Richard Roff
Building safety regulations – reflections one year on event chair and Process Safety Director at Costain
We’re thrilled to have you chair our Building Safety Regulations – reflections one year on event in September, what are you most looking forward to during the evening?
We have tried to set this event up to hear from those being ‘regulated’ under the new act. I hope to understand their experiences and discuss how industry and professional engineers can share good ideas and learn across sectors.
We know Costain are a member of the Hazards Forum and we’d like to know more about your professional life. Please can you give some background of your current role?
I am Process Safety Director for Costain, my role is a group function that brings focus to catastrophic incident prevention within safety, health and environment management in all our activities. My early career was in the chemical industry, and I then had a spell in steelmaking; I aim to bring the good practices from those sectors together with lessons learned in design and delivery of infrastructure projects to support continuous improvement in our safety, health, environmental and quality performance. I deliver education programmes across the business covering executive management to front line operatives, I help our teams to recognise potential catastrophic incidents in their activities and identify the barriers that are needed to reduce the risks of these. As part of our drive to learn from all we do, I sponsor our lead-investigator training programme and mentor investigators in their practice.
During your career, how have Building Safety Regulations affected your work?
As far as the regulations go, not so much until recently. In the high-hazard sectors I worked in, the focus was on keeping people apart from the hazards, so identifying occupied buildings – where the people are – was necessary, followed by deciding whether people really needed to be there. In some cases, special building design was needed (to protect against blast for example). One should eliminate hazards, if possible; if it’s not, then keeping people apart from them remains a very valuable strategy in risk reduction.
What risks do you foresee in building safety?
Building safety will consider people being present all the time in the case of residential buildings, and a limit to the ability to eliminate some initiating hazards; we should also expect a lower level of ‘training’ than one might see in a workforce.
What are the benefits of building safety?
Along with a reduction in risk of catastrophic incidents, I am sure that building users will be open to engaging with building safety information and understanding more about the design and approaches needed, rather than having these aspects ‘imposed’ upon them.
At the end of our event, we’ll be holding a panel discussion with all three speakers, what will be your burning question for the panel?
I will be interested to understand how we can improve the application of lessons across sectors against the backdrop of liability-transfer inherent in the contract models we are familiar with.
What do you think the takeaway will be for those attending this event?
Hearing some real-world experience and an opportunity to discuss how professional engineers can support improvements ahead.
