The tragic loss of at least 151 lives to the fire at Wang Fuk Court in Hong Kong on 26 November has rightly put a focus on fire safety and for many brought back horrendous memories of the tragedy at Grenfell Tower. So far the regulatory response to Grenfell has not been good enough and is placing more lives at risk. Urgent action is needed.
Readers of PropViews will be well-accustomed to the challenges of passing Gateway 2 for new build projects and the fact that this process is delaying the development of new Higher Risk Residential Buildings, adding cost and further undermining viability. Some will be aware that the Building Safety Regulator has been swamped with applications for existing buildings and this is causing some of that delay. I think many will be unaware that the Gateway 2 process itself is delaying, in hundreds of cases, works to make these buildings safer. People living in these buildings are actually less safe than they otherwise would have been.
Backlog and rising
The heart of the problem is the BSR’s Gateway 2 process, a mandatory design approval stage for work on existing high-rise residential buildings. According to the latest figures from the Building Safety Regulator there are currently 1,028 buildings awaiting Gateway 2 approval. This is ten per cent up from May 2025 when my Freedom of Information request revealed 938 buildings were at this. Now, as then, the overwhelming majority of buildings (85%) are existing buildings.
The regulator itself admits it severely underestimated this workload. Tim Galloway, a BSR director, stated that their pre-launch modelling “didn’t survive contact with the real world,” with the volume of minor works to existing blocks “significantly higher than we’d anticipated”
The consequences of this range from the daft to the dangerous.
A leaseholder in a ground-floor flat in Westminster, needing to replace rotten wooden windows, has been been quoted between £5,000 and £12,000 to prepare an application to the Building Safety Regulator (BSR) for approval. In total, at the lower end of the range, the cost of seeking regulatory approvals is estimated to be double the cost of the window replacement itself.
In another part of London a housing association has been waiting for over two years for Gateway 2 approval to replace fire doors in a block of flats. The inadequacy of the fire doors was identified in a Fire Risk Assessment and was classed as a High Risk action. This should typically be completed within three months, meaning that already the residents have been placed at greater risk for 21 months. For housing providers, the unpredictable delays make it impossible to get contractors to hold fixed prices, destabilising budgets and delaying vital work indefinitely
This isn’t an isolated case. The Building Safety Regulator’s own numbers show that 271 of the existing buildings at Gateway 2 are those that require cladding remediation. From talking to colleagues across the industry many have experienced situations where the regulator forbade them from removing any cladding for investigation without a full plan of remediation. In each and every case the as-built reality of the building behind the rainscreen has required a change to those plans – and a new application to the Building Safety Regulator, with additional delays.
Difficult choices
Building owners currently face an uncomfortable choice between proceeding with works, illegally breaching building control, or waiting for an indeterminate amount of time before they can start to make a building safer. This cannot have been the intention of legislators and we all must hope that no fire occurs in a building awaiting approval for remediation.
This is a problem that is on the radar of the Building Safety Regulator’s new leadership, who have made an early positive impression with their focus on outcomes. In an interview with Inside Housing the new Chair Andy Roe stated that he expected minor changes to a building to soon be “back out of this form of control into a more proportionate regime, potentially back with local authorities”.
This will obviously be welcome – and cannot come soon enough – but I’m not convinced it will solve many of the problems and might simply gum up applications with cash-strapped local councils instead.
Solutions
To clear the logjam for minor, routine work, the government must empower and expand a solution that already works in other parts of the construction industry, namely Competent Person Schemes (CPS). These are government-authorised schemes that allow qualified, vetted tradespeople and companies to self-certify that their work complies with Building Regulations, bypassing the need for local authority inspections. They exist for electrical work, gas installation, plumbing, and the replacement of windows and doors.
At the moment none of the Competent Persons Schemes will issue certification for Higher Risk Residential Buildings. It appears the fundamental issue preventing them acting is in relation to insurance.
In reality the risk is low and if government was prepared to underwrite the risk it could unstick hundreds of buildings from the current process and enable vital safety works to happen much faster.
A deal to either provide top-up cover through existing insurers or to provide a bespoke product to the schemes themselves – just for Higher Risk Residential Buildings would likely only be needed for a limited period to time to prove the market and risk. A reasonable commercial fee would mean that it should actually make a small return for tax-payers too.
The Building Safety Regulator was set up with the noblest of intentions but in its current form, it is making people less safe by preventing repairs. By embracing and underwriting a robust competent persons scheme, the government can start to deliver on the promise of safe homes for all – whilst simultaneously unlocking capacity for more new homes to be approved faster.
Jamie Ratcliff is co-founder of Place Base (Place Base Ltd.) and has over twenty years senior experience in the housing industry working in the public and not-for-profit sectors in local, national and regional roles. Most recently Jamie has worked in a range of executive positions for large housing associations and before that was responsible for housing for the current and previous Mayor of London. He has also worked for what is now Homes England and Norwich City Council.
