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

Baroness Harding of Winscombe Excerpts

Monday 8th June 2026 Grand Committee

[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.