More than 95 per cent of housing projects expected to start in London last year failed to do so amid regulatory turmoil, the Local Authority Building Control (LABC) has said.
Lorna Stimpson, chief executive of LABC, said “there is no doubt” that delays with the Building Safety Regulator (BSR) approving high-risk buildings has impacted the construction supply chain “enormously” and will affect the delivery of the government’s housing targets.
Speaking before the House of Lords’ industry and regulations committee on Tuesday (2 September) she added: “In London alone, they were anticipating 20,000 starts last year, and only 900 have happened.”
Stimpson said that staff issues at local authority building control are part of the problem, as “salaries in the private sectors are double” as contractors are increasingly “paying even more” for building inspectors in a bid to get through the BSR’s gateways systems.
“Salaries are going up and up and up […and] working within local government is difficult,” she said.
“We lost lots of people when we went through the [re]registration and the whole process of reform in the building control profession — we lost an awful lot of people, and we’re a very aging community.”
In a session before MPs from the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government earlier this week, BSR chair Andy Roe warned that his organisation risked “losing the complete confidence” of the building sector if it fails to significantly cut the building safety backlog this year.
Separately, the Office for Product and Safety Standards (OPSS) chief executive Graham Russell told the House of Lords’ committee that the move from creating products offsite to creating them onsite had added “complexity” to the regulator’s work.
The OPSS assumed regulatory powers over the construction sector in 2022, in addition to its work monitoring products across consumer goods (excluding food), medicine and vehicles.
Russell told peers that the “historic lack of regulation and the lack of consumer influence” within the construction sector had also made regulation of construction products more challenging.
“If we think about cosmetics, buyers of cosmetics typically have a strong interest in not buying cosmetics that will harm them,” he said. “But the end user of a construction product has no say in the chain.”
To tackle that problem, he said the OPSS was pushing for the supply chain to be “incentivised and encouraged to be curious”.
Russell also warned that, due to the number of products within the construction industry that need regulating, the OPSS “can’t necessarily always engage with every single product”.
He added: “We need to identify a priority product and try and shift the whole market towards compliance, not just the manufacturers, but the buyers and all the other people with an interest in the specifiers.”
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Joshua Stein