The Building Safety Act: What We’ve Learned, One Year On

One year on from the Building Safety Act coming into force, we reflect on its impact on the prime London construction industry overall and more specifically on our own processes, projects and clients.

Partners James Hall and Kathryn Archer carrrying out an inspection on site.

The 2022 Building Safety Act was introduced in October 2023 with the primary purpose of making buildings safer – in particular, those deemed to be ‘higher risk’. While we unquestionably support this aim, we have encountered a variety of challenges resulting from the wide-reaching changes to regulatory requirements. These challenges are affecting our clients, our contractors, and the construction industry at large.

As we have adapted to the regulatory changes, we have implemented new ways of tracking and documenting our projects to fulfil our compliance obligations and communicate requirements effectively with project teams.

In this post, we look at some of the questions we have been asked about the BSA, especially with regard to Higher Risk Buildings (HRBs), and some of the lessons we have learned.

What is a higher-risk building?

While the Act covers all building work, its impact is felt particularly on buildings that are deemed to be higher risk. A higher-risk building (HRB) is at least seven stories or 18m high, and consists of two or more residential units.

As specialist prime residential architects in central London, we’re currently working on a number of projects affected by the new regulations. Whether it’s a modern luxury apartment building like One Hyde Park or a grand, Edwardian mansion block like Orchard Court in Portman Square, London has many thousands of buildings that are now classified as higher risk.

One Hyde Park, an example of the many buildings now classified as ‘higher-risk’ residential buildings in London that LA London have projects in.

How has the architect’s role changed?

As architects working on HRBs, we are now taking on the new role of Principal Designer for Building Regulations on top of our existing Principal Designer role for the CDM (Construction (Design and Management) Regulations 2015. 

This new role requires us to prove that our projects’ designs are fully compliant with every applicable regulation by providing all relevant certification and testing evidence. Whereas in the past we would typically work collaboratively with an Approved Building Inspector, who could flag early-stage design compliance risks and suggest remedies, inspectors are no longer permitted to offer any advice on design compliance; they can only approve or reject them. With the burden of proof being on us, our workload has increased more than we had originally anticipated.

We are also required to demonstrate that we ourselves have the necessary competency as a “designer” to work on HRBs and to fulfil the role of Principal Designer; the same applies for all designers and contractors involved with a project. Competency statements take the form of resumés – listing relevant experience, qualifications, memberships and certifications, both for individuals and for organisations.

What kind of work is affected?

Prince’s Gate Court, where we converted three duplex apartments into a large family home, and now an HRB.

Any material change to an HRB, or on an apartment in an HRB, now has to be submitted to the Building Safety Regulator (BSR) for Building Regulations approval. 

This ranges from simple renovation work like installing a new bathroom or kitchen, to substantial remodelling or extension work, to building a new block of flats from the ground up.

If a project in an HRB needs building regulations approval, it needs to go through the BSR. Only works that can be self-certified by a plumber of electrician, for example, will not need to be notified.

As the Principal Designer, we are subject to the same level of scrutiny and compliance for a basic apartment refit as we are for an entire new building.

Will construction projects take longer?

Unfortunately, yes. As well as the additional time it takes to prepare the application, we are now facing an unspecified validation period once it has been submitted. This is followed by a statutory review period of twelve weeks for a new HRB and eight weeks for an existing HRB. 

In our experience, and from industry chatter, the validation period has been known to take up to three months, which may in part be due to a lack of Registered Building Inspectors that are qualified to oversee HRB applications. New registration requirements for building inspectors mean that from an original pool of around 4,500, we understand that there are now just 2,000 registered to act on HRBs. 

Between the additional work for all designers, especially us, in preparing the application, the uncertain validation period, and the statutory review period during which time only strip-out works can commence, we now need to allow for several months before any meaningful work on site can commence.

Will clients pay more?

More stringent regulatory requirements do come with associated costs, as we and our fellow consultants need to spend more time preparing the application and compliance documentation. 

In addition, a project now has to be fully designed before we can submit the application to the Building Safety Regulator, which requires us to engage a contractor at an earlier stage than we might have done in the past so that they can supply necessary technical details, as well as their own competency statement.

Any substantive changes to the scope or design once work is on site also mean that work has to be paused while we submit the change to the BSR for approval. This can add significantly to both the time and the cost of a project, and carries further uncertainty for both.

Clients also need to anticipate the cost of additional reports and inspections that are likely to be needed. By way of example from our own experience, working with a fire engineer to produce a fire strategy, complete with fire and smoke modelling, could cost between £18,000 and £43,000, depending on the project scale and complexity of the modelling. 

What is LA London doing differently?

The LA London team.

As always, our goal is to relieve our clients of as much stress as possible during a project, while keeping costs competitive and timeframes tight. 

To ensure we have fully understood and embraced our new role and obligations, one of our Architects has undertaken formal training as a Principal Designer for Building Regulations. Alicia has now imparted her knowledge to the wider team and created highly effective guidelines and templates for managing the new process and developing the information and evidence we are required to provide.

For all projects now, HRB or not, we have a detailed live tracker in our online project management platform, Notion. This allows us to track every regulation the project needs to comply with, providing a supporting statement for each to explain how it has been complied with, with links for each to the relevant evidence – drawing, specification, technical data sheet or certificate of conformity. In this way, we can create and maintain the ‘Golden Thread’ of information required by the Act, which is so crucial for reducing risk and enforcing accountability.

Our tracker (below) is simple for our fellow consultants to feed their own information into, preventing misunderstandings and improving communication. It also eventually becomes our compliance statement, which we can submit to the regulator at the end of a project. It really helps and reassures them to see the paper trail of how we achieved compliance, as well as the end result.

A sneak perview of LA London’s bespoke Building Regulations Compliance Tracker

Will things change further?

Here at LA London, and talking to our colleagues across the prime central London market, where apartments in HRBs dominate, we believe some refinements to the current process are very likely.  

Firstly, we need to see the number of registered inspectors, especially those qualified to oversee applications on HRBs, increase. This is vital to prevent the backlog of HRB applications that we are already starting to see, so that the application validation and review periods can be held at no more than one to two weeks.

We also feel that proposals in individual apartments within HRBs could be judged according to their scope and complexity, so that simple refurbishments that have no wider impact on the safety or fabric of a building are subject to a more straightforward and simple application process than is understandably necessary for complex new-build projects. We anticipate there being two to three classes of application for HRBs, from minor refurbishments and refits of individual apartments to wholesale new-build skyscrapers.

We must reiterate that we fully support the objectives of the Building Safety Act, which reflect our own robust risk-mitigation processes, but our own experience suggests that some tweaks to how it is applied to apartments in HRBs might be needed in order to avoid stymying the market, both in terms of sales and construction, which currently risks becoming an unintended side-effect of the Act. We are already aware of a number of high-net-worth individuals who have been put off either from purchasing apartments in HRBs or from carrying out refurbishments of apartments they already own in light of the additional costs and time that their being in an HRB now generates.

If you have any questions about the Building Safety Act or how LA London can assist with your project, please contact us.