Exploring factors shaping fire and building safety behaviours for residents of multi-occupied buildings
At a glance
The Welsh Government wanted to understand how to reassert the role of residents of multi-occupied buildings, in ensuring fire safety. Mixed method research, structured around the COM-B behavioural model, was used to develop residents’ rights, roles and responsibilities, from a set of principles, into a set of implementable behavioural interventions.
About the client
The Welsh Government is the devolved government for Wales, making decisions, and developing and implementing policies and laws, across (e.g.) education, health, local government, transport, planning, economic development, culture and the environment.
Challenges and objectives
In the wake of the Grenfell Tower tragedy, Dame Judith Hackitt’s Independent Review of Building Regulations and Fire Safety recommended reasserting the role of residents of multi-occupied buildings, in ensuring their own safety and those of their neighbours. This required ‘a significant cultural and behavioural shift from all involved’. In response, the Welsh Government wanted research to help develop residents’ rights, roles and responsibilities, from a set of principles, into a set of effective, implementable behavioural interventions.
Solution
A rapid evidence review and stakeholder interviews were used to gather relevant evidence on building and fire safety in multi-occupied buildings. We then workshopped this evidence with Welsh Government officials to develop hypotheses and potential policy interventions to test. Before surveying 1,562 residents of multi-occupied buildings in Wales and conducting ‘deep dive’ qualitative research with selected residents, to explore fire-safety attitudes, behaviours together with details about the residents themselves and the buildings they lived in. The workshop, and the primary research that followed, was structured around the COM-B behavioural model, to help identify behavioural barriers, enablers and interventions that could improve fire safety behaviours.
Impact
The research generated practical recommendations for landlords, building managers and the Welsh Government. For example, ways of encouraging residents to comply with fire safety by making it easier to store large items or remove rubbish that might pose a fire hazard; normalising the idea of residents raising fire safety concerns and providing channels to do this anonymously; and improved visibility of fire safety signage. It also identified six resident segments, by attitudes and behaviours, highlighting that three of them (representing 41 per cent of all residents) were more receptive to communications or interventions to encourage positive fire safety behaviours.