Barry Cope, Group Managing Director of The Building Compliance Testers Association gives his view on Quality Management in CABE‘s April Issue of Building Engineer.

The article goes into culture changes, competency and safety and asks where the construction industry is in terms of managing quality and where it should be.

Barry Cope, along with three other professionals give their view on quality management how the construction industry is in terms of changes to safety and competency.

Barry writes that “Quality is largely subjective and when we say construction quality or building quality, we need a metric to measure that against”.

He then goes through the culture change stating, “it has improved but there is an issue per site and is defined by specific people working there”.

Testing is done because there is a lack of trust

Barry Cope

The Building Compliance Testers Association specialises in building test, but testing in the UK has had much of a role in improving quality so far. Testing is done because there is a lack of trust. Blower Door – or airtightness testing – is a perfect example. The reason we test is because we are not sure that those building are airtight. In Norway, Sweden and other cold countries they don’t do anywhere near as much testing because they trust their building are airtight.

Testing may play an increasing role in the coming years to instigate higher quality, although in different ways such as results-based performance.

Barry ends with “I think what we’ll start to see is homes being tested once they are built, with overnight heating tests. That will be the way we measure our homes going forward. That will be how we get our EPC ratings: it won’t be theoretical; it will be measured performance that will reflect how the building has been built. That’s where testing performance could be an absolute game changer in terms of quality”.

Find the full article on Pages 34 to 39 of Building Engineer, April 2024 edition.