You appoint a design team, or a contractor, on the strength of a portfolio, a conversation, and a set of letters after a name. You find out whether they were actually competent to build your building when something fails. Under the law as it now stands, that reckoning can arrive up to thirty years later, long after the team has moved on, dissolved, retired, or ceased to exist.

Thirty years is too long to wait to learn something you needed to know before you signed.

The Building Safety Act already says competence is not optional. Part 2A of the Building Regulations makes it a legal duty: no one may carry out design or building work unless they are competent to do it, and no one may appoint a team without being satisfied that they are. This is not a higher-risk-building rule. BS 8670-1 sets the core competence criteria for work on buildings of all types and scales, and the PAS 8671, 8672 and 8673 frameworks and BS 8674 define what that competence means role by role. Every building. Every appointment. The duty exists. What has never existed is a way to prove it, at the point it matters, from evidence rather than assertion.

And this duty is not the client's alone. Whatever your role on a project, the moment you engage someone else to do design or building work, the responsibility to satisfy yourself that they are competent becomes yours. The principal contractor engaging a subcontractor. The designer bringing in a specialist. The contractor appointing a temporary-works engineer. Each carries the same obligation, and each is exposed when it is not met. Competence is not something you confirm once, at the top of the chain. It is a duty that runs through every appointment on the project, and until now, no one has been able to prove they discharged it.

Because competence is not a credential. It is not the size of the last project or the logo on the letterhead. It is whether this team is capable of this building, on this site, at this height, to this programme, a different question every time, one a CV cannot answer and a claims record only answers in hindsight, when the claim is already yours.

STRAND answers it now. Before the appointment. Before the policy. Before the loan. Before the ground is broken. It assesses competence against the frameworks the law already recognises, from the work a team produces rather than the assurances they give, and returns an answer you can act on while you still have the freedom to act.

The regime is moving one way: from competence declared, to competence demonstrated. STRAND is built to that standard now, ahead of the requirement, not chasing it.

The thirty-year wait was never a safeguard. It was only the delay before the bill arrived. STRAND closes it.

You did not price it.

The competence of the team is the single largest determinant of whether a building fails, and it is nowhere in your model. Not in the covenant, not in the claims record, not in the proposal form. You priced the value, the track record, the turnover. The one variable that actually decides whether this building comes back as a claim, you left at zero, because you had no way to measure it, so you pretended it wasn't there.

It is there. It is in your book right now. A design decision made this year, on a scheme you have already underwritten, by a team nobody assessed, that becomes a claim in fifteen years against a policy written in a market that no longer exists. The premium is spent. The reserve was never set. And your loss ratio already contains it. You just can't see it yet.

The clean claims record you rated them on tells you nothing. It is backward-looking, firm-level, and blind to the team on the scheme. It was clean at Grenfell. It was clean at every building on the wall you have just passed. A clean record is not the absence of risk. It is the absence of a claim so far, and you have been selling cover on the difference.

STRAND is the variable you never had. The competence of the actual team, on the actual scheme, from evidence, at the moment you set the price, not in hindsight, when it is already a loss and a recovery action against a practice that has dissolved and a policy that has lapsed.

You have been carrying this risk for years and pricing it at nothing. The only question is whether you would rather find out now, or when it surfaces.

You have found a builder. Maybe two or three to choose between. They seem confident. The quote is reasonable. They showed you photos of a job like yours, and a friend of a friend used them once and it was fine.

And now you have to decide, with your home and your savings, whether to trust them. On not very much at all.

Here is what nobody tells you. There is no register you can check that says whether this builder is actually competent to do your job. Not a kitchen, not a job like yours, but yours. The extension that needs the wall above it properly supported. The loft that needs the floor calculated. The basement that could take the house next door with it if it is got wrong. A builder can be genuinely good at one thing and completely out of their depth on another, and you would have no way of knowing until it was built.

Most of the time it goes fine. But when it doesn't, you find out slowly, and late. A crack that keeps coming back. A door that stops closing. A survey, years later, when you try to sell, that finds the thing that was wrong from the start. By then the builder is long gone, the guarantee is worthless or the company has folded, and the cost of putting it right lands where it always lands. On you.

You are not expected to know any of this. That is the whole problem. You are making one of the biggest decisions of your life about people whose competence you have no way to judge.

STRAND judges it for you. Before you sign anything, before a penny changes hands, it assesses whether this team is genuinely competent for the work you actually want done. Not their charm, not their photos. The real thing. In plain terms you can understand, while you can still walk away.

It is the second opinion you would ask for if you knew who to ask.