The Building Safety Regulator: Building a Better Regulator (Industry and Regulators Committee Report)

Monday 8th June 2026 Grand Committee

Motion to Take Note

17:43

Moved by

[Baroness Taylor of Bolton]

That the Grand Committee takes note of the Report from the Industry and Regulators Committee The Building Safety Regulator: Building a Better Regulator (2nd Report, HL Paper 225, Session 2024–26).

[Baroness Taylor of Bolton (Lab)]

My Lords, I am pleased to introduce this debate on the report The Building Safety Regulator: Building a Better Regulator, which was published by the Industry and Regulators Committee in early December. As is often the case, we have to wait some time for these debates, but the issues that we raised are still very relevant.

I place on record my thanks to members of the committee and our whole team for the work that they have done. I particularly mention the noble Lord, Lord Best, who was the first person to alert us to the problems that we should be looking into as a committee. I also thank Dominic Cooper, our researcher, for the sterling work that he put in.

There is a wealth of experience in this Room. My noble friend Lord Roe will give us the insider’s view, my noble friend Lady Warwick will talk about social housing, and there is a wealth of experience from local government and elsewhere. However, we should start off this debate by remembering the 72 people who died in the Grenfell Tower fire. This coming Sunday will be the ninth anniversary of that tragedy and, as the Minister told us, remembering that is at the heart of everything we do. We have to remember the 72 people who lost their lives and those who were bereaved and who survived them. It was a very significant event.

The inquiry that followed that tragedy found that the regulatory arrangements for the construction industry were too complex and fragmented. In many cases, they allowed the industry to choose its regulator, creating a commercial incentive not to regulate too strongly. As part of efforts to ensure that such an event could not happen again, Dame Judith Hackitt’s independent review recommended the establishment of a new regulatory framework to oversee building safety in higher risk buildings. Consequently, Parliament legislated, with all-party support, to create this new framework in the Building Safety Act 2022, which gave this responsibility to the Building Safety Regulator set up within the Health and Safety Executive.

The Act gave the BSR responsibility for approving safe construction of new higher risk buildings and construction work within existing higher risk buildings. This was to ensure that compliance with building regulations would be assessed by an independent regulator rather than by the complex framework that existed with local authorities or private sector building control approvers. The establishment of the Building Safety Regulator and its regulatory framework was necessary and it was welcomed quite significantly. The committee heard some evidence that the BSR was improving safety by requiring greater consideration of safe design and management by the housing industry. However, the overwhelming impression the committee got was that the BSR’s current impact is that it has caused widespread delays to both the delivery of new housing and the improvement of existing higher rise buildings, including the remuneration of dangerous cladding.

The BSR’s statutory timeframe for making building control decisions for existing buildings is eight weeks, and for new build it is 12 weeks. Its own data shows that it takes, on average, much longer than the statutory timelines, and we have heard that many applicants were waiting up to a year for very significant decisions. This has threatened the viability of new housebuilding in cities and left residents in unsafe buildings for longer than necessary. It does not make anyone safer if we fail to deliver new housing in overcrowded cities or leave residents waiting longer for remediation of their unsafe buildings. We heard from one leaseholder, Pamela Street, that residents in her building

“have quite simply had enough”,

after their application was delayed when the building was identified as needing work in 2019. Many others have had to live with uncertainty and seemingly open-ended financial commitments for work that might have to be done.

There are reasons for these delays but, whatever they are, this level of performance is entirely unacceptable. During our inquiries, the Government and the Building Safety Regulator recognised these problems and began to make practical improvements, which I will mention. The committee welcomed this. However, the BSR admitted that, even after these changes, it may fall short of meeting its statutory timeframes. This will not banish the anxiety or frustration that residents and companies are already experiencing, so I ask the Minister to update the Committee on when the Government expect the Building Safety Regulator to meet its statutory timeframes for making decisions.

We heard several reasons for these delays. Initially, the Building Safety Regulator seconded in members of multidisciplinary teams to make building control decisions, leading to delays in setting up those teams in the first place. The BSR is now increasing its in-house capacity following government investment, which is a significant and positive move. However, this sits within the broader shortage of building and fire inspectors to staff the BSR and other related organisations, such as local building control authorities and fire and rescue services. The Government have made £70 million of additional funding available to address these shortages in building safety personnel, which must be welcomed. The planned construction action plan is also welcome, but it needs to have the long-term funding necessary to increase this capacity. I hope the Minister will be willing to update the House on a regular basis about progress that can be made in this respect.

Another key issue was that the construction industry did not understand what information it needed to provide for the BSR to approve its projects. That was compounded by the Building Safety Regulator, certainly in the early days, not communicating clearly with applicants about their projects. It is unreasonable to expect applicants to meet a standard when it is not clear how it is assessed or what a successful application would look like. We heard that progress had been made during our inquiry, with the BSR beginning to provide greater guidance and increasing communication with applicants. How confident are the Government that the BSR has now given sufficient guidance to make its requirements clear?

However, not all the problems are on one side. The Building Safety Regulator has expressed concerns about the capability of the construction industry to meet its requirements, arguing that the requirements of the building regulations have not changed, only the way in which they are assessed. The BSR gave examples of the reasons why it has rejected applications, including an inability to show how buildings had been designed to avoid collapse, which sounds very basic to me, and a common issue whereby applicants’ own computer modelling showed that smoke would be pumped into fire exits rather than extracted. While the BSR must improve its own performance and provide clear guidance, it does not reflect well on the construction industry that many applications are rejected or delayed due to basic errors and an inability to evidence information on central elements of fire and structural safety. The Government have since consulted on their strategy for the built environment professions, and I hope the Minister can tell us when they will announce reforms to ensure that industry can play its full part in improving the safety of buildings.

So we have a situation where the BSR’s own processes contributed to delays and where industry complained that a significant amount of design information was required up front before construction could begin. This was a necessary change from the previous situation, where developers could decide and change critical features after construction had commenced. However, we felt that the BSR overcorrected for this problem and we welcome that it is planning to take a more staged approach to approvals, allowing construction to begin without requiring the full design of non-safety critical features. The balance has to be carefully assessed, because both factors are important.

Of course, our report is not just about new build. We heard significant frustration from leaseholders that smaller, less safety-critical works to their properties, including domestic renovations, required approval from the BSR, and that could often lead to significant delays and a significant increase in the costs of projects. It also tied up in-demand safety professionals on more minor works. So we called upon the Government to remove less safety-critical works from the BSR approval process or to provide a more streamlined approach to them. The Government are consulting on taking a more proportionate approach to works inside individual flats and small-scale works in communal areas, such as the replacement of fire doors, but keeping them within the BSR framework. That would be welcome, and we are hoping that the Government can move swiftly to implement those proposals.

I turn to the products involved. The use of combustible cladding and insulation at Grenfell Tower shows that the quality of construction products is critical to the safety of a building, but the regulation of construction products is patchy and fragmented. The Government have consulted on their initial proposals for improving construction product regulation. We were pleased at that and support it, particularly the introduction of a generalised safety requirement to ensure that all products are covered by at least some regulation. It is urgent that people can trust the materials that their buildings are made of. Again, I hope the Minister can update us on when the Government will take these plans forward.

The Government have taken action, changing the leadership of the BSR, including by installing my noble friend Lord Roe, and we welcome that. The Government have also provided additional investment in BSR staffing and removed it from the Health and Safety Executive to set it up as a stand-alone agency, which are steps in the right direction. This is a move toward introducing a single construction regulator, as recommended by the Grenfell Tower Inquiry. We welcome this as it will provide greater clarity and consistency in the regulation of the industry, but there is still a lot to do. The Sunday Times said yesterday that there are still over 400,000 people living in flats with fire risk and that only 21% to 26% of buildings known or estimated to have unsafe cladding have actually been fixed. So a start has been made but further action has to be taken, and it is planned in a number of the areas that we have raised. We welcome that but we think there is still a long way to go to avoid another tragedy happening.

Moreover, and this point is very important, without further action from the Government and indeed from the BSR, there is little chance that the Government will be able to meet their target to build new homes and to remove dangerous cladding, and a failure to meet either of those challenges will leave people living in unsafe conditions for longer. I know that the Minister is engaged and aware of these problems, and we welcome the fact that some action has already been taken during the time since our report was published, but we have to keep on top of this issue because it is still a serious problem that many people are facing. I beg to move that the report be considered.

17:59

[Baroness Harding of Winscombe (Con)]

My Lords, it is an honour to follow our erstwhile chair of the Industry and Regulators Committee. I begin by declaring my interest as a member of that committee.

I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Taylor of Bolton, for her excellent chairing of both the committee as a whole and this inquiry; I have to be careful about how much I say we miss her because her successor, who is also doing an excellent job, is sitting just beside her. I shall try very hard not to repeat the noble Baroness’s excellent, clear and comprehensive introduction, which really set out the content of the committee’s report, with which I wholeheartedly agree. I also thank the clerk and the staff who worked so hard on producing this report and who continue to support the committee so well.

As the noble Baroness, Lady Taylor, just said, the Building Safety Regulator was created as a direct result of the tragedy of Grenfell Tower nine years ago. It was a clearly necessary and welcome step, and it demonstrated a clear regulatory gap that had absolutely tragic consequences. However, this time last year, when we as a committee started to investigate the performance of the Building Safety Regulator, it was also clear that the recommendations from the Grenfell Tower Inquiry had not been implemented very well at all.

That was causing material harm in and of itself. Remediation was nowhere near on track. Unsafe buildings remained unsafe—and, sadly, still remain so today. Tenants are stuck, unable to move on with their lives, and unable to do basic DIY. Frankly, they are still scared, too. So it is a thoroughly unsatisfactory situation in terms of remediation, as well as a real handbrake on development in a country that desperately needs new housing. That is something with which all of us on all sides agree, as does everyone else in the country—except, sadly, when it actually involves each of our local areas, but that is a different issue.

We had a regulator that was set up with the best possible intent and with genuine cross-party support but was simply failing in its job. In our political process, when we debate Select Committee reports, even though it takes quite a long time to get here, as the noble Baroness said, my experience is that, often, nothing much has changed. Even though it might be a year since it came out, we can pick up the report and carry on the debate as we have done. This is an unusual instance where that is not the case and where I need to congratulate the Government on acting. I wait, as I suspect others do, to hear from the noble Lord, Lord Roe, for a proper, up-to-the-minute update on the performance of the regulator, but, based on a basic measure of the number of emails I have received from organisations lobbying in this space, as compared to the number of emails I received this time last year when we initiated the inquiry, I have to conclude that an awful lot of the noise has died down, which suggests that there is real movement and improvement. That is something we should mark.

I will try hard in the rest of my speech not to go back over what the noble Baroness has just set out but to look forward. First, it is clear that a beginning has been made. It is hugely tempting—just as when the regulator was first set up—to assume that, once you have said it, it exists. An awful lot of good things have started, but they need to finish. I echo the noble Baroness’s question on when the Building Safety Regulator will meet its operational KPIs. It is definitely improving, but when it meet them? When will the Government bring forward the necessary changes in legislation to enable some of the high-volume, low-risk work to be moved out of the scope of the BSR so that it can focus on where it will really make a difference? When will we know what the path to create a single construction regulator will look like? That is where I would really like to focus: on the lessons learned. The Government undoubtedly embarked on creating a new, bigger regulator, because this is a tale of creating a regulator not going very well at all.

I have tried to pull out the big lessons that I would like us to learn. The first is that it was clear that culture change was, and still is, needed in this industry. However, the approach taken was to assume that that culture change can be created without the regulator engaging directly with the industry at all: “The industry can’t be trusted, so we’re not going to engage with it”. That does not create culture change. Culture change is created by grown-up, adult discussions with a regulator that retains its independence but has the courage and capability to talk to the industry; I believe that that is what the noble Lord, Lord Roe, and his team have started but, my goodness, we must not forget that. After you have seen the sort of regulatory failures that were in the construction industry, it is very easy to assume that the same mistakes will be repeated, but you need active engagement between the regulator and the industry to create change.

Secondly, the operational performance of the regulator really does matter. The moment in the inquiry that depressed me most was when we took evidence from the then leaders of the Building Safety Regulator. They told us not only that they were missing their operational KPIs by a very long way but that, even with their best endeavours, in several months’ time, they might get to missing them by only a few weeks. That is just not good enough. If we want regulators to perform, we in Parliament and the Government need to hold them to account for delivering their operational performance. This means that we need to think very carefully about what those KPIs are because, if they get so accustomed to missing them that it is okay to say in Parliament, “Never mind, we’ll get better but we won’t actually get there”, we have a real problem.

My third learning is that, if you are going to create a new regulator, you must resource it properly. The unintended consequences of great intentions that are poorly resourced are worse than not doing anything at all. If we are going to set up a single construction regulator, we have to do it properly and set targets with a line of sight to the resources so that we are capable of meeting them. I talk about a line of sight to the resources. It requires us to think about not just the money but the skills. One of the biggest problems that the BSR faced was the lack of a supply chain of people with the required skills to join its multidisciplinary teams. There is a role for the Government in thinking through the end-to-end supply chain of talent and capability to meet these standards.

Finally, there are unintended consequences of regulation. I am certain that, four or five years ago, when they were setting up the BSR, officials tried to work this through in advance, but, no matter how hard they tried, it quickly became obvious that the BSR was not fit for purpose. This means that you need a very rapid review after you have started the journey of building a new regulator. If we as a country are about to embark on setting up a single construction regulator, will the Government commit to a review within 12 months of it being set up?

I would like to think that the committee of which I am a proud member did an outstanding job in writing this report, but I do not think that it was actually that difficult: it was pretty obvious what was wrong, and most people already knew that. We could have got to grips with those changes earlier if we had had a government-led review within 12 months of the BSR beginning. Everyone would have said the same things, and we would have had a head start on trying to fix the problems. By definition, I do not know what the unintended consequences of setting up a single construction regulator will be, but I am sure that there will be some, so I urge the Government to set up that rapid review process so that they can catch things before they do too much harm.

I have nearly come to the end; I promised that I would not speak for too long. This might feel like minutiae but we are living in a world where getting the balance between enabling the market to solve some of our fundamental problems and protecting our citizens from dreadful harms, of which this is a great example, shows that the minutiae of setting up a regulator properly can make or break some big things in this country. Sadly, when the BSR was set up, we did not get that right. We must learn from those mistakes.

18:09

[Lord Best (CB)]

My Lords, I too was delighted to be a member of the Industry and Regulators Committee that produced this report. I also thank the clerk and the team who looked after us. They did an absolutely brilliant job. What we discovered six months ago has been brilliantly explained by our esteemed then chair, the noble Baroness, Lady Taylor of Bolton. I would just like to summarise our findings.

First, the ghastly Grenfell Tower tragedy revealed the long-overdue need for expert, decisive regulation for building safety. Secondly, the Government’s response in establishing the Building Safety Regulator had floundered and the BSR urgently needed to improve its performance. Thirdly, the Government were seized of the urgency of this situation and, not least with the appointment of the noble Lord, Lord Roe of West Wickham, as the new BSR chair—I am delighted to see him here—there were important signs of real progress in clearing the backlog and achieving faster and more effective regulation. I am sure we will hear more of this progress tonight.

This story is not one of a need for deregulation. No one would wish us to return to a system that allowed dangerous practices across the construction industry. Rather, it is about speedy and effective regulation. The BSR in its initial form was opaque in its requirements and irresponsibly slow in its decision-making. The new-look BSR is not about deregulation but about better regulation, as I am sure this debate will make clear.

I would like to raise the related issue of regulation of construction products, which the noble Baroness, Lady Taylor of Bolton, has touched on. The BSR is not directly responsible for this. The task falls to the Office for Product Safety and Standards, the OPSS, located within the Department for Business and Trade, which has the duty of protecting

“people and places from product-related harm”.

Dame Judith Hackitt’s 2017 review had found the process for testing and certifying products for use in construction is

“disjointed, confusing, unhelpful, and lacks any sort of transparency”.

It is clearly impossible for the BSR to make buildings safe if the products being used are unsafe. In one of our debates on the Grenfell disaster, the noble Lord, Lord Porter of Spalding, told us how the tiles for cladding were used as the best fuel for bonfires on construction sites, with those working in construction entirely familiar with just how inflammable—and therefore dangerous—these products could be. Yet there they were on the face of the tallest buildings, which were the least likely to cope with a serious fire.

The Grenfell Tower Inquiry’s phase 2 report, published last September, argued that there was systemic dishonesty on the part of those who made and sold the cladding panels and insulation products as used on the building. The phase 2 report suggested enhanced arrangements for regulating construction products. Samantha Dixon, the Minister for Building Safety, told our committee that the plans to establish a single construction regulator would include greater regulation of construction products. Could the Minister update us on progress in achieving a new regime for regulating construction products?

There was good news last summer in the extension of government support to cover the remediation costs of social rented homes in buildings over 11 metres. The cost is being largely covered by the original builders that are still in business and by the building safety levy. Are there now plans to go further and compensate occupiers for safety measures in buildings that are less than 11 metres high but which have life-critical safety defects, as certified by qualified fire engineers? Can we expect support for the unfortunate shared owners and leaseholders, some still facing truly ruinous bills, in these less tall but just as unsafe homes? An update from the Minister would be much appreciated.

18:14

[Lord Roe of West Wickham (Lab)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Taylor of Bolton, for the opportunity to speak in this debate and for the invaluable work of the committee when she was its chair. I say that on behalf of the regulator; I declare an interest as its chair. The report was enormously important and a very useful lever to drive forward what has been a fundamental process of change. Since sitting in front of the committee—perhaps I would say this—we as a regulator have undergone a fundamental process of change in just about every area of operation, including culture. I will speak to that to provide some reassurance on these well-placed questions and concerns.

I acknowledge that the problems that the noble Baroness spoke to in opening were entirely real. I do not intend to debate that. Last July, I was given a job to do because of those problems and because the Government had recognised that there was certainly a job to be done to improve the regulator. When I took over the regulator, which was still within the HSE at that point, there was a backlog of around 33,000 homes stuck in the application pipeline. I think it is fair to say that there had been a disproportionate impact on housing starts in London. Those two things are undeniable and inexcusable in the context of a regulator that should perhaps have paid more due regard to proportionality and the duties of a regulator to understand its economic impact.

I am in violent agreement with the position stated by all previous speakers that, basically, not having a home does not make you safer. We have to be an enabling regulator because there is a dire need for housing in this country. As someone who, in a previous life, ran one of the largest emergency services in the world, I can tell the Committee that poor access to housing creates as great a danger as living in dangerous housing. I do not say that hypothetically: it is there in the statistics. People very often die, sadly, in crowded and inappropriately converted accommodation. I agree with all of that.

In that spirit, I draw the Committee’s attention to some of the data which shows that there has been a sustained change at the regulator, particularly concerning new builds. The committee provided us with some very well-made challenges. The first was that there was a lack of transparency. We now publish data monthly which shows both the trajectory of change and the remaining challenges. I will come to some of those. We do that openly and in good faith, and we provide a detailed narrative alongside it. If noble Lords go on to the BSR or MHCLG web pages, they will see how things have been improving, month by month.

When I sat in front of the committee, there was a 30% approval rate for applications, which spoke to the lack of available guidance and the confusion that surrounded the regulations. It probably said something about the relationship between the industry and the regulator—a lack of communication, mutual respect and understanding that, in the end, the construction sector will deliver the homes and it is our job to hold it to account, enable it and pull standards up. The average approval rate across all parts of the BSR system is now sitting at more than 75%. I do not believe that that is because we have gone soft; it is because we have helped drive standards upwards. That is above 75% across every single part of the system.

I turn to the innovation unit, as it is termed—it is actually just the centralised model, which previous speakers talked about—where we have taken control of our own MDTs and are directing them more assertively. In the past month, 90% of all decisions delivered by the innovation unit were approvals, whereas previously we were invalidating applications, sometimes at the six-month point, because they were missing documents or there was something not quite right in the way the application was put in. It was completely inappropriate to leave people delayed in that way. We are now making determinations within a week for invalid—that is, missing—parts of an application process.

In London last month, 100% of all applications across 19 case decisions were approvals. In remediation, the approval rate is up to 79% on average, and we are motoring through them now. Across all categories, as I have said, we are up to 75%. More than 10,000 housing units were approved in the past 12 weeks. When I sat in front of the committee, the median for a determination was 43 weeks nationally and 48 in London. Obviously, that speaks to even greater delays at the wrong end of that—people who had put in entirely valid applications but had been waiting and waiting. The median approval time is now down to 22 weeks.

I would like to talk about the KPIs at some point within the next nine minutes. There is a principal point here about how those KPIs were first come to and whether, in the opinion of both the industry and the regulator, they would ever be achievable. If you were to sit with some of the CEOs of the major constructors in this country, they would tell you that they do not need me, along with my colleagues, to rush to those 12 weeks. I suggest that it might force some illogical, cliff-edge-style regulatory decisions. I will come back to that.

We are down to a 22-week median approval time now. It could be lower, I think around 15 to 18 weeks, depending on the complexity of an application. Do not forget that our regulatory remit is everything from a single 12-storey tower block right through to the Shard. As one could imagine, it is highly unlikely that you would reach a decision on the Shard in 12 weeks. We have schemes of very significant complexity and scale—multi-tower schemes or those of more than a thousand housing units—alongside those single blocks. For single blocks, we could probably get close to 12 weeks, but I would argue that we would not be doing anyone any favours to rush towards 12 weeks for the larger and more complex schemes, and that is why the median time is at 22 weeks: there is a balance between approval, rejection and the amount of time.

The reason that it is 22 now is that we are working with developers on a weekly basis to guide them, to help pull up the standards of design and to challenge where necessary. We are doing that in a transparent and recorded way, but in an environment of positive communication. I would like to see the time come down, but I would be a bit cautious about suggesting a blind rush to a KPI that was designed by people who perhaps had not fully understood how hard it is to design something of that scale and complexity in advance. Noble Lords do not have to take just my word for that; the industry would probably say the same thing. It really wants regulatory certainty, and that is what we have given it, because that 22-week median has held solid for months now. I would like to see it come down further. We need to come back to some stuff around engineering design decisions, which I will describe in a minute, because they will help us get it down, particularly for complex case applications.

Noble Lords were absolutely right about guidance. We are bang to rights. If people are not told what to bring, how on earth could they be expected to make a good application? The guidance out there now is significant, considerable and, more importantly, co-authored with the industry. To go back to the principle, the noble Baroness, Lady Harding, is absolutely right: we want people who are experts in building buildings, who are in the industry—whatever story might have been told in public—to improve it. My experience is that the Construction Leadership Council led by Mark Reynolds is owed a great deal of thanks for helping us to improve as a regulator. Working with the CLC and the industry to produce industry-relevant guidance based on best engineering practice has helped to drive that approval rate up, because people are now coming into the application process understanding what we need and what best practice looks like. That has been from a joint effort with industry, and the results speak for themselves.

There was an absence of good guidance in the remediation space, where there are some complexities, particularly around facade engineering and the level of expertise available in the country. That has radically shifted again and we have a 79% approval rate now because—again, to its credit—the industry has worked hard with the regulator to produce guidance and videos. There will be more on that by 22 June, as we start to ramp up our remediation programme.

Just for information, I shall talk about things that have worked. One is centralising teams—getting control of MDTs. I talked about picking a football team where you did not know what pitch you were playing on or who was on your team. That was the old model, and that has gone. We do not do any of the franchise MDT work anymore in any part of our systems. Either it is delivered through a centralised team process where we control it—that is, we have direct control of fire engineers, structural engineers, geospatial and building control specialists—or we have private sector contracts with the big engineering companies where we batch out applications under very strict regulatory oversight, so we control what goes in, and we have oversight of the information that those engineering concerns are taking in and making determinations on. At the end of the day, the legal decision has to lie with the regulator. Our experience is that that has provided great contingency and additional capacity that, again, brings times down.

Obviously the biggest improvement has been in the new-build space, and what we have done there has to be repeated in remediation. We are beginning to see that now but, frankly, it took us up until just after Christmas to clear the backlog in new build, and then we turned our gaze to remediation, but we are now starting to see that accelerate. That is good because, with credit to the Minister and the department, we are now seeing real pressure being brought to bear, both through the grant system and in the relationship with developers through the developer contract, to speed up applications into the process. We are seeing a considerable uptick in the number of applications coming into the remediation process. We have to keep pace with that, and my assurance to the Committee is that we will.

We have been recruiting at pace and are building new contracts at pace with big engineering firms to focus specifically on remediation. We now have a full-time centralised team fully established inside the remediation space for applications. They have their first 50 applications now as a new unit and are working their way through. So, even in the context of some of the problems that previous speakers have described, we had started improving anyway just by improving communication, relationships, guidance process and general grip. Now that we are resourcing up, I think that again we will continue to see an improving trajectory.

On problems within categories A and B, we will come back to the principles around refurbishment in those categories. I apologise—I am conscious that I am running out of time, so I will wrap up as quickly as possible.

I have a dedicated NHS team. It was inexcusable to me that we were holding up hospital refurbishment and improvements. We have broadly dealt with that by just establishing a dedicated NHS team, which is probably worth knowing about. Probably, like my colleague the Minister, I am measuring the success of that by the far more limited emails that I now get in my inbox directly from the CEOs of NHS trusts.

If the Committee might indulge me going a minute over my time, I would like to talk about the remaining challenges, because it is worth being honest with noble Lords. On the remaining challenges, we are now doing what we should do as a regulator, because we have dealt with the bureaucratic failures. We are not refusing to reply to emails; now we are meeting developers weekly. We have a dedicated account management function that will be meeting all the big developers and the majority of SMEs on a weekly and monthly basis to problem-solve. That is all great, but we have realised that we need better industry-wide benchmarks, commonly understood with the regulator, about engineering principles. As much as I love lawyers and engineers, if you put the two in a room, they will have a different opinion, whether on our side, on the applicant’s side or even within either entity. That is what we are finding, and it is extending determination times, so we are doing something about it. We have appointed independent chairs of the statutory committees, and we have set up internal panels to allow for third-party challenge.

We are dealing with some of the big issues—for example, around structural engineering calculations and design ideologies—that are really bothering the industry at the moment. We need to have a reset in the back regime. I would be happy to come back to the Committee or to report in future debates on what we are doing there, but that is imminent, because that system still is not functioning as we would want it and we want to turn it to a risk-based inspection programme, to put it broadly, rather than calling them all in, which is what we do at the moment and places an undue burden.

I am grateful to the Minister and the department for supporting us in rationalising the category A and B refurbishment regime, and we are a long way down that road now. I expect to see the results of that coming through consultation, and therefore a change to our operations. I am sorry for the rush through; I probably could have said more about change, but I hope it has given the Committee a sense of what we have been doing that is evidenced in the numbers, rather than just empty promises. I would welcome the opportunity to speak again as we drive further change forward.

18:29

[Lord Fuller (Con)]

My Lords, it is an honour to follow the noble Lord, Lord Roe of West Wickham, whom we know has unparalleled expertise of not just the regulator but the service, in defence of safety and security in London. I declare that I am a member of the Industry and Regulators Committee, but I joined after this report was published. Nevertheless, I manage a residential block of flats in Norwich.

Self-evidently, a building should be sufficiently safe for not just residents and occupiers but visitors, tenants and everybody else. We have all seen the consequences when things go wrong. When I was a member of the fire service pension scheme, we had a meeting on the morning of the Grenfell fire in the headquarters of the London Fire Brigade. None of us really knew the gravity of what was unfurling before us; those horrors came later. The noble Baroness, Lady Taylor, has given us the chronology, so I will not detain the Committee with it.

I have no wish to criticise the regulator or anybody who works within it. They have had to get going under the glare of publicity. There was the move from the HSE to Marsham Street; the regulations had to be revised; delays were inevitable and staffing changed. Let us not rehearse all the difficulties. Our challenge is to look forward and get these issues fixed in a proportionate manner so that we can get Britain building again.

Back in about 2019, I sat in the office of the then Secretary of State when the Building Safety Act 2022 was being mooted. He made a powerful observation that stuck with me: some felt that the Act, if implemented, could in some way prevent fire. That misdirection by some was a delusion, because fires will happen. The first purpose of the Building Safety Act should be to enable people to get out quickly. Clearly, there are ways to prevent fire, slow its spread, compartmentalise and raise the alarm in the event of a conflagration. Nobody wants to see a building burn, but too often the regulations that have flowed from the Act have placed too great a focus on the purist approach to preserving a building’s fabric rather than saving lives. We must restate the balance between protecting the building and getting people out more quickly.

The regulations have spawned a huge amount of work. Approaches have inevitably created a bureaucratic monster, especially for older buildings. I think it is fair to say that, historically, there have been unrealistic assessments of risk—blind to cost and burdened by process delays—which have stymied desirable works while making homes worthless in the meantime. Counterintuitively, in some cases they have reduced safety, with refurbishments abandoned, increased risks to residents and the open-ended costs of waking watches and unsellable homes. Success was never meant to be like this.

Obviously we need to focus on the highest-risk buildings—those that are hardest to get out of—but this bureaucratic mission creep has blighted otherwise safe buildings. The fault is not necessarily with the regulator, the builders, the landlords or whoever is directly involved with a premises. Other actors have contributed to the misdirection that has blighted buildings and stalled lives. The mission creep has led to many cases of 11-metre buildings, for example, which are much safer and easier to get out of—and in which, if fires occur, they are much easier to fight—being needlessly tainted. A practical example of this misdirection sees uninformed conveyancers, egged on by mortgage providers, estate agents, valuation surveyors and insurers, demanding unnecessary EWS1 inspections at a specimen cost of £25,000 each, because inevitably intrusive investigations—with scaffolding and making good—will be required. Legally unnecessary, these EWS1s then need to be repeated every five years. It is pointless and counterproductive, and diverts from the risks of addressing the needs of the really high-rise, high-risk buildings.

I am not making the case to ignore unsafe buildings, but excessive delays over specification and costs are keeping people in unimproved buildings that could be made safe for longer, so that they cannot move; it takes too long to buy a home and sales fall through. Housebuilding itself has collapsed in London and, because what happens in London—where there is a disproportionate number of high-rise buildings—follows elsewhere, we are just gumming up the national market. That is why it is important to get this right and to get a grip, not least because we will see perverse consequences if we make it all too difficult for freeholders to do the right thing, especially if the regulatory costs exceed the costs of doing the work. They will just collapse their firms, leaving the leaseholders—those least likely and able to afford it—holding the baby.

Molior reports that new starts in London developments have fallen from a peak of 33,774 in 2015 to just 5,547 in the first quarter of 2026. Getting this wrong in a city that houses 10 million people is never going to grow the economy at the rate we need to.

How do we improve? I am grateful to Berkeley Homes for telling me that, within the regulator, we need to streamline the move from gateway 2 to gateway 3 as an application moves from idea to reality, and we need case officers to be passported through on the same application. Sometimes—we have heard the reasons why—case officers change, with their different views, interpretations or prejudices, which adds to delays, risks and costs. It would be helpful if we fixed the reinvention of the wheel, where lessons learned from one application cannot be passported to another similar development of a common design.

We should celebrate innovation, but we must turn against the notion that anything new is intrinsically high risk and is tipped into the lottery of the bucket of most complex cases. Such Ludditism will never get roofs over our heads. We need to recognise that the building levy, which is £90 per square metre in Fulham, is killing building for little purpose save to sustain the bureaucracy. It is not entirely clear how, in the case of Fulham, which is a high-value area, that figure was calculated in the first place. Elsewhere, the surveyors, mortgage providers, conveyancers and the rest need to stop demanding legally unnecessary tickets with impossible burdens of proof that are collapsing sales and trapping people in their own homes.

It would be churlish if we did not recognise the enormous strides that have been taken with the move from the Health and Safety Executive to Marsham Street, but we need to recognise that we have to get better—from the 22 weeks we have heard about down to the 12-week deadline, and so forth. I am grateful that the noble Lord, Lord Roe, explained that, in order to increase confidence, which is really important, regular data releases are needed to show progress. It is important to show that trajectory; it will get developers off the pot and starting building, which will in turn get the economy moving. Something as simple as that is so welcome.

My main point is to restate the purpose of the regulator and the regulations, which is to ensure that, if a fire happens, we get people out quickly. Creating a counsel of perfection, where every single minor detail is fettled to the nth degree regardless of cost, is not helping either the system for new builds or, more particularly, older buildings that are crying out for refurbishment. Unless we get this balance right, especially in our capital city, we will not build new homes and people will not be able to get on with their lives.

18:38

[Baroness Warwick of Undercliffe (Lab)]

My Lords, I congratulate my noble friend Lady Taylor of Bolton on her comprehensive and forensic introduction to this report. I wanted to speak in this debate because the role of the regulator is crucial in delivering the Government’s aim of urgently building more homes and in resolving one of the most intractable social problems that the country faces: the lack of safe, healthy, affordable homes for everyone.

Of course, it is not just new homes that we should be concerned about. The Grenfell Tower tragedy put into stark relief the problems we face with existing stock. It is worth reminding ourselves that most housing stock is already ageing. Indeed, the majority of our homes are already more than 60 years old. It is a problem that has exercised all parties when in government. The previous Government set up the BSR following the Grenfell fire to improve the regulation of building safety standards. Grenfell Tower was built 50 years ago, and it was its refurbishment, and the materials and products used, that came under close scrutiny.

The Select Committee’s report is a timely review of whether the BSR has delivered on its intentions. Its findings make for sombre reading; it was very helpful to hear about the salutary other side of the argument, if you like, in my noble friend Lord Roe’s much more upbeat report on the progress made so far. The committee found that the BSR took far too long to make decisions on construction projects; that is still a problem, I think. There were also issues around staffing and skills, poor communication, a lack of high standards in some parts of the building industry and inefficient BSR processes.

My emphasis is on social homes, the majority of which are built by housing associations. The Select Committee heard from housing associations about how the BSR’s delays and a lack of clarity and communication are holding up vital safety work. I know that housing associations have been keenly focused on the safety of their residents and are doing everything they can to meet the deadlines in the Joint Plan to Accelerate Remediation of Social Housing, so it has been very frustrating that the BSR’s regulatory framework is having such a direct impact on enabling safer homes and on the delivery of new homes. The Government’s own data shows that the social housing sector has been completing works at around twice the rate of the private sector, so it is vital that these delays are resolved. I want to add here, though, that the collaborative approach from government—as well as the engagement work of the National Housing Federation to ensure that housing associations were able to feed into the joint plan’s development in order to secure agreed timelines—is an excellent example of the strong partnerships that we need to make buildings safe.

The report makes some powerful recommendations to resolve these issues. Its recommendations were welcomed by the Government, who have already put in train changes that have produced clear improvements in the BSR’s performance; my noble friend Lord Roe echoed that. There is no doubt that recent progress has been made. Since my noble friend Lord Roe and Charlie Pugsley took over the leadership of the regulator, implementing new innovation units for both types of applications and recruiting more staff to review cases, there have been significant improvements in decision-making times. These welcome changes will ensure that housing associations can remediate and build at a faster pace, securing safer homes and the new social and affordable homes that we desperately need. Even more progress will be made following the publication of the guidance for applicants on good submissions to the regulator, which should give further clarity and reduce rejections. I hope that the Minister will be able to provide some detail on when this will be published.

Collaboration between the BSR and housing associations is only growing stronger through these new initiatives. I know that the social housing sector is committed to continuing to work with the regulator on not only delivering remediation but resolving other safety risks, including transfer slabs and large-panel system buildings, to ensure that every single one of their residents feels safe in their own home.

I welcome this report. It is vital that we have a robust and proportional regulator to ensure that everyone in the country lives in a safe home. The report sets out very clear and practical recommendations on how to achieve this. The Government have welcomed them and have already taken action to improve the performance of the BSR. I hope that, in her response, the Minister can give us greater detail on any further initiatives that may follow.

There are two areas about which I remain concerned. One is leaseholders in high-rise buildings—the noble Baroness, Lady Harding, referred to this in her remarks—in terms of the remediation of dangerous cladding and other safety issues, in addition to financial uncertainty. All of these issues are compounded by the fact that leaseholders are already facing significant regulatory costs to examine and resolve safety issues for which they bear little or no responsibility. In his role as chair, my noble friend Lord Roe again gave us a much more reassuring picture, but I hope that the Minister will be able to give us an update on where precisely we are on high-rise buildings.

As I said earlier, one of the main causes of the Grenfell fire was its cladding, which is of course a building product. The committee questioned the BSR about the product testing regime and the fact that enforcement of the regulations has been almost non-existent. The noble Lord, Lord Best, also made this point. That was a very low bar indeed for the BSR to improve on. In reading the evidence, I was concerned that the BSR seemed to rely on a “nudge” approach, which it hoped would raise awareness and “ripple out”. I did not find that very convincing, and the level of enforcement action that is taking place was not clear from the report. I hope that the Minister can tell us what progress has been made in developing a rather more rigorous approach.

18:44

[Lord John of Southwark (Lab)]

My Lords, I declare my interest as chair of H4Life and as a partner in Quoin Partners, which represents the building development industry. I very much welcome this report; it is really an excellent piece of work. I also welcome the Government’s initial response to the report. I welcome, too, the work that my noble friend Lord Roe has done since he took up his role as chair of the Building Safety Regulator. He has clearly had a significant impact in that new position.

I do not have the knowledge that some have, having not followed this report all the way through the committee, but I wanted to talk a little about my own journey to the Building Safety Regulator, which started on 3 July 2009, when six people died in a fire at Lakanal House in Camberwell. I was the leader of the opposition group in Southwark at that time. It was a dreadful evening, and a dreadful period in Southwark’s history. Lakanal was a 14-story council-owned block, which had recently undergone major repairs. What happened at Lakanal was that a fire broke out in a television set and spread through the exterior cladding panels. It also went through voids that should have been protecting residents in the block, but which had been compromised during recent works, with holes being drilled and new pipes being inserted. The stay-put policy of the London Fire Brigade at that time, which was followed that night in Lakanal, was found to be wanting, because people were not safe—they did not have the 45-minute or hour-long protection that they should have had in their homes on that night. It is appalling to think of the six residents who died because they stayed put in their flats.

That was an incident that scarred Southwark. The 2013 inquest made recommendations. The coroner sent a rule 43 letter to the Secretary of State, the noble Lord, Lord Pickles, as he now is. But while Southwark embarked on a significant number of fire safety works, spending £70 million on our blocks in the aftermath of Lakanal, that was not the story nationwide. What breaks my heart is that some of the lessons from Lakanal were clearly not learned by the time of Grenfell. If lessons had been learned about exterior cladding, the compromising of the integrity of the building by those works and about the stay-put policy, about which my noble friend Lord Roe, has spoken so eloquently in the past, maybe the result would have been different.

However, with such a severe loss of life, the reaction from government and society to the Grenfell Tower fire was significant, unlike with Lakanal. We have talked about Dame Judith Hackitt’s inquiry from May 2018, which made so many important recommendations and brought about the introduction of the Building Safety Regulator. I remember going to a presentation that Dame Judith gave about the impact of her report and thinking that it would have quite an impact on the skyline of London if it was followed through. Suddenly, we were talking about having a different regime for buildings of 18 metres and below and for those above that height. I do not think that that was a point that the industry necessarily picked up on at that time, in 2018 and 2019; it did not recognise that this was going to mean a very different approach.

On my next contact with the Building Safety Regulator, I was particularly impressed by the contribution of the noble Baroness, Lady Harding; she perfectly captured the problems that we saw with the creation of that regulator. I saw that, alarmingly, during a presentation at the Local Government Association conference in July 2023. This was before the Building Safety Regulator had done a thing—it was being created. I went along and heard some description, and I suppose we knew that these descriptions were going to come about post Hackitt, but they started talking about “higher risk buildings” in new-build terms. Who wants to go and live in a higher risk building? I thought, “This is going to have an impact”, and indeed some of the terminology we have used has had an impact on people’s desire to live in new builds that are described as high risk, which has had a knock on effect on the mortgage market.

The most alarming thing in that presentation at the LGA conference was representatives from the Building Safety Regulator saying, “Well, we’ve got a target of 13 weeks”—I thought it was 13 weeks but actually it might be 12—“but I can tell you now that we’re not going to meet it”. I thought, “This is odd. How can you be a regulator that hasn’t even started work yet but you’re telling the world that you’re not going to meet the targets that you have set?” The only interpretation that I could put on it was that if they were saying they were not going to meet 13 weeks then it was going to be 26 weeks or even longer, and that is how reality has played out. That comes about from the points that my noble friend Lady Taylor and the noble Baroness, Lady Harding, talked about: not properly resourcing the Building Safety Regulator at the start set it up to fail. As the noble Baroness said, that is a lesson that must be learned and taken away from this experience.

I would say that no builder or developer I have ever met wants to build an unsafe building; I think we can accept that. They want to be cost effective but they do not want to build an unsafe building. However, with the BSR we have created an overly bureaucratic regime. It is costly and has been time consuming. I have talked about the anticipated missed deadlines; they have come true, and we know that it has taken a year, if not longer, for some applications to pass through the BSR process.

There have also been some incredibly perverse results. I learned about a building of 100 new apartments in London that was complete and which waited for at least a year to be signed off by the Building Safety Regulator. Even though people had paid for the apartments because they were now complete, they had not been signed off so they could not be occupied. This is a crazy dystopian world that we have entered, where the BSR is, essentially preventing people from moving into completed buildings.

As everyone has observed, the BSR has contributed to a significant reduction in house building in London at a time when we need to be building more, not less. Someone said we need to ensure that it is not complex and confusing. I think the BSR is complex and confusing in the way that it operates at the moment.

I welcome what my noble friend Lord Roe has talked about today. I hear what he says about speed, and it will help the industry if the BSR regularly publishes its performance tables, because that will begin to send out a message about the regulator’s effectiveness. However, consistency is as important, and there is a massive complaint at the moment that I hear about consistency of decision-making. The point has been made already: if you have one building that goes through the BSR process and an identical building is then proposed next door or nearby, that one still has to go through the entire process. There does not seem to be any way of short-circuiting that, although maybe my noble friend will correct me afterwards. Surely, if one building has been signed off for safety, something that is identical could also be. Then there is the issue of fire doors that are accepted as safe by one part of the BSR but not accepted as safe by another, so a stand-off takes place between the developer and the BSR about whether those fire doors are safe or not. Consistency seems to me to be hugely important in how the BSR performs.

I want to talk about how I became interested in this issue and the lessons from Lakanal House. We need to achieve something speedy, effective and consistent from the Building Safety Regulator, so I ask the Minister for her observations on how we can ensure that it is delivering that speed, effectiveness and consistency. I would hugely welcome her comments on that.

We know that the performance of the BSR has had an adverse impact on the building industry. I have talked about the impact of people being afraid to get involved in higher-risk buildings. It has undoubtedly had an impact, because of the uncertainty of timing, on investment into London: investors cannot just put money forward without knowing when a building might be signed off; they need to know that there is a realistic prospect of deadlines being met. I take heart from what the noble Lord, Lord Roe, said, but there are still issues to be addressed.

There are undoubtedly some things about the state of the building industry in London and across the country that are outside our control, such as world events and other financial considerations, but the performance of the Building Safety Regulator is within our control. It is certainly within the control of the noble Lord, Lord Roe, more than it is of most of us. This is something on which we should bear down so that, as others have talked about, we can give confidence to the industry and to housebuilders to get the new homes built that we so desperately need.

18:56

[Lord Jamieson (Con)]

My Lords, I declare my interest as a councillor in central Bedfordshire. It is a delight to follow so many excellent speakers, such as not only the noble Lord, Lord Roe, but the noble Lord, Lord John, given his experience of Southwark. I also give my thanks to the committee and to the noble Baroness, Lady Taylor of Bolton, for their excellent work and this very helpful and useful report before us.

This is a subject of real importance; it goes to the heart of two of the most pressing challenges that we face: ensuring that buildings are safe for those who live in them and ensuring that we can actually build the buildings that we need for our communities and people. There was a very interesting comment from the noble Lord, Lord Roe, that one of his big concerns is not just the safety of buildings but having safe buildings available for fire staff in London.

The establishment of the Building Safety Regulator was one of the most significant reforms introduced under the Building Safety Act 2022, by the previous Conservative Government, in response to the Grenfell Tower tragedy. That Act was necessary and it was a serious attempt to restore confidence in the system of building control to strengthen accountability across the construction sector and to ensure that the failures that led to Grenfell could never be repeated.

We should be clear about why reform was needed: the Grenfell Tower fire, now almost nine years ago, led to the loss of 72 lives. Beneath that was the exposure of profound, long-standing failures in regulation, oversight and professional competence, as others have mentioned. That subsequent inquiry identified that the regulatory system had not kept pace with risk, a culture in parts of the industry where fire safety was not given sufficient weight and deeply concerning misconduct by some manufacturers of construction products.

In that context, the direction of travel set by the Building Safety Act was right: stronger regulation of higher-risk buildings, clearer responsibilities and a more robust system of oversight were all necessary reforms. However, as the committee’s report makes clear, the effectiveness of the system now depends on its operation in practice. It is one thing to design a regulatory framework; it is an entirely different thing to make sure that it operates well in practice. As the committee suggests, in its early operation, the Building Safety Regulator faced a number of challenges in its performance. I am delighted to hear in the update from the noble Lord, Lord Roe of West Wickham, that its performance is improving substantially and that a number of the recommendations that are in the report are, in effect, being taken forward and acted upon, but there is more to do. I will concentrate on some of that, but I recognise that the regulator is part of the way along that journey.

Importantly, there have been delays in decision-making, uncertainty among applicants about what information is required at different stages, inconsistent communication, and a shortage of suitably qualified inspectors and fire safety professionals. Building safety is a shared responsibility: a regulator cannot succeed without a competent and responsive industry and, equally, the industry cannot succeed without a regulator that is clear, proportionate and efficient in its decision-making. I am pleased that other noble Lords have mentioned the importance of culture and of working with the industry and not being entirely separate.

As leader of Central Bedfordshire, I saw directly the challenges of delivering housing, regeneration and infrastructure within an increasingly complex regulatory environment. Local authorities sit at the intersection of these systems. We work with the developers, housing associations, utilities and regulators. What matters most in practice is not simply the existence of regulation but that it is clear, predictable and capable of being navigated without unnecessary delay. Where that clarity exists, delivery can proceed at pace. Where it does not, even well-intentioned policy can become a barrier to progress.

If we are to build the homes this country needs, we cannot look at building safety regulation in isolation. We must consider how it interacts with practical realities. How can we ensure those high standards ensure the use of safe materials but deliver decisions in a timely and predictable way? I do not think many noble Lords mentioned risk in terms of development. If you ask developers, the things that they are interested in are speed, certainty of decision-making and risk. This is a particular issue in places such as London, where you have huge upfront costs—buying the land, the development process and so forth. If you are building a large block of flats, you cannot sell them until you have completed the whole building. For those of us in rural areas, if you have 10 acres and are building detached houses, you can build them a house at a time and your upfront costs are so much less. Ensuring that you have a safe process is absolutely the first thing, but how can we also give people certainty that they will get through the process and know what the requirements are? That is how we will be able to get more buildings done.

The figures in the report illustrate the scale of the issues. The target is 12 weeks. In May this year, it was 35 weeks. I am really impressed that it is now 22 weeks, which is an improvement. We acknowledge that, but there is more progress to be done in the process. Delays inevitably have consequences, not just for new buildings but in existing buildings where remediation needs to happen. It means leaseholders remain in buildings with unresolved safety issues for longer than they need to. Remediation schemes are extended. Development pipelines are slowed and councils, particularly those engaged in regeneration, face uncertainty that can affect viability, funding and sequencing.

The committee is also right to highlight skills. It seems that everything in the development world revolves around a shortage of skills—whether of planners, plasterers, brickies or electricians. This is a critical area of safety, and I am really pleased that the Building Safety Regulator has been able to get more people with the skills they need. The one question I will ask is about an experience we have had with planners. When there is a downturn for developers—clearly, they are not bringing forward as many projects as they have in the past; their demand has gone down—we find that there are more people available on the regulator and planning side. I would like an assurance from the Minister that we recognise the need for a skills pipeline but are not overoptimistic, as we could be in a situation where, because of a slowdown in the number of developers bringing forward projects, the demand on their side is reduced and availability for the regulator is increased. I think that is something we need to look at.

One particularly important recommendation that the noble Baroness, Lady Taylor of Bolton, brought forward was around the well-judged balance in determining what needs to be approved and when. That is very important for looking at category A and category B and the timing. Getting everything done up front is great, but when you are dealing with something with very high costs involved, if you are able in a safe way—as the committee suggests—to do it over a period of time and bring forward things at the appropriate time rather than up front, that has significant benefits. Equally, as we have been saying, with category A and category B works, it is about ensuring that you have the right specialist expertise operating on the most demanding aspects and the appropriate levels at some of the other maybe less demanding categories, such as category B.

We have talked about clarity of communication. I would also mention—I am very pleased that the noble Lord, Lord Roe, raised this—that building safety is not a static discipline. As the noble Lords, Lord Roe and Lord Best, said, we need to ensure that there are safe materials and that they are tested suitably. That is not necessarily within the remit of the Building Safety Regulator at the moment but, as we get a better understanding of what safe materials and safe design are and how fire operates in a building, with that greater knowledge and experience, the Building Safety Regulator should look at how regulation can evolve to ensure that we enhance building safety and have a responsive regulator. I am very keen that those lessons are brought forward and that we can evolve our approach to regulation to ensure that we improve our safety.

In conclusion, we are dealing with two parallel national priorities: the remediation of unsafe buildings in the wake of Grenfell and the need to increase housing supply across the country and to ensure that buildings are safe. These priorities should not be in conflict and they do not need to be. A system that restores confidence in building safety will support investment and delivery, but a system that is slow and unpredictable risks undermining both. That is why the report is so important. It does not question the principle of strong regulation or seek to dilute the lessons of Grenfell; rather, it focuses on how we can ensure that the system introduced by the Building Safety Act 2022 works as effectively as Parliament intended and as is needed. I hope the Government will give the committee’s recommendations careful consideration. They are practical, measured and focused on improving outcomes, rather than on the process for its own sake. I commend the report to the Committee.

19:07

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (Baroness Taylor of Stevenage) (Lab)]

My Lords, I am very grateful to my noble friend Lady Taylor of Bolton, not just for forwarding my mail when we get sent each other’s mail but for securing such an important debate and for what my noble friend Lady Warwick described as a comprehensive and forensic introduction. I am also grateful to the members of the Industry and Regulators Committee. This is a detailed and thoughtful report on the performance of the Building Safety Regulator. I add my thanks to my noble friend Lord Roe, to Charlie Pugsley and the team at the Building Safety Regulator and to Mark Reynolds and the Construction Leadership Council. All have played a fundamental part in moving this issue forward significantly, partly as the committee was doing its work but also since the report was published.

I recognise much of what has been said today. I thank all noble Lords for their constructive contributions, as well as their recognition that progress is being made now. Of course, the 72 victims of Grenfell and the survivors sit at the heart of this issue. My noble friend Lord John rightly reminded us of the fire at Lakanal House in Southwark, where six people were killed and 20 were injured. We must always keep the lessons learned from those dreadful incidents, as well as how to take this issue forward in future, right at the heart of the issue.

The committee’s inquiry forms an important part of Parliament’s wider scrutiny of regulators. Its report is a timely and valuable assessment of whether the Building Safety Regulator has the capacity, the capability and the right approach needed to deliver the statutory functions effectively; as the noble Lord, Lord Jamieson, said, they were set out in the Building Safety Act. It has rightly examined how the regulator is operating in practice, how it is responding to early challenges and how it can continue to build confidence as the new regime matures. Since its establishment under the Building Safety Act, the BSR has been central to delivering post-Grenfell reforms and to restoring confidence in the safety of our built environment. There cannot be anything more distressing than not feeling that you are safe in your own home. At the heart of this work are the residents themselves, who rightly expect a regulatory regime that is rigorous in its standards but also clear, proportionate and effective in how it operates in practice. As my noble friend Lady Taylor and the noble Baroness, Lady Harding, reminded us, this has also been a handbrake on the development that we need in this country.

Taken together, these points underline the scale of the task that the regulator was asked to take on and the importance of ensuring that it is properly supported to mature, adapt and improve over time. I am grateful to my noble friend Lord Roe for giving such a valuable insight into the role of the regulator, the situation as it was and the data emerging as improvement is made. This is vital in order to build public confidence and that of the industry.

The regulator now operates as a stand-alone organisation sponsored by the department, marking an important step towards reducing the fragmentation that was identified in the system in both the Hackitt review and the Grenfell reports. That has given the BSR, as a new organisation, greater operational flexibility and clearer accountability, while allowing it to focus on its core regulatory functions.

My noble friend Lady Taylor reminds us that public trust in the regime depends not just on its intent but on how clearly, consistently and efficiently it operates on the ground. That is why the department and the Building Safety Regulator have worked closely together to implement a substantial programme of operational reforms. I accept that the reforms took longer than anticipated to get going, but they are beginning now to deliver tangible improvements. Over the past 12 weeks, close to 10,000 homes have been approved, including more than 2,000 in London. Performance has improved markedly, with new-build approval rates rising to 90%, up from 33% in February. In April, the BSR also introduced an external remediation improvement plan, supported by updated guidance for existing higher-risk buildings, to accelerate the pace of remediation. Approval rates for remediation cases—I think my noble friend Lord Roe quoted this—rose to 79% in May, exceeding the 65% target.

It is also important to consider how improvements in regulatory performance sit alongside our wider objectives on housing delivery. Building safety and growth are not competing objectives; they are two sides of the same coin. Proportionate and effective regulation is essential both to ensuring that homes are built and remediated safely and to supporting housing delivery by reducing the risk of people remaining in unsafe ageing buildings or in temporary accommodation.

Against that backdrop, the Government welcome the committee’s recommendation and the challenge that it has provided in this area. We published our formal response in February this year, and we remain committed to continuing to improve the operation of the Building Safety Regulator. That includes listening carefully to feedback from residents, industry stakeholders, developers and Members of this House to ensure that the regime continues to evolve in a way that delivers safety, confidence and homes that people can trust.

I turn to some of the specific issues raised today, and I will set out how the Government are responding to some of those issues. My noble friend Lady Taylor and other noble Lords raised issues around the gateway 2 delays that we saw back in the day. As the committee highlighted, timely decision-making is critical, which is why we have focused on improving throughput at gateway 2. My noble friend is quite right: clarity of expectation for the industry is vital. The legacy gateway 2 new-build backlog has now been cleared, down from 103 cases in September 2025. New-build applications are being approved within 22 weeks on average by the innovation unit, compared with 37 weeks in July 2025. As set out by my noble friend Lord Roe, that balance is being achieved by working with developers.

Early expectations on BSR approval timelines were set before operational capacity and system maturity were fully established. It is key to say that things have moved on since then, and the BSR strategic plan now sets a clear and deliverable trajectory towards 18-week determinations. The focus now is on embedding these improvements so that stronger performance at gateway 2 is sustained. The noble Lord, Lord Jamieson, mentioned risk in development. He is right that we must try to get through the process of assessing and dealing with risk as quickly as possible.

The noble Lord, Lord Fuller, also mentioned gateway 3 approvals. Gateway 3 is still relatively new and only a small number of projects have reached that stage, but it is a critical final check before the occupation of higher-risk buildings. The Building Safety Regulator is ensuring that regulatory scrutiny is front-loaded at gateway 2, but the learning is helping developers and the Building Safety Regulator refine the gateway 3 process, improving consistency and efficiency while maintaining a firm focus on resident safety. The peril here is that I am looking at the chair of the Building Safety Regulator to make sure of what I am saying. He is nodding.

A number of noble Lords mentioned the review of the higher-risk regime, including the noble Baroness, Lady Taylor, and the noble Lords, Lord Fuller and Lord John. We have acted on the committee’s recommendation to review the higher risk building control regime to make sure that it is proportionate for lower risk and routine works. We consulted on how building work to existing buildings should be categorised under the higher-risk regime, ensuring that the information submitted to the regulator is proportionate to the scale and nature of the work while maintaining safety standards. That included proposals to reduce documentation requirements for building work within individual flats and for small-scale works in communal areas of existing higher-risk buildings. The consultation has now closed and we are carefully considering its responses. I hope it will enable a more proportionate response.

A number of noble Lords, including the noble Baronesses, Lady Taylor and Lady Warwick, and the noble Lord, Lord Jamieson, referred to the building professions, trades and occupations. Having the skills to do this work is vital. To support this, on 26 March the Government announced a £70 million investment to address shortages in building inspectors and fire engineers—the largest investment in these vital safety professions for generations. This sits alongside the wider construction skills package, to which the Government committed £625 million to improve training quality and to recruit an additional 60,000 skilled construction workers by 2028. We are committed to working with the sector to publish a new long-term strategy for building professions, which will carry out a system-wide review of regulation competence and culture, including the creation of a new central oversight function. On 20 May, we launched a call for evidence on this. I encourage all those interested to respond by the deadline of 12 August.

I was pleased to hear the noble Lord, Lord Roe, talk about the engagement that has taken place with the industry, because I know this came out clearly in the committee’s report. The noble Baroness, Lady Taylor, spoke about the quality of applications, and the noble Baroness, Lady Harding, and the noble Lord, Lord Jamieson, referred to this. We have worked very closely with industry, including through the Construction Leadership Council, to improve the quality of applications and strengthen that two-way engagement. As noble Lords have rightly said, this is a two-way process. Alongside this, the BSR has published a comprehensive suite of guidance, both directly and with industry partners, covering building control approvals, application requirements and key stages such as completion. This has been supported by wider resources including webinars and practical materials to help duty holders understand and meet their obligations. We think this is now driving significant improvement in the quality of remediation and new-build applications.

The noble Baroness, Lady Taylor, spoke powerfully about the phasing of decision-making around less high-risk buildings and the noble Lord, Lord John, spoke about consistency in decision-making. The BSR is now taking a more structured and consistent approach to decision-making, including through that clearer guidance, stronger quality assurance and greater engagement with industry. This is improving the predictability of gateway decisions, which will be critical, and maintaining a robust and proportionate safety regime with a shared expectation that applications will meet the required standard.

On reporting transparency, the noble Baronesses, Lady Harding and Lady Taylor, raised issues about the BSR reaching its KPIs. The noble Lord, Lord John, referred to the BSR saying that it felt that it could not comply, in the early days. I hope we have moved on from that now.

Transparency and regular reporting are critical so that Parliament and the industry can track performance and understand how the regime is operating in practice. For this reason, as the noble Lord, Lord Roe, said, the Building Safety Regulator now publishes monthly data on building control approval applications, covering both new-build and remediation activity. That regular publication helps provide visibility of volumes, progress and trends, and supports scrutiny of improvements over time. The Building Safety Regulator is under a statutory duty to publish a strategic plan setting out its priorities, and, as a new arm’s-length body, it will also publish an annual report and accounts to provide transparent reporting on its performance.

A number of key issues were raised around construction products—an issue about which I personally feel extremely strongly. The noble Baroness, Lady Taylor of Bolton, and the noble Lords, Lord Best and Lord Jamieson, all raised this issue. The committee was clear that long-standing weaknesses in the construction products regime must be addressed to close the regulatory gaps and restore confidence that the products we see on the market are safe. For that reason, we published a construction products White Paper in February this year, outlining proposals for ambitious, system-wide reform of the construction products regulatory regime.

The systemic dishonesty in continuing to market the dangerous products we all know about now, when their failings were well known throughout the industry, was disgraceful. Confidence must now be restored. That cannot wait any longer; we have to tackle this product-related harm. The White Paper delivers: a path to implementing a new general safety requirement to bring unregulated products into scope more quickly; a step change in product information, testing standards, certification oversight and digitisation so that those installing and using products can rely on clear and trustworthy information; a coherent regulatory framework; and a system that incentivises safety while supporting innovation, enabling the industry to grow with confidence. The White Paper and general safety requirement consultations have now closed, and our reform proposals will help build renewed confidence and trust in the construction product sector for residents—and the industry, because working with unsafe products affects not just residents but the people who work in the industry.

The noble Lords, Lord Fuller and Lord Best, raised issues around under 11-metre buildings. Buildings that have fewer than five storeys or are below 11 metres are not within scope of the leaseholder protections introduced by the Building Safety Act, but we recognise the concerns raised by leaseholders who fall outside these protections. The Government are actively considering how we can go further to support those affected. In line with the remediation acceleration plan, we are committed to providing targeted funding in limited circumstances through a small fund for the remediation of cladding in buildings under 11 metres. Further details of the scheme design and how it will operate will be set out in July ahead of the Summer Recess.

I welcome the comments from the noble Lady, Baroness Taylor of Bolton, and others about the steps that have already been taken towards the single construction regulator. In December, we published the prospectus and the consultation. We are now analysing the responses to that consultation and will publish a response this summer. The Building Safety Regulator’s functions will form a key foundation of a single construction regulator, with changes carefully phased to avoid disruption. Primary legislation is required to implement several proposals; we will bring forward that necessary legislation as soon as parliamentary time allows.

The noble Baroness, Lady Harding, rightly raised the issue of the regulator’s costs. Detailed costs will be set out in due course as we finalise the design and funding model for the regulator. Our priority will be to ensure that it has the resources to be effective while keeping costs proportionate. The noble Baroness also raised the issue of a review of the new regulator to make sure that we do not end up with something that is not working being allowed to carry on. We are considering the responses to the consultation. We expect the regulator to be introduced on a phased basis, but I assure the Committee that we are aware of the need for an early assessment of how it is working; that will be put in place.

A number of noble Lords mentioned the pace of remediation and the delays in implementation. The noble Baroness, Lady Warwick, rightly raised the issues around how this is taking effect in the social housing sector. Back in December 2024, we launched our remediation acceleration plan, and, in July 2025, we set out further steps, including the intention to bring forward primary legislation and more than £1 billion in new investment to speed up the remediation of social housing, giving social landlords equal access to government funding schemes with immediate effect. We are working with the BSR to establish a new remediation enforcement unit focused on buildings with unsafe cladding that are 18 metres and above. The noble Baronesses, Lady Harding and Lady Warwick, reminded us of the impact on leaseholders, which is certainly part of the Government’s considerations.

Since April 2024, we have also invested £39 million to strengthen regulatory capacity across local authorities, fire and rescue services and metro mayors, supporting the Building Safety Regulator to hold those responsible for remediation to account. Nearly nine years on from Grenfell, there is no justification for any building to remain unsafe. We will shortly bring forward the remediation of unsafe cladding Bill, which will drive forward cladding remediation and ensure that those responsible for the cladding safety crisis pay towards fixing the problem they caused. We will introduce a new legal duty to remediate, requiring those responsible to assess their buildings and promptly fix unsafe cladding, or face criminal prosecution. When they do not, a new remediation backstop will allow a third party to step in and carry out the work. Every building made safe means fewer families left waiting and real progress towards helping people move on with their lives.

The noble Lord, Lord Fuller, raised the cost of the building regime—an important issue that I will cover briefly. The committee raised concerns about the cost impacts of the building safety regime and the importance of ensuring that fees are fair, transparent and linked to improve performance. The Building Safety Regulator’s fees and charges are set in line with His Majesty’s Treasury’s Managing Public Money guidance and operate on a cost-recovery basis. Any changes to fees would need to be considered carefully, alongside wider efforts to improve system capacity, efficiency and the consistency of decision-making. Should future changes be made, the Government will take into account the committee’s recommendations as part of their wider assessment of what the options might be.

I hope that I have covered the points made by noble Lords. In conclusion, the Government remain firmly committed to a building safety regime that is both robust and proportionate and which protects residents, maintains confidence and supports the delivery of safe homes. The committee’s recommendations have provided a valuable challenge and clear focus on what matters most: safety, consistency, transparency and delivery in practice. As I have set out today, we have already taken significant steps to strengthen the operation of the higher risk regime, and we will continue to refine it where necessary to make sure that it works effectively for residents and the sector.

I am very grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Taylor of Bolton, for securing this debate, and to all noble Lords who have contributed, and I thank the committee for its very careful and constructive work. I look forward to continuing the dialogue as we work collectively to make sure that the building safety system delivers for residents and the wider sector for the long term.

19:27

[Baroness Taylor of Bolton (Lab)]

My Lords, I said at the beginning that there was a wealth of experience in this Room; the speeches that we have heard this afternoon prove that. Every individual person has added their own insight into the nature of the problems that we are talking about, which has been extremely useful.

The starting point that we all had was that the idea of a Building Safety Regulator was something that everyone agreed was necessary. It was born out of those tragic circumstances that we must all have at the back of our minds, and it is a great shame that it got off to such a difficult start. In many respects, it was understandable that the pressures to emphasise, “This must never happen again” perhaps froze some people’s outlook in terms of what could be done and how it should operate. We all agreed that the initial period of the Building Safety Regulator resulted in delays, bottlenecks, a lack of transparency, and bureaucracy that was not necessary and could have been avoided, but unfortunately that is where we are.

It was a suggestion of the noble Lord, Lord Best, that we look at this issue, because of some of the delays that he had heard about. The more we looked into this, the more concerned we became. It was the intention of the committee to raise awareness of this issue, to highlight the difficulties that were being faced that were causing delays and difficulties for people who needed new housing—because, as my noble friend Lord Roe and others pointed out, not having a decent home is in itself a danger. We hoped that the establishment of the committee would highlight these issues and focus on the need for change.

I was really pleased when my noble friend Lord Roe said that the committee was actually a useful lever to drive forward the change. It was part of our intention to highlight the problems that could happen. Perhaps things happened more quickly than we anticipated, because we got the sense while we were taking evidence and coming up with ideas that we were having an impact, and that was extremely helpful.

So we are seeing some improvements that have been outlined by my noble friend Lord Roe and the Minister. Perhaps even more important than some of the technical improvements, although they are massively important—getting teams working together—are the beginnings of the cultural change that was being talked about. As the noble Baroness, Lady Harding, mentioned, you cannot legislate for cultural change, but when you have a regulator and an industry working together to try to improve things, you have the best way forward, and that is what we have been hearing about this evening.

The Minister outlined what she and her department are doing. Her approach is very much along the lines that the committee was hoping for. So I welcome what she has said on a whole range of issues.

I end by saying that we hope that the Minister will keep pressure on my noble friend Lord Roe, keep holding him to account and keep reporting back to Parliament, because that is the best way of giving us assurances about what is happening, and the best way of individuals being able to raise problems that perhaps do not come immediately to those who are at the coalface, so to speak. So I hope that the Minister will keep us posted.

There are still some outstanding issues. The Minister mentioned some of them. Consulting on the proportionate approach is very important. I noted that she did not give a specific date. Perhaps that was wise, because these things can drift from time to time. Making progress on products I think is extremely important. The noble Lord, Lord Best, said that we must all be able to trust that the materials in our buildings are safe. There is an urgency about that need and I think it is one that the Minister will have to continue to look at.

The progress towards a single construction regulator will have to be considered and people will have to be kept in touch and consulted about the best way forward, because we do not want to recreate new problems in the future.

The one issue I will mention that still concerns me is the question of skills. The Minister outlined the very significant investment that the Government are making. I wrote down the figure that she mentioned. Wanting 60,000 by 2028, we have a very deep problem in terms of skills shortages in this country. The Government’s targets are extremely ambitious. It really is a priority of the Government to concentrate on this, for everybody’s sake, not just in construction but across the board—but particularly in construction, especially when we look at the age profile of many of those involved.

I am very glad that we can see tangible improvements. I am very glad that we can see some development of cultural change. I thank everybody who has contributed to this. I assure the Minister and my noble friend Lord Roe that people will be keeping an eye on this issue and I am very pleased that everybody has been able to participate in this debate.

Motion agreed.

Committee adjourned at 7.34 pm.