Fire safety is back at the heart of the building debate. According to TNO, building regulations are insufficiently tailored to the building practices of today and tomorrow. That quickly sounded like a warning against timber construction, biobased materials and other lightweight building systems. As if making construction more sustainable automatically leads to greater fire risks. That's a dangerous oversimplification.

The interesting question is not whether wood burns. Of course wood burns. The interesting question is whether our system is set up well enough to implement new construction methods safely, predictably and affordably.

In the podcast Bureau Stoer this became nicely visible. Saskia Hegeman and lector fire safety Lieuwe de Witte made it clear that the concerns about fire safety are justified, but that this does not mean that we should stop using wood or bio-based building. On the contrary. Especially if we want to use these materials, we have to take fire safety into account from the start. Not as an afterthought, not as a nuisance, but as an essential part of good design. Therein lies the difference between a sensible conversation and the panic frame that quickly arose around the report.

The minimum as the end point

The problem is certainly not that good designers create fire-resistant buildings. A serious agency does not design exclusively with the Building Works Decree for the Living Environment (Bbl) under its arm. Fire safety consultants work with NEN standards, EN standards, NTAs, European classifications, fire tests, certification schemes, calculation methods and project-specific fire safety concepts. That world has certainly not stood still since 1992.

As such, the Bbl is not a design manual; it is a minimum public framework. And that's where the real problem begins. Too many developers mistakenly use that minimum as the end point: it complies with the Bbl, so it's good.

But a legal minimum is not yet a social optimum. Certainly not in a building practice in which we build higher, denser, lighter, faster and more often industrially. And certainly not in a society in which the elderly are living at home longer and the fire department cannot solve everything everywhere.

The split of the fire department

This pushes the fire department into an uncomfortable role. Formally, it does not want to be the party that imposes local additional requirements on top of the Bbl; that would only make construction more unpredictable. At the same time, the fire department does see that minimum designs sometimes do not sufficiently match the actual risks, the self-reliance of occupants or the prospects for action in the event of an incident.

This creates exactly the situation no one wants. While the government wants to remove rules to make building cheaper and some market players build tightly to the minimum, the fire department sees risks but does not want to become an alternative regulator. The inevitable result is that innovative building concepts then have to prove again on a project-by-project basis that they are safe enough. That's expensive, it slows down and it stifles innovation.

Equivalency as the highway

This is why equivalence is not a detour, but the highway. If a solution has been properly tested, soundly substantiated and proven to work in multiple projects, it should not be treated as an exception every time. We do not lack knowledge; we lack recognition, ordering and predictability.

This includes better linking of existing standards, assessment methods and recognized routes to the public framework. Not everything needs to be literally regulated in the Bbl, but it must be clear which routes are recognized, which scenarios are accepted and when a solution is sufficiently substantiated. A shared database of proven solutions can help. Not as an additional tool for consultants, but as a flywheel and cost savings for the entire sector.

Indeed, the alternative is that every project has to reinvent the wheel. Or worse: having to go through the test circuit again to prove what has long been known in practice.

An uncomfortable field of tension

In doing so, we should not shy away from an uncomfortable truth: This complex, project-based system is maintained in part by a robust tension of interests. After all, in this sector, uncertainty is also a revenue model. Fire laboratories have a commercial interest in endlessly testing materials in ever new setups.

Consulting firms lovingly write a new, comprehensive customized recommendation for each individual project. Even academic chairs and research institutions depend in part on the persistent call for more research for their continued existence and funding. While the integrity and professionalism of these parties are beyond question, the current system lacks the much-needed incentive to widely share knowledge, standardize and structurally remove uncertainty from the market.

What is 'safe enough'?

Here we touch on a deeper point. We often do not know exactly what residual risk we socially accept. In water safety, we talk openly about probabilities, standards and scenarios. In fire safety, too much is still implicitly hidden in rules, tests and traditions. As a result, we sometimes only know after an incident whether something was "safe enough." That is not a solid basis for a building transition.

The modernization of fire safety should therefore not begin with fear of new materials, but with clarity about the goals. We must be clear about which fire scenarios we must take into account and what deployment can still reasonably be expected of the fire department. It is also crucial to determine how much damage we consider socially acceptable, when self-rescue is sufficiently guaranteed, and exactly how fire safety, sustainability, affordability and execution quality relate to each other.

Away from the evidence swamp

The above questions require political and social choices. These should not be left on the plate of the fire safety consultant, the local fire department or the individual developer.

Fire safety is not an argument against future-proof construction, it is a system test. Do we dare to break through minimum thinking without falling into arbitrary additional requirements? Do we dare to take new materials seriously without making them suspect in advance? And do we dare to organize equivalence in such a way that good solutions can be applied faster, cheaper and more reliably?

Anyone who wants to build more cheaply must not only remove rules, but above all remove uncertainty from the system. We must prevent quality, safety and innovation from having to go through the same evidence swamp over and over again. Only then will we truly pass this system test.

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• Why fire safety regulations are under attack