How the Building Safety Regulator has become the slow death of Labour’s housing agenda

The BSR isn’t protecting people, it is paralysing housing starts in the places that need them most.

Chris Worrall is a housing columnist for LFF. He is on the Executive Committee of the Labour Housing Group, Co-Host of the Priced Out Podcast, and Chair of the Local Government and Housing Member Policy Group of the Fabian Society. 

“Safety first” has become Whitehall’s code for “build nothing”. It’s now June 2025, and the Building Safety Regulator (BSR), well meaningfully born from Grenfell, and then bloated by bureaucracy, has finally been dragged into the spotlight. On 19^th June, the House of Lords quietly admitted what the industry and I have warned at Left Foot Forward for months: the BSR isn’t protecting people, it is paralysing housing starts in the places that need them most.

Labour’s 1.5 million homes pledge is now a punchline. London’s 88,000-unit target? Buried. And while ministers dither, the sector is bleeding out. Jobs gone. Investment torched. Developers and builders collapsing under the weight of red tape. Thousands still live in deathtraps. And new homes can’t escape a proverbial Squid Game where almost nobody makes it through.

CASSANDRA CALLS, CRITICISM, AND COSPLAY

Back in October 2024, I wrote in Left Foot Forward that the BSR had become the biggest threat to housing delivery in the UK. By March 2025, I went further, calling it the regulator that “ate the construction industry”. I argued it had grown so unwieldy it risked devouring the very industry it was meant to safeguard. My language was incendiary because the facts demanded it. But six months later, following the Cassandra call, the BSR has finally come under the spotlight.

Inevitably, it would appear, almost too little too late.

Even its staunchest defenders happily admit the BSR torpedoed the design-and-build model on which much of the construction sector relies upon. Journalist and prominent voice on Grenfell author Peter Apps, went so far as to say the disruption was the “entire point”. He’s also taken aim at Ant Breach, accusing the Centre for Cities YIMBY of “overcooking” the anti-BSR case in his call to revisit these less safety more anti-supply measures.

In fact, Apps went full contrarian in his Substack, mounting a full “defence of anti-supply measures”. All on the grounds the regulator’s ‘official’ approval times were 18 to 20 weeks. This was, in my opinion, oddly detached from Breach’s far more credible warning that two-year delays were fast expected to become the rule. Not the exception. Now such assumptions are routinely baked into financial models and investor risk calculations.

Sadly though, these models rarely ever stack these days. If at all. Unless you’re an organisation that can access huge amounts of grant funding and property tax reliefs, like some out there.

Let’s not pretend Whitehall has a great track record on transparency. Facts have been hard to come by openly from the regulator. But a recent FOI request by Cast Consultancy exposed that 20 of 187 Gateway 2 applications for new builds had been approved. Barely one in ten. Worse – firms like Quintain have shockingly reported wait times of nine months. So much for 20 weeks Mr Apps. Yet it is clear to me what the regulator says on paper, and what it actually delivers in practice, are two entirely different timelines. One for press release. The other for funding and planning purgatory where businesses are regulated into oblivion.

So it is no surprise when nine in ten applicants are left in limbo, investor confidence evaporates the moment any potential scheme creeps over six storeys? Most won’t even bother taking a look. It comes as no surprise that in London alone, 23 out of 32 boroughs saw zero new housing starts last quarter. That is not a slowdown. It is a blob induced coma. Meanwhile, those brave or foolish enough to stay in the system are forced to grim the conversations with lenders and investors, watching business plans bleed out slowly under the dead weight of state-imposed uncertainty.

Now, with the smell of political panic in the air, wafting fresh from numerous UKREIF panel discussions, the government has finally shuffled the deck. The BSR will move out of the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) and rebranded as an arm’s-length body under MHCLG, complete with “fast-track” pledges and a new leadership duo. But let’s be real: even a single track would be an upgrade at this point. What we have been handed instead is bureaucratic cosplay, a showy reshuffle screamed with the wide-eyed gusto of a toddler cleaning their room by stuffing everything under the bed. Meanwhile the rot of Whitehall policy failure remains untouched.

FROM SAFETY TO SQUID GAME

But let us go back. The BSR was meant to be the answer to Dame Judith Hackitt’s 2018 review. A clear call for a standalone, independent regulator with real teeth and public trust. Rather than create something new, ministers in January 2020 opted for speed over structure. They announced that the BSR would be set up inside the HSE. A body with no meaningful history in regulating residential buildings or housing construction. All within the no brainer operational remit of the Department of Work and Pensions (DWP). Makes perfect sense right?

No, me neither.

By April 2022, the Building Safety Act codified this makeshift arrangement. MHCLG set the policy and funding. HSE ran the operations. The Permanent Secretary at MHCLG remained publicly accountable for building safety, but had no direct control over HSE’s performance. Meanwhile, the BSR began enforcing its infamous three-gateways system. A framework so convoluted it made seasoned developers feel like an unfortunate contestant with a gambling addiction duped into game of ‘ddakjii’. Slapped repeatedly before being thrust into a proverbial unwinnable Squid Game run by the regulator. And what are they graced with? Unclear rules, arbitrary eliminations, and the looming threat that one misstep means financial ruin.

HOW WHITEHALL’S REGULATOR IS BURYING BUILDERS AND BREAKING FAMILIES

Beyond the Whitehall Rorschach Test, a proverbial psychological inkblot test where everyone sees something different and where there is no clear answer or consensus, the House of Lords Committee politely received some cold hard truths. Up stepped the gallant Executive Director of Quintain, Matthew Voyce. A veteran in the construction industry with thousands of homes built under his belt. Voyce’s oral evidence professionally set out in no uncertain terms that the delays with the BSR could result in people losing their jobs and is ultimately deterring investors.

Voyce was not just speaking candidly on behalf of the many. But for the – not so few – that have already faced losing their jobs.

This is no joke. Businesses such as Godwin Developments, the likes of who the market relies on to go get planning permission, recently plunged into administration. All having made development director hires as recently as September 2024, quoting “the market is showing signs of recovery”. Yet those signs of recovery appear to now have been short lived. A year is a long-time in business. But feels less so in politics.

Redundancies are now rocketing across the sector. Construction jobs are being shed at the fastest rate since October 2020 post the Covid-19 fallout. A modular construction firm, yes another, has shed 140 workers in West Midlands. Not-for-profit social housing developer, Building for Humanity, has filed for liquidation. Forget backing the builders. When construction insolvencies now balloons to over 4,000 companies, 17 per cent of all industry cases, this government appears to be actively destroying them.

And for a party whose clue is in the name, it seems like anyone within the development sector is not so much as protected. But evidently politically expendable. Crushed beneath the digger while Whitehall drafts another strategy nobody asked for. If this is Labour standing with workers, God help the ones holding the bricks. Because right now they are getting buried in ministerial incompetence and regulatory neglect.

And the cost is not just financial. Every home delayed means another child doing homework in a B&B hallway. Shunned from their local housing market. Living miles away from where they once called home. It means yet another survivor of domestic violence uprooted to a strange town with no network of support. Kindly labelled a “priority resident”. But living anything but a dignified life. Parents are having no choice but to send their kids to counselling. Not because of trauma at home. Because their children have had five addresses in two years and still no place to call home. These are not just abstract side effects of policy. They are the real-life casualties of a civil service that finds building safety too boring for the headlines and too politically toxic to fix.

And this isn’t just a technical failure. It is a moral one. Labour inherited a mess and chose to tinker. Rather than tackle, immediately. Faced with a system collapsing under its own bureaucratic weight, ministers buried their hand in the sand and sat on their hands. Now offering little more than a PR-friendly reshuffle dressed up as reform. The result? Spooked investors. Shelved projects. Lost jobs. And families still trapped in B&Bs.

THE LANDBANKING BLAME GAME

Let’s not forget: just before this announcement, in what looked suspiciously like future blame-dodging, Labour’s housing team dusted off the tired old “use it or lose it” line. As if the problem is developers hoarding land. Rather than a regulator that can’t approve a start line. It’s not just wrong. It is downright insulting. You can’t shout “build faster” while Whitehall can’t even find a pen to sign off the plans.

Maybe stop scapegoating the market for a failure now squarely at the feet of this government?

And yet, real solutions have been on the table. Matt Voyce has called for a Functional Requirements Tracker to bring clarity to submissions and proper resourcing to end BSR paralysis. But is the real blockage just more taxpayer funding? Seems to be an easy answer to everything. What about Whitehall’s backside-covering culture? Where risk is feared, decisions are dodged, and residential building safety operations are placed in the pension department.

All in can be up to 18-24 months of regulatory roulette for a Gateway 2 sign-off, where even the winners appear to go home broke.

Even if you win, you don’t get a prize. You get the ‘privilege’ to start construction. The Whitehall edition of a Squid Game that gives chances of progress lower than a contestant’s completion rate.

THE OSTRICHES HAVE COME HOME TO ROOST

The truth is we didn’t need a departmental reshuffle. We needed a rescue plan. Instead, all we got was a marketing rebrand and a new org chart. The BSR was never meant to be the slow death of Labour’s housing agenda. But that is exactly what it is becoming. And those now in charge? They’re only just waking up, while the industry bleeds out. Even binding 12-week deadlines would be the bare minimum. But nothing’s changes. Everything just stays buried in the blob that’s been more Kafka than Hackitt.

Homes are still on hold. Builders are still laying off. And Labour is losing more than just housing supply. It is losing trust, credibility and the right to say it stands with workers. Faith in ever being able to deliver meaningful brownfield sites? Barely hanging on by a thread. If Labour wants to back the builders, not the blockers, it should start by facing those it’s let go. And explain how “safety first” became “supply last”.  Squid Game was fiction. But this is far worse. Because the casualties here are not actors. They are real workers. Real companies. And real people.

Yet when ministers bury their heads in the sand long enough, they don’t just miss the crisis. They literally hatch it. Thousands still trapped in flammable flats. Shovel-ready homes smothered by a system where nine in ten don’t make it past the first bureaucratic hurdle. It is  nothing short of economic self-harm in a high-vis vest.

But now the BSR ostriches have finally come home to roost, having trampled on workers, families, and developers along the way. Whether they realise the entirely predictable drop in housing starts isn’t a market failure remains to be seen. It is, however, without doubt a failure firmly at the feet of Whitehall. After all, Britain hasn’t run out of people wanting to plan or build. It is just running out of time, confidence, and capital to deal with a state-induced paralysis designed by the risk averse, rubber-stamped by the clueless, and paid for by the families and workers they promised to protect.