Almost a decade on from the devastating Grenfell Tower fire that took 72 lives, UK construction policy has been overhauled to help prevent such a tragedy ever happening again.
Guidance has shifted, and regulations have tightened as part of a stricter approach to safety, but old habits die hard, and changing the rules does not instantly change the culture.
Deeply embedded values, practices and beliefs will not go away overnight. In fact, altering the industry’s mindset to better align with regulations and government policy is one of the greatest challenges facing the construction and aluminium in building sectors.
While government has a key role to play in effecting change, action is required at grassroots level to bring about a real difference in culture. Legislation and guidance provide the framework, but ministers cannot tell every organisation and every individual exactly how to behave.
Neither should the construction industry interpret the focus of Phase 2 of the Grenfell Inquiry and subsequent government action as an indication that it has somehow “got off lightly”. If anything, it should be a prompt to take ownership of the industry’s previous failings and look more closely at its own responsibilities and the changes it still needs to make.
With different priorities and commercial pressures facing every link in the construction supply chain, relationships can sometimes become fragmented, and even adversarial, making it easy for responsibility to become diffused.
Instead, each and every one of us should hold ourselves accountable for safety and competence, by asking ourselves what ‘doing the right thing’ actually looks like.
We must scrutinise the decisions we make every day, how we communicate with others and consider whether we are prepared to voice our concerns when necessary. We must take competence seriously, rather than treating it as a box-ticking exercise.
Everyone has a part to play. Sometimes doing the right thing will mean asking for advice, challenging a specification, or stopping to resolve a technical issue before a project moves forward.
It will not always be the easiest option. It may mean questioning a decision that appears commercially attractive but raises concerns about safety, competence or performance. But these are the kinds of situations in which culture is truly tested.
Proactivity is key. We should not wait for the next regulation or government initiative before deciding what good practice looks like within our own sector.
CAB provides members with a place to share their experiences, raise concerns, improve competence and learn from one another. As an industry voice and source of knowledge and information for the aluminium in building sector, CAB is helping to shape what responsible practice looks like, by means of open discussion.
Changing culture takes time because it involves changing habits and attitudes that have developed over generations. It also requires people to take responsibility and not assume that somebody else will.
The construction industry has made significant progress since Grenfell and while we should recognise that, we must also be honest about the work that remains. That requires thinking about how we can change, ourselves, to keep up with evolving regulations and building safety reforms while ensuring we have the mindset to match.
Because real cultural change will not come from regulation alone but from the choices made by organisations and individuals across the industry and their willingness to do the right thing, even when nobody is watching.
