Gateway 3 New-build Applications

Lord Kirkhope of Harrogate Excerpts

Wednesday 3rd December 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)]

The noble Baroness is quite right to point to the balance we need here. I can do no better than to quote Andy Roe, who said that

“the BSR remains firmly committed to its core mission: keeping residents and their homes safe. Life-safety critical defects cannot be ignored and improvements to efficiency cannot be pursued at the expense of rigour”.

So we must get the balance right here: we have to speed up these processes and get them working properly for the industry, but we must also make sure that, in doing that, we do not relax at all on the very clear standards we must have to keep buildings safe.

[Lord Kirkhope of Harrogate (Con)]

My Lords, there are great concerns about the standards being applied in the building industry nowadays. We no longer have Walker Morris standards to guide us, but, having had many dangerous situations such as Grenfell Tower and a lack of quality in many builds, particularly in large estates, surely it is necessary to increase the resources available to the regulator in order to deal with these matters quickly and make sure that the standards people expect are maintained.

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)]

I think the noble Lord might have been referring to Parker Morris standards, but it is quite right that we have to focus very hard on keeping up the quality of build. That is absolutely what the building safety regulator is there to do. We are making sure that we support Andy Roe and his team in what they need to do. As I am sure noble Lords are aware, there has been a capacity issue in the system, but the June spending review committed an additional £1.2 billion a year to the skills system, supporting over 65,000 additional learners in key areas such as housebuilding, remediation and building safety. That will be critical. We have also invested £16.5 million specifically to recruit and train registered building inspectors, who form a vital part of this process. We are working with the independent building control panel to identify system-wide improvements, which I am sure will help with the issues the noble Lord is concerned about.