The times are a-changing

The line “All this must change” in American writer Henry Longfellow’s poem Kéramos is certainly apt for the future of regulation and oversight in construction. This year is a time of transition for the Building Safety Regulator (BSR). By the end of January 2027, it will have emerged from under the wing of the Health and Safety Executive to become an independent body. This is the first milestone towards the creation of this new single construction regulator (SCR), the prospectus for which was published shortly before Christmas.

The purpose of the new SCR is to bring the construction industry’s fragmented regulatory framework into one single powerhouse. Building safety, construction products and professional competence will all come under the same roof. A one-stop shop.

It may sound like the government is intent on creating a colossus – a bureaucratic behemoth that could clog up the system with red tape, and in doing so become the antithesis of the central election pledge of Labour to make life easier for businesses. That is possible, but such concerns are generally being outweighed by industry optimists.

The BSR itself was not without its teething problems, including a mismatch between the industry’s capability to provide information and the BSR’s capacity to process it. As such, we’re now all familiar with the gateway delays that a House of Lords committee recently referred to as “unacceptable”. But the backlog is now largely cleared and the path for new applications is considerably smoother.

This summer it will be nine years since the Grenfell Tower fire and it’s now 17 months after the final report of the subsequent inquiry was published. And the pace of reform seems steady – not rapid, but not glacial. Indeed, the word that’s most often seen in government press releases regarding the transition to the single regulator is “careful”.

Some industry watchers say construction companies are only just getting used to the BSR and it’s both unwise and unfair to bring in a new system too quickly. But others, like Dame Judith Hackett, have often felt change is not being embraced fast enough and reform needs to outpace legislation.

Nonetheless, there is a broad consensus that reform is needed and a single construction regulator is a good idea. But we’ll have to wait at least a year to see if bigger is better. And while Henry Longfellow’s line “all things must change” may be applicable to the disparate regulatory framework that currently exists, the poem’s following line may be equally apt: “To something new, to something strange”.