Verified safely

As the guardians of organisational competence, safety and risk oversight FM’s responsibility has never been greater. The Building Safety Act 2022 has substantially raised the standard of accountability. We now operate in an environment where completing the work is not enough. Organisations must prove when they acted, that the contractors they deployed were competent for each specific task, and that the work met the required standard at the time. Without that evidence, the consequences range from enforcement action and reputational damage to criminal prosecution.

There are steps that organisations can take to protect themselves, but they depend on moving beyond static checks and building compliance into the everyday management of people, assets and suppliers.

GET YOUR ASSET REGISTERS IN ORDER

Asset registers are the foundation of ongoing risk management in FM. You cannot maintain what you cannot accurately identify, and you cannot defend decisions about assets you have not correctly recorded. The SFG20 State of FM Report 2025 makes uncomfortable reading: only nine per cent of FM professionals believe their asset registers are fully accurate, while 37 per cent rate them as no more than 50 per cent accurate. That is not a data quality issue. It is a fundamental breakdown in the safety chain.

Accurate asset data has both preventive and reactive dimensions. Reactively, it is the only basis on which FMs can respond with confidence to equipment failures or fire incidents. When something goes wrong, investigators want a precise, time-stamped record of what was in place, when it was last maintained, and by whom.

Preventively, usage data allows FMs to allocate resources proportionately to actual risk. A server room HVAC system that has run for 2,000 hours carries a fundamentally different risk profile from an office unit that has run for 200. Treating them identically is an avoidable liability.

Reliable condition data also feeds directly into capital works planning, enabling informed decisions about when to repair, refurbish or replace rather than simply reacting to failure.

ENSURING COMPETENCE

Effective compliance management is not just about when work happens. It is about who does it and whether they are genuinely competent. Some roles carry a hard legal threshold, such as Gas Safe, REFCOM, SIA licensing, or UKAS accreditation. These are legal deployment requirements, and deploying without them is a criminal offence.

Most FM tasks fall into a more nuanced bracket. The FM must verify that an operative has the specific skills, experience and documented procedures for the task at hand. A Working at Height assessment is not a training certificate. It is evidence of a functioning system: a risk assessment, a rescue procedure, equipment inspection records and a named responsible person. That distinction matters enormously when a fatality leads to an investigation.

This verification must be continuous. The Building Safety Act has shifted the question from whether an FM checked the paperwork to whether they can evidence competence the moment the work was carried out. When 31 per cent of professionals still manage this in static spreadsheets, establishing a live source of truth is almost impossible. A verified badge captures a moment in time. It does not make a contractor safe to work on every site, on every asset and at every moment.

CONTINUOUS COMPLIANCE

A contractor may pass verification at onboarding and still not hold current credentials six months later. Licences lapse. Insurance renewals fail. Individual operatives arrive on site without the specific competency their company-level accreditation implies. These are not edge cases. They are structural features of a supply chain model built around annual point-in-time checks.

Forward-thinking FMs are addressing this by adopting digital systems that provide real-time monitoring and automated alerts the moment a supplier’s status changes. Rather than treating compliance data as a historical archive, these systems serve as a live early-warning function, surfacing risks before they become incidents.

This is what organisational defensibility requires: a live, unbroken trail that proves an organisation has met its legal obligations at every stage and clearly defines the chain of accountability if a serious incident occurs.

SETTING A NEW STANDARD

It is no longer credible to operate on a 50 per cent accurate asset register or to rely on annual pre-qualification checks as evidence that a contractor is safe on site today. Continuous compliance and rigorous digital asset management move the sector beyond box-ticking toward safer, more defensible operations. This does not remove the human judgement at the heart of good facilities management. It gives FMs the evidence, visibility and control to exercise that judgement with confidence.

Organisations that embed continuous compliance into daily operations will have what they need when scrutiny comes. Those that do not are carrying more risk than their documentation suggests, and in the current regulatory environment, that gap is narrowing fast.