Competence expectations under the building safety regime

Building safety competence in planning is not a general claim to be good at your job. For higher-risk buildings it is a documented answer to a narrow question: does the person who wrote this document have the skills, knowledge, experience and behaviours to write it, and can you show that if the Building Safety Regulator asks. The duty bites hardest at building control stage, but two planning-stage submissions already carry a named author whose competence is on the record.

The regime sits on the Building Safety Act 2022, with the Regulator hosted inside the Health and Safety Executive. A higher-risk building for the Regulator's purposes is at least 18 metres tall or has at least seven storeys, and contains at least two residential units. Planning Gateway One reaches a wider set of buildings than that, which is where architects most often get caught out.

Where the planning stage picks up a competence duty

Article 9A of the Town and Country Planning (Development Management Procedure) (England) Order 2015 requires a fire statement with applications for development involving relevant buildings, and makes the Health and Safety Executive a statutory consultee. A relevant building broadly means one containing two or more dwellings, or educational accommodation, that meets the height condition of 18 metres or seven storeys.

The fire statement is submitted on the published form, and the form asks who prepared it, what their qualifications are and what relevant experience they hold. That is the competence test in practice. An unnamed statement, or one signed off by a project architect with no fire engineering background, invites a holding response from the Regulator and a validation query from the council.

A Fire Statement is one of the report types where a suitably qualified professional is legally required rather than merely advisable. The same is true of a Fire Safety Strategy prepared to BS 9991 or BS 9999. PlanScope can draft the structure and the policy narrative around either, and the draft flags every site fact it does not hold, but it is a starting point for a fire engineer, not a replacement for one.

The roles that carry duties

Duties on clients, designers, principal designers and contractors were added to the Building Regulations 2010 by the 2023 amendment regulations and applied from 1 October 2023. They apply to all building work rather than to higher-risk buildings alone, which surprises people who assumed this was a tall-buildings problem.

The short version is that nobody may accept an appointment, or take on work, unless they have the competence for that particular job. Competence is assessed against the work in front of you rather than in the abstract, so an architect who is competent to design a three storey terrace is not thereby competent to act as principal designer on a 20 storey residential block.

Clients carry a duty too. A client must take reasonable steps to satisfy themselves that the people they appoint are competent, and must not appoint where they are not satisfied. In a development company that means a written check before the appointment letter goes out, not a conversation afterwards.

What counts as evidence

BS 8670-1 sets core criteria for competence frameworks in the built environment, and the associated PAS documents cover principal designers, principal contractors and the management of safety in occupied residential buildings. Institutions have built registers and assessment routes against them.

In an appointment file, useful evidence looks like this:

• chartered membership or registration with the relevant institution, with the grade stated
• a named individual rather than a firm, because competence attaches to people
• project experience of comparable type, height and complexity, with dates
• continuing professional development records relevant to the subject
• the limits of the appointment, written down, so that the scope of what was assessed is clear

Titles alone prove little. Membership of an institution shows that a person met an entry standard at a point in time, which is why what chartered membership actually means is worth understanding before you rely on the letters after a name. The same question arises across the technical disciplines, from fire to ground conditions, and the answer is usually specific to the standard in play rather than generic. Who can carry out a Phase 2 ground investigation works through an example.

Consistency between the planning scheme and Gateway Two

A planning permission that cannot be built as approved is a commercial problem, and under the gateway regime it is a visible one. The Gateway Two application to the Regulator must show a building that satisfies the functional requirements, and the drawings will be compared with what the council approved.

Two areas cause most of the trouble. Vertical circulation is the first: staircase provision in tall residential buildings changed with the amendment to Approved Document B, and transitional arrangements determine which projects may still proceed on the earlier basis. Check the current Approved Document B and the commencement wording before you assume a scheme is in the old regime.

Fire service access and water supplies are the second, because they take up land outside the building line. A hardstanding for a pumping appliance that was never shown on the planning layout has to come from somewhere, and if it takes amenity space or parking you may need a section 73 application to vary the approved plans.

The way to avoid both is to have the fire engineer produce the strategy early enough that the planning drawings reflect it. That runs against the usual fee sequence, where the fire engineer arrives after permission. It is also why conflicts of interest when your designer writes the reports matter: the person marking the homework should not have set it.

Records that outlive the project

The golden thread requires information about the building to be kept, in a structured and accessible form, and handed on. Competence evidence forms part of the surrounding paper trail: who was appointed, on what basis, and what they were asked to do.

Keep the fire statement, the strategy it was based on, the version of the Approved Document or British Standard used, and the dated appointment record. When a building changes hands, or a defect emerges years later, those documents decide who answers for what.

Checks to run before you appoint

1. Write down the scope of the appointment, including the building height, storey count, use and whether it is a higher-risk building.
2. Ask for a named individual, their registration or membership grade, and two comparable projects with dates.
3. Confirm the professional indemnity cover in place, the limit, and whether fire safety work is excluded, because exclusions are common.
4. Record what you relied on when you decided the person was competent, and keep it with the appointment.
5. Re-run the check if the scheme grows past a threshold, because a building that gains a storey may change category.

PlanScope's professional review route lets an AI-drafted document be sent to a reviewer who can check and sign it off, and the professional directory is where that request starts. PlanScope provides AI-assisted draft reports for planning applications. Reports should be reviewed before submission. We do not guarantee planning approval. For specialist technical reports, qualified professional input may be required.

This is general guidance, not legal advice; check the position with your local planning authority or a qualified professional before relying on it.