Last week, we had the opportunity to join one of our large developer clients at their HQ for a cross-disciplinary review session focused on lessons learnt from recent Building Safety Regulator (BSR) submissions.
In the room were over 60 professionals representing the client-side team, fire engineers, building safety leads, CDM principal designers, employers agents, contractors, architects/lead designers, and principal designers for Building Regulations. Together, we reviewed the feedback from the BSR on 35 remediation projects, assessing what’s working and where improvements can be made.
The session was enhanced by the direct involvement of a BSR team member joining us live via Teams, providing invaluable insight into current processes, assessment timescales, and expectations around submission quality.
Key takeaways included:
- Keep it simple – clear, concise submissions are essential.
- Provide context – show understanding of the project, site, and constraints.
- Documentation matters – issue registers, content pages, and logical structure help regulators navigate submissions efficiently.
- Relevance is key – only include necessary documents, and clearly state how each regulation is addressed (and, where applicable, why exemptions apply).
- Is it Complete? -If it’s not, wait until it is before you submit it (this will change in the future)
- Information requests from the BSR adds weeks into the process at the moment.
It was also refreshing to hear from technical directors who acknowledged that, while this work may not win design awards, it’s some of the most important and impactful work we do — delivering safer buildings and peace of mind to those who live in them.
A really productive and valuable day in London — and a great example of how collaboration, transparency, and shared learning can raise the standard across the industry.
If you want to know more about the Principal Designer for Building Regulations role or if you are looking at any works on an HRB do let us know, it’s a lot of work to undertake even simplest of works currently and 2 years on from the law being enacted the vast majority of the industry still are unaware of the requirements (including non HRBs)
#PrincipalDesiger #PDBR #BuildingRegulations #BuildingSafetyRegulator #BSR #Architecture #ArchitecturalTechnology