ISO 19650-6 explained: can you still find and trust your safety records years later?
nima has folded ISO 19650-6 into the IMI Framework: a formal standard for managing health and safety information. Here's what ISO 19650-6 actually says, in plain language, and why it matters even if you'll never read the standard itself.
What is ISO 19650-6, in plain English?
It's the part of the ISO 19650 series that covers health and safety information specifically: how risks, incidents, and the treatments applied to them get recorded and shared across a project and an asset's operational life. It replaces ad hoc and organization-specific approaches with a shared, structured way of recording and exchanging information.
Is this a new legal requirement?
Not directly; it's a standard, not a statute, and nobody formally "fails" it the way you'd fail a regulation. However its place at the table is assured with nima's own announcement calling it "a key tool for managing the golden thread of information for higher-risk buildings" under the Building Safety Act. The golden thread, however, is a legal requirement for higher risk buildings in England: accurate, up-to-date safety information, held digitally, and available when needed throughout a building's lifecycle. What does this mean in practice? While the standard itself isn't law, it's positioned as one of the practical routes to meeting a requirement that is.
Does this apply to us?
It applies more widely than you might expect: clients, principal designers, contractors, and principal contractors under CDM (Construction Design and Management) Regulations 2015, plus asset and facilities managers, maintenance teams, and the people actually working in a building day to day. If you touch a risk assessment, an incident report, or a method statement at any point in a project or a building's life, this is describing your record.
What's actually different in practice?
The standard expects a structured record, instead of a free-text risk register: consistent fields for the risk itself, what happened if it materialized as an incident, and what was done about it, shared through a common data environment rather than buried in one party's files. It's meant to be specified upfront, in the employer's information requirements, so it's built in from the start of a project, rather than reconstructed afterward.
That's a significant step forward for project teams, but it naturally raises another question: what happens to those records once the project itself is finished?
What does the standard not tell you?
While it is detailed about how information should be structured and shared across project and asset lifecycles, it is less prescriptive about the practical challenges of ensuring records remain accessible, readable and trustworthy decades into the future. Long after after the project team has moved on, the software that created it may no longer exist, and someone (an insurer, a coroner, the Building Safety Regulator) needs to open it and trust that it hasn't changed.
Capturing the data well and ensuring it remains findable, openable, and trustworthy over decades are related but distinct challenges. ISO 19650-6 focuses primarily on how health and safety information is created, structured, and shared; long-term preservation and evidential integrity require additional consideration.
What should my company do about this?
Treat it as a prompt to check the second problem - the future-proof points - not just the first. For any safety record you're structuring more carefully at the point of capture, put in place measures now to answer whether you could actually find it, prove it hasn't been altered, open it in a readable form, and defend it, five years from now, not today.
This is where digital preservation becomes part of the conversation: ensuring safety records remain accessible, understandable, and trustworthy long after the systems that created them have changed.
That gap, between capturing the data well and actually being able to stand behind it years later, isn't unique to health and safety records. It's the same test underneath everything on our construction hub: can you find it, prove it, open it, and defend it?
Start with seven real questions construction teams are already being asked. Take the 7-question test.
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