Chris Curtis

I beg to move, That this House has considered the performance of the Building Safety Regulator. It is an unrivalled pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Desmond. I thank the Backbench Business Committee for granting the debate and colleagues from four different parties for adding their names to the application. Since being elected last year, I have been searching for something that the hon. Member for Boston and Skegness (Richard Tice) and I can agree on, and I am thankful that we finally managed to find it. The breadth of support demonstrates the shared determination across the House to make the system work better. I also thank those from across the industry for their tireless campaigning on the issue, as well as for the constructive way they have worked to ensure that we can get safer buildings across the housing system and provide the supply that is so desperately needed. Across the construction and development sectors, there is rightly a growing frustration about how the new building safety regime operates in practice. Everybody supports the principle of safer buildings, but there is increasing concern that the system as it stands is holding back progress on building the new homes that are so desperately needed. My hon. Friend the Member for Northampton South (Mike Reader) and I sought this debate because of the growing concern across industry that the Building Safety Regulator, while well intentioned, is becoming a real barrier to hitting the 1.5 million homes target that we promised at the general election and that it is so important we achieve. We should be absolutely clear that this debate is not an attack on the principle of building safety—very far from it. Seventy-two people lost their lives in the Grenfell Tower fire on 14 June 2017—72 lives needlessly and tragically lost. It remains a stain on our national conscience that it took such a disaster to ensure that we have proper accountability and testing in the building industry. The Building Safety Regulator is a vital part of ensuring that nothing like Grenfell ever happens again, but it has to work. Time and again, developers and councils tell me exactly the same story: that schemes are stuck in the system and that, although the regulator is supposed to process applications within 12 weeks, tens of thousands of homes are still stuck to this day. The latest figures suggest that 22,000 homes are waiting for a remediation decision and that 33,000 new homes are waiting for approval. The cost of that is severe: according to the Centre for Policy Studies, there has been a 73% drop in housing starts in London over the past year, with the regulator one of the biggest causes. It is good to see today’s Government announcement on the ways we are going further to get the London housing market moving again, but the industry will still say the Building Safety Regulator is one of the biggest obstacles. Perhaps the biggest travesty is that if we do not build new safer homes, more people in this city and across the rest of the country are stuck in more dangerous and older properties. That is before we even start to consider the thousands who are stuck in temporary accommodation —one child in every classroom—or those who are paying extortionate rents because this country has failed for decades to build the homes that are needed. We now see a growing backlog in the BSR because telecoms infrastructure is being caught up in the new regulations for high-risk buildings—I say this in a building where I still cannot seem to get good phone signal, because we are not building the mobile phone infrastructure that is required across the city. That is causing real practical problems. It threatens to seriously impact the delivery of new buildings, particularly when rooftop installations are involved. If that is not addressed quickly, it could slow down construction and digital roll-out at exactly the point when this country needs to be improving both. The delays affect not just developers but people: the families living in buildings that are still awaiting remediation and the people who know that their homes are not yet deemed fully safe. The stress that causes day after day is unimaginable. When we talk today about process, paper- work and delays, we must remember the human beings at the heart of this issue. The economic impact is also huge: rising insurance costs, development finance drying up and higher up-front fees—all before a single brick gets laid. It has a real effect on the viability of building, particularly in our bigger cities. Peter John, the former head of Southwark council put it bluntly: “The greatest single burden developers have faced over the last five years has been the introduction of the Building Safety Regulator. The unintended consequence of improving building safety cannot be to cut off the supply of new homes.” He is right. Melanie Leech of the British Property Federation told the Select Committee that BSR delays are holding back two thirds of the build-to-rent pipeline. As we are rightly reforming the Renters’ Rights Bill, which was considered in the Commons again yesterday, we need to ensure that new build-to-rent properties are built, in order to keep the system unclogged. Fewer new rental properties obviously means higher rental prices for everyone else. The Home Builders Federation says exactly the same: the delivery of high-rise developments has “ground to a halt”. Earlier this week, the Government held their regional investment summit, and the message could not have been clearer: the UK is open for business, full of opportunity and led by a Government determined to drive growth. But investors also reminded us about the hard truth that investment is global, and if it takes too long or if it is too difficult to see a return here, capital will simply go elsewhere. We must pull down the barriers to investment and make it easier for growth to happen right here in the UK. If we are serious about growth, we need to back the builders, not the blockers. The good news is that fixing this does not require a huge amount of money from the Treasury—given how difficult it is to get money out of the Treasury—and it is not primarily about huge amounts of new spending. But it does mean investing in the right people: the experts who can process complex applications quickly and accurately. Will the Minister confirm whether the BSR will have the flexibility to offer market rates to attract those people, rather than being constrained by standard civil service pay bands? Secondly, it is about culture. Too many developers tell me they face a “computer says no” approach—an invalid application is simply rejected, forcing the whole process to restart. That would be frustrating enough over 12 weeks, but over nine months or more it is a killer for confidence. One of the most frustrating stories I have heard in all this is from a developer who was asked by someone at the Building Safety Regulator to slow down the speed at which they were making applications, to stop the BSR from becoming overwhelmed. At a time when this Government are rightly determined to speed up house building, it is frustrating to see an arm of government trying to slow the process down.