Londoners trapped in high-rise buildings with dangerous cladding could see repairs sped up significantly under new reforms announced this month.
The Building Safety Regulator (BSR) – which regulates higher risk buildings across the UK – has announced a targeted package of measures aimed at streamlining both remediation projects and approvals for new residential buildings.
The body, set up after the Grenfell tragedy in 2017 to overhaul building safety standards, has previously been criticised for long approval delays and a lack of practical guidance for developers.
The Mayor of London has said the “botched implementation” of the regulator has been a “disaster…whichhas made delivering new homes more difficult, slow and uncertain.” Approval delays have hit the capital particularly hard due to London having 61 per cent of England’s high-rise buildings and 96 per cent of all new builds being flats.
“The BSR therefore made it harder and costlier to build flats over six storeys and deliver critical remediation works,” Sir Sadiq Khan said last year.
However, both ministers and City Hall say the appointment of Lord Roe, former commissioner of the London Fire Brigade (LFB), will help unlock bottlenecks in both remediation and development across the country.
The reforms announced this month include recruiting more case leads, allowing projects to start safely while ironing out any “distinct technical issues” and new guidance for the external remediation process.
Officials hope that the move will ensure quicker dispute resolution between the BSR and developers and improve the standard of applications to prevent delays from a back-and-forth with developers over paperwork.
The overall goal will be to reduce average decision times for remediation applications to less than 12 weeks, with an approval rating of over 65 per cent.
Lord Roe, who chairs the BSR, said: “This plan represents a targeted and achievable package of measures to reset the system and clear older legacy remediation cases.
“By doing so and then focussing on more recent applications, we can ensure high-rise residents see essential safety improvements they deserve without unnecessary or further delays.”
Officials admitted that internal resource pressures and a backlog of non-compliant applications have slowed down the progress of older, more complex cases, but have claimed a new specialist external remediation multidisciplinary team will go some way to clearing the blockage.
Charlie Pugsley, the Acting CEO of BSR, added: “Collectively these measures will ensure current and future remediation applications can proceed as smoothly and quickly as possible.“By launching a dedicated multidisciplinary team and introducing account managers, we are dramatically increasing our capacity to make faster decisions.
“But speed cannot come at the cost of safety. We will also publish further specific guidance and support to help industry submit higher-quality applications, ensuring thousands of residents can feel safe, and are safe in their high-rise homes.”
Londoners trapped in unsellable and unsafe high-rise properties will be hoping that the reforms will speed up their own experiences with cladding delays.
Ministers have ordered landlords to either remediate or set a completion date for all residential buildings over 11m with unsafe cladding nationwide by 2029 or risk severe penalties.
Last month the Mayor of London said it would be “some time” before significant progress is made in the capital.
“In London alone, we have more than double the amount of dangerous buildings than the rest of the country put together,” he told a People’s Question Time event in Greenwich.
“This is a London problem.”
