Competent fire safety professionals could be overworked due to delays in upgrading the profession’s qualifications, leading to safety risks, according to a senior industry professional.
Nick Pickles, systems and assurance lead for passive fire protection at Laing O’Rourke, made the stark warning during a panel session at last week’s London Build event.
Gaps in education and training mean it will be a “good number of years” before the industry is fully up to speed with building safety legislation that requires subcontractors to demonstrate their competence, he said.
And he added: “I think the risk is that people who are considered competent, whether they are or not, end up overburdened.
“There is a lot of work that needs to be done. And it will be done by people who don’t consider themselves competent, or you overburden the people who are [and these] people get burned
“And that’s when people make mistakes, they take their eye off the ball. If you do it once … we’re not talking about a leaky pipe, we’re talking about life safety.”
Pickles suggested that the fire safety profession needs an equivalent to the mechanical permitting engineer profession, which oversees electrical safety in buildings.
During the discussion, Richard Fordyce, project engineer for mechanical, electrical, instrumentation, control and automation (MEICA) systems at Laing O’Rourke, identified the need for a new, separate construction discipline covering the specification and selection of critical buildings for fire safety. products
He said: “We have to have the right people doing these jobs, otherwise there will be no mechanism for improvement.
“It will be included in the contracts of the designers, who may not have the right [qualifications]or carried in subcontract packages that may not have the correct design liability insurances.”
He said procurement, outsourcing, manufacturing and design professionals need to work together in an “effort to begin to define what this new discipline will look like.”
Mace technical compliance manager Paul McSoley said shared platforms are vital for sharing information on critical fire products between different professions in the construction supply chain.
Citing recent guidance from industry bodies on shock absorbers, he said: “These documents are about 200 pages long on this topic alone.”
McSolely said it was “very difficult” to expect an individual to have the competence to select all the products involved in creating, say, a single wall.
“I think the expectation was that architects could do all that, but they can’t unless other actors pass that information through a common platform that can actually be seen.”
