Building safety: Is standardised competence proof the missing link?

If you asked most people working in the built environment whether they’re competent at their job, the answer would almost always be yes.

The people I encounter every day in the fire industry are by and large very knowledgeable, experienced professionals who care about what they’re doing. They’ve spent years developing expertise, take their responsibilities seriously and are genuinely committed to doing their job well.

But being competent and being able to prove it are two very different things. And right now, the industry has no consistent, reliable way of doing the latter.

That raises an important question for building safety. If competence now needs to be demonstrated rather than assumed, is a standardised approach to competence proof the missing link?

Competence without proof

Competence is now a legal requirement and the industry is still coming to terms with the changes introduced by the Building Safety Act 2022.

The frameworks to define it are being developed, the regulator to enforce it is in place and increasingly active, and the gateway process for higher-risk buildings demands competence declarations at key stages.

All of this is welcome and much needed. But there’s a significant problem the industry is now grappling with: very little thought has been given to how those on the ground can evidence their competence in a way that meets these new expectations.

The Industry Competence Committee’s own annual report for 2025 to 2026 is quite open about this. While it highlights significant progress in developing competence frameworks and guidance, it also points out that these aren’t yet being consistently adopted or applied in practice.

We’re getting better at defining what ‘good’ looks like, but we’re still some way from being able to demonstrate it consistently.

The report also highlights that many organisations still rely heavily on the capability of individual people rather than embedded systems of assurance, supervision and governance that provide ongoing evidence that competence is being maintained.

The standards and expectations are becoming clearer. What’s missing is a consistent, industry-wide approach to help people prove they meet them.

The evidence problem in fire doors

In the fire door industry alone, the numbers make for uncomfortable reading. Industry inspection data suggests that 75% of fire doors in UK buildings fail inspection.

Context matters enormously. A fire door could have deteriorated through poor maintenance, been modified after installation or been affected by changes to the building itself.

But some failures will almost certainly be competence failures. The problem is that we often have no reliable way of knowing which ones.

In many cases, the evidence simply doesn’t exist. There’s no consistent record of who installed the door, what their competence was at the time, what standard they were working to, what checks were carried out at handover or what has happened to the door since.

Without that evidence trail, there’s no way of knowing where the problem started.

This is where standardisation becomes important. If competence evidence is recorded differently from one business, project or individual to the next, establishing what happened later becomes far harder than it needs to be.

The behaviours problem

Historically within the built environment, competence has been assumed from experience. If you’d been working in the same role for 15 years, the assumption was that you knew what you were doing.

But the Grenfell Inquiry showed us that experience alone isn’t enough. Many individuals involved in the building’s safety had long careers but missed critical risks and warning signs, and didn’t always follow correct procedure.

Behaviours is one of the four pillars that the industry is least equipped to handle. You can assess skills, test knowledge and document experience, while behaviours are much harder to evidence reliably.

How can you prove that someone raises concerns when they find something wrong on site? How do you evidence that an assessor worked within the limits of their own competence? How do you demonstrate that someone followed the specification when time pressure made cutting corners tempting?

These aren’t trivial questions, and the industry hasn’t fully worked out how to answer them yet. Guidance on evidencing behaviours is still emerging and the frameworks acknowledge this openly.

Any standardised approach therefore has to go beyond qualifications and certificates. It needs to reflect the full picture of someone’s competence, including experience and behaviour.

The organisational gap

The individual competence problem is well understood, even if the evidence infrastructure isn’t there yet.

The organisational competence problem is less discussed and arguably more significant.

I’d say most businesses in the built environment are reasonably good at employing competent people. Where they struggle is proving the competence of their people or organisation because there isn’t a consistent, practical way to manage the process.

If we were being honest, many businesses don’t have clear visibility of who is competent to carry out particular safety-critical roles, when qualifications or CPD need renewing, or whether someone is working beyond the limits of their competence.

Historically, competence has often been tracked through informal knowledge, personal relationships and professional trust. That might’ve worked when the legal framework allowed it. But now the Building Safety Act has placed obligations on organisations as well as individuals, this approach has to change.

A more standardised approach to competence evidence would give organisations a clearer basis for making those decisions and showing how they reached them.

The adoption gap

There’s a pattern emerging in the built environment that concerns me more than the skills gap itself.

Frameworks are being developed, guidance is being published and standards are being set, but only a relatively small number of organisations and individuals are engaging with them seriously.

The majority haven’t started yet. This isn’t cynicism; it’s what the ICC’s own reporting tells us.

The reasons are understandable. The frameworks are complex and sometimes hard to navigate, guidance is spread across multiple bodies and documents, and most professionals are busy doing the job rather than reading competence frameworks in their spare time.

The sense that enforcement is still some way off can make the urgency feel abstract. But the Building Safety Regulator is actively enforcing, gateway applications are being challenged and legal action has been taken.

The direction of travel is clear, and the window for getting ahead of it is narrowing.

Standardisation could help close that adoption gap. If proving competence remains fragmented and difficult to navigate, widespread adoption will be harder. A clearer approach to what evidence is required and how it should be maintained would make competence assurance easier to embed into everyday practice.

What needs to change

The conversation about competence in the UK built environment has focused heavily on developing it, and that work needs to continue. But developing competence and evidencing it are separate problems, and the industry has been treating them as one.

What the industry needs now is a systematic, consistent approach to evidence: an infrastructure for capturing, organising and demonstrating that individuals and organisations meet the standard for their specific roles.

Individuals need a way to map themselves against the relevant framework, understand where they stand, identify gaps and build an ongoing record that reflects all four elements of SKEB, including experience and behaviours.

It should be a living record that develops over a career rather than a snapshot taken at a single point in time.

Organisations need clear visibility of workforce competence, the ability to check the people they appoint and an auditable evidence trail showing they’re taking their obligations seriously.

The industry also needs to stop treating evidence as an administrative burden that comes after competent work is done and start treating it as an integral part of what competence means.

Standardisation doesn’t mean reducing competence to a tick-box exercise. Done properly, it gives the industry a common way of capturing and presenting evidence while recognising that different roles demand different levels and types of competence.

Is standardised proof the missing link?

The UK has an evidence gap, and it runs deeper than most people in the industry have been willing to acknowledge.

The people are largely there and the expertise exists. What’s missing is a consistent, structured and accessible way of capturing that expertise, maintaining it over time and producing it when required.

That’s why standardised competence proof deserves more attention.

If individuals can evidence their competence against recognised requirements and organisations can verify that evidence consistently, the industry has a much stronger foundation for competent appointments and accountable decision-making.

In a regulatory environment where what you can prove matters as much as what you can do, that gap represents a fundamental risk to those responsible for managing the built environment safely and to the people who rely on them.

We already have much of the expertise required. The next challenge is building a practical, standardised way of proving it.

Jonny Millard is Managing Director of UK Fire Door Training, a specialist provider of fire door installation, inspection and maintenance training. He has spent his career working at the intersection of fire safety practice and competence development in the built environment.