Camden Council: building compliance that works on the doorstep

How we joined up Camden’s housing data so building safety, housing management and fire safety teams see the same residents, the same buildings and the same risks.

At a Glance

The Numbers

The Problem

In early 2022 Camden needed to issue Building Safety Assurance Certificates for its high-rise blocks under incoming building safety law. Everything it needed was already held somewhere, but in four systems that did not talk to each other. Fire risk actions were logged in three different places. Fire risk assessments, fire strategies and structural reports sat in a document store, apart from the data on the people living in each block. Officers printed lists before visits and rekeyed what they found afterwards.

The biggest gap was people. What a neighbourhood officer learned at the door about a resident’s mobility or vulnerability did not reliably reach the team planning evacuations. Camden wanted more than one-off compliance. It wanted building compliance that stayed current, every day.

Our Approach

• Embed, then scale: we started inside Camden’s data and digital team, working in their tools, then took the same approach into housing services.
• Map the data first: we documented how the repairs and property data fit together before building anything, so every screen rests on known fields.
• Join up, don’t replace: a data layer over the existing systems meant no migration, lower risk and faster delivery.
• Design for the doorstep and the desk: mobile first for officers in the field, block level views for managers.
• Measure adoption from day one: usage analytics built in, so Camden can see how each tool is used rather than guess.

The Solution

Building Safety Manager. One dashboard per block. Fire risk actions from three systems in one list, with status, priority and target dates. Key documents in one place: fire risk assessments, external wall assessments, fire strategies, structural reports, plans and monthly inspections. A residents view showing who may need help in an emergency, and a risk register scored on likelihood and severity. Managers can view by building, estate, responsible manager or the whole service.

Home Visits for neighbourhood officers. A secure app on work phones. Officers find a property, see the tenancy, household, open cases and repairs, then update records during the visit: new household members, contact details, next of kin, adaptations. Caution notes warn them before they knock. Every visit is logged with a structured outcome, and concerns become cases there and then.

Home Visits for fire safety advisers. Person centred fire risk assessments completed in the app, from referral and fire safety survey to actions, review dates, a risk rating and peer approval. A residents report lets managers see who is due a review across every building.

The Thread in Action

• A neighbourhood officer visits a flat and records that the resident has limited mobility and may need help to evacuate.
• The building safety manager sees that resident flagged as a risk factor on the block’s residents view.
• The resident is referred for a person centred fire risk assessment.
• A fire safety adviser completes the assessment in the app, and the approved record joins the building’s file.

One observation on the doorstep becomes part of the building’s safety record, with no rekeying.

The Results

Between 1 April and 23 June 2026 officers logged 1,067 home visits in the app. 801 of them, three in four, confirmed and updated resident data on the spot. The most common reason a visit did not succeed was nobody being home, at 20%, and because that is now recorded, Camden can plan revisits around it. Officers also raised 10 safeguarding and tenancy cases directly from the doorstep.

Making the Numbers Trustworthy

We are now tracing Camden’s management KPIs back to the source data behind them, naming who owns each source and writing down how each figure is calculated. Fifty five repairs and property KPIs are in scope. The early finding: the source data is usually right, but figures are reshaped in spreadsheets on the way to the report.

What This Means for Your Council

• Use the systems you already have; we join them up rather than replace them.
• Give officers a tool they will use: Camden’s officers logged over a thousand visits in 12 weeks.
• Connect what you know about residents to how you keep buildings safe.
• See adoption and data quality in numbers, not anecdotes.

In Camden’s Words

Talk to Us

Running building safety from disconnected systems? Book a conversation and we will show you how Camden did it.