Building Safety Act Update – January 2025
In early January, the Building Safety Regulator (BSR) updated its Building Assessment Certification guidance and detailed the specific criteria being used when they are assessing safety case reports submitted as part of the Building Assessment Certificate (BAC) application.
What is the current situation?
Buildings over 18 metres or 7 storeys have been identified as high-risk buildings (HRBs), with over 12,500 properties now registered with the BSR. In April 2024, the BSR began calling forward safety cases on registered HRBs, in a tranche regime based on the BSR’s own risk matrix. A building’s risk has been determined based on the information provided when buildings were registered on the BSR portal.
The tranche regime is scheduled to run over the next 5 years, with tranche 1 currently under way from the 1st of April 2024 to 31st March 2025. For a building to fall under tranche 1, they must meet one of the following criteria:
- Be over 50 metres tall with 11 or more residential units
- Between 30 and 49.9 metres tall with more than 227 residential units
- Buildings of any height that still have combustible Aluminium Composite Material (ACM) cladding
- Certain Large Panel System (LPS) buildings
What have we seen so far?
At Rendall & Rittner, several of the tranche 1 buildings within our HRB portfolio were called forward by the BSR in 2024. From this, we received a number of feedback requests for further information, along with feedback on our Resident Engagement Strategies (RES) and Mandatory Occurrence Reporting Procedure (MOR).
The changes recommended by the BSR on the applications we saw were minimal, testament to the in-house expertise of our Health and Safety department and confirming that we are continuing to work in line with the BSR’s expectations on both important topics.
We anticipate that the BSR will extend the tranche 1 end date, due to the sheer volume of buildings to review. The regulator is also yet to issue a BAC. We anticipate that this will occur in 2025 though this isn’t confirmed.
What is new in the updated guidance?
In summary, the criteria document sets out that the safety case report will be assessed by a multi-disciplinary team comprising three key roles: the BSR regulatory lead, a structural assessor and a fire assessor.
The updated guidance has been designed to highlight the BSR’s core requirements for successful Building Assessment Certificates, increasing the understanding for all Accountable and Principal Accountable Persons regarding what should be included within their application when called forward.
Based on the criteria document, we have created a checklist for our clients. Each BAC submission that we complete will include a copy of this checklist, signposting the reviewer to the specific page number for each criterion. This should not only highlight understanding of the criteria to the BSR team, but also ensure that the submission is easier to review, keeping hourly reviewing charges down.
Contact us re the Building Safety Act
If you have any questions regarding a safety case report for your building that we manage, are unsure on next steps or just want to have a general conversation around the requirements, please contact our Building Safety team on bsa@rendallandrittner.co.uk or call 0161 929 2150.
