About
The people who assess buildings and the people who install in them rarely work together.
One side writes what is wrong. The other side puts it right. The information that should connect the two is usually lost in between. Compartis was set up to do both halves and keep the information.
An installation problem that is also an information problem.
Compartmentation is built into a building, hidden from view, breached routinely by other trades, and almost never recorded in a way anybody can use afterwards. Very little else in a building is all four at once.
A building can hold entirely compliant passive fire protection and still be unable to demonstrate it. Under the current regime, protection that cannot be demonstrated is treated, correctly, as protection that may not be there.
The Building Safety Act 2022 made that explicit for higher-risk buildings and the direction of travel for everything else is the same. The obligation is continuous. Most passive fire protection is still delivered as though it ends at practical completion. Compartis exists in that gap.
Nick Beers
Director
A chartered building surveyor who has spent nearly twenty years in building and fire safety: safety cases, fire risk appraisals of external walls, remediation strategy and Regulator engagement on higher-risk residential buildings.
The recurring finding was not that the work had been done badly. It was that nobody could prove how it had been done at all.
Sam Kirk
Director
A carpenter by trade who has spent his career in specialist contracting, fitting fire doors and passive fire protection, and who knows what a drawing does not tell you about the wall in front of you.
The recurring frustration was the mirror image: work carried out properly, and no mechanism to demonstrate it once the site closed.
Structure is the safeguard.
A behaviour that depends on two people remembering it is not a control. Each of these is written down, owned by a named person, and capable of being produced to a client who asks.
Delivery and verification are separate functions. The person who inspects the work is never the person who carried it out.
A named technical authority reviews every specification before it is priced and applies the completion test at project close. The claim rests on a person, not on a company.
Where a director holds an interest in another business that advises on a building, Compartis does not deliver the works on it without written disclosure and the client’s agreement, and the reverse holds too. A conflict register records each one, and the separation protocol is attached to tenders as a matter of course rather than produced when challenged.
Competence is recorded per individual, with scheme, scope and expiry, and the register carries a stop rule: work outside recorded competence is not started, and the decision to stop is never counted against the person who made it.
The client owns the record of their building. We create it, hold it and maintain it under instruction, and hand it over in a form the client and their next contractor can use directly.
More useful to you than another paragraph about what we do.
We do not review our own work independently, or advise you on a matter where we hold the delivery interest.
We do not certify or guarantee the compliance of a building, or of anybody else’s work. We record our own to a declared standard.
We are not a duty holder. The duty to hold the information, and to act on what it shows, stays with you.
We are not a survey business that generates its own remediation, and not a fire door company. Fire doors are something we do. They are not what we are.
Tell us about the building.
New build, refurbishment, remediation, planned maintenance, inspection, or the information a building has to be able to produce.
Or speak to one of us directly.
nick@compartis.co.uk
sam@compartis.co.uk