Teams working on Gateway 2 submissions should engage early with the Building Safety Regulator (BSR) and clearly set out team responsibilities, according to a leading expert.
Speaking at a Construction Management webinar last week, Rider Levett Bucknall partner Samantha Mepham said early engagement was crucial for complex schemes and helped avoid inconsistent rulings.
Mepham said she had seen examples of similar schemes that were rejected by the BSR for different reasons, but that early engagement with BSR could help avoid this.
Clarity on principal designer roles key
She said: “Not everybody knows that you can engage early with the BSR, and it is most valuable with complex schemes or where you have multiple buildings.”
Mepham also recommended being very clear on principal designer and principal contractor roles early in projects.
She said it was “easy to get confused” between the role of principal designer for building regulation and for CDM, and it was “critical” to establish competent individuals were in place for both roles.
She added that building regulation principal designers were often assumed to be responsible for some of the prescribed documents required for Gateway 2, “but it is technically a client’s obligation to do those prescribed documents with that assistance”.
Flaws in design responsibilities
The webinar – How to ensure fire safety compliance in Gateway 2 submissions – also heard from speakers Josephine Neill, regional design lead at contractor McLaughlin & Harvey and Lee Lambley, specification director at manufacturer Knauf.
Neill pointed to key challenges facing designers and contractors in the process, with the design responsibilities between the two being “inherently flawed”.
She said: “The design deliverables provided to the BSR need to be developed to a greater degree than current standard practice. The design teams are being asked to pull what traditionally is seen as (RIBA) Stage 5 now into Stage 4.
“The design deliverables provided to the BSR need to be developed to a greater degree than current standard practice.”
“The concern we raise over and over again is that the Stage 4 design period provided within programs at tender is not sufficient for the design to be coordinated.”
Neill said that to address these challenges, her company establishes de-risk strategies that include fully competent teams, creating a compliant and robust fire strategy with no assumptions, and a coordinated and constructable MEP design change.
Knauf’s Lambley offered key tips when specifying products as part of Gateway 2 from a fire safety perspective. This included five key areas to focus on: authenticity, age, accuracy, applicability and availability.
- Watch the webinar, sponsored by Knauf, on demand.
