One of the UK’s largest Social Housing Providers approached Metro SRM with a unique problem.
They have over 4,000 residential blocks where they are the Responsible Person and wanted someone to develop and undertake a desktop risk rating approach for the External Walls of all these blocks.
This would help prioritise their program of investigation in the coming year.
They also wanted to ringfence their obviously low risk blocks to prevent them taking unnecessary resourcing.
Metro SRM posited a theoretical process that needed to go through proof of concept. Once approved, we pulled together a development team of several fire engineers and our IT team to further develop a balanced scoring approach to take all the pertinent characteristics and apply a suitable weighting to them. This approach was based on PAS 9980 and only utilised existing documentation. The aim was to both give a risk rating of low, medium or high – but also give an overall score of 1 – 100 that would aid overall prioritisation (particularly in their sub 11m blocks).
A completely new module was developed in SafetySMART to extract all the data from the existing documentation that was available (including Google street search) and then our Senior Fire Safety Advisors were then able to go through and consistently appraise all the properties. We produced an individual report per block to be held against the properties for future reference, while at the same time providing a complete portfolio overview.
One of the key value adds was the accessible digitisation of the entire portfolio from a fire safety perspective. Not only is the data held in SafetySMART, it is very straightforward to manipulate it into lots of different ‘views’ to help facilitate ongoing monitoring and management. Exports of these views are easily provided to the customer so they can continue to manage in their own system.
The overarching view of the portfolio that SafetySMART was able to give to the client will facilitate the prioritisation of resourcing and it will give a simple to use management tool to allow them to work through this program.