Clarion Housing Group is collaborating with Adelard, safety case and risk management specialists, to develop and deploy a safety case programme and framework for Higher Risk Buildings (HRB) helping to further enhance the safety of its residents and visitors.
Following the tragic events at Grenfell Tower and the subsequent recommendations of the report by Dame Judith Hackitt to the UK Government, Clarion has taken the initiative to develop a new framework for creating, managing, communicating, and maintaining residential buildings’ safety cases across its organisation.
Ian Morrison – Clarion Director of Property Services said: “As a responsible landlord, the safety of our residents has always been our number one priority. The findings of the Hackitt report have encouraged a new way of thinking about high-rise building safety and advocates the need to consider buildings as complex systems and to provide periodic safety cases that demonstrate building safety is being maintained. This new approach is a challenging mindset change within the sector and this was one of the reasons we reached out to the specialists at Adelard to help us with this undertaking.”
In the collaboration, Adelard is mentoring Clarion in becoming proficient in developing safety cases for themselves using Adelard’s industry standard software tool, Assurance and Safety Case Environment (ASCE).
ASCE will help to show safety practitioners areas of building safety that successfully meet regulatory requirements as well as those areas in need improvement. ASCE’s ability to visually represent the safety argument and the case for building safety is proving far easier to understand and manage than wading through a lengthy written report.
The safety case in ASCE acts as a ‘living document’, and together with its on-demand reporting feature, make for the easy generation of safety case reports, something that the new housing regulator is going to want to see. ASCE’s reporting capability can also be utilised to produce communications that can be used as part of a resident engagement strategy.
The concept of a safety case for complex systems is something that has been prevalent in other regulated sectors for some time, such as the chemical, nuclear energy and rail industries. Although the safety case concept is new to the housing sector, safety case best practices are transferable with some expert guidance. Clarion’s engagement with Adelard has seen the housing association leverage not only the benefits of the company’s ASCE software but Adelard’s mentoring approach and knowledge transfer drawn from experience gained across varied industries.
