The moment the Building Safety Regulator directs you to apply for your Building Assessment Certificate, you have 28 calendar days to submit a complete, building-specific safety case. Miss it, without reasonable excuse, and it is a criminal matter. The safety case cannot be built from nothing in 28 days — which is exactly why it has to be ready before the call comes.
The Principal Accountable Person who fails to apply in time, without reasonable excuse, commits an offence carrying unlimited fines and imprisonment for up to two years — with a further penalty for every day the default continues. Liability can reach named individuals, not only the company.
And the 28 days is a submission window, not a preparation window. The duty to hold this information has applied since January 2024. "We weren't ready" is unlikely to be a reasonable excuse.
See exactly who is liable, and for what →The Regulator wants a building-specific, evidenced safety case — and it challenges generic ones. But for most occupied buildings the evidence is scattered across managing agents, old contractors and lost archives, degraded, or was never captured at all: original compartmentation, fire door provenance, structural history, materials nobody wrote down.
You are not filling in a form. You are excavating the safety truth of a building that may be decades old — and you have 28 days to do it. Done by hand, that is close to impossible.
Give STRAND whatever exists — the scattered records, the old drawings, a basic survey — and it reconstructs the complete, evidenced picture the Regulator is looking for, tells you in plain English exactly what is still missing, and shows you your true position in minutes.
A change of use like a hotel becoming student accommodation is the safety-case nightmare in miniature: the building isn't what its records say, and often the records are gone. But one drawing is always there — the fire evacuation plan fixed to the inside of every room door, required by law. STRAND starts there, and rebuilds outward.
From one floor, STRAND stacks the building — every level, every room, every escape route — into a complete, evidence-grade set, round-trip checked against source. A safety case that had no drawings at all now has a verified record, built from a notice on the back of a door.
STRAND assesses everything you have against what a BAC requires and returns a precise readiness picture — what's present, what's missing, and what each gap needs.
Evidence-grade as-built drawings reconstructed from fragments and a basic survey — no expensive surveys, no open-ended consultant fees.
The evidenced, demonstrated safety case the Regulator is actually looking for — the kind that passes, not the kind that gets challenged.
The Regulator aims to reassess every higher-risk building roughly every five years — and that obligation already reaches almost everyone who holds one. Most of these buildings are woefully short of the information they are supposed to hold.
The same capability that builds a safety case solves this too: STRAND assembles everything from what exists, and prompts for what's missing or inadequate.
No surveys metered by the hour. No consultants billing until the money runs out.
Every dutyholder's legal responsibilities, the exact provisions, and the criminal consequences of getting them wrong — laid out plainly.
Read it →The full scope of a Building Assessment Certificate application — the five parts, in plain terms, and why it's harder than a gateway.
Read it →Establish exactly where your building stands — before the Regulator sets the clock running.
Establish where you stand