Exchanging best practice and learning lessons internationally can help further advance the building safety agenda in the UK, says Victoria Hills
A couple of weeks ago, CIOB co-hosted a webinar on “Building Safety Regulation in a Changing World: Global Lessons for Reform”.
We had a stellar panel, featuring our co-hosts for this event, the International Building Quality Centre, represented by Kim Lovegrove, alongside Jayashree Srinivasan of the World Bank and Dame Judith Hackitt, who will be known to most of our UK-based members.
The purpose of this event was to put some of the advancements in building safety legislation in the UK in a broader, more international context, and to understand where we can learn lessons from overseas and support the exchange of international best practice.
We need to avoid complacency
It’s worth noting there is still a need to avoid complacency on this topic – we may have relatively new building safety legislation in the UK, but things are by no means finalised, as the Building Safety Regulator is still becoming established, and we must remain focused on the fact that this work is intended to save lives.
Among the key messages from the panel was a reminder from Dame Judith Hackitt, an Honorary CIOB Fellow, that we are in a new regulatory regime in the UK, but we also need to continue driving culture change. She noted that we are starting to see the impacts of these things in the UK, but urged people to “look up and look around at what’s going on around the world” as we have much to learn from other regulatory regimes and how they’re implemented.
She also offered a note of optimism that things are slowly moving in the right direction and that “we’re going to get there”.
Beware the gap between ‘paper to practice’
Jayashree Srinivasan commented that looking around the world, the “legislative layer” is present almost everywhere, but even sophisticated regulatory regimes can have a gap between the intention of the legislation and the application of implementation measures, the “paper-to-practice gap”. She cautioned that “enforcement is only as strong as the inspection system behind it”.
Kim Lovegrove talked about “let’s build better” (not build back better), suggesting more focus on getting it right first time and making it clear that no one should look to codes and regulations as a panacea. He added that buildings change and owners change, but the “building’s memory must not”, which is a sharp and concise argument for taking the golden thread of information about a building seriously.
My overall takeaway was that the International Model Building Act provides the “best in class” blueprint for regulators to learn from. I am proud that CIOB is utilising its influence to help move the conversation forward, in the UK and elsewhere, as we continue to advocate for quality and safety as priorities in the built environment.
The full webinar is now available to watch on demand, for free, on the CIOB Academy website: Building Safety Regulation in a Changing World: Global Lessons for Reform
Victoria Hills is CEO of CIOB.
