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

Lord Fuller Excerpts

Monday 8th June 2026 Grand Committee

[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.