Andy Roe tells committee there is ‘great danger’ in subcontracting system
Professional regulation in the construction sector should extend beyond the building control profession, the chair of the Building Safety Regulator has argued.
The Building Safety Act 2022 introduced a requirement for building control inspectors to pass competency assessments and to register with the Building Safety Regulator (BSR).
Andy Roe, chair of the regulator since the summer, suggested this approach should be extended during a discussion of culture change in the industry.
Speaking to the House of Lords’ industry and regulators committee, Roe said that developers accepted both the moral and commercial case for higher standards after Grenfell.
“If you were to speak to any of the really big blue chip developers, they will tell you they never want to experience the expense of remediation again,” he said, adding that there had been “a very, very significant culture shift already”.
The BSR chair said there had been a tendency in media and politics to paint industry and regulator as “either hero or villain”, which he described as “spectacularly unhelpful”.
Roe, who was incident commander during the Grenfell Tower fire in 2017, said it was wrong to blame developers alone and that “as the person who stood there that night and watched that tower, everyone had failed, so therefore everyone has a responsibility to do better”.
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Addressing the further reforms that were needed, Roe said that construction chief executives would be “the first to admit that the system of subcontracting in this country in the construction industry still holds great danger”.
“I would argue that there’s a real need to regulate not just the building control profession, but the other engineering professions, [and] other critical roles inside construction,” he added.
Separately, Roe gave the committee greater clarity about the regulator’s plans for the ‘account managers’ that it is currently onboarding.
These account managers will look at “portfolios of cases”, whether divided by applicant, region or type, enabling them to “start to see inconsistencies” in regulatory decision making
“That’s an individual that isn’t taking regulatory decisions, but is there to hold a relationship with either a developer or a region or a local authority or a particular set of schemes,” he said.
However, he reassured Lords that the introduction of these managers would not mean that applicants would lose direct access or communication with regulatory decision makers.
“For an individual application, so that the proper regulation is delivered and so that the detail of the scheme can be properly considered, discussed and communicated with developer, that individual reg lead-to-project manager relationship has to be maintained.
“Individual MDTs (multi-disciplinary teams) have to be able to speak to their respective professional peers on the applicant’s side. If anything, we want to increase that level of communication”.
Explaining the principle of the account manager, he gave the example of a large developer with a multi-towered scheme across a split site.
“You’re probably going to have to make, within the context of the way the legislation is written, eight or nine applications,” he said.
“What we want to do is group those applications together rationally, so you’ve got consistency, if possible, of regulatory leads [and] MDTs looking at them”.
He said having an account manager with an overview of this portfolio, as well as over other of this hypothetical developer’s schemes, would enable the regulator to assess a developer’s performance at a system level.
For instance, they might notice that the developer has an approach to structural engineering that the regulator doesn’t agree with.
“It’s a relationship role where we can both, helpfully, I would hope, at a system level, hold applicants to account, but they reasonably can also hold us to account,” he said.
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