What the Building Safety Act 2022 asks of an Accountable Person

The Building Safety Act 2022 put a named person in the frame for the safety of an occupied higher-risk building, and then made that person prove it on demand. The role is the Accountable Person, and where a building has several, one of them must act as the Principal Accountable Person. It is not an honorary title. It carries registration duties, a standing obligation to manage building safety risks, and the responsibility for a safety case that the Building Safety Regulator can ask to see.

Who the Accountable Person is

An Accountable Person is the party who owns or has a repairing obligation for the relevant parts of an occupied higher-risk building. Under the Building Safety Act 2022, a higher-risk building in England is at least 18m tall or at least 7 storeys, whichever comes first, and contains at least two residential units. That definition is worth committing to memory, because it decides whether any of this applies to a given block at all. Where responsibility for the structure and common parts is split across more than one party, each is an Accountable Person for their part, and the Principal Accountable Person carries the building-wide duties.

The point of naming the role is accountability that does not evaporate when a managing agent changes or a freeholder sells. If you are the Accountable Person, the duty is yours until it lawfully passes to someone else, and the record should make that handover legible.

The duties, in order of when they bite

It helps to separate the one-off duties from the continuing ones.

• Register the building with the Building Safety Regulator before it is occupied, and keep the registration accurate.
• Assess the building safety risks, meaning the spread of fire and structural failure, and take all reasonable steps to manage them.
• Prepare and maintain a safety case, and produce a safety case report for the Regulator on request.
• Set up a system for residents to raise safety concerns, and respond to them.
• Keep the golden thread of information current, so the building's safety story can be read at any point.

None of these is a single event. Registration is a moment, but assessment, the safety case and the golden thread are all things you keep current. The Regulator's interest is less in whether you once did the work and more in whether the work still reflects the building in front of it.

Managing the risk, not just describing it

The Act asks for risks to be assessed and then managed by all reasonable steps. The difference matters. A risk assessment that sits in a drawer is not management. Managing a building safety risk means the controls are in place, they are checked on a sensible cadence, and the checks are recorded. A defective fire door noted in an assessment and then left for eight months is not a managed risk, however well the assessment was written.

This is where the day-to-day discipline lives. The fire risk assessment, required of the responsible person under the Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005 and widened by the Fire Safety Act 2021 to cover the structure, external walls and flat entrance doors, feeds the safety case. The remedial actions that flow from it need owners and dates, and someone has to close them. We cover the practical side of this in the fire risk assessment, beyond a tick-box.

The safety case is the proof

The safety case report is where an Accountable Person shows their working. It is not a single form. It pulls together the building's risks, the measures in place to control them, and the evidence that those measures are real and maintained. A regulator reading it should be able to trace a claim of safety down to the inspection, certificate or check that supports it.

That traceability is the hard part. It is easy to assert that fire doors are inspected; it is harder to produce the dated record for each one. A safety case that cannot reach the underlying evidence is a description, not a case. We go further into what makes one stand up in building a safety case the regulator will accept.

The golden thread underneath it all

The Act expects an Accountable Person to hold accurate, current information about the building, kept digitally through occupation. This is the golden thread, and it is the connective tissue between every duty above. Registration draws on it, the safety case is built from it, and resident concerns are answered against it.

It is worth asking, of each duty, what would actually prove it to a stranger. Registration is proved by the record itself, kept accurate. Risk management is proved by dated assessments and closed remedial actions, not by the assessment alone. The safety case is proved by evidence traceable to source. Resident engagement is proved by logged concerns and the responses to them. And the golden thread is proved by a single, ordered, searchable history that someone other than you could follow. None of those is the law itself, but each is a fair test of whether the duty has something real behind it.

Where this leaves a building manager

The honest summary is that the Accountable Person role rewards routine over heroics. The buildings that struggle under scrutiny are rarely the ones that did nothing; they are the ones that did the work and could not find it, or could not show when it was done. Keeping assessments dated and owned, keeping remedial actions on a calendar that chains its own deadlines, and keeping the whole history in one place is most of the job.

A single source of truth is what makes the duties survivable. SAMRISK holds the assessments, the safety case, the building plans and the compliance calendar against one building record, so the golden thread is a by-product of the daily work rather than a separate project. You can see how the safety case fits together on the safety case page, and how recurring duties are tracked on the compliance calendar.

This is general information and a reading of the position rather than legal advice, and the live requirements should be checked before you act on any single point. The direction, though, is settled: the Accountable Person is the person who has to show the building is safe, and showing it is a habit.