Health and safety and other risk areas, including fire, emergency resilience and environmental compliance across commercial real estate has never been more important. As a result, we have seen the health and safety role with regards to the property management function of assets including shopping centres, office blocks and leisure parks, and the way we think about safety, becoming more advanced than ever before.
Health and safety now covers a wide range of risks for most businesses outside of display screen equipment or slip, trip and falls hazards. While these factors are still important and need to be managed, health and safety is now more often being seen as the overarching risk management process and has evolved to include a much wider spectrum of considerations such as security with the up and coming Protect Legislation, designed to improve the protection of publicly accessible places from terrorist attacks, emergency planning, and building fire safety.
One particular area that the pandemic bought to the forefront is the ‘health’ within health and safety of staff and we expect that this is going to be a priority going forward. Mental health, wellbeing and stress management are just as important as safety.
The importance of data
Data has proved to be essential for developing and continuously improving a health and safety culture. Data enables us to remain compliant, actively monitor areas of high risk or potential high risk, and review trends across the portfolio.
Actively encouraging all sites to report incidents and update our compliance systems allows us to be data led. This is important as it enables us to identify trends, review immediate causes, update central processes and proactively share lessons learnt across the portfolio, as well as including at the concept stage of new schemes to incorporate best practice at the earliest possible point.
This again fits into the continuous improvement of any business's safety culture, as having a culture where people feel comfortable and confident to report and record incidents, or near misses that could lead to something more serious allows us to learn and the process to continually evolve.
Safety regulations
Legislation also plays a crucial role in managing a building’s health and safety. The introduction of the Building Safety Act (2022) is an important milestone for the proposed reforms to building safety law. It paves the way for the official formation of the independent Building Safety Regulator (BSR), a role the Health & Safety Executive(HSE) has been tasked to deliver. Many of the detailed provisions in the Act will be implemented over the next two years through a programme of secondary legislation.
The Fire Safety Act 2021 updates the Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005 to include sites where a building contains two or more sets of domestic premises. The things to which this order applies to include a building’s structure and external walls and any common parts, including and all doors between the domestic premises and common parts. The reference to external walls includes doors or windows in those walls and anything attached to the exterior of those walls (including balconies).
Fire Safety (England) Regulations 2022 implement the recommendations of the Grenfell Inquiry (phase 1), come into effect January 2023, and are applicable to all residential buildings containing two or more separate dwellings and are 18m and/or seven storeys in height.
Regulations and strategy help to standardise the industry and ensure that health and safety is no longer a tick box exercise. Effective health and safety management to modern standards can only be achieved through a combination of competent and well informed people, technological advancements, robust data strategies and effective communications systems.
There needs to be clear transparency between the landlord, property management teams and tenants working together to achieve best practice, share knowledge and champion new innovations.
Further information
Contact Andrew Williams or Zoë Osborne
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