The head of the Building Safety Regulator (BSR) has said he “wouldn’t be averse” to pre-application engagement to ease gateway two delays.
Amid uncertainty over the BSR’s gateway two preconstruction hard stop, the Health and Safety Executive’s director of building safety Philip White told Construction News the regulator had been reassessing its communication methods in discussions with the construction industry.
White said: “I’m not convinced about the idea of pre-application advice, per se, but I wouldn’t be averse to some sort of pre-application engagement, particularly on complex projects.
“That could be a way of operating so that we understand what the concerns may be. There might be a few high-level pointers that we give to the applicant.”
However, White warned: “We’ve got to be really careful about this, because we are regulating here.
“The [Grenfell Tower] Inquiry was very critical of building control. The report says building control needs to be ‘regulated vigorously’ – that was the wording used.”
Dame Judith Hackitt, whose 2018 Building a Safer Future report informed the structure of the Building Safety Regulator’s gateway system, told CN she thought pre-application engagement would not betray the spirit of the new regime.
She said: “The regulator isn’t set up to catch people out – the role of the regulator is to ensure that we get buildings that are safe and fit for purpose.
“How they choose to divide their time between acting as a gatekeeper and how much time they put into helping people raise standards to get through those hurdles is a subject for debate, and I don’t think there’s anything wrong with doing that.
“The balance has to be struck between giving advice and guidance, which is absolutely right and proper. [The BSR] is not there to tell people what to do. We’ve got to get this shift in ownership and responsibility.”
Some have argued pre-application engagement between the BSR and applicants would help applicants focus applications on the most important information, making them easier for BSR staff to process. McLaren Construction preconstruction director Adam Nicholson has suggested a version similar to that used within the planning system, in which the applicant would pay for the costs of engagement.
“What we’re trying to suggest is a positive thing,” he told CN. “We think the developer would pay for it the same as they would with a planning application, and fund it and start that engagement.
“While the regulator is building up its capacity and its team and its resource, it would be good if it could start developing this a workstream.”
Read the second instalment of Construction News’ deep dive into BSR backlogs here