Why I Founded the National Building Register

The problem NBR was created to solve

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I founded the National Building Register because of something I kept seeing on projects over many years. Everyone recognised the problem, but no one was prepared to take responsibility for solving it. I decided that if I was going to have any lasting purpose in an industry I care deeply about, I would be the one to provide a solution. I do not underestimate the scale of that task. I am up against multinational software companies and an industry that is not naturally comfortable with culture change. None of that has put me off. 

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Why building information gets lost over time

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Building information is not usually missing because people do not care. It is missing because no one remains responsible for it over time. The culture in construction is often to race to the finish line and avoid delay or penalty. Record information and certification then gets pushed down the priority list and treated like administration, often handed to people with no real relationship to the project and no technical or governance understanding of what they are compiling. By that stage, the team who designed and built it has usually moved on. That is not a criticism. It is simply the reality. 

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At one stage, most of the information exists. Drawings, reports, emails, decisions, certificates. Then the building moves into operation, priorities change, reactive and planned maintenance takes over. As the years pass and teams change, that information becomes harder to find, harder to verify and, in some cases, impossible to explain properly. The responsibility, however, never disappears. That disconnect has never sat comfortably with me. I can trace that frustration right back to my early career, sitting in dusty basements going through battered lever arch files trying to find usable record drawings and design information for a refurbishment project.

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​From firefighting to construction and design management

 

Earlier in my career, I was a firefighter in London, and that experience fundamentally changes how you look at buildings. You do not see them as static structures. You see how they behave under pressure. You understand how important it is to know exactly what you are dealing with, quickly and clearly. That perspective stayed with me as I moved into construction and design management, and it still shapes how I think today. 

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Over the last 20 years, I have worked on complex refurbishment projects across the built environment, particularly where scrutiny is high. Much of that work has been through STATUS A Ltd, supporting large-scale cut-and-carve remediation programmes, rooftop extensions and, over the last five years, Fire Safety façade replacement schemes. A consistent part of that work has involved going back through existing information and trying to establish what has actually been built. 

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Why was something designed this way? What changed? Who signed it off? 

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Why audit trails matter

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Those are fundamental questions. A proper audit trail should answer them. Too often, it does not.

 

Sometimes the information exists, but it is incomplete. Sometimes it sits in different places with no clear ownership. Sometimes no one can say with confidence whether it is the latest version or even the correct one. That is where risk creeps in, and where decisions become much harder to stand behind. 

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A governance problem, not just a software problem

 

That is the problem NBR was created to address. It is not another project platform, and it is not simply somewhere to store documents. It is a managed environment where building information is actively maintained, properly structured and kept connected to responsibility over time. 

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The principle is simple. If something matters, it should still make sense years later. 

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What makes NBR different is that we are not trying to force a software solution onto what is fundamentally a governance problem. Our focus is the ongoing management of compliance information by people who understand what they are looking at. Yes, we use artificial intelligence to assist with sorting and filtering, but every document is checked by a human who understands context. We challenge rather than accommodate, because our job is not simply to collect information. It is to make sure the audit trail is complete, relevant and capable of standing up to scrutiny. 

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Building information that still makes sense years later

 

Grenfell brought all of this into much sharper focus for the industry. Not only in terms of materials and compliance, but in how information is handled, how decisions are recorded and what happens when that chain of understanding breaks down. For me, it reinforced a very basic point: safety depends on being able to explain what has been done and why. If that cannot be done clearly, then you are relying on assumption, and assumption is not a safe foundation for anything. That was the point at which the need for NBR fully crystallised for me. I could see exactly what was needed, and I set about developing the solution.

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Alongside NBR, I am still directly involved in project work with clients, contractors, consultants and dutyholders on live schemes. That keeps everything grounded in reality for me. Information is often imperfect and has to be worked through properly. I have no intention of leaving the coalface, because remaining hands-on directly informs how I shape and develop NBR. 

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NBR exists to make sure information holds up over time and that responsibility does not drift as projects move on. I did not build NBR for a quick exit. I built it to create something that genuinely improves this industry, not simply to create another piece of bolt-on software. 

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NBR has not been built around venture capital funding. That is a deliberate choice. We want to remain impartial and free to develop around the real needs of the sector, not around a pre-determined product model or investor timetable.

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Independence takes patience and discipline, but for a register built on trust, we believe it is the right foundation.

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Start a conversation

If you are dealing with complex buildings, remediation, or trying to make sense of existing records, I am always open to a conversation. 

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