Restructure announced for Industry Competence Steering Group

Established in response to the Grenfell Tower tragedy of June 2017 and the subsequent Independent Review of Building Regulations and Fire Safety undertaken by Dame Judith Hackitt, the ICSG has now transitioned to become a formal Working Group of the Industry Competence Committee (ICC) under the auspices of the Building Safety Regulator, in turn signalling a strategic shift towards more rigorous industry-wide competence frameworks.

“The new relationship between the ICC and the ICSG is key to transforming the competence of the industry,” commented Hanna Clarke, co-chair of the ICSG and digital and policy manager at the Construction Products Association. “The ICC aims to set expectations for industry and challenge it. The ICSG is where industry can collaborate to meet those challenges.”

Clarke continued: “The ICSG also provides the ICC with a clear picture of what industry is doing, feeds back on what challenges industry is facing and notes which levers can be pulled to improve competence. We are able to work together on developing solutions and aim to provide clear messages and guidance for the industry and the public about competence.”

Culture change

The ICSG was set up to enable culture change in relation to competence across the built environment. It does this by providing the UK’s dedicated built environment industry with access to appropriate competences such that practitioners may safely contribute to the creation and use of built environments and, importantly, can readily demonstrate their competence to others.

Formerly known as the Competence Steering Group, the ICSG is co-chaired by Hanna Clarke and Gill Hancock, head of technical content at the Association for Project Management.

Under its new chairs, the ICSG has restructured. This will better cover the built environment’s disciplines and support existing work across the industry.

The new structure includes sector-led groups, key topic groups and various Working Groups. They currently bring together contributions from over 60 professional and trade bodies and 1,500 individuals in the built environment, with membership of the sector-led groups themselves still growing.

These groups will produce competence frameworks mapped to the BS 8670 series. They will also create guidance and implementation programmes to enable culture change in relation to competence across the built environment.

Another key role of these groups is to provide forums for industry feedback relating to the understanding of legislation and barriers to its implementation.

The ICSG is working with the British Standards Institution (BSI) to create a communications hub. This will be a central repository of all the ICSG’s work for the industry to access. More information on this (and the competence frameworks) will be made available in the next few months.

Keen focus

The ICSG’s focus is to keep people safe through competent practices and ethical behaviours throughout the built environment. Central to this aim is enabling collaboration and the continual sharing of Best Practice, learning and resources to support continuous improvement in industry competence.

The ICSG collaborates closely with the BSI and its committee CPB/1: Competence in the Built Environment, contributing to many of the British Standards that are in development. It also has a strong relationship with the Construction Leadership Council (CLC), both in terms of contributions to the work on competence and in view of the desire to join up the competence work with the other industry initiatives for which the CLC is taking the lead.

“The ICSG enjoys end-to-end coverage from construction products through to demolition and disposal, including in occupation,” explained Gill Hancock. “By collaborating with both industry and the Building Safety Regulator, we firmly believe that we can enable real culture change, in relation to enhanced competence right across the built environment.”