Building Safety Regulator: Powers and Responsibilities

The Building Safety Regulator oversees building control for higher-risk buildings, sets and monitors competence expectations across the built environment, and has a broader remit to raise safety standards throughout the industry, not only for buildings that meet the higher-risk definition.

Its existence changes the practical stakes of poor recordkeeping. Where safety information was once mainly a private matter between client and contractor, it is now something a regulator can examine directly, at gateway approvals, during occupation, or in response to a specific concern.

Powers include reviewing and approving gateway submissions for higher-risk buildings, requesting information from dutyholders, and taking enforcement action where safety management falls short of what is required.

The practical response is to treat information management as a delivery task with a named owner, not something completed retrospectively when a gateway deadline approaches. Assign clear responsibility for compiling and checking records ahead of each submission, and keep safety-critical decisions traceable at the point they are made.

Teams that already work this way tend to find gateway submissions straightforward. Teams that leave recordkeeping until the end usually find it is the single biggest source of delay.