FIA Guide to the UK Fire Safety Industry Passive Fire Protection Feature
unable to sell their properties subject to
determining whether or not their home
is actually able to go on the market.
Despite support from the House of
Lords, Government rejected a proposed
amendment to the Fire Safety Bill that
was designed to prohibit remediation
costs from being passed on to residents.
External Wall Surveys
EWS-1 Forms – with EWS being the
acronym for External Wall Survey –
were developed by the Royal Institution
of Chartered Surveyors (RICS) as a
means of enabling competent fire
experts to record whether buildings are
fire-safe in respect of their external
cladding and, if not, note that remedial
work must be carried out. The provision
of these forms has proven to be
successful in creating clear and
consistent documentation in this respect
and, in consequence, supports the
buying, selling and re-mortgaging of
flats in given properties.
There remained, however, some key
issues to be resolved in order to create a
fully reliable and accessible process for
the upload and retrieval of the EWS-1
Forms themselves. The Fire Industry
Association duly stepped in to meet this
requirement. In consultation with the
Ministry of Housing, Communities and
Local Government (now the
Department for Levelling Up, Housing
and Communities) and in collaboration
with the RICS and other stakeholders
(among them lenders and insurers), the
Trade Association developed a portal
that, since November last year, has
provided a central and readily accessible
location for EWS-1 Forms and, for the
first time, the ability for qualified
experts to complete these forms online.
Signatories to EWS-1 Forms must
first register to submit or complete
forms online and provide evidence of
applicable professional memberships
and qualifications prior to the
application being approved. Those
signing forms to Option A (where
external wall materials are unlikely to
support combustion) would normally be
full members of professional
membership organisations such as the
RICS and the Institution of Fire
Engineers (IFE). A full list of approved
organisations is featured on the portal.
Those able to sign to Options A and B
(with the latter indicating that
combustible materials are present)
would require a higher level of relevant
competence and would have to be
Chartered Engineers registered with the
IFE or hold an equivalent designation.
Buyers, sellers, lenders, insurers and
others having an interest in particular
properties can search for specific
buildings by postcode or building name,
after which the EWS-1 Form, if located
on the portal, will appear with the full
postal address. The EWS-1 Form can
then be viewed and downloaded on
entering a valid e-mail address, a
requirement that enables us to contact
the enquirer if an EWS-1 Form is either
withdrawn or superseded in the future.
Information portal
The website is named the Building
Safety Information Portal and may be
accessed at www.buildingsafety
portal.co.uk The naming convention
reflects its future potential to act as a
reliable resource for a wide range of
building safety documentation
including, for example, a list of approved
assessors for EWS evaluations, full EWS
reports and ‘whole building’ fire risk
assessments. Looking beyond the fire
safety of buildings, in time the website
may well act as a depository for other
aspects of building safety.
What the portal does hold at the
present moment meets an increasingly
urgent need for property sellers and
buyers, insurers and mortgage lenders to
easily access for free – and in one
specific location – the key detail and
information they need in order for
transactions involving properties in
residential buildings to proceed as
normal post-Grenfell.
It’s particularly important to prevent
fraudulent activity relating to EWS-1
Forms which, regrettably, has been
identified in the market and can place
lives at risk. A rigorous approach has
been applied to the portal to include
manual checks at various stages.
For example, each fire engineer
wishing to submit EWS-1 Forms must
present evidence that they’re fully
qualified and competent to do so. This is
interrogated prior to enabling their
forms to be submitted to the portal.
In addition, all existing EWS-1 Forms
and online submissions are subject to
further checks in order to determine
their validity before they appear as
publicly-available documents.
Development process
The EWS-1 Forms portal has been
subject to revision since its launch to
reflect recent developments based on
Government advice, the resulting RICS
guidance (including an evaluation of
whether a building requires a full EWS
analysis) and, indeed, the release back in
early April of a revised EWS-1 Form.
We are also responding to
Government support for Professional
Indemnity Insurance for EWS-related
activity and to those assessors gaining
the right to engage in EWS assessments
as a result of completing the new RICS
EWS Assessment Training Programme.
There has been a period of
uncertainty in the sector as the EWS
processes have evolved over the last year
or so. With these issues reaching
resolution, however, and a period of
equilibrium becoming established, we’re
confident that an acceleration in usage
of the Building Safety Information
Portal is emerging across all
stakeholders from buyers, sellers and
EWS assessors through to, of course, the
lenders and insurers themselves.
We certainly encourage all
stakeholders and beneficiaries to actively
promote and use this online facility as it
undoubtedly plays a vital role in
enabling the identification of domestic
buildings that are safe in respect of the
fire safety of external cladding and,
critically, those which are not safe and
will, therefore, require some form of
urgent remedial action to be taken for
the purposes of life safety. •
Dave Smith is Secretary of the FIRESA
Council and Export Manager for the
Fire Industry Association
(www.fia.uk.com)
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/www.buildingsafety
/portal.co.uk
/(www.fia.uk.com)
