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

Lord Roe of West Wickham Excerpts

Monday 8th June 2026 Grand Committee

[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.

Grenfell Tower Memorial (Expenditure) Bill

Lord Roe of West Wickham Excerpts

2nd reading & Report stage & 3rd reading & Committee negatived
Tuesday 14th April 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Roe of West Wickham (Lab)]

My Lords, I start by thanking my noble friend the Minister for her words and for the continued commitment, which she is correct to say started with the previous Government. I welcome her comments that this is not a political matter but one of moral duty and the necessity to recognise that a tragedy of this scale speaks to the state of our nation—not just of our politics, of our housing, of people’s class or where they come from, but actually the state of the nation. The sensitivity with which my noble friend the Minister spoke is greatly appreciated, and I hope that those out in the community and the immediate families of those who lost their lives will recognise the intent, as spoken, that they are to be given the power to determine what the physical manifestation of this memorial should be.

In that context, I do not intend to speak to the principle of the memorial that has to exist on that site, because I do not believe it is for anyone in this House to speak to that, nor to define it. It is not our privilege nor is it our right, because we did not lose our loved ones. I hope that those conversations will continue and, as the speakers clearly expressed in those first two opening statements, the way it progresses has to lie in the control and power of those who lost their dearest loved ones. I hope we do not rush that, and I commend my noble friend Lord Boateng, who so ably led the commission with that in mind and charted such difficult waters. I think it is the sole job of this House and the other place to hold the Government of the time to account on that matter, and to demonstrate and evidence that there has indeed been conversation with those families, and that there has indeed been a richness of process that allows for divergence of thought, because grief is personal.

In that sense, I have nothing further to say. I did not have any notes, because I tried to write something, but I could not. Instead, I would like to speak to what I think “memorial” must mean for the state and for society, because I think they are separate things. Sometimes they are conflated, whether in statements around justice or around change, but what we are talking about today, in respect of a physical memorial, is very different from what I think the memorial should be for the rest of the nation, and the reason I say this is because of what I witnessed that night.

Since that night, I have thought long and hard about what my place was in that tragedy and what might motivate me to keep going to, I would hope, drive better change in the spaces where I might have a good effect. What has motivated me was both the profundity of what I saw that night and the courage that was embodied in individuals, both rank-and-file firefighters and those who lost their families. Because I have no notes and I could not think of something suitably strategic to say, I would like to tell the story of the night from the eyes of someone who stood there, having been sent in to try to do something to resolve what was a desperate situation on the ground.

In telling the story of these two men, I hope it might bring home to this House the horror of the night. We use words like “tragedy” and “loss of life”, but I cannot explain the granular horror of the night without telling the story of people, of humans, and the courage embodied in both the family of the young man who lost his life, and who I will describe in a moment, and the rank-and-file firefighter. In doing so, I hope we will understand our privilege and that of those who lead industry and who build and refurbish houses. We have something to aspire to, and we should be led by them and not pretend that we lead them. In the same way that the power in respect of the memorial must be given to the families, we must let them, with their courage, lead us in a continued journey and endeavour, not only to improve the built environment but to restore our reputation as a country, because I saw Grenfell as a statement on where the UK had got to. I will now tell the story.

Having arrived at Grenfell, I was confronted by the absolute failure of the building almost immediately—it was so graphic and profound. It was unbelievable that it had happened in this country; it looked like something you might see in another country. Having realised that we would have to end “stay put” immediately—all the investigation that has followed since has shown the trauma that all of it placed, completely understandably, on families—I wanted to go inside the tower to understand what I was sending firefighters into. I queued to run in—we ran in under the shields of our policing colleagues because of the debris falling. I was standing behind a firefighter I had known for some time; I had served with him earlier in my career. Both of us were scared because of the scale of what we were heading into. Then, due to the ferocity of the fire, and due to the nature of where this poor young man had been trapped, the young man jumped from the building. Having jumped from the building, there was a terrible shout. I will never forget the noise of the impact, nor the shout as it came. He hit my colleague full on. He died in the most terrible way, this poor young man, and I thought my colleague had died, because they were both inert on the ground.

Surrounding me were 100 firefighters waiting to go into the tower, so I asked that the body of the young man be moved with dignity and that the body of the firefighter be moved. I went into the tower. Inside the tower, I was confronted by a situation where there were no real services of any kind to provide protection to firefighters on their way in. We did not have enough water, so we were going to commit them, without water, right into the upper reaches of the building. We were in a situation where multiple members of the public were trying to get out of the tower, desperate to save their lives. Bodies were being carried down the stairs. It was a scene of absolute horror on a scale that I had not witnessed before, and I had seen many awful things in my careers in both the Army and the fire service.

It became clear to me that I could not provide any comfort to my colleagues in terms of what we were ordering them to do. So I came back outside the tower and briefed 200 of them. I basically said to them, “Our radios are failing. We have no water. I’m going to ask you to commit into the building—I can’t order you; you have families and you have places you might want to go home to—but I believe it is in the best traditions of our service. At the end of the day, we’ve got breathing apparatus and we’ve got protective kit; it’s what we have to do and it is in the best traditions of our service to the community”. Not a single one of them stepped back; they were terrified but not a single one of them stepped back—and it was the same throughout the night. We had failed as an institution, but rank-and-file firefighters did not, and their courage to this day has lifted me.

As I walked away from that briefing, I came across the gentleman who had been standing in front of me, who I had believed to be dead. He was sitting on the ground serving his breathing apparatus set, having discharged himself from the back of an ambulance. He pulled his drip out, gathered his breathing apparatus set and committed himself into the building to save lives.

A month after taking over the role of commissioner of the London Fire Brigade, charged with changing the institution that needed desperate change and failed that night—along with government, the industry, the local authority and anyone who should have demonstrated any care—I met the family of the young man who had jumped from the tower. Their courage was shocking. Their courage was as significant as the firefighter who had suffered serious injury and then gone back into the tower. They had clarity about what had gone wrong. They told me what had gone wrong. They explained the failure of my institution to me. They explained the failure of government to me. They told me that they expected justice, and they told me what they wanted. To echo the words of both my colleagues here in the House, we are not there yet. They set clear and straightforward expectations.

I am going to end—I apologise for the time taken—simply by saying that the physical memorial that must be laid in Lancaster West is for the families and those who survived. We have a different job to do. If noble Lords ever doubt the necessity of it, I ask them to think of my colleague, the family of that young man, the desperate situation they found themselves in and the courage with which they have lifted themselves since then.

I thank the Minister for her words, and I hope she will agree that it is the duty of this House, along with the other place, to hold ourselves and wider society to account to make sure that those changes are made real.

Social Cohesion Action Plan

Lord Roe of West Wickham Excerpts

Monday 16th March 2026 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)]

As the noble Baroness says, the reason for a definition is that if you cannot clearly define an issue, you cannot properly identify it, measure it or address it. This definition provides the clarity needed to respond consistently and effectively. It helps to distinguish between legitimate debate—which remains fully protected—and unacceptable hostility, prejudice and discrimination directed at individuals, enabling people to name and describe specific forms of hostility that Muslims experience, helping to build understanding in wider society and giving victims confidence that they will be taken seriously.

Government and organisations will then have a consistent framework for training, reporting, data collection and prevention work to improve how incidents are recognised and addressed. That is the longer-term process. This is protecting people, not beliefs, and helping to prevent harmful behaviour while safeguarding open discussion and criticism of ideas.

[Lord Roe of West Wickham (Lab)]

My Lords, I thank my noble friend the Minister for the Statement. I strongly support this action plan. Like my noble friend Lord Harris, I say this in the context of having spent decades on the front line of where cohesion fails. Very few people in this House have had to pick up the bodies at the endpoint of failure, where cohesion has fractured and where enmity has played out on our streets. I have seen that in my career as a soldier and as a firefighter in the most terrible way.

I would like to see non-partisan politics in this space because, regardless of which Government have brought this plan forward, we should all support it. We should all support it with the way we use our language because not doing so—with an increasingly divided politics—ends in a most terrible way. How will we measure early the impact and effectiveness of this plan? If we do not, I am afraid that the first we will know of its ineffectiveness is when the most terrible things play out.

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)]

I thank my noble friend not just for his very important question but for all his work on this during his career. We are setting out a bold new approach here, not just tackling hate speech but countering extremism by adopting and implementing definitions of extremism. We will publish the annual state of extremism report. That is one way of making sure that we are keeping a focus on the issue. We are strengthening Charity Commission powers to tackle extremist abuse, including the power to shut down charities and suspend trustees—and there are the measures I have already mentioned on tackling extremism on university campuses and in health.

We will work to implement the definition to make sure it has real effect, making sure that public bodies do not confer legitimacy, funding or influence on extremist groups. We will work with the Crown Prosecution Service and the police to ensure robust use of existing legislation on that harmful extremist conduct. As my noble friend said, the consequences of not taking action here are critical and dangerous. We will make sure that all organisations, now that they have this definition, can take action and monitor what is happening.