Building Safety Resident Engagement Strategies documents - Disproportionate burden assessments for digital accessibility

Accessibility legislation (on legislation.gov.uk website) states that public sector websites must publish content in an accessible format, unless doing so would impose a disproportionate burden on the organisation. If that is the case, an assessment of the extent to which compliance with the accessibility requirement imposes a disproportionate burden must be carried out.

This is a Disproportionate Burden Assessment for each of the Building Safety Resident Engagement Strategy documents which are in PDF format.

The benefits of creating an HTML version of this PDF would be: 

• a fully accessible version for all users to access 
• an easily searchable and indexable version 

We are required under the Building Safety Act 2022 to co-create Building Safety Engagement Strategies for each of the five high rise buildings in the Council’s housing stock. The strategies were created following consultation with residents and other stakeholders and published in November 2024.

Only a summary version is currently available on the website as the strategies are all very similar, however with the increased focus of the Regulator of Social Housing on safety, there is a need to publish all five strategies.  

The resource required to convert these documents to accessible documents is not insignificant and for the purposes of urgency, publication as a PDF is preferrable.  

Also relevant to this decision are that: 

• We are legally required to make the documents available to the public, and it is prudent to publish them on the website
• Due to the nature of this content, there was a need to publish the document quickly, so we took the decision to publish the PDF  
• We have and will always assist with accessible versions on request 

We are required by the Building Safety Act to have strategies in place for the high-rise buildings.  

To convert them to accessibility compliant documents would be time consuming and there is a need for urgency to have them published as soon as possible on the website.  

Should anyone ask for an accessible version, we would make every effort to provide them with the data included in the documents. 

4 November 2025