Building Safety Regulator

Luke Taylor Excerpts

Thursday 23rd October 2025 Westminster Hall

[Luke Taylor (Sutton and Cheam) (LD)]

It is a pleasure as always to serve under you, Sir Desmond. I congratulate the hon. Members for Northampton South (Mike Reader) and for Milton Keynes North (Chris Curtis) on securing this important debate.

Eight years ago, London watched on in helpless horror as Grenfell Tower burned. Some 72 lives were lost, families were decimated and a community was changed forever. The tragedy was compounded by the fact that this was by no means a natural disaster; it was the direct result of a failed system that was allowed to prioritise cheap, flammable cladding over people’s lives.

Almost a decade on, that system is still failing. Other major fires have burned on and seared themselves into our memory. In 2019, Richmond House in Worcester Park in my constituency burned to the ground, and tomorrow I will visit the Hampton estate, where the rebuilt Richmond House stands. In August last year, a building on Freshwater Road in Dagenham caught alight just days before the final Grenfell report was published. In July this year, we watched on as a major fire ripped through a 17-storey complex in Walworth. Those are just a few examples, but there are many more.

Londoners are on edge every time they see a breaking news story about a building fire. They worry that another terrible tragedy is unfolding—another awful fire that will uproot lives and impose a terrible toll on communities. Hundreds of thousands of Londoners do not have confidence that they are safe and that they can sleep easy at night in their own homes. They live with cladding that hugs their home, keeping them warm in the winter and cool in the summer, but that threatens to become a towering inferno, leaving residents reliant on waking watches and, too often, faulty fire alarms. For too long, developers have been getting away with rolling the dice with people’s lives.

When the Building Safety Regulator was established through the Building Safety Act 2022, people living in these unsafe high rises were promised action by the previous Government, but instead of accelerating remediation the BSR has become one of the biggest barriers to removing dangerous cladding from buildings. Since the BSR came into force in 2023, construction projects have been delayed, costs have spiralled and thousands of residents remain trapped in unsafe homes. One of the reasons for that is that the BSR approval process is weighed down by complex bureaucracy.

Cladding remedial works to high-risk buildings cannot begin until the regulator has signed off the scope of the works. Officially, approval should take eight weeks for existing buildings and 12 weeks for new projects; in reality, cladding remediation applications are routinely taking more than 30 weeks and sometimes more than 40 weeks. We have heard even longer waits reported by Members in this Chamber.

The communication from the regulator has been equally inadequate. Developers and housing associations report one-way communication and applications disappearing into the void. When a response finally comes, a high proportion of applications are rejected at the validation stage. That cannot just be labelled as administrative lag; it means months of avoidable risk for thousands of people.

In many ways, the regulation is currently manifesting as the worst of both worlds, standing in the way of not just progress in remediating the existing properties, but building the next generation of safe, affordable homes that we need to end the housing crisis. The situation is not helped by the fact that there is a mismatch between the Building Safety Act’s definition of building safety risks and the approach to identifying defects under the PAS 9980 fire safety standard. That is quite clearly a lower standard that fails to take action on major fire safety risks and does little to nothing to bring down extortionate insurance premiums.

The Liberal Democrats are clear that the standards for remediation under PAS 9980 should match the statutory standards in the Building Safety Act, so that there is a clear rulebook for everyone. If the Government want applications to the BSR to be faster, they must ensure that those submitting them are equipped with all the facts and given clarity about what is required to meet the right standards, and that the process for approving those applications is as fast as it is rigorous.

Those two vital aspects of solving our housing and safety crisis—speed and accuracy—need not exist in tension; for the BSR to be effective, it must be more comprehensive. Limiting its scope to buildings over 11 metres tall is narrowing its ability to properly scrutinise and facilitate works on many other vulnerable apartment buildings. Indeed, Richmond House, which I mentioned earlier, would not have fallen under its remit, despite the fact that it housed 23 flats across four storeys. I invite the Minister to outline what plans—if any—exist to bring those standards together, facilitate faster processing of applications for works, and extend coverage and support to those in buildings less than 11 metres tall.

What compounds this crisis in perhaps the most nefarious way is the impact it is having on leaseholders, too many of whom are still paying out of their own pockets for dangerous construction and regulatory neglect. They are sent eye-watering bills, living in fear of the next service charge. They are treated as an afterthought in a housing system that increasingly seems rigged in favour of developers. The Liberal Democrats will not accept a housing market in which ordinary people are left powerless while corporations walk away scot-free, and we are concerned that the building safety levy that the Government have proposed will not provide sufficient funding for all required remediations. It makes no sense whatsoever for the BSL to exclude properties under 11 metres, but that is what the Government are pushing ahead with.

There must be a thorough and funded plan to assist leaseholders in properties under 11 metres to make their properties safe to live in. The Government should be taking swift and serious action to ensure that all leaseholders, including those currently excluded from the BSL, are protected from remediation costs in defective blocks with safety risks, as defined in the 2022 Act. I hope that the Minister can shed some light on whether the Government are considering taking those further steps, because leaseholders—not just in London, but across the country—are watching, and will be hoping not to be let down once again.

None of this should detract from the need to build the next generation of green, affordable and safe homes. I reject the implication we sometimes hear that there is some inherent tension between those objectives. If we want to truly solve the housing crisis in this country with a renaissance of sensible and community-driven house building, we have to recognise the defects in the existing system upon which we are layering new infrastructure. Two things can be true at once—that allowing safety standards to become a barrier to house building will damage our long-term economic security, and that accelerating new building without rigorous safety standards and proper accountability for developers will damage our physical security.

There are those who say that only a small fraction of new build units are defective, but I remind them that the fraction will account for a much larger overall number of units as we grow that stock. We can and must do both. A sensible, progressive, interventionist Government would recognise that their purpose is exactly that— not just to regulate the market, but to play an active role in it, discouraging cowboys and faceless, careless developers with rules, standards and real, comprehensive enforcement.

In fact, any Government worth their salt would see this issue in its wider context: a housing market that is fundamentally broken, not just by years of inaction on house building or by the great council housing sell-off, but by decades—maybe even centuries—of lopsided relationships between leaseholders and landowners. If we are really to put the power back into people’s hands and reconcile the two dreams of housing that have dominated in this country over the past century—the right-wing dream of democracy in which everyone has an ownership stake, and the left-wing dream of a nation in which everyone’s right to shelter is guaranteed, no matter their income—we need to end the broken leasehold system altogether, both for owners and for renters.

I invite the Minister to tell us why the Government have failed to commit, as the Liberal Democrats did at our recent conference, to ending that lopsided relationship by giving leaseholders new powers and rights to take collective ownership. Why have they not committed to removing dangerous cladding from all buildings, while ensuring that leaseholders do not have to pay a penny towards that removal—as is only right, because of the regulatory failure that enabled it? Why have they not committed to holding developers to the highest possible standards and introducing tougher oversight of building inspectors, and not just to capping unreasonable service and estate management charges, but to abolishing ground rents on all existing leases?

That is the radical but necessary action that we must take, and actions such as these, which actually fix issues that our constituents face, are how we defeat the new populists on the right and the left who offer nothing more than simple slogans and catchy TikToks. It is up to the Government to respond to our calls and deliver the necessary changes.