From product testing to worker training, it is vital for those in construction and building services to keep abreast of changes and prepare for those to come. Held at IMechE’s Westminster headquarters yesterday (17 March), Building Safety 2026 brought together leading voices from industry and government to explore the implications of new rules and discuss practical guidance to ensure people live in safe homes.
Here are five key lessons from the event.
The Grenfell disaster was a ‘whole system failure’
In the early hours of 14 June 2017, Lord Andrew Roe saw the compounded effects of countless safety failures firsthand. As incident commander during the Grenfell fire, the then assistant commissioner of the London Fire Brigade directed firefighting operations and was responsible for revoking the ‘stay put’ order for residents.
What he saw that night ultimately led to him becoming non-executive chair of the Building Safety Regulator (BSR), he told the IMechE conference: “Whole-scale failure of regulation, government, private industry, local government, those who were managing the block and those who had renovated the block.”
While firefighters acted with bravery, he said the wider corporate institution had suffered from “years of neglect” of professional training and systems that should have identified risk and communicated it to the hundreds of first responders he sent into the block.
The commander was “devastated” by the result, he continued. “I love the community, love the multiculturalism, love everything that those places represent,” he said. “What we saw that night was a complete disrespect to that way of life, and how we treat people in social housing… I really woke up the next day knowing that I’d been at the centre of the most appalling system failure.”
Appointed commissioner in 2020 and nominated for a life peerage in 2025 after resigning and joining the newly formed BSR, Lord Roe has since dedicated himself to preventing similar failures from ever happening. The deaths of 72 people that night are an “unassailable” moral imperative for the Building Safety Act, he said, which introduced new rules and requirements for thousands of buildings.
The introduction of that act, as well as other new regulations, set the backdrop for the IMechE event.
Regulations won’t work in isolation
The Grenfell disaster is a “driving force” for change being led by the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government, said Kate O’Neill, the ministry’s director of building design and construction, providing a “real sense of social justice in addressing what happened and how we can put that right”.
New regulations are a key part of that, including the Building Safety Act, dozens of recommendations from the Grenfell Tower Inquiry and changes proposed in the recent Construction Products Reform white paper.
While new rules and regulations are already bringing improvements for residents, O’Neill stressed the need for a trained workforce to ensure their full benefits. “You can have the most beautifully designed set of regulations, but without a workforce that understands what they need to do and how they need to apply those regulations, and having the skills and the competence and the right incentives, I don’t think you’re ever going to make real progress in terms of building safety and building quality,” she said.
The ministry is working to ensure that workforce exists, she said. In December, it published an ‘authoritative statement’ on fire engineers, setting out the knowledge and skills expected from those in the profession, and attempting to align it with more established engineering regimes. The government is also planning an overall workforce strategy on building safety and the construction professions, to be published next year.
The recent white paper also sets out the need for skilled workers, including in the regulation of new testing requirements. “Without decent enforcement, none of that really works,” O’Neill said.
The conference also featured a panel discussion on the competencies, certification and accountability required for the new era of building safety. Facilitated by Brian Cox, board member of IMechE’s Construction and Building Services Division, the session explored topics including how professional institutions can collaborate to strengthen competence frameworks, and asked how institutions and government can address the shortage of qualified, certified professionals.
Engineers are vital to system improvements…
Taking place at the One Birdcage Walk lecture theatre, the event highlighted engineering’s pivotal importance to building safety. The profession is “profoundly needed”, Lord Roe said, with vital contributions to be made in the remediation of thousands of unsafe buildings and the construction of safe new homes.
While regulators now understand that engineers are the “only people who are going to get stuff designed and built”, that relationship was previously more “adversarial”, Lord Roe said.
The BSR boss spoke candidly about other hurdles. This sometimes included engineering decision-making, he said, with engineers working on the same problems but coming to different conclusions. This can cause delays during building applications, he said.
The regulator is working with the big engineering institutions, including IMechE, to tackle those problems. “We’ve got to hit this head on,” Lord Roe said. “We need you to help us set a standard for what an application should look like.”
BSR will be setting up convention committees this month, with roles for engineering institutions. That will provide good practice and highlight what “good innovation looks like”, he said, forming part of a more open relationship and enabling improvements where needed.
…but building safety is a multidisciplinary field
Frances Maria Peacock, a fire engineer at Olympus Fire Safety, highlighted the importance of a multidisciplinary approach to her work. “I’m a fire engineer. I’m also a fire investigator. I’m also a chartered building engineer, a chartered architectural technologist.”
That multiplicity of perspectives provided a solid foundation for her reports on architectural fire dynamics, she said, a field she developed following the Grenfell Tower fire. Her presentation demonstrated the ways in which building geometry, façade materials and other factors can interact during fires.
The importance of varied expertise within organisations was also stressed by fellow panel member Peter Sutcliffe, head of building engineering at engineering consulting firm Aecom, who said that the level of submissions for high-risk buildings is often not sufficient, with missing details and reasoning, and sometimes “truly awful”.
A multidisciplinary approach is “vital” to understanding how engineering and architecture interact with the procurement process, he said. That “needs to be defined and needs to be set out” in submissions, he added. “That is the complication that people are now getting.”
Climate change must not be forgotten
While safety was front and centre, speakers at the event repeatedly highlighted the perils of viewing important topics in isolation. Sustainability is another vital factor that must be considered as industry delivers the new-build homes the UK needs, Kate O’Neill said. The Future Homes Standard, due to be published in the coming weeks, is designed to address those points.
“This is key for making sure that we are building homes that are futureproofed,” O’Neill said. “There is no point building a home that can’t survive what we know to be likely changes as a result of climate change, and we know that we have to start building homes that could be carbon neutral, as we shift our energy away from carbon and into renewable sources.”
Addressing climate change is much easier, cheaper and effective to do when building new homes rather than retrofitting existing buildings, she continued. Measures covered in the FHS will include high levels of fabric efficiency, low-carbon heating and “solar by default”.
The new standard will provide industry with much-needed certainty, O’Neill said: “We know that you want to plan and invest, so that you can start building.”
Learn how to apply building physics to improve comfort, reduce energy use and ensure compliance with net zero and safety standards at the Principles of Building Physics course, next taking place in London on 14 September. Learn more, book your attendance or check for further dates on the course page.
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