A feature story from Construction News highlights the substantial progress made to date on making sure firms and workers are competent to carry out construction projects.
The story, authored by Ian Weinfass, features contributions from leading industry figures, including Construction Products Association (CPA) Chief Executive Peter Caplehorn, Construction Leadership Council (CLC) Co-Chair and Mace Chief Executive Mark Reynolds.
It details how, in the wake of the Grenfell Tower tragedy, Dame Judith Hackitt’s seminal report ‘Building a Safer Future’ highlighted a construction industry that had failed on safety. She found an ignorance of regulations and guidance, an indifference to quality, a lack of clarity about responsibility, and inadequate oversight by regulators. One of her major recommendations for improvement was the development of industry competence, “to ensure that there are people across all key design and construction roles with the relevant skills for the job” and that they are readily identifiable on projects. In this, the Electrotechnical Certification Scheme (ECS) was held up as an exemplar as one of the ways in which industry had come together to start to define competence standards. However, it was recognised that more could and should be done to raise the bar.
Separately, in the aftermath of the fire, the Government formed an industry response group to advise on immediate steps to improve safety. What followed has been one of the biggest and longest-running projects in the construction industry, despite it having gone relatively under the radar. And yet its work is set to affect every single person working in the sector.
CPA Chief Executive Peter Caplehorn said: “If we go back to that immediate period post-Grenfell, I think everyone was in shock and everyone was saying ‘what can we do?’. We came together and really the question was, ‘how many competent people do we have in the industry to look at the current situation, analyse what potential problems we’ve got and guide everyone to sort it out?’. Nobody in the industry should be in any doubt that the main regulator and the product regulator are there to see that the regulations are followed.”
Competence Steering Group
Caplehorn serves as one of the Deputy Chairs of the Competence Steering Group under the leadership of Construction Industry Council (CIC) Chief Executive Graham Watts. Hundreds of people across nearly as many organisations have worked on the initiative, with 12 working groups established to set or enhance competence standards across different areas ranging from procurement and project management to the management of occupied buildings.
The CSG’s working groups needed to cover a range of roles, with different parts of the profession such as architects having well-established systems, and others – like building safety managers – beginning from scratch with no existing recognised accreditation.
The working group for installers has been the largest and most complex, containing several different trades with many different competence schemes. Trades such as domestic plumbing, drylining, roofing, rainscreen cladding, fire-stopping specialists, and fire detection and alarms are all under the remit of the same competence working group. Jay Parmar, JIB Chief Executive, and Andy Reakes, JIB & ECS Director of Growth and Development, have been heavily involved in Working Group 2 for Installers in helping to encourage industry to define the necessary standards and provide a simple way to verify those standards through ECS and CSCS systems. At the same time, Jay Parmar, as Chair of the CSCS Alliance, has been working to better coordinate the systems for checking competence, and Andy Reakes acted as Chair for the group which developed CSCS Smart Check, the free to download app which can verify all 2.1 million CSCS and partner cards across all 38 CSCS Alliance Schemes.
Jay has now also been appointed to the Health and Safety Executive’s Industry Competence Committee which will help the Building Safety Regulator role out these new standards and advise on all matters of competence.
If the challenge of developing the competence frameworks has been difficult in some cases, what follows is the equally challenging task of rolling them out to the entire industry.
A sustainable system
For CLC Co-Chair and Mace Chief Executive Mark Reynolds, the key elements are skills cards, accreditation and training curricula. “What we’re trying to do from the CLC’s perspective is not boil the ocean. We’re trying to create a system where it’s self-auditing, self-managing,” he said.
Apprenticeship standards need to be updated every three years through the Government-funded Institute for Apprenticeships and Technical Education, allowing the industry to ensure those being trained are learning the latest competence standards. Reynolds added: “In time that will create that long-term sustainable system – the challenge is how do you embed it in continuing professional development (CPD), and this is where the institutions and the trade bodies have a real role to play.”
This is where systems such as CSCS Smart Check and ECS Check come into play. Ways in which clients and contractors can easily identify who are on their projects and is there the right mix of skills to complete a project competently, safely and with a better chance of being on time and on budget.
The CSCS Alliance is continuing to work through its Competence and Skills Group on how CPD and reassessment are or can be recognised within each of the 38 card schemes, and CSCS Smart Check is also being updated to allow integration with existing infrastructure systems for project access (such as access control gates and systems on larger sites). This will give greater visibility and oversight in this crucial area.
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