Freedom without responsibility: how the UK Government ignored engineering competence whilst deregulating fire safety regulation in the 1980s

Professional status rests upon a social contract in which society allows specialists to monopolise certain roles on the understanding that they will do so ethically and with appropriate competence. Mechanisms to police such behaviour can be left to professional groups to organise or be legislated for by government, or some combination of the two. In the UK an opportunity to formalise the professional status of engineers arose with the publication of the Finniston Report in 1980. Its calls for a statutory authority to regulate the engineering professions found an unreceptive audience in a government committed to shrinking the state, and arguments for professional registration and licencing as a mechanism to ensure engineering competence were strongly opposed by the Health and Safety Executive. This in turn had serious consequences for the emerging field of fire safety engineering—and for the UK built environment more generally—because the Building Act 1984 offered building designers a new freedom to develop first principles solutions without providing any mechanism to ensure their competence. This paper describes and analyses the three key historical episodes at the heart of this development.