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

Lord Roe of West Wickham Excerpts

Monday 8th June 2026 Grand Committee

[Lord Roe of West Wickham (Lab)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Taylor of Bolton, for the opportunity to speak in this debate and for the invaluable work of the committee when she was its chair. I say that on behalf of the regulator; I declare an interest as its chair. The report was enormously important and a very useful lever to drive forward what has been a fundamental process of change. Since sitting in front of the committee—perhaps I would say this—we as a regulator have undergone a fundamental process of change in just about every area of operation, including culture. I will speak to that to provide some reassurance on these well-placed questions and concerns.

I acknowledge that the problems that the noble Baroness spoke to in opening were entirely real. I do not intend to debate that. Last July, I was given a job to do because of those problems and because the Government had recognised that there was certainly a job to be done to improve the regulator. When I took over the regulator, which was still within the HSE at that point, there was a backlog of around 33,000 homes stuck in the application pipeline. I think it is fair to say that there had been a disproportionate impact on housing starts in London. Those two things are undeniable and inexcusable in the context of a regulator that should perhaps have paid more due regard to proportionality and the duties of a regulator to understand its economic impact.

I am in violent agreement with the position stated by all previous speakers that, basically, not having a home does not make you safer. We have to be an enabling regulator because there is a dire need for housing in this country. As someone who, in a previous life, ran one of the largest emergency services in the world, I can tell the Committee that poor access to housing creates as great a danger as living in dangerous housing. I do not say that hypothetically: it is there in the statistics. People very often die, sadly, in crowded and inappropriately converted accommodation. I agree with all of that.

In that spirit, I draw the Committee’s attention to some of the data which shows that there has been a sustained change at the regulator, particularly concerning new builds. The committee provided us with some very well-made challenges. The first was that there was a lack of transparency. We now publish data monthly which shows both the trajectory of change and the remaining challenges. I will come to some of those. We do that openly and in good faith, and we provide a detailed narrative alongside it. If noble Lords go on to the BSR or MHCLG web pages, they will see how things have been improving, month by month.

When I sat in front of the committee, there was a 30% approval rate for applications, which spoke to the lack of available guidance and the confusion that surrounded the regulations. It probably said something about the relationship between the industry and the regulator—a lack of communication, mutual respect and understanding that, in the end, the construction sector will deliver the homes and it is our job to hold it to account, enable it and pull standards up. The average approval rate across all parts of the BSR system is now sitting at more than 75%. I do not believe that that is because we have gone soft; it is because we have helped drive standards upwards. That is above 75% across every single part of the system.

I turn to the innovation unit, as it is termed—it is actually just the centralised model, which previous speakers talked about—where we have taken control of our own MDTs and are directing them more assertively. In the past month, 90% of all decisions delivered by the innovation unit were approvals, whereas previously we were invalidating applications, sometimes at the six-month point, because they were missing documents or there was something not quite right in the way the application was put in. It was completely inappropriate to leave people delayed in that way. We are now making determinations within a week for invalid—that is, missing—parts of an application process.

In London last month, 100% of all applications across 19 case decisions were approvals. In remediation, the approval rate is up to 79% on average, and we are motoring through them now. Across all categories, as I have said, we are up to 75%. More than 10,000 housing units were approved in the past 12 weeks. When I sat in front of the committee, the median for a determination was 43 weeks nationally and 48 in London. Obviously, that speaks to even greater delays at the wrong end of that—people who had put in entirely valid applications but had been waiting and waiting. The median approval time is now down to 22 weeks.

I would like to talk about the KPIs at some point within the next nine minutes. There is a principal point here about how those KPIs were first come to and whether, in the opinion of both the industry and the regulator, they would ever be achievable. If you were to sit with some of the CEOs of the major constructors in this country, they would tell you that they do not need me, along with my colleagues, to rush to those 12 weeks. I suggest that it might force some illogical, cliff-edge-style regulatory decisions. I will come back to that.

We are down to a 22-week median approval time now. It could be lower, I think around 15 to 18 weeks, depending on the complexity of an application. Do not forget that our regulatory remit is everything from a single 12-storey tower block right through to the Shard. As one could imagine, it is highly unlikely that you would reach a decision on the Shard in 12 weeks. We have schemes of very significant complexity and scale—multi-tower schemes or those of more than a thousand housing units—alongside those single blocks. For single blocks, we could probably get close to 12 weeks, but I would argue that we would not be doing anyone any favours to rush towards 12 weeks for the larger and more complex schemes, and that is why the median time is at 22 weeks: there is a balance between approval, rejection and the amount of time.

The reason that it is 22 now is that we are working with developers on a weekly basis to guide them, to help pull up the standards of design and to challenge where necessary. We are doing that in a transparent and recorded way, but in an environment of positive communication. I would like to see the time come down, but I would be a bit cautious about suggesting a blind rush to a KPI that was designed by people who perhaps had not fully understood how hard it is to design something of that scale and complexity in advance. Noble Lords do not have to take just my word for that; the industry would probably say the same thing. It really wants regulatory certainty, and that is what we have given it, because that 22-week median has held solid for months now. I would like to see it come down further. We need to come back to some stuff around engineering design decisions, which I will describe in a minute, because they will help us get it down, particularly for complex case applications.

Noble Lords were absolutely right about guidance. We are bang to rights. If people are not told what to bring, how on earth could they be expected to make a good application? The guidance out there now is significant, considerable and, more importantly, co-authored with the industry. To go back to the principle, the noble Baroness, Lady Harding, is absolutely right: we want people who are experts in building buildings, who are in the industry—whatever story might have been told in public—to improve it. My experience is that the Construction Leadership Council led by Mark Reynolds is owed a great deal of thanks for helping us to improve as a regulator. Working with the CLC and the industry to produce industry-relevant guidance based on best engineering practice has helped to drive that approval rate up, because people are now coming into the application process understanding what we need and what best practice looks like. That has been from a joint effort with industry, and the results speak for themselves.

There was an absence of good guidance in the remediation space, where there are some complexities, particularly around facade engineering and the level of expertise available in the country. That has radically shifted again and we have a 79% approval rate now because—again, to its credit—the industry has worked hard with the regulator to produce guidance and videos. There will be more on that by 22 June, as we start to ramp up our remediation programme.

Just for information, I shall talk about things that have worked. One is centralising teams—getting control of MDTs. I talked about picking a football team where you did not know what pitch you were playing on or who was on your team. That was the old model, and that has gone. We do not do any of the franchise MDT work anymore in any part of our systems. Either it is delivered through a centralised team process where we control it—that is, we have direct control of fire engineers, structural engineers, geospatial and building control specialists—or we have private sector contracts with the big engineering companies where we batch out applications under very strict regulatory oversight, so we control what goes in, and we have oversight of the information that those engineering concerns are taking in and making determinations on. At the end of the day, the legal decision has to lie with the regulator. Our experience is that that has provided great contingency and additional capacity that, again, brings times down.

Obviously the biggest improvement has been in the new-build space, and what we have done there has to be repeated in remediation. We are beginning to see that now but, frankly, it took us up until just after Christmas to clear the backlog in new build, and then we turned our gaze to remediation, but we are now starting to see that accelerate. That is good because, with credit to the Minister and the department, we are now seeing real pressure being brought to bear, both through the grant system and in the relationship with developers through the developer contract, to speed up applications into the process. We are seeing a considerable uptick in the number of applications coming into the remediation process. We have to keep pace with that, and my assurance to the Committee is that we will.

We have been recruiting at pace and are building new contracts at pace with big engineering firms to focus specifically on remediation. We now have a full-time centralised team fully established inside the remediation space for applications. They have their first 50 applications now as a new unit and are working their way through. So, even in the context of some of the problems that previous speakers have described, we had started improving anyway just by improving communication, relationships, guidance process and general grip. Now that we are resourcing up, I think that again we will continue to see an improving trajectory.

On problems within categories A and B, we will come back to the principles around refurbishment in those categories. I apologise—I am conscious that I am running out of time, so I will wrap up as quickly as possible.

I have a dedicated NHS team. It was inexcusable to me that we were holding up hospital refurbishment and improvements. We have broadly dealt with that by just establishing a dedicated NHS team, which is probably worth knowing about. Probably, like my colleague the Minister, I am measuring the success of that by the far more limited emails that I now get in my inbox directly from the CEOs of NHS trusts.

If the Committee might indulge me going a minute over my time, I would like to talk about the remaining challenges, because it is worth being honest with noble Lords. On the remaining challenges, we are now doing what we should do as a regulator, because we have dealt with the bureaucratic failures. We are not refusing to reply to emails; now we are meeting developers weekly. We have a dedicated account management function that will be meeting all the big developers and the majority of SMEs on a weekly and monthly basis to problem-solve. That is all great, but we have realised that we need better industry-wide benchmarks, commonly understood with the regulator, about engineering principles. As much as I love lawyers and engineers, if you put the two in a room, they will have a different opinion, whether on our side, on the applicant’s side or even within either entity. That is what we are finding, and it is extending determination times, so we are doing something about it. We have appointed independent chairs of the statutory committees, and we have set up internal panels to allow for third-party challenge.

We are dealing with some of the big issues—for example, around structural engineering calculations and design ideologies—that are really bothering the industry at the moment. We need to have a reset in the back regime. I would be happy to come back to the Committee or to report in future debates on what we are doing there, but that is imminent, because that system still is not functioning as we would want it and we want to turn it to a risk-based inspection programme, to put it broadly, rather than calling them all in, which is what we do at the moment and places an undue burden.

I am grateful to the Minister and the department for supporting us in rationalising the category A and B refurbishment regime, and we are a long way down that road now. I expect to see the results of that coming through consultation, and therefore a change to our operations. I am sorry for the rush through; I probably could have said more about change, but I hope it has given the Committee a sense of what we have been doing that is evidenced in the numbers, rather than just empty promises. I would welcome the opportunity to speak again as we drive further change forward.