Changes at the Building Safety Regulator and building the future London
This week's post considers the surprising new appointments at the top of the BSR, as well as some of the proposals for a new London Plan
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Changes at the BSR
Big changes to the Building Safety Regulator (BSR) were announced this week - with the government laying out plans to move the beleaguered watchdog out of the Health and Safety Executive’s structure and into the control of a new arm’s-length body being set up by the Ministry for Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG).
The regulator has also been given new leadership in the form of former London Fire Brigade commissioner Andy Roe, who takes over as chair of the new board which will take on responsibility for the BSR, and his former deputy Charlie Pugsley, who will become the new chief executive.
A new ‘fast track’ process is being laid out to help unblock delays with new build housing, as well as fresh investment into staffing.
What to make of all this? Reaction on Linkedin - never short of opinions about the BSR - has been mixed. There is some welcoming of the additional investment, and the move away from HSE (a workplace safety regulator was always an odd fit for a construction watchdog).
But there is also a fair bit of skepticism being expressed about two firefighters taking over at the helm. Plenty of professionals are wondering why it wasn’t a fire engineer or construction sector figure who got appointed.
And some residents of impacted buildings are nervous about the LFB’s involvement - having experienced the LFB’s regulatory arm in years previous, through suddenly mandated waking watches and forced building “decants” which turned their lives upside down.
My own view is cautiously optimistic. It looks (tentatively) like the government actually placing faith in the principle of the BSR and trying to rejig its structure and resource it to make it work, rather than heeding the very noisy calls of some of those in the construction industry to abolish it entirely or cut its remit.
As for the new leadership, it has been hard not to be impressed by Roe in recent years. Coming in at the helm of the LFB at a very difficult moment in its history, he has been consistently willing to admit fault, challenge orthodoxy and implement change.
Personally, I also don’t have a problem with him coming from outside the sector. He isn’t being appointed to review structural surveys, the BSR will (hopefully, by now) have engineers for that. His job is leadership, culture and strategy. A good regulator needs to understand the industry they are regulating, but not be so versed in its norms they are blind to its faults.
He also speaks with charisma and character, which is an underrated skill in a climate where the BSR needs an advocate to stand up against the interests which would like to see it removed completely.
Take, for example, the House of Lords’ Industry and Regulators Committee review of the body. The questions in its call for evidence read (to me at least) as a fairly open invitation for the industry to line up and hammer it for delaying house building. A scorching report about its failures (and even its most staunch defenders will admit there have been some) could open the door to pressure from Number 10 and the Treasury to get it out of the way.
In particular, a suggestion in one question that the regulator could move to “an organisation-by-organisation” approach from its current “building-by-building” assessment is deeply troubling. Such an approach would utterly defang the regulator. A sophisticated volume builder would be able to sell an inspector a good game on its commitment to safety. But we still need someone to check that the buildings it is building (or, more accurately, hiring a complex chain of subcontractors to build) have properly fitted fire breaks and structural integrity.
It will be up to Roe to make the case over the coming years that while some reform could help, the BSR still has a job we need it to do. As the incident commander who had control of the operation at Grenfell Tower for longer than anyone else, he is well placed to make this argument.
Towards a new London plan
What is London going to look like in 20 to 25 years time?
Given the rising threat of a hot nuclear war, the ongoing breakdown of the climate and the AI-led destruction of the job market, the best bet might be a flooded nuclear wasteland being tidied up by robots.
With that typically upbeat opening out of the way, let’s talk about the consultation documents for the next London Plan.
The London Plan is, on its face, a document which sets a plan for the city’s future over the next two or three decades. But given how uncertain these longer timescales are (robots, floods and bombs etc), its real purpose is actually much more a strategy document underpinning the Mayor of London’s immediate planning policies.
The London Plan is revisited every five years. The last iteration was published in 2021, and the process towards writing the 2026 version has taken its first steps - with the first consultation, Towards a New London Plan, closing last week.
I’m not going to discuss everything in this document (which can be read here), but I do want to make a couple of points which might be of interest to readers of this Substack - first about affordable housing and second about fire safety.
Affordable housing
Affordable housing delivery in London is not currently working very well. There are two ways to build a new ‘affordable’ housing unit in the capital.
The first is a social landlord (housing association or a council) taking grant funding from the GLA, and building it directly.
After a strong start under Sadiq Khan, this has come off the rails recently largely (as I’ve written previously) because of the capital’s housing associations and councils increasingly running out of money.
The second way of getting affordable homes built in the capital is through ‘Section 106’ - the planning law which allows councils to impose requirements for community benefits on developers as a condition of building. In London, this usually ends up being a requirement to make a proportion of the homes “affordable”.
This has always been tricky, because developers can use viability assessments to argue their way out of meeting any requirements which would limit their profit margin.
Sadiq Khan’s response, in the last London Plan, was to offer a 35% fast track route (for private land) and 50% (for public land) - which promised a quicker journey through the planning process if the builder signed up to meet the threshold.
This, too, has recently gone wrong. It is costing private builders more to build homes than it used to, and their profits have also dipped - in part due to a slowing sales market, and in part due to a reduced demand from global investors to buy London flats “off plan”.
The result is that their profit margin calculations have changed and they are increasingly ignoring Khan’s fast-track option and are instead fighting local planners for the lowest percentage of affordable housing possible.
They are often winning these fights - with appeal decisions ruling in favour of developers at Stag Brewery (Richmond), Cuba Street (Canary Wharf) and West Ealing for affordable housing provisions of between 7-20%. I wrote about this recently, in the context of a big planned development in Rye Lane, Peckham.
The consultation document for the next London Plan recognises these falling affordable numbers to be a problem for London.
“The focus must be on delivering affordable housing, not simply building more market homes,” it says. “Put simply, even if the rate of market house building significantly increases, house prices will remain unaffordable to most people who need a home.”
But its cure is a problem. Somewhat cryptically, it promises to “review threshold requirements… to make sure that they still provide the right incentives to support affordable housing needs and delivery”.
As I understand it, from people who have been involved in the conversations, this is essentially a suggestion to move the “fast track” percentages downwards, closer to what builders consider “viable”.
This is the wrong approach. What we should be learning from the current market strife is that large developers, with their short-term interest in annual returns, and a model which relies on releasing properties for sale gradually to keep prices high, are the wrong partners to rely on to build the London of the future - especially on larger sites.
What we need is public sector land ownership and masterplanning, with a long-term strategy in mind and models which build up and capture value over time. Lowering affordability thresholds to the level that is acceptable to volume builders would be accepting a broken system and baking it in.
Fire safety
The drafting of the 2021 iteration of the London Plan began not long after the Grenfell Tower fire, and as such took a robust stance on fire safety.
It set out an aim to ensure developers met “the highest standards of fire safety”. This insisted that fire safety should be considered “from the outset” and required thought be given to matters such as evacuation and access for the fire services from “the earliest possible stage” in the building’s design.
The new consultation document takes a remarkable step back from this position. Instead, it says the next plan should “consider whether fire safety and emergency evacuation could be better dealt with nationally”, and says it will “remove” the “confusing overlap of planning policies and building regulations”, as well as “making it clear that planning officers should not be involved in assessing fire safety”.
This feels, to me, like the wrong approach. It is obvious that some questions relating to fire safety (space separation, firefighter access, number of staircases etc) have to be considered at the planning stage if they are going to be properly incorporated.
London is unique in many ways, and fire is just one of them. The country has 177 buildings above 100m in height - 121 of them are in the capital. Even at lower height thresholds, the capital is grossly over-represented in the stock of tall buildings around the country.
It’s also a much more densely populated city, which faces a range of different risks, from urban wildfires to terrorism. This means that fire safety, and London’s resilience to deal with it, is something that we need to think about strategically when designing the new buildings which make up our city. The local fire station’s view on whether or not they should have a 15th super skyscraper on their patch is one worth taking into account in planning decisions.
As it happens, this sort of battle is scattered throughout this consultation document. London’s space standards, overheating regulations, ventilation, family-sized homes requirements and flood risk standards will all be up for grabs when the new plan is produced.
In some instances, the consultation suggests retaining or expanding higher-than-national standards. In others it floats the idea of cutting them back. A draft London Plan will follow in early 2026, which is when these decisions will be made.
When it is released, responding to the consultation will be worthwhile. Those with a vested interest will find the time to send in 15 cookie cutter responses calling for their lobbying ask to be approved. They should not be the only ones policy makers hear from.
This content is not behind a paywall, but since it takes time to create and upload each piece, do please consider becoming a paid subscriber (especially if this project is something that you value, and you have the means to do so), which is either billed monthly at £3.50 or annually at £35. A paid subscriber has full access to the back catalogue of posts.
If you pay £40 or more for an annual subscription, I will send you a signed copy of my book Show Me The Bodies. Or you can buy a copy here. My forthcoming book, Homesick, can be preordered here.