Part 4: Higher-risk buildings Registration and certificates Section 79: Occupied building: duty to apply for building assessment certificate Background
This is a new provision.
	The Independent Review identified that there should be clear dutyholders during occupation who will have statutory obligations to maintain the fire and structural safety of the building. The requirement to apply for a Building Assessment Certificate, and the building assessment that follows, provides a mechanism for the Building Safety Regulator to assess whether the dutyholders are, at that point in time, complying with the relevant Part 4 duties. The Building Assessment Certificate provides a transparent outcome to that assessment
Example
Building Assessment Certificates issued by the Building Safety Regulator are intended to provide an indication to residents that the regulator assessed the Accountable Person(s) for their building to be meeting specified statutory requirements at the time of assessment. The statutory requirements include, among others, that reasonable steps are being taken under section 84 to prevent building safety risks materialising and to reduce the severity of any incident resulting from such a risk materialising.
The circumstances and likely timings under which a Principal Accountable Person can expect the Regulator to issue the notice requiring them to apply for certification (the "call-in") will be set out in the regulator’s Strategic Plan, which the regulator must follow, and which will be approved by the Secretary of State. For any building that passes through Gateway three and is registered, the call-in will likely be within a defined period following occupation. For existing occupied buildings, the regulator will be able to create tranches of buildings, for assessment according to tranche, calling in buildings in stages over an extended period. Existing buildings will likely be tranched according to factors such as height and other risk factors. It is intended that all existing occupied buildings will be initially assessed over a 5-year period.
The Building Safety Regulator’s approach to calling in existing buildings in tranches will necessarily be flexible to accommodate emerging risk factors and intelligence, allowing buildings to be called in earlier than originally outlined in the Strategic Plan in some cases, if necessary. Should the regulator’s overarching approach to tranching shift as a result, the regulator would revise its Strategic Plan to reflect the updated operational timescales.
The Building Safety Regulator will also be responsible for calling in buildings for reassessment periodically. A maximum period by which the regulator must assess any given building for its Building Assessment Certificate will be set out in regulations made by the Secretary of State. Within this maximum period, the regulator will be able to take a risk-based approach to calling in buildings for reassessment, and this approach will be outlined in the Strategic Plan. There may be scenarios under which reassessment is automatically triggered, such as a significant refurbishment, and these circumstances will also be set out in the Strategic Plan.
A Building Assessment Certificate will not be issued by the Building Safety Regulator if the Accountable Person(s) are failing to meet the specified statutory obligations, save for where the regulator considers that the breach can be remedied promptly and is done so, further to the terms of a notice issued pursuant to subsection (4) of this section.