Building Safety Regulator

Gareth Bacon Excerpts

Thursday 23rd October 2025 Westminster Hall

[Gareth Bacon (Orpington) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Desmond, and to take part in this debate on the building safety regulator. I thank the hon. Members for Milton Keynes North (Chris Curtis) and for Northampton South (Mike Reader) for securing this debate and for their opening speeches, both of which I thought were extremely reasonable and set the tone for what has been a largely reasonable debate in which there is much common ground.

It is a primary duty of any Government to ensure that everyone has a safe and high-quality home to live in. Progress has been made in recent years to ensure the nation’s housing stock, with the share of non-decent and unsafe homes witnessing a decline in the last decade. Official statistics from the National Centre for Social Research, funded by the Government, show that under the last Government the prevalence of non-decent homes fell from 17% in 2019 to 15% in 2023, with falls across every tenure. The focus of this debate is the building safety regulator and its performance since being established by the last Government.

Through the Building Safety Act, the BSR was created with the intention of regulating higher-risk buildings, raising the safety standards of all buildings, and helping professionals working in the sector. It was established in good faith, with sensible aims that any Government would agree were needed at the time; and, pertinently, as I think every speaker has referred to this afternoon, it was done in the light of the tragic loss of 72 lives in the appalling Grenfell Tower fire. As a former chairman of the London Fire and Emergency Planning Authority, I was taken to Grenfell Tower by the London Fire Brigade a week after the fire. I went to the top of the building and saw at first hand the devastation that had been wreaked there and the consequences of years of inadequate building safety control, so I believe the motivations behind the creation of the BSR were entirely understandable.

However, there is simply no point in denying that the BSR is not working today as it was originally intended. The truth is that it is proving to be a major additional contributor to a malaise that Britain has been suffering from pretty much since the turn of the millennium. Put simply, we struggle to build. Britain is now constrained within a self-imposed straitjacket of over-zealous red tape, which prevents much-needed development while at the same time causing absurd outcomes such as £100 million bat sanctuaries.

The context of this debate is worth noting. As we know, the Government have ambitious targets for housing delivery, having insisted that they will build 1.5 million new homes by the end of this Parliament; but with at least 25% of this Parliament now behind us, they are miles behind schedule, and barely a third of what should have been built by now is actually completed. The new Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government, the right hon. Member for Streatham and Croydon North (Steve Reed), has publicly said that his job should be on the line over whether or not he meets the target. Unfortunately for him, nobody believes that this Government will meet their housing target in just one Parliament: not the Office for Budget Responsibility, not Savills, not the Home Builders Federation, not Professor Paul Cheshire of the London School of Economics and not the National Federation of Builders—the list goes on and on.

In London the situation is particularly dire, not least because of some of the policies in the Mayor of London’s London plan. A further problem coming down the line is the possibility of the Government’s making changes to the landfill tax. At present, potentially toxic landfill is taxed at £126.15 per tonne, whereas harmless inert waste such as soil or concrete is taxed at £4.05 per tonne, and nothing at all if it is used to fill up former quarries. However, there are strong rumours circulating that the Government are thinking of abolishing the quarry exemption and switching all landfill up to the higher rate. Building industry experts have estimated that that rise, which is in excess of 3,000%, will add up to £28,000 to the construction cost per home. That is especially an issue in London, where the high proportion of apartment buildings generates much more landfill than elsewhere.

The impact of such a change on the construction industry is obvious. As inflation sits stubbornly at nearly 4%, twice the target level, alongside anaemic growth and increased costs to the industry, including materials and fuel, additional costs to the building trade are stacking up.

It is in that context that we need to consider the performance of the building safety regulator. The BSR is not only moving too slowly to fulfil its purpose, but wielding the axe to too many of the applications crossing its desk. As the hon. Member for Northampton South said, the Building Safety Regulator rejects about 70% of applications to begin construction, compared with roughly 10% to 15% of applications that get rejected in the wider British planning system.

Something is very clearly wrong here. When 150 high- rise residential construction projects are delayed across the UK because of the BSR, when schemes are delayed 38 weeks longer than the target time for approval, and when 60% of affected schemes are in London, the city with the highest need and the greatest demand, it is clear that we must work together to realise a better future for the BSR and to unchain the industry from some of the restraints it currently wears.

The Building Safety Regulator is all too often a handbrake on development, rather than an accelerator of safe and effective development. I welcome the Minister to her place in her first Westminster Hall debate, and I know she will be eager to tell us about the Government’s attempts to reform the BSR and solve this issue in June earlier this year. On the face of it, increasing the BSR’s headcount could be a positive move, but only if the staff brought in have the requisite technical expertise in building and fire safety and are thus able to accelerate the planning process. By simply increasing the BSR’s capacity, the Government have not yet been able, as was promised in an MHCLG press release,

“to enhance the review of newbuild applications, unblock delays and boost sector confidence”,

because it has not solved the core issue: the number of application rejections.

As the British Property Federation has argued, improved dialogue with applicants and more guidance on the BSR application process would go a long way to speeding things up by vastly increasing the likelihood that applications are right first time, rather than their having to be revised after being rejected. In the age of artificial intelligence, mandating machine-readable submissions and building an electronic file management system that ingests structured data would be immeasurably useful, enabling the use of commercially available AI to triage completeness, flag inconsistencies and vastly speed up the process for both the applicants and the regulator.

As was said earlier—I believe by the hon. Member for Kensington and Bayswater (Joe Powell), but I stand to be corrected—introducing greater transparency around the BSR’s performance is certainly welcome. The new fast-track process seems like a good idea, although it remains to be seen whether it is effective, but clearly more needs to be done.

Reforming the operation of the BSR should not be about making developments less safe. Changes must instead tackle the fundamental problem: being process-focused to the point that we fail to deliver. That is particularly true in places such as London, where it has now become difficult to build anything at all. The existing urban environment lends itself to denser developments, which are inevitably viewed as higher risk under the BSR and therefore face very lengthy delays and huge additional construction costs. Consequently, there is a danger that we risk urban sprawl into the countryside and the destruction of the green belt, with homes being forced into communities with an inability to meet the infrastructure demands of all new residents.

It is important that all sides work constructively, across Government and Opposition, to deliver remediation, building safety and the best outcomes for local communities. This debate has encouraged me that we can work across the House to tackle burdensome regulation in the housing and planning industry, including where the Building Safety Regulator is playing its well-intentioned, but undeniably imperfect role. That requires real and serious focus from the Government, who will have to act far faster than they have done to date. I will listen with interest to what the Minister says.