Building Safety Act: what you need to know
Article posted on: 19 November 2024
The Building Safety Act established the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) as the Building Safety Regulator (BSR), which has the role of a statutory consultee for planning applications to raise the safety standards of ‘higher risk’ buildings – those above 18 metres, seven storeys or with more than two residential units.
To improve safety standards and compliance in these ‘higher risk’ buildings, the Building Safety Act stipulates a three-stage Gateway system for all relevant planning applications:
Gateway 1: to demonstrate that the proposed design meets safety requirements;
Gateway 2: when the BSR approves the planning application and carries on inspection of the design to ensure that construction can commence;
Gateway 3: when the BSR issues a Completion Certificate and people can begin to use the building.
After planning permission is granted at Gateway 2, any changes in the design will have to be resubmitted and approved once more, which would create significant delays to work starting on-site.
That said, there is still a lot of grey area when it comes to Gateway 2 applications. The online submission process is not straightforward, and there are still questions about how the Gateway 2 process integrates with design and build procurement. The lack of clarity around these fundamental requirements is a side effect of this new system.
As a multi-disciplinary engineering firm, we work with developers at the earliest stages of projects, to help bring their vision for a design to life. The Building Safety Act aims to increase accountability for those developers – who will need to absorb that responsibility by investing more into the pre-construction phase to ensure that designs and products that are specified meet safety standards.
The cost and time implications of this will be unavoidable. However, to prevent even more expensive, time-intensive delays to the planning process as a result of the Gateway system, developers will need to engage more closely with architects and specifiers from the outset of a project.
In short, it’s no longer viable for developers to address design challenges as they navigate the build process; it’s now about integrating building safety from project inception onwards.
It’s also possible that we might see a void period for developments that are deemed ‘higher risk’ by the Building Safety Act. Developers will be reassessing the viability of schemes above 18 metres or seven storeys so they can incorporate the necessary extra time and costs needed to finalise their plans.