Strengthening competence: How BSI Competence Hub supports Building Safety Act compliance
Iain Hoey
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Ian Richardson, Sector Lead at BSI, introduces the BSI Built Environment Competence Hub
Competence has quite rightly become a defining issue for the built environment sector following the Building Safety Act 2022 and tightening regulatory expectations.
Professionals across fire safety, construction, building control and facilities management are now required to demonstrate clearer accountability, stronger oversight and more consistent decision-making.
However, competence guidance has often remained fragmented, making it difficult to interpret requirements and apply them in practice.
In response to these challenges, BSI has launched the Built Environment Competence Hub, a national digital platform designed to bring together standards, competence frameworks, regulatory guidance and industry insight.
Developed in collaboration with the Industry Competence Steering Group (ICSG) and the Building Safety Regulator (BSR), the Hub aims to support clearer understanding, practical implementation and ongoing professional development across the building lifecycle.
Why competence needed a central focus
The renewed emphasis on competence stems directly from the regulatory reforms that followed the Grenfell Tower fire and the subsequent Independent Review of Building Regulations and Fire Safety.
The Building Safety Act 2022 and the establishment of the BSR placed statutory weight behind competence requirements for duty holder roles and those responsible for managing safety throughout a building’s lifecycle.
These reforms have been underpinned by a suite of new and emerging standards, including the BS 8670 series and PAS 8671, PAS 8672, PAS 8673 and BS 8674.
Together, these documents define core competence criteria and role-specific expectations for principal designers, principal contractors and those managing residential building safety.
While these developments have strengthened the regulatory framework, they have also created a complex and fast-moving landscape.
Competence materials have been distributed across multiple organisations, websites and professional bodies.
The worry is that for many professionals and organisations, identifying which standards apply to which roles, and how to evidence compliance, is an increasingly burdensome task.
Industry has also been moving towards more consistent, cross-disciplinary competence criteria.
The adoption of Competence frameworks for building safety – Core criteria.
Code of practice (BS 8670-1), which sets out core competence criteria based on skills, knowledge, experience and behaviours (SKEB), alongside role-specific documents, has highlighted the need for alignment across disciplines.
This shift reinforces the value for a single, authoritative reference point.
Introducing the Built Environment Competence Hub
The Built Environment Competence Hub has been created to meet that need.
Quite simply, it is designed to be a national digital repository and central point of reference for competence-related information.
It consolidates standards, competence frameworks, regulatory guidance, webinar recordings, articles and discussion forums within one accessible platform.
The Hub is free to professionals, organisations and stakeholders across the sector, including designers, contractors, manufacturers and suppliers, building owners and managers, those undertaking duty holder roles, professional bodies, training providers and regulators.
Addressing fragmentation and inconsistency
BSI decided to develop the hub following frequent reports from professionals that competence information was fragmented and difficult to navigate.
They were finding guidance and frameworks inconsistent across roles and disciplines, with resources spread across numerous platforms.
This created uncertainty and, in some cases, inconsistent interpretation of legal duties.
This is not just inefficient, but ultimately risks undermining the good work being done to support building safety in the last near-decade.
For organisations, the challenge extended beyond understanding requirements.
Demonstrating competence through documented processes, training plans and audit trails requires significant time and effort to gather and interpret information from multiple sources.
The Hub addresses these issues by consolidating key resources and signposting authoritative documents within five thematic areas.
It aligns standards, ICSG-led frameworks and regulatory information according to role, duty holder expectation and lifecycle stage.
By doing so, it reduces duplication, minimises conflicting interpretations and establishes a common reference point for project teams and organisations.
Promoting consistency across the building lifecycle
A defining feature of the Hub is its lifecycle perspective.
By organising resources by role, lifecycle stage and topic, and by signposting both core and role-specific competence criteria, it aims to promote a shared vocabulary and threshold expectations from concept and design through construction, commissioning, handover and in-use management, and ultimately to refurbishment or deconstruction.
This cross-referencing is also designed to reduce divergence between teams and support continuity of competence at interfaces and regulatory gateways.
In a sector where safety depends on coordinated action across disciplines, such alignment is critical.
Supporting day-to-day professional practice
The Hub is designed to support day-to-day work.
Organisations can use it to identify applicable role and function requirements, such as PAS 8671 for Principal Designers, PAS 8672 for Principal Contractors and PAS 8673 for those managing residential building safety.
Through clear signposting, our hope is that it will help organisations align policies, role profiles and training plans with national standards.
It is intended to support the operationalisation of competence by linking duties to SKEB criteria and encouraging structured evidence capture.
This strengthens due diligence processes, supports audit readiness and reinforces accountable appointments and oversight.
The platform also provides updates on regulatory developments and emerging good practice.
This will help inform decisions at key gateways, during design changes, procurement stages and in-occupation risk management.
Beyond its repository function, the hope is for the Hub to serve as a collaborative space, where members can engage with peers, share lessons learned from real projects, discuss areas of uncertainty and contribute to informed debate.
This community element reflects the fact that competence development is not static, but an ongoing, shared responsibility.
A living resource for a changing landscape
The regulatory and standards landscape will continue to evolve.
New documents will be developed, existing standards will be revised and expectations will mature as further lessons are learned.
The Built Environment Competence Hub has therefore been designed as a “living resource”.
Users are encouraged to register, contribute content and participate in events.
Feedback from industry will inform future updates, ensuring the platform remains aligned with BSR expectations and emerging standards.
Ultimately, this reflects a broader shift: from reactive compliance towards proactive competence management and continuous improvement.
Raising confidence and improving safety outcomes
As the built environment sector adapts to a new regulatory era, clarity and consistency around competence are essential.
Through the Hub, BSI, working alongside ICSG and the Building Safety Regulator, aims to provide the infrastructure to support that change.
Success will be measured by this work’s impact on professional confidence and, ultimately, in the safety of buildings.
By replacing fragmented sources with a single, trusted reference point, the aim is to reduce uncertainty and variability in interpretation, and to support more consistent competence management across organisations and supply chains, strengthening the quality of appointments, supervision and assurance.
In doing so, it will contribute to the wider objectives of the Building Safety Act 2022: improving accountability, restoring trust and delivering safer buildings.
