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Building safety round-up: July 2025
A round-up of the key news stories, guidance documents and new thinking for those involved in building safety issues, gathered by Peter Apps
A round-up of the key news stories, guidance documents and new thinking for those involved in building safety issues, gathered by @PeteApps #UKhousingNews
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The Building Safety Regulator (BSR) will move from the remit of the Health and Safety Executive (HSE), to a new board sitting within central government, ministers have announced. This board will be chaired by Andy Roe, former commissioner of the London Fire Brigade. The BSR will also get new resources and will attempt to implement a “fast-track” process to speed up its ’Gateway’ system. It comes as a House of Lords committee begins an inquiry into whether the regulator is slowing down housebuilding.
- 344 social housing blocks with ‘life-critical safety defects’ have no clear remediation plan, according to figures from the Regulator for Social Housing. This is out of a total of 1,897 buildings taller than 11 metres – of which just 67 have completed works.
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The Supreme Court dismissed an appeal by URS Corporation (formerly AECOM) in a case against Barratt Homes. The long-running saga relates to structural defects in blocks built by Barratt, where URS provided the engineering advice. The case allows Barratt to pursue compensation even though it no longer owns the building. This could have consequences for other cases where there is a claim of negligence against a consultant for improperly built homes.
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- Eight ‘large-panel systems’ tower blocks in Brighton and Hove will be demolished, the council has said. This is due to the cost of strengthening work to remove the risk of disproportionate collapse. There are more than 700 tall residential LPS blocks around the country – 350 of which still have a piped gas supply. Many will need expensive works or demolition in the coming years.
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Fire tore through a huge skyscrape in Dubai on 14 June, the eight-year anniversary of the Grenfell Tower fire. The tower, believed to be home to more than 3,500 people, was evacuated without loss of life. Expert commentary said it was likely clad in the same aluminium composite panels which caused the fire spread at Grenfell.
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19 flats were destroyed in a blaze which spread through low-rise flats on 1 June in Andover (see image below). Details of how the fire spread have not yet been revealed, but imagery of the fire appears to show the blaze burning through roof space.
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Fire spread through wooden cladding on a block of flats in Barnsley on 25 May (see image below), leading to the evacuation of the building. No one was injured. Images show the blaze climbing four storeys from the base of the building before being extinguished. Planning documents show an application for cladding remediation was submitted in May 2024.
- The BSR will begin publishing quarterly performance updates, covering the volume of applications received, recorded outcomes and decision times, a parliamentary question confirmed.
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A major fire in Slough in August 2024 spread via aluminium composite material (ACM) panels, after breaking out in a light fitting on a balcony, a fire service review concluded. The Slough Mosaic Apartments fire spread from the balcony to the ACM cladding on the sixth and seventh floors after being spread by high winds, the Royal Berkshire Fire and Rescue Service said.
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Residents of 160 ex-council flats in Merseyside are facing homelessness, after their homes were deemed unsafe to occupy by the local fire authority. The council, Knowsley, is temporarily funding a waking watch after the private owners of the building said they could no longer afford to keep it in place.
- The London Fire Brigade warned the capital is at risk from wildfire after an exceptionally dry spring. London provides one of the most challenging urban environments in the world for a fire and rescue service, the brigade said. Just under half of the capital is considered as green space, but the risk is heightened because many of these green spaces lie next to homes and businesses.
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Minutes of a meeting of the Scottish government’s Building and Fire Safety Working Group set out plans to implement the recommendations of the Grenfell Tower Inquiry by 2030. They plan to introduce legislative reform, new competency frameworks, and closer co-ordination with the UK government on reserved matters.
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Lithium-ion battery-caused fires requiring a response from firefighters in the UK have risen 93% over two years to 1,330 incidents, with London the epicentre of the crisis, research by an insurer showed. The report by QBE found that e-bike fires caused most of the blazes (362), while cars (232) and e-scooters (156) were also major contributors.
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The Collaborative Reporting for Safer Structures UK (CROSS-UK) group published a report raising concern about the use of plasterboard which may not meet fire resistance requirements in light-timber frame properties. In order to hit insulation targets, some insulation manufacturers have been recommending 12.5mm thick plasterboard, which may not be thick enough to meet requirements for 30 minutes’ fire resistance.
Guidance
Philip White, chief inspector of building safety, discusses the ways to meet the requirements of the regulator’s Gateway process in these new videos.
The BSR has also published guidance for local authorities on how their staff can support its multi-disciplinary teams.
A consultation on reform to the building control regime for higher-risk buildings in Wales closed on 25 May. Building control is a devolved matter, and the Welsh government is seeking views on similar changes to those implemented in England over the past three years.
Government guidance on defining higher-risk buildings in England was amended to include a First-Tier Tribunal decision which held that roof gardens are not a storey.
A consultation on a revised version of PAS 9980, the guidance which sets out methodology for risk-assessing an external wall, closed on 6 June. It was run by the British Standards Institution (BSI) and sponsored by the government.
The HSE released a report looking into the effectiveness of regulations on preventing falls from windows – something which has been tragically relevant in the social housing sector in recent years. The review concluded that the height of window guards is crucial – with 1.1 metre guards “protective against tipping risks for practically the entire adult British population”, while an 80cm guard “is protective for less than 1% of the adult population”. You can read the full report here (see graphic below).
The BSR also updated its charging scheme for the new financial year, with increases imposed to take account of inflation.
A new advisory note for those preparing for building control applications for higher-risk buildings has been published by the Construction Leadership Council, amid widespread struggles with the new Gateway process.
The government has published an ‘A-Z glossary’ of common building safety terms, which can be accessed here.
Thinking
What are the fire considerations for modular housebuilding, and how differently will they perform to the block, brick and concrete structures we are familiar with? This essay from an engineer based in Australia offers an interesting insight into the fire resistance challenges – and the way blazes can spread to other compartments in ways that they might not in traditional build.
A research paper by CROSS-UK looked into risks from lithium-ion batteries. “It is critically important that those with responsibilities for designing, constructing and managing aspects of the built environment keep their knowledge of this evolving technology up to date,” the organisation said. The importance of this was emphasised by a fire in Hither Green, London, earlier in the year where an e-bike fire became so severe it blew through an internal wall, forcing residents to jump from a first-floor window to escape.
Research considering the structural integrity of timber support beams after a fire has been published here. The research, important for our understanding of mass timber buildings, shows that since “the compressive strength of timber drops rapidly with temperature (75% reduction at 100°C according to Eurocode 5, even a moderate temperature increase in the core of the section results in a significant reduction in column strength”, according to one of the authors.
A detailed article by fire expert Dr Jim Glockling, formerly of the Fire Protection Association, looked into the issue of toxic smoke during the fire – a major issue which has received little regulatory attention.
- An article in the RICS Built Environment Journal looked at the recent figures on rooftop solar PV fires and the necessary steps to ensure these increasingly popular systems are safe.
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