A guidance note for FM
Most of us picked up what we know about discrimination law from a half-day induction course and experience since, and the honest truth is that the law has moved on and the cases keep showing the same gaps. So I've tried to write the note the way I wish someone had explained it to me: what the Act actually asks of a manager, how tribunals think about it, and how that plays out on a client site with a shift team and no HR office down the corridor.
The starting point was a review of tribunal claims against construction and building-services employers decided in 2025. What comes through is that the cases weren't lost by bad people. They were lost by ordinary managers applying ordinary processes (an absence trigger, a redundancy score, a certificate renewal, a roster change) without noticing that the process was landing unfairly on one person with a health condition. In one case, a 16-year site manager needed help renewing his SMSTS and first-aid tickets after a new manager arrived; nobody helped, he was dismissed, and the award was over £72,000. The adjustment would have cost almost nothing.
The note works through this in stages. Section 2 explains the types of claim and why "I didn't mean anything by it" is not a defence for most of them. Section 3 looks at what the successful claims had in common and what the FM equivalent of each one looks like. Sections 4 to 7 go deep on reasonable adjustments: when the duty starts, what counts as knowing about a disability (nobody has to tell us; a fit note or a pattern of absence is enough), what "reasonable" actually means, when it's fair to say no, and the FM-specific pressure points such as TUPE, shifts, PPE and client instructions. Section 8 turns all of that into a step-by-step process, and Section 10 is a record template.
I'd suggest reading it in two sittings: Sections 1 to 3 for the why, and Sections 4 to 8 for the how. Then try it against a real situation you've handled and ask yourself whether you'd have done anything differently. If the answer is yes, that's exactly the point.
A fire strategy is too often treated as a formality: written once, filed after handover, and never revisited. Yet it is the single document underpinning a building's fire risk assessment, maintenance regime, insurance position, and legal defence should an incident occur. Since the Building Safety Act 2022, higher risk buildings must maintain their fire strategy as a live, statutory part of the golden thread, tested at Gateway 2 and reverified at Gateway 3. This guidance note, grounded in GOV.UK, the Building Safety Regulator, BSI, the Engineering Council, and the National Fire Chiefs Council, explains what is required and by whom.
Why FM Should Be Involved in the Valuation Process
A Red Book valuation isn't just a figure for the accounts. It's built on a set of assumptions about condition, services, planned works that FM teams are usually best placed to confirm or correct. And it typically ends with a SWOT that, read properly, is less commentary and more a shortlist of what would actually move the asset's value such as a reception refurbishment, a plant upgrade, an early lease renewal.