As we emerge blinking into the spring sunshine, the association is gearing up to get back out and about with a series of face-to-face events, says Lesley McLeod.
Spring is all around and, finally, everything is waking up after the winter. At the Association for Project Safety (APS) we’re gearing up for a busy season of events and activities built around the things you told us matter most to you.
The association is going back on the road around our regions. You told us how keen you were to meet up face-to-face and we promised we would deliver – so you should start looking out for live events coming closer to home.
We’ll be kicking off in England South with an event in London at the end of April. APS is very grateful to our regional supporters – and we catch up with Kevin Bainbridge in the member profile – for keeping the show on the road when we were office-bound.
Proving competence
But, just because you’ve not seen much of us, doesn’t mean there’s not been a lot going on as you’ll see in our article from Sam Allwinkle. Sam is our independent chair and an expert in how people can prove their competence. He, and our own Andrew Leslie, have designed a way industry professionals can demonstrate they’ve the right stuff to take on the principal designer building regulations roles opening up as a result of the Building Safety Act. We’ll be doing more on this separately so keep an eye on the website.
APS is also going to take a deeper dive into those subjects about which we get the most questions. We’ll have more on sustainability, artificial intelligence in the built environment and design risk management.
Our legal feature makes a start by looking at dual liability. It’s a very complex field and good to have it untangled so everyone knows where they stand. And worth remembering, as Philip White says, how the new building safety regulator will be keeping a weather eye on enforcement on those rare occasions when things go wrong.
Unashamedly, we are also looking at more issues around fire safety – from the slow progress we’ve been making sorting out cladding problems since Grenfell, an eye-opener about firestopping and our detailed CPD feature on doorset safety.
Offsite building
There will also be more about offsite building – something we are all going to have to master if the industry is to rise to the challenge of building more and building faster. In this edition of the magazine Stephen Cousins highlights many of the issues with modular building. His piece walks you through what happened when the government had to step in to knock down unsafe schools. But the focus is definitely on how offsite building can be transformative – if we get it right.
That’ll have its own knock-on effects as Anthony Taylor of the Building Safety Alliance explains when talking about work on safety in the occupied sector and the competencies necessary for improving and managing those higher-risk residential buildings.
It’s all a bit overwhelming. APS is always on your side and we will be supporting the Lighthouse Construction Industry Charity throughout the year. We want to help our friend Bill Hill make it easier to talk about wellbeing.
That’s something we can all get behind! Grab a coffee and read on…
Lesley McLeod is CEO of the Association for Project Safety.
