Building safety round-up: October 2025

• Thouria Istephan, an architect and former panel member at the Grenfell Tower Inquiry, has been appointed the government’s chief construction advisor. The creation of this role was a recommendation of the inquiry. 

• The government has published a template agreement on access to a building for developers that are fixing fire safety defects under the developer remediation contract, but no longer own the building. The lack of access agreements on some of these jobs has slowed remediation in the past.

• A High Court case in London, in which the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea is pursuing damages from other parties responsible for the Grenfell fire, heard that manufacturers of insulation used on the tower behaved “dishonestly”. You can read some of our inquiry coverage about this evidence here and here. 

• Just over 1,000 expressions of interest for cladding remediation funding have been submitted in Scotland, government data shows. Initial funding provides £50,000 for a single building assessment, after which a building is either put forward for remediation or deemed safe. The process is moving forward slowly, and the Scottish government estimates that up to 1,450 buildings will require remediation, but it has only completed 16 assessments so far.

• House builder Bellway has put a further £50m aside for cladding remediation, taking its total pot to more than £700m.

• E-bike and e-scooter fires in London are set to reach a record high this year, with the capital on course for more than 200 incidents. The fires can be fast-spreading and fatal, with Eden Abera Siem the latest victim after a blaze in Wood Green. Pamela Oparaocha, assistant commissioner for prevention and protection at the London Fire Brigade, said: “We continue to see the devastating consequences of e-bike and e-scooter fires in London. Our thoughts are with the family of Eden as well as all those who’ve been impacted by fires in recent years.”

• The responsible person at a care home in Lancashire has been handed a suspended sentence and a £43,000 fine after being charged with a series of fire safety breaches.

• New building safety legislation in Wales, which will require fire risk assessments in some privately rented homes, faced opposition from landlord bodies, which warned that the government’s cost estimates were too low and the increased bills would be passed on to tenants in the form of rent hikes. 

• Fire chiefs have criticised the English government’s remediation programme, calling the funding schemes “fragmented and inconsistent”.

• New data from the BSR provides a detailed breakdown of the reason for each application that is not progressing being “blocked”. The charts show a range of issues, but structural engineers make up the largest proportion. 

• Despite some positivity about cladding remediation in New South Wales, where the Australian government’s agency has taken a much more direct approach, ABC has reported on serious problems. Costs to ‘owners corporations’ (effectively the commonhold model) are rising, despite government support and low-interest loans, and the majority of 76 buildings identified for completion by 2024 have still not finished. Some owners corporations have elected to work outside the government scheme, finding that costs are lower.

Guidance

• The BSR has published an article on Gateway 3 – the final stage in construction or refurbishment, which confirms a building as safe to occupy following work. 

• The BSR has also published a new page that brings its guidance and resources together in a single place.

• CROSS-UK, a reporting service for the construction sector, released guidance on using digital engineering, after receiving multiple reports about misuse and misunderstanding of computational models, which can result in dangerous structures.

Thinking

• The Fire Protection Association – a research body funded by the insurance industry – released a manifesto calling for five policy changes, including prosecutions for those who fail to remediate buildings and swifter adaptation of construction product reform.

• At an international conference in Saudi Arabia, the National Fire Protection Association called for more global awareness of EV fires, and better regulation of innovation in this area. The group said that while EV fires occur less frequently than those in petrol cars, when they do happen they bring “unique and difficult challenges including longer burn durations, high heat release, toxic gases, re-ignition risks and significant water demand for suppression”.

• Lawyer Michael Teys discusses the divergence in safety laws in Florida, the UK and New South Wales in new research that highlights a move “from neoliberal regulatory approaches to more interventionist frameworks, particularly concerning new construction and the remediation of at-risk buildings”.