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

Baroness Taylor of Bolton Excerpts

Monday 8th June 2026 Grand Committee

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.

--- Later in debate ---

[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.