On June 30, 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 an average of nearly a year to get an approval. According to the BSR’s own figures, over 33,000 homes are currently held in a backlog awaiting construction approval.

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 September 25 Quintain had got its approval. “Those last 10 weeks the behaviour switched. Everything we’d 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 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?

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