Four years on from Royal Assent, the Building Safety Act is no longer a piece of prospective legislation to be discussed at conferences. It is a live operating condition on every higher-risk building in the country, and it has done something the industry has spent decades avoiding: it has named people.
That is the reform’s genuine achievement. Where responsibility for a defect was once dispersed across a chain of appointments until it could no longer be located, the Act now insists on a Principal Designer and a Principal Contractor with obligations that attach to individuals and organisations rather than to a general atmosphere of good intentions.
Naming a duty holder is not the same as creating one
The difficulty is that the Act redistributes accountability far faster than the industry can build the competence to carry it. I have sat in appointment discussions where a practice accepted the Principal Designer role without anyone in the room being able to describe, with precision, what the golden thread obligation would require of them at Gateway Three.
This is not incompetence in the pejorative sense. It is a structural problem. Competence frameworks arrived after the duties did. Insurers priced the risk before the market understood it. And a great many appointments were made in the interval.
Legislation can move a liability overnight. It cannot move twenty years of experience with it.
Where this shows up on site
On the projects I am asked to look at, the pattern is consistent. The paperwork is present. The information within it is not. A golden thread that records what was specified rather than what was installed is a filing system, not a safety case. It will satisfy an audit and fail a fire.
- Design responsibility matrices that name a party but not a deliverable.
- Change control that captures cost and programme but not the safety implication of the change.
- Handover information assembled at practical completion rather than accumulated through construction.
None of these are new failings. What is new is that they now have a statutory consequence and a named person attached to them.
What would actually help
Not further legislation. The Act is, in its architecture, broadly right. What is missing is the unglamorous work of building capability: properly funded competence assessment, a realistic view of how long Gateway Two will take, and clients who are prepared to pay for the design maturity the Act assumes exists before a project reaches the Regulator.
Until then, we have moved the risk to people who did not create it and cannot yet discharge it. That is a policy outcome, not an accident, and it is worth being honest about.
