BS 851188

On 27 March 2019 the British Standards Institution (BSI) opened a public consultation exercise to gather feedback on the draft of the newly formed BS 851188. This is expected to replace the existing Publicly Available Specification PAS 1188 standards for flood resistance products.

This existing PAS standard is broken down into four separate parts:

PAS 1188-1: Building aperture products
PAS 1188-2: Temporary products
PAS 1188-3: Building skirt and wall systems
PAS 1188-4: Demountable products

Whereas the new BS 851188 standard will be split into the following categories:

BS 851188-1 Flood resistance products. Part 1: Building products
BS 851188-2 Flood protection products – Specification. Part 2

Drafts of both of these new standards are currently live for public comment and consultation through the BSI’s website. These can be accessed at:

The public consultation phase is expected to be open until 28 May 2019.

These standards look at a series of products for flood resistance, which seek to manage water entry into a building, allowing for appropriate conditions. With a wide range of products now available on the market including both active measures (requiring manual implementation in the event of a flood) and passive measures (not requiring manual implementation in the event of a flood outside of normal everyday use), this standard will help identify products that have met an industry recognised British Standard.

BRE conduct a wide variety of training in the field of property flood resilience, to find out more about what resources and products are available to help manage risk of flooding, see the introduction to property flood protection and flood prevention course. Or for more detailed information about how to successfully survey the flood resilience of properties, see Property Flood Resilience Surveyors training course.

This article was originally published on 12 April 2019 on BRE Buzz. It was written by Matt Barker.

--BRE Buzz