Free Golden Thread Register Template (UK): Building Safety Act

Most accountable persons hold far more of the golden thread than they can prove, because the information is real but scattered across consultants, contractors, managing agents and a shared drive nobody has audited. This register indexes each prescribed item against where it is actually held, which is what turns a pile of documents into something you can demonstrate.

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Free for use within your organisation. No sign-up required. If it saves you time, a link back to this page is always appreciated.

Tell me when the rules behind this template change (free, one email when it happens, nothing else).

Who this applies to

Higher-risk buildings in England. A building is higher-risk if it is at least 18 metres in height or has at least 7 storeys, and contains at least 2 residential units. The duty falls on the accountable person, and where a building has more than one accountable person each is responsible for the information relating to their part of the building.

The legal basis is section 88 of the Building Safety Act 2022, with the detail prescribed by regulation 4 and Schedule 1 of the Higher-Risk Buildings (Keeping and Provision of Information etc.) (England) Regulations 2024. The standards the information has to be kept to are set separately, by the Higher-Risk Building (Management of Safety Risks) (England) Regulations 2023.

What's in the template

• Information to be kept: the 13 categories in Part 1 of Schedule 1, from building compliance and registration through key building information, fire safety management, evacuation, structural risks, building design, mandatory reporting, resident engagement and complaints
• Documents to be kept: the 16 categories in Part 2, including completion certificates, the building assessment certificate, the building safety risk assessment, plans and contravention notices
• Against each: whether it is held, where, who owns it and when it was last reviewed

How to use it

Work down the register and be honest in the "Held" column. A blank is more useful than an optimistic tick, because the purpose of the exercise is to find what is missing while you still have time to obtain it. The categories that most often come back blank are building design information for older buildings, and completion documentation for works carried out by previous owners.

Name an owner for every row. Golden thread information decays through ambiguity rather than neglect: where a category is nominally the managing agent's and nominally the freeholder's, it is in practice nobody's. Then set a review cycle and record the date, because the golden thread is required to be kept current, not merely assembled once.

Related records: fire risk assessment record keeping, residential PEEPs, fire door inspection records, and for non-higher-risk buildings the Part L building logbook.

Who must keep this record

The accountable person. For most buildings that is the freeholder or whoever owns or has repairing obligations for the structure and exterior, and the principal accountable person is the one responsible for the structure and exterior as a whole. Managing agents very often hold the information day to day, but the duty is not delegable by contract: the accountable person remains answerable to the regulator for it.

This register is an index, not the golden thread itself. The underlying information still has to be kept to the prescribed standards, which include being kept electronically, being accurate and being capable of being handed on when the accountable person changes.

How long to keep it

For as long as the building stands, and it must transfer on any change of accountable person. That handover obligation is the reason the "where it is held" column matters more than it looks: information that exists only in a departing agent's private filing is information that will be lost at exactly the moment it is needed.