Safety Case Report — suggested outline

The Building Safety Regulator does not publish a Safety Case Report template — deliberately, because each report must be proportionate to the specific building. This outline is Brocade's interpretation of what sections 85–87 of the Building Safety Act 2022 require, structured from the BSR's 'Preparing a safety case report' guidance on gov.uk (last updated 6 December 2024) and the BSR Safety Case Toolkit (February 2024). Use it as a starting point; rewrite every section for your building.

Section 85 of the Building Safety Act 2022 sets out the obligation to prepare a safety case report, and section 87 sits alongside it as the Mandatory Occurrence Reporting system that the safety case management arrangements must implement. The BSR's own 'Preparing a safety case report' guidance breaks the report into seven sections covered by this template: building description, hazards, risk assessment, risk control, resident engagement, management arrangements, and continuous improvement. Each section ties back to a specific obligation in sections 85 to 87 or an adjacent BSA provision (s.62, s.65, s.81, s.83, s.91, s.92).

The template is structured for buildings in scope of Part 4 of the Building Safety Act 2022: residential buildings of at least 18 metres or 7 storeys with 2 or more residential units. For buildings just inside the threshold (a 30-flat single-block) the seven sections typically fit in 15 to 25 pages; for larger or more complex buildings (estates, multi-block portfolios, mixed-use) Section 4 (Risk control) and Section 6 (Management arrangements) usually carry the most adaptation work. Buildings outside the Part 4 threshold do not have a statutory SCR obligation, though the underlying fire-safety and management questions are still load-bearing under the Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005 and the Fire Safety (England) Regulations 2022.

The BSR Safety Case Toolkit (February 2024) makes proportionality the test: each section should be long enough to address the risk picture for the specific building, no longer. A 30-flat single-block with no significant remediation work in train typically lands at 10 to 20 pages total; a 100-flat block with active cladding remediation and a single-staircase configuration may need 40 to 60 pages; a 200-flat estate with multiple buildings will often run past 100 pages. The report is judged by whether the BSR assessor can verify the claims against the underlying evidence (the FRA register, the statutory check log, the MOR record), not by page count.

The SCR is a cover document; the substantive evidence sits in the Golden Thread (BSA 2022 s.86). Each section of the SCR cross-references a specific evidence layer: Section 1 points at the building registration record and the EWS1 form; Section 3 points at the Type 3 or Type 4 FRA report and the action register; Section 4 points at the statutory check log (LOLER, FSR 2022 reg.6 quarterly fire door checks, dry riser testing), the contractor competence records under BSA s.81, and the planned-maintenance schedule; Section 5 points at the section 91 resident engagement strategy and the section 92 complaints log; Section 6 points at the principal accountable person registration, the Companies House records of any RTM or RMC entity, the document-management system holding the Golden Thread, and the MOR submission log. Brocade is the evidence layer the SCR points at: FRA actions closed, checks done, MORs logged, document audit trail, and the section 91 resident engagement record sit in one system that the cover document references.

There is no single calendar deadline for the Safety Case Report. The Building Safety Act 2022 requires it to be prepared 'as soon as reasonably practicable' after the building is registered with the BSR (s.85(1)). The practical trigger is the BSR Building Assessment Certificate (BAC) assessment call-in: when the BSR opens the assessment, the principal accountable person has 28 days to supply the safety case report alongside the other evidence the assessor requests. The Compliance Calendar tool tracks the registration window, the BAC assessment cycle, and the related FSR 2022 inspection cadences in one view.