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

Lord John of Southwark Excerpts

Monday 8th June 2026 Grand Committee

[Lord John of Southwark (Lab)]

My Lords, I declare my interest as chair of H4Life and as a partner in Quoin Partners, which represents the building development industry. I very much welcome this report; it is really an excellent piece of work. I also welcome the Government’s initial response to the report. I welcome, too, the work that my noble friend Lord Roe has done since he took up his role as chair of the Building Safety Regulator. He has clearly had a significant impact in that new position.

I do not have the knowledge that some have, having not followed this report all the way through the committee, but I wanted to talk a little about my own journey to the Building Safety Regulator, which started on 3 July 2009, when six people died in a fire at Lakanal House in Camberwell. I was the leader of the opposition group in Southwark at that time. It was a dreadful evening, and a dreadful period in Southwark’s history. Lakanal was a 14-story council-owned block, which had recently undergone major repairs. What happened at Lakanal was that a fire broke out in a television set and spread through the exterior cladding panels. It also went through voids that should have been protecting residents in the block, but which had been compromised during recent works, with holes being drilled and new pipes being inserted. The stay-put policy of the London Fire Brigade at that time, which was followed that night in Lakanal, was found to be wanting, because people were not safe—they did not have the 45-minute or hour-long protection that they should have had in their homes on that night. It is appalling to think of the six residents who died because they stayed put in their flats.

That was an incident that scarred Southwark. The 2013 inquest made recommendations. The coroner sent a rule 43 letter to the Secretary of State, the noble Lord, Lord Pickles, as he now is. But while Southwark embarked on a significant number of fire safety works, spending £70 million on our blocks in the aftermath of Lakanal, that was not the story nationwide. What breaks my heart is that some of the lessons from Lakanal were clearly not learned by the time of Grenfell. If lessons had been learned about exterior cladding, the compromising of the integrity of the building by those works and about the stay-put policy, about which my noble friend Lord Roe, has spoken so eloquently in the past, maybe the result would have been different.

However, with such a severe loss of life, the reaction from government and society to the Grenfell Tower fire was significant, unlike with Lakanal. We have talked about Dame Judith Hackitt’s inquiry from May 2018, which made so many important recommendations and brought about the introduction of the Building Safety Regulator. I remember going to a presentation that Dame Judith gave about the impact of her report and thinking that it would have quite an impact on the skyline of London if it was followed through. Suddenly, we were talking about having a different regime for buildings of 18 metres and below and for those above that height. I do not think that that was a point that the industry necessarily picked up on at that time, in 2018 and 2019; it did not recognise that this was going to mean a very different approach.

On my next contact with the Building Safety Regulator, I was particularly impressed by the contribution of the noble Baroness, Lady Harding; she perfectly captured the problems that we saw with the creation of that regulator. I saw that, alarmingly, during a presentation at the Local Government Association conference in July 2023. This was before the Building Safety Regulator had done a thing—it was being created. I went along and heard some description, and I suppose we knew that these descriptions were going to come about post Hackitt, but they started talking about “higher risk buildings” in new-build terms. Who wants to go and live in a higher risk building? I thought, “This is going to have an impact”, and indeed some of the terminology we have used has had an impact on people’s desire to live in new builds that are described as high risk, which has had a knock on effect on the mortgage market.

The most alarming thing in that presentation at the LGA conference was representatives from the Building Safety Regulator saying, “Well, we’ve got a target of 13 weeks”—I thought it was 13 weeks but actually it might be 12—“but I can tell you now that we’re not going to meet it”. I thought, “This is odd. How can you be a regulator that hasn’t even started work yet but you’re telling the world that you’re not going to meet the targets that you have set?” The only interpretation that I could put on it was that if they were saying they were not going to meet 13 weeks then it was going to be 26 weeks or even longer, and that is how reality has played out. That comes about from the points that my noble friend Lady Taylor and the noble Baroness, Lady Harding, talked about: not properly resourcing the Building Safety Regulator at the start set it up to fail. As the noble Baroness said, that is a lesson that must be learned and taken away from this experience.

I would say that no builder or developer I have ever met wants to build an unsafe building; I think we can accept that. They want to be cost effective but they do not want to build an unsafe building. However, with the BSR we have created an overly bureaucratic regime. It is costly and has been time consuming. I have talked about the anticipated missed deadlines; they have come true, and we know that it has taken a year, if not longer, for some applications to pass through the BSR process.

There have also been some incredibly perverse results. I learned about a building of 100 new apartments in London that was complete and which waited for at least a year to be signed off by the Building Safety Regulator. Even though people had paid for the apartments because they were now complete, they had not been signed off so they could not be occupied. This is a crazy dystopian world that we have entered, where the BSR is, essentially preventing people from moving into completed buildings.

As everyone has observed, the BSR has contributed to a significant reduction in house building in London at a time when we need to be building more, not less. Someone said we need to ensure that it is not complex and confusing. I think the BSR is complex and confusing in the way that it operates at the moment.

I welcome what my noble friend Lord Roe has talked about today. I hear what he says about speed, and it will help the industry if the BSR regularly publishes its performance tables, because that will begin to send out a message about the regulator’s effectiveness. However, consistency is as important, and there is a massive complaint at the moment that I hear about consistency of decision-making. The point has been made already: if you have one building that goes through the BSR process and an identical building is then proposed next door or nearby, that one still has to go through the entire process. There does not seem to be any way of short-circuiting that, although maybe my noble friend will correct me afterwards. Surely, if one building has been signed off for safety, something that is identical could also be. Then there is the issue of fire doors that are accepted as safe by one part of the BSR but not accepted as safe by another, so a stand-off takes place between the developer and the BSR about whether those fire doors are safe or not. Consistency seems to me to be hugely important in how the BSR performs.

I want to talk about how I became interested in this issue and the lessons from Lakanal House. We need to achieve something speedy, effective and consistent from the Building Safety Regulator, so I ask the Minister for her observations on how we can ensure that it is delivering that speed, effectiveness and consistency. I would hugely welcome her comments on that.

We know that the performance of the BSR has had an adverse impact on the building industry. I have talked about the impact of people being afraid to get involved in higher-risk buildings. It has undoubtedly had an impact, because of the uncertainty of timing, on investment into London: investors cannot just put money forward without knowing when a building might be signed off; they need to know that there is a realistic prospect of deadlines being met. I take heart from what the noble Lord, Lord Roe, said, but there are still issues to be addressed.

There are undoubtedly some things about the state of the building industry in London and across the country that are outside our control, such as world events and other financial considerations, but the performance of the Building Safety Regulator is within our control. It is certainly within the control of the noble Lord, Lord Roe, more than it is of most of us. This is something on which we should bear down so that, as others have talked about, we can give confidence to the industry and to housebuilders to get the new homes built that we so desperately need.