How the building safety regime is getting back on track

2025 was challenging for the UK’s fledgling building safety regime, but towards the end of the year there were signs that things should be better in 2026, says Rachel Davidson, Director of Specialist Knowledge at the Building Engineering Services Association (BESA).

There is one thing everyone can agree on about the building safety regime: Nobody ever said it would be easy. Attempting to change the culture of a major industry was bound to take time and cause considerable pain…and that is exactly how it has turned out since the Building Safety Act came into force in 2022.

During a parliamentary inquiry into the slow pace of adoption of the requirements of the Act, Dame Judith Hackett, one of the driving forces behind the legislation, said her greatest fear was that the whole process was going backwards.

She accused the construction industry of “making a big deal” of the well-publicised planning delays which have been blamed on lack of resource and expertise in the office of the Building Safety Regulator (BSR).

Hackitt, who chairs the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government’s Building Control Independent Panel, told the ongoing BSR inquiry led by the Lords Industry and Regulators Committee that change was “taking longer than I anticipated, but…we have to move forward”.

Approvals

At one point, planning consents collapsed to their lowest level since records began in 2006, according to the Home Builders’ Federation. Nearly 30,000 homes (almost 10,000 of which were in London) were held up at Gateway 2 and the average time for approvals was 36 weeks – the statutory target is 12.

With more residential capacity needed in cities, there are more high-rise (higher risk) applications in the system than ever – including some important refurbishment projects – that come under the Regulator’s remit, but many struggled to get approval.

This prompted several commentators to suggest that the legacy of Grenfell will be even more people living in unsafe, unhealthy buildings because it is proving so difficult to build better ones.

This was one of the issues quickly grasped by the former London Fire Brigade chief commissioner Andy Roe when he was appointed as the new chair of the BSR in July.

He set about updating the organisation’s internal systems which he described as “not viable,” with staff still manually handling cases due to a lack of digital infrastructure, pointing out that much of the bureaucracy involved in planning had “nothing to do with safety.”

If it is radically improved it will enable “more houses to get built, more applications to be processed without ever compromising the ideology of the Act,” but he made no apology for preventing “bad and unsafe buildings” being built and challenged the sector to improve the quality of planning submissions.

Roe and his team also changed their internal process from the traditional ‘franchised’ model to a centralised team of 15 in-house registered building inspectors (RBIs) and have introduced a ‘batching process’ to get bundles of applications through the system more quickly using external engineering experts.

This is already bearing fruit, as some of the larger projects are now getting through the bottleneck, freeing up more resource to tackle the rest of the problem and get money flowing through the industry again.

The BSR’s director of operations John Palmer also identified a role for wider use of AI: “AI screening of applications early [could] give applicants an indication of whether it’s a red, amber or green, [which] will save them and the BSR a lot of time before things get in the [system],” he told the committee.

However, there is not much time to waste, not least because some developers are so frustrated they are reportedly redesigning some projects, so they no longer have to be signed off by the BSR. This rather defeats the purpose and, if they scale back the ambition of their projects, they will put the government’s target of 1.5 million new homes by the end of this parliament in even greater doubt.

Roe has a plan here too and is appointing a team of ‘account managers’ to work more closely with developers to iron out some of their concerns. He also made it clear that a big part of the faster moving system relied on the support of sector bodies like BESA.

Solutions

We recognised from the start that we had a key role to play – in both identifying the problems our members and their supply chains were having with the legislation and then providing at least some of the solutions.

While 78% of respondents to our survey said improving building safety was a top priority for their organisations, only half of those thought they had done enough to achieve compliance.

BESA’s report ‘Turning Awareness into Action’ also found that just 39% of micro and small companies were even aware of the Act and its consequences and one in five respondents, who did know about the Act, said they were still unclear about their roles and responsibilities.

Most respondents to the survey said there was an urgent need for more guidance, practical support and mandated training to help them achieve compliance.

They were also heavily critical of client behaviour, accusing many of carrying on with ‘business as usual’ putting low cost and speed of delivery ahead of new, legally required safety measures. As a result, a significant proportion of respondents called for stronger enforcement of the regulations with real penalties for those who fall short.

While awareness of the Act is relatively high across BESA membership, this is the biggest change to construction procurement and practice since the middle of the last century, so turning around the whole sector was always going to take time.

Companies tell us that there is still a lack of consistent understanding of what is needed in practice. They would welcome mandatory training leading to a set of specific qualifications in line with the Act. This could be supported by practical tools to help achieve compliance such as templates, checklists and phased compliance roadmaps, helping smaller firms to benchmark their progress and manage their resources.

Similarly, they believe that clients need to be held accountable to recognise their responsibilities because many are still opting for the lowest price rather than a solution that offers the best long-term value for building users. This requires them to be better engaged but also to understand there are consequences to their choices, which means more visible enforcement of the legislation.

Producing targeted, sector-specific guidance is clearly vital to help our members and the wider sector break their roles and responsibilities down into easily digestible elements. BESA launched this with our widely welcomed ‘Play it Safe’ campaign in 2024 and have continued to build on that foundation responding to the clear calls for help in our annual industry surveys.

Confusion

BESA’s ‘Clients’ Guide to the Building Safety Act’ is due to be published in early 2026[RD1]  , following quickly on the heels of the new Guidance Framework for Principal Contractor Competence (PAS 8672) which has already been widely welcomed for addressing a source of growing confusion in the new building safety regime.

The Clients’ Guide will emphasise the key role clients play in ensuring only competent and compliant companies and individuals are appointed to deliver their projects, and the long-term benefits to their businesses and reputations of safe and sustainable buildings.

The Principal Contractor (PC) framework seeks to address the lack of a consistent industry approach to assessing the competence of one of the key professions charged with delivering the requirements of the Act. Clients have, therefore, been approaching the appointment of PCs in a piecemeal way which has led to further complication, confusion and project delays.

PCs themselves are also coming under increasing pressure to provide evidence of competence throughout their supply chains but lacked a recognised and standard format for doing this. 

Therefore, following months of research and cross-industry collaboration, BESA produced a guidance framework which provides a considerably simplified andstandardised method for meeting PAS 8672, the standard used to assess PC competence. The new framework is aligned with BSI standards and cross-mapped to relevant ISO standards along with the Build UK Common Assessment Standard to help all members of a supply chain prove compliance once and avoid having to continually repeat the process for every project. 

It can be used by organisations and individuals to define and provide evidence of the Skills, Knowledge, Experience and Behaviours (SKEB) and core functions of this key role – supported by practical guidance and examples of the proof they must provide to clients including existing qualifications and accreditations.

The need for such a guide was growing throughout 2025 as more potential PCs reported having to provide overly prescriptive and repetitive pre-qualification questionnaire (PQQ) evidence and that existing certifications were only receiving limited recognition.

A regular concern is PCs being asked to comply with every element of PAS8672 – not just those relevant to the project size, nature and complexity – and the difficulty of breaking down SKEB and core functions into a practical solution for self-assessment and selection.

BESA’s guidance, therefore, provides a structured approach to proving compliance with SKEB criteria related to the core minimum functions and competency requirements set out in the PAS. It also clearly sets out how evidence can be mapped against industry standards and accreditations to avoid duplication of effort.

The guide also covers core themes and competence categories across the six major areas relevant to the PC role: Legal and contractual requirements; managing building work, planning and organising work, construction supervision and quality, leadership and competence culture, and stakeholder and information management.

Competence

As well as being useful for PCs seeking to prove competence and their ability to carry out the role, the BESA guidance also gives clients and duty holders a structured and clearly defined route to appointing suitably qualified and competent firms and individuals.

And, with the Regulator under new management, we have, effectively, a fresh start. The industry knows where it stands and must sort out the quality of planning submissions and invest in competence and compliance, but it also needs more practical support, training and guidance.

Clients must also do their bit by ensuring they only use competent and compliant firms to carry out work – and not necessarily at the lowest price on the table.

We all have our roles to play – and now we must play them. The changes at the BSR and the improvements in collaboration across the sector should be a recipe for success and ensure we start moving forwards again in line with Dame Judith’s vision.

For more information about the Act and to access BESA’s suite of guidance and practical tools visit the Building Safety Hub on the BESA website, where you can also sign up for our ‘Get your Act Together’ newsletter.