Ahh, the big question itself!

By carefully assessing your needs and only including costs directly related to compliance with the Building Safety Act, you can create a more accurate budget and ensure that you are not unnecessarily inflating your costs. But, as these costs can vary depending on the type and size of the building, the current state of its fire safety measures, and the specific requirements of the regulations, we are going to shy away from providing actual cost suggestions and instead offer some potential costs to consider:

Building Safety

The proposed reforms include new safety requirements. You will therefore need to budget for the cost of these safety measures, which may include the hiring of additional staff or contractors to carry out safety inspections and remediation work. Examples include;

1. HRB Registration: Applying for registration of a higher-risk building and any resubmissions following any changes in the future will incur a fee.

2. BAC Certificate: Applying for a building assessment certificate could include a fee. There will also be a cost in displaying a building assessment certificate regarding labour and materials.

3. Developer Levy: The levy would be paid by developers of new high-rise buildings and would be based on the size and value of the building. Whilst it’s clear that a levy will need to be paid, it’s still not entirely clear how much it will cost. The recent Building Safety Levy Consultation is now closed (opened on 22 November 2022, and closed on 7 February 2023), and suggests the fee will be either worked as a cost per unit or cost per metre squared. Whichever rate they go with to start, they government suggest that they will review the rates regularly, possibly every 3 years and will consider adjusting for inflation at the review points as needed.
4. Residential Property Developer Tax: The Residential Property Developer Tax is a proposed new tax that was announced by the UK government in the 2021 budget. The tax would be paid by residential property developers who make profits of over £25 million per year. The tax is designed to raise revenue for the government and to encourage property developers to build more affordable homes. The exact amount of the tax has not yet been determined.
5. Community Infrastructure Levy: The Community Infrastructure Levy is a proposed replacement for the current system of Section 106 agreements and the Community Infrastructure Levy (CIL). The Infrastructure Levy would be a flat-rate tax on all new developments and would be used to fund local infrastructure projects. The exact amount of the levy has not yet been determined as the legislation is still being drafted.

6. Assessing and Managing Building Safety Risks: Taking reasonable steps to carry out the initial and ongoing regular safety risk assessments will also need to be factored in. Your team could undertake this in-house or externally by a specialist provider. In either case, please remember that whoever carries out these assessments must prove their competencies per the legislation.

7. Upgrades or Remediation Work: If your building is not up to standard, following your building safety assessments, owners may need to invest in upgrades to their fire safety measures to bring it into compliance by making upgrades or renovations, such as; adding/upgrading or installing sprinkler systems, fire alarms, smoke detectors, installing additional fire exits, upgrading the electrical system or fire-resistant cladding. You may add a ‘risk pot’ item within your budget for necessary changes.

8. Safety Case and Safety Case Report: The preparation, storage, revising, notifying and provision of a safety case and the safety case report will incur its costs with management and digital platform costs.

9. Golden Thread of Information: As mentioned above, there are costs associated with the general management, creating, updating and storing the prescribed documents on a digital platform such as Operance. But costs here could also involve fees costs related to ‘filling in the gaps’ where information is required but is not available and therefore needs to be provided by either your internal team or external consultants. For example, suppose you have a 30+-year-old building, and you have no evidence of its foundations. In that case, you may need to pay for a consultant to investigate these foundations should you consider them a risk and provide information about them, i.e. trial pit investigations, drawings, and descriptions. These additional costs could rise rapidly if your existing building information is inadequate or simply not existing.

10. Mandatory Occurrence Reporting: establishing and operating a Building Safety Mandatory Occurrence Reporting (BSMOR) system and providing information to the regulator will again involve management and platform costs. BSMOR requires responsible and accountable persons to report specific safety-related incidents and near-misses in their buildings to the Building Safety Regulator. The incidents could include events that could cause or have caused harm to the safety of occupants or other individuals in or around the building, or that could have affected the structural or fire safety of the building. This includes gas leaks, fires, explosions, structural collapses, and serious accidents.

11. Residents’ Engagement Strategy: Preparing, reviewing, and sharing of the strategy. The residents’ engagement strategy is a set of guidelines and principles aimed at ensuring that residents are effectively engaged in improving building safety. The strategy emphasises the importance of clear and transparent communication between building owners, managers, and residents and sets out a framework for engaging with residents throughout the building safety process.

12. Resident’s Voice: The proposed reforms aim to give residents a more significant say in the management of their homes, such as by establishing a new national tenant voice and the requirement for landlords to have a resident engagement strategy, as mentioned above. You may need to allocate resources to support resident engagement and empowerment initiatives, such as hiring staff to liaise with residents or providing training and support for resident-led groups.

13. Complaints: establishing and operating a system for the investigation of complaints.

14. Contravention Notices: providing a contravention notice to a resident and applying to the county court could include costs, such as legal advice. This may be required when requesting to enter premises or making an application to the county court for an order requiring that the accountable person be allowed access to premises, for instance.

Fire Safety

The Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005 is the primary legislation governing fire safety in non-domestic premises in England and Wales. The Fire Safety (England) Regulations 2022 amend the Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005 and introduce new requirements for building owners and managers to ensure the safety of people from the risk of fire.

To comply with these specific fire-related legislations, you should allow for the following costs:

1. Fire Safety Equipment: This could include fire alarms, sprinkler systems, smoke detectors, and fire extinguishers. You may also need to hire contractors to install or maintain this equipment.

2. Emergency Lighting: Potentially including additional or replacement exit signs and lighting in stairwells and other emergency exits. Again, you may need a contractor to install or maintain this lighting.

3. Fire Safety Signage: You may need to provide appropriate upgraded/additional fire safety signage throughout your premises, such as fire exit signs and fire equipment signs.

4. Fire Risk Assessments: Your organisation must carry out regular fire risk assessments of your premises and implement any necessary measures to reduce the fire risk. The cost of the fire risk assessment will depend on the size and complexity of your premises and the scope of the evaluation and may also include the cost of hiring external fire consultants. To satisfy the Fire Safety Act, you must carry out the following as a minimum;

   1. Communal fire door checks every three months.

   2. Internal flat/dwelling fire door checks every twelve months.

5. Fire Safety Training: You will need to train your staff on fire safety procedures, such as how to use fire extinguishers, evacuate the building, and raise the alarm in the event of a fire. The cost of providing this training will depend on the number of staff and the specific training required. You may need to hire a consultant or trainer to provide this training.

6. Fire Systems Maintenance and Testing: You must regularly maintain and test your fire safety measures, such as fire alarms, emergency lighting and fire extinguishers, to ensure they are in good working order. The cost of maintenance and testing will depend on the size and complexity of your premises and the specific measures being maintained and tested.

7. Record Keeping: You must keep records of all fire risk assessments, inspections, and testing carried out, as well as any actions are taken to mitigate risks. The cost of record keeping will depend on the size and complexity of the building and the specific requirements of the Fire Safety (England) Regulations 2022.

8. Secure Information Box (SIB): A secure and fire-resistant box or cabinet that must be installed near the main entrance or in another prominent location in multi-occupied residential buildings. The box is intended to provide a safe and secure location for storing fire safety information and is easily accessible to fire and rescue services in case of an emergency. The SIB must contain important fire safety information, including a copy of the latest fire risk assessment, emergency fire evacuation plan, and other relevant information. It must be clearly labelled with the building’s address and additional relevant identifying information. It must be securely fixed to the structure and be easily accessible to fire and rescue services at all times. The box must be fire-resistant and able to withstand exposure to fire and heat for a certain period of time, typically at least 30 minutes. The Secure Information Box aims to ensure that critical fire safety information is readily available to fire and rescue services in case of an emergency, which can help improve the safety of occupants and minimise the risk of damage to the building.

Compliance and Governance

There are various other additional costs associated with general compliance and governance that you may wish to consider, and these could include;

1. Social Housing (Regulation) Bill: This proposed bill also includes additional requirements for social housing providers to comply with, such as publishing annual reports on their performance and having a clear system of accountability and governance. You may need to allocate resources to ensure you have the necessary systems and processes to comply with these requirements.

2. Building Inspections: You should budget for regular inspections of your building to ensure it is up to code and compliant with safety regulations. You may need to hire a third-party inspector to conduct these inspections.

3. Staff Training and Recruitment: Whilst the Building Safety Act no longer makes the Building Safety Manager a mandatory requirement, the importance of someone taking on the responsibilities of this role is still massively essential to your organisation. Therefore you may factor in training and recruitment for those responsible for overseeing the safety of the building and ensure they have the necessary skills and knowledge to comply with the new regulations.

4. Legal and Administrative Fees: Building owners may need legal advice or hire administrative support to help with the compliance process and documentation.

5. Insurance: You should budget for either upgrading or obtaining new insurance policies that meet the required standards and cover fire damage and liability in case of a fire or other safety incident. Existing insurance premiums may increase as insurers want to ensure that buildings are as safe as possible.

Digital transformation

The proposed reforms include a focus on using technology to improve the efficiency and transparency of social housing management, such as using digital tools to communicate with residents or monitor building safety. You may need to allocate resources to invest in new technology and systems to support these initiatives, such as Operance, the world’s first purpose-built golden thread platform.

Complying with the Building Safety Act will require various digital transformation requirements, and prioritising these requirements will depend on your specific situation and needs. However, some of the key digital transformation requirements that you may want to consider prioritising include the following:

1. Defining Your Exact Information Requirements: Platforms such as Operance have an in-built interface to develop your own ‘Data Templates’. These are critical to ensuring your organisation creates a unique set of requirements that are uniform across every building within your portfolio, both old and new. Costs involved here include digital services consultants to help you develop your initial set of data templates. Our Head of Digital Services, Dave Peacock, would be more than happy to help you with an idea of costs for this; contact him at dave.peacock@operance.app.

2. Curating Your Digital Information: With your Data Templates and organisational requirements in place, you need a platform such as Operance to help semi-automate the collection of this digital information and to store it at the ‘elemental level’ it is associated with. This is a key recommendation of Building A Safer Future, the resulting report from Dame Judith Hackitt’s investigation into the Grenfell disaster. Your teams mustn’t rely on PDFs stored within a generic filing system such as a Common Data Environment (CDE) or a standard Dropbox-like system. Costs for curating your information for new build or refurb projects currently in the Design and Construction stages should be offset by the project costs themselves, but be warned, your project team probably did not have the exact information requirements at the start to request the complete set of information, so there may be additional costs involved, but again, at the project level. Operance can help here by providing a guide on costs for our information managers to help coordinate the information you need for both new and old facilities. Contact our Chief Sales Officer, Ian Hetherington, at ian.hetherington@operance.app.

3. Accessing and Sharing of Your Digital Information: Information collected must be easily accessible for all those needing access, such as building owners, operators, occupants, residents, local emergency services, local authorities and of course, the Building Safety Regulator. This can easily be forgotten when being seduced by impressive 3D model-type environments when looking to procure a ‘golden-thread’ solution. The issue here is that not everyone is comfortable navigating a complicated 3D model to find the information they need to understand how safe your building is, particularly when sharing information with residents. A platform such as Operance provides easy access to anyone that needs it to find the information they need in a simple interface which they are used to in everyday life, such as finding films on Netflix or music on Spotify. Contact our Chief Sales Officer, Ian Hetherington, at ian.hetherington@operance.app for a guide on these costs and an idea as to how our costs compare against other said solutions.

4. Maintaining Your Digital Information: This is the most crucial part of the golden thread requirements. There is little to no benefit in producing information if you are not going to keep it up to date across the lifecycle of the building. To do this effectively, your full set of digital information should be the same set as, or at least fully integrated, with your facilities and asset management information. This is a big part of your single source of truth. If this is the case, you can provide a full lifecycle history of every component of your building, providing accountability and transparency of the decisions made, by whom and when. Contact our Chief Sales Officer, Ian Hetherington, at ian.hetherington@operance.app for a guide on these costs also.

5. Digitising Existing Building Safety Information: The Building Safety Act requires building owners to maintain and provide detailed information about their existing buildings, including fire and structurally related components, to the Building Safety Regulator. Digitising this information can help make it more accessible and easily updated, reducing the administrative burden on building owners. Should your information be found but provided in paper form, Operance can help with this too. Contact our Chief Sales Officer, Ian Hetherington, at ian.hetherington@operance.app for a guide on how we digitalise paper and can store it within the golden thread to the latest ISO19650 standards.

6. Implementing Digital Inspection and Reporting Tools: The Building Safety Act will require more frequent and detailed inspections of high-risk buildings, and digital inspection and reporting tools can help streamline this process. These tools can enable inspectors to capture and share information in real time, reducing the need for manual data entry and improving accuracy.

7. Enhancing Collaboration and Communication Tools: The Building Safety Act requires building owners, residents, and other stakeholders to work together to ensure building safety. Digital collaboration and communication tools can facilitate this collaboration and make it easier to share information and updates in real time.

8. Adopting Data Analytics and Predictive Maintenance Tools: Digital tools such as data analytics and predictive maintenance can help identify potential risks and maintenance needs before they become significant issues. These tools can help building owners prioritise maintenance and repairs, reducing costs and improving safety.

9. Improving Cybersecurity Measures: As digital tools become more central to building safety compliance, it is essential to ensure that your organisation has appropriate cybersecurity measures to protect sensitive information and systems.

Prioritising these digital transformation requirements can help you comply with the Building Safety Act more effectively and efficiently while improving overall building safety. However, it is essential to work with qualified professionals to develop a comprehensive digital transformation strategy that is tailored to your specific situation and needs. Contact our Head of Digital Services, Dave Peacock, for an idea of costs: dave.peacock@operance.app.

Miscellaneous Costs

There are bound to be costs that we have missed here or that we simply are unaware of, given the complexity of the subject and depth of requirements. Here we list any other items that we have been made aware of that you may want to consider;

• Potential Business Interruptions: Compliance may require temporary closures of parts of the building or disruptions to operations, which could impact revenue.

• Professional Consultancy: It is recommended that you work with a qualified professional or consultant to assess your situation and develop a detailed budget and plan for compliance with the Social Housing White Paper, a policy paper the UK government published in November 2020. It sets out a range of proposed reforms to improve social housing in the country. It was intended to address some key challenges facing the social housing sector, such as the shortage of affordable homes, poor quality housing, and a lack of tenant engagement.