The Building Safety Act: What Developers and Contractors Should Be Paying Attention To
The Building Safety Act 2022 changed how responsibility for a building is assigned, recorded, and enforced — and it did so retrospectively. This article explains what the Act means in practical terms for developers and contractors, where the real exposure sits, and why compliance now has to be proven rather than assumed. It is written for developers, principal contractors, housing associations, and the project teams responsible for delivering and signing off building work.
Quick Summary
A Different Kind of Legislation
Most construction regulation tells you how to build. The Building Safety Act 2022 goes further: it tells you who is accountable, for how long, and what you must be able to demonstrate if that accountability is ever tested. That is a meaningful shift. For developers and contractors, the practical question is no longer only "does the work meet the standard?" but "can we prove it did, years from now, to a regulator, an insurer, or a court?"
The Act emerged from the Grenfell Tower tragedy and the independent review that followed. It is now largely operational, with the most demanding controls falling on Higher-Risk Buildings. But its influence reaches wider than that category alone, because it reframes how the whole industry treats evidence, competence, and long-term liability.
From our experience, the businesses that struggle with the Act are not usually the ones that build badly. They are the ones that build well but document loosely — and then find they cannot evidence good work after the fact. That gap between doing it right and proving it was done right is where most of the new risk lives.
What Counts as a Higher-Risk Building
The strictest duties apply to Higher-Risk Buildings (HRBs). In England, a Higher-Risk Building is generally one that is at least 18 metres tall, or has at least seven storeys, and contains at least two residential units. That definition captures most residential towers, and also brings in buildings such as student accommodation and some care settings.
If you are working on an HRB, the project moves through a regime of statutory "hard stops" that did not exist before. Outside that category, the Act still matters — particularly the extended liability periods discussed below — but the gateway controls are specific to higher-risk work. Knowing which regime your project falls under is the first decision that shapes everything else, and it is worth confirming with Building Control or a qualified adviser at the earliest stage rather than assuming.
The Gateways: Three Points Where a Project Can Stop
For HRBs, the Building Safety Regulator (BSR) sits at three control points known as gateways. Each is a genuine checkpoint, not a formality.
| Gateway | When it applies | What is required | Consequence of failure |
|---|---|---|---|
| Gateway 1 | Planning stage | Fire safety considered in design and layout; fire statement submitted with the planning application | Planning refused |
| Gateway 2 | Before construction begins | BSR approval of the design and construction control plan before any work starts | Work cannot lawfully begin; starting without approval is a serious breach |
| Gateway 3 | Before occupation | BSR satisfied that what was built matches what was approved; safety information handed over | Building cannot legally be occupied |
It is worth being candid about the current reality. Through 2025 and into 2026, gateway approvals — Gateway 2 in particular — became a significant source of programme delay, with some higher-risk projects reported to have slipped many months while applications were assessed. The regulator has since restructured how it handles applications, introducing batch processing for similar schemes and a separate pathway for genuinely complex cases, and has set out published targets to improve turnaround times. For anyone planning an HRB now, the lesson is straightforward: the gateway timeline is part of your programme, not an administrative afterthought.
A stronger approach is to treat Gateway 2 readiness as a project milestone in its own right, with the design genuinely fixed and evidenced before submission. Applications fail most often not because the building is unsafe, but because the information is incomplete or inconsistent — a preventable problem.
The Duty-Holder Regime: Liability You Cannot Contract Away
The Act, working alongside changes to the building regulations, formalised a set of duty-holder roles that closely mirror the CDM 2015 framework many in the industry already know. In broad terms, the developer or commissioning party acts as the Client, with a Principal Designer and Principal Contractor carrying defined responsibilities for the design and construction phases.
The critical principle is this: these duties cannot simply be handed off and forgotten. A client who appoints a design-and-build contractor does not thereby discharge their own legal obligations. The Client must take reasonable steps to satisfy themselves that the people they appoint are competent — and must be able to show the written record of how that judgement was made. Allocating realistic time and budget for compliance is itself a duty; squeezing the programme at the expense of safety is now a breach rather than a commercial decision.
For contractors, the obligations are equally concrete. The Principal Contractor owns the construction phase and must ensure the building is constructed to the approved design. On an HRB, a significant on-site change — swapping a specified fire door or cladding component for an alternative, for instance — cannot simply be made on the day. It has to go through formal change control, and where required, back to the regulator. "We fitted what was on site" is no longer a defence if what was fitted differs from what was specified and tested.
This is where independent quality assurance and site oversight earns its place. Verifying that the build matches the approved design, stage by stage, with a documented trail, is exactly the kind of evidence the regime now expects — and exactly what is hard to reconstruct after handover if nobody captured it at the time.
What This Means in Practice
For a developer appointing a design-and-build contractor: you still carry your own legal obligations as Client. You must check the contractor's competence, document how you reached that judgement, and satisfy yourself throughout the project that the duties are being met — not just sign a contract and step back. Delegating the task does not delegate the liability.
For a contractor receiving a specification: you cannot substitute a safety-critical component on the day because the specified item is unavailable. Any significant change must go through formal change control and, where required, back to the regulator for approval. Your role is to build what was approved — and to be able to prove you did.
The Golden Thread: Documentation as a Legal Asset
One of the most consequential ideas in the Act is the golden thread — a live, secure, digital record of the building's safety-critical information, established at the start of a project and maintained through to occupation and beyond. For higher-risk work it is a structured requirement, but the underlying principle is good practice on any serious build.
The golden thread is not a folder of PDFs assembled at the end. It is meant to be the accurate, accessible, current record of what was designed, what was actually built, and why decisions were made. At handover, the developer or principal contractor presents this record, and the person taking over responsibility for the building formally accepts it. If the information is incomplete, that acceptance can be withheld — which can delay occupation and, with it, final payments.
We often see documentation treated as the last task before handover, compiled under time pressure from memory and fragments. That is precisely the wrong way round. Captured properly from the beginning, the golden thread protects everyone: it speeds handover, supports future maintenance and refurbishment, and becomes the primary evidence if the building's safety is ever questioned. This is why project governance and documentation should be designed into a project at the outset, not retrofitted at the end.
Mandatory Occurrence Reporting
The Act introduces a duty to report safety occurrences on HRBs — incidents or near-misses that present, or could present, a significant risk to life from fire spread or structural failure. There is a formal mechanism for capturing these and reporting them to the regulator within defined timescales, followed by investigation of the root cause.
In practical terms, this creates a culture obligation as much as a procedural one. If a fire-resisting element is accidentally compromised during installation, the correct response is to log it, report it, and put it right under proper supervision. Concealing it is the serious offence. For contractors, this means the reporting system has to be real and understood on site, not a policy document nobody reads.
The Liability Shadow: Claims Reaching Back Decades
This is the change with the longest tail, and the one most often underestimated. The Act amended the Defective Premises Act 1972 so that the period in which certain claims can be brought is dramatically extended.
| Claim type | Before the Act | After the Act |
|---|---|---|
| New dwellings (s.1 Defective Premises Act) — work completed before 28 June 2022 | 6 years from practical completion | 30 years retrospectively — long-expired claims can be revived |
| New dwellings — work completed after 28 June 2022 | — | 15 years going forward |
| Work on existing buildings (broadened duty) | Narrow / limited | Broader duty applies prospectively from commencement |
The 30-year retrospective period attaches specifically to new-dwelling claims under section 1 of the Defective Premises Act. This is a summary, not legal advice — confirm the position for your project with qualified legal advisers.
The retrospective reach has already been tested in the courts, confirming that long-expired claims can be brought back to life. The practical message for developers and contractors is sober but clear: design records, specifications, material certificates, and as-built information may need to be defensible for far longer than anyone previously planned for. Where those records no longer exist, defending a claim becomes very difficult — even where the original work was sound.
The Act also makes it harder to hide behind corporate structure. Through Building Liability Orders, courts can extend liability to associated companies, reaching beyond a single special purpose vehicle to parent or related entities. The era of dissolving a project company and walking away from the risk is, for these purposes, over.
Criminal Sanctions and Personal Exposure
The shift from civil recovery to criminal sanction is one of the Act's defining features. Breaching a gateway, failing to meet mandatory reporting duties, or providing false information to the regulator can attract unlimited fines and, in defined circumstances, imprisonment of up to two years. There is also a power to disqualify directors who commit relevant offences. These are not theoretical provisions; they signal that building safety is now treated as a matter of individual as well as corporate responsibility.
None of this should be read as cause for alarm so much as a reason for rigour. The protections against criminal and financial exposure are the same things that produce good buildings: competent appointments, an accurate record, controlled changes, and honest reporting.
What Is Still Changing
The regime is not static. In late 2025 the government consulted on moving towards a single construction regulator, and an independent review of the building safety regulatory framework is expected. A Building Safety Levy on certain new residential development is due to take effect, and further adjustments to make the regime proportionate for lower-risk works within HRBs have been signalled. For developers and contractors, this means watching the regulatory horizon as part of normal planning. Decisions made today should anticipate where the framework is heading, not only where it stands. Current guidance should always be checked through GOV.UK and the Building Safety Regulator before relying on any summary, including this one.
What Better Practice Looks Like
The Act rewards organisations that were already disciplined and exposes those that were not. The practical priorities are consistent across project types:
The Bottom Line
The Building Safety Act has not made good construction harder. It has made unevidenced construction far riskier. The buildings that pass through the new regime cleanly are not necessarily the most expensive or the most complex — they are the ones where competence was checked, decisions were recorded, changes were controlled, and the safety record was built in real time.
Compliance is now about provable evidence, not good intentions. The gap between doing it right and being able to prove it was done right is where most of the new risk lives — and it is a gap that closes only if the record is built from day one.
At Tarj Construction, we believe compliance should be designed into a project, not inspected at the end of it. That principle runs through our Compliance & Building Safety Audits and Quality Assurance & Site Oversight services — because the cheapest time to fix a compliance gap is always before it becomes one.
If you are planning or delivering a project affected by the Act and want an independent view of where your exposure sits, that is exactly the kind of independent consultancy support worth bringing in early.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does the Building Safety Act apply to my project if it isn't a high-rise?
The gateway controls and most of the formal safety management duties apply specifically to Higher-Risk Buildings — broadly, buildings of at least 18 metres or seven storeys with two or more residential units. If your project falls below that threshold, you are not subject to the same regime. However, the Act's extension of liability periods under the Defective Premises Act applies broadly to new-dwelling work completed after 28 June 2022, regardless of height. The duty-holder roles (Client, Principal Designer, Principal Contractor) that the Act formalised also apply across residential projects through the parallel changes to building regulations. In short: the gateway controls are HRB-specific, but the liability and documentation disciplines apply more widely.
How far back can a claim now be brought?
For new dwellings under section 1 of the Defective Premises Act 1972, the limitation period was extended retrospectively to 30 years from the date of practical completion for work completed before 28 June 2022. This means claims relating to work completed as far back as 1992 can, in principle, be brought. For work completed after 28 June 2022, a 15-year prospective period applies. These figures relate specifically to the Defective Premises Act — other limitation periods under different causes of action are governed by separate rules. Always confirm the position for your project with qualified legal advisers.
What is the golden thread, in plain terms?
The golden thread is a continuous, accurate, and accessible record of the information needed to understand a building and keep it safe — maintained from the first design decisions through construction and into occupation. For higher-risk buildings it is a legal requirement; for other projects it is best practice. It is not a document assembled at the end: it is built up throughout the project, capturing what was designed, what was actually built, and why decisions were made. At handover, it transfers formally to whoever is responsible for the building going forward. If it is missing or incomplete at that point, occupation of a higher-risk building can be delayed.
Do duty-holder responsibilities transfer to my contractor once they are appointed?
No. Appointing a contractor — including a design-and-build contractor who takes on both design and construction responsibilities — does not discharge your own obligations as Client under the Act and the associated building regulations. You remain legally required to take reasonable steps to verify that the people you appoint are competent, to record how you reached that judgement, and to satisfy yourself throughout the project that the duties are being met. The duty-holder regime allocates responsibility across all parties; it does not allow one party to hand theirs off completely. Taking legal advice on how this applies to your specific contractual structure is worthwhile before the project starts.
This article is general guidance only and does not constitute legal advice. Duty-holder obligations, gateway requirements, and liability periods under the Building Safety Act 2022 depend on your specific project, building type, and contractual arrangements. Always confirm current requirements with GOV.UK, the Building Safety Regulator, and qualified legal or building safety advisers.