The London Assembly held its latest Fire Committee meeting on 14 January 2025, to discuss the building safety regime and remediation and its impact on the London Fire Brigade (LFB)
Addressing Assembly members, London Fire Commissioner Andy Roe acknowledged that the new regime was “a very positive step forward” but noted that “implementing any new regime into a built environment as complex as London has challenges in the context of scale.
“Just the scale and complexity of risk in London means there is a constant tension between the progress of that regime and the need for society’s benefit to build new residential volume,” he added.
He added that the LFB had been working very closely with the Building Safety Regulator (BSR) and colleagues in the Ministry of Housing, Communities, and Local Government (MHCLG), with the challenges being acknowledged and understood by all parties and dealt with in a “clear and transparent way”.
Calling it a “more-than-one-generation problem”, Roe admitted it would be some years until the endpoint of remediation and “driving popular cultural change” occurred. He noted that the implementation of the new regime had brought about a “fairly significant kind of change in the operating environment”.
“Now it's about the practical application of it in a way that allows us to drive forward the great societal needs to fix the legacy stock and build enough volume of residential [buildings],” he said.
Also in attendance was Deputy Director of the BSR, Tim Galloway, who agreed that following initial scepticism, the “early impacts” of the new regime were now being seen. Taking a national view, he said: “We are seeing designs that do consider fire safety at an earlier stage, as opposed to the feeling…of fire safety being a bit of a bolt-on in the design process.”
As reported by Inside Housing, Galloway noted that “40% of more general applications are not able to assure us that the functional requirements, the building regulations, are being met.
“That’s quite a worry, because that isn’t about the new regime. That’s about being able to show that your design, your intended building works, will meet standards that haven’t changed since 2010. That’s the last time the building regulations were modified.”
However, processes that the BSR had put in place, such as Gateway 2, had enabled the regulator to “stop…building work going forward in a way that wasn’t available under the old regime in higher-risk buildings”.
Galloway noted that it was a learning process for all involved, adding: “One of my concerns that I wanted to mention here is that, at times, it starts to feel almost as if the whole conversation around applications is about the application, rather than whether the building work will meet the requirements.
“That starts to feel a little bit as if it’s, ‘How do I get this past the regulator?’”
Speaking of non-compliance, Roe cited the example of a 17-story building that had been inspected by both the LFB and BSR and major fire safety issues found:
“It was about to go into occupation. We are all grappling with layers of problems – lack of competent inspection and lack of competent skills when constructing. This is the reality,” Roe explained.
As such, fire safety needed to be brought much earlier in the development of a building and he welcomed moves by the government to increase the level of construction skills, saying, “you need people who can build safely and properly”. However, he also raised the issue of competency:
“You then need at every single stage of the inspection process... competent people. There is a big question for government laid out in the second phase of the Grenfell Tower Inquiry report around whether the construction industry and society have been best served by the privatisation of competent building inspection and what that has done to the number of local authority registered inspectors.”
Roe explained that it took on average two and a half years of training to reach the level of competency required by the BSR, with only 40 out of 170 inspectors deemed competent. He added that high-risk was not just limited to high-rise buildings, which only represent a small percentage of London’s building stock, but certain low and medium-rise buildings as well.
“We've got 300 hospitals. We've got an unbelievable number of transport hubs and major critical national infrastructure. Parliament alone represents an interesting fire safety issue. We're stretched across a number of regimes within the overarching context of fire safety…It's not for the BSR to solve, but that brings tremendous pressure into the space and the need for us to intelligently move and manage resources to meet these kinds of competing demands.”
Also partaking in the committee meeting was Roxanne Ohene, Assistant Director for Building Safety, Housing and Land at the Greater London Authority (GLA), who reported on the progress of the GLA’s government funds for high-rise building remediation.
As of last year, the GLA had delivered over £1billion of capital spending, with 205 of the 510 buildings within London in the programme having completed work. Asked why the remainder had not yet started, Ohene noted: “I think one of the main challenges that we've all experienced is that there's no one individual organisation that can fix those buildings. We certainly have some bad actors in terms of freeholders and building owners who stall and hold up a remediation, which is why, specifically, as Andy mentioned, we are all really pleased by possibly new regulation that the government might bring in to help us to enforce against those actors.
“Certainly, from my experience … the thing that's really helped in terms of driving progress on these buildings is where all of the organisations that have an enforcement role, or a decision-making role in terms of funding, when they come together, it's when we drive the most progress.”
In a statement to Construction News, a spokesperson for MHCLG said: “We are more committed than ever to improving competence and capacity in the building control sector, which is why we have invested £16.5m in new local authority building control inspectors. The new Building Safety Regulator is essential to ensuring safety is considered at each stage of the building control process for high-risk buildings, helping people live in the safe and decent homes they deserve.”
You can watch the full fire committee meeting here.