Mandatory occurrence reporting, in plain terms

Among the duties the Building Safety Act 2022 places on those running higher-risk buildings, mandatory occurrence reporting is one of the less discussed and more easily misunderstood. It is not about routine faults or the ordinary stream of repairs. It is a specific obligation to report certain safety occurrences, the structural and fire-safety events that could put people at significant risk, to the Building Safety Regulator. For an Accountable Person, getting this right is partly a matter of understanding what counts, and largely a matter of having a system that captures the right things before a judgement call even has to be made.

The phrase sounds bureaucratic, and the temptation is to file it under "things lawyers worry about". That is a mistake. Mandatory occurrence reporting is one of the mechanisms by which problems in one building become knowledge that protects others, and it sits at the centre of what it means to run a higher-risk building responsibly.

What it is, and what it is not

Mandatory occurrence reporting applies in the occupation phase of higher-risk buildings. A higher-risk building in England is at least 18m tall or at least 7 storeys with at least 2 residential units, according to gov.uk, and the dutyholder for an occupied one is the Accountable Person, with a Principal Accountable Person where there are several. The duty to report sits with that dutyholder.

What has to be reported is, in plain terms, a safety occurrence: a fire or structural safety event, or a situation that could have led to one, that poses a significant risk of death or serious injury. The crucial word is significant. This is not a channel for every defect, every minor fault, every routine repair. It is a channel for the serious end, including near misses, situations that did not cause harm this time but plainly could have. The near-miss element is what makes the regime valuable, because a near miss in one building, reported, can prevent a tragedy in another.

What it is not is a substitute for fixing the problem, or for the building's own internal record-keeping. Reporting an occurrence to the regulator does not discharge the duty to deal with it. The two run in parallel: you report, and you act.

Why the regime exists

It helps to understand the logic, because it makes the judgement calls easier. The Grenfell Tower Inquiry described the old regulatory regime as too complex and fragmented, according to Construction Briefing, and a recurring theme of building-safety reform is that information about danger too often stayed local, unshared, until it was too late. Mandatory occurrence reporting is a deliberate counter to that: a route for safety-critical information to reach a regulator who can see across the whole stock and act on patterns no single manager could see.

Seen that way, reporting is not a confession of failure. It is participation in a system designed so that hard-won knowledge does not stay trapped in one building. An Accountable Person who reports a genuine occurrence is doing the thing the regime exists for, not admitting fault.

The hard part is capture, not the report

The act of submitting a report is the visible end of the process, but it is rarely the difficult part. The difficult part is making sure the occurrence is captured in the first place, by whoever notices it, and reaches the person who can judge whether it is reportable. Safety occurrences do not announce themselves with a label. They surface as a contractor's observation, a resident's complaint, a finding in an inspection, an entry in a log. If those observations scatter across emails, paper notes and conversations, the reportable occurrence can sit unrecognised among the noise.

A few things make capture reliable:

• A single place where observations, defects and incidents are recorded, so nothing depends on one person's memory or inbox.
• A clear route from a front-line observation to the person who makes the reporting judgement, so a contractor's note does not die at the contractor.
• A record of what was decided and why, including the occurrences judged not reportable, so the reasoning is evidenced either way.
• A link between the occurrence and the action taken, because reporting and remedying have to run together.

The Accountable Person's exposure is rarely that they reported something wrongly. It is that something reportable was never escalated because it was never properly captured. Fixing the capture problem is most of the work.

How it fits the rest of the duties

Mandatory occurrence reporting does not stand alone. It is one of a connected set of obligations the Building Safety Act 2022 places on the Accountable Person, alongside registering the building, holding a safety case and producing a safety case report for the BSR, according to the RICS. These are not separate filing exercises; they are facets of one continuous account of how the building is kept safe. An occurrence that gets reported is also, usually, something the safety case has to absorb, because it is new information about how the building behaves. We have written about what an Accountable Person actually signs up to and about keeping a safety case alive between reviews; occurrence reporting is one of the streams that keeps the safety case from going stale.

Holding the whole chain, observation, capture, judgement, report, remediation, in one connected record is what makes the duty manageable rather than a recurring scramble. It is the same instinct behind the safety case module: that the building's safety information should be one continuous, current account rather than a set of disconnected documents.

A short, practical close

Mandatory occurrence reporting asks an Accountable Person to route the serious, the significant and the near-miss to the Building Safety Regulator, so that danger learned in one building can protect another. The reporting itself is the easy end. The real work is capturing observations reliably, getting them to the person who can judge them, evidencing the decision either way, and tying it to the action taken. SAMRISK keeps that chain in one place, connected to the safety case it feeds, so a reportable occurrence is recognised rather than lost. This is general information rather than legal advice, and the precise scope of the reporting duty should be confirmed against the current regulations and BSR guidance that apply to your building.