What is the Building Safety Act 2022?
The Building Safety Act 2022 created a regulatory regime for higher-risk buildings in England, introducing new duty holders, a safety case regime and the Building Safety Regulator.
It applies a different and heavier regime to a defined set of buildings, alongside — not instead of — the fire safety duties that apply to residential blocks generally.
Its central idea is that someone identifiable is accountable for a building's safety through its life, and that they can demonstrate how the risks are being managed rather than asserting that they are.
The information requirements behind that are substantial and continuous, which is the practical reason the regime pushes towards structured record-keeping rather than document folders.
In practice
A developer and a building owner arguing about who holds what.
The regime introduced duty holders, a gateway process and an accountable person for occupied higher-risk buildings, with a different set of obligations from the Fire Safety Order.
The two regimes sit alongside each other rather than replacing one another, which is the source of most confusion.
Whether a building is in scope is the question everything else depends on.
What goes wrong in practice
- Assuming the Act replaces the Fire Safety Order rather than sitting alongside it.
- Buildings not assessed against the higher-risk criteria at all.
- Information gathered for a submission and then allowed to go stale.