Episode 217:

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I am your host Maria Skoutari and this week we will be talking about the Building Safety Regulator’s 2026-2027 plan. Todays’ episode meets PC3 of the Part 3 Criteria. 

And make sure to stay until the end for today’s scenario.

So back in Episode 202 I spoke about the government’s consultation on the Single Construction Regulator Prospectus, which launched in December 2025 and sought views on the proposed development of an integrated construction regulator. That episode covered the Prospectus’s three pillars:

• The regulation of buildings, 
• Construction products, 
• And building professions

As well as the four overarching outcomes for the building system, and the proposed timeline for legislation and reform. 

Since then, a number of things have occurred. Firstly, the consultation on the Single Construction Regulator Prospectus closed in March 2026 and the government’s formal response is expected in summer 2026. Secondly, the Building Safety Regulator itself has now published its annual plan for 2026 to 2027, setting out exactly how it intends to operate and what it is prioritising over the next twelve months. So today I want to take you through that plan.

First, let’s start with what has happened to the Building Safety Regulator in the past twelve months:

The Building Safety Regulator, as you know, was created under the Building Safety Act 2022 to oversee higher-risk buildings, raise safety standards across the built environment, and ensure those responsible for the design, construction, and management of all buildings are held to account. It regulates new and existing higher-risk buildings, enforces compliance, and works directly with residents through legally required consultation structures.

Now, in January 2026, the Building Safety Regulator, formally transitioned from the Health and Safety Executive, to become a standalone regulator as a non-departmental public body now sponsored by the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government. This move was anticipated in the Episode 202 Prospectus, which confirmed the Building Safety Regulator would be separated from the Health & Safety Executive to form the foundation of the future single construction regulator.

As an independent body, the Building Safety Regulator, is now required to absorb significant new duties, including implementing recommendations from the Grenfell Tower Inquiry Phase 2 Report, expanding oversight of professional competence, improving oversight of building products, and establishing regulatory consistency across the sector.

The move away from the Health & Safety Executive and becoming an independent regulator, comes from:

The industry scrutiny faced by the Building Safety Regulator due to slow decision-making, lack of clarity, and a regime seen as well-intentioned but not yet working in practice. The most notable concern were the excessive processing times for Gateway 2 building control applications. These delays have contributed to stalled development, unoccupied completed homes, and rising project costs.

Developers and professional bodies argued that poor resourcing, disproportionate processes for small works, and inconsistent feedback cycles created unnecessary friction. The system was intended to ensure rigorous safety oversight, but those administering it acknowledged it was not functioning as intended.

Now in order to address these concerns, the Building Safety Regulator responded by:

Taking a series of targeted steps to ease the Gateway 2 backlog and restore output in the higher-risk buildings system. These include:

• Introducing batch processing for similar schemes, allowing technical assessments to be carried out more efficiently and consistently.
• Creating a new complex case pathway to separate genuinely high-risk or novel projects from more straightforward applications, preventing complex cases from clogging the main pipeline.
• Recruiting specialist fire and structural engineers to increase internal capability.
• Improving triage at the validation stage to reduce incomplete submissions and cutting rework by working more closely with applicants to resolve issues earlier in the process.
• Publishing clearer guidance and engaging more actively with industry to raise the quality of applications coming in.

So those were the first steps to address the initial issues faced by the Regulator. Now that it is an independent Regulator, what is its 2026-2027 Direction moving forward to keep improving:

The Building Safety Regulator’s strategic plan for April 2026 to March 2027 makes its priorities very plain. It says its work over the year is focused on improving operations and processes, supporting remediation, managing gateway 3 and the building phase, keeping safety and standards under review, and improving professional standards across the industry. It also makes clear that the Building Safety Regulator wants to be faster, clearer, more data driven, and more consistent while still holding safety as the highest priority. This shows that the regulator is trying to move away from a model that feels purely reactive or procedural, and toward one that is more active, proportionate, and transparent. In practical terms, this means the profession should expect more emphasis on evidence, clearer submission quality, stronger engagement, and better information management.

As such, the Building Safety Regulator has structured its 2026 to 2027 annual plan around five priority areas. The strategy is explicit that safety standards are not a blocker to growth, and that the Building Safety Regulator aims to support the government’s target of delivering 1.5 million high-quality homes.

Priority 1: Focuses on operational efficiency and process improvement:

This first priority focuses on making the Gateway process faster and more effective. The Building Safety Regulator has set a target to respond to Gateway 2 applications for non-complex higher-risk buildings within eighteen weeks or less by the end of March 2027 and remediation applications within 12 weeks or less. It also says it wants an approval rating of 65% through better guidance, support, and collaboration with applicants.

To achieve this, the plan includes:

• Investing in automation and new software to increase collaboration with residents and industry, alongside better data collection and sharing.
• Bringing multi-disciplinary teams fully in-house. Since 2025, the Building Safety Regulator has been building these teams internally rather than relying on external resource. It is now creating an account manager role to provide more structured engagement between multi-disciplinary teams, establishing an Innovation Unit, piloting batch processing of applications, and introducing staged gateway 2 applications for all buildings.

This doesn’t mean approvals will become easy. It means the Building Safety Regulator is trying to reduce avoidable rejection by improving the quality of submissions and the quality of dialogue before submission.

Priority 2: Targets accelerating remediation:

The second priority centres on the removal of dangerous cladding from existing higher-risk buildings. This remains one of the most urgent outstanding issues in the post-Grenfell reform agenda. The Building Safety Regulator is focused on providing building control approval for the removal of dangerous cladding to protect lives and restore property value. Specific commitments include:

• Working directly with mayoralties that contain high numbers of at-risk buildings.
• Setting a target of a twelve-week response time for remediation applications in non-complex cases by the end of March 2027.
• Taking enforcement action against Principal Accountable Persons who fail to take reasonable steps to remove unsafe cladding or keep residents safe.

This is an important reminder that building safety reform is not only about new buildings. Existing buildings continue to shape the work of the regulator, and the BSR says it will publish data on remediation applications and processing times so that residents and industry can understand progress and hold the system to account.

Priority 3: Will focus on construction oversight at Gateway 3:

Gateway 3 is the completion stage, the point at which the Building Safety Regulator issues a completion certificate confirming the building has been constructed in accordance with the approved design before residents can move in. The third priority focuses on strengthening oversight at this stage. This includes:

• Increasing site inspections during the building phase to ensure standards are met before occupation.
• Addressing a national shortage of Registered Building Inspectors. The Building Safety Regulator has acknowledged this shortage and is exploring ways to attract and retain talent in this area.
• Streamlining the completion process so that administrative delays do not leave safe buildings sitting empty, a problem that has been reported by a number of developers. The Building Safety Regulator is working to ensure it has the internal expertise to review completed buildings and is committing to publish comprehensive guidance for Gateway 3 applications.

Priority 4: Aims to keep standards and risks under review:

The fourth priority is about ensuring the Building Safety Regulator remains forward-looking rather than reactive. This involves:

• Reviewing and updating Approved Documents to ensure they are clear, accessible, and current, particularly in light of recent regulatory changes and emerging construction methods and technologies.
• Investing in new software for horizon scanning and risk assessment, enabling the Building Safety Regulator to identify risks from new technologies or from existing buildings approaching the end of their design life.

Priority 5: Will target professional standards and cultural change:

The fifth and final priority directly links back to the themes raised in Episode 202 around professional regulation and competence. The Building Safety Regulator is focused on:

• Upholding and improving the skills and behaviours of those working in the built environment, including a review of competent person schemes to reduce unnecessary bureaucracy, improve guidance on skills and competence, and strengthen standards for registered building inspectors.
• Publishing a framework to help organisations drive a culture where safety and high standards are valued as everyday practice, not just as a compliance exercise.

This fifth priority is significant for architects specifically. As the Prospectus consulted on in Episode 202 made clear, professional regulation across the built environment is being reimagined, and the Building Safety Regulator’s annual plan reflects that trajectory with competence, accountability, and culture all explicitly named as regulatory priorities.

So, what does this mean for architects in practice:

• If you are working on higher-risk buildings, the eighteen-week target for non-complex Gateway 2 applications is a meaningful commitment. However, the emphasis on ‘non-complex’ is important. Complex or novel projects will continue to sit in the separate pathway, and you need to ensure your application quality is high from the outset to avoid being caught in rework cycles.
• The account manager role being introduced by the Building Safety Regulator is a potentially significant change for practitioners. Having a named point of contact for multi-disciplinary team engagement should, in theory, improve communication and reduce the delays caused by unclear or inconsistent feedback.
• The increased focus on Gateway 3 site inspections means that compliance with the approved design during construction is under greater scrutiny than before. Architects acting as Principal Designers need to ensure that information management, change control processes, and design documentation are robust throughout the construction phase.
• The explicit focus on professional competence and cultural change under Priority 5 signals that demonstrating competence through CPD, competence frameworks, and day-to-day practice behaviours is becoming central to how the regulatory system evaluates practitioners, not just individual applications.
• The enforcement action being committed against Principal Accountable Persons who fail to act on dangerous cladding is a reminder that accountability in the higher-risk buildings regime is real and active. Where architects are involved in remediation projects, understanding the dutyholder roles and responsibilities under the Building Safety Act 2022 remains essential.

Generally, the Building Safety Regulator’s 2026 plan strongly supports the interpretation of professional responsibility, it frames the regulator as part of a broader effort to restore confidence, improve building safety, support growth, and place residents at the heart of the system. It also reinforces the need for realistic briefs, good information flow, and proper coordination. In other words, the regulator is effectively asking the industry to stop treating compliance as a separate checklist and start treating it as part of everyday practice.

For architects, the implication is straightforward. We need to work with more rigour, communicate more clearly, and treat competence as something that must be demonstrated continuously, not assumed. That applies in design, coordination, delivery, and in the way we explain decisions to clients, consultants, contractors, and residents.

Let’s sum up what we ran through today:

• In January 2026, the Building Safety Regulator formally transitioned from the Health and Safety Executive to become a standalone non-departmental public body sponsored by the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government, laying the groundwork for the future single construction regulator.
• Prior to the annual plan, the Building Safety Regulator introduced batch processing, a complex case pathway, and in-house specialist recruitment to address the Gateway 2 backlog, a problem that had been causing significant delays for higher-risk building projects.
• The 2026 to 2027 annual plan is structured around five priority areas: operational efficiency and process improvement, accelerating remediation, construction oversight at Gateway 3, keeping standards and risks under review, and professional standards and cultural change.
• Key targets include an eighteen-week response time for non-complex Gateway 2 applications and a twelve-week response time for remediation applications, both by the end of March 2027.
• The Building Safety Regulator’s explicit focus on competence, cultural change, and enforcement action against dutyholders who fail to act reinforces the direction of travel signalled in the Single Construction Regulator Prospectus, that professional accountability in the built environment is being strengthened, not loosened.

The BSR’s 2026 plan is a significant step forward from where the regulator was even twelve months ago. The shift to a standalone body, the concrete processing targets, and the explicit naming of enforcement action all signal a regulator that is maturing and becoming more operationally focused. 

For architects working in the higher-risk buildings space, this is a positive development but it also raises the bar on the quality and completeness of applications, the rigour of information management, and the demonstration of competence across the project team.