Competence on the Day: Proving Who Was Competent

The question rarely arrives while the work is going on. It arrives years later, in a letter about a defect, a remediation survey or a dispute over who is liable, and it is specific: on the date the cavity barriers on the north elevation were installed, who fitted them, and what made each of them competent to do it on that day. The person who ran the job may have moved on. The operatives almost certainly have. What is left is whatever was written down at the time.

What's Actually Being Asked

Since 1 October 2023 (subject to transitional arrangements for projects already in the system), Part 2A of the Building Regulations 2010 has required that anyone carrying out design or building work in England has the skills, knowledge, experience and behaviours necessary to do it, that organisations have the policies, procedures, systems and resources to do the work properly, and that anyone still in training is adequately supervised by whoever asked them to do the work. Anyone appointing a designer or contractor (other than a domestic client, whose duties pass to the contractor) must take all reasonable steps to satisfy themselves that the people they appoint are competent, and designers and contractors must not carry out work they are not competent to do unless they are in training and adequately supervised. These duties apply to all building work the regulations cover in England, not only to higher-risk buildings. On higher-risk building work, the steps taken to check competence on appointment also have to be recorded in writing and end up with the client.

None of that is new to anyone who has read about SKEB. What tends to be missed is the tense. A competence duty is owed while the work is done, so the useful question is never "is this person competent?" asked today. It is "was this person competent for this operation, on this system, on the date they did it?", asked about a day that may be long gone. The person asking might be a client's consultant, an insurer, a remediation contractor, an expert in a dispute, or, on a higher-risk building, the Building Safety Regulator. Some of those questions now have a long tail: since the Building Safety Act 2022, a claim under section 1 of the Defective Premises Act 1972 about a dwelling can be brought up to 15 years after the dwelling was completed, and for dwellings completed before 28 June 2022 the period was extended retrospectively to 30 years.

A current competence record cannot answer a question about a past date. Only a record that kept its history can.

The Evidence That Answers It

An answer for a past date is a chain, and each link has to carry its own date.

• The allocation record: who was assigned to which task, at which location, on which day. This is the link that is most often missing, because nobody thinks of a daily allocation as evidence.
• Attendance: sign-in, timesheet or labour capture showing the person was on site that day, and ideally on that area of the works.
• The work record: the inspection and test plan sign-off, daily record or photographs that tie a named person to the location and the date.
• The scope in force on that date: the operations and systems the person had been assessed as competent to carry out, with the date that scope started and, if it was later changed or withdrawn, the date it stopped.
• The assessment behind the scope: who made the decision, on what evidence, and when. A scope with no assessor and no date is an assertion, not a record.
• Certificates valid on the day: qualifications, system training and cards with their issue and expiry dates, kept as history so that a renewal does not overwrite the fact that the previous one lapsed.
• Supervision, where the person was still training: who supervised them, on which operations, and the supervisor's own scope on that date.
• The briefing: the method statement and risk assessment version the person was briefed on before starting, with the date of the briefing.
• The appointment record: the steps your firm took to satisfy itself that the subcontractor or individual was competent when you engaged them, and on higher-risk building work the written record of those steps.

Read together, those records let you answer the letter in one paragraph: these people, on this date, at this location, within this scope, assessed by this person on this evidence. Missing any one link turns the paragraph into a reconstruction.

Why the Spreadsheet Version Fails

The training matrix is built to answer a question about now. When a certificate is renewed, someone types the new expiry date over the old one, and the record that the card had lapsed for three weeks in the spring disappears. The matrix has no column for the day, so it cannot say who was on the north elevation on a given Tuesday; that lives in a site diary, a WhatsApp photo or a timesheet in another system, if it lives anywhere. The certificates folder is organised by course rather than by person or date. Scope decisions, where they exist, are often a supervisor's judgement that was never written down, or an email that sits in one person's inbox. Asked about a past date, the honest answer from that setup is a best guess assembled from three systems, and a best guess is exactly what the person asking will test.

Keeping It Provable

The fix is not a better matrix. It is to treat competence as a record built as the work happens, anchored to the building, with every entry dated and nothing overwritten. A person's scope is a list of decisions, each with a start date, an assessor and its evidence; a change adds a new decision rather than editing the old one. Each day's allocation checks the person against their scope before the shift, and the allocation is kept against the location. The work record for that location, the sign-off and the photographs, then carries the names of people who were within scope at the moment they did the work.

Kept that way, the question about the north elevation is answered by going to the location and the date and reading back, rather than by asking people to remember. It also changes what happens on the day itself. A check made before the shift is a control: someone whose scope does not cover the task is reassigned or supervised before they start. A check made years later is only an explanation.

The Monday Checklist

1. Pick one safety-critical operation completed six months ago. From records alone, name who did it and show their scope on that date. Write down every link you could not find.
2. Stop overwriting. When a certificate is renewed or a scope changes, add a new dated entry and keep the old one.
3. Give every scope decision an assessor, an evidence reference, a start date and a review date.
4. Keep the daily allocation of people to tasks and locations, and treat it as evidence, not as a whiteboard that gets wiped.
5. Move the scope check to before the shift, at the point of allocation, so it can change who does the work rather than only describe it afterwards.
6. For anyone working under supervision while they train, record the supervisor by name for each operation, and check the supervisor's own scope.
7. Decide how long you keep these records, and set the period with the longest likely claim or enquiry in mind rather than the length of the contract.

Where BrieXO Fits

In BrieXO, competence records sit in the FIELD bundle, which is live today. Its competence app, XO Comp, holds role frameworks, a scope per person, evidence reviews, training plans, CPD and verification links, and it passes eligibility signals to XO Time, so eligibility checks run as labour time is captured rather than being reconstructed later. Those records sit alongside the daily site records, inspection sign-offs and photo evidence for the locations they describe. It does not decide whether someone is competent: that judgement stays with your assessors, against your own frameworks, and it supports rather than certifies compliance. It supports your competence duties; it doesn't discharge them. The detail is on the XO Comp page.

Related reading:SKEB in practice: skills, knowledge, experience, behaviours, Building Safety Act dutyholders and who signs what, and the as-built record at Gateway 3 handover.

George Sfica is a senior design manager at a specialist façade contractor, with 23 years in manufacturing and construction, eleven of them in façades and external envelopes, spanning fabrication, installation and design management, an MSc in Façade Engineering and an IFE Level 2 Certificate in Passive Fire Protection. He is the founder of BrieXO.