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Ensuring safety though specification and detailing Blog

Ensuring safety though specification and detailing Blog
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Fiduciary Rules (an obligation to make a profit for shareholders) interpreted here as ‘Profits before People before Planet’ means our self-serving construction industry increasingly puts time pressure on tradesmen and financial pressures on sub-contractors to prevent them using their skills and care, resulting in unsafe buildings.

We are increasingly under the ill-advised ambition to build cheaply rather than to invest in healthy, environmental, resourceful, appropriate, safe, effective buildings; not setting yardsticks for the future.

No longer master-builders we have progressively relinquished our skills, inventing specialists to do our thinking.

Procurement of buildings has moved from constructors with employed artisans to contractors with lawyers and bean counters; the buck being passed down long supply chains into the hands of those untrained to handle it.

Recent examples from Grenfell cladding, fire doors and gas pipes show we have lost our way with compliance and competence in favour of lowest costs or maximum profits, allowing FM to ‘get that done cheaply’.

Health, safety and wellbeing of all makers, users, fixers and hackers throughout the first and subsequent life of buildings enables us to engage in careful choices of ‘proper material’ and methods of construction; how they are sourced, manufactured, handled; installed, assembled, connected; maintained, dismantled and reused.

We need to better engage as problem solvers to understand and engage robustly with circular economic ambition, framework of regulations, physics or building, science of materials and crunching of numbers to determine, design, detail and robustly specify to create safe, competent, not just delightful buildings.

Cost planning, quantity surveying, cost cutting, value engineering, substitution and surreptitious substitution in the wrong hands, without good governance, competent policing or reintroduced high level supervision; bring us full circle, Fiduciary Rules potentially eroding competency and compromising safety.

If governance or regulations do not improve we need to change for the sake of our industry’s reputation.