Hands up all those who opposed tougher safety rules after the Grenfell Tower fire? Not many. So naturally enough in 2021, the Building Safety Bill passed through parliament with little opposition and the Building Safety Regulator was established. It manages the registration of tall buildings to check their compliance with safety standards.
The only objection from the then Labour opposition was that it didn’t go far enough. This extra regulatory check is applied to buildings over 18 metres. The default impulse under the Conservative government was to increase regulation, which would dismay Conservative supporters. Yet Labour and much of the broadcast media would still manage to denounce the Tories for being callous in not increasing regulation with greater rigour.
Thus, we had Lucy Powell, the Shadow Housing Secretary at the time the Building Safety Bill was being debated, declare:
The Select Committee raised questions about whether the scope should be extended. The Fire Brigades Union says that 11 metres or four storeys would be a safer threshold, as that is the threshold that firefighters can reach with their ladders. The regulator will be the building control body for taller buildings, but not for those under 18 metres, even where other risks could remain. The Government should think again about their arbitrary definition of high-risk buildings.
Of course, we now have a Labour Government. But the 18 metres threshold has not been changed. Be thankful for small mercies. The Building Safety Regulator is already helping to make a mockery of Labour’s Manifesto pledge of ‘1.5 million new homes over the next parliament’ in England. So that’s 300,000 a year over a five-year Parliament – assuming they struggle on that long. The initial figures for Labour’s first year come from Energy Performance Certificate lodgements. The data estimates that between July 9 2024 and June 15 2025, there was a net addition of 186,600 homes. So to catch up, they would need a lot more than 300,000 annually for the remaining four years. Don’t hold your breath.
It is not that a big increase in supply is impossible. Radical liberalisation of the planning system would allow it just like letting a Border Collie off its lead. An obvious start would be to abolish the Building Safety Regulator, which has already proved disastrous.
This week, Sky News reports:
There are 1,210 completed homes which cannot be occupied because of delays in the work of the government’s building safety regulator.
Sky News has visited an empty block of 99 flats in west London where future residents – who have purchased the properties – have been unable to move in for over a year because of the lack of regulator approval.
New data obtained exclusively by Sky News through a Freedom of Information request shows the extent of the issue.
As of 1 August, there is ‘no decision’ on eight applications covering 1,210 completed new residential units. For sites yet to be built, there are 156 applications with no decision, covering 34,965 new residential units.
A commendable piece of investigative journalism. But it would be awkward for the Government to do anything much about it. They are constrained by the climate they helped to create. Anyone, especially any politician, who is a voice of caution against a new regulatory ‘safeguard’ lives in fear of a ‘social media pile-on’. A plea for nuance? An acknowledgement of trade-offs? A call for a sense of perspective? Welcome to the danger zone.
Presenting these issues as an emotive and simplistic choice between goodies and baddies does not make for rational law-making. The requirement for cladding on tower blocks such as Grenfell Tower was well-intentioned. EU climate change directives, such as the Construction Products Directive, revised by Regulation (EU) 305/2011, were important factors. Higher standards of insulation were intended not only to avert global warming but also to save the lives of elderly residents shivering in the winter. It is hard to stay warm in the bracing winds in a high-rise.
The disastrous consequences for fire safety are all too apparent. But the legislation has not been proportionate. The most cost-effective way to prevent people being killed in residential fires is putting in sprinklers. The Chief Fire Officers Association points out that nobody has ever died in a fire, in the UK, in a property with a properly installed sprinkler system. The cost is much lower than some of the other remedies – second staircase requirement, cladding remediation and so on – while providing a much greater safety enhancement. Leaseholders and taxpayers have been stung for billions extra without justification. We have also seen the extra burdens blocking the supply of new homes.
Robert Colvile, of this parish, has written in the Sunday Times of another perverse aspect of the supposed safety drive:
The Building Safety Regulator is an awful combination of inexperienced, under-resourced and pernickety – meaning that huge numbers of projects are stuck waiting for approval, or not being put forward at all. Indeed, the main legacy of Grenfell will probably be more people living in unsafe, overcrowded buildings, because we’ve made it harder to build safer, newer ones.
I am no fan of tower blocks. My experience is that neither are the people who live in them. If we had greater choice, I suspect many would relocate to more agreeable residences. The planning policy of Sadiq Khan, the Mayor of London, of favouring tower blocks while thwarting the building of other new homes, is bizarre. Why should the planners force us to choose between ugly development or no development at all?
But 18 metres is 59 feet. Not really ‘tower blocks’. There are plenty of beautiful Victorian mansion flats in Chelsea of six or seven storeys, with generous ceiling heights, that would be higher.
The long-term trend of fire deaths in the UK has been declining and we all want to see practical ways to help that trend continue. Misguided legislation has instead piled on costs for existing homeowners and thwarted others from escaping overpriced, overcrowded rented accommodation when less costly alternatives would have saved more lives.
Many in ‘Generation Rent’ voted Labour last year with the naive belief that it would offer their salvation from the debilitating and quite unnecessary housing shortage. I’m afraid all the signs are that their trust was betrayed and that, as housing becomes ever more unaffordable, the dreams of even more of them will be unfulfilled.
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