Building Safety Network

In the aftermath of the Grenfell fire, HM Government commissioned Dame Judith Hackitt FREng to undertake an ‘Independent Review of Building Regulations and Fire Safety.’ Her review uncovered systemic failings that undermined the safety of people living in high-rise residential buildings across the country.

The new Building Safety Act (2022) goes some way to providing a legislative framework for addressing the failures identified in the Hackitt Report, yet an integrated and nuanced research approach to underpin its implementation is still underdeveloped.

The urgent need for regulatory ‘reform,’ transformation in central government policy-making in the context of housing and improvement of the Building Regulations are widely accepted as necessary actions following the tragic events leading up to Grenfell. Minister Gove’s statement on 28/01/22 reflects this in his assertion that “faulty and ambiguous (guidance and regulations) allowed unscrupulous people to exploit a broken system.”

Building on interdisciplinary research from The University of Manchester's expertise in housing safety, the social science of infrastructure and housing, and research on standards and policy, the goal of the Building Safety Network (BSN) is to create a community of scholars, industry experts, officials and representative bodies who together will help inform the future of building safety policy and practice through internationally excellent co-produced research.

Pump-priming funding from The University of Manchester sought to initiate a cross-faculty, interdisciplinary Building Safety Network (BSN) with the aim of developing a UKRI cross-council funding bid to fully establish the network on a national scale.

Network aims

The programme of activity stimulated by the network will re-energise attempts to tackle entrenched problems within a sector that is scarred by the tragedy at Grenfell and stymied by fragmented relationships between designers, constructors, building owners, managers, and residents. The network’s activities will be set within a genuinely transdisciplinary environment – bridging the expertise of the School of Engineering and the School of Social Sciences with the needs of building residents. The BSN will create a community of UK-based expertise, engaging experts from fields ranging from high-risk safety engineering to anthropology of the built environment.

It aims to amplify interdisciplinary research approaches to building safety and promote knowledge exchange across boundaries to address under-explored dimensions of risk, trust, quality, procurement, management, and transparency.

Our work

The network will explore the relevant explicit or implied changes and requirements resulting from the Building Safety Act 2022; this may include consideration of the implicit ‘burdens’ or ‘needs’ placed on building residents and the role of the building safety manager and the accountable person in assuring golden thread workflows. Some of these measures will be directly legislated for in the Act, while in other areas, powers for the Government and/or Building Safety Regulator to take forward detailed requirements through secondary legislation may emerge. We are also interested in the procedures for accessing the Housing Ombudsman – and the perceived legitimacy of this body from the perspectives of trust and independence. We aim to consider these regulatory frameworks within a larger landscape of resident empowerment, the intersection of housing politics and industry, and wider questions of public trust.

Such activities require joined-up and comprehensive research approaches, linking critically engaged social research that engages with a shifting political and socio-economic landscape with technical questions of structural integrity, material properties, analysis of procurement and construction process, and practice-orientated methodologies that ensure research leads to meaningful change in the sector.

Funding

This research/work has been supported by The University of Manchester Research Institute (UMRI) Pump-Priming Programme.

Project team

The challenges we have identified transcend the engineering, physical and social sciences and cannot be addressed in the absence of a genuinely inter-disciplinary approach. The research team reflects the interdisciplinary challenge.

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  Dr Richard Kirkham - The University of Manchester (UoM)

  Richard is a Reader in Civil Engineering at UoM, Deputy Director of the Thomas Ashton Institute, and member of the senior leadership team in the Manchester Urban Institute. Richard’s research on government major project delivery has attracted funding from ESRC and he provides expert advice to government on aspects of risk management in the context of major projects. He is also leading the Cabinet Office Science and Engineering Network workstream on ‘knowledge transfer’ having successfully completed an ESRC funded secondment into the Cabinet Office in 2016.

  Dr Richard Kirkham's personal profile

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  Dr Constance Smith - The University of Manchester (UoM)

  Connie, a Lecturer in Anthropology at The UoM School of Social Sciences, focuses on the anthropology of architecture, time, and urban change. She explores shifting landscapes of buildings, planning, and infrastructure, examining how materialities inflect engagement with the past and future. Her policy work with the Building Remediation Directorate at DLUHC advising the Residents Voice team on improving tenants’ experiences of the remediation program will offer valuable expertise to the Network.

  Dr Constance Smith's personal profile

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  Professor Neil Bourne - The University of Manchester (UoM)

  Neil is a Professor of Matter in Extreme Environments at The UoM and Director of the Thomas Ashton Institute. Neil is by training a physical scientist, by inclination a communicator, and always a champion for both his specialist areas and the wider fields of safety that they serve. He has extended his expertise over recent years into the areas of risk, occupational health, and workplace stress, working within universities and government as an educator, an advisor and now as the leader, of National and International Institutes in Health and Safety and National Facilities Science.

  Professor Neil Bourne's biography

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  Dr Mohamad Kassam - Newcastle University

  Mohamad (>130 papers, i-index:65, >4850 citations) is Professor of Digital Construction Management, the Deputy Director of Education and the Lead of the Digital Construction Research theme in the School of Engineering at Newcastle University. He is a renowned Scholar for his research in digitalisation of construction and the built environment at both technical and policy level. Previous appointments include advisor on Digital Transformation to the European Commission, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, Inter-American Development Bank, among others.

  Dr Mohamad Kassam's personal profile

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  Professor Luke Bisby - The University of Edinburgh

  Luke is Chair of Fire and Structures within the School of Engineering at the University of Edinburgh. He is distinguished as a world-leading researcher and educator in structural and fire engineering, with related research interests in regulation, testing, engineering failures, and engineering education. His internationally recognised work has led to a global renaissance in structural fire engineering testing, analysis, and design. He is a leading authority on cladding fires and has been appointed to multiple high profile expert witness roles in this context.

  Professor Luke Bisby's biography

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  Professor Helen Carr - University of Southampton

  Helen is a Professor of Property Law & Social Justice at the University of Southampton. Helen studied law at Oxford and qualified as a solicitor in the 1980s. She was seconded from academia to the Law Commission in the 2000s and joined Kent Law School in 2006. She joined Southampton Law School in 2021.

  Professor Helen Carr's profile

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  Dr Ian Tellam - The University of Manchester (UoM)

  Ian is a social anthropologist and postdoctoral research associate with The UoM. He previously worked in the IT sector and developed relationships between technology and culture. His PhD project focused on the adoption of novel technologies such as robotics and AI for nuclear decommissioning, with a focus on the barriers to innovation and organisational change within such a highly regulated and risk averse industry. Following on from this, his work looks at the role of regulation and risk management in the construction industry, the efforts to encourage culture change in the sector.

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