Who holds the record when the business is gone?

On 6 October, the Building Safety Regulator’s (BSR) Gateway 2 figures showed 66 ‘transitional’ cases – projects passed back to it when their building control body stopped trading. Because they began under the previous regime, the BSR says they are “generally much more complicated to progress”, as “much of the evidence that we now expect at Gateway 2 is not available”.

On 8 October, it was reported that eight ISG administrations will run until at least September 2028. Previous reports stated that ISG’s records include more than 800TB of data still to be worked through.

On 9 October it was reported that Balfour Beatty Kilpatrick, and its parent, Balfour Beatty, were defending a £9.6m High Court claim over alleged external wall defects, including cavity barriers, at The Green student accommodation in Bradford, which was completed in 2011.

Balfour Beatty Kilpatrick accepts that post-Grenfell investigations found some cavity barriers missing or displaced, but denies that the buildings were unfit for habitation or failed to meet the Building Regulations. It says its predecessor did only the MEP work and that the other JV partner, GB Building Solutions, did the general building and facade works. GB Building Solutions was dissolved in 2022. Balfour Beatty Kilpatrick also accepts that this split does not limit the claimants’ contractual rights. The court has made no findings.

For higher-risk buildings in England, the Building (Higher-Risk Buildings Procedures) (England) Regulations 2023 say where the record must end up. Under regulation 31, the client keeps an electronic facility that holds the golden thread of information, including the approved plans with the evidence recorded to show compliance, and the records of controlled changes. Any change to the golden thread must record who made it and when, and the client must have procedures that give those designing and carrying out the work access to it so they can keep it up to date.

Regulation 38 then requires the client, no later than completion, to hand the specified golden thread information, in its original filing structure, to the building’s accountable person and to the responsible person under the Fire Safety Order, along with the fire safety information.

At Gateway 3, regulation 40 requires the completion certificate application to be accompanied by a declaration, signed by the principal contractor, that it fulfilled its duties under Part 2A of the Building Regulations. Those duties include planning, managing and monitoring the building work so that it complies.

The regulations say little about how a photo taken by a subcontractor’s installer gets into the facility. On many jobs, the evidence that closed-up work was done properly is still created by subcontractors, and not all of it reaches the main contractor’s system as it is made: photos of fire-stopping before the boards go on, cavity barrier inspections, test sheets. Some of it sits in specialist installers’ own certification apps, some with sub-subcontractors, some on personal phones and in WhatsApp groups. It reaches the client’s facility only when someone moves it there.

That matches what we hear from contractors. The formal record usually goes through the main platform, and when we ask where evidence is kept, the answer is an internal system, if there is one, or SharePoint. The clarifications travel differently. They happen in project WhatsApp groups on people’s own phones, or in a phone call that leaves nothing behind. People on site are busy. They don’t stop to write things up, and on many sites the signal is poor, so a tablet app that needs a connection may not function where the work is.

As I see it, the weak point is the transfer from all of that into the record. It depends on someone choosing to do it, often at the end of a busy week, and it rarely has its own line on the programme.

While the subcontractor is trading, that gap costs a few emails. If it goes into administration or liquidation, its records come under the control of an insolvency practitioner, who must act in the interests of its creditors as a whole. Its staff move on, and the software subscriptions it paid for can lapse. A replacement firm may use a different fire-stopping or cavity barrier system, which could be a controlled change, and work that cannot be evidenced may have to be opened up.

People leaving is damaging even without an insolvency. One firm we spoke to told us that when it analyses a dispute, the hardest part is finding the information at all. Some people would rather not say, some have forgotten, and some aren’t sure it is relevant. When someone leaves, the firm keeps their mailbox, but rarely their notes or what they knew about the job. Rebuilding that takes a long time, and where it cannot be done, the gap is filled with assumptions.

Start with the fire-critical packages, while every firm on the job is still trading.

1. The closed-up test. Pick one element covered up this month: a run of cavity barriers, or the fire-stopping around the service penetrations in a riser. Ask someone in your own team to show, from your own system or the client’s facility, the record that released the hold point before it was closed: who inspected it, when, against which approved detail, with photos. If the answer is “the subcontractor has it”, that evidence depends on the subcontractor staying in business.

2. The account test. List every place that compliance evidence is captured on the job: inspection apps, cloud folders, photo libraries, WhatsApp groups. For each one, note whose account it is, who pays for it and who can export from it. Then ask whether the tool used on site works without a signal and syncs later.

3. The contract test. Read one live fire-critical subcontract. Does it require records of work that will be covered up to be handed over as the work proceeds, or only with the O&M manuals when the package finishes? Then check the licence clause. Does it cover photos, inspection records and test sheets as well as design documents? Does it survive termination, and does it depend on the subcontractor having been paid? If you want records to count in valuations, take legal advice on how the Construction Act’s payment rules, including payment and pay less notices, govern when money can be held back.

Under the Building Safety Act, claims under section 1 of the Defective Premises Act that accrued before 28 June 2022 can now be brought up to 30 years after completion (15 years for claims that accrue later). Building liability orders can extend liability to associated companies. At The Green, the questions have come 15 years after handover.

A practical first step is to take the construction control plan the regulator approved at Gateway 2, read what it says about capturing golden thread information, and compare it with what is happening on site this week.

Olena Bochulia is CEO and co-founder of Severus, a business automation and operations partner for UK contractors.

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