3500 views: Why the UK Construction Industry Is Still Sleeping on the Building Safety Act

Six months ago, twelve of the UK's top Tier 1 contractors published a video. It was a direct message to their supply chains about the Building Safety Act (BSA). The message was clear: this applies to you, whatever you build, whatever your size. 

As of today, it has 3,500 views. 

Draw your own conclusions. 

What the video actually says

The contractors are not being subtle. The video states it plainly: construction companies must demonstrate organisational competence, and workers must be able to demonstrate their individual competence. 

Two different things. One sentence. 

Organisational competence is the part the industry has started to move on. Pre-qualification questionnaires, Common Assessment Standard accreditation, building safety policy statements. Constructionline and others are helping companies tick those boxes. That work matters. 

But individual competence is different. The video admits it directly. 

"Demonstrating individual competency is presently more challenging as some sectors are more advanced than others." 

Their interim solution? CSCS cards. 

In January 2023, the Construction Leadership Council (CLC) confirmed that all CSCS cards must be achieved via recognised qualification, ending the era of cards issued on employer recommendation alone. A card is not proof of competence. It is proof of a qualification, (usually achieved years before). Under the SKEB framework that the Building Safety Regulator (BSR) uses to define individual competence — Skills, Knowledge, Experience, and Behaviours — a CSCS card maps to one slice of Knowledge: assessed once, at a point in time. It says nothing about whether a worker understood their briefing this morning, on this site, for this task. 

So the industry's answer to the hardest part of the Building Safety Act is a credential that only speaks to part of one of the four things the regulator is actually asking for. 

The Individual Competence Gap the Building Safety Act Exposes

The BSR requires demonstrable competence across all four SKEB components. Not one. All four. 

Skills: observed, assessed task performance.  

Knowledge: proof of understanding at the point of need.  

Experience: continuity of practice over time, across roles and projects.  

Behaviour: acknowledgement of expectations and observable conduct on site. 

A CSCS card touches Knowledge, partially, historically. A pre-qualification questionnaire evidences your company's policies and procedures. Neither of them answers the question the regulator is actually asking: did this worker, on this site, on this day, understand what they were being asked to do before they started? 

That is individual competence. That is the hard part. And right now, most construction companies have no systematic way to prove it. 

Why 3,500 views matters 

The video was published by Constructionline, one of the most widely used pre-qualification platforms in UK construction. Twelve Tier 1 contractors put their names to it. It is ten minutes long and covers some of the most significant regulatory changes in a generation. 

3,500 views in six months is not a reach problem. It is an awareness problem. 

A separate industry white paper published this month found that 89% of CEOs and CFOs may be unaware of their duties under the post-Grenfell building safety regime. That figure is striking. But when you look at the view count on a video that the industry's biggest contractors made specifically to close that gap, it starts to make sense. 

The nettle is not being grasped. 

What this means in practice 

The BSR became a standalone body in January 2026 with unlimited fine authority. The Building Safety Act applies to every construction project covered by building regulations. Not just high-rise residential. Not just new build. Refurbishment. Office blocks. One-storey extensions. The video says so explicitly. 

Principal contractors are accountable for the competence of every worker on their projects, including those employed by subcontractors. Those subcontractors are accountable for the competence of their workers. The chain of accountability runs all the way down to the individual on site.

A pre-qualification certificate stops at the company gate. Individual competence starts on the other side of it. 

The question every principal contractor should be asking 

You can verify that a subcontractor has the right policies. You can check their CSCS cards. You can confirm they completed the Common Assessment Standard. 

But can you prove that each worker understood their risk briefing before they started work? Can you show the Building Safety Regulator a timestamped record of who was briefed, what they were asked, and whether they understood it — by site, by role, by subcontractor? 

If not, you have organisational competence on paper and a gap in the evidence where individual competence should be. 

That gap is where incidents happen. It is also where enforcement notices will eventually land. 

The ones that move first will use it to win work 

LUMA1 is the Workforce Readiness System. It evidences all four SKEB components in a single auditable system. Every worker has a status: Cleared, or Not Cleared. That status is backed by comprehension data, not just attendance records. 

Falco Construction used LUMA1 evidence as a direct tender differentiator. It contributed to winning the most significant contract in their history. 

The Building Safety Act is not going away. Enforcement is live. The supply chain is being asked to comply. The question is whether companies will reach for a pre-qualification certificate and call it done, or build the individual competence evidence the regulator is actually asking for. 

3,500 views suggests most haven't decided yet. 

The ones that move first will use it to win work. The ones that wait will use it to explain themselves.