Is the Building Safety Regulator’s plan to tackle the backlog likely to succeed?

On 30 June, the housing ministry announced a major series of reforms to the regulator it had set up just two years ago to oversee the new regime for constructing high-rise residential buildings.

Gone was the existing management, to be replaced by a new chair and chief executive – respectively former fire officers Andy Roe and Charlie Pugsley – with the body itself shifted wholesale out of the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) to become an independent agency of the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG).

The move followed a troubled start for the Building Safety Regulator (BSR), set up under the auspices of the post-Grenfell Building Safety Act. It had lost control of decision-making timelines, resulting in developers waiting nearly a year on average to get an approval. According to the BSR’s own figures, more than 33,000 homes are currently held in a backlog awaiting construction approval.

Suddenly the BSR started contacting us, we got a timeline for an approval. It was a lightbulb moment

Matt Voyce, Quintain

With the new management came an immediate new strategy and approach. “It was like the penny dropped,” says Matt Voyce, executive director of construction at developer Quintain, which at that point had been had been waiting on regulatory approval for its 487-home Solar scheme in Wembley for over a year.

“Suddenly the BSR started contacting us, we got a timeline for an approval. It was a lightbulb moment.”

By 25 September, Quintain had got its approval. “Those last 10 weeks, the behaviour switched. Everything we had been asking for for months started happening,” Voyce says.

A week after that, Roe formally revealed his turnaround plan at the Building the Future conference. The BSR, he said, would clear a backlog of 95 new-build schemes by the end of the year, while “batching out” groups of remediation applications to building inspectors in private firms such as Arup. Meanwhile an innovation unit, set up in the summer, would fast-track new applications coming in, to ensure that they met the 12-week timeline for a decision.

Roe and his plan have both been widely welcomed. The question for the industry, which is now facing the collapse of one of the major private sector building control firms the BSR was relying on to process applications, is how credible the plan is, and will it work?

Building Safety Regulator’s rocky start

The Building Safety Regulator was given various responsibilities by the 2022 Building Safety Act. These include both the regulation of building inspectors and, crucially, signing off designs for new “higher-risk Buildings” (HRB) at three separate “gateway” points in the construction process.

While many in the sector are careful not to directly criticise the HSE, it is widely believed that the placement of the BSR inside the HSE meant it was totally divorced from the wider policy driver to support housing delivery.

Mark Reynolds, executive chair at construction firm Mace, and co-chair of the cross industry-government Construction Leadership Council, says of the shift to MHCLG – which holds the target to deliver 1.5 million homes: “It’s a positive move.”

Quintain’s Voyce says: “The HSE was probably the wrong vehicle to entrust with the BSR.

“The HSE performs a very valuable function within construction, but there was very much in my view a behaviour of trying to find reasons to refuse [applications], rather than trying to find ways and means to approve and get construction up and running.”

“It was a behaviour that was not aligned with government.”

Much of the frustration of the industry was felt in the BSR’s reluctance, prior to July, to communicate with applicants – either to discuss timeframes, or to collaborate to solve issues which might be preventing approval. In 2024 it said it would not assist applicants by “tell[ing] you how to comply with the requirements of the building regulations” or “provid[ing] pre-application advice on building control applications”.

The upshot was that, where applicants had issues, rather than resolving those during the application process, they were simply refused, forcing people back to the back of an ever-lengthening queue. “This is not really a fair outcome,” says Lee Wingate, director at multi-disciplinary consultant McBains.

The HSE refused to act as a consultant. It didn’t have the mentality to deal with developers. It needed to have a more open approach

Graham Watts, Construction Industry Council 

Graham Watts, chair of the consultant umbrella group the Construction Industry Council (CIC), says: “The HSE refused to act as a consultant. It didn’t have the mentality to deal with developers. It needed to have a more open approach.”

Quintain’s Voyce says: “We’re an industry that collaborates. We’re problem solvers – but we do that by coming together and talking about issues and finding solutions. That was off the agenda as far as the BSR was concerned for many months.”

Speaking at a House of Lords select committee late last month, Andy Roe said there was a lot the BSR had done well, but accepted that “until we sort out the very real challenges and issues at gateway 2 … none of that [success] means anything”.

It had failed, he said, “because a process was designed in good faith that does not work. It is that straightforward.”

Fundamental shift under new leadership

Given the BSR’s initially hard-nosed approach to applicants, the new plan pioneered by Roe and Pugsley is nothing short of radical, says the CLC’s Reynolds.

So, what does it entail? First, the organisation is making an about-turn in terms of how it communicates with applicants at gateways 2 and 3 of the new HRB approvals process. Where applicants would previously get little if any feedback or information on the progress of their application, and no opportunity to rectify issues once the application was in, now the system is aimed giving confidence and making progress.

“It’s things like making sure there’s regular communication with the developer,” says Reynolds. “That’s a major and important step. [Previously] it was a policy decision not to have direct communication – and that has now changed.”

For the biggest applicants, such as major developers and volume housebuilders, this takes the form of having a dedicated account manager. And, crucially, the regulator is now willing to discuss how applications can be improved to get them good enough to approve.

Quintain’s Voyce says the new approach paid dividends. “It was, ‘Let’s get round the table let’s talk, let’s find solutions’. And, when we got engineers talking to engineers, we got resolutions to issues very quickly.”

An innovation unit has been set up to tackle major new-build schemes coming in now – which the BSR says is hitting timelines – while other teams have been set to work tackling the 90-odd scheme backlog. Guidance has been produced – something the BSR previously refused to countenance – in collaboration with the CLC.

The innovation unit is currently processing 27 schemes comprising 6,192 units, and Roe told peers that “all the applications in that process … are either meeting or exceeding the SLA [service level agreement timeline]”.

In addition, a philosophical barrier has been overcome: the BSR, which previously sent applications to be processed by teams made up of appropriately qualified Local Authority Building Control (LABC) staff, has now also started batching up groups of applications to be processed by teams from private sector registered building inspectors (RBIs) at firms such as Arup.

These big changes have come amid a raft of other technical measures, such as allowing the issuing of provisional approvals conditional on specific outstanding issues being resolved, which the sector has largely welcomed (see The BSR’s turnaround plan panel below).

They are doing their utmost at a leadership level to make the changes and improve the process. They know they still have work to do

Mark Reynolds, CLC

Together these are “fundamental shifts”, Reynolds says, adding that the strategy largely matches the recommendations for changes made to the BSR by the CLC. “They are doing their utmost at a leadership level to make the changes and improve the process. They know they still have work to do,” he says.

The CIC’s Watts, likewise, welcomes the plan and says he has real confidence in the new leadership. “The innovation unit does seem to be cutting down the time,” he says. “It appears to be focusing on real fire safety on projects – not process issues and ticking boxes on forms.”

Dan Hollas, director of building safety at housing association Clarion Housing Group, says moves to increase the number of inspectors available to the BSR were particularly welcome. “Greater capacity, combined with other initiatives such as the fast-track process and more open engagement, could reduce the current backlog of applications,” he adds.

More change that could boost investor confidence

Further to all this, Roe and Pugsley have signalled that they will act on another major ask of the industry, the issuing of so-called “staged approvals”. These are BSR approvals at gateway 2 for the basic design principles of a scheme, which allow work to proceed on early stages of a project, ahead of final details of the overall build and cladding.

McBains’ Wingate says: “The substructure and superstructure aren’t often the problem when it comes to fire safety – it’s the elements that hang off the frame that cause issues.

“So, the potential benefit is, can the BSR release the piling contractors, and others early? It could get the whole supply chain moving. It would really give investors confidence.”

In written evidence to the House of Lords committee, the BSR said that, from “the autumn”, it proposes “to extend” the use of staged approvals “to enable initial works on some projects to start earlier”. It added that the specific building work that will be allowed in a staged approval was subject to final confirmation but “likely to include groundworks and foundations” – with applicants able to submit applications in two stages.

Quintain’s Voyce says being able to work in this way would be “really beneficial” for the industry. “We could really steal a march in terms of programme,” he says.

Challenges remain: The Impact of Assent’s collapse 

However, despite a recognition that things are genuinely changing at the regulator, there remain big concerns about its ability to pull off such a significant turnaround in performance. Data so far (see BSR: Key data panel) suggests that, while performance for recently submitted new-build applications is now on track, it is much harder to discern the pace of improvement that will allow it to eliminate a 91-scheme backlog in less than two months, as well as deal with continued delays on remediation projects and other works on existing HRBs.

For example, the HSE said in October that gateway 2 determinations had reached an all-time high of 209 across all application types during August 2025. However, it reported that just nine decisions on new-build schemes were taken in September, against a requirement for 28 to be taken in October and 49 this month if its target to clear the backlog is to be hit.

Meanwhile, the BSR still has a 253-application backlog on remediation projects (defined as major refurbishments of existing HRBs with combustible cladding), and nearly 700 applications to decide (according to a data release in July) on other works to existing HRBs.

CIC’s Watts says: “We’ve seen some improvements but so far the data suggests they are marginal. It’s going to take a while to get up to speed.”

On top of this, the collapse of one of the biggest private building control firms, Assent Building Control Compliance, in the past few weeks, will be adding strain to the system. Building has seen correspondence from Roe suggesting that Assent was processing 10 gateway 2 HRB applications, and Building understands the firm was overseeing a further 19,000 other projects – much of which work is likely to now revert to the local authority sector.

“The Assent administration is a massive issue,” Watts says. “Those projects have got to now get picked up by LABC. This has the potential to reduce spare capacity to process BSR applications.”

Not much movement

Some in the industry have concerns that, while the policy has shifted at the top, on the coal-face the culture is taking longer to change. One construction industry leader says: “We had a feeling in the multi-disciplinary teams that they want to take every design back to first principles and query your approach – rather than simply address whether your design meets the functional requirements of building regulations. Some RBIs are still adopting the old regime.”

Roe defended the culture and expertise of the BSR’s staff to the House of Lords committee, saying BSR staff were “very hard working” with an “unbelievable” work ethic who were “keen to own and see change and are operating in a complex environment”. He said: “I have not experienced a culture of saying no.”

However, the CLC’s Reynolds says it remains to be seen whether the Christmas deadline will be hit, adding: “There’s some filtering down of the intent that still needs to happen. There is some work to be done to filter down that leadership intent to the RBIs and the multi-disciplinary teams.” 

McBains’ Wingate says his firm has so far not seen any of the projects that it is working on stuck at gateway 2 resolved, albeit he has heard of others that have. “Personally we’ve not seen much movement from the BSR. Discussions are starting but it’s not a flood,” he adds.

In terms of clearing the backlog, Wingate says the “proof is in the pudding”. “There are a lot of projects where the date for determination just keeps being shifted out to the right. Industry needs to see things released in order to get confidence,” he says.

At the same time, while things may be improving slowly, not everyone is even convinced that the stated strategy is right. Building understands that many local authorities, some of whom have staffed up with highly skilled class 3 inspectors in the understanding of a large volume of BSR workload coming their way, are concerned about the BSR’s shift to using private sector building inspectors.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the fence, Darren Ettles, secretary of the Association of Building Control Approvers (ABCA), which represents private RBIs, is unhappy at the lack of consultation with his members, which he says is hindering the BSR’s success. He says excessive bureaucracy in the tender process is making it very difficult for private RBIs to qualify to process applications, exacerbating skills shortages even now the BSR has decided to reach out beyond local authorities.

“The BSR won’t engage with us as an equal stakeholder,” he says. “It seems reluctant to engage with the private sector, even though we look after more than half of all applications and employ half of all inspectors. It’s frustrating.”

Future risks

Watts is also worried about the body taking its eye off the ball as the transition is made to a new agency, with issues such as staff restructuring, TUPE and reporting lines inevitably set to come to the fore. “The thing that worries me is not getting the transition right – and making sure we don’t make the same mistakes when this agency becomes the single construction regulator,” he says.

More immediately, the question of what will happen to hundreds of projects that will shortly be hitting the project completion gateway 3 stage, and require further approval before occupation can happen, is worrying many.

Watts adds: “You’ve got to ensure this experience isn’t repeated. You can’t have inspectors backtracking and re-covering ground already covered at gateway 2 – that would be a nightmare.”

Mark Reynolds says: “We must not fall into the same trap on gateway 3. It is no good building buildings and have them sitting there unoccupied. We must learn those lessons and put resources in place and together ensure those are safe at completion. I’m concerned that’s not going to happen.”

Many in the industry are positive about the changes made in recent months – but construction still requires proof that an efficient system is delivered before it, and its financial backers, can have real confidence.