The Building Safety Act: Reduce project risks with “on-the-fly” site decisions.

For years, construction has relied on rash fixes on site. Details adjusted. Materials substituted. Solutions found under programme pressure; but it is now clear that this culture carries real delivery risk.

The Building Safety Act seeks to combat this approach, which provides many positives for ensuring the safety and quality of construction. But it also means that undocumented design changes or poor workmanship are no longer purely defects issues. They can serve to delay approvals and completion, restrict occupation and drive late-stage rework or cost overruns.

Some of the most common problem areas include unapproved design changes made on site, poor or inconsistent fire stopping, services installed before coordination is resolved, a lack of clear inspection records, and missing or unreliable as-built information.

For high risk buildings, these issues directly undermine Gateway approvals and the Golden Thread. For non high risk buildings, while the Golden Thread doesn’t apply, the same behaviours still create compliance, programme, and cost risk.

The shift is clear: it is no longer enough to simply build a project. Teams must be able to demonstrate compliance through clear, coordinated, and well-documented design and construction decisions.

At Norton Mayfield Architects, acting as Principal Designer for Building Regulations we support project teams in embedding compliance into the design and delivery process from the outset. Ensuring decisions are recorded, coordination is robust, enabling projects to move through approval and completion with confidence.

At our project in Crown Street, Acton; the client, design, and construction team ensured that works were co-ordinated throughout the project and compliance was met rigorously. Once we viewed this as the ideal approach, now it is the minimum standard.