Why building safety cannot be left entirely to the free market: A history of building regulations (part III)

Last month I continued my short synopsis of the history of building regulations, examining how the impact of two world wars led to levels of experimentation and a shift towards standards of performance, and away from mandated details. The freedom to experiment with new construction technologies grew and the rebuilding following the wars offered plenty of scope for experimentation in both form and detail.

The years that were to follow would see another significant shift as power moved, as it was in the rest of the economy, into the private sector.

In 1985 the building regulations were “recast” under Margaret Thatcher’s government in order to “cut red tape”, to simplify the building regulations and to bring London under the national building regulations for the first time (when the GLC was abolished). The new regulations would be “maximum self-regulation, minimum government interference” in a wider governmental drive to remove burdens from the market and incentivise private sector innovation.

An author at the time noted that, pre-1965, there were 78 pages of regulations, growing to 350 by 1980. The Thatcher reforms reduced the building regulations to just 24 pages. However, much of the detailed guidance was kept, moved to a series of 12 booklets of advisory guidance – the Approved Documents – which in real terms did not really ‘cut the red tape’.

This need to deregulate in order to “remove barriers to growth” continued through successive governments of all political persuasions, with a 1991 revocation and replacement of the building regulations. In 1992 they were revised again, and the market for policing the regulations was opened to the private sector with the introduction of Approved Inspectors.

Registration of Approved Inspectors was also moved into the private sector in 1996, and, in 2013 under the coalition government, limitations over which buildings Approved Inspectors could undertake building control functions on were also removed. These inspector reforms were intended to improve the efficiency of the building inspector service through competition; instead they led to greater fragmentation of regulatory control.

Of course, privatised building control does not necessarily indicate a reduction in thoroughness, but it does fragment policing. Building projects are necessarily bespoke and a level of interpretation of the regulations is required by inspectors in their work, regardless of whether they are from the public or private sector. Fragmentation of management can lead to divergence in this interpretation, and perhaps its policing.

The 1991 Building Regulations was replaced by an updated set in 2000, which was subject to revisions in 2001 and 2003. A new Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government under David Cameron saw a new set of building regulations brought in in 2010, which have been subject to multiple amendments since but are still current in 2026.

The coalition government also introduced a formalised “one-in, one-out” approach to regulation. Launched in September 2010 and applied from January 2011, the policy mandated that any government department wanting to introduce a new regulation which imposed a financial cost on businesses had to find and remove an existing regulation of equal value. The policy heavily restricted building regulations, escalating to “one-in, two-out” in 2013, and to “one-in, three-out” in 2016.

This aggressive deregulation policy later faced immense scrutiny during the inquiry following the Grenfell Tower fire in 2017, with the inquiry’s final report concluding that the “one-in, one-out” (and subsequent “two-out”) culture created a defensive environment within the civil service, where critical safety reviews of building regulations (specifically fire safety guidance like Approved Document B) were repeatedly delayed or blocked because officials did not wish to fall foul of the deregulation targets.

Dame Judith Hackitt’s independent review of building regulations and fire safety concluded in its interim report that the whole system of regulation “is not fit for purpose, leaving room for those who want to take shortcuts to do so”. The final report in 2018 led to the Building Safety Act 2022, intended to overhaul building safety. It suggested a new regulatory regime for those buildings considered “higher risk” (in terms of fire); clearer legal duties for participants in the design and construction process; increased leaseholder protections and extended defect liability periods for developers; as well as mandating digital management and transfer of essential building safety information to defined duty holders.

It further suggested a new Building Safety Regulator to oversee the safety and performance of all buildings, a new National Construction Products Regulator, and a New Homes Ombudsman scheme.

It is fair to say there have been teething problems with the implementation of the provisions of the Building Safety Act, and with the new Building Safety Regulator; it is too early to tell if the act has succeeded in its aims of making buildings safer. The provisions of the act do however, seem to be a tacit acknowledgement of the failures of deregulation for its own sake, and that building safety cannot be entirely left to the free market; a similar conclusion perhaps to the debates of the 1800s which concluded in the Public Health Act of 1875.

I wonder if our next reforms will be the re-introduction of mandated construction details?

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