A resident reports a damaged fire door on the 14th floor. Your DLO goes out, assesses it, and replaces it. Job closed, everyone moves on.

Here is the problem. Replacing a fire door on a high-rise building is not an emergency repair under the Building Safety Act. It is notifiable work. That means notifying the Building Safety Regulator before anyone starts. That notification opens a 16 to 18 week approval window, sometimes longer.

Your DLO probably did not know. Your planner may not have flagged it. And that is not a criticism of anyone, because this particular distinction, repairing a fire door versus replacing one, is not widely understood yet. If nobody in your team has worked through the BSR's guidance on Regulation 10, there is a real chance this has already happened.

Most housing providers know the Building Safety Act exists. What is genuinely difficult is understanding what it means for decisions happening on the ground every day.

Regulation 10 draws a line between emergency repairs and notifiable work on High Rise Buildings (HRBs). An emergency repair is work completed within 24 hours, where the risk is so severe that no temporary measure can substitute. Everything else is notifiable, which means telling the BSR and waiting for approval.

The fire door repair/replace distinction comes from the BSR's own position, and it catches teams out because it is not intuitive. Facade works go further: they are explicitly Class A notifiable, meaning the emergency route is essentially unavailable. One council found this out after treating facade works as an emergency repair and receiving an enforcement notice.

Even when a repair does qualify as emergency, a regularisation certificate still has to be submitted after the work is done. There is no version of HRB repairs where the paperwork goes away entirely.

None of this is intended to make managing your stock feel impossible. Residents cannot wait months for urgent safety work, and nobody is suggesting they should. But it does mean that any job touching an HRB needs a check at the point of triage, before an operative is dispatched. Is this building an HRB? Is this repair or replacement? Is the person doing the work competent to do it?

That last question has its own regulatory weight. Under Article 11 of the Building Regulations, in force since September 2023, anyone carrying out building work must be competent to do so, or must decline it. A past qualification is not automatically enough. Skills, knowledge, experience, and current CPDs all count.

Most of the organisations carrying out notifiable work without realising it are not cutting corners. They are managing large portfolios, often without a clear view of everything happening across their stock. When a job comes in, the immediate priority is getting it resolved, and the broader compliance question does not always surface in time.

That is the gap Alix is designed to help with. Repairs managers get a view across their portfolio so they can see what is happening, where, and by whom before work starts rather than after. Every job builds its own record along the way, which means if the BSR does come asking, the audit trail is already there.

It will not make the regulations any simpler. But it can make them easier to stay on top of.

If the Building Safety Act landscape feels hard to navigate right now, you are genuinely not alone. We would love to show you how Alix works in practice.