Building a Safer Future: Interview with Neville Grunwald

https://youtu.be/rjv5-FbekLM?si=VMijhQz8Cg92NWuC

Building A Safer Future: Transforming roofing, cladding & insulation industries through industry-wide standards & competence training

• Dr Claire Griffiths, Editor at Roofing Today
• Neville Grunwald Director of Facades and Roofs at Wates and Chair of the Joint Competency Initiative.

Read the interview transcript below.

Claire

Good morning everyone, thank you for coming this morning.

As I’m sure you’re aware, this is an interview with Neville Grunwald who is the director of roofing and facades for Wates, and also the head of the Joint Competence Initiative.

So, a very important part of the industry’s response post Grenfell has been to instigate the demonstration of competence for tradespeople involved in roofing and facades projects. So, that’s what we’ll be talking about this morning.

So, to get us started Neville, I wonder if you can tell everyone what the Joint Competence Initiative is and what it’s trying to achieve.

00:00:54

Neville

Yeah, sure. The JCI – the Joint Competency Initiative for the building envelope sector. About four or five years ago, I realised that we’ve got problems with some of our installations and I started examining what was going wrong, and we had a bit of a thrash about, and we realised that we were lacking competence – not of the installer, potentially, but the whole team.

Everything from the people that are helping to specify the product when we’re in tender, through to design, procurement, manufacture and then on to install. There are plenty of competent companies out there. We’re now a business of slightly over 6,000 people – Wates – and trying to get everybody up to the same level, the high watermark that you’d hope that we’re going to be, is difficult.

So, I started looking at it and I ended up getting involved with the Dame Judith Hackitt Working Group and it became obvious that we’d got a similar viewpoint to them. And I sat through God knows how many meetings, lots of talking shops with the Building Regulator, with various organisations and trade bodies, but nobody had a way forward.

They were saying “Well, what we need is a competence framework” or “the framework’s okay but what specifically do I have to do as an estimator for a roofer?”

“What makes me competent as a designer?”

“What makes me competent? Show me what it should look like.”

So, we set up the JCI to actually write those standards because nobody else was prepared to.

And we brought together the likes of the NFRC, GGF, the MCRMA – all these trade bodies and a lot of other stakeholders from subcontractor specialists through to distributors, manufacturers.

We said “Okay, what do we think these standards look like?” Let’s get it down on a piece of paper, let’s hone them, let’s make them appropriate and easy to understand and give people a direction to aim for and let them understand what training they might need to get them to those levels, particularly as they start to grow.

One thing that worries me is we have a paucity, a lack of young people, in the industry. You know, most of the industry looks like me – male, stale and pale, which is a terrible thing.

We need a lot of young people coming in of both sexes, of multiple ethnicities, that have got different ideas, different approaches, and can bring something new to it.

So, if you join the industry and you want to do it on purpose rather than by accident like I did 37 years ago, then where do you start? What does it look like? How do I grow? So again, those standards – if we set them now and we say “If you do that, that gets you as a base estimator or an estimating manager or a commercial manager.”

It gives you a professional route to grow your career as well.

00:03:42

Claire

How does that fit in, Neville, with the range of specialisms, particularly in roofing? There are just so many varieties of roofing – whether it’s single ply or, bitumen, flat pitch, slate, whatever it is – that must be difficult to set standards for all those different specialisms.

00:04:06

Neville

Yeah, it’s a big old beast. So what we’ve actually done is we’ve joined the joined the JCI, the Joint Competency Initiative, with Dame Judith Hackitt. As I say, she’s set up 12 working groups originally to look at competence in the industry. The JCI has now become one of the working groups. So we’re working together to set standards for ESLG10.1.

We’re actually setting standards for installation for all of those types of roofing materials you’re talking about – and hard metals and lead – to make sure that we’ve got somebody looking at the specific standards for each of those, because they’re all slightly different. And if we’ve got something like 120 people working on this right now across installation, estimating, design, sales and specification writing, it’s taking hundreds and hundreds of people.

And it’s not just in industry. We’re also getting assistance from CITB, CSCS, from the regulator – so it’s a massive undertaking.

We think there’s going to be something like 150 to 200 standards. So you would go in, look for your role, and it will tell you what that standard should be. And it won’t matter whether you’re doing hot melt, cold applied, whether you’re doing bitumen felt, whether you’re doing single ply membrane, those standards should be there for you.

00:05:32

Claire

And where will those standards be held? Where will people be able to find out what’s applicable to them?

00:05:37

Neville

That’s a question I’ve been asking the regulator for the last three years. So, from my perspective, we set up the JCI with its own website, so it’ll be accessible there. However, we think that that should be the second place you look.

We’re trying to encourage government to have a central website, which they are talking about with Skills England now, where you would be able to go and say “Right, I want to go and learn about construction”. All the standards for my role, regardless of whether I’m doing concrete, brickwork or whether I’m doing a roof, I can go and find it.

It’s early days. You’d be surprised just how far behind industry the regulator and the Industry Competence Steering Group, the ICSG, that works for it, actually is.

We’re hoping to have the standards out – 100 by the end of next year.

So, we’re still a long way away. Bearing in mind that the Building Safety Act said we should all be able to prove competence by October last year.

00:06:34

Claire

Yeah. I mean, that was another one of my questions. I think it was the white paper on achieving competence which set the target of 80% of staff by next year.

00:06:45

Neville

Wildly ambitious.

00:06:48

Claire

But I don’t think it’s even been started really.

00:06:51

Neville

Well, we’ve got some standards that are actually giving you a benchmark for the management of each of the departments. So, you could look and go “Well, I’d expect to have this level. I’d expect to have these many hours of CPD.”

00:07:06

Claire

This is management?

00:07:07

Neville

This is management of estimating, sales, the commercial departments, procurement. Procurement, you see, if you’re a procurer, if you’re selecting something, you could accidentally become a designer, which is a terrifying prospect. So, I’ve got a lot of commercial staff at Wates. And I said, “Well, you could end up as a designer” and they say “Oh, don’t talk wet”.

Okay. Well, if I select this insulation, over that insulation, for this roof – that one gets me a BRooft4, that one doesn’t; who’s at fault– who’s done the design? “Well, you have. You chose the material.”

I said “Okay, if you chose a subcontractor that says we’re going to use the flammable material instead of non-flammable, then what?”

“Oh, God, yeah, I am. I’m a designer.”

So, we’re trying to make sure that their management levels are actually able to look down on them, help them, so they don’t make bad decisions.

The one thing that I think we’ve got to do as an industry right now is work more closely. From architect and principal contractor, right down to manufacturer – to look out for each other, because we’re in a situation at the minute where none of us can prove competence readily, or very few.

Architects can because they’re RIBA approved and there’s the ARB, Architects Registration Board. They’ve got to prove their competence so often, they’ve got to do CPD and so on.

But unless you’re in a chartered position or a protected occupation, those standards aren’t there – they never have been. So we’re having to work harder to enhance our skills because our skills are not infinite.

I always say your brains are like a piggy bank, you can hold £100 worth of information in your head. You can either have £100 pounds on one product or a pound on each, but at some point the piggy bank is full and you can’t take any more on. So, we need other people in the room that are working actively with us to make sure that none of us ever get the wrong side of building regs so we’re not building incorrectly.

00:09:02

Claire

Because it’s important, isn’t it, to recognise where your competence ends?

00:09:05

Neville

Absolutely. That’s as important as actually having your competence. For example, I’m often asked about passing fire protection. So I look at a building and we’re looking at cavity barriers and firestops and fire breaks across rooms; and I’ll look at the details and I’ll go, “Yeah, I’m satisfied. That’s fine”. And my teams will say, “Oh, right. Can you sign off on that?”

And I go “No”.

“Well, you seem to know what you’re doing. You understand the certificates, you’ve talked to the manufacturers, you’re on board with the fire engineers.”

“Yes, but I’m not a certified fire engineer. There may be something that I’m not spotting. We’re going to get the fire engineer to review what I’ve put together with you as a project team, because my competence stops there”. That is difficult for us to admit.

Now, bearing in mind, I’m supposed to be the pinnacle in Wates when it comes to facades and roofs, and I turn around and go “I don’t know”. And they go “What do you mean you don’t know?”

Well, actually, that’s the bravest and most sensible thing you can do. And I’m trying to encourage my team that work with me to do the same, to go “Hang on, I don’t know. We need to get somebody outside this room to tell us”.

It could be a manufacturer, it could be a specialist subcontractor. It could be the regulator, it could be a fire engineer, an acoustician. Understandably, you don’t know everything – and be brave enough to say that, particularly to your boss, because your boss isn’t always going to want to hear that.

00:10:26

Claire

No, particularly in the construction industry, we haven’t got a good rep, have we, for admitting our weaknesses perhaps?

Related to that then, Neville, is what stage of a project would you be expecting competence to become, you know, an important issue? At what stage will people have to demonstrate the competence of their construction team?

00:10:53

Neville

Well, legally, the principal contractor and the principal design have to prove their competence before they can be engaged in the scheme.

00:10:59

Claire

Would that come under frameworks?

00:11:02

Neville

So that would come up at the bid stage. As soon as the bid turns up, even at an invitation to tender we’re often asked “prove your competence” before we even get into the stage one tender.

00:11:13

Claire

And is that part of CHAS or any of the pre quals? Have they taken on board the need to demonstrate competence yet?

00:11:24

Neville

Yeah. There are two levels of competence. There’s an organisational competence which, Build UK have just updated the common assessment standard for. We’re actually running the beta of that right now which will allow you to complete your CHAS or your Constructionline Gold, or one of the SSIPs. That will allow you to prove your organisational competence.

And that’s relatively easy. Most companies – I think most people are representing companies here -their businesses will be on to prove their competence quite easily as an organisation. Individual competence – that’s where we start getting the difficulty.

00:11:57

Claire

So would organisational competence encompass the individual competence of their teams?

00:12:05

Neville

No. So what we’re doing is when we go out to tender, we start looking at the subcontractor. We look at them organisationally.

“Are you organisationally competent?” “Yes”.

“Have you got people that have done this kind of work before?” “Yes”.

“Right. And you’ve worked with these products, you’ve had good outcomes?” “Yes”.

“Cool”.

We start looking at that in tender. We put the contracted proposals together with the tenderers because each roofing or façade company, the specialist, will have a slightly different house style. For example, on hot melt or felt roofing, one will want to use a GRP edging to the roof; others will want to use an aluminium coping; some will want to use panels on the back of the upstand; some will want to use felt. That’s fine. It doesn’t matter. They both work.

But once we’ve got the CPs together, we’ve got to be fairly sure – and we’ll be interviewing during tender the subcontractors to make sure they’ve got the right competencies. And if they haven’t, that’s fine. We can work together and cover those off. It might be that we need to get an external consultant to do a little bit of extra checking on structural calculations or on design details, just to make sure that we’re safe, the subcontractors’ safe, and ultimately the building is safe.

So that conversation is now happening at tender before we even start thinking about employing them.

00:13:26

Claire

So are you interested in the competence of the subcontractors who’re going to be actually installing?

00:14:04

Neville

Not just them. The industry needs to know about the estimator – do they know what they’re putting forward? Because they start with a pseudo-design. I say pseudo, it’s more of a quasi, it’s part formed.

“Well, this is what we’re thinking, we’ll put some structure in here and we might have some seals there” and right, fine okay, that’s cool but what we don’t want to do is find out we’ve nailed our colours to the wrong mast, jointly.

I then want to know that the designers are designing correctly. I then want to know that the procurement people are procuring correctly, because if you’re procuring product, it’s very easy with some of the amalgamation certificates. Naming no names, but I have point two dozen of these types of certificates on my machine where we’ve got the certificates that says it’s class A2 reaction to fire, and when you look at the fire certificate behind it that this amalgamation organisation has used, it either isn’t A2, or even worse, it’s not the same product.

Now, we want to make sure the procurer for the subcontractor understands that kind of level of nuance.

If they don’t, then we say, “Right, okay, that’s fine. Just before you press the button, do us a favour, bounce that certificate across to us, let’s have a look at it together”, because it’s also a learning experience for you and for me – you as the subcontractor, me as the main contractor, to make sure -again – that we’re getting right under its skin. And if it comes across great, brill. We can use that material again and again and again. If it comes across dodgy, we can either put it aside and not use it or we can actually investigate why is it not right.

So, when we’re talking about competence, we’re actually talking about the lead designers we’re particularly interested in, the lead procurer we’re particularly interested in, and the site management. Because if we don’t get it right at the start, whatever we do on site, with the best trained installers in the world, we’ll still end up with a bad outcome. Because if we give them the wrong products, we can still end up with another Grenfell.

00:15:36

Claire

In the roofing industry, as you’ll know Neville, about 40% of roofers are self-employed, and it is very common to put together a gang of roofers for a particular project and the people within that gang – the individuals – could change day-to-day, certainly week-to-week.

So, if you as a main contractor have assured yourself that the people that are being employed on site to deliver your project are competent today, how are you going to make sure that that is the case tomorrow?

00:16:18

Neville

So the Building Safety Act says that if we change key staff we’ve got to review their competence. At the moment we’re thinking if you’ve got a design manager in your office that’s working with 3 or 4 drafts people, you know CAD drafts people, then, if they’re overseeing what’s been done beneath them, that’s probably sufficient as a starter for 10.

But if we’ve got a chalk and a cheese of those people, you know, they win the lottery, they leave, whatever, then we need to jointly have a look at them as a team, make sure they’re competent.

When it gets to site – I mean we are using a biometric system so you can’t get on to site willy nilly. You’ve got to have turned up with the right CSCS card, prove that you’re competent, that you’ve worked on this kind of project before with these products, because what we can’t do is have a slater turning up and start to turn their hand to hot melt because times are a bit tough at the minute. Or a hard metal person turning up going, “Yeah, I can do a bit of leadwork, don’t you worry. I can work with lead, it’s a little bit different to work in copper.”

So we need to be asking those questions before we give them an idea that we’ll let them on site but the problem is, this is not a message that has got through to all main contractors.

The more I talk at events like this, the more I find that people are vaguely aware of the Building Safety Act or don’t understand the nuance. We both attended the MCRMA event a few weeks ago, and there were 70 people in that room, and we asked the question, ‘how many people talk about competence outside this forum?’

You were the only that put their hand up. 69 other people, and from some fairly major manufacturers, are going ‘we’re hearing nothing’ So it’s not a message that’s getting out.

00:17:59

Claire

And yet it leaves them liable, doesn’t it? Now.

00:18:03

Neville

Yeah, I mean the regulator has said, straightforward, “If you’re working towards competence, we’ll work with you”. It’s like writing bad rounds if you’ve attempted to write the risk assessment method statement, and you’ve made a pig’s ear of it and we’ll go “What’s that? Do this. Do that. You’ve missed this”. You go away and you kind of use your learning experience. They give you a slap on the hand and say get on with it.

The regulator will do that with competence. If you are either ignorant of the law or even worse, you’re aware of it but you’re thinking ‘it doesn’t apply to me’, they’re going to come looking for you shortly because they’re getting a little bit antsy about that. There is definitely pressure within government now.

Kier Starmer has made it very clear that there’s going to be a reaction to the Grenfell inquiry final report and I think he’s going to be pushing the HSE and the regulator to get out there and show its teeth. So, it’s a dangerous place to be in.

00:18:57

Claire

Yeah, well, the regulator’s operational now, aren’t they? But I mean, I don’t know whether you want to comment at all, Neville, on whether you think they’re adequately resourced to police all this?

00:19:09

Neville

I think everybody’s aware that they’re struggling. They need more resources than they’ve got. I don’t think this is a politically charged comment. I’m certainly not pointing fingers, and I’m not saying that, they’re useless and they don’t know what they’re doing.

They’ve got some actually really good technical people – we’re meeting them on a regular basis as we’re getting more projects, getting closer to the higher risk buildings, getting closer to Gateway 2, where they’re really going to have to show their mettle. And they’ve got some really good people.

The problem is the timescales that they’ve got, the numbers of buildings they’ve got. They’ve got a lot of work on, so you can have some sympathy for them. Yes, they could always do with more staff, everybody could.

Where they are at at the moment is unclear. But we do know they’ve had a terrible backlog on signing off one of Gateway 1 and Gateway 2 applications and they’ve actually come out in the press and apologised. I’m not telling you anything new in that respect, but, I do know they’re working hard to try and address their shortfalls and sort out the recruitment, but there is only so fast you can go when you’ve got, again, a lack of understanding, knowledge and experience that you can draw from industry, because I don’t think there’s a business in this whole building that isn’t saying ‘I can’t get hold of the right people.’ They just don’t exist.

00:20:29

Claire

Exactly. And that’s another issue, isn’t it? That the skills shortage means adding on any further demands to the people coming into the industry is presumably, one would assume only going to exacerbate that shortage if you’re raising the bar ever higher.

00:20:57

Neville

True. We’ve got a careful balance to hit here. So, in 2020, as an industry, we employed just under 2.5 million people. As of May this year, it was down to just over 2.05. So we’ve lost about 450,000 people out of the industry, some of it is retirement, some of it is Brexit driven, I’m fairly sure.

Some of it is people going “This is just getting too hard. I’m done with this”, and going off and doing other things. So we’ve got to consider how do we get people in? How do you get the people who are in here now feeling comfortable? With CSCS cards, with grandfather rights being withdrawn, there’s been quite a kick in the teeth for a lot of the smaller subcontractors.

They’ve gone “Well hang on, we’ve been doing this for 20 years. It’s acceptable and now it’s not? I’m not going to apply for a card anymore, therefore I can’t work on site”. And that’s just been their personal view. What we don’t want to do is replicate that in proving competence. And as you’re aware – the JCI – we’ve been working on a baseline competence assessment because the Building Safety Act will allow you to apply previous learning to prove your competence.

Fantastic. How do you prove your previous learning? Particularly if you’re like me it’s only the last couple of years that certificates have been a big thing. Most of the certificates, the training CERTS, the CPDS, God knows what else, have gone in the round filing cabinet next to my desk and then gone away. So, what do I do about proving that?

Well, if we do a test, an assessment, you can actually say, “Well, my management staff can prove that they’re on the right level and that they can bring on the next stage of the staff without fear of teaching them the wrong things”.

I’m lucky. I’ve worked for some really good companies, and I’ve worked with some really good people, some of whom are in the audience today and they’ve taught me things about the right way to work. But that’s not a great way for it to be. It shouldn’t be “Look that I’m sat here”, it should be “Look, I’ve built my career working with people that just automatically do the right thing”. And the cream rises to the top rather than just the lucky.

Because you could say “Well, actually Neville, all you’ve been is bloody lucky” and that’s not great. So, if we get the competence assessment that we deploy to middle management, that’s a short form test online to be able to work your way through that and work out whether you’ve got shortfall in competence.

But it also means you’re doing the right things and you can train those below you. And then if we start doing those assessments further down, they’re going to be more granular. So it’ll be just hot melt, just felt, just flat, just aluminium cladding, then people coming in with be able to say “Actually, I can see what my progression is going to be”. It’s less about luck. It’s more about skill, application and willingness to be professional.

And I think that’s going to be the most cost-effective balance, because right now when we’ve got companies like ISG going bust, taking billions out the market as they’ve gone, you know, we’ve heard of one subcontractor particularly getting taken for 15 million pounds that they’re probably never going to see again. That’s an existential threat to their businesses.

You know, we can’t then turn around and expect businesses to pay £10,000 per head to train their staff again for all they’ve done in the past 37 years. We’ll kneecap them all and before long we won’t have an industry. So, we need to find that happy balance.

And to be fair, the government is coming with us on that. When I started the conversations with the regulator initially, they were quite anti. Sort of “Let’s take it slowly, let’s get it on the right footing, let’s move forward”.

Until I had a fairly savage discussion with them a year and a half ago. And I said “Well, you’ve got two choices. You either understand that this is going to be a journey of 5 to 10 years, or you can go tell the PM that he’s going to lose 10% of GDP on the 1st of October, when we supposed to be able to prove competence, because it’ll be illegal for us to all trade”.

00:24:50

Claire

Yeah. The trouble is with that if the industry hears that message – it’s 5 to 10 years before the industry as a whole to be competent – it dilutes it, doesn’t it? It’s a hard enough task, I think, to ask the industry to take regulatory change seriously anyway, because if you’ve been in the industry for a while, you’ve seen new initiatives come and go. Think of, what was it, the green home grant over the pandemic?

I think that lasted a record six months. And, you know, if you put training into place to deliver that, you’re going to be pretty peed off, I would imagine, that that investment will never see a return.

But, just in a broader perspective, what do you think will be the most important driver – other than money – in the industry as a whole becoming competence? Will that be resting on having sufficient trainers or cultural change within organisations?

00:25:59

Neville

Right. I mean, that’s a big question. You touched on a couple of points that I’d like to pick up on. The first one is, yes, we’re talking about 5 to 10 years, we’ve got that as sort of “That’s our target. We’ve got to be pragmatic because that’s what we can do”. If we think that that’s going to water down the effect… Well, I think we’d have to just deal with that.

If we go to your next part, which is “What about training certification?” How many operations are our there that could train for everybody in the next year? How many bums on seats can we get through? Let’s say money’s not an object. How many bums on seats?

Well, you go to even the biggest outfits and they’re talking about “We’ve got a thousand seats a year”. Okay, if we’re talking about, I don’t know, quarter of a million, let’s say a 100,000, working in building envelope. So, we’re talking a hundred weeks – or are we talking 1000 a year? If it’s 1000 a year, we’re talking 100 years.

Okay, we’ve got a lot of work to do. So let’s be pragmatic and understand that in terms of doing the right thing, I think the companies that grasp this quickly, I think there will be commercial benefit, because they’ll be the only ones that can get on the high price, the high ticket, high value, high rise buildings.

I think anything that’s a little bit edgy design-wise, they’re going to be benefiting there too. But there’s also the fact that the guys and girls that are running these businesses do not want to be seeing the inside of a prison cell anytime soon or having unlimited fines put their way. So there’s self-preservation.

And that’s not even considering the fact that there are people out there, and we often forget this, not everybody is a feral, money-grabbing monster. They’re not.

We get to see the worst of it with things like the Grenfell inquiry, you focus on it, but for every one of them, there’s a thousand that actually want to do the right thing. It’s just a very complicated machine that we run and we’re as strong as the weakest link.

If we hadn’t been training people and if we hadn’t got the right people in and we’ve been making do because A), nobody’s making enough money to pay for the training, and B), it’s been a bit they come, they go. Like you said about the subcontractors on site, it could be Fred today, Pete tomorrow, John the day after. Trying to manage that when you are leading a sizable, specialist subcontractor, it’s a terrifying prospect that your desire to do the right thing might not get to the bottom of the training.

You’ve got to make sure, you’ve got to keep preaching. And I’m fairly sure that these people are out there, because the volunteers that we’ve got in the JCI come from a wide variety of companies, and most of them spend most of the time picking it up and saying “Why are we not going faster?” which is a great thing.

00:28:59

Claire

Once the industry has become competent, and once individuals have become competent, is that it? Do they have to do anything else afterwards, or will it stop there?

00:29:02

Neville

It’s going to be a continual thing. Funnily enough, on my drive here this morning, I was talking to our head of building safety and our head of HR, and we were talking about measuring the competence of our own people and, our head of HR said “Oh so, simply, we get this competence certificate and everything’s good, we’ve checked our people out, big tick”.

And both me and the head of building safety went “No” because there’s two problems – one, for example, we’re working on a lot of MoJ work which is very specific in its standards, in its products, the types of roofing that we do, the types of walls we do. We’ll end up with some really good experts in that field.

If we then put them on a stool, they’re going to be out of their depth because they’re no longer working with the same standards or the same products. So we need to keep refreshing their training every time they move. The other thing is, things that you did last year and haven’t done since, you’ll forget how to do them. It’s just human nature. We all do.

For competence, you need your recipe book. You need to own your competence and keep up to date. So, I was talking about that building envelope competence assessment – that’s a foundation to build on.

Don’t rest on your laurels at that point. Keep learning. I mean, for example, we had a new Document B supplement come out a few weeks ago which passed a lot of industry by because it came out so quietly on a Monday morning. And you know we’re getting people going “What do you mean Class O, Class 1 has gone away?”

“Well, the document came out, you know, a few weeks ago now” and they go “What?”

The problem is there are big manufacturers that if they don’t sponsor and anybody here that’s working from a manufacturing perspective might not spot that coming through.

Subcontractors are one removed from that, they’re dealing with hundreds of products. It could be they’re dealing with Bauder, they’re dealing with Iko, they’re dealing with Moy…

Okay. I can keep on top of what they’re doing with their products. Make sure that they’re testing and they’re up to the right standards. And then there’s some new standards falling quietly in the distance – trying to stay on top of that – the only way you’re doing it is with CPD and by CPD, for JCI, we use the CIOB definition – the Chartered Institute of Builders – which includes research.

It includes teaching other people about a document or a specification or a product, doing it competently obviously.

So, it’s not just about sitting through an event like this, getting your little CPD at the end of it going “Fantastic, I’ve done my hour”. Actually, what’s going to be useful to you? There’s no point just turning up to do a CPD for sake of a CPD just so my competence is up to date. Do something that counts.

00:31:59

Claire

One thing I was mentioning to you earlier, Neville, was I’d seen this LinkedIn post a couple of weeks ago – by an SME roofing contractor – and the post was to encourage his more experienced roofers to go through an OSAP process to gain an NVQ to A, update themselves about the latest standards that they should be working to, but B, to be able to demonstrate competence.

And he’d put in this LinkedIn post that the requirement to demonstrate competence was part of the post-Grenfell response; it was bigger than any individual, everybody needs to do it and if they’d come into the industry relying on grandfather rights then this was a good idea.

And the post got over 250 comments from tradespeople basically suggesting that they were being blamed for Grenfell. They seem to, in summary, see the requirement to demonstrate competence as they’re being made scapegoats for what is systematic regulatory failure.

00:33:29

Neville

I think there’s more than systematic regulatory failure. So the Grenfell final report has identified some issues with that and I don’t really want to cross-examine that document in a public forum. I don’t think that’s right, right now. I think we need to wait for the dust to settle and work out what is actually going to happen going forward.

00:33:38

Claire

Industry’s been quite quiet, actually, hasn’t it, about the Grenfell report?

00:36:49

Neville

I think that’s a respectful thing. I don’t think we’re all hiding under a rock waiting for it to go away. We’re all very much engaged with it at tier one level, I can tell you that for sure.

We know what went wrong ultimately, and the recommendations are there for all to see. If we look back to what we want to do, do we want to blame the subcontractor installers? Well, how much did they choose in terms of material? How much did they design? How much did they procure?

They’re part of the problem. We all are – but they’re not the only problem.

When I started on this journey with competence, the first thing I was told by many, many training bodies, and training courses was, “Don’t worry, we’ve got competence sorted, we’ve got training cards for the installers”.

Brilliant, fantastic. But what’s going to happen if we buy the wrong things? Specify them wrong, with the wrong certifications and we bring them to site? What we’re going to find is it’s going to be lovingly put on the wall, incorrectly, because that’s all you can do. So blaming site and saying that is the only issue, it’s a nonsense.

And to be fair, I don’t think that was the thrust of the post. I think that the post was possibly misinterpreted and possibly the wording could have been better. The thrust to become more competent as installers – I’m all for that. I’m right behind it. I’d back it every day of the week. Are they entirely responsible for what went wrong? No. However, I’ve opened up.

00:35:29

Claire

Are they even at all responsible?

00:35:30

Neville

Well, yes, I’d say that there is some responsibility. I’ve opened up God knows how many buildings because obviously, when I joined Wates, one of the first things I did was get introduced to many of our old buildings and some buildings for our clients that had been built by other contractors. We opened them up to make sure we knew what problems we might have, and we knew what problems might be on some of our other clients’ buildings.

And we found plenty of issues where there’s been that lack of forethought or it’s been a rush job, or it’s just a job because we didn’t design it. We just left it for the guy on site, the girl on site, to fix and they didn’t put their hand up and go “Look this is rubbish” or “It doesn’t work. Somebody design this because I can’t install a cloud on a drawing, a bubble, give me a solution”.

So that’s where they’ve fallen down, they’ve either done a bit of a just job. Just – “I just need to do this. Get it over the line”. Or, they’ve rushed it and missed things. Nobody gets up in the morning and goes, “You know what? I want to kill 72 people by building this building wrong”.

00:36:33

Claire

But in the perspective, in the view, of what you were talking about before, where you’ve got this whole line behind the installer, the designer, the middle management, all overseeing that work, surely that shouldn’t happen if that works? And I think that’s maybe a big if.

00:37:01

Neville

Yeah, I mean, you’ve also got to think about – and again – the law and pragmatism are not always happy bedfellows. If we take Hinkley Point C, they’ve got 2/3,000 people working on and off that site every day. You can’t have 2 or 3000 additional supervisors standing over each one of them, making sure that they’re doing it right, and the design’s been correct.

And if you’ve got hundreds of thousands of drawings for that project, the chance of something slipping through the net is possible. It’s not impossible by any stretch of the imagination, no matter how many levels of safeguarding you have, but you want to make sure that those are the exception and they’re minor, rather than they’re the rule because this is the way the industry works.

So it’s a culture shift. Everybody’s going to be looking for themselves and also for the next job. None of this, “This is my job. I shouldn’t be doing it”. It should be, “Actually, this is my job. I’m here to safeguard my team as a whole”.

00:38:00

Claire

So you would expect a roofer to get onto site and say “Oh, this bit – this detail doesn’t look quite right to me”. Would you?

00:38:15

Neville

Yeah.

00:38:16

Claire

Even though they’re being paid by the result and there’s race to the bottom procurement, you know, everybody’s under financial pressure. Do you think they really will have time?

00:38:31

Neville

No I don’t think they will. Not unless we have a culture shift. If we’re paying somebody piecemeal to do something, they’re going to do that job. Otherwise, they don’t put food on the table. They don’t pay for the bills. They don’t keep the roof over the kids heads. So they’ve got to stay on top of it, I get that.

But if you’re competent and it’s wrong, you should still be saying regardless. If I paid you £1000 to stab somebody, would you do it? The clear answer is no. Not unless you’re a psychopath. And you know, all outward indications say that you’re not, so I feel fairly safe.

But if you take and say “Right. Well, if I paid you £1000, will you not put that cavity barrier in and risk fire passing from flat to flat?” It’s the same thing. There’s a potential for a death. I realise there’s a higher risk with a knife than there is with a cavity barrier, but that shouldn’t be the driver. It should be “This isn’t right” or “The detail doesn’t work, I’ve got to stop”.

And if you need you to stop, somebody should be paying for that time because ultimately, that’s how you earn your living.

00:38:47

Claire

Do you think it will then take the prosecution of a contractor for contractors to wake up and see themselves as liable, as indeed they are?

00:40:03

Neville

I’d like to say no, I really would. It will make boards sit up and lean more heavily on their management and their management more heavily on their operatives. Whether they’re designers or estimators, or buyers or installers, and there will be individuals that end up with massive fines, and I’m sure of it, but that shouldn’t be the reason for doing something that’s right.

At the end of the day, I always say, when you finish constructing this building, if you stand in the car park and look at it, regardless of what it is, would you put your family in there, your kids in there, your loved ones, your best friends? Would you let them work in there or live in there?

And if the answer isn’t a resounding yes – you’ve got it wrong.

Why are we not all doing that as we’re doing our part of the build?

00:40:55

Claire

So underlying everything is that individual assumption of responsibility.

00:44:46

Neville

Absolutely. It’s now a legal thing.

00:41:00

Claire

A legal duty, that seems a good note to stop on. Thank you very much Neville. That was a very interesting talk I think. Thanks very much. And thanks to the audience for being here.

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