Confidential Reporting for Fire Safety

The paper will set the context for fire safety in the UK up to the time of the Grenfell Tower fire and provide a synopsis of changes currently being considered. It will map the significant developments in the regulatory systems that impact on design, construction, and management of buildings. It will emphasise the important role of a confidential reporting system to help gather information from responsible professionals, in a performance-based design regime. In comparison to other engineering disciplines, fire safety is relatively young. For most of the 20th Century the focus was on firefighting, deploying systems designed after World War II to provide emergency response, with very little emphasis on fire safety design. Large fires with multiple fatalities lead to some major changes, from the 1960s, the fire brigades became increasingly involved in approval and enforcement. Standards were broadly prescriptive, but the vast majority of designs were conservative in terms of complexity and materials. Thus, the Grenfell Tower public inquiry, a review by Dame Judith Hackitt and the discovery that hundreds of residential buildings over 18 m (59 ft) tall had unsafe external wall systems has exposed systemic failings. The UK, quite reasonably, appears to be wedded to performance based design but is increasingly recognising that design freedoms should only be exercised by competent ethical professionals. Part of being “professional” is to contribute to ongoing improvements to the profession. This is, in part, being enabled by the expansion of CROSS, a system that has achieved significant success for the structural safety profession. The paper will describe how fire safety professionals report to CROSS, what is being reported, and how the information is being used.