Building Safety Bill

Written evidence submitted by the UK Certification Authority for Reinforcing Steels (CARES) (BSB40)

Dear Building Safety Bill Committee,

CARES product certification scheme for reinforcing steels

I am the CEO of CARES.  CARES is the UK Certification Authority for Reinforcing Steels and our headquarters are in Sevenoaks, Kent.  We are an independent, not-for-profit product certification body providing confidence to the users, purchasers and specifiers of reinforcing steels through voluntary regulation, testing and inspection. CARES benefits the construction industry by offering certification for companies that provide materials, components, and services primarily to the reinforced concrete industry.  Customers who specify CARES approved companies and products have confidence that they comply with the relevant standards without any need for further verification.  

 

I should like to welcome The Building Safety Bill which was introduced to Parliament on 5 July 2021. I wholeheartedly support the objectives of the Bill, namely, to learn lessons from the Grenfell Tower fire and to remedy the systemic issues identified by Dame Judith Hackitt in order to strengthen the whole regulatory system for building safety. This will be achieved by ensuring there is greater accountability , and responsibility , for fire and structural safety issues throughout the lifecycle of buildings contained in the scope of the new regulatory regime for building safety.

However, we would like to seek clarification on a number of important issues:

1. Schedule 9 - Construction products regulations - refers to regulations to be applied to Construction Products and in particular those of a safety critical nature. Our understanding of Schedule 9 is to maintain the current EU CPR approach for products with harmonised European standards, introducing similar requirements for "safety critical products," and to require other construction products to be safe and to establish a new regulatory role. It is proposed that ‘safety critical products’ is defined as [Schedule 9 10 (1)]: "construction products which are included in a list contained in the construction products regulations." Reinforcing steel products manufactured to comply with the British Standard, BS 4449, are not covered by a harmonized European Standard.

2. Will reinforcing steel be included in the list of safety critical products?

3. Who will be responsible for developing the list of safety critical products?

Schedule 9 appears to assume that the CPR is working. Unfortunately, this is not our experience. Indeed, the failures of the CPR have been recognised by the European Commission with a paper inviting comments on the options for future improvement of the CPR currently being discussed. One option in this paper is to repeal the CPR. In our opinion, Harmonised European Standards and the CPR can work where the performance of a product can be adequately defined by a limited number of essential requirements. However, many products have numerous requirements to satisfy in order to be deemed safe. Historically, standards have allocated classes such that compliance with a class implies compliance with a set of requirements – and the user only needs to consider the class. Without classes, the user needs to be familiar with, and check, each individual requirement. The process of the CPR is generally removing classes unless mandated specifically. In addition, not all products can be defined solely by test result and therefore require an element of design. As it is up to National Bodies to set levels of Safety and Economy, the design may differ across Europe meaning that the "design" performance of a product can vary from country to country. This means that a CE mark is, in many cases, not helpful in defining the products fitness for purpose, or indeed its safety in use.

The priority points I have set out, above, represent a top-level assessment of outstanding matters of concern CARES wishes to raise and which I recognise may already be under active technical review by your colleagues. Nevertheless, I do believe it would be helpful to provide clarification on these matters, and if there are any points I have raised here which you wish to discuss I would be only too happy to provide further information on any aspect of our activities.

In summary, CARES stands ready to provide any assistance you may feel would be helpful to the Review as it progresses to the next stage. The overall direction of work to date on this important matter is something CARES fully supports for the benefit of all in our industry; policy direction and the strategic intent is clear. We simply wish to ensure that any ambiguities or scope for confusion as changes begin to be rolled out are mitigated at the Review stage, rather than being addressed retrospectively.

Thank you for giving this submission you attention.

Yours sincerely,

Lee Brankley.

1st October 2021