The compliance software that thinks your Edinburgh building is in England
Picture a facilities manager with eleven buildings. Seven in the central belt, four in Leeds. She has just sat through a polished demo of a compliance platform. Accountable Persons, Higher-Risk Buildings, golden thread, one-click reports for the Building Safety Regulator. It looked great.
Then she tried to add the Edinburgh office.
Is it a Higher-Risk Building? There is no such thing in Scotland. Who is the Accountable Person? Nobody, that role does not exist here. Which regulator gets the report? Not the one the software is built for. Three fields in, the platform is already describing a building that does not legally exist.
Why this keeps happening
The Building Safety Act was written for England after Grenfell. It created a regulator, a category of high-rise building and a set of named roles, and a whole industry of software has grown up around them. Scotland was never in scope. Building standards, fire safety and housing are devolved, and Scotland runs its own regime with its own words.
So the Leeds buildings fit the software. The Scottish ones get forced into boxes that do not apply, or the clever features get switched off and what is left is a diary of renewal dates. Either way, the one thing the FM needed, a single honest picture of the whole estate, is exactly what she does not get.
The part that matters more than the Act
Here is the thing the BSA headlines hide. Most of the evidence that proves a building is safe has nothing to do with the Building Safety Act at all. The gas certificate, the electrical inspection, the lift thorough examination, the legionella regime, the asbestos survey, the pressure vessel test. Those duties are the same in Glasgow as in Manchester, they attach to individual assets, and they are what an inspector, an insurer or a buyer's solicitor actually asks to see.
That is the layer where compliance is won or lost, and it is the layer most platforms treat as a footnote.
What good looks like
Country should be a fact about the building, not an assumption baked into the software. When you add a site, the system should already know which law applies there and attach only the duties that are real:
- The Edinburgh office gets the Fire (Scotland) Act, not the Fire Safety Order.
- The Leeds office gets the reverse.
- Both get the GB-wide asset duties, per boiler, board, lift and tank, with the same evidence standard.
- One dashboard, one report, no invented categories.
That is how Samtap is built. Every obligation in our catalogue carries its own jurisdiction, cites the actual instrument, and is checked at the asset level with a tap of a tag at the point of work. The FM with eleven buildings gets eleven buildings, each under the right law, each with proof.
The law in one box (if you want the detail)
England only: Building Safety Act 2022 (BSR, Higher-Risk Buildings, Accountable Persons, golden thread); Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005; Awaab's Law.
Scotland instead: Building (Scotland) Act 2003 and Regulations 2004; Fire (Scotland) Act 2005 Part 3 and Fire Safety (Scotland) Regulations 2006; Housing (Scotland) Acts, Tolerable and Repairing Standards; Scottish Housing Regulator.
Everywhere in Great Britain: Gas Safety Regulations 1998, Electricity at Work 1989, LOLER 1998, PUWER 1998, Pressure Systems 2000, Control of Asbestos 2012, COSHH and L8 (legionella).
General information, not legal advice. Wales is now building its own regime too.
Buildings on both sides of the border? Request a Golden Thread sample report for one of your assets at samtap.uk and see what the right law looks like.