What metrics provide the best leading indicators for building safety and construction health and safety performance at both an industry and project-specific level?

Background

HSE Strategic Objective: Increase and maintain trust to ensure people feel safe where they live, where they work, and in their environment (https://www.hse.gov.uk/aboutus/assets/docs/the-hse-strategy.pdf)

Research is required to address priority knowledge gaps that will underpin effective and proportionate regulatory regimes for building safety, construction and chemicals through evidence-based approaches. To underpin policy, regulatory and operational activities in this strategic objective the evidence requirements in this area will include:

To address key areas of focus for the Building Safety Regulator (BSR) to inform its continuing work to develop a collective understanding of the built environment that will underpin policy and regulatory decision-making and standards development with an improved understanding of building safety risk. This will involve identification and assessment of emerging risks and keeping abreast of changes and trends across the built environment. Research will also underpin the BSR strategic objective to lead the development of policy relating to the regular review of Approved Documents and the provision of associated technical advice to aid compliance with the building regulations.

To further develop understanding of innovation and of new and emerging legacy issues and their impact on building safety and on construction health and safety and associated standards and guidance. This will include identifying potential implications of new and emerging technologies for building safety risk profiles through the building life cycle and identifying opportunities to eliminate or reduce risks at the design stage whilst also informing the development of appropriate intervention strategies.

To inform standards and guidance development to improve the safety and standard of buildings and develop effective strategies for oversight of the built environment, evaluation of the BSR and to measure and build competence across the built environment and construction sector.

To enable transformative advances in health and safety across the diverse construction sector through technology and innovation and the new opportunities and risks arising from such changes.

To ensure that our approach to regulating chemicals and microbial control agents is effective, efficient, agile and based on up-to-date understanding and evidence. This will ensure that HSE continues to be an internationally influential and competent regulator that ensures the protection of workers, bystanders, consumers and the environment from chemicals whilst enabling GB to grow and prosper.

To develop the evidence needed to ensure that our regulatory approach to chemicals is fit for purpose for the future. This requires an understanding of the future trends in chemical use, technological changes and consequences for both health and environmental hazards.

To develop the evidence for innovative approaches to regulation through collaboration across HSE and other government departments, to make sure we maintain our world-class reputation for regulatory excellence. We will continue to make the best use of new data collection techniques, modelling and analytical methods to help us make proportionate regulatory decisions.

The questions provide more detail of the evidence needs within the main Areas of Research Interest Question Group.

Next steps

Get in touch: [email protected]

Source

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

HSE areas of research interest 2025

Topics

No topics assigned yet

Research fields

No research fields assigned yet

Related UKRI funded projects


  • 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

    Lead research organisation: University of Manchester

    Why might this be relevant?

    Partially relevant as it focuses on design for safety in construction, but does not directly address leading indicators for building safety.

  • The Building Safety Application

    ONE Creative's innovation will embed core Building Information Modelling (BIM), information management, facilities' management (FM) and IoT (Internet of Things) capability within a central, cloud-based information manage...

    Funded by: Innovate UK

    Lead research organisation: ONE CREATIVE ENVIRONMENTS LIMITED

    Why might this be relevant?

    Partially relevant as it addresses building safety management but does not specifically focus on leading indicators for building safety.

  • 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

    Lead research organisation: DATA INNOVATION.AI LTD

    Why might this be relevant?

    Partially relevant as it addresses bio-safety in building design during pandemics, but does not specifically focus on metrics for building safety and construction health.

  • Machine Learning-Enabled Fire Performance Diagnostics BIM Solution (FireBIM) for Building Design and Construction Compliance Check

    The unfortunate Grenfell fire disaster, where 72 lives were lost, has gone down as one of the UK's worst disaster of modern time. As a way of preventing future occurrence of such tragedy, one of the key recommendations o...

    Funded by: Innovate UK

    Lead research organisation: INNOVATION FIRE ENGINEERING LIMITED

  • University College London and Heathrow Airport Limited

    To develop and deploy a new Prevention and Appraisal Methodology and associated Dashboard which will increase construction project success rate and reduce in-project and post-project quality issues....

    Funded by: Innovate UK

    Lead research organisation: UNIVERSITY COLLEGE LONDON

  • Resilience funding for enabling safer and more efficient construction through video analytics and machine learning

    **Introduction** The COVID-19 contingency has highlighted the urgent need for site monitoring systems that enable measuring relative distances, effectively and accurately, among workers and plant equipment to ensure saf...

    Funded by: Innovate UK

    Lead research organisation: ZEST CONSULT LTD

  • Aston University and Arcadis Consulting (UK) Limited KTP 22_23 R3

    To create Building Information Modelling based automated health and safety rule and code compliance checking system for infrastructure engineering design in the construction industry....

    Funded by: Innovate UK

    Lead research organisation: ASTON UNIVERSITY

  • Smart Hazards

    Smart Hazards is an intelligent safety tracking and detection platform designed to make construction sites safer, smarter, and more efficient. Construction is one of the world’s highest-risk sectors, where accidents can...

    Funded by: Innovate UK

    Lead research organisation: IMAGE + LIMITED

  • A vision-based system for proactive management of safety on construction sites

    Evercam is a construction-oriented software company. With our disruptive technology, we focus on increasing construction productivity by improving project visibility and team communications. To do this, we build tools th...

    Funded by: Innovate UK

    Lead research organisation: EVERCAM UK LIMITED

  • Leeds Beckett University and Wakefield and District Housing Limited

    To research, develop and implement a building performance evaluation capability....

    Funded by: Innovate UK

    Lead research organisation: LEEDS BECKETT UNIVERSITY