Building Safety Regulator

Thursday 23rd October 2025 Westminster Hall

[Sir Desmond Swayne in the Chair]

15:09

[Chris Curtis (Milton Keynes North) (Lab)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered the performance of the Building Safety Regulator.

It is an unrivalled pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Desmond. I thank the Backbench Business Committee for granting the debate and colleagues from four different parties for adding their names to the application. Since being elected last year, I have been searching for something that the hon. Member for Boston and Skegness (Richard Tice) and I can agree on, and I am thankful that we finally managed to find it. The breadth of support demonstrates the shared determination across the House to make the system work better. I also thank those from across the industry for their tireless campaigning on the issue, as well as for the constructive way they have worked to ensure that we can get safer buildings across the housing system and provide the supply that is so desperately needed.

Across the construction and development sectors, there is rightly a growing frustration about how the new building safety regime operates in practice. Everybody supports the principle of safer buildings, but there is increasing concern that the system as it stands is holding back progress on building the new homes that are so desperately needed. My hon. Friend the Member for Northampton South (Mike Reader) and I sought this debate because of the growing concern across industry that the Building Safety Regulator, while well intentioned, is becoming a real barrier to hitting the 1.5 million homes target that we promised at the general election and that it is so important we achieve.

We should be absolutely clear that this debate is not an attack on the principle of building safety—very far from it. Seventy-two people lost their lives in the Grenfell Tower fire on 14 June 2017—72 lives needlessly and tragically lost. It remains a stain on our national conscience that it took such a disaster to ensure that we have proper accountability and testing in the building industry.

The Building Safety Regulator is a vital part of ensuring that nothing like Grenfell ever happens again, but it has to work. Time and again, developers and councils tell me exactly the same story: that schemes are stuck in the system and that, although the regulator is supposed to process applications within 12 weeks, tens of thousands of homes are still stuck to this day. The latest figures suggest that 22,000 homes are waiting for a remediation decision and that 33,000 new homes are waiting for approval. The cost of that is severe: according to the Centre for Policy Studies, there has been a 73% drop in housing starts in London over the past year, with the regulator one of the biggest causes. It is good to see today’s Government announcement on the ways we are going further to get the London housing market moving again, but the industry will still say the Building Safety Regulator is one of the biggest obstacles.

Perhaps the biggest travesty is that if we do not build new safer homes, more people in this city and across the rest of the country are stuck in more dangerous and older properties. That is before we even start to consider the thousands who are stuck in temporary accommodation —one child in every classroom—or those who are paying extortionate rents because this country has failed for decades to build the homes that are needed.

We now see a growing backlog in the BSR because telecoms infrastructure is being caught up in the new regulations for high-risk buildings—I say this in a building where I still cannot seem to get good phone signal, because we are not building the mobile phone infrastructure that is required across the city. That is causing real practical problems. It threatens to seriously impact the delivery of new buildings, particularly when rooftop installations are involved. If that is not addressed quickly, it could slow down construction and digital roll-out at exactly the point when this country needs to be improving both.

The delays affect not just developers but people: the families living in buildings that are still awaiting remediation and the people who know that their homes are not yet deemed fully safe. The stress that causes day after day is unimaginable. When we talk today about process, paper- work and delays, we must remember the human beings at the heart of this issue.

The economic impact is also huge: rising insurance costs, development finance drying up and higher up-front fees—all before a single brick gets laid. It has a real effect on the viability of building, particularly in our bigger cities. Peter John, the former head of Southwark council put it bluntly:

“The greatest single burden developers have faced over the last five years has been the introduction of the Building Safety Regulator. The unintended consequence of improving building safety cannot be to cut off the supply of new homes.”

He is right.

Melanie Leech of the British Property Federation told the Select Committee that BSR delays are holding back two thirds of the build-to-rent pipeline. As we are rightly reforming the Renters’ Rights Bill, which was considered in the Commons again yesterday, we need to ensure that new build-to-rent properties are built, in order to keep the system unclogged. Fewer new rental properties obviously means higher rental prices for everyone else. The Home Builders Federation says exactly the same: the delivery of high-rise developments has “ground to a halt”.

Earlier this week, the Government held their regional investment summit, and the message could not have been clearer: the UK is open for business, full of opportunity and led by a Government determined to drive growth. But investors also reminded us about the hard truth that investment is global, and if it takes too long or if it is too difficult to see a return here, capital will simply go elsewhere. We must pull down the barriers to investment and make it easier for growth to happen right here in the UK. If we are serious about growth, we need to back the builders, not the blockers.

The good news is that fixing this does not require a huge amount of money from the Treasury—given how difficult it is to get money out of the Treasury—and it is not primarily about huge amounts of new spending. But it does mean investing in the right people: the experts who can process complex applications quickly and accurately. Will the Minister confirm whether the BSR will have the flexibility to offer market rates to attract those people, rather than being constrained by standard civil service pay bands?

Secondly, it is about culture. Too many developers tell me they face a “computer says no” approach—an invalid application is simply rejected, forcing the whole process to restart. That would be frustrating enough over 12 weeks, but over nine months or more it is a killer for confidence. One of the most frustrating stories I have heard in all this is from a developer who was asked by someone at the Building Safety Regulator to slow down the speed at which they were making applications, to stop the BSR from becoming overwhelmed. At a time when this Government are rightly determined to speed up house building, it is frustrating to see an arm of government trying to slow the process down.

[Neil Coyle (Bermondsey and Old Southwark) (Lab)]

I congratulate my hon. Friends the Members for Milton Keynes North (Chris Curtis) and for Northampton South (Mike Reader) and the Backbench Business Committee on this debate. My hon. Friend talks about the frustration of a nine-month delay, but the BSR is supposed to work to a 12-week turnaround. Is he aware that 338 council homes at the Bermondsey biscuit factory have already been held up for 54 weeks? When approached, the BSR asked for another 12 weeks to complete the application decision.

[Chris Curtis]

I thank my hon. Friend for those comments, which show exactly the kind of consequences we are facing because of what has been happening to the Building Safety Regulator. If we are not building new social homes, we have to ask where they are going to be instead. Quite often, children aged one or two are stuck in temporary accommodation, not learning to walk or crawl properly and having their life chances curtailed because this city and this country have failed to build the homes to give them a proper life chance. It is important that we stand up to the blockers who stand in the way of that.

Could we move to a more collaborative approach, in which BSR staff can work iteratively with applications to resolve issues as they arise, rather than starting from scratch each time? I have heard worrying reports of inconsistency, with different teams taking different decisions on similar cases. What is being done to ensure greater transparency and consistency? Has the Department assessed whether further guidance is needed for both applications and the regulator itself?

The BSR has said that it hopes to clear the gateway 2 backlog before Christmas. I welcome that level of ambition, but will the Minister confirm what support the Government are providing to make it happen and whether new applications submitted after that point will be turned around within 12 weeks? Once gateway 2 approvals start to come through, we will start hitting the gateway 3 process, which is the sign-off after construction and before occupation. What preparation is being made to ensure that that process does not simply become the new bottleneck?

I will finish with a slightly wider point. Grenfell was a national tragedy caused by unforgiveable negligence, and it was right that the state responded, but when we design new regulations or regulators, we must remember the cost of getting it wrong. In this case, the cost is stalled projects, families waiting longer in unsafe homes, tens of thousands of children waking up this morning in temporary accommodation, and families paying unaffordable rents. The intent was sound; the implementation has been a catastrophic failure.

The lesson is clear: future systems must be built with feedback loops from day one, clear service standards, real-time data on performance, and consistent guidance. If the first version falls short, as it will from time to time, we need rapid reform, not months of drift while the consequences stack up. That is not about weakening safety; it is how we deliver better and faster. It is how we honour the lives of the 72 people we lost at Grenfell—not only by saying, “Never again,” but by building more of the safe, modern homes that this country needs, with a regulator worthy of the trust we place in it.

[Several hon. Members rose—]

[Sir Desmond Swayne (in the Chair)]

Order. I suggest a time limit of five minutes. Mr Tice, do you wish to speak?

[Richard Tice (Boston and Skegness) (Reform)]

In due time.

[Sir Desmond Swayne (in the Chair)]

Oh, I see. That is very gracious of you. We will have Mr Mike Reader then.

15:21

[Mike Reader (Northampton South) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Desmond. I thank the Backbench Business Committee for granting the debate, and I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Milton Keynes North (Chris Curtis) for doing tireless work to co-ordinate it on behalf of us both. I thank his team as well.

I want to start by echoing my hon. Friend’s comments on the disaster that was Grenfell. Waking up on my birthday, 14 June, to see the disaster unfolding in front of my eyes is something that will stick with me for the rest of my life; I am reminded every single time I celebrate a birthday. As we move away from the disaster, I am always very much reminded of the impact not only on the families who lost loved ones, but on the hundreds of other families and the community that was devastated by Grenfell.

To complement what my hon. Friend said, I have heard from the industry that the principles on how the Building Safety Regulator should work are very sound. We should work in a way that puts safety up front. There is a golden thread of data. When I joined the industry 20 years ago, one of my jobs as a graduate was to go and hunt O&M—operation and maintenance—manuals to find out exactly what had been built on site and how on earth we could improve it. There is a thread of information so that we can make decisions in relation to maintenance and operation, and there are very clear duty-holder liabilities and requirements, which were missing at Grenfell and in the industry.

In practice, we are seeing poor performance, which is why this debate was called. We see a regulator that is risk-averse and adversarial and that has an outdated approach, despite being a very new regulator. It prevents the delivery of safe, affordable homes, which is critical given the housing crisis and the homelessness crisis we inherited from the Conservative party.

I am perhaps a glutton for punishment. I give up my time as a Back Bencher to go to quite a number of breakfast events, dinner events and roundtables to talk about the sector that I am passionate about—the construction and built environment sector—as someone who built a 20-year career working in that great industry. It used to be about growth and change, when Opposition Members were in power as Ministers, but now the Building Safety Regulator comes up time and again as a real industry frustration. The BSR is widely regarded as actively hindering the construction of new homes—as a key blocker of the Government delivering 1.5 million homes. As my hon. Friend the Member for Milton Keynes North said, 22,000 homes are awaiting approval for remediation and 33,000 new homes are waiting for approval.

Sometimes, it is not even homes that are stuck in this process. A small to medium-sized contractor from Northampton, Briggs and Forrester, spoke to me about doing the Guildhall in the centre of London. One might not think that that scheme would be caught up, but there are two grace and favour flats in the Guildhall, so the whole thing got stuck in the BSR and was delayed by over six months—all they were doing was replacing chillers on the roof and some mechanical and electrical equipment. Had those two flats not been there, the scheme would have been rushed through and we would have seen one of the great feats of engineering in our city renewed and improved.

I am hearing some worrying things, which I have raised with the Minister, about a trend in London for developers to seek to develop hotels that, once built, are flipped into long-term rents, avoiding the BSR. There is now a grey market of people finding ways of avoiding going through the BSR, including by building alleged hotels that then become rental accommodation under long-term leases.

I do not want my contribution to be only negative. I welcome the reforms, and particularly today’s announcements: the recruitment drive, the new BSR innovation unit and the new leadership, which I think will make a big difference. However, I have to ask the Minister why the industry does not feel like it is seeing the benefits. Is it because that is not enough, or because the Government have been poor at communicating what we are doing to fix this mess? I encourage the Minister to do more to talk about the things that we are changing, because we also need to change the industry culture of talking ourselves down and talking only about the issues that we face.

I started my career 20 years ago in the construction sector as a civil engineer. I am fortunate to chair the all-party parliamentary groups for excellence in the built environment and on infrastructure and to be Labour’s construction champion. On Monday, I put out a LinkedIn post saying that my hon. Friend the Member for Milton Keynes North had secured this debate and that we would like views from industry. Generally, people have welcomed what has happened. There are lots of different proposals for how we could fix this: improving the way that fast-track lanes work; a ratings system for developers; digitising the process; competitive pay, as my hon. Friend said; and even a pre-application process so that developers can engage early to address the issues, as we do in the planning process. I encourage the BSR to consider private sector partnerships to build capacity, because I do not believe that we can recruit quickly enough to deal with the problem.

From what I have heard, the fundamental thing that makes a difference to delivery—whether it is in projects or something like the BSR—is culture. We have heard about a “computer says no” approach and a binary blame culture. The BSR does not believe that developers are trying to do the right thing and is bureaucratic and combative. I have heard that 70% of submissions are returned to developers on their first submission. The majority of those returns are not because of safety concerns, but because of documentation errors. That is not what we want the regulator to do. We want it to focus on safety, not ticking boxes. The regulator should be a problem solver, it should be collaborative, and it should help us to deliver brilliant, affordable, safe homes.

When I joined the industry 20 years ago, people talked about Latham and Egan, and about trust, teamwork and collaboration being central to how we deliver things in the sector. Twenty-five years later, that should still be the case. The Construction Leadership Council, co-chaired by my former boss Mark Reynolds of Mace, has done some brilliant work on that, for which I commend it thoroughly.

I end by encouraging the Minister to challenge her officials on the culture that they are creating. It has to be a culture that says, “Yes, let’s do it together,” rather than, “No, come back and try again.” I have a number of questions for the Minister. The BSR has said that it will clear the backlog by 26 January. Does she feel confident that it can achieve that? The Construction Leadership Council co-chair said in front of a Committee that he believes it will be able to get down to a five-week approval process. How achievable is that? Can the Minister commit to making sure that there are more proactive communications on the issue from her Department so that we can start to deal with the negative sentiment in the market, encourage investors to invest in high-rise and mid-rise schemes, and start building the homes that we need in urban areas?

Can the Minister challenge her officials to make sure they are ready for gateway 3? About three weeks ago, I attended a breakfast where the director of one of the UK’s biggest commercial firms told a room of 50 people, to some quite shocked faces, that she had been considering having a year in their programme to deal with gateway 3 beyond gateway 2, as we see projects now come through. That is a real risk, because we will have buildings finished, but the capital that is tied up in them will not be able to be released through sale or rental. It could really collapse the market.

Finally, there is a suggestion that the new construction regulator could envelop the Building Safety Regulator within its remit. That will need primary legislation. It may well come through in the next couple of years, but knowing now how long things take to get through Parliament, we could be waiting until 2028 or 2029. Can the Minister assure us that if the scope expands and we see a construction regulator whose remit includes construction products and other things, we will not lose the focus on building safety and getting that process going?

I have one more ask of the Minister. As the chair of the all-party parliamentary group for excellence in the built environment, our next inquiry will be into the Building Safety Regulator, so I hope that she will help us with evidence and support us in engaging with industry and helping the Government to fix the problem.

[Sir Desmond Swayne (in the Chair)]

Can we try harder to stick to five minutes?

15:31

[Richard Tice (Boston and Skegness) (Reform)]

I will do my very best, Sir Desmond, and it is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship. I congratulate the hon. Members for Milton Keynes North (Chris Curtis) and for Northampton South (Mike Reader) on securing this important debate. The Building Safety Regulator has the potential to hinder dramatically the Government’s laudable regime of building more homes and more affordable homes. We all remember the horror of Grenfell, and having this entity is probably the right way forward, but there are certain key lessons that are rapidly being learned.

Hon. Members have spoken about some of the specific details, but I fear that the consequences of this issue are even greater than we may imagine. I have been listening to businesses from the property industry, which is my core industry—I started digging trenches in 1983, so I have been in the industry a long time. House builders and investors are now telling me that they are done. They are just not going to bother. We have heard experiences of people allocating a year from completion to occupation. Investors are saying, “We’re not going to bother. We’re going elsewhere.” We have to act faster on this.

There are a couple of key things that we need to consider, including the application of a strange thing called common sense, which, too often among regulators, is sadly not very common. When we have traditional building materials that have stood the test of time for hundreds of years, be it brick or concrete, we could apply common sense to say, “Well, if using those materials, there should be a fast fast-track process.” I question also whether the whole concept of gateway 1 is necessary at all. If a project gets to gateway 2, that covers gateway 1. A developer is not going to spend hundreds of thousands or several millions on a planning application and get on site if they know they are not going to pass gateway 2, so why bother with gateway 1 at all? Numerous other examples have been talked about.

Although there have been changes, we need to monitor those changes very quickly. It may well be that what we need is either an outsourcing or—dare I mention the word—competition. A competitive process or regulator could operate alongside the existing process, so that it does not act as too great a block. If it does, we will suffer the worst of all worlds, one in which those who most need new homes in our cities, particularly affordable homes, suffer the most. As a consequence of well-intentioned—but badly implemented and organised—caution and prevention, they will miss out. The numbers are as bad or worse than people fear, particularly in city centres.

The issue also means that people are just not bothering to develop on brownfield sites—I have a number of them in my constituency—because the costs are too great, and because of the fear of the Building Safety Regulator and of ever-more regulation that may make the situation even worse. There is an enthusiastic pressure on the Minister and the Department to listen to these concerns and respond to them with constructive answers and keep everybody updated. As other hon. Members have said, the Minister should communicate that rapidly to industry participants. She needs to give the industry confidence that it is worth bothering to seek planning and start on site on important new housing projects here in the United Kingdom and help us all to create growth, wealth and more homes.

15:35

[Danny Beales (Uxbridge and South Ruislip) (Lab)]

It is an honour to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Desmond. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Milton Keynes North (Chris Curtis) for securing this important debate.

The housing crisis is one of the defining challenges of our generation. We clearly face a series of overlapping problems: a crisis of poor quality and unsafe homes, affordability and now also housing delivery. I hear about the impact of that in Uxbridge and South Ruislip every day at my surgeries and via my inbox. It is clear that this problem is chipping away at our growth potential, health and educational outcomes, and even public confidence in our political system. The Government have rightly set an ambitious target of 1.5 million new homes over the course of this Parliament to address those issues. We must do everything we can and leave no stone unturned in meeting that challenge.

I am concerned that the BSR, in its current form, is now acting as a barrier to delivering new homes at the pace required, particularly taller buildings, which disproportionately affects house building in urban areas such as my west London constituency. As hon. Members have expertly set out already, the BSR requires all prospective high-rise buildings to pass through three stages of approval, and at each stage, developers are seeing significant delays and setbacks.

Applications are routinely spending 25 to 40 weeks at gateway 2, and some developers I have spoken to have even seen applications take over a year, compared with a 12-week target. Approximately 70% of gateway 2 applications were rejected or invalidated, and only seven out of 40 applications at gateway 3—which is supposed to be a post-construction formality—were approved last year.

Some rejections will always be necessary and may be critical to ensure the safety of developments. The Grenfell inquiry revealed systematic safety failures in the construction industry, but we have to get the balance right and the system has to be effective and fair. As my hon. Friend the Member for Milton Keynes North said, we have to look at safety holistically. Safety is one form of risk and impact, but if we are not remediating homes or building homes, we are not moving people out of damp or mould, homelessness or temporary accommodation, which has immense safety implications for our population.

Over the summer, I wrote to the BSR to raise my concerns about its efficiency. In reply it highlighted a high volume of non-compliant applications. My response is to ask, what is it doing to ensure compliance? The BSR should work collaboratively with the sector. Major developers have cited contradictory communications from the BSR about safety standards, which have been exacerbated by a high turnover of staff and have led to unnecessary delays in projects.

A large developer hoping to build 6,000 homes near my constituency in west London described the issues with the BSR as an “existential” threat to its business, and said that in one current application, the BSR team were not even appointed to work on the application until week 15 of what should be a 12-week process. Those issues are having a significant impact on housing delivery, especially in urban and high-density areas, and we have seen massive falls in new housing starts in London in the first quarter of 2025.

Unpredictable and unreliable regulatory processes weaken the attractiveness of investment in British housing developments, leading to delays in projects progressing and causing costs to spiral. We all know that the construction sector is under serious strain—17% of all insolvencies in May 2025 being construction companies—and that this emergency requires an emergency response.

There are many reasons for the construction sector and housing delivery to be weakening, some of which—such as international issues and construction material costs—are out of the Government’s control, but this reason is not out of their control. It appears that an overly adversarial culture has been allowed to develop between industry and the Government over recent years. Although we must look seriously at who was to blame for the failures that led to the horrific scenes at Grenfell, as mentioned by my hon. Friend the Member for Northampton South (Mike Reader), it is important to work collaboratively to solve those issues.

Markets work best when there is a genuine partnership between industry and the Government, and where builders and regulators work together to achieve shared goals. I am pleased, therefore, that the Government announced plans this summer to start moving forward on those issues with a more collaborative model of regulation, and that they have listened to and acted on industry concerns about the capacity of the BSR by hiring 100 new members of staff. I also welcome the new fast-track process being developed and a number of measures that the Government have taken.

We need up-front guidance about expectations, so that everyone understands what is required and expected. I was a cabinet member for planning in a London borough for seven years, and we would have clear planning guidance documents, a pre-application process to discuss applications, and dialogue about applications—not a yes/no, binary, approve-or-reject approach. The view was that the role of planners and regulators should be to resolve issues, approve sustainable development and ultimately support growth. We now need that approach at the BSR.

The BSR needs to focus on crucial safety issues and avoid mission creep. I have heard stories of prolonged discussions and disagreements over the colour of the paint in internal hallways—clearly, the system has not been working. The BSR can and should play a role in restoring the public’s confidence in construction post Grenfell. It should be a vital safety backstop, but it cannot be allowed to become a roadblock to all development. If the BSR loses the trust of industry, loses us investment as housing stalls, and loses the public’s confidence as they are unable to live in new, safe and affordable homes, that would be a regressive step.

I again thank my hon. Friend the Member for Milton Keynes North for securing the debate. I hope the Minister will agree that the BSR must be reformed further and faster if we are to meet our target of 1.5 million new homes.

15:41

[Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Sir Desmond. I commend the hon. Members for Milton Keynes North (Chris Curtis) and for Northampton South (Mike Reader) for introducing the debate. It is always great to be here to give a local perspective from Northern Ireland.

I commend the Government and the Minister in particular for their commitment to the 1.5 million homes. I hope they can achieve that, but some things have to be in place for it to happen. One of those relates to the Building Safety Regulator. Northern Ireland does not have a building safety regulator equivalent to the one in England, but we are strengthening building safety regulations, which are enforced by local councils across Northern Ireland.

Building regulations in my constituency of Strangford are carried out by Ards and North Down borough council and, to a lesser degree, by Lisburn and Castlereagh city council and by Newry, Mourne and Down district council. My relationship with them has always been positive and helpful. When we bring something to their attention, they do their best to contact the office right away. Local building control enforces health, fire safety, energy and safe accessibility—all the things that I hope the Building Safety Regulator here would do as well.

The safety of derelict buildings is an issue I have mentioned before. Some of the ones in my constituency raise deep concern, and there is a call for building safety officers to step in and do their bit. For example, in the past few years young people have been breaking into a number of derelict two-storey homes and businesses in Court Street in Newtownards, the main town in Strangford. They were using them for under-age drinking and antisocial behaviour—drug smoking and other things. The antisocial behaviour is one thing, but it has been noted that the buildings may not have been safe for people to be in, even prior to their dereliction. In such instances, there is a real need for further consideration to be given to having a building safety regulator, which could support what the hon. Member for Milton Keynes North and others have put forward as the key issue here on the mainland.

The safety of housing has been a key theme in this debate, and I wholeheartedly agree with what has been said, especially as we instinctively think of the likes of Grenfell. The devastation that that caused for so many people is imprinted on our minds forever.

We have a housing crisis across the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. We have homes that are not deemed safe or habitable for our constituents. Work can be completed through the Building Safety Regulator to enforce the maintenance of homes so that they are safe for people and their families, and in Northern Ireland the local building control will do the same.

Ever mindful of your request to be pithy, Sir Desmond, as you always are, I will conclude. We reflect on lessons learned from past tragedies, including Grenfell. Building safety is our moral responsibility. Everyone should have the right to feel safe and sleep soundly at night, knowing that the homes they are in, as well as their places of work, are safe. While England is the Minister’s jurisdiction, I respectfully request that she looks to commit to ensuring that Northern Ireland follows with similar rules and that building legislation be looked at and, more importantly, improved for everyone.

15:44

[Joe Powell (Kensington and Bayswater) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Sir Desmond. I congratulate my hon. Friends the Members for Northampton South (Mike Reader) and for Milton Keynes North (Chris Curtis) on securing this debate.

I start by briefly reminding hon. Members why Britain’s building safety regime needed such radical reform after the Grenfell Tower fire, which took place eight and half years ago in my constituency of Kensington and Bayswater, with 72 people losing their lives in an entirely preventable and foreseeable tragedy. The bereaved, survivors and our community are still waiting for justice. We hope it will come soon.

As the Grenfell Tower inquiry revealed, there were a litany of systematic failures that led to the fire—a failure to learn lessons from previous fires, most notably the Lakanal House fire in 2009; a failure of Conservative Ministers to update approved building regulations; a failure of manufacturers to produce safe cladding; a failure of builders and architects to ensure safe design; and a failure to spot risks on the part of local building control, who signed off an unsafe building. There are many more.

As many Members will know from their own constituencies, this problem stretches far beyond Grenfell. Today, more than 5,500 residential buildings contain dangerous, flammable cladding and fewer than half of mid and high-rise buildings have even begun remedial work. That is up to 1 million people still stuck in unsafe buildings, victims of the building safety crisis that is ruining lives.

Many of those residents have themselves suffered due to the performance of the Building Safety Regulator. Other Members have not yet mentioned that there are almost double the number of major cladding remediation projects awaiting gateway 2 approval than there are new builds. The housing journalist Pete Apps wrote today of a housing association-owned block that has been waiting since November 2023 to install new fire doors.

I welcome the new chair of the Building Safety Regulator, Andy Roe, being so candid last month with the Housing, Communities and Local Government Committee, of which I was a member up until this week. Mr Roe said:

“if we have not shown very significant change by the end of the calendar year, we run the risk of losing the complete confidence of everyone in the regulatory regime.”

That is why it is so important.

It has been felt in recent months that there has been something of a campaign about the Building Safety Regulator, and some of that campaign is driven by a desire to roll back changes in building safety introduced post Grenfell. I totally reject the false choice between safety and house building. I believe we need a regulator that works. That means being specific about what changes will make the system more predictable and faster, to help deliver on the Government’s housing goals, while ensuring that we do not compromise on safety.

I can assure hon. Members that I have never met anyone involved in campaigning for truth, justice and change for Grenfell who does not want to see this Government tackling this country’s housing crisis, including by increasing the supply of social and affordable homes that would get children out of temporary accommodation in constituencies like mine, which has some of the worst housing inequality in the country.

The question for me is not whether the BSR should exist, but how it can improve. I welcome its improvement in transparency. We can now get a breakdown of the reasons behind the delays.

We have already heard some really constructive suggestions. They include: hiring more registered building inspectors centrally, given that 27% of the backlog is due to a lack of registered building inspectors being able to get on to projects; engaging in predictable pre-application dialogue; having clearer guidelines for submissions; moving away from a staffing project model that relies on ad hoc multidisciplinary teams that take too long to form, which were described to our Committee as “dysfunctional” by Mr Roe; and perhaps even considering whether more minor improvement works, which are the majority of projects in the BSR, could be dealt with outside the scope of the full gateway process, to keep the BSR focused on the higher risk projects.

I welcome the Government’s decision to unlock the building safety fund to social housing providers, as well as the £39 billion for the affordable homes programme, the remediation action plan to devolve responsibility down to local level, so that we get that building-by-building conversation on fixing the cladding crisis, and the construction products regulation process. Those are all positive steps.

In closing, like other colleagues, I ask the Minister how much she is able to keep track of the hiring process for the 100 new staff, including the 15 new inspectors, who Andy Roe told us would be in place by the end of September. How do we deal with the skills shortage? What conversations is she having with the Department for Education to co-ordinate the construction skills package announced several months ago? Will that include the types of skills that we need for the BSR? Will the BSR moving under the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government deliver the additional transparency and accountability that we need on performance? I hope this debate can contribute to a better BSR that can tackle the building safety crisis and the housing crisis together.

15:50

[Luke Taylor (Sutton and Cheam) (LD)]

It is a pleasure as always to serve under you, Sir Desmond. I congratulate the hon. Members for Northampton South (Mike Reader) and for Milton Keynes North (Chris Curtis) on securing this important debate.

Eight years ago, London watched on in helpless horror as Grenfell Tower burned. Some 72 lives were lost, families were decimated and a community was changed forever. The tragedy was compounded by the fact that this was by no means a natural disaster; it was the direct result of a failed system that was allowed to prioritise cheap, flammable cladding over people’s lives.

Almost a decade on, that system is still failing. Other major fires have burned on and seared themselves into our memory. In 2019, Richmond House in Worcester Park in my constituency burned to the ground, and tomorrow I will visit the Hampton estate, where the rebuilt Richmond House stands. In August last year, a building on Freshwater Road in Dagenham caught alight just days before the final Grenfell report was published. In July this year, we watched on as a major fire ripped through a 17-storey complex in Walworth. Those are just a few examples, but there are many more.

Londoners are on edge every time they see a breaking news story about a building fire. They worry that another terrible tragedy is unfolding—another awful fire that will uproot lives and impose a terrible toll on communities. Hundreds of thousands of Londoners do not have confidence that they are safe and that they can sleep easy at night in their own homes. They live with cladding that hugs their home, keeping them warm in the winter and cool in the summer, but that threatens to become a towering inferno, leaving residents reliant on waking watches and, too often, faulty fire alarms. For too long, developers have been getting away with rolling the dice with people’s lives.

When the Building Safety Regulator was established through the Building Safety Act 2022, people living in these unsafe high rises were promised action by the previous Government, but instead of accelerating remediation the BSR has become one of the biggest barriers to removing dangerous cladding from buildings. Since the BSR came into force in 2023, construction projects have been delayed, costs have spiralled and thousands of residents remain trapped in unsafe homes. One of the reasons for that is that the BSR approval process is weighed down by complex bureaucracy.

Cladding remedial works to high-risk buildings cannot begin until the regulator has signed off the scope of the works. Officially, approval should take eight weeks for existing buildings and 12 weeks for new projects; in reality, cladding remediation applications are routinely taking more than 30 weeks and sometimes more than 40 weeks. We have heard even longer waits reported by Members in this Chamber.

The communication from the regulator has been equally inadequate. Developers and housing associations report one-way communication and applications disappearing into the void. When a response finally comes, a high proportion of applications are rejected at the validation stage. That cannot just be labelled as administrative lag; it means months of avoidable risk for thousands of people.

In many ways, the regulation is currently manifesting as the worst of both worlds, standing in the way of not just progress in remediating the existing properties, but building the next generation of safe, affordable homes that we need to end the housing crisis. The situation is not helped by the fact that there is a mismatch between the Building Safety Act’s definition of building safety risks and the approach to identifying defects under the PAS 9980 fire safety standard. That is quite clearly a lower standard that fails to take action on major fire safety risks and does little to nothing to bring down extortionate insurance premiums.

The Liberal Democrats are clear that the standards for remediation under PAS 9980 should match the statutory standards in the Building Safety Act, so that there is a clear rulebook for everyone. If the Government want applications to the BSR to be faster, they must ensure that those submitting them are equipped with all the facts and given clarity about what is required to meet the right standards, and that the process for approving those applications is as fast as it is rigorous.

Those two vital aspects of solving our housing and safety crisis—speed and accuracy—need not exist in tension; for the BSR to be effective, it must be more comprehensive. Limiting its scope to buildings over 11 metres tall is narrowing its ability to properly scrutinise and facilitate works on many other vulnerable apartment buildings. Indeed, Richmond House, which I mentioned earlier, would not have fallen under its remit, despite the fact that it housed 23 flats across four storeys. I invite the Minister to outline what plans—if any—exist to bring those standards together, facilitate faster processing of applications for works, and extend coverage and support to those in buildings less than 11 metres tall.

What compounds this crisis in perhaps the most nefarious way is the impact it is having on leaseholders, too many of whom are still paying out of their own pockets for dangerous construction and regulatory neglect. They are sent eye-watering bills, living in fear of the next service charge. They are treated as an afterthought in a housing system that increasingly seems rigged in favour of developers. The Liberal Democrats will not accept a housing market in which ordinary people are left powerless while corporations walk away scot-free, and we are concerned that the building safety levy that the Government have proposed will not provide sufficient funding for all required remediations. It makes no sense whatsoever for the BSL to exclude properties under 11 metres, but that is what the Government are pushing ahead with.

There must be a thorough and funded plan to assist leaseholders in properties under 11 metres to make their properties safe to live in. The Government should be taking swift and serious action to ensure that all leaseholders, including those currently excluded from the BSL, are protected from remediation costs in defective blocks with safety risks, as defined in the 2022 Act. I hope that the Minister can shed some light on whether the Government are considering taking those further steps, because leaseholders—not just in London, but across the country—are watching, and will be hoping not to be let down once again.

None of this should detract from the need to build the next generation of green, affordable and safe homes. I reject the implication we sometimes hear that there is some inherent tension between those objectives. If we want to truly solve the housing crisis in this country with a renaissance of sensible and community-driven house building, we have to recognise the defects in the existing system upon which we are layering new infrastructure. Two things can be true at once—that allowing safety standards to become a barrier to house building will damage our long-term economic security, and that accelerating new building without rigorous safety standards and proper accountability for developers will damage our physical security.

There are those who say that only a small fraction of new build units are defective, but I remind them that the fraction will account for a much larger overall number of units as we grow that stock. We can and must do both. A sensible, progressive, interventionist Government would recognise that their purpose is exactly that— not just to regulate the market, but to play an active role in it, discouraging cowboys and faceless, careless developers with rules, standards and real, comprehensive enforcement.

In fact, any Government worth their salt would see this issue in its wider context: a housing market that is fundamentally broken, not just by years of inaction on house building or by the great council housing sell-off, but by decades—maybe even centuries—of lopsided relationships between leaseholders and landowners. If we are really to put the power back into people’s hands and reconcile the two dreams of housing that have dominated in this country over the past century—the right-wing dream of democracy in which everyone has an ownership stake, and the left-wing dream of a nation in which everyone’s right to shelter is guaranteed, no matter their income—we need to end the broken leasehold system altogether, both for owners and for renters.

I invite the Minister to tell us why the Government have failed to commit, as the Liberal Democrats did at our recent conference, to ending that lopsided relationship by giving leaseholders new powers and rights to take collective ownership. Why have they not committed to removing dangerous cladding from all buildings, while ensuring that leaseholders do not have to pay a penny towards that removal—as is only right, because of the regulatory failure that enabled it? Why have they not committed to holding developers to the highest possible standards and introducing tougher oversight of building inspectors, and not just to capping unreasonable service and estate management charges, but to abolishing ground rents on all existing leases?

That is the radical but necessary action that we must take, and actions such as these, which actually fix issues that our constituents face, are how we defeat the new populists on the right and the left who offer nothing more than simple slogans and catchy TikToks. It is up to the Government to respond to our calls and deliver the necessary changes.

15:59

[Gareth Bacon (Orpington) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Desmond, and to take part in this debate on the building safety regulator. I thank the hon. Members for Milton Keynes North (Chris Curtis) and for Northampton South (Mike Reader) for securing this debate and for their opening speeches, both of which I thought were extremely reasonable and set the tone for what has been a largely reasonable debate in which there is much common ground.

It is a primary duty of any Government to ensure that everyone has a safe and high-quality home to live in. Progress has been made in recent years to ensure the nation’s housing stock, with the share of non-decent and unsafe homes witnessing a decline in the last decade. Official statistics from the National Centre for Social Research, funded by the Government, show that under the last Government the prevalence of non-decent homes fell from 17% in 2019 to 15% in 2023, with falls across every tenure. The focus of this debate is the building safety regulator and its performance since being established by the last Government.

Through the Building Safety Act, the BSR was created with the intention of regulating higher-risk buildings, raising the safety standards of all buildings, and helping professionals working in the sector. It was established in good faith, with sensible aims that any Government would agree were needed at the time; and, pertinently, as I think every speaker has referred to this afternoon, it was done in the light of the tragic loss of 72 lives in the appalling Grenfell Tower fire. As a former chairman of the London Fire and Emergency Planning Authority, I was taken to Grenfell Tower by the London Fire Brigade a week after the fire. I went to the top of the building and saw at first hand the devastation that had been wreaked there and the consequences of years of inadequate building safety control, so I believe the motivations behind the creation of the BSR were entirely understandable.

However, there is simply no point in denying that the BSR is not working today as it was originally intended. The truth is that it is proving to be a major additional contributor to a malaise that Britain has been suffering from pretty much since the turn of the millennium. Put simply, we struggle to build. Britain is now constrained within a self-imposed straitjacket of over-zealous red tape, which prevents much-needed development while at the same time causing absurd outcomes such as £100 million bat sanctuaries.

The context of this debate is worth noting. As we know, the Government have ambitious targets for housing delivery, having insisted that they will build 1.5 million new homes by the end of this Parliament; but with at least 25% of this Parliament now behind us, they are miles behind schedule, and barely a third of what should have been built by now is actually completed. The new Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government, the right hon. Member for Streatham and Croydon North (Steve Reed), has publicly said that his job should be on the line over whether or not he meets the target. Unfortunately for him, nobody believes that this Government will meet their housing target in just one Parliament: not the Office for Budget Responsibility, not Savills, not the Home Builders Federation, not Professor Paul Cheshire of the London School of Economics and not the National Federation of Builders—the list goes on and on.

In London the situation is particularly dire, not least because of some of the policies in the Mayor of London’s London plan. A further problem coming down the line is the possibility of the Government’s making changes to the landfill tax. At present, potentially toxic landfill is taxed at £126.15 per tonne, whereas harmless inert waste such as soil or concrete is taxed at £4.05 per tonne, and nothing at all if it is used to fill up former quarries. However, there are strong rumours circulating that the Government are thinking of abolishing the quarry exemption and switching all landfill up to the higher rate. Building industry experts have estimated that that rise, which is in excess of 3,000%, will add up to £28,000 to the construction cost per home. That is especially an issue in London, where the high proportion of apartment buildings generates much more landfill than elsewhere.

The impact of such a change on the construction industry is obvious. As inflation sits stubbornly at nearly 4%, twice the target level, alongside anaemic growth and increased costs to the industry, including materials and fuel, additional costs to the building trade are stacking up.

It is in that context that we need to consider the performance of the building safety regulator. The BSR is not only moving too slowly to fulfil its purpose, but wielding the axe to too many of the applications crossing its desk. As the hon. Member for Northampton South said, the Building Safety Regulator rejects about 70% of applications to begin construction, compared with roughly 10% to 15% of applications that get rejected in the wider British planning system.

Something is very clearly wrong here. When 150 high- rise residential construction projects are delayed across the UK because of the BSR, when schemes are delayed 38 weeks longer than the target time for approval, and when 60% of affected schemes are in London, the city with the highest need and the greatest demand, it is clear that we must work together to realise a better future for the BSR and to unchain the industry from some of the restraints it currently wears.

The Building Safety Regulator is all too often a handbrake on development, rather than an accelerator of safe and effective development. I welcome the Minister to her place in her first Westminster Hall debate, and I know she will be eager to tell us about the Government’s attempts to reform the BSR and solve this issue in June earlier this year. On the face of it, increasing the BSR’s headcount could be a positive move, but only if the staff brought in have the requisite technical expertise in building and fire safety and are thus able to accelerate the planning process. By simply increasing the BSR’s capacity, the Government have not yet been able, as was promised in an MHCLG press release,

“to enhance the review of newbuild applications, unblock delays and boost sector confidence”,

because it has not solved the core issue: the number of application rejections.

As the British Property Federation has argued, improved dialogue with applicants and more guidance on the BSR application process would go a long way to speeding things up by vastly increasing the likelihood that applications are right first time, rather than their having to be revised after being rejected. In the age of artificial intelligence, mandating machine-readable submissions and building an electronic file management system that ingests structured data would be immeasurably useful, enabling the use of commercially available AI to triage completeness, flag inconsistencies and vastly speed up the process for both the applicants and the regulator.

As was said earlier—I believe by the hon. Member for Kensington and Bayswater (Joe Powell), but I stand to be corrected—introducing greater transparency around the BSR’s performance is certainly welcome. The new fast-track process seems like a good idea, although it remains to be seen whether it is effective, but clearly more needs to be done.

Reforming the operation of the BSR should not be about making developments less safe. Changes must instead tackle the fundamental problem: being process-focused to the point that we fail to deliver. That is particularly true in places such as London, where it has now become difficult to build anything at all. The existing urban environment lends itself to denser developments, which are inevitably viewed as higher risk under the BSR and therefore face very lengthy delays and huge additional construction costs. Consequently, there is a danger that we risk urban sprawl into the countryside and the destruction of the green belt, with homes being forced into communities with an inability to meet the infrastructure demands of all new residents.

It is important that all sides work constructively, across Government and Opposition, to deliver remediation, building safety and the best outcomes for local communities. This debate has encouraged me that we can work across the House to tackle burdensome regulation in the housing and planning industry, including where the Building Safety Regulator is playing its well-intentioned, but undeniably imperfect role. That requires real and serious focus from the Government, who will have to act far faster than they have done to date. I will listen with interest to what the Minister says.

16:08

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government (Samantha Dixon)]

I am pleased to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Desmond. I am grateful to my hon. Friend the Member for Milton Keynes North (Chris Curtis) for securing this important debate on the performance of the Building Safety Regulator, and I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Kensington and Bayswater (Joe Powell) for so ably setting the context of this debate around the terrible Grenfell disaster. I recognise much of what he and other Members have said. We will make changes where necessary and we are focused on the outcome, which is a country with the safe homes that it needs.

Colleagues will have seen today’s announcement from the Mayor of London and the Secretary of State concerning a package of support for house building in the capital. The package is designed to improve the viability of housing developments in the near term, boosting the number of new homes, including affordable homes, to be delivered in the next few years. This action to accelerate development goes hand in hand with our continuing commitment to make sure that homes are safe.

The regulator plays a vital role in ensuring the safety of residents in high-rise buildings. Since its establishment under the Building Safety Act 2022, it has been central to delivering post-Grenfell reforms and restoring public confidence in the safety of the built environment. I appreciate and acknowledge the concerns raised by industry stakeholders, developers and Members of this House regarding delays, operational challenges and the impact on housing delivery. These are serious issues, and I welcome the opportunity to discuss them openly today.

In June, MHCLG announced its intention to transfer the Building Safety Regulator from the Health and Safety Executive into a new dedicated body under the Department, making it clear where responsibility lies. A statutory instrument to enable the transfer is expected to be laid before Parliament next month. This move will ensure that the BSR provides a dedicated focus for building safety and will strengthen accountability to Ministers and Parliament. Furthermore, it marks an important milestone towards the Government’s commitment to an integrated single construction regulator, as recommended by the Grenfell Tower inquiry.

A dedicated programme team has been established to manage the transition of people and services from the Health and Safety Executive to the new body, ensuring a smooth and orderly transfer without the disruption of the BSR’s ongoing operations. As we heard today, Andy Roe has been appointed non-executive chair of a new board within the Department to take on the functions of the BSR as part of initial steps towards creating a single construction regulator. That is the technical explanation, but put simply, he is chairing the BSR. I have been truly impressed by how hands-on he has been.

Andy, probably more than anyone in this room, understands the necessity of balancing the need for new housing with the safety of those houses. He brings a wealth of experience in safety regulation and leadership from his previous role as commissioner of London Fire Brigade. He is supported by the new chief executive officer for the BSR, Charlie Pugsley, who was also a senior officer in the London Fire Brigade. The new leadership team are already implementing significant operational changes based on their extensive industry experience.

Turning to gateway 2, we recognise that delays are unacceptable, which is why the Government announced these changes to the BSR in June. They are not just personnel changes, but substantial changes that have improved the way the regulator works. As part of the reforms, a new innovation unit is already managing 27 new build applications, consisting of 6,192 housing units. The innovation unit is already demonstrating progress, with the majority of applications currently meeting or bettering the 12-week service level agreement for processing applications. The BSR has also recently announced a new batching process for category A projects. This consolidates the teams used to review applications into one organisation, significantly reducing delays. The BSR has also committed to recruiting 100 new staff by the end of the year to boost its capacity.

Since July 2024, the BSR has met weekly with industry bodies to address gateway challenges and has increased two-way engagement with applicants. We are clear that the conversation must deepen. The BSR also plans to introduce an account manager model, where applications from large developers will be grouped and assigned a dedicated point of contact to ensure that issues are identified at the earliest opportunity. New guidance, developed in partnership with the Construction Leadership Council, has been published to help applicants clearly understand what is needed for a successful submission. The BSR is actively supporting the Construction Leadership Council to publish a further suite of industry guidance—expected around mid-November—on the statutory documents accompanying building control approval applications, staged approvals and gateway 3. The BSR is continually reviewing its guidance to help duty holders understand the legal requirements and how to comply.

My hon. Friends the Members for Milton Keynes North and for Northampton South (Mike Reader) both raised concerns about gateway 3 approvals. Gateway 3 is still new and only a few projects have reached it so far. As more projects reach this stage the backlog should clear, making specialist support more available to the BSR. Class 2 registered building inspectors are now able to handle simpler, high-risk work which frees up class 3 inspectors to focus on new builds and remediation, helping make the best use of available resources.

As of early September, BSR has received 16 gateway 3 applications for new build high-risk buildings, with nine already approved and issued with completion certificates, while seven remain under review. Those figures will grow as more schemes reach completion. Some applications have moved through quickly, demonstrating what a well-prepared submission can achieve. Others have required additional information before assessment could progress. This early experience is helping both developers and the BSR to refine the process, making sure it is consistent, efficient and firmly focused on safety outcomes.

The BSR has previously committed to improving operations by December. To support transparency and accountability, as we have heard, it published performance data on 16 October and will do so monthly to track progress publicly against that commitment. It reported that in August, gateway 2 determinations hit a record 209 across all application types. A total of 152 national new build applications are being progressed—that is 33,670 homes—with the newly established innovation unit handling 27 of these.

Most applications in the innovation unit are meeting or exceeding the 12-week service level agreement for new build applications, and the BSR expects nearly all new build applications to conclude by December, with the final three closing in January 2026.

The first recommendation from phase 2 of the Grenfell Tower inquiry was to create a single construction regulator to tackle complexity and fragmentation in the regulatory system. The Government have already begun implementation, starting with improvements to the BSR and plans to transition it into the new arms-length body. We intend to legislate when parliamentary time allows and will publish a prospectus later this year to set direction.

My colleagues asked a number of questions, in particular regarding skills and salaries. The BSR was designed to draw on industry experience while also managing the known shortage of skilled specialists. However, as the construction sector and partner regulators rely on the same limited pool, this continues to constrain the BSR’s capacity. While offering higher pay might attract talent, it risks destabilising partner organisations by shifting, not solving, the shortage. A long-term workforce strategy, like that under way in the fire service, is needed to build system-wide capacity, and we are working on it with local authorities, the BSR and registered building control approvers to help shape it.

In conclusion, the Government remain firmly committed to a building safety regime that is both robust and proportionate—one that protects residents while enabling the delivery of much-needed homes. We have listened to the concerns and taken decisive steps. We want to improve processes and ensure that they are fit for purpose. The reforms announced earlier this year are designed to address the very issues that have been debated today, and we will work closely with industry, residents and Parliament to ensure that the regulator delivers effectively. I am very grateful to my hon. Friends the Members for Milton Keynes North and for Northampton South for securing this debate, and I look forward to the continued dialogue ahead.

16:18

[Chris Curtis]

I will be as quick as I can. I welcome the Minister to her place and thank her for her response. I also thank my hon. Friend the Member for Northampton South (Mike Reader) and the hon. Member for Boston and Skegness (Richard Tice) for bringing their experience from industry and talking about some of the things they believe we need to do to address these problems.

I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Uxbridge and South Ruislip (Danny Beales), who has had experience of homelessness and therefore knows personally the importance of getting this right. Finally, I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Kensington and Bayswater (Joe Powell), who reminds us of the backstory and the tragedy that made it so important for us to set up the Building Safety Regulator and get this right.

My first debate in this House was about building safety, and I talked about my brother, who is one of the brave local firefighters in Milton Keynes. If there were an incident in a high-rise flat, he would be one of the people risking his life to fix it, so it is important that we get building safety right. He will be one of those going into unremediated buildings unless we have a Building Safety Regulator that can act quickly enough to enable remediations, and he will be one of those going into older and unsafe buildings if we cannot move residents into safer buildings because we cannot build them in the first place.

We cannot forget the human cost of getting this wrong. I hope we are not back here in a year’s time still talking about a regulator that is not moving quickly enough and a country that is not building enough homes.

Question put and agreed to. 

Resolved,

That this House has considered the performance of the Building Safety Regulator.

04:20

Sitting adjourned.