Building Safeguards report a year on: how the ICE has enacted its own recommendations

Twelve months on from the publication of Building Safeguards: an ICE review of safety risk management in civil engineering, it’s time to report on how the institution has been executing its own action plan.

To help deliver the plan, I invited senior experts to form a Safety Risk Advisory Group (SRAG), which I chair.

We have worked hard over the past year, completing several of the recommended actions and making a start on others.

The Building Safeguards action plan has three strands: competence, learning from failure, and culture and practice.

Competence

This strand has two main objectives: to equip ICE members with the safety risk awareness and skills needed for their roles, and to ensure that professionals working in critical roles on higher-risk structures are qualified to do so.

Much of our effort here has focused on providing learning resources to support members’ continuing professional development (CPD) in safety and risk management.

This became one of the ICE’s three mandatory CPD themes in January 2026, helping to ensure that members fully understand their responsibilities and how to fulfil them.

Enhancing our learning materials

To support this initiative, we have:

• Published an explainer on the Building Safety Act 2022.
• Updated the guidance on how to comply with the Building Safety Act competence requirements.
• Reviewed the ICE’s safety and risk management CPD modules.
• Started updating Knowledge Hub modules, including How to comply with CDM 2015 and Design risk management.

We are keeping the ICE Knowledge Hub reviewed and refreshed as a rolling programme, focusing on the mandatory CPD themes.

In March 2026, the ICE Professionalism Panel held an insightful workshop with senior practitioners on asset safety risk management and current and potential tools, methods and frameworks. 

This session supported the development of new learning resources that will be published on the Knowledge Hub.

Plans are also under way to explore specialist CPD training that leads to certification.

Introducing the specialist registers committee

The ICE has set up a committee to determine whether further specialist registers are needed to cover higher-risk infrastructure. It will conduct a gap analysis focusing on asset types and engineering activities.

Learning from failure

The ambition in this strand is to raise awareness of common causes of safety risk and failure, helping members to learn and apply lessons from notable incidents.

We are publishing a series of Lessons Learnt case studies on the Knowledge Hub. The first of these cover the 2005 Gerrards Cross railway tunnel collapse and the 2018 Florida International University footbridge collapse.

We have further case studies in development that we’re planning to publish by the end of this year.

Collaborative Reporting for Safer Structures UK (CROSS-UK)

The ICE is one of the founding members of CROSS-UK, a scheme enabling professionals in the built environment to disclose safety concerns anonymously.

One of our key objectives is to raise the profile of this important scheme among members and encourage them to share knowledge through its safety reports. To this end, we have:

• held an informative discussion about CROSS-UK at the ICE Council’s meeting in December 2025;
• published a CROSS-UK page on the ICE website; and
• begun circulating the CROSS-UK quarterly newsletter to members, which includes reports on key safety issues affecting the industry.

We will continue to work closely with CROSS-UK – for instance, by integrating the scheme into ICE events. We’ll also signpost it as a learning resource to help members meet their mandatory CPD requirements.

Culture and practice

The goal of this strand is to embed ethical character and resilience as elements of professionalism, while establishing a set of norms for key areas of industry practice.

In January 2026, Ethics and professional behaviours became a mandatory CPD theme. This was followed in April 2026 by an update to the ICE Code of Professional Conduct.

Supporting work in this area, the newly formed ethics and professionalism review task group assembled representatives from across the industry for a roundtable discussion in June 2026.

We also formed an industry guidance task group to examine standards across the sector. The group held discussions at the December 2025 ICE Council meeting and a dedicated roundtable in June 2026.

Building on solid foundations

Paul Sheffield, ICE past president and chair of the group that produced Building Safeguards, says that he is “very pleased to see the progress the SRAG has achieved in the year since we published the report”. 

“It’s made great strides in actioning the plan and maintaining the momentum in embedding this important subject in the ICE’s overall programme.”

But, while we’ve achieved a lot over the past 12 months, there’s still plenty to do:

• Competence: the specialist registers committee will make its recommendations to the SRAG at the end of 2026. Future work includes embedding a requirement for “register engineer” in key procurement positions.
• Learning from failure: common causes of failure will be identified from the Lessons Learnt case studies and shared at a planned event in December 2026 and the Inspiring Engineering Excellence conference in 2027.
• Culture and practice: commitments will be sought from the government and large infrastructure clients to embed ethics and professionalism into their procurement practices and delivery models.