News |
OPINION: ‘Make your commitment to the Charter, to your customers and to building safety’
News |
By Sue Sutton, Chief Executive at Salix Homes and Chair of GMHP Building Safety Group
This month Salix Homes turned eight years old.
Still a relatively young organisation on paper, however when we reflect on the events and changes of the last eight years, both across the social housing sector and within our organisation, an eternity could have passed.
We’ve seen 12 Housing Ministers, seven Housing Secretaries and five Prime Ministers. Housing has gone from being an after-thought to a key priority on the political agenda.
Across the sector, the challenges have been plentiful – welfare reforms, homelessness, Right-to-Buy, housing shortages, Brexit, cladding, pandemics, inflation, cost-of-living, housing conditions, damp and mould – to name just a few.
For more than half of Salix Homes’ existence, since that fateful night at Grenfell Tower on June 14 2017 to be absolutely precise, there’s one issue that has been at the forefront of my mind day-in, day out – and that is building safety.
We made a clear and conscious decision that we would do everything in our power to ensure our buildings and our customers were safe, and felt safe.
From the offset, we signed up to become an ‘Early Adopter’, working with the Government and other decision-making bodies to help test new ways of working, which would then shape the new building safety regime.
Coinciding with our eight-year anniversary, we’ve just been announced as one of the first housing associations to become a Building a Safer Future Champion – an initiative led by Building a Safer Future (BSF), which was established following the Grenfell tragedy.
The Building a Safer Future Charter consists of five pledges that demonstrate commitment to protecting life by putting safety first, ahead of all other building priorities. It was developed as a first step towards spearheading the cultural and behavioural changes required across the industry to achieve a safer building design and management system.
To meet the requirements of Building a Safer Future Champion status, there’s a complex assessment and audit process that delves into the inner workings of an organisation. BSF carry out an in-depth review of culture, leadership, strategies and processes for improving the safety of high-risk buildings, as identified within the scope of the new building safety regime.
This isn’t a box-ticking exercise or a piece of paper you sign. Organisations have to provide evidence that they are delivering on commitments around safety, standards and working with customers. Areas for improvement are identified and an improvement plan is developed, which is then monitored by BSF going forward to ensure the necessary changes are being made.
Employees across your organisation are interviewed as part of the assessment to ensure you are actually doing all the things you say you are doing to keep people safe. And they don’t just question the chief executive and leadership teams – any employee can be involved, from housing officers to caretakers.
As a small landlord of 8,000 homes and 19 tower blocks in Salford, Greater Manchester, we’re proud to be leading the way. However, this has never been about accreditations or being the first past the post, not when 72 people died for the building safety scandal to come to light.
This is about doing the right thing for customers. It marks another step forward on the building safety journey, another step towards ensuring that people living in high rise and high-risk buildings are safe, and feel safe.
One of the key findings in Dame Judith Hackitt’s report following the Grenfell tragedy was the need for culture change, calling for increased competence, professionalism and responsibility.
The Building Safety Act 2022 has demanded these changes through statute – and with Building a Safer Future, the sector has the opportunity to rise to the challenge and demonstrate how it will embrace this chance to put residents at the heart of the design, construction and management of high-risk buildings.
For Salix Homes, and others who now go on to commit to the Charter, this isn’t the end of the process, this is another learning opportunity. We’ll be using our status as a benchmark and an assessment tool so we can continue to improve.
This month has also seen the Health and Safety Executive launch its Be Ready Campaign. Those responsible for the safety of high-rise residential buildings have six months to register their buildings with the new Regulator and ensure they’re ready to step up and comply.
The new Regulator will expect organisations to demonstrate how they are changing their culture in relation to customer engagement and building safety, and the deep dive assessment provided by the Building a Safer Future Champion assessment process, will assist organisations in this task.
We don’t pretend to have completed our building safety journey at Salix Homes, but we are committed to sharing what we have learnt so far with others, and our approach from the start has been don’t wait – get on with it now.
Make your commitment to the Charter, to your customers and to building safety.
