Standards Before Shortcuts: Closing the Competence Gap in Fire Safety and Façade Delivery
Competence has become one of the defining issues in modern fire engineering and façade safety. As regulatory expectations rise across the UK and internationally, the sector is under increasing pressure to demonstrate not just compliance, but consistent and defensible decision-making across design, construction and occupation.
In many cases, failures in fire performance are not driven by design intent, but by gaps in understanding, product selection and workmanship during delivery. This has shifted the focus from simply meeting standards to ensuring those standards are properly interpreted and applied in practice.
Training and competency development therefore sit at the heart of effective consultancy, shaping how projects are delivered and how organisations build internal capability.
Not just consultancy, at Global HSE Group, everything we do is about improving standards of work and competency across the industry. We place structured learning at the centre of our approach as a way to support consistent standards across projects. We focus strongly on raising those standards through the Level 4 Fire Safety Design qualification, which supports professionals working in complex and high-risk environments. Further programmes will follow as we build on this foundation. On the façade side, our team in the UK has developed a high level of competency and that expertise creates clear opportunities to share knowledge into other markets.
Competency is no longer a background requirement. It is critical for building safety outcomes. The Building Safety Act, PAS 9980 and the Scottish Single Building Assessment framework have placed façade performance under close scrutiny. In Scotland, the introduction of the Single Building Assessment process has reinforced the need for consistent methodology, clear documentation and defensible professional judgement.
Current industry demand reflects this focus, as we are heavily engaged in single building assessments and Fire Risk Appraisal of External Walls (FRAEWs). One ambition is to recruit within the region so that capability grows locally as well as through visiting teams, allowing us to blend regional presence with targeted support. Where travel makes sense we can bring our specialists into the Middle East and where regional talent is available we want to build capacity on the ground so the flow of expertise runs in both directions.
Façades have become a major part of our workload because of legislative change and rising expectations across the UK construction and housing sectors and our teams now deliver FRAEWs in line with the Building Safety Act and Single Building Assessments within the Housing (Cladding Remediation) (Scotland) Act 2024. Demand continues to increase and we see that trend extending across the next three to five years as building owners look for consistent and reliable guidance.
We currently lead many of these programmes Nationally, from London to Scotland, and plan to expand our team as the volume of projects grows, supported by professional indemnity cover for assessment, design and remediation activities that enables us to manage full façade lifecycles. The insights from these projects carry direct relevance for other regions, including the UAE, where façade performance and cladding issues feature as part of a wider set of sector concerns.
Addressing this challenge at scale requires more than project-level intervention. It depends on structured, accessible pathways for developing competence across the workforce.
Developing the Global Academy
Our training division, Global Academy, began as an internal vehicle to give our staff a clear route to the competency levels we expect across every division and over time we recognised the scale of the need for structured learning at Level 2 and Level 3, along with formal qualifications that match real roles in the field. In response, we are extending Global Academy into Level 2 pathways and establishing Global Skills Academy as part of our learning ecosystem.
The aim is to develop multi-skilled people across the fire sector trades, with joiners, technicians, passive fire specialists and fire door practitioners gaining a broader set of abilities rather than working within narrow task bands. Many individuals currently work in isolation from adjacent trades, and qualification frameworks often fail to reflect the realities of modern passive fire installation or inspection.
As buildings become more complex and regulatory scrutiny continues to increase, competence is no longer a supporting function. It is the critical link between design intent and real-world performance.
The industry’s challenge is no longer defining standards, but ensuring they are consistently understood, applied and upheld in practice. Raising that baseline of competence across design, construction and inspection will ultimately determine how effectively those standards translate into safer buildings.