Moving too quickly on the Grenfell Tower Inquiry’s call for a new construction ‘super regulator’ would be a “distraction”, Dame Judith Hackitt has warned.
Hackitt, whose 2018 report informed the creation of two new construction regulators, gave her personal verdict on the inquiry panel’s proposal to combine them during a building safety conference held yesterday (25 September) at law firm Devonshires.
In response to a question from Construction News, she said: “I think there is a case to be made for bringing the construction product regulator and the building safety regulator together at some point. I don’t think it’s now.
“In fact, I think it would be a distraction to do it right now, because I think we’ve spent an awful lot of time trying to sort out form, when what matters right now is function.”
In its final report earlier this month, the Grenfell Tower Inquiry panel recommended bringing the oversight of construction products and higher-risk buildings under a single regulator. It was one of 58 recommendations in the 1,700-page report, published more than seven years after the fatal blaze.
Two new regulators – the Building Safety Regulator (BSR) and the Construction Products Regulator – were based on Hackitt’s recommendations in an interim post-Grenfell review, the 2018 Building a Safer Future report.
Hackitt said: “We need to get them both up and working and working properly. That’s where our attention needs to be.
“And then at some stage in the future – three, four, five years from now – we can have that debate around whether to bring them together as one super regulator, as it’s being called.”
She also urged the construction industry to show tolerance to the fledgling BSR, which has come under fire for the slow speed at which it assesses building control applications.
She said that while the BSR is finding it challenging to resource at the necessary pace, she was confident it would have enough staff within three to six months.
Hackitt pointed to the “absolutely appalling quality” of some gateway two applications the BSR has received, including one in which the applicant wrote “I don’t know why I’m having to do this” across all the forms.
She said: “Next time you put in an application to the Building Safety Regulator and it takes longer to come out the other end than you think it should, maybe, just maybe, it’s not necessarily because they’re struggling.
“It’s because some of your colleagues, somewhere else in the system, have put such an appalling application to them beforehand, and it’s taking time to get round to yours.”
