The Building Safety Act (2022)

January 14, 2025

The Building Safety Act (2022) has created additional responsibilities regarding protecting residents within High Rise Buildings.

Under the Act, Accountable Persons must apply to register high-rise residential buildings (buildings over 18+m/seven storeys with two or more residential units) with the new Building Safety Regulator.

Read on to find out more about specific requirements of Building Safety Compliance.

What is the Building Safety Act?

The Building Safety Act aims for a “fundamental reform of the building safety system”. Enacted in April 2022, the act set key changes concluded by the Government’s “Building a Safer Future” Consultaton.

The Grenfell Tower fire in 2018 exposed issues with some high-rise buildings’ construction, management and maintenance. Enquiries into the fire, and subsequent reviews of building regulations and fire safety, showed that:

Residents and construction employees had valid concerns about the safety of the building, but these concerns had not been taken seriously;
Regulations and guidance were ignored, misunderstood, and wrongly applied by some who were responsible for their compliance;
The motivation to build or renovate homes had led to the prioritisation of fast, cheap solutions – favouring financial outcomes over the provision of safe, quality homes. Safety was not given the due thought required.
A lack of clarity on roles and responsibility complicated the ability to identify who could take account for safety.

Read the Independent Review of Building Regulation and Fire Safety

As a result, the Building Safety Act 2022 aims to ensure that there is now greater accountability and responsibility for fire and structural safety issues through a new regulatory regime for building safety by enabling the Government to:

Create clearer responsibilities for those building or managing high rise buildings;
Give residents a stronger voice and provide them with better information about their buildings and how they can raise any building safety concerns;
Ensure that regulators get greater oversight of high-rise buildings, building modifications, and communications to residents about building safety;
Enable tougher enforcement when incidents occur.

One of the ways that they are achieving this is through establishing a new Building Safety Regulator in England.

The Role of the Building Safety Regulator (BSR)

The regulator is now leading a new regime for higher-risk buildings. BSR “will have oversight for the built environment, promoting competence across industry and putting residents’ safety first.”

Under the BSR, those responsible for high rise residential buildings (Accountable Persons) legally must register their building, creating a record of:

Accountable Persons;
Storeys above ground level;
Height in metres;
Number of residential units in the building;
The year of build;
Address.

Since April 2024, the BSR has been inviting Accountable Persons to apply for a Busilding Assessment Certificate.

Who is an Accountable Person (AP)?

“An AP is an organisation or individual who owns or has a legal obligation to repair any common parts of the building.”

An AP can be a:

freeholder or estate owner
landlord
management company
resident management company
right to manage company
commonhold association

Under the Building Safety Act (2022), Jennings & Barrrett Ltd. must be instructed by an AP (or Principle Accountable Person, PAP) to carry out building safety related duties on their behalf.

What is required to apply for a Building Assessment Certificate?

Ahead of the invitation from the BSR, Accountable Persons must first have registered their building with the BSR. Primarily, this means getting initial clarification of the building’s qualification of as a High Rise Residential Building.

Barriers to Clarification of Building Height Under The Act:

There are cases where a building may appear high-rise, but would not be defined as high-rise under the Act. In these cases, we work with building safety experts to understand whether a building requires an application to the Building Safety Regulator.

For example:

Building height is measured from ground level to the floor of the top storey. It does not include any floors below ground level, e.g. basements or under-ground car-parks.
Mezzanine floors only count as a storey if the floor area is at least half the floor area of the largest storey in the building;
Height of the top storey excludes roof-top plant areas, and any top storeys consisting entirely of plant rooms;
It does, however, include rooftop gardens.

First Tier Tribunal cases are ongoing to truly establish what does, and does not, count as a storey, and therefore which buildings qualify as High Rise Residential Buildings.

What’s Involved in Preparing a Safety Case Report

A safety case report is a detailed document describing the building, its storeys and layouts.

It also must cover the “resident profile”, a description of the demographic population of residents in the building and any needs that people within that building may have regarding safe evacuation or communication of building safety procedures.

There has been no clear guidance on what the “golden standard” Safety Case Report would look like. The Minister for Housing stated, in May 2024, that the BRS “will not know until they have seen examples”. The Health & Safety Executive have been regularly publishing updates to the existing guidance.

This therefore has created complications in the process of:

Understanding what does and doesn’t need to be included
Understanding the level of detail that needs to be provided
Hiring experts to assist with the production of the Safety Case Reports – with estimations from building safety businesses ranging from as low as £11,000 to as high as £42,000.

Whilst the Safety Case Report submission requires some easy to find and provide information (such Building Safety Risk Assessments, Fire Door Surveys, escape route information, and fire procedures, fire detection and warning systems, sprinklers and supression systems, detection and warning systems – any competent Property Manager or Accountable Person would already have these available) the report also requires:

Descriptions and information on the number and type of residential units and communal areas such as bin stores and underground parking, as well as any parts of the building that are not residential and the surrounding area of the building;
Details of the construction methods and materials within the main structural elements of the building;
A history covering any structural faults that have occurred within the building;
Information on any building work, refurbishments or remediation that have occurred;
Details of any surveys or inspections that have been done, by who they were completed, as well as how and why they were completed;
Services and utilities provided to the building, including isolation points;
Any gas supply and piping routes, including those going into individual units.
Smoke control methods in the building;
Details on staircases – the number, location or type, which floors and areas they serve, and how wide they are, as well as width changes if these occur.
Residential profiles.

Many of these elements are not usual documents to have to hand for most buildings, especially those that are older, so therefore they need to be created.

Additional requirements exist for buildings that have undergone a change in their use and multi-building developments.

See Government Guidance on Preparing a Building Safety Case Report

A Resident Engagement Strategy

A Residential Engagemenet Strategy is a document setting out what, and how, residents and owners of residential units are consulted on or communicated to about Building Safety related matters. The Strategy must be rationalised, reviewed, consulted on, and (if necessary) revised annually.

See more on Resident Engagement Strategies

A Mandatory Occurrence Reporting (MOR) System

Each high-rise residential building is now required to have an MOR, which must be reguarly reviewed to ensure that it remains effective.

When applying for a Building Assessment Certificate, the Accountable Persons must detail how the system allows for the:

Reporting and recording of safety occurrences to one of the two Accountable Persons;
Recording of safety occurrences that have already been identified to the AP;
Assessment of safety occurrences for validation;
BSR to be notified of safety occurrences as soon as possible, and within 10 days.

For new constructions of higher-risk buildings, work on existing higher-risk buildings, and work that affects the qualification of an existing building as a higher-risk building (including work to stop it from qualifying as higher-risk), principal designers and principal contractors must also establish and operate a MOR. This must occur before any contrustion or building work begins.

The MOR system must let anyone in the building report building safety incidents and risks that have caused, or, if not remedied, are likely to cause, death or serious injury to a significant number of people. This includes both structural failures in the building and the spread of fire and smoke in the building.

See more about MOR systems.

Creating a clear, digitally-led process to Building Safety Act Compliance

Following a year of training around the Act, Jennings & Barrett’s Operations and Communications teams created a concise mission statement to lead our approach to compliance:

We will utilise inexpensive digital innovation and strategic actions to ensure that all elements of Building Safety compliance are:

Easy for all stakeholders to understand and comply to, ensuring that as many residents of High Rise Residential Buildings as possible can understand what is required of them, and how to find the information they require;
Inexpensive to provide on a wide scale in order to protect Leaseholder funds.