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Hackitt urges professional bodies to push new building safety competence standard

Dame Judith Hackitt has called on the five professional bodies that have been licensed to award the Engineering Council’s UK Standard for Professional Engineering Competence and Commitment Contextualised for Higher-Risk Buildings (UK-SPEC HRB) to promote the new qualification among their members and to strongly encourage members to register. 

She has also stressed the importance of informing the wider industry about the standard and the benefits of being able to prove that HRBs have been designed and built by demonstrably competent people.

Presenting the keynote address at the launch of the UK-SPEC HRB at the House of Lords on 1 May, the Building a Safer Future report author supported the delivery of a qualification that enables professionally qualified structural and civil engineers who work on HRBs to demonstrate their competence.

In her 2018 report, published a year after the Grenfell Tower tragedy, Hackitt identified inconsistency in the processes and standards for assuring the skills, knowledge, experience and behaviours of those working on HRBs, which constituted a significant flaw in the current regulatory system.

Developed in direct response to her independent review of building regulations and fire safety, the Engineering Council’s new UK standard is the product of a collaboration with professional engineering institutions and expert volunteers.

Its purpose is to assess the competence and commitment of individual engineers and technicians who work on HRBs, one of the recommendations outlined in the CIC’s Setting the Bar building safety competence report.

The UK’s regulatory body for the engineering profession has licensed five professional bodies for the HRB standard registration: the Chartered Association of Building Engineers (CABE); the Chartered Institution of Building Services Engineers (CIBSE); the Institution of Civil Engineers (ICE); the Institution of Fire Engineers (IFE); and the Institution of Structural Engineers (IStructE).

In her keynote address, Hackitt said she wanted to hear more about the Engineering Council’s “next steps”, which, she added, will need to include “driving” the five institutions to raise awareness among their members, not just of the new qualification’s existence but also to encourage them to register against the standard.