Question to the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government:

To ask the Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government, what steps his Department is taking to help ensure that the Building Safety Regulator works within its intended timeframes to process applications.

We recognise there have been operational challenges within the Building Safety Regulator (BSR), which is why we announced a series of reforms to strengthen it in June. Improvements to ensure applications are processed within the intended timeframes are already underway. These include:

• An Innovation Unit which assembles multi-disciplinary teams (MDTs) in house to accelerate the processing of new build applications. The Innovation Unit is already demonstrating progress, with the majority of applications currently meeting or exceeding the 12-week service level agreement (SLA).
• A new ‘batching’ process for allowing applications from the same developer or organisation to be grouped. This consolidates the multi-disciplinary teams used to review applications into one organisation, significantly reducing processing delays while retaining BSR as the regulatory lead;

• Freeing up Class 3 Registered Building Inspectors to focus on new builds and remediation by enabling Class 2 Registered Building Inspectors to take on reviews of less complex building work;

• Improved communication with applicants, recruiting 100 additional staff, and greater use of staged and approvals with requirements to allow construction to begin safely.

The BSR previously committed to improving operations by December, with faster processing of new build applications and decisions on most of the existing new-build caseload. To increase transparency and accountability, the BSR published performance data on 16 October and will continue to do so on a monthly basis to track progress against this commitment.