Building the safety case is probably the most important step in writing a safety case report. It’s highly likely that the majority of the information you need to build your safety case already exists. It’s essential to pull together all the key elements of the safety case so that they can be analysed to ensure you have everything you need before starting the safety case report.
One of the most important elements of your safety case will be your building’s risk assessments. These will include the most crucial documents, such as the fire risk assessment, the structural survey, a resident engagement strategy, and one of the many forms of exterior wall assessments or appraisals, such as an FRAEW.
In addition to this, you’ll need to have the various maintenance and inspection reports for all works undertaken on the building. These prove that you have been maintaining your building according to the legislation or remediating it according to the recommendations found in the various risk assessments. Many of these documents will have their own actions that need to be completed, and it is vital to ensure you include all proof showing that work has either been done, is underway, or has been scheduled.
To ensure that you consistently maintain the safety of your building, you will have various processes that you follow. These processes may be paper-based logbooks, they could be simple spreadsheets, or you may have a software application that ensures everything is scheduled and completed on time via various notifications. Regardless of the method you use, a safety case report will require details of these processes, explaining how you ensure risks are identified and managed. These systems are referred to as safety management systems and should be included in your safety case. It’s common to have several different systems to manage the various parts of the building; details for all of them should be included.
Finally, as with your golden thread of information, the safety case will need to be in a digital format. Ideally, it should be made up of machine-readable PDF documents, not scanned images. This means that if you have a room full of paper documents, it would be worth engaging an optical character recognition (OCR) company soon to convert your documents into machine-readable PDF files. This will not only support the creation of your safety case but also your golden thread of information.