Cladding compliance for HRBs: The evidence gap still exists
Since the Building Safety Act came into force, the conversation around cladding has shifted.
It is no longer just about whether a façade system is compliant.
It’s about whether the Accountable Person can evidence ongoing knowledge, risk identification, and reasonable steps taken to maintain building safety over time.
For many high rise residential buildings, cladding remains one of the biggest areas of scrutiny.
Not only because of combustible materials or historic remediation concerns, but because façade condition directly affects:
Fire spread risk
Water ingress and structural degradation
Resident safety
Insurance exposure
Regulatory accountability
The accuracy of the Golden Thread
The challenge is that most portfolios were never designed to be monitored proactively.
Inspections are often:
Access-led and expensive
Infrequent
Reactive after reports or incidents
Difficult to standardise across multiple assets
Hard to convert into defensible audit trails
Under the Building Safety Act 2022, Principal Accountable Persons and Accountable Persons are expected to demonstrate that building safety risks are being identified, assessed, and managed on an ongoing basis.
That includes maintaining suitable evidence relating to external wall systems and façade condition.
The regulator increasingly expects:
Traceable inspection records
Prioritised risk identification
Clear maintenance rationale
Evidence-backed decision making
Visibility across the whole portfolio, not just isolated buildings
This is where many organisations are exposed.
Not necessarily because issues are being ignored, but because evidence is fragmented across surveys, PDFs, contractors, spreadsheets, and disconnected systems.
At Ovrsite, we help organisations create a clearer operational picture of façade and cladding risk across large property portfolios.
Using UAV inspections and AI-assisted analysis, we’ve designed a customer platform that converts visual, thermal, and condition data into:
Verified findings
Risk-prioritised outputs
RAG-rated issues
Evidence trails
Portfolio-level oversight
The goal is not more data.
It is helping building owners move from reactive inspections toward a defensible, evidence-backed approach to ongoing compliance and risk management.