Help CROSS to create a safer built environment

Share safety concerns in confidence with Collaborative Reporting for Safer Structures.

In shaping the world around us, civil and infrastructure engineers have a core responsibility in keeping the public safe.

A fundamental principle of the ICE is to help engineers build, operate and maintain structures that are safe, reliable and fit for purpose.

The institution is committed to creating a culture of safety and risk management across the whole industry.

One way it does this is by working with the Institution of Structural Engineers (IStructE) to run Collaborative Reporting for Safer Structures in the UK (CROSS-UK).

What is CROSS?

It’s a confidential system enabling professionals working in the built environment to report structural and fire safety issues.

It will publish this information anonymously so that knowledge can be shared and action can be taken to improve safety throughout the sector.

Reports can be submitted by anyone working on any structure at any stage of its life. No safety issue is too small to disclose.

CROSS operates in the UK, the US and Australasia.

The history of CROSS-UK

The ICE and the IStructE co-founded CROSS-UK in 1976. The institutions formed Structural-Safety Ltd (SSL) as the legal entity enabling them to jointly manage the system.

They own equal stakes in SSL, which provides benefits to both professionals and the public and makes decisions without any outside pressures affecting its fairness.

Since 2020, CROSS-UK has also been supported by the Institution of Fire Engineers.

The expansion of its remit to cover fire safety followed the Hackitt review, which recommended that CROSS "should be extended and strengthened to cover all engineering safety concerns".

In 2025, CROSS-UK was appointed as the official voluntary occurrence reporting system (VORS) by the UK's Building Safety Regulator (BSR). It will officially hold the role until at least 2028.

Although appointed by the BSR, CROSS-UK is entirely independent, providing industry professionals with a trusted, confidential way to report safety concerns.

Make your sector safer:

Report to CROSS

Other industry sectors like airlines have shown how valuable this type of no-blame reporting of concerns can be in identifying potential causes of failure before they happen and ensuring that they are shared with the whole sector.
Dame Judith Hackitt (2021)

Why is such a system important?

Having a way to report safety concerns in a secure, anonymous way allows engineers to speak up in confidence and enable the industry to act accordingly.

It’s also crucial that engineers learn from safety failures and near-misses to prevent them from happening again.

This is something the ICE highlighted in its findings after the Grenfell Tower disaster, and reaffirmed in a report acknowledging the industry’s “inadequate” response eight years later.

The ICE is putting together a series of case studies analysing notable structural failures, drawing on sources such as independent incident reports and CROSS-UK alerts.

This aligns with the ICE’s goal of both supporting its members with CPD learning on safety risk management and providing actionable guidance to the wider sector.

What can you do on the CROSS-UK website?

Access the CROSS-UK website to:

report structural and fire safety issues;
find information about structural and fire safety;
keep updated with the latest news and events concerning structural and fire safety;
review case studies; and
sign up to receive the CROSS-UK newsletter.

Report to CROSS