Archived

Building standards: What evidence is available to improve the safety and standard of
buildings and people in or about buildings to inform the evaluation of the Building
Regulations and the associated guidance?

Background

To enable strategic and transformative advances in health and safety across the diverse construction sector through technology and innovation and the new opportunities and risks arising from it. To underpin construction and building safety regulatory regimes with evidence-based approaches and enable effective oversight across the whole built environment. To inform standards and guidance development to improve the safety and standard of buildings and develop effective strategies to measure and build competence across the construction and building safety sectors. To ensure that our approach to regulating chemicals and microbial control agents: is effective, efficient and agile, reflecting current and developing scientific understanding and technical knowledge; reinforces our position as an internationally influential regulator; and enables society to derive the benefits of access to safe and sustainable use of chemicals; and ensure there is no harm to workers, bystanders and consumers or unacceptable effects on the environment.

Next steps

Get in touch with hsecsa@hse.gov.uk

Source

This question was published as part of the set of ARIs in this document:

HS Es Areas of Research Interest ARI 2023

Related UKRI funded projects


  • AI-Enabled Bio-Safety Assessment Tool for Sustainable Building Design in Pandemic Conditions.

    At this time not only is there a global pandemic for the novel coronavirus COVID-19, at time of writing this application there is the 11th outbreak of Ebola being fought in Africa, Europe is recovering from a 3-year outb...

    Funded by: Innovate UK

    Why might this be relevant?

    The project focuses on AI-enabled bio-safety assessment for building design in pandemic conditions, directly addressing the safety and standard of buildings in relation to health risks.

  • AI-Enabled Design Diagnostics and Optimisation System for Mould Prevention (AI-DOMP)

    The aftermath of the tragic death of Awaab Ishak because of prolonged exposure to mould in Rochdale Boroughwide Housing flats in 2020 increases the level of awareness of the health risks posed by mould. At the time, heal...

    Funded by: Innovate UK

    Why might this be relevant?

    The project addresses mould prevention in building design, which is related to safety and standard of buildings, but does not cover the broader aspects of the question.

  • Health Effects of Modern Airtight Construction: Follow-on funding

    The way that buildings have been designed and constructed has changed rapidly in recent years, driven to a significant extent by the need to meet challenges of climate change and energy costs, but also to reduce costs an...

    Funded by: AHRC

    Why might this be relevant?

    The project addresses the health impacts of modern airtight construction, which is partially relevant to improving the safety and standard of buildings.

  • Building insights: metrics informing performance, wellbeing and risks

    Build Test Solutions, in partnership with Loughborough University and SOAP Retrofit, are working to develop, validate and implement a highly scalable mould risk indicator for homes. Designed as a web hosted algorithm to ...

    Funded by: Innovate UK

  • BuildAir: a holistic framework to design safe built environments

    BuildAir seeks to incorporate the infection risk component in building codes and design guidelines, whilst providing comprehensive tools and frameworks to make it possible. This overarching idea is motivated by the clear...

    Funded by: MRC

  • Health effects of modern airtight construction

    Awareness of the impacts of climate change, rising energy prices, fuel poverty and a demand for energy security have prompted significant changes in design thinking, construction practice, building materials and building...

    Funded by: AHRC

  • IMPROVING DESIGN FOR SAFETY: A WEB-BASED DESIGN FOR SAFETY CAPABILITY MATURITY INDICATOR (DFS-CMI) TOOL FOR THE CONSTRUCTION SECTOR

    The global construction sector is estimated to account for 100,000 fatalities annually and about 30-40% of all fatal occupational injuries. In the UK, although the construction sector accounts for only approximately 5% o...

    Funded by: EPSRC

  • Platform: Complex Built Environment Systems

    CBES aims to tackle the following three main issues:1. How to design, maintain and operate the built environment while minimising the emissions of greenhouse gases. 2. How to adapt the environment, fabric and services of...

    Funded by: EPSRC

    Why might this be relevant?

    Partially relevant as it addresses health, comfort, security, and productivity in buildings, but does not specifically focus on building safety standards.

  • RegBIM: BIM-based Regulatory Compliance Design Environment

    The RegBIM project is a Technology Strategy Board supported collaboration between BRE, Cardiff University, Bentley Systems, AEC3, Skanska, RIBA and LABC. Working with Building Information Modelling (BIM) within the UK co...

    Funded by: Innovate UK

  • ACCORD: Automated Compliance Checks for Construction, Renovation or Demolition Works

    ACCORD's objective is to digitalise permitting and compliance processes using BIM and other data sources to improve the productivity and quality of design and construction processes, support the design of climate-neutral...

    Funded by: Horizon Europe Guarantee