Solutions in typical guidance ( Approved Document B, BS 9999, BS 9991 ) provide no measure of building fire safety. The same is true of the deterministic models in fire engineering codes, such as BS 7974.

Not knowing what safety level your fire strategy provides is the reason why the Hackitt review recommended outcome-based approaches and why owners of tall residential buildings have been hurriedly preparing safety cases. This work is helping stakeholders determine which buildings, due to an over reliance on guidance,  have been left in an unsafe condition.

It would be better if fire strategies were developed to achieve explicitly stated levels of safety and fire engineers remained with projects to ensure these were maintained.

We started to change the way we do things once Semper was formed. First, we altered our approach to external wall assessments, which was made easier by the introduction of PAS 9980, which calls for a risk-based approach. We then introduced probabilistic elements to many of our structural fire engineer offerings.

More recently we have developed an outcome-based approach for high rise residential buildings.  The inner workings of our safety case approach are complex, but the method ensures a solid position for our clients, should the safety of their building be questioned.

These are just the first steps on a journey that should see us become the first fire engineering company to offer fully quantified solutions for building fire safety.

Our desire to change the way fire safety is delivered is the reason the company was formed back in 2014.

At that time, our forward-thinking ideas seemed to confuse the majority, and many just could not see the need for change. Not seeing the need for change was understandable back then, as building fires had tended to always be low frequency low consequence events for which the simpler more ambiguous approaches in typical guidance seemed well suited.

Then came Grenfell and people’s thoughts started to change.