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Consultation on ‘radical’ building safety regulatory changes launched

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  1. What is hmg’s solution to a system so complex it is patenetly unfit for purpose? Why, add another layer of complexity, of course. The bulging cupboard of documents that is the building regulations, was once a single A5 handbook; simple to read and implement. When hmg’s system can once more be contained in a hundred pages of A5 text we will know they are getting somewhere. Just because building regulations have been so abused to please the powerful as to be useless, doesn’t mean the idea is wrong, but any new layer will just make matters worse. And residents – the ones who pose a risk to others by their behaviour – are only interested in their building after it goes wrong. If they survive.

    UK legislation is littered with – possibly – well-meaning laws that have drifted into obscurity because they either don’t have teeth or funding for regulatory inspection has been reduced to nothing. Finding a way of making sure the regulators keep their teeth with advancing years, are effectively supervised by elected bodies, and those bodies are kept up to the task by those who care, is a significant problem.

    It is not an accident, in my view, that the past forty years have seen the strength and effectiveness of the building regulations diluted in direct proportion to their increase in verbosity.

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