ICE reveals plan to drive radical safety improvements

An extensive review of safety risk management in civil engineering has prompted the ICE to refresh its approach to promoting best practice.

The goal of the review, which started gathering evidence last year, was to gauge whether the institution still meets society’s needs in assuring the safety of infrastructure.

The review, carried out by a group of senior infrastructure experts chaired by ICE Past President Paul Sheffield, recently issued its recommendations.

One of these is to nominate a member of the ICE Trustee Board to take forward a new safety risk management action plan.

The main aim of this plan is to sharply increase the scope and urgency of the institution’s work to tackle sector-wide safety challenges.

Although the Building Safety Act 2022 (BSA) was a direct response to the Grenfell Tower tragedy of 2017, its principles affect the whole infrastructure sector and apply to all safety-critical structures.

The new action plan is designed to help ICE members and industry stakeholders to satisfy the sector’s post-Grenfell legal and moral obligations.

It also addresses other notable changes in the safety risk landscape over the past eight years.

These include the increasing danger posed by ageing infrastructure and the growing need to extend assets' originally planned lifespans or to repurpose them.

A reaction to fair criticism

The safety risk review acknowledges that cultural and operational failings in the construction industry, as highlighted by the Grenfell Tower Inquiry, have held back effective safety risk management.

It stresses that the ICE must challenge harmful practices and other industry norms that prevent engineers from fully applying their expertise to improve safety outcomes.

The review “recognises the industry’s inadequate response to the Grenfell tragedy so far”, said the ICE’s President, Professor Jim Hall.

“The reaction of professional institutions and the industry as a whole to the disaster has been widely criticised as insufficient,” he added.

“The ICE accepts this and is strengthening its leadership role to spur tangible improvements to safety practices and enhance public trust in the profession.”

How the action plan will work

The plan has been designed to enable immediate improvements in safety risk management. It covers the following three strands:

Competence:

• “Ensure that professionals in critical roles throughout the lifecycle of higher-risk structures are independently verified as suitably qualified and experienced persons.”
• “Equip all ICE members with the safety risk awareness and skills needed for their roles.”

Learning from failure:

• “Promote an understanding among all ICE members of common causes of risk and failure, ensuring that they can apply this knowledge to their work.”
• “Foster a culture of proactively identifying and applying lessons from failures, near misses and precursor events across the engineering profession and the wider industry.”

Culture and practice:

• “Embed the development of ethical character and resilience as core aspects of professionalism.”
• “Establish ICE-endorsed norms for key areas of industry practice to engender higher, more consistent safety standards.”

The institution wants to “position itself as a leader in safety risk management with this plan”, said Dr Ohis Ilalokhoin, the trustee responsible for its learning society portfolio.

“It’s designed to give members critical support and increase the public benefit we provide.”

Key short-term objectives

The ICE has committed itself to issuing annual progress reports on the plan’s delivery.

It has identified some “quick wins” that can be achieved this year. One of these is forming a committee to review the case for creating new specialist registers for higher-risk categories of infrastructure that aren’t currently covered.

Another is putting together a series of case studies analysing notable structural failures, drawing on sources such as independent incident reports and CROSS-UK alerts.

These in-depth articles will set out what the sector can learn from such incidents and so prevent similar dangerous safety lapses.

They will be published on the all-new ICE Knowledge Hub, the online CPD platform that already offers a wide range of content on safety risk management.

One module, for instance, distinguishes between the obligations of “duty holders” under the BSA and those of other members.