The Building Safety Act competence requirements mean anyone carrying out or managing building works must have the skills, knowledge, experience, and behaviours to do it properly, and the people appointing them must check. For a contractor, proof means recognised qualifications behind each role, current CSCS cards, safety training in date, and a written supervision structure.
Okay, no faffing about.
Competent used to be something you said about a good lad or gaffer. Now, it’s a word in an Act of Parliament, and the people who hire you have a legal duty to check it.
That is why the forms have started arriving by the way. Main contractors and clients are not being awkward. They’re being asked the same question from above and they need your answer before the sign off.
This post explains what the law actually says, in plain English, and what proof looks like. It is not legal advice. If a specific project turns on it, get a specific answer from someone qualified to give one.
The Building Safety Act 2022 came from the Grenfell Tower inquiry and the Hackitt review that followed.
One of Hackitt’s central findings was that the industry could not show that the people designing, building and managing buildings were competent to do so.
The Act itself sets up the framework. The Building Safety Regulator, the higher risk building regime, and the new duty holder roles.
Those regulations put explicit duties on clients, designers and contractors, and they apply to building work generally, not only to high-rise.
So when someone says the Building Safety Act requires competence, what they mean is the Act plus the regulations under it, plus the duties that already existed under CDM 2015. It is one picture, and it points the same way.
The regulations use four words.
Skills, knowledge, experience, and behaviours. You will hear it shortened to SKEB
So, what you’ll need to demonstrate is that your boys are competent. It’s not enough to be good anymore, you’ll have to show it, and the person appointing you has to eb able to show they checked.
Three sets of people, and contractors sit in the middle of all of them.
The client has to take reasonable steps to satisfy themselves that the people they appoint are competent, and to make sure arrangements are in place to manage the work.
The principal contractor has to plan, manage and monitor the building work and co-ordinate the other contractors, which in practice means checking their competence too.
Every contractor has to be competent for the work they take on, has to make sure the people they employ or appoint are competent, and must not accept an appointment for work they are not competent to do.
That last one is the bit that lands on a subcontractor. You cannot just say you are competent. You have to be able to show it, for the firm and for the people on the tools. CDM 2015 Regulation 8 has said much the same since 2015; the newer regulations sharpened it and added the behaviours element.
So this is the main thing the paperwork is really asking for, the same list, whether the request comes from a client, a principal contractor or a prequalification scheme.
Behaviours are the hardest to prove.
It’s why the industry has published guidance on behavioural competence. So your best evidence is consistent records of toolbox talks, near miss reporting, supervision that is actually happening.
Our post on evidence that the workforce is competent turns this into a spreadsheet you can send when the form lands.
Because of what an NVQ is. It is not a course. It is an assessment, by a qualified assessor, of a worker doing the job in real conditions against the national occupational standard for that trade.
Skills, knowledge and experience are assessed directly. Behaviours come through in the observation and the professional discussion.
That is exactly the shape of the legal test, which is why clients ask for the certificate and not just the card.
If you want to check which card each of your lads should be on, our CSCS cards guide goes through every colour and what it takes to get one.
The pattern is nearly always the same. The firm is good, the people work well, and the paperwork is ten years behind.
A foreman on a Blue card who has been supervising for years. Two skilled workers on green labourer cards because nobody got round to it.
A site manager with an SMSTS and no management NVQ. None of that is a competence problem. All of it is a proof problem, and a proof problem is fixable in months, not years.
If a client has asked you to demonstrate competence and you are not sure your records would stand up, we can help you work out where the gaps are and what it takes to close them.
Ring us on 01942 673047 or send us your details, and we will go through your team role by role. We have assessed construction workers on site since 2013, and there is no hard sell.
