Essential Safety Measures

Churches will initially locate and review their Certificate of Occupancy for the premises they own. This Certificate when completed by a reputable building surveyor, will detail a list of relevant maintenance areas that need to be addressed during the year to ensure the building remains compliant. These are called ‘Essential Safety Measures’ (ESM) responsibilities.

If you cannot locate a current Certificate of Occupancy please contact a Registered Building Surveyor to perform an ESM assessment. Once completed and signed off, this will form the basis of your decisions on what information to enter into B-Safe.

Your first task, given that the system is structured so you can easily select the building standards that are relevant to the property, is to enter basic information on your property/s. You are prompted to select the date of construction and you will be presented with the relevant elements of the building code.

The aim is to match your Certificate of Occupancy responsibilities with the subject areas in the software to build a tailored schedule of checks and maintenance actions relevant to each of your church properties.

This will allow you to produce your Annual ESM Management Statement.

The ESM requirements in the system vary depending on the construction date of the building so you will need to select the correct, dated version. In most cases you will not need to complete ESM if the church doesn’t own the property:

- renting a property for worship or other church activities

- conducting home church

You will need to gather and enter ESM information if the church is:

- occupying a single building

- occupying multiple buildings