Safety case reports for historic higher-risk buildings

A new legal duty, applied to buildings of every age

Since the Building Safety Act 2022 introduced its regime for higher-risk buildings — broadly, residential buildings at least 18 metres or seven storeys with two or more residential units — the Health and Safety Executive has published guidance on what compliance requires. Among the most consequential is its guidance on preparing a safety case report: the document every Principal Accountable Person must produce, demonstrating that fire and structural safety risks are properly understood and actively managed. The regime applies equally to a building completed last year or a century ago.

What a safety case report actually has to demonstrate

A safety case report is not a compliance checklist. It has to demonstrate, with genuine supporting evidence, that the Accountable Person has taken ‘all reasonable steps’ to prevent and mitigate structural and fire risk — reviewing original design records against current codes, assessing condition, checking resistance to disproportionate collapse, and screening for known risks such as reinforced autoclaved aerated concrete. For buildings with complete original records, that process is substantial but working from a known starting point. For a meaningful proportion of older stock, original drawings may be incomplete, contradictory, or simply lost.

Large panel system buildings: what this looks like in practice

We have supported the owners of one estate containing nineteen large panel system tower blocks across more than two decades of structural investigation, work that has taken on renewed relevance under the safety case regime. A concrete condition survey combined visual inspection with cover meter surveys and carbonation testing, while a later intrusive assessment examined compliance with disproportionate collapse provisions — particularly pressing given these towers, like Ronan Point itself, have always had gas supplied to each dwelling.

Where original records are incomplete: the honest answer

HSE's guidance is candid that where records are incomplete, findings have to be built from visual survey, structural markup and a formal hazard identification process — not from an assumption of safety by default. A safety case report that overstates its own certainty is, in a real sense, more dangerous than one that honestly flags what remains unknown. We have found that clients consistently prefer the honest version, because a defensible report with a clear forward plan withstands regulatory scrutiny far better than a confident-sounding one built on assumption.

The particular complication of listed higher-risk buildings

Where a higher-risk building also carries heritage protection, the intrusive investigation a safety case might call for sits in direct tension with the conservation principle of minimum necessary intervention. Resolving that well requires the same staged, evidence-led methodology we apply to any historic building survey — non-intrusive assessment first, targeted investigation at specific locations of genuine concern, full intrusive testing only where the safety stakes clearly justify the heritage impact, documented as carefully as the structural findings themselves.

What this means for accountable persons now

Our clearest advice on the safety case regime, applied to older and historic higher-risk buildings: don't wait to be directed by the regulator before starting. The legal duties became enforceable from October 2023, and the practical work of gathering records and commissioning targeted investigation takes real time — particularly for buildings whose construction type carries specific, well-documented risks that any credible safety case now has to address explicitly.