From Building Safety to Sustainability: The Strength of Altair’s Asset Offer

It’s been four years since I joined Altair and in that time our offer has evolved and strengthened.

Today, Altair’s asset workstream offers clients a range of services, tailored to the safety of their residents and the care of their stock, including:

 

• Building Safety
• Strategic Asset Management
• Strategic Health & Safety
• Policy and procedure reviews and updates
• Latent defect rectification
• Sustainability & ESG
• Technical options appraisals
• Reviews (Lessons Learnt, Peer and Operational)

 

As part of Altair’s Assets, Development & Regeneration practice area, Altair’s Assets workstream is able to provide value-added practical asset advice, benefitting from the input and insight of our development and regeneration colleagues.

Working within a multi-disciplinary practice means that we can offer Clients advice, drawn from a single workstream or multiple workstreams. Altair’s Assets workstream often works closely with colleagues in the Governance & Regulation, Digital, Data & Technology and Transformation & Change practice areas.

Altair’s Assets workstream can help with the following:

Building Safety

Helping clients to meet the Building Safety Act requirements:

• Preparation of digital records of key building safety data.
• Project management for external wall remediation.
• Building Safety Fund and Cladding Safety Scheme applications.
• Delivery of start-to-end process for the identification, prioritisation, and remediation of building safety risks.
• Full customer engagement reviews.
• Corporate risk management to assist boards.
• Preparation of draft Building Safety Case Reports.
• Building safety project and governance reviews.

 

Strategic Asset Management

• Preparation of Asset Management Strategies.
• Housing Compliance Reviews of the Big 6.
• Undertaking Repairs Analysis and reviewing structures.
• Providing assistance with Strategic Procurement.
• Data Validation / Cleansing reports and support.
• Stock Condition or Compliance validations – on site.
• Arranging onsite stock condition and compliance surveys through our associate network.
• HHSRS advice, including operational challenges of legislative changes.
• Advising on the implementation and delivery of the new Decent Homes Standard.
• Providing advice to registered providers on STAIRs, the new statutory transparency framework.
• Decarbonisation – Assisting with strategy, funding applications and carbon accounting.
• Governance and Policies – to assist Inspection.
• Specialist Housing Review.
• Biodiversity – Assist in Action Plans and Strategies.
• Acquisitions and Disposals – to assist with the Regulator expectation to sweat your assets.
• Transport Strategy to enable integration into Communities.
• Community-Led Initiatives to ensure Customer Voice is heard.

 

 

Strategic Health & Safety

• Health and safety management system audits and gap analyses.
• Development, implementation and review of health and safety management systems.
• Strategic health and safety advice and governance support.
• Compliance monitoring and assurance reviews.
• Health and safety performance reporting and KPI development.
• Data analysis, trend identification and management information dashboards.
• Board and executive reporting, lessons learnt and validations.
• Policy and procedure development and review.
• Risk management and assurance frameworks.
• Incident analysis and lessons learnt reviews.
• Contractor and supply chain assurance.
• Regulatory and best practice compliance support.
• Training, awareness and continuous improvement programmes.

 

Policy and procedure reviews and updates

• Reviewing and updating existing policy and procedure documents.
• Preparation of new procedures, to supplement existing documents.
• Preparation of a new suite of policy and procedure documents.

 

Latent defect rectification

• Developing an Action Plan in partnership with the client.
• Procuring specialist partners.
• Co-ordinating investigations, including targeted opening-up works.
• Identifying causation and proposing remedial strategy.
• Preparation of specification for rectification works.
• Leading on commercial negotiations with Contractor / Developer / Housebuilder.
• Liaison with new build warranty provider, including claims submission and management.
• Resident consultation, including attendance at resident meetings and home visits.

 

Sustainability & ESG

• Carbon footprint baseline calculation and monitoring through our Excel-based tool.
• Decarbonisation target setting and pathway modelling including alignment with science-based targets.
• Sustainability strategy development and alignment of other strategies with net zero goals.
• Third-party analysis and quality assurance of existing carbon footprint calculations including scope 3 gap analysis.
• ESOS compliance and other third-party reporting support.

 

Technical options appraisals

• Preparation of data-led technical option appraisals, considering particular problems within existing property portfolios, available market products and solutions, and recommendations.

 

Reviews (Lessons Learnt, Peer and Operational)

• Preparation of lessons learnt, peer and operational reviews for UK and RoI Clients.
• Authored a peer review on behalf of a major RoI Developer comparing the design and specification of affordable homes in a proposed waterside Dublin development, with comparable schemes in UK cities.
• Production of a technical options appraisal, considering ‘no access’ in multi-storey multi-occupancy blocks and the role that smart cloud-based technology could play in improving customer service, while reducing operational costs.
• Prepared a lessons learnt report, on a troubled development scheme, exploring causation, impact and foreseeability. Altair’s report included recommendations to strengthen pre-contract due diligence and project management rigour.