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FROM THE EDITOR


I


t’s hard to believe that next year will be a decade since the Grenfell tragedy, the most devastating single event in UK construction since the second world war. The response has been patchy, with the golden thread and the Building Safety Act bringing in some much needed accountability, but also creating logjams of approvals at the regulator which aren’t producing the fast change needed.


An area which was left in limbo post-Hackitt was the promised reform of construction products regulation. Like the promised review of Approved Documents, the lack of signs of action is an indicator of the complexity and diffi culty of changing the status quo in a fragmented and confusing web of regulations, testing and procedures with little national coordination. However, the Ministry of Housing has now nailed its colours to the mast, with a Construction Products White Paper that comes with a pledge to “strengthen safety and regulation of building products, ensuring they are properly assessed before being used.” It also has a candid admission from the slightly ‘Brazil’ movie-sounding Under Secretary of State for Building Safety, Fire and Democracy – Samantha Dixon – near the beginning of the Foreword. Dixon says: “We must move from a framework originally designed to reduce technical trade barriers to one that places safety, accountability, public confi dence, and growth and innovation at its core.” In this simple sentence, there is an entire world of tangled commercial issues, vested interests, and lack of third-party governance, which have made the efforts of enlightened suppliers and specifi ers diffi cult to safeguard in projects. The Government says the White Paper will lead to a “crackdown on unregulated practices and weaknesses that are undermining the construction sector,” and that all products “must be properly assessed before being used in the building process.” It admits that only around a third of products are even covered by regulation, and this begs the question, how do you police the unregulated majority, without requiring a drastic shift to mandating regulated products?


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Secondary legislation is expected later this year which will detail how this will all work. But, as the Government begins to make Annual Reports on Grenfell Tower inquiry implementation (fi rst report saying that 12 recommendations have been “completed,” they cannot hope to tick the box on the reform of construction products regulation any time soon.


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Although the Building Safety Regulator is now a standalone body independent of the HSE, its list of challenges are huge, with nine months reportedly a standard wait time now for Gateway 2 submissions. As well as potentially being a symptom of under-resourcing, this is also a factor of the realities of having a single, consistent regulatory system, rather than the more piecemeal, if less accountable processes it replaces. Its performance was recently deemed “unacceptable” by a parliamentary committee, but it has managed to cut its backlog down to three open project submissions, admittedly by some sleight of hand involving creating another channel for “complex schemes”. Full review of Approved Documents – also advocated in Hackitt’s report – is the last and probably most elusive piece of the jigsaw. Apparently (at least in terms of reviewing Part B), it’s another thing the Regulator is currently doing. Bearing all this mind, for it to turn into the all-encompassing single construction regulator which has been called for will need huge funding and manpower to supply the demand.


James Parker, Editor


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