Part 4: Higher-risk buildings Duties relating to building safety risks Section 83: Assessment of building safety risks Background
This is a new provision.
	The Independent Review identified that a new approach, built on existing risk management principles, was needed to manage building safety risks to residents of higher-risk buildings and ensure that the whole building is properly, regularly and proactively considered by dutyholders against the principles of what is reasonably practicable to reduce and manage risk.
	The Independent Review recommended new responsibilities be placed on dutyholders to proactively manage risks and work with residents (both those residing in the property and, depending on the ownership model, the landlord or leaseholder of the flat) to ensure that the building remains safe throughout its life cycle.
Example 1
Both higher-risk buildings that have passed through the Gateway process and are recently occupied, as well as existing higher-risk buildings that have long been occupied by residents will be covered by this clause.
Undertaking a suitable and sufficient risk assessment of the building safety risks is the initial step of a systematic approach that the Accountable Person will need to adopt, to achieve the outcome of managing the building safety risks. That is to say the Accountable Person will follow a set process of identifying the hazards within their building, deciding who might be harmed by those hazards, evaluating the likelihood and consequence of those hazards developing into a building safety risk, deciding on the measures that are needed to lower the risks of the hazards becoming a building safety risk to an acceptable level, deciding what measures are needed to mitigate further risk of harm to residents in the event a building safety risk is realised and ensuring those measures remain fit for purpose whilst the building is occupied. The Accountable Person should review their assessment of the risks where there has been a significant change to matters which may impact on the spread of fire or structural collapse, and their management of those risks. Even where they are of the opinion that a change to the building would not alter the level of risk, the assessment should be undertaken to verify if that assumption is correct.
Example 2
The following would be appropriate in terms of a regular review where a building is fully occupied (and settled) and/or the building has been occupied for some time. The Accountable Person has scheduled a review of the building’s risk assessment to comply with the duty and checks that the assessment of the potential causes of fire remain valid. The potential causes of the outbreak of fire or rapid fire development beyond a single fire compartment are confirmed by the assessment to be: hoarding, uncontrolled combustible materials in the common corridors; unchecked fire spread through voids and penetrations; uncontrolled or unreported penetrations through walls by residents (or their contractors); uncontrolled changes to front doors of flats (meaning they are no longer 30 minutes fire resisting), damage to fire resisting doors in the common areas; obstructed open vents (especially in winter when common areas can get very cold and windy). No new foreseeable causes of escalation are found and that the existing control and mitigation measures are adequate to deal with the identified potential causes of fire spread, and their cumulative effect. They schedule a further review in 3 months.
Example 3
The Accountable Person reassesses the building safety risks when there has been a significant change in the building, for instance when refurbishment work was carried out, such that a previously in-use alarm system was taken out of use; or when new residents with mobility impairments move in meaning that assumed compartmentation that relied on residents having the ability to escape fire/respond to emergencies in certain ways which no longer applied.
Example 4
The Accountable Person reviews their assessment of the risks as there has been a significant change to matters which may impact on the spread of fire or structural collapse and their management of those risks, due to the change to the timing of bin collections which means that a bin store is no longer big enough to store all the building’s cumulative waste for the whole period between collections, with the potential for rubbish bags to be left outside, increasing the risk of fire spread.
In that case, the Accountable Person would make a new assessment of risks and the ways of managing those risks given the likely build-up of bin bags, and to update their steps/actions to ensure the risks do not materialise.