My business is all about evidencing compliance (with regulations) so some might naturally assume I want MORE of them. Well no. 

What I want is a regulatory regime that is clearly articulated, proportionate and effective.

What we have right now in Building Safety is neither clearly articulated, proportionate or effective. 

If the Government doesn’t take a pause before loading an additional 58 recommendations onto the sector they will make a very bad situation a whole lot worse. 

Nobody wins and most importantly building safety will not improve.

Parking the car 

The Co-Op store in my village is on a busy road, has a bus stop opposite and a large (free) car park just behind. All good reasons for the double yellow lines along the shop frontage.

The council officials that made the decision ‘way back when’ to prohibit parking probably did so with the best of intentions, but there is a snag.

The villagers all know from experience they are unlikely to ever meet a traffic warden so the learned behaviour for many of them is to ignore the rule and park wherever they like. 

The council bosses, however, probably pat themselves on the back daily for a job well done.  

This brings me onto our Government’s regulatory response to the Grenfell Tower tragedy…

In the aftermath of Grenfell, we were all asking why and how such a disaster could occur in a first-world country with some of the seemingly most stringent safety-related rules and regulations ever created. Britannia surely rules the (health and safety) waves.

David Cameron clearly felt we were hamstrung by overly zealous regulation, which led to his infamous 1 in 3 out policy.

To cut a very long story short, the rules and regulations leading up to Grenfell were either inadequate, ignored or both. 

And, just like the double yellow lines outside my local Co-Op, the likelihood of enforcement action was low to non-existent.

Regulation had failed.

Over the 7 years since Grenfell our government has commissioned Dame Judith Hackitt to conduct the Independent Review of Building Regulations and Fire Safety, which reported back in May 2018.

The government also instituted the Grenfell Tower public inquiry which published its Phase 1 report in October 2019 and its Phase 2 (final) report in September 2024.

The first two reports prompted significant regulatory change in the form of the Building Safety Act and the Fire Safety (England) Regulations. A large number of existing Acts were amended and additional Statutory Instruments (Regulations) were published. 

Regulatory response 1 – Building Safety Act 

The ‘Building a Safer Future’ (Hackitt) report contained 8 high-level recommendations that ultimately led to the Building Safety Act and the establishment of the Building Safety Regulator within the Health and Safety Executive.

It is almost impossible to put into words the complexity and scale of the Building Safety Act. Even the government teams that wrote it don’t seem to understand it and certainly didn’t mitigate the chaos it would cause through its implementation.

In early 2020 I penned the Building Safety Regulator – Doomed for failure? blog to draw attention to how our government was making a series of regulatory mistakes, how they should alter course and how ultimately the changes would not make residents safer any time soon.

‘Despite repeated promises that “we will learn from the Grenfell tragedy” and an intent to create the Building Safety Regulator (BSR), I remain cynical that this will positively impact building safety any time soon.’ – Matt Hodges-Long Feb 2020

Roll the clock forward four and a half years and the Building Safety Regulator is indeed failing to deliver on its regulatory responsibilities. 

One example of this regulatory quagmire is the slow approval of Building Control applications that now fall under the BSR Gateway process.

Delayed approvals directly impact the pace of critical building safety remediation projects, the exact same projects Secretary of State Angela Rayner recently vowed to accelerate. 

Recent reporting in The Observer stated: 

‘But work has still not started, because permission from the building safety regulator is now statutorily required as the building is high rise, and under a chronically under-resourced and agonisingly slow-moving Health and Safety Executive the BSR has not been able to process the application within its eight-week target.

And

Construction News, via a freedom of information request, learned that as recently as February that the BSR had only 10 regulatory leads and eight case workers. More have been hired but capacity remains woefully short;’

Last week on Sky News I described the Building Safety Regulator as ‘struggling to operationalise’ which in the context of this article was remarkably kind to them.

There are so many new responsibilities and checkpoints for the Building Safety Regulator to manage. One of their key responsibilities is overseeing the safe management of 13,000 high-rise blocks, which are already occupied by residents.

Under current plans, the enormous task of assessing the initial regulatory submissions of these 13,000 blocks is expected to take 5 years! This process started in April 2024 and at the time of writing this article, I have not come across a single Principal Accountable Person (typically the building owner) who has received feedback from the new regulator.

The assessment process requires the following information to be submitted for each block:

1. Safety Case Report – detailed narrative of the fire and structural safety risks of the building and the controls that are in place
2. Resident Engagement Strategy – detailed information about how residents are included in the management of building safety
3. Mandatory Occurrence Reporting System – how serious safety incidents are identified, recorded, managed and reported to the regulator

Sitting behind the production of these documents are multiple other regulatory requirements including the creation of a Golden Thread of information, hazard identification workshops, safety management systems etc.

The level of industry change is unprecedented and expensive to implement. The significant increases in compliance costs that result are in most cases recovered from leaseholders via the service charge.

At the time of writing, I am unaware of any enforcement action taken by the Building Safety Regulator for any breach of the Building Safety Act. In response to the recent and widely reported fire at Spectrum House, Dagenham, the regulator made a written statement some 80 hours after the event. However, they did not appear before a camera or give any media interviews.

Despite his promise in March 2024 that he would ‘regulate with teeth’ the lack of prominent leadership by the Chief Inspector of Buildings, Philip White has been noted by many industry commentators including myself.

There is a clear and present risk that the Building Safety Regulator is swamped by complexity and lack of resources.

Regulatory response 2 – Fire Safety (England) Regulations 

The Phase 1 Grenfell Inquiry report was published in October 2019 and many of the report recommendations were incorporated into the new Fire Safety (England) Regulations (FS(E)R) that commenced in January 2023.

The FS(E)R clarifies the existing Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order in relation to multi-occupancy residential buildings of all heights. Key points inclusions are:

1. Inclusion of the external wall within Fire Risk Assessment
2. Sharing of fire safety information with Fire Service
3. Routine inspection of fire doors
4. Reporting of faults and rectification of fire safety equipment to the Fire Service
5. Installation and maintenance of Secure Information Boxes 

Applicability of different duties under the FS(E)R depends on the height of the building. Responsibility for enforcement of the regulations lies with the Fire and Rescue Service, who work under the direction of the Home Office.

The FS(E)R in my opinion had the opportunity to be the most significant positive improvement to Fire Safety of all the post Grenfell regulations (subject to effective implementation and enforcement).

Unfortunately the implementation of the FS(E)R was lacklustre in terms of communication, education and enabling technology. Since the new duties for Responsible Persons went live on 23rd January 2023 I am aware of widespread non-compliance in the industry and a total absence of enforcement by the Fire and Rescue Service.

In May 2024 I asked the Home Office for information about FS(E)R Enforcements and inspections. A few weeks later they responded to confirm that no statistics had been published. At the time of writing this article, 19 months after FS(E)R commencement, no statistics have been published.

I have also repeatedly asked for clarification of the additional funding provided to the Fire and Rescue Service for the enforcement of the FS(E)R. However, an answer has never been forthcoming. I can only conclude that additional funding has not been made available.

Could the regulatory situation get worse?

Yes!

Our new government has promised to report back within 6 months on all 58 Grenfell phase 2 recommendations and move at pace to complete the implementation of the outstanding phase 1 recommendations.

In the main I completely agree with the Inquiry recommendations but need to sound a loud word of caution. They will take time to plan and implement. I worry that the Whitehall mandarins will load extra responsibility onto existing poorly performing regulators, create additional regulators and fail to grasp the amount of time and resources that substantial change takes.

Policymakers need to ensure they do not repeat the mistakes of the past 7 years. There is a clear risk of the inquiry recommendations being blindly accepted to meet the need for political expediency.

As Dr Al Pinkerton MP, speaking in the Building Safety and Resilience debate on 11th September 2024 put it to Ministers:

“I ask them to act with “more haste, less speed” to ensure that safety is not compromised in the name of expediency.”

I understand the urge to ‘hurry up’ with Building Safety reform, but we owe it to all stakeholders to ensure we move forwards rather than backwards.

If we are going to paint more double yellow lines we need to ensure the signage is clear and we have sufficient traffic wardens recruited.