The UK’s building safety landscape has changed dramatically in the eight years since the Grenfell Tower fire. What began as a profound shock to public confidence has evolved into a wholesale reform programme, the centrepiece of which is the Building Safety Act.
Now fully in force, the act assigns clear legal duties to those who commission, design, construct and operate higher-risk residential buildings (HRBs), defined as structures more than 18m or seven storeys high, containing at least two homes.
At the heart of the new system is the principle of demonstrable competence. Regulators, insurers and residents are no longer satisfied by persuasive CVs or corporate track records; they want objective evidence that the people making decisions about life-safety-critical assets understand the risks they are taking and the standards they must meet.
In January 2025, the Engineering Council – working with the Building Safety Regulator and the professional engineering institutions, including CIBSE – published the UK-SPEC HRB standard. This extends the familiar UK Standard for Professional Engineering Competence by overlaying multidisciplinary requirements specific to HRBs.
The standard asks engineers – whether chartered, incorporated or technician level – to show they can integrate fire and structural safety, manage the ‘golden thread’ of digital information, and communicate with duty-holders in a language that residents and regulators can understand.
Institutions with a licence to award HRB Registration, of which CIBSE is one, offer routes for members to demonstrate this competence and, with the required revalidation, provides an assurance mechanism that remains valid for the whole of a member’s practising life, not just at the point of registration
All corporate members are required to include at least one semi-structured CPD activity on building safety. CIBSE’s Building Safety Working Group is running a pilot scheme to support the initial cohort of applicants in their HRB registration. This scheme is instrumental in shaping guidance and clarifying the standards required for HRB engineers. There are demanding expectations for these registrants, and everyone working on an HRB must understand and meet robust standards.
CIBSE is additionally now approved to assess the Façade Annex of the UK-SPEC HRB standard. In collaboration with the Society of Façade Engineers, we are actively developing guidance to support this important addition.
The Building Safety Act’s emphasis on competence is matched by its focus on organisational accountability. Every company working on an HRB must appoint, and name to the regulator, individuals who carry the legal title of principal designer and principal contractor.
If organisations cannot point to staff who meet the standards, they face enforcement action that ranges from improvement notices to criminal prosecution. This is already altering procurement behaviour. Tier-one contractors report that clients now ask for evidence of HRB-specific competence at pre-qualification stage, while insurers insist on it before they will write professional indemnity cover.
Perhaps the most significant cultural shift lies in the way the act blurs the boundary between design and operation. Safety must live beyond practical completion; it must be updated whenever the building, or the knowledge about its risks, changes. That requirement elevates the role of building services engineers, because HVAC, smoke-control and digital monitoring systems are key to occupant safety.
Designers must think like facilities managers, ensuring that equipment choices enable straightforward inspection and maintenance, and operators must think like designers, feeding real-world performance data back into the golden thread so that future refurbishments can address actual, not just theoretical, risks.
The Building Safety Act and the UK-SPEC HRB promise a safer, more transparent construction sector – but only if the profession embraces the competencies now demanded of it. CIBSE’s role is to provide the competency frameworks, training and guidance that allow engineers to meet those demands with confidence.
Our task as individual professionals is to engage with these resources, to document our competence honestly, and to recognise that the true measure of our expertise is both the detail of our designs and the long-term wellbeing of the people who live in the buildings we design. The bar has been raised; together we must ensure it stays there.
About the author
Dr Anastasia Mylona is technical director at CIBSE
