Andrew Parker speaks to The Times on Build Safety Gateway Delays
Post Grenfell and the subsequent Building Safety Act, a new rigorous gateway regime has been established to ensure the safety of residential high-rise buildings. However, numerous building and construction projects up and down the country are being held in an everlasting bottleneck, halting construction progress. Red tape, confusion around the completion of forms, and understaffing of the BSR has led to decision waiting times being more than twice the legal limit of 12 weeks. Further complicating the process, less than 15% of applications made to the BSR are approved, with 31% being returned as “invalid”.
Speaking to The Times, Andrew Parker, Head of Building Safety and Construction Disputes, gives his insight on these delays:
“[The new regime] is the result of a fairly damning critique of the construction industry in terms of how they procured, designed, tested, built and actually managed high-risk buildings. Nobody is under any illusion now that it’s a tick-box exercise. It needs to be handled properly. Maybe I’m naïve but it would be great to think that people realise that this is a problem that now affects everybody – contractors and developers, investors. It may well be that it just gives the construction industry the shot in the arm it needed for collaboration.”
Read the full article in The Times here.
