, as such, mixed use buildings of greater complexity may need to be designed and built using a fire safety engineering approach.
Where construction methods are novel – for which the elastic policy jargon of Modern Methods of Construction (MMC) is often used – they may not be considered a “common building situation” for the purposes of the Approved Document. Nowhere in the Approved Documents is a “common building situation” defined, and nowhere in the government’s framework for MMC is there a measure of what is common or uncommon.
Promoters of MMC may want to consider construction products and systems as common enough to not require a fire safety engineering approach, and to encourage market reliance on the statutory guidance alone. After all, MMC-committed manufacturers want market share. However, the ministry authors of the Approved Documents, currently the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities (DLUHC), properly decline to explicitly endorse products and systems becoming common in this way. The statutory guidance, published in updated and extending parts, and combined periodically as a single document, carry a caveat that changes in meaning over time:
“Although approved documents cover common building situations, compliance with the guidance set out in the approved documents does not provide a guarantee of compliance with the requirements of the regulations because the approved documents cannot cater for all circumstances, variations and innovations. Those with responsibility for meeting the requirements of the regulations will need to consider for themselves whether following the guidance in the approved documents is likely to meet those requirements in the particular circumstances of their case.”
Even for life safety as the legal minimum, before property protection is procured, the buyer of MMC must be wary and not imagine the Approved Documents are sufficient for, or even apply to, novel construction. Caveat Emptor applies, even though the mood at the Office for Product Safety & Standards (OPSS) might tend to encourage Caveat Venditor, or the seller to beware. Government department policies are often in tension and so this requires thorough investigation of innovations in the construction industry before their use.
This vexed question of whether the Approved Documents apply to novel construction is pivotal when considering Category 1 MMC as “3D primary structural systems,” in a modular or volumetric approach to building. The CROSS Safety Report 1065: Volumetric modular buildings and fire published on 6 December 2021 takes the view that modular may be outside the Approved Documents. CROSS 1065 says “… it can be argued that volumetric modular is not a common building situation, as it incorporates modern construction methods.”
The CROSS consideration of “modern construction methods” as an uncommon construction method has more extensive implications for MMC providers and advocates. Surely not all MMC is uncommon – much MMC is ubiquitous.
What construction has DLUHC considered when authoring the statutory guidance under Section 6 of the 1984 Building Act?
This is resolved nowhere by the Ministry, is outside of the OPSS remit, is not for CROSS to resolve, and Mark Farmer as the lead author of the MMC framework appears not to have been asked to address it. Which makes it impossible to say that the categories of MMC are addressed by the Approved Documents in any of their parts, let alone Part B Fire Safety.
Strategic thinking by the investor or client around the aspects of susceptibility, vulnerability, and recoverability, is essential when developing a brief for the consultants and contractors that follow. This is covered in the Fire Engineering Guide for Property Protection and Business Resilience 2020.
Allowing default to minimal life safety measures in Approved Documents indicate a regrettable and potentially expensive lack of strategic thinking. While the statutory guidance may be insufficient for life safety in the case of uncommon buildings.
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Ian Abley is Principal Consultant at RISCAuthority.
References
Business Resilience - A guide to protecting your business and its people Fire Engineering Guide for Property Protection and Business Resilience 2020: 2020 Resilience guidance webinar by Director of RISCAuthority, Jim Glockling.
For permanent stacked modular buildings, RISCAuthority published the IQ8 Questionnaire and the Technical Checklist as two related documents organised against schedule 1 of the Building Regulations 2010.
IQ8 Buildings System Questionnaire – Permanent Stacked Modular Buildings
IQ8 Technical Checklist for England – Permanent Stacked Modular Buildings
UK government’s framework for MMC Statutory guidance of Approved Documents: Office for Product Safety and Standards policie
CROSS Safety Report 1065: Volumetric modular buildings and fire