Building Safety Regulator delays “challenging, frustrating and costly”

Charlie Pugsley was known a few years ago as having an unusual hobby. The London Fire Brigade (LFB) veteran performed as a magician in his spare time. And judging by the positive feedback on his LinkedIn profile he was pretty good. “Charlie is an incredible magician with amazing talent,” writes one happy punter.

 

Pugsley is going to need every trick up his sleeve in his next full-time job.  

 

This month he is leaving the LFB after a near 30-year career as a firefighter to take up the newly-created role of chief executive at the Building Safety Regulator (BSR). The task is significant with the regulator’s well-documented problems causing frustration for developers.  

 

Pugsley will have familiar help at hand. His former boss at the LFB, Andy Roe, who is effectively the BSR’s chair will be alongside him.  

 

Speed will be vital though. As Roe, who spent five-and-a-half years as the LFB’s commissioner, bluntly told MPs this month: “If we have not shown very significant change by the end of the calendar year, we run the risk of losing the complete confidence of everyone in the regulatory regime.” No pressure then.  

 

 

The BSR was created as part of the post-Grenfell Building Safety Act 2022. It is the Building Control Authority for all “higher-risk” buildings, recognised as those over 18 metres or seven storeys. Under the system, developers must get BSR sign-off at three stages, known as “gateways”. It is at Gateway 2, where consent must be given by the BSR before work can start, that the problems have arisen.  

 

Frustration has been bubbling over with developers and consultants exasperated over delays and a lack of communication from the regulator. The BSR deals with applications for new-build schemes and remediation projects. 

 

“My experience of the BSR is challenging, frustrating and costly,” is the blunt assessment of Matt Voyce, executive director of construction at Quintain, in evidence to a House of Lords inquiry.

 

Part of the problem, Voyce suggests, could be the BSR not paying enough to attract the best people to assess applications: “Salaries are probably not high enough and good calibre fire safety experts are probably getting a better living in consultancy than they would at the BSR.”

 

The fact that there’s been an inquiry reflects the interest that MPs and peers are taking into the BSR’s challenges. The Lords probe remains on-going while Parliament’s Housing, Communities and Local Government committee holds a one-off evidence session this month.   

 

 

The BSR’s problems were laid bare in the summer with official statistics showing the average time it was taking to get approval at gateway 2 was 36 weeks. The BSR’s target is 12 weeks.

 

New figures revealed by the BSR this month to July 2025 show that the regulator is struggling to keep pace with an uptick in applications. Less than a third of applications were decided in the 12-week time frame. Sky News recently reported that 34,965 future residential units are awaiting decisions from the regulator. 

 

Housing associations have also felt the impact. Richard Cook, chief development officer at 125,000-home Clarion, tells The Developer it had to wait 42 weeks for full approval on two separate schemes. “It felt like a bit of a vacuum,” Cook says. “They (BSR) weren’t ready when it started and they’ve been playing catch-up.” 

 

Ever since the BSR was launched it has created headlines. Often the wrong sort.   
  
Just a few weeks after the registration process for buildings launched in April 2023, it emerged the regulator’s chief, Peter Baker, was retiring. The timing of his decision raised eyebrows. 
  
Baker had the job title ‘chief inspector of buildings’; Initially the Health and Safety Executive (HSE), which oversees the BSR, said the job title would not be applied to his replacement Philip White.

 

An attempt to recruit a new chief inspector of buildings failed; HSE said it could not find anyone suitable. White appears to have ended up with the title ‘chief inspector of buildings’ to go with his role of director of building safety. Now White is due to step down from the BSR this month but remain chief inspector of buildings.   
 

Conscious of the sector’s frustrations and its much-heralded 1.5 million new homes target, the government made a dramatic intervention in June 2025: Ministers announced they were stripping the HSE of its responsibility for the BSR and instead will bring it in-house as an executive agency of the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government. However the process will not be quick and will require secondary legislation.   

 

The shift is part of a plan to establish a new single regulator for construction, a recommendation from the Grenfell Inquiry Report. At the BSR a new fast-track process was also promised to “unblock delays” with 100 extra staff.  

 

Alongside this announcement was the unveiling of Roe and Pugsley. But even this drew criticism as some questioned whether two former fire-chiefs, while clearly skilled in understanding risks, would be efficient at dealing with the development sector.

 

Roe acknowledged the criticism by admitting to MPs: “We ain’t got all the answers. I’m just not that arrogant. We need a really good mix of professionals inside the BSR.” 

 

So where are we now, three months on from the major shake-up announcement? Geoff Wilkinson, managing director of Wilkinson Construction Consultants, tells The Developer he has yet to see any discernible impact and does not expect to until next year.

 

“As far as I can tell they’re still in the process of seeking additional resource,” Wilkinson says. “I know that several private-sector inspectors have indicated they’ve been approached and are potentially offering a couple of days a week now.” 

 

Will this lead to any instant change? “To be honest, no,” adds Wilkinson. “I think it will help with capacity on the smaller projects. But you need someone working on those larger projects full-time.”  

 

 

Wilkinson does not expect to see any “substantive change” until next year. “We’re looking into 2026 to start feeling some of the benefits of this,” he says.  

 

Allan Binns, national director, at consultants Project Four Building Safety Experts, paints a slightly more positive picture. He tells The Developer he has seen improvements around communication at the BSR. “We are getting updates saying what stage the application is at,” Binns says, having previously not had that before. “There were horror stories previously that people were reaching out to the regulator for an update, then not hearing anything for three to six months.”  

 

For its part, the BSR has defended itself over the criticism and pointed the finger at the quality of applications it has received.  

 

In May, it emerged that the BSR was rejecting around 70% of applications because they were not meeting legal requirements with 44% turned down at the validation stage, often because of the absence of ‘basic’ information. White said the BSR was having to reject applications for “fundamental failures” and “significant life safety matters”.  

 

The agency has also not shied away from locking horns with those who voice criticism. A senior figure at Luton Council accused the BSR of being “unresponsive” over its application for a £120m regeneration of the area’s town centre. However the BSR hit back, saying the local authority’s application “fell some way below the required standard”.  

 

 

Others have noticed a shift of late. Giving evidence to the HCLG committee, Dame Judith Hackitt says she had seen a “sea change” on both sides with more of a willingness to work together. “It is a shame we did not see it earlier, but it is there now,” she tells MPs.    

 

Melanie Leech, chief executive of the British Property Federation, also agrees that progress is being made and a “better quality of conversation” is happening.  

 

Wilkinson recognises there’s been a “huge learning curve at the BSR and “there’s a commitment to making it work”. 

 

“There’s a lot of positives in there,” he says. “The key question is about how resources are currently used and how they can be used to remove these logjams. Everything that’s being said is reassuring but I’m not seeing any change in actual delivery.”  

 

For some developers, the changes have come too late, with market challenges compounding the problem of the BSR delays. Some have started to shift their focus away from residential altogether to commercial.  

 

“There’s one significant developer in the North West who used to be fairly famed for building residential units that a has pulled away from that market almost entirely for the last couple of years to focus on the commercial sector,” says Binns.  

 

 

Others have raised the alarm about the impact the BSR’s problems are having on development, particularly in London. The Home Builders Federations has called for “urgent” government action as it says the problems at the BSR are having a “disproportionate impact” in the capital.  

 

“When combined with other policy costs, such as dual staircase requirements, carbon offset charges, and per-square-metre levies under the Building Safety and Mayoral Construction Infrastructure Levy, the financial burden on developers, particularly those building apartment schemes, has become unsustainable,” the HBF says this month.  

 

Wider market challenges, including the higher gilt rate, are putting investors off investing in property investment and causing widespread turmoil as viability assessments fail. In other words, the BSR delays are not the cause of the slowdown in housebuilding, but they haven’t helped confidence at a time when it is in short supply.  

 

All this will ring alarm bells for ministers who remain obsessed with hitting the 1.5m million new homes target.  

 

The fast-growing build-to-rent sector has sounded the alarm. A new group - the BTR Alliance - formed by trade bodies the British Property Federation and Association for Rental Living have flagged that the number of new schemes in planning have dropped 18% in this year’s second quarter partly due to the impact of BSR’s delays.  

 

Binns believes the race to get new homes built and the BSR’s systems can be compatible. “We’ve got a government target of 1.5 million new homes by 2029 and we’ve got a safety regulator that is trying to implement a new series of regulations. The two appear to be very much at odds.  

 

“But I don’t think there is an inherent conflict between the two. We can build a significant number of new safe homes.”  

 

Despite widespread cynicism over whether the government can get anywhere near that target, new housing secretary Steve Reed has insisted it is still doable. He told the BBC’s Political Thinking podcast: “I am confident we will get to 1.5 million.”   

 

As for the problems at the BSR, the newly-installed building safety minister, Samantha Dixon, has insisted things are getting better. “Early indications suggest the new model is working effectively,” she said in a written response to a parliamentary question on 11 September, less than a week after being appointed following the post Angela Rayner reshuffle. “I expect the model to start to deliver improvements in processing times in the coming months.”   

 

All eyes then on Pugsley to pull a rabbit out of the hat before Christmas.  

 

James Wilmore is a journalist and editor whose work has appeared in Inside Housing, Social Housing, Construction News and Planning. Wilmore is the founding editor of independent newsletter Modular Monitor which covers news in the MMC sector.