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

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

Your operative probably did not know. Your planner may not have flagged it. And honestly, that is not a criticism of anyone. The distinction between repairing a fire door and replacing one is not widely understood yet, and if nobody in your team has worked through the BSR's guidance on Regulation 10, there is a real chance this has already happened to you.

Most housing providers know the Building Safety Act exists. The hard part is understanding what it actually means for the decisions your team is making every single day.

Regulation 10 draws a line between emergency repairs and notifiable work on High Rise Buildings. An emergency repair is work completed within 24 hours, where the risk is so severe that no temporary measure will do. Everything else is notifiable. Facade works go further still: they are explicitly Class A notifiable, meaning the emergency route is essentially off the table. One council found that out after treating facade works as an emergency repair and receiving an enforcement notice.

And even when a repair does qualify as an emergency, you still have to submit a regularisation certificate after the work is done. There is no version of HRB repairs where the paperwork disappears entirely.

None of this is meant to make your job feel impossible. Residents cannot wait months for urgent safety work, and no one is suggesting they should. But it does mean that any job touching an HRB needs a compliance check at the point of triage, before anyone is dispatched. Is this building an HRB? Is this a repair or a replacement? Is the person doing the work actually competent to do it?

That last question carries real 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 they must decline it. A past qualification does not automatically count. Skills, knowledge, experience, and current CPDs all matter.

The organisations getting caught out are not usually cutting corners. They are managing large, complex portfolios, often without a clear picture of everything happening across their stock. A job comes in, the priority is getting it sorted, and the compliance question does not surface until it is too late.

That is exactly the gap Alix is built to close. Repairs managers get visibility 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 audit trail as it goes, so if the BSR does come asking, the evidence is already there.

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

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