Construction Products Register of Specialists

Applications are open for experts wishing to join the Office for Product Safety and Standards Register of Specialists (OPSS RoS)

The Office for Product Safety and Standards is a part of the Department for Business and Trade, and our purpose is to make regulation work so that it protects people and enables businesses to understand their obligations.

OPSS is:

  • the national regulator for all consumer products, except for vehicles, medicine, and food.
  • the national regulator for legal metrology, ensuring weighing and measuring instruments are accurate and reliable.
  • the national regulator for construction products.

We also:

  • lead Government policy on product safety, metrology, hallmarking and market surveillance, and are responsible for product safety at our borders.
  • lead standards and accreditation policy across Government, working with the British Standards Institution and the United Kingdom Accreditation Service, providing benchmarks for the manufacture of safe products and assuring the quality of testing, calibration and certification services.
  • sponsor the British Hallmarking Council.

https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/office-for-product-safety-and-standards/about

As part of our remit to regulate construction products, OPSS have created a dedicated register for construction product related expertise.  In this call for construction products expertise, we are looking for individuals within the domains of civil and structural engineering, fire sciences, material science as well as other associated areas of knowledge in relation to the natural analytical sciences and technical fields of expertise. Refer to Annex A of the information pack for applicants for a non-exhaustive list of the specific areas of expertise.

Experts are encouraged to apply to join the register of pre-approved experts from whom OPSS can commission short pieces of ad hoc scientific work to support its regulatory work. By applying to the register, OPSS will be able to work at pace with you, to ensure that the needs of the request are met in a timely manner that accommodates both parties.

The work that you undertake will be used to inform our thinking, develop research proposals, and assist with solving complex technical challenges.  Therefore, experts will be selected based on their experience and ability to provide scientific evidence, analysis or technical advice across OPSS’s remit including:

  • Construction product research support: methodological design
  • Proposal appraisal
  • Rapid evidence reviews
  • Report evaluation/peer review
  • Quality assurance
  • Risk analysis

Additionally, individuals may also be asked to contribute on:

  • Guidance and technical support on the development and validation of analytical methodologies applied to the assessment of construction products.
  • Ad hoc technical advice on construction product safety and compliance issues across a broad range of products and impacts.

There is further information available on the OPSS web pages.

Specialists can find out more information via the Information pack for applicants.

The call for specialists is ongoing and there is currently no deadline by which applications must submit by.  Any specialist who wishes to apply must submit a completed application form in Microsoft word format.

All applicants looking to apply to be on OPSS’s register of specialists for construction products are to send the following information to [email protected]:

  • your CV (mandatory)
  • completed application form in Microsoft Word format (signed electronically) (mandatory, forms in other formats will not be processed)
  • your Declaration of Interests (mandatory)
  • your list of publications (last 10 years) (optional)