Established in response to the Grenfell Tower Fire and subsequent Hackitt Review, ICSG has now transitioned to become a formal working group of the Industry Competence Committee (ICC) under the Building Safety Regulator (BSR), signalling ‘a strategic shift towards more rigorous industry-wide competence frameworks.
Hanna Clarke, Co-Chair of the ICSG, and Digital and Policy manager at the Construction Products Association (pictured), said: “The new relationship between the ICC and the ICSG is key to transforming the competence of the industry. ICC aims to set expectations for industry and challenge it. The ICSG is where industry can collaborate to meet those challenges. The ICSG also provides the ICC with a clear picture of what industry is doing, and feeds back on what challenges industry is facing, and which levers can be pulled to improve competence. We are able to work together on developing solutions, and aim to provide clear messages and guidance for the industry and the public about competence.”
ICSG was set up ‘to enable culture change in relation to competence across the built environment’. The Steering Group says it does this ‘by providing the UK built environment industry with access to appropriate competences, so it may safely contribute to the creation and use of built environments and can demonstrate its competence to others’.
Gill Hancock, head of Technical Content at the Association for Project Management, is the other Co-Chair.
Under its new Chairs, the ICSG has restructured, with the new structure including sector-led groups, key topic groups, and working groups, that currently bring together contributions from over 60 professional and trade bodies, and 1500 individuals in the built environment, with membership of the sector-led groups still growing. The ICSG says these groups will produce competence frameworks mapped to the BS 8670 series, and create guidance and implementation programmes ‘to enable culture change in relation to competence across the built environment’. Another key role will be to provide forums for industry feedback relating to the understanding of legislation and barriers to its implementation.
ICSG is working with the BSI to create a communications hub as a central repository of all its work for the industry to access. More information on this and the competence frameworks will come next Spring.
ICSG’s focus is ‘to keep people safe through competent practices and ethical behaviours throughout the built environment’. Central to this is enabling collaboration and ongoing sharing of best practice, learning, and resources, to support continuous improvement in industry competence. ICSG closely collaborates with the BSI and its committee CPB/1 – Competence in the Built Environment, contributing to many of the standards that are in development. It also has a strong relationship with the Construction Leadership Council, both with its contributing to the work on competence, and in with the goal of joining up the competence work with the other industry initiatives CLC is leading on.