Building Safety Regulator

Danny Beales Excerpts

Thursday 23rd October 2025 Westminster Hall

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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