Fire Science Show
Fire Science Show
175 - Changes in the UK fire regulations with Dame Judith Hackitt
The Grenfell Tower tragedy has triggered a Public Inquiry (which just published their final report), and concurrently - a review of the UK Building Regulations and Fire Safety. The latter task was given to Dame Judith Hackitt, a former Head of the Health and Safety Executive and a chemical engineer.
In this interview Dame Judith Hackitt lends her voice to a pressing dialogue on fire safety reform following the Grenfell Tower tragedy. She uncovers the systemic flaws that allowed such a disaster to occur and stresses the urgent need for a cultural shift in safety practices, beyond mere regulatory compliance. By dissecting the UK's Building Safety Act, we discuss the prioritization of life safety over property protection, particularly within vulnerable residential zones. This conversation not only addresses disparities between residential and commercial building regulations but urges a reevaluation of how safety standards are applied globally.
The episode further explores the inadequacy of outdated fire safety frameworks in the context of modern architecture. Dame Hackitt provides insights into the necessity of involving competent fire engineers early in the design process and the importance of a holistic approach to fire risk assessment. With a new regulatory regime shifting responsibility onto duty holders, the onus is on architects, constructors, and engineers to prove safety from the onset. We highlight the growing demand for skilled fire safety professionals and the need for collaboration and transparency, setting a performance-based precedent for future safety measures.
As we navigate these necessary changes, the discussion underscores the broader implications for the construction industry, including architects, designers, and product manufacturers. We delve into the challenges of adopting a new regulatory mindset, inspired by global practices and insights from esteemed reviews. Dame Hackett's perspectives advocate for industry-led guidance and innovation, stressing the potential for alliances to drive the evolution of fire safety standards. This transformative dialogue serves as a clarion call for heightened accountability and a collective pursuit of excellence within the construction landscape.
If you would like to learn about the regulatory review, please read the Dame Hackitt's final report.
If you would like a scientific commentary to this review, please refer to this paper by Spinardi and Law.
Some of the changes to the regulatory system were also discussed in the Episode 102 of the Fire Science Show about the changing role of architects in the system.
Thank you to the SFPE for recognizing me with the 2025 SFPE Fire Safety Engineering Award! Huge thanks to YOU for being a part of this, and big thanks to the OFR for supporting me over the years.
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The Fire Science Show is produced by the Fire Science Media in collaboration with OFR Consultants. Thank you to the podcast sponsor for their continuous support towards our mission.
Hello everybody, welcome to the Fire Science Show. I have a delightful episode for you, an episode that many of you have asked for. I'm in New Zealand and I was recently at the FireNZ conference by the way, a very nice conference. Congratulations to the organizers. Anyway, at that conference I was giving my keynote speech about communication and need for better communication in fire safety engineering better communication in fire safety engineering and by chance, in the same session there was another keynote by Dame Judith Hackitt about the changes to the British fire regulatory system. Now our talks kind of both called for a cultural shift in how fire safety is performed mine more through approach to communication, Dame Hackitt's more through how the regulatory system is going to evolve. But basically we were pretty much calling and asking for very similar things and those talks resonated well with each other.
Wojciech Węgrzyński:I had a chance to talk with Dame Judith Hackitt afterwards and, yes, she agreed to do an interview for the 5 Cents show to talk about the British regulatory system and how it's going to change, how it's shifting, so my audience can also learn about that firsthand. I could not miss such an opportunity. And here we are with the interview. And yeah, if you're not british and you think you may not be interested in this, I I guarantee you that you are, because the way how british system influences global fire safety regulations, how standards coming from the UK spread around the world and how a lot of us follow what's happening in the UK is very impactful worldwide, to everyone. And the second thing is it's better to learn on mistakes of others. The call for independent fire review came after the tragic fire of Grenfell and pinpointed a lot of weaknesses in the existing regulatory system and I think it's important to learn from that, no matter where you are from, to learn, see how your local system, how your local culture looks like, and perhaps adjust, because you don't really want to do that after you have your Grenfell. One of Dame Hackett's regrets was that there were opportunities to change the system before Grenfell Tower fire, but they were kind of ignored and missed. So you'll learn more about the new British regulatory system in the interview. Let's not prolong this anymore. Let's spin the intro and jump into the episode.
Wojciech Węgrzyński:Welcome to the Firesize Show. My name is Wojciech Wegrzyński and I will be your host. This podcast is brought to you in collaboration with OFR Consultants. Ofr is the UK's leading fire risk consultancy. Its globally established team has developed a reputation for preeminent fire engineering expertise, with colleagues working across the world to help protect people, property and environment. Working across the world to help protect people, property and environment. Established in the UK in 2016 as a startup business of two highly experienced fire engineering consultants, the business has grown phenomenally in just seven years, with offices across the country in seven locations, from Edinburgh to Bath, and now employing more than a hundred professionals. Colleagues are on a mission to continually explore the challenges that fire creates for clients and society, applying the best research, experience and diligence for effective, tailored fire safety solutions. In 2024, ofr will grow its team once more and is always keen to hear from industry professionals who would like to collaborate on fire safety futures this year, get in touch at OFRCconsultantscom. Hello everybody, I am here today, joined by Dame Judith Hackitt, nice, to meet you.
Dame Judith Hackitt:Pleasure to meet you too.
Wojciech Węgrzyński:And excellent day in Fire NZ Conference in New Zealand and opportunity to meet two fellow.
Dame Judith Hackitt:Europeans. Indeed, we meet the other side of the world. That's right.
Wojciech Węgrzyński:I don't think you can go any further, but still I appreciate the opportunity and your time and I would love to talk about some of the important stuff that's now changing in the UK the whole rework of the fire regulatory system that you've been tasked with. My question is about how it started. So you've been chair of the Health and Safety Executive for many years. You're a chemical engineer by trade. After the horrible tragedy of Grenfell, you're tasked to take a look at the fire regulatory system. What's the first thing you see?
Dame Judith Hackitt:Okay, well, so, as I always explain when I talk to people about this, the government set off two things almost at the same time. So the first was the public inquiry into the Grenfell incident itself, which has gone on for seven years and just produced its final report. What the government asked me to do was different, which was to look at the fire safety and the whole regulatory system around it in terms of how had we arrived at a place where something like that, like Grenfell itself, could happen? But also what we were beginning to realize very quickly after Grenfell was that there may well be a number of other buildings out there, high-rise buildings, where we were concerned about the fire safety. And that was the focus of my piece of work.
Dame Judith Hackitt:What was my first thought when I came to it? I was very, very keen to take on the role because, as an engineer, and one who had spent a lot of my time in that health and safety space, as chair of the regulatory body and so on, it was a mystery to me how we could have arrived at a place where such a disaster could happen. So I was very keen to understand that and to be able to play whatever part I could in trying to improve the system going forward. I remember very clearly my first day when people said I suppose you'll want copies of all of the guidance and the regulations, of course, and I said no, thanks, that's not the way I'm going to do that. I'm not going to do this piece of work by reading through all the clauses of the regulations and telling you how those need to be changed.
Dame Judith Hackitt:I need to understand how the system is supposed to work and then understand why it doesn't work. So I brought a very engineering mindset to it. I drew out the flow diagram of how the regulatory system was supposed to work, and I did that by interrogating people and saying what happens here? What happens here? How is it supposed to work then? Then what happens? How does it go through? And I came up with a very, very complicated diagram of the way the system works. The minute you look at that, how it used to be, your first instinct, I think, would be to say well, it's not surprising that doesn't work, because it's hugely complex and provides every reason for people to try and find ways around and work around in the system.
Wojciech Węgrzyński:I wonder why have we been blind to the problem? Because there were fires before Grenfell that involved cladding. But overall, you could argue, looking at statistics like the decreasing number of fatalities, the fire damage and so on, the system was to some extent successful. It took the outlier like Grenfell, a horrible tragedy to showcase that perhaps it is working on run-of-the-mill cases in many cases, but in some cases it creates extreme situations like in Grenfell. Was that something surprising to you that the system could at the same time work and help us lower the fatalities and so on and lead to?
Dame Judith Hackitt:I think it came as a shock to many, many people. So, as I said, I've talked to an awful lot of people as part of conducting my review and many of them said to me we knew this system was broken, we knew it wasn't working system was broken. We knew it wasn't working. But what I also got from talking to all of those people was a sense of no one really had any sense of just how bad it could be if it all fell apart. So the shock that people felt when they saw the magnitude of the consequences at Grenfell was the thing that really shook everyone. So, yes, I think that we know there had been other warning signs. Lackanell House is a good example. Yes, and that was an opportunity missed to look at the system and so on, and it wasn't taken. So, yes, there were opportunities to look at it and look at it differently, but the scale of the tragedy of Grenfell was such that people were really absolutely committed to. We have got to rectify this and we've got to do it with a sense of urgency now.
Wojciech Węgrzyński:The immediate shake for us as the fire safety community was really huge, because this happened in the middle of the biggest fire safety conference we had at the time in.
Wojciech Węgrzyński:Lund. So all of us were there. As fire safety scientists and you know, we wake up to this tragedy and like we're shocked, we don't know how to respond to that it. You immediately feel like we we have in some way failed. But then there's the immediate question could we have uh, easily, I don't know prevented? Prevented? That I'm not sure we could, because Greffel was not just a fire of a frigid, it was not just a cladding fire. I think it was a lot more to that right.
Dame Judith Hackitt:Absolutely, václav, and that's one of the biggest fights I've had over the last six years is to get people off. This hook of this is all about cladding, and if only'd have banned that cladding, it would never have happened. What it uncovered in that broadest look at the regulatory framework was a broken system, and the tragedy that happened did not have to be one associated with cladding, and therefore the solution we put in place to make the system better had to be more than just do not use flammable cladding from now on.
Wojciech Węgrzyński:You say it was a broken system. But was it really broken or it had too many ways to go around it?
Dame Judith Hackitt:No, it was broken. It was broken because there were not only too many ways to get around the system, but there were also too many conflicts of interest in the system. We had partly privatized our building control system, which meant that people who should have been regulating were actually employed by the developers. That was one example of conflict of interest. That was one example of conflict of interest no-transcript. And now you're kind of crossing the line into helping them get around the system. That's more than just workaround. That's the problem. It's actually we haven't got the responsibilities in the right place.
Wojciech Węgrzyński:I'm also representative of a fire testing house. My laboratory is very similar to BRE. We're under governmental control. We're not like privately owned.
Wojciech Węgrzyński:So we're like self-owned institute. Anyway, I know how it looks from inside the fire laboratory. I know those stocks, I've been in those rooms, you know. And when the manufacturers are looking for help to make their product better based on laboratory experience, that's fantastic Because we can tell them how the product works. But when a person looks into where to put a specific part, like a cavity break, to shield the thermocouple from measuring the real temperature, that's when you break the system Absolutely. Measuring the real temperature, that's when you break the system Absolutely. And when your test becomes your only goal, it starts to be a very bad test. And we're doing that for 100 years for testing. Still, there's no other way. I also think it's less life and safety, it's more market regulation thing, right? Yes, and we believe this is a life safety system. Yeah, in your talk today you've used this term race to the bottom.
Wojciech Węgrzyński:Like what do you mean by that?
Dame Judith Hackitt:So my remit was to look at the regulatory system.
Wojciech Węgrzyński:Okay.
Dame Judith Hackitt:Okay. So look at the regulatory framework. Do we have a good enough regulatory framework? And it's pretty clear pretty quickly that we don't.
Dame Judith Hackitt:do we have a good enough regulatory framework, and it was pretty clear pretty quickly that we don't. But what was also clear was that, because we had a weak regulatory system, that that then allowed the construction industry to find not just ways around things but to actually game the system. And so you got into this game of if the rules don't say I can't do it, then I'll assume I can. And in any case, even if I get caught, the penalties are so low that it's worth taking a chance because I probably won't get caught anyway. And at that point you realize the system is truly broken because everybody's lost sight of the purpose. You know, here we are building houses, building high-rise buildings that people are going to live in and where they have a right to feel safe and secure, and people are playing games with the system without any sight at all on that purpose of providing safe homes for people to live in.
Wojciech Węgrzyński:I think it's such a very important thing because fire safety came to life from large fires in industrial facilities in the 19th century. It was very often connected to property protection.
Wojciech Węgrzyński:Life safety was an important part of it, but most of it was property protection In residential buildings. We don't have that strong enforcement of fire safety features In Poland. You don't have sprinklers in residential compartments. You wouldn't have even smoke detectors in them. We put some rules forward to offices, industry, car parks and so forth, but we don't really regulate that much for residential buildings. Yet in statistics residentials are where the fatalities are.
Wojciech Węgrzyński:And as you said, people have a right to feel safe at their home. Today we are also doing crazy things like building underground car parks under residential buildings without appreciating the impact of that fire on the residential part of the building, of that fire on the residential part of the building. Do you think that the focus also needs to shift more to actually providing safety to those most vulnerable to the fires? Because I would find residential people, people living in all of us, actually in our homes. That's the place where you're under the biggest fire risk, perhaps.
Dame Judith Hackitt:That's exactly what the Building Safety Act that we've now implemented in the UK sets out to do is to take a risk-based approach to those who are at greatest risk, and that's why we are focusing the highest level of regulatory attention on multiple occupancy buildings, high-rise buildings, which in themselves are complex and which, when you add things like underground car parks, mixed use, where some of it is commercial, some of it is residential, and the fact that, unlike office buildings and commercial buildings, where, under normal circumstances, someone is in control of the activities that are going on in that building, by definition, in a residential building, once people are in their own homes, we have no control over what they're doing and what risks they might be taking, unknowingly putting both themselves and others in that building at risk. So for me, all of the arguments are very heavily weighted in favor of we have to put much more attention into residential safety, particularly into multiple occupancy buildings.
Wojciech Węgrzyński:One more thing that relates to the old system, let's say, is this pursuit of compliance. I felt that that's what everyone wanted to be compliant with, something to have it off their shoulder, and in Poland it's also like that. I want my building to be signed off. We have a horrible, horrible saying in Poland that if a building burns down, make it at least burn down according to the law.
Wojciech Węgrzyński:And it's kind of a difficult pill to swallow where you have fatalities of that. I don't agree with that. But I think the pursuit of compliance was there. Is there still, and how that relates to providing real safety to people. Is compliance the proxy of safety? I'm not sure.
Dame Judith Hackitt:I'm very much with you that it's not enough. Compliance with the rules is the absolute minimum that we expect, but until you start to think about buildings as what they truly are, which is complex systems, not just complex in terms of the way they were designed and built, but the very fact that you have people in them who are doing whatever it is they're doing, that is a complex and dynamic system, and so simply complying with a set of rules that were set at the time when it was built is not enough, because you continue to change it and you have to have a dynamic system to maintain safety and occupation.
Wojciech Węgrzyński:If you think about the systems that we're using, even the fire resistance framework, that's a hundred year old system. It's basically a definition of how quickly someone could shovel a coal into a furnace a hundred years ago.
Wojciech Węgrzyński:You think about applying fire resistance to, let's say, Atria. There were no A-Train in the 19th century. There were no shopping malls in the 19th century. There were no car parks in the 19th century it did not exist. And so how can those things respond to the modern architecture? And again, buildings are becoming more complex. They are also more expensive. So there's also this financial loss aspect of that. There's more to protect, and also you just have more people in one space that you want to protect, right yeah?
Dame Judith Hackitt:And a good example good example of what you're talking about. So very early on in. What we discovered after Grenfell, of course, was that the fire risk assessment process that was carried out on high-rise buildings didn't include the external walls.
Wojciech Węgrzyński:Okay.
Dame Judith Hackitt:And the minute someone says that and you, I'm sorry. How can you do a fire risk assessment of a building that does not include the external walls? Okay Of course, we have now rectified that, but how we arrived at that situation, as you said, relates to a time when buildings were built in a certain way and the assumption was that the external walls of the building would be made of brick or concrete or whatever, and could be taken for granted as solid and firm.
Wojciech Węgrzyński:I had this horrible discussion with the Polish colleagues who are involved in writing the law and and we were discussing the green walls because my team was researching green walls, you know.
Wojciech Węgrzyński:And we explained them the challenges of the green walls and they're like okay, yeah, this is very distressing. But you know what happens when we bring that up to people? They will ask us for the definition of the wall because they will say, oh yeah, but the wall ends before the plastic pot in which you put the plant starts and this is just a decoration. We are not allowed to regulate the decorations people put on the walls. So it's a very complex problem to actually make a system that people would follow because they have so many incentives to go around it.
Dame Judith Hackitt:And also I think that this is very much linked to the issue of compliance and to this seeing things in discrete elements. People will say things like I did my bit. The bit I did was okay. If there's now a problem, it's somebody else's fault, not mine. And what you absolutely need in the case of complex buildings I am in no doubt at all will be someone who is looking at the integrity of the totals.
Wojciech Węgrzyński:I think that should be the fire engineer, a competent fire engineer. I think that's the only person in the room who can look at the building wide holistically and look at all of it. But we're not evolved, at least in my country. We're evolved very late. It's very difficult to make changes to projects. This is also something that needs to change right.
Dame Judith Hackitt:Certainly that's what I hear too in the UK. You know, fire engineers frequently say to me we're brought in far too late. We're asked to fire engineer buildings that have already started construction and it's too late to properly fire engineer a good solution.
Wojciech Węgrzyński:Do you think it's going to change?
Dame Judith Hackitt:The new regime will require that, because this gateway system that we've now put in place, both the plan for the building has to be approved and then the detailed design of the building has to be approved by the regulator, and what's very important to understand is that that is not the regulator ticking a box to say, yes, you've complied.
Dame Judith Hackitt:The question the regulator is asking at that point is demonstrate to me that what you are about to build is going to be safe, and that will result in questions about who have you involved? Has a fire engineer been involved thus far? If not, why not? And how can I know that you have got the correct solutions in place here to deal with whatever might happen in this building in the future? So they will have to answer all of those questions at the design stage, and that is going to necessitate much earlier involvement and much more collaboration.
Wojciech Węgrzyński:But this also means a lot more education for the authorities as well, because they will have to be able to judge Box ticking exercise is easier. Do you have 60 minutes? Yes, no, in in here we're talking about more, more of an assessment of a project absolutely they become they.
Dame Judith Hackitt:They have to be able to ask those right questions and to be able to assess the validity of the answer that they're being presented with. So it's not inconsistent. You talked earlier in the conference today about do we have enough fire engineers, and I think the answer to that is clearly no, because we cannot expect any more than we can expect the people who are on the side of doing the work to have super experts who have every answer to every question. We cannot expect the regulators to be super experts either.
Dame Judith Hackitt:So they too, will have to call upon their own team of experts to advise them on what they're hearing and what they're being presented with as proposals. So it's not inconceivable to me at all that fire engineers will be in demand for both sides.
Wojciech Węgrzyński:That's very interesting. This podcast is listened by my fire safety engineers and my audience knows that the job security for us is very, very good. We're in high demands, especially the competent ones. If you had to define the main difference between the new system and the old system, what's the main switch?
Dame Judith Hackitt:the main switch is that switch of responsibility. Away from just do what the rules say and then you'll get the building. What's the main switch? The main switch is that switch of responsibility. Okay, Away from just do what the rules say and then you'll get the building signed up. The new system says you are now clearly responsible for demonstrating that a building is safe and demonstrating that to the regulator, and you will not get permission to proceed to the next stage in the process until you have satisfied the regulator that what you have proposed built is safe for occupation.
Wojciech Węgrzyński:And on whom is the responsibility now? On the architect, the main constructor or engineer it?
Dame Judith Hackitt:depends. It's a different stage in the process. So, prior to construction, the principal designer is the title of the duty holder, and that has to be a nominated person. Once you proceed to construction, that then becomes the principal contractor, who will be responsible for ensuring that the building is then built in accordance with the design. And then, when the building is occupied throughout its life cycle, the building then continues to have a duty holder in the form of a building safety manager, who will be required, as the building is used, abused, repaired, refurbished and so on, to continue to demonstrate that the integrity of the building is maintained.
Wojciech Węgrzyński:But this also creates liabilities, right. So the point of having a responsible person, one of the points is that person is liable for the fire safety strategy or fire safety of the building in general, what does it mean to the fire safety engineering market? Because now that's going to create challenges with ensuring. I've heard some rumors about difficulties in ensuring professional practice in the UK already for fire safety engineers, especially for smaller practices. Do you think the market will solve that in some way?
Dame Judith Hackitt:I think it will.
Dame Judith Hackitt:I think it will take a while to settle down and I think what we've seen so far is very much the pendulum swinging from one end of the spectrum to the other and as much as now, the insurance industry has become very risk averse in relation to providing professional indemnity insurance.
Dame Judith Hackitt:But some of that is because the industry is not doing as good as it could be at demonstrating and differentiating between those who are truly competent and who can be insured because they are a good risk, as it were, and you cannot but link that to demonstrated competence. And in any case, as I said in my presentation, remember this is akin to regulatory systems that we already have in place in industry, where that same kind of safety case approach to show me that what you are doing is safe and show me that you can manage this in such a way that it will be acceptable and that you know how to deal with emergencies if they occur. That regime has been in place in industry for a very long time. All we're doing now is applying that to high-rise buildings in the same way that we have been applying it for many, many years to high-hazard industries.
Wojciech Węgrzyński:Previously. You've said that in the previous system some people would just not follow the requirements because it's just worth trying to not follow them because nothing is going to happen. The penalties were low enough. Now you, of course, have a single responsibility owner. What mechanisms are there to stop that person to take the responsibility on myself and you can do something completely wrong and we'll just get done with that.
Dame Judith Hackitt:The difference will be about the provision of proof that things have been done properly. So part of the problem with our existing system or our old system, as it were, was it very much depended upon whether the building control regulator turned up at the right time to see what was being done and if you managed to cover up all of the fire stopping before they got there, how can they tell?
Dame Judith Hackitt:So if the onus is placed very much on the regulator to catch out the people doing the work, then they've kind of got to be there all the time if they're going to pick up everything. And clearly that was not possible. So the burden of proof now shifts to one where it's up to the duty holder, the responsible person, to provide evidence that they have done the work to the right standard. And that is really giving the industry something to think about in terms of how they're going to present that evidence. But with the technology we have to hand today in terms of being able to provide proof in the form of videos, proof in the form of digital proof, in the form of digital records of what materials have been used, and so on, I think it's actually going to cause the industry to make quite a significant leap forward in terms of much more modern practices.
Wojciech Węgrzyński:As in maintaining track of what has been done and proof of record, because this will make your life simpler at the commissioning stage.
Dame Judith Hackitt:Absolutely. And there is a requirement that underpins all of this for what's called this golden thread of information.
Wojciech Węgrzyński:Very good. We had a funny golden thread when we were doing one of the tunnels in Warsaw, because the local community was so obsessed with the tunnel we were building. There was an internet forum with thousands of pages Every day. They were discussing how the building changed and actually there was a failure in one concrete layer during the late stage of construction and those people tracked back like 500 pages before to the day when the concrete was poured and they showed oh no, they poured it in low temperatures.
Dame Judith Hackitt:So we had the golden thread but it was community built by the populations around the tunnel.
Wojciech Węgrzyński:But I see you know having this sort of record it also helps solve some problems, because it's much easier to check on video. How has someone put the fire stopping instead of removing a part of wall to check if it's there? What about enforcement sanctions? Is this also something that's changing, improving?
Dame Judith Hackitt:Yes, the sanctions, the powers that are now available to the regulator, the sanctions that they can take against people who fail in their duties are very, very significant, but also because they can stop occupation of the building or indeed, in extremis, ask for people to be moved out of a building if it is in imminent danger. The penalties go beyond merely the fines that can be imposed by the regulator. There is a significant financial risk associated with not getting approval from the regulator, over and above the financial penalty itself.
Wojciech Węgrzyński:I must say in Poland the system works like that and it kind of works. We had cases where, because of fire non-compliance, airport was not open for months.
Wojciech Węgrzyński:We had a case where a metro line was not commissioned for months. The tunnel that I just talked it was delayed by two or three months because of the commissioning process, and the fire brigade has the power to stop the building, and it's something that it's a very powerful thing, right, because it's in some cases multi-million dollar decisions, but this really makes the stakeholders work to their best ability. What about competency? And I know that in your work and in Grantville Inquiry, this came up a lot we need competencies in fire safety, engineering and civil engineering overall. How does competency look in the new system, or what you're looking for in the new system in regards to that?
Dame Judith Hackitt:I think competency in the new system looks like people really understanding the importance of their role and their part of the work and how it fits into the overall system, rather than just having that blinkered approach to it.
Dame Judith Hackitt:This is all that I do, and it doesn't matter, because the reality is that every element of the building interacts with other elements, and simple things like the window's not fitting and then you put the filler in around and the windows, you've immediately compromised a huge part of the integrity of the building, just as much as if you knock a hole through a wall that is and don't refill it properly. You know, so there are. The heart of the new competence regime is for people to understand what their role is, how it interacts with everyone else's, and also being prepared to call out the standards of workmanship of other people if that is a problem, not to simply say that's not my job so I'll ignore it. There's got to be part of this system that requires people to say that's not good enough and I'm not going to put my work alongside something that compromises this whole.
Wojciech Węgrzyński:So instead of a web of blame it's everyone else's fault we go into pride in my job. I've done my job to the best of my capability.
Dame Judith Hackitt:You mentioned earlier that I talked a lot about this race to the bottom. We've got to reverse that dynamic and start to create the dynamic that takes us on a journey to the top. We're all supporting one another to get there and deliver good outcomes.
Wojciech Węgrzyński:Is there any way we can measure or enforce that competency?
Dame Judith Hackitt:How do you foresee that One of the biggest challenges I think we face in the built environment particularly is about the transient nature of a large proportion of the workforce. Are we ever going to overcome that? I don't know. It's a very mobile industry in that sense. But if you can't generate competence through having people there who you invest in training and bring them up to speed and so on, then you have got to, in my view, increase the levels of supervision, and that's one of the areas where I think we have eased off in the past to our detriment, and many, many people have said to me things like we used to have clerk of works, we used to have site supervisors. We don't anymore. I think we will start to see those people returning to oversee the quality of some of the work that is done by those parts of the workforce where actually instilling competence in the individuals themselves may become an ever-ending task.
Wojciech Węgrzyński:I think this ownership of responsibility that you've talked before is also one way to ensure competency, because if I'm responsible for the work of my subcontractors and they're responsible for their subcontractors, it creates a pyramid of reliance on competency. What about the competency of fire safety engineers? Because it seems that in this new system, fire safety engineer will be an important person. We hope that is an important person. We hope that it's a person that's involved in the project early on, is working together with the principal designer or principal contractor.
Wojciech Węgrzyński:That is there to support because in no way the principal designer will have intimate knowledge of fire problems to solve this complicated systematic problems in buildings. How do you foresee some need for professional credentials? That was something called by the Grinnell Inquiry right.
Dame Judith Hackitt:Yes, it was. Yes, it was indeed, and I think there will be a long, hard look at which are the key professions that need to have that added level of accreditation or licensing. But you said something really important in your presentation today, which was about the need for people not to exaggerate. Yeah.
Dame Judith Hackitt:And for me that is a really important part of being competent. Too much is as bad as not enough, and the really competent and confident professionals are the ones who can put together proportionate solutions and not seek to overdo it any more than they would underdo it.
Wojciech Węgrzyński:Is this new regulatory system? Does it involve all actors or is it just something that makes a big difference to, I don't know, the architects or the designers and the product manufacturers, for example?
Dame Judith Hackitt:they do as they did it truly is a seismic shift for the whole industry okay and I think a number of people have woken up to that early. Some parts of the system are only beginning now to realize that this is going to change the way they work too, but I was never in any doubt that this was about a seismic shift for everyone involved.
Wojciech Węgrzyński:Do you think it also requires a shift in how we approach the product testing market regulation? Yes, yes, yes, and any specific ways how this should be done? Or you just point out that we need to and it's up to us to figure it out?
Dame Judith Hackitt:No, I've done some work myself on that with people from other parts of the world looking at what good practice looks like in that space. But also we've had a review done by Paul Morell and Annalise Day in the UK to look at what a good product regulatory system looks like. I don't think there's any shortage of information on what good looks like. By picking on different elements of good practice from around the world and pulling that together, we know what we need to do. But I suspect that there will be a lot of resistance from the market, particularly to some of those things. There'll be lots of cries of commercial inconfidence and all sorts of other reasons why the transparency that's needed can't be provided. But for me it's time we got past all of that Because, as I said in my presentation today, if you compare this to the automotive industry or the white goods industry, we wouldn't tolerate that level of opacity and in some cases downright dishonesty from suppliers in any of those other supply chains that has kind of crept in here.
Wojciech Węgrzyński:I wonder. One thing that's going through my mind with the new system is the state of performance-based design in that system. So I'm involved with the Society of Fire Protection Engineers. We're promoting a performance-based design approach to fire safety engineering and we truly believe that for big buildings, that's the way how you can solve the problems. Now, in demonstrating responsibility, in demonstrating compliance. Previously it's easier to showcase that you're aligning with some standardized solution, but it's so much harder to demonstrate the goodness of your performance-based design. Are you worried that this new system will present barriers to performance-based design?
Dame Judith Hackitt:No, I don't think so, Because it's not a prescriptive system, because it says demonstrate that you have thought about the risks. It creates the opportunity for anyone who wants to provide an innovative solution, whether that be new materials or whatever, to do that, provided that they take the responsibility for identifying the risk and proving how they're mitigating that.
Wojciech Węgrzyński:And the role of documents like ADB. Is this still something that goes into the new system? Will you have a catalogue of solutions?
Dame Judith Hackitt:Well, ADB will need to be rewritten. We know that that's been underlined by the public inquiry, that that needs to be done as a matter of urgency, underlined by the public inquiry that that needs doing as a matter of urgency. What I think we will see emerging under the new regime, however, is a different style of approved document, because some of those elements of prescription that are so much in place in those documents, and indeed the way the documents are written in silos in those documents and indeed the way the documents are written in silos this document about electrical safety, this one about when we all know those things interact.
Dame Judith Hackitt:I think we're going to see a fundamental rethink of how you put the guidance together.
Wojciech Węgrzyński:And would you kind of narrow down the application of ADP, because there was this discussion about can you consider the mass timber building, your common structure, for which you could apply the rules of ADP, or is something very exotic new that you have to do performance-based design for I felt that it was not narrowly enough defined for which buildings it applies or is fit for which it's not well, I think, I think all of that is.
Dame Judith Hackitt:You know, as I said, we're on a journey. We haven't got all of the answers at this stage. We know we have to rethink that whole framework of how the guidance is structured and so on. What I think is really interesting is that in other industries I've worked in yeah you know, very often it's industry who write their own guidance.
Dame Judith Hackitt:They come together to set their own standards across the whole industry body, rather than waiting for all of that to be done for them by the regulator or by government. What I would dearly love to see and I talk a lot about the needs of leadership from the construction industry, and that's what I mean If we all know they truly get this and they really do want to lead the way to a different place, when they come together and start setting some of those standards and offering up those standards to the regulator that says, if we all commit to doing this, will that be good enough and the regulator is simply able to endorse that, rather than having to do the work for them.
Wojciech Węgrzyński:So here you would kind of expect the FI community to come up with some rules, or guidance itself. That's a big burden, that's a challenge. I know the community but it truly is a stationary shock.
Dame Judith Hackitt:But that's what leadership looks like, right, I know, I know, yeah.
Wojciech Węgrzyński:It's also a world of a lot of competing interests, a lot of also big money. To be honest, it's a huge part of the GDP, it's 10% or more value of the building. So we're talking about a very, very big industry, much bigger than most people think. So I wonder truly if it's possible for the industry you know to build an alliance and step up. That's a big task. I would love to see that, but unfortunately I'm not that optimistic about that. But yeah, we will see. To finish off, looking from your experience from chemical engineering, do you see any other things that perhaps are not within the regulatory system, but from the culture or the way how things are handled, that we could in our fire world, we could put in to manage the risks and do better?
Dame Judith Hackitt:I think. Interestingly, we've talked about that today, and your presentation about all of us needing to become better communicators, I think, lies at the heart of it for me, which is this thing about multidisciplinary teams produce better results than a whole series of very clever people working in splendid isolation. Yeah. And the more that we can break down those barriers and recognize those interdependencies and work more collaboratively, we will get to much better solutions.
Wojciech Węgrzyński:Yeah, I think it's a really strong message for the end. So thank you so much for your time. Enjoy your stay in New Zealand. I am certainly enjoying mine and looking forward how this system will be implemented and perhaps in some time we can talk about does it work?
Dame Judith Hackitt:and where to move forward. We will learn lessons, I'm sure, from implementation. We won't get it all right the first time, but we are on a journey.
Wojciech Węgrzyński:Thank you so much, and that's it. A lot to unpack in this episode and I really really wonder how this new regulatory system will work out for our British colleagues. I've tried to push Dame Hackitt into some areas of fire safety engineering that I think the regulatory system may have a lot of impact on how we pursue our engineering. You know, the ability to ensure engineers the ability to perform performance-based design, the changes to the system regarding materials and products and their certification, how they are put in the market a lot of things that have to be improved, and I think the solutions are not there yet on the market. They will need to appear. So we're going to enter some turbulent time where the things settle down. That's a direct consequence of the big catastrophe, the Grenfell Tower, which we can to some extent attribute to the ill broken previous system.
Wojciech Węgrzyński:The biggest shift in the new system is the shift of responsibility. It's this idea of demonstrating safety. I was talking about that with Michael Woodrow in the podcast I believe that was episode 100, where we've discussed that simply being compliant or simply sharing compliance with something and designing a bad building, designing a dangerous building, does not take responsibility from you. I think that's a massive shift. That's a really welcomed idea. It puts a lot of burden on us, on fire safety engineers, but also gives us a place at the table, makes us necessary at the building design from its earliest stage, because without us, no one can demonstrate this safety so clearly. We're entering interesting times. I hope you live in interesting times. That's apparently an old chinese curse, but I hope it's not going to be cursed for us. I hope the times will be great and, as always, the need for fire safety engineers, the need for competent, skilled fire safety engineers, is as high as ever, and this new building regulatory system also creates that need at levels that were not there previously.
Wojciech Węgrzyński:Share your thoughts about the new regulatory system. Share your thoughts about what's been happening in the UK post-Grenfell. Are you observing cultural challenges? Are you observing cultural shift? Do you call for more? Also, you know Dame Hackitt asked us to stand up and come up with some own ideas as the fire community. That's a big thing to ask, but I guess if we could do that, it could be amazing. If we set up our own rules, set up our own expectations towards how fire safety engineering should look like, it could be an interesting concept that would allow us do our jobs better, easier and and really thrive with them. Anyway, I could speak about this interview for literally hours because there are so many important points in there, but I'll just leave you here with your thoughts. Share them with me and let's see each other next wednesday. Same place, same time. Cheers, bye, bye.