The Building Safety Regulator has said it has made “significant changes” to the way it deals with safety applications following a damning House of Lords report into the issue published yesterday.
Streamlining the approvals process, hiring more building inspectors and cutting out unnecessary red tape are among the recommendations made by peers following an inquiry into the regime.
Responding to its findings, the BSR said: “We recognise that building control applications have been taking too long to process.
“Since the committee began its hearings in the summer, we have made significant changes to speed up decision making with a focus on new build and cladding remediation applications. These include a new Innovation Unit, batching processes, and the introduction of account managers to improve communication with applicants.”
It said that in the 12 weeks to 24 November, the changes meant construction was able to begin on over 11,000 new homes. “We also saw a 73% approval rate for new build decisions during that time, demonstrating that changes introduced are beginning to work,” it added.
Peers said the process for signing off safety approval could be improved by “removing smaller works from the BSR’s building control approval processes” and recommended “the BSR allocate the same multi-disciplinary teams to similar buildings or projects built by the same organisation, which could improve efficiency and consistency”.
Alex Delin, construction partner at law firm Irwin Mitchell, said other efficiencies could include sharing site preliminaries to reduce cost “particularly where an applicant has buildings adjacent to one another built by the same developer”.
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