The Building Safety Act 2022 received Royal Assent in April 2022, with the operational regime brought in through secondary legislation across 2023 and 2024. The Building Safety Regulator, established in 2021 within the HSE and since 27 January 2026 a standalone non-departmental public body sponsored by the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government, is now the Building Control Authority for every higher-risk building in England, replacing the local-authority and approved-inspector regime that came before.
A higher-risk building is, in law, a building that is at least eighteen metres tall or has at least seven storeys (either threshold qualifies on its own), and contains at least two residential units. The threshold catches a much wider portfolio than the post-Grenfell “tall buildings” shorthand implies; a seven-storey multi-family block at sixteen metres is in scope.
Construction cannot start on an HRB without BSR approval at Gateway 2, and residents cannot move in without BSR sign-off at Gateway 3. Both are statutory hard stops. Failure at either stage stops the programme dead. There is no workaround and no precedent for one.
Five disciplines BREE runs alongside the client, the design team and the wider consultants, carried through from Gateway 2 application to occupation.
BSR approval at Gateway 2 is the hard stop before any construction can begin on a higher-risk building, with a statutory twelve-week determination period that, in practice across 2026 applications, is running between twelve and twenty-plus weeks depending on complexity and routing. BREE manages the application package end-to-end with the design team: competence declarations, construction control plan, change control procedure, mandatory occurrence reporting plan and the full design intent. The team owns the BSR engagement through to validation. Gateway 3, at the end of construction, is the second hard stop: as-built compliance, the completion certificate application and the golden-thread handover to the Principal Accountable Person before any resident can move in.
Quality on an HRB is engineered upstream of the programme, not inspected in at handover. BREE writes Inspection and Test Plans aligned to the safety-critical elements of the building, with witness and hold-points built into the construction programme rather than retrofitted at the end, and a defects register tied directly to the QA evidence pack the BSR will want to see at Gateway 3. Pre-construction mock-ups for the facade, the fire-stopping and the compartmentation junctions are signed off by the design team before serial production starts on site. The discipline that protects the programme from the kind of late-stage rework that has derailed schemes under the new regime.
Under the new regime, any material change during construction must be notified to the BSR, and depending on its impact on the approved design, may require formal re-approval before work can continue. BREE runs a documented change control process from day one of construction: every proposed change goes through a designer-led assessment of whether it crosses the BSR notification threshold, with a clear audit trail of the decision and the BSR engagement that followed. Late or undocumented change is the most common reason HRB programmes slip; structured change control is the cheapest insurance available against it.
The Act's dutyholder regime imposes competence requirements on the Principal Contractor and every contractor working below them, both organisational and individual. BREE's pre-qualification of subcontractors carries through to the appointment file: documented training records, NVQ and CSCS evidence, competence statements aligned to the work being asked of them, and a written record of the steps BREE took to satisfy itself that each appointee was competent. The cascade keeps working when a sub-subcontractor is brought on: competence evidence has to follow the work, not the contract.
The golden thread is the digital record of building information that the regime requires to be continuous, accurate and accessible from design through handover and into occupation: design, construction, change, materials, test results, as-built drawings. BREE captures the construction-phase golden thread in a structured common data environment, indexed to the building's elements and the Gateway 3 evidence framework, and hands it to the Principal Accountable Person as a single integrated record rather than a folder of disconnected documents. It is the artefact the regulator will ask to see if anything ever goes wrong.
