Digital service

Regulating the building control profession

OVERVIEW

On 14 June 2017 the worst UK residential fire broke out in the 24-storey Grenfell Tower in London. 72 people lost their lives.

As part of the UK Government's response to this tragedy, the then Home Secretary commissioned Dame Judith Hackitt to undertake an independent review of Building Regulations and in particular their impact on Fire Safety.

The Building Safety Regulator (BSR) was set up in 2022 under the Building Safety Act to regulate higher-risk buildings, raise safety standards of all buildings and help professionals in design, construction, and building control, to improve their competence.

CONTINUE

Bringing regulation to life

Four squads were stood up to bring the various aspects of the Building Safety act to life. Adhering to GDS (Government Digital Service) standards, the services would go through all the required phases (Discovery, Alpha, Beta, Public Beta etc) to ensure the best possible outcome.

My role

I joined the "Regulating the building control profession" squad at the start of the Alpha phase as the interaction designer and scrummaster. In addition I filled in as interim delivery lead as and when required. This squad focused on services for the professionals working within building control including building inspectors as individuals and the entities that offer building inspection services. Aside from my primary remit to design and build prototypes for user testing and policy validation, throughout alpha and beta phases I assisted with user research and wider service design.

Project challenges

Constant evolving policies, fixed legislative deadlines, low industry morale

Processes and Tools

Full Agile/scrum delivery, working to 2 week long sprints with daily stand ups and required backlog refinement, planning, demo and retrospective sessions.

Tools used included GDS prototype kit, Figma, Mural and Azure Devops.

Artefacts