Building safety regulations: time for a radical rethink?

The Grenfell Tower fire claimed 72 lives and brought the issue of building safety into the public eye. In the nine years that have passed since, governments have grappled with how to improve safety, regain public trust and reform a construction regulation system that the inquiry into the tragedy condemned as “seriously defective”.

Today, as the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG) consults on the architecture of a revised regulatory system, RICS is championing a radical approach. It’s one that could define the next chapter in professional regulation and form the foundation for a trust-based regulatory ecosystem for the built environment sector.

Outcome-based collaborative regulation (OBCR) is a new approach to regulation based on scientific research about how people behave. It is grounded in observations that regulation is more effective and produces results that better serve the public interest when it encourages people to cooperate, rather than simply threatening them with sanctions for non-compliance.

“We want to help the government, the profession and the public to view regulation in a much more expansive way that will ultimately protect public safety,” says Chris Alder, senior executive officer, standards and regulation at RICS. The chief determinants of decisions around building safety are founded in ethics and competence of the people involved, he argues. 

Statutory regulation is needed to ensure compliance in the areas of highest risk, for example fire safety, he says. But what he calls “whole system regulation” would be more effective to guide the behaviour of actors across the full range of the construction ecosystem, whether they be professionals, trades, manufacturers, suppliers or educators, he suggests. 

“A more expansive approach involving insight into behavioural science is needed to help everyone involved improve competence, do the right thing and flag issues when they see them,” he says. 

Christopher Hodges, emeritus professor of justice systems at the University of Oxford, is one of the UK’s leading thinkers on regulatory systems. He advocates the OBCR approach. “If you can get into the space whereby people are well trained, well motivated, doing the right thing whatever the circumstances, then that is incredibly powerful. And to do that you use a collaborative mechanism rather than a fear-based enforcement mechanism.” 

He points to the success of cooperative approaches to regulation in industries such as aviation and nuclear power, where all the participants have a strong individual and collective focus on the crucial importance of safety. While actors in those sectors have plenty of rules with which they must comply, he observes that they are also constantly feeding back any information relevant to safety and sharing it across the industry, however minor or potentially embarrassing it appears.

Hodges says there is a shift in thinking about regulatory systems away from breaches and compliance, and towards outcomes. OBCR-style approaches involve the regulator and stakeholders governing their system in a collaborative way, using feedback from a trusted community of participants to upgrade systems and improve outcomes. 

He envisages it would also lead to the establishment of an agile system of regulation based on risk: “The model can deliver hard-edged, compliance-based regulation where needed, or allow participation in a trusted ‘help us innovate, help us grow’ model.” That could remove some of the regulatory logjams that have held back growth and prevent red tape from stifling innovation aimed at speeding up delivery, while continuing to protect public safety, he suggests. 

For example, delays in receiving approval from the Building Safety Regulator, which was established after the Grenfell tragedy to regulate the safety of high-rise buildings, have been blamed for restricting the progress of housing projects. 

“In a number of sectors, we’ve seen regulatory models that may have been right for specific points in time and specific issues, often using old prescriptive approaches. Not all of them have kept pace with change and evolved as risks have changed, harming the ability to grow,” says Alder.

He believes we are reaching “a new frontier of professionalism,” an inflection point at which technology-driven change is transforming how professions operate. As well as the advantages associated with viewing regulation through a different lens, whole system regulation promises to enable the built environment sector to seize the opportunities presented by advances in technology and AI, says Alder. “You create a system in which participants can share concerns, intelligence and information, and that can then be analysed to provide real-time risk analysis.”

RICS has invited consultancy firm Arup to join the conversation around digitally enabling a new regulatory model for construction. Simon Evans, global digital energy and global digital twin leader at Arup, has been working with the energy industry since 2021 to improve data sharing. He says that there is widespread recognition now, stimulated by the UK’s industrial strategy, that large-scale data sharing is needed in every sector of the economy. Meanwhile, the value of data as an economic asset is beginning to be recognised.

Moreover, Evans suggests that there are wider potential benefits to data sharing. “You create an opportunity where the whole business process can be reimagined, and efficiencies can come into the system that you’ve never seen before.” 

In construction, that could lead to swifter and more efficient approvals processes, project completion and auditing of health and safety data. Buildings can be digitally enabled and ‘smart’, improving their operation and providing better services. Ultimately, he believes that data could be shared across sectors such as energy, water, transport and the built environment if their systems are designed to be compatible. This integration could boost the whole national economy.

Hodges recognises that there will sometimes be tension between competing outcomes. For example, in the construction sector there’s the public’s need for safe and affordable housing, the private sector’s need to generate profits and the government’s desire to encourage economic growth. “If it is done right, this approach can be extraordinarily powerful and effective, because all the outcomes can be achieved, although not necessarily all at once,” he argues.

In its prospectus for the establishment of a single construction regulator, published at the end of 2025, MHCLG acknowledges that the built environment needs to be regulated as a system, which should “contribute to positive outcomes through setting clear expectations of what is required, enabling people and businesses who can be trusted to benefit, and enforcing consequences for those who consistently or deliberately fail to do the right thing and put people at risk.”

Hodges says he is not yet aware of any governments around the world that have defined outcome delivery as the principal role of a regulator. Some regulators have been measuring their own outcomes, however, and several OBCR pilot schemes have been undertaken. These include a Safe Food system in Queensland, Australia, and one by the Scottish Environmental Protection Agency to support the net zero transition of the former oil refinery at Grangemouth in Scotland, as well as schemes in Finland, India and Singapore.

“The momentum is really building at the moment, although it is at an early stage,” he says. “I’m not aware that anyone has tried to do this so far in construction, property or housing, but it is a sector where there’s certainly quite a lot of enthusiasm for this.”

Building a community of trust across the built environment sector would take years and involve significant behavioural change, accepts Alder, but the potential benefits in the UK and internationally could be transformative. 

In the coming months, he says RICS will continue to share its experience on professionalism, professional development and what effective regulation looks like, as well as helping to convene academics and industry leaders. Doing this will help support the government’s understanding of the sector’s ecosystem more fully as it progresses its plans for regulatory reform.