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Reimagining AEC is Dr Sepehr Abrishami's independent podcast on how the built environment handles information. Each episode takes one subject from digital construction, from the ISO 19650 series and the common data environment to the golden thread, soft landings and the arrival of artificial intelligence in design and surveying practice, and tells it as a single argument built on the published standards, guidance and evidence. Sepehr is a researcher and former architect who leads the Centre for AI in Construction and teaches building information modelling at master's level. The episodes are written for postgraduate students and practitioners who want the reasoning behind the rules, not a summary of them.
Hello, I am Dr Sepehr Abrishami. My research includes citizen engagement in the built environment, the part residents play in decisions about the places they live, and residents are the people building regulation is meant to protect. That interest led me to give this Reimagining AEC episode to the single construction regulator, the body the UK government proposes in response to the Grenfell Tower Inquiry.
Few residents complain, and the government's prospectus for that regulator shows how few. In the English Housing Survey for 2022 to 2023, only 29 per cent of social housing tenants had even considered complaining to their landlord or letting agent in the year before the survey. Among private renters the figure was 25 per cent. For leaseholders, the prospectus cites the survey for 2023 to 2024 and gives 22 per cent. The prospectus also reports the government's research with residents. Many never try, because they fear eviction or the consequences of legal action. Those who do try can meet several agencies, schemes and ombudsmen over a single problem, and be passed back and forth without knowing where to start.
The Grenfell Tower Inquiry found the same division at the level of government. At the time of the fire, the Building Regulations, construction products and the fire and rescue services sat with three different government departments. So my question in this episode is what a single construction regulator would change about who answers for a building, and how much of that change the government has decided.
To keep the answer concrete, I follow one building throughout, a residential tower of twenty storeys in England that I have invented for this purpose. Because it is at least 18 metres tall and holds at least two homes, the Building Safety Act 2022 makes it a higher-risk building. At each stage I ask who regulates which part of it, and where its future residents could turn.
Tracing the tower through the reform prepares you to explain the Inquiry's case against a fragmented system and to describe the outcomes and objectives proposed in its place. It should let you distinguish how buildings, products and professions would be joined, judge what that means for clients, designers, contractors and information managers, and summarise where the reform stood in October 2026. My main source is the prospectus that the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government published for consultation in December 2025. I describe what it proposed and say where the government has since decided something. Much of the rest is still proposal, not law. I take the subject in five parts. They are why one regulator, what it would be for, what it would bring together, how it would work with information at its centre, and how far it has come.
The first part asks why one regulator, and it starts with the fire. On the fourteenth of June 2017 the fire at Grenfell Tower killed 72 people. The Inquiry's Phase 2 report, published in September 2024, made 58 recommendations, and the first was a single construction regulator. In Volume 7 it judged the arrangements it had found in one sentence. "In our view, this degree of fragmentation was a recipe for inefficiency and an obstacle to effective regulation."
The Inquiry found systematic dishonesty among those who made and sold some of the products used on Grenfell Tower. It found conflicts of interest inside regulatory bodies, and a failure by central government to protect matters of life safety from deregulation. Its remedy was a single independent body, headed by what it called a construction regulator and reporting to one Secretary of State. That body would drive culture change and let information be shared easily across the industry. On the twenty-sixth of February 2025 the government accepted all of the Inquiry's findings.
The arrangement the Inquiry described divided along two lines. The first ran between government departments. The Department for Communities and Local Government owned the Building Regulations and their statutory guidance. The Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy regulated construction products, and the Home Office looked after the fire and rescue services. The second line ran between public duty and commercial interest. Building control was split between local authorities and approved inspectors operating as commercial organisations, and the prospectus records concerns that commercial interests could conflict with inspectors' public duties. On the product side, Trading Standards enforced the law on sales, while commercial organisations, accredited by the United Kingdom Accreditation Service, tested and certified products for manufacturers. Built in 2017, our tower would have answered to all of them, and none held the whole picture of a building, its products and the competence of the people who built it.
Reforms have followed since 2017, in two groups. One group controlled the most immediate hazard. In 2018 combustible materials were banned from the external walls of new residential buildings over 18 metres in England. The other group created regulators. The National Regulator for Construction Products was set up in 2021, inside the Office for Product Safety and Standards. The Building Safety Act gave that products regulator its full powers and created the Building Safety Regulator, or BSR, within the Health and Safety Executive. From October 2023 the BSR became the building control authority for higher-risk buildings. From the same month, Part 2A of the Building Regulations 2010 required competent people to plan, manage and monitor design and building work.
The prospectus says these reforms tackled the most immediate issues and that key gaps remain. The ministry estimates that between about five thousand nine hundred and nine thousand residential buildings above 11 metres carry life safety fire risks from unsafe external walls. Its central estimate of the cost of fixing them is sixteen point six billion pounds. The prospectus commits to solving what it calls the deep fragmentation of the building system, and that is the diagnosis the reform starts from.
The second part turns to what the government proposes instead, and the prospectus starts with outcomes rather than institutions. It proposes four outcomes for the whole building system, which fall into two pairs. The first pair concerns the people in buildings. Outcome one was first framed as safe and high-performing buildings. Safe in that sense reaches beyond fire to chronic harms such as summer overheating, excess winter mortality and poor indoor air quality, and high-performing covers a building's whole life, including end of life and reuse. The government's response of the ninth of July 2026 reworded it to read that buildings and built environments are safe and meet the needs of occupants and users. Its partner is trust, that users can rely on the system to put the safety and needs of occupants first.
The second pair concerns the market. One outcome rewards firms and individuals who act in the interests of building users, and penalises those who do not. The other asks that construction products perform as intended, with accurate product information. That outcome bears directly on information management. It includes a duty to give future generations information on design, material composition, testing and production, so that products can be removed, reused, recycled or safely disposed of. The response kept these three as they were, and all four are meant to become measurable objectives for the regulator.
Outcomes alone do not tell a regulator what to do when aims collide, so the prospectus proposes a hierarchy of objectives. At the top sits one primary objective, securing the safety of people in buildings and improving the standard of buildings and built environments. The response confirmed it. Beneath it come secondary objectives drawn from the other outcomes, including sustainable economic growth, which the prospectus says apply only where they do not undermine the primary objective. Below them, the outcomes become measurable duties and functions, and the regulator would prioritise its work by its own assessment of risk. Over the whole structure, the Secretary of State may publish a statement of strategic priorities. For our tower, the hierarchy means that growth could not be pursued at the expense of the safety of the people who will live there. The response did not settle the secondary objectives, so treat them as proposals.
The prospectus then asks what any effective regulatory system has to do. Drawing on work on outcome-based regulation by Christopher Hodges, published in 2022, it sets out six functions that form a cycle in three movements. The first sets expectations, through outcomes and rules, and through standards, licensing and accreditation that build a culture. The second finds and stops harm, by identifying problems and their root causes and acting to prevent them. The third repairs and learns, through remediation, retrofit or redress, and through monitoring that feeds back into the outcomes where the cycle began.
Two points follow. No single regulator performs all six functions. They are shared across a network of public, private and regulatory bodies, which is why the prospectus speaks of a regulatory system as well as a regulator. The second point is the one to hold on to, because the prospectus states that these functions require data to flow continuously around the system and between the people and bodies in it. I return to that sentence with the regulator's digital plans. The regulator's purpose, then, is safety first within outcomes for the whole system, with work that depends on data moving between many bodies.
The third part asks what the regulator would bring together. The Inquiry named twelve functions, and the clearest way to hear them is by who performs them today. Six already sit with the BSR and would move across. They cover oversight of building control, monitoring the Building Regulations, fire safety research and information, and developing fire test methods. Regulation of construction products, done since 2021 by the products regulator, would move across too, with wider oversight. Three functions have no owner today. No one licenses contractors to work on higher-risk buildings, accredits fire risk assessors or keeps a public library of test data, so these would be new.
The remaining two functions are where the government departs from the Inquiry. It accepted ten of the twelve, but not the testing and certification of products or the issue of compliance certificates. Its reason is that one body that both regulated and certified products would face a new conflict of interest. Conformity assessment bodies, the independent organisations that test and certify products, would keep that work under the regulator's oversight. The government also proposes to keep every current duty of the BSR, including those for existing and non-residential buildings.
Of buildings, products, people and residents, buildings come first, because the BSR already does much of the work. It oversees the safety and performance of all buildings in England. It is the building control authority for higher-risk buildings, so our tower's building control approvals come from it. It regulates those who manage safety risks in occupied higher-risk buildings, and it oversees every building control body. The prospectus calls the delays at its approval gateways unacceptable. The gateways are the points at which the regulator must approve a higher-risk building before work starts and before it is occupied. In June 2025 the government installed interim leadership, began publishing operational data each month and announced that the BSR would leave the Health and Safety Executive.
On the twenty-seventh of January 2026 the BSR became a standalone body, an executive non-departmental public body working at arm's length from ministers and sponsored by the ministry. Its staff transferred formally in June 2026. The prospectus calls this body the home for the new integrated regulator, and the government's response names it as the foundation. The Building Control Independent Panel, chaired by Dame Judith Hackitt, published its report on building control on the twentieth of May 2026, together with the government's response. The government accepted the panel's five principles as the basis for strengthening building control. One of them is transparency and data, which calls for clear data standards, interoperability and visible accountability.
On construction products, the prospectus says critical gaps persist. The Inquiry confirmed the findings of two earlier reviews, the Hackitt Review of 2018 and the Morrell-Day Review of product testing in 2023. Their findings come down to two failures. The first was institutional, a limited regime that put trade before safety, with too little capacity and rigour and enforcement that was almost non-existent. The second concerned information, with poor product information and misleading marketing. Those problems, the prospectus argues, let manufacturers sell and contractors buy products that were unsuitable or unsafe for their intended use.
Since 2021 the products regulator has increased market surveillance and removed non-compliant products, including insulation from two manufacturers. The new regulator would answer for the whole chain, from strategy and policy through compliance and assurance, including oversight of testing and certification, to enforcement with other agencies. Data and information appear on that list by name. Construction products are a reserved matter, decided by the UK Parliament, so these reforms would apply across the United Kingdom. The Construction Products Reform White Paper followed on the twenty-fifth of February 2026, alongside a consultation on a general safety requirement. That requirement would oblige economic operators, the manufacturers, importers, distributors and others who place products on the market, to control their products' safety risks first. Both consultations closed in May 2026, and the government has said it will respond later in the year. If the proposals go through, the products in our tower's external wall would answer to the same body as its building control.
The third area is people. No single body today sees competence, capacity and enforcement across the building professions. Only architecture and building control are regulated in statute, and most other roles are self-regulated or not regulated at all. The Inquiry asked for three reforms here, and the government accepted all three. They are statutory regulation of fire engineers, mandatory accreditation of fire risk assessors and licensing of principal contractors for higher-risk buildings. Two bear on our tower. Its fire engineer works in a profession with no statutory regulation today, and its principal contractor could in future need a licence to build it. A Fire Engineers Advisory Panel was set up in April 2025, and a consultation on fire risk assessors closed in June 2026. Beyond these, the government wants one strategy for the built environment professions, trades and occupations. Its call for evidence closed in August 2026, and the strategy is due in spring 2027. Whether the single regulator will oversee the professions has not been decided, and the government will settle that after the strategy is published.
The last area brings back the residents from the opening of this episode. The prospectus argues that the current system leaves residents to work through its complexity and put things right themselves. Its proposals would build on the BSR's statutory resident panel and share information between regulators and ombudsmen. In its response the government said the regulator will play a key role in setting standards of behaviour for industry. It is also considering a power to require a warranty on every new-build home, and it will consult on stronger consumer protections. For the future residents of our tower, the test is whether they are safe and feel safe. Taken together, buildings and products would be joined on the foundation of the BSR, testing would stay independent under oversight, and the place of the professions is undecided.
The fourth part moves to how the system would work, beginning with three roles. Government would be the steward of the system. The ministry would sponsor the regulator, resource it through funding and cost recovery, and appoint its chair and non-executive board. The regulator, as a non-departmental public body, would have operational autonomy to make decisions impartially while staying aligned to priorities set by ministers. Local authorities and fire and rescue authorities keep their existing roles. Industry is asked to go beyond compliance across the whole life of buildings, to rethink outdated procurement models and contracting practices, and to promote early design collaboration. The prospectus credits those who have already put the golden thread into practice. The golden thread is the legal term for the information about a higher-risk building, together with the processes that keep it accurate, which the Building Safety Act requires. As evidence that such change can happen, the prospectus points to health and safety, where the industry moved from tick-box compliance to a risk-led culture.
Here the sentence about data returns. Because the functions of a regulatory system depend on data moving around it, the prospectus proposes a regulator that is digital first, with information management systems that unify the regulation of buildings, professions and products. The central idea is a common information architecture, linking building control records, professional accreditations and product information. For our tower, that would connect its approvals, the credentials of the people who designed and built it, and the data on its products. The prospectus expects to build this in increments, starting with core data and services. Its consultation asked how to promote interoperability, the ability of systems to exchange and use each other's data, and how to keep human review when compliance checking is automated, for example by artificial intelligence.
In the response, the most common problem respondents raised was the lack of integrated digital services across regulators. They asked for open standards aligned with building information modelling, or BIM, and with information management based on standards from the International Organization for Standardization, or ISO. They also pointed to common data environments, or CDEs, the agreed workflows and tools through which a project's information is produced, shared and kept. The government committed to establish consistent information standards in the next phase of reform. It also committed to publish a Digital Building Control Roadmap, backed by an initial one million pounds for a digital consortium led by local authorities.
What follows for the people you will work alongside is my reading of the direction of travel, not settled law. Clients already carry duties under Part 2A to manage and resource projects properly, and those duties continue. What may change is that one regulator, rather than several, would oversee buildings and products, and possibly the professions. Designers, including principal designers, depend on product information, which the proposals aim to make accurate and accessible, and more of their professions may face registration. Principal contractors on higher-risk buildings may need a licence.
In my reading, information managers are the role these proposals touch most directly. A regulator built on a common information architecture and consistent information standards will expect structured, interoperable information, and the government's response asks the whole sector to build on the golden thread principles. Here I add a link of my own. ISO 19650 is the international series of standards for managing information using BIM, whose first two parts were published in 2018. Under it, requirements are defined in advance, and information is exchanged in information containers, the named sets of information a project produces, held in a CDE. If you work that way, you already practise much of the discipline these proposals assume. Neither the prospectus nor the response names ISO 19650, so treat that link as interpretation.
The fifth part places the reform in time. The prospectus was presented to Parliament as Command Paper one four six four and published on the seventeenth of December 2025. The consultation closed on the twentieth of March 2026, and the government's response in July drew on 184 written responses and events with almost a thousand stakeholders. Primary legislation is still needed to establish the regulator and its outcomes and duties, to transfer existing functions and to create the new ones. The government will bring it forward as soon as parliamentary time allows. Depending on that time and on the progress of the bill, it expects implementation to start from 2028, phased to minimise disruption, with the period before full operation used to test the regulator's core services.
By the end of October 2026 some points had been decided and others had not. The government's progress report on the Inquiry's recommendations, last updated on the second of October 2026, lists the single construction regulator as in progress and accepted in principle. The qualification is the decision not to take on testing and certification. No bill has yet been introduced, and the report says legislation will follow later in this Parliament. The government has confirmed that a single regulator will be created on the foundation of the BSR, with safety as its primary objective, and that it is intended to become accountable for construction products. The outcomes are settled, with the first reworded. Still open are questions of timing and money, such as when legislation will come and how the regulator will be funded. Questions of scope are open too, such as its role for the professions, the answers to the product consultations and the content of the information standards. Our tower's building control already sits with the body that will become the single regulator. Its products and the people who built it may follow, but only once Parliament has legislated.
That brings the episode to its close, and to my question about who would answer for a building and how much is decided. Where the Inquiry found a fragmented system, a single construction regulator would put one body, built on the BSR, in charge of buildings and products and possibly the professions, with safety as its primary objective. The reform is agreed in principle, with legislation still ahead and implementation expected from 2028.
When you assess any part of this reform, ask whether it gives one body sight of a building, its products and the people who made it. The lack of that view is what the Inquiry identified. Expect the reform to reach your own work through information. A regulator that depends on data moving around the system will need consistent standards and interoperable records, and the golden thread and ISO 19650 practice give practitioners a starting point. Keep what is decided apart from what is proposed, and check the government's progress report before you rely on the reform, because the position is still moving.
For reading, start with the prospectus and the government's response, and use the progress report for later updates. The episode on the golden thread for higher-risk buildings sits closest to this one, and the episodes on the common data environment and on interoperability and delivering valuable data take the information side further.
I have been Dr Sepehr Abrishami on Reimagining AEC. Think about where your own practice or research would sit among the bodies and duties this reform would bring together.