Dame Judith Hackitt will chair the new panel of construction industry leaders that is being set up to look at how to improve local authority building control in response to the Grenfell Tower Inquiry.
Building safety minister Alex Norris revealed the appointment this morning (1 April) as he appeared in front of MPs on the Housing, Communities and Local Government Committee.
The government’s February response to the Grenfell Inquiry’s phase two report said it would establish an independent panel “to consider how to address conflicts and commercial interests in building control and whether there needs to be a change to the delivery model for building control decisions”.
Norris told the committee: “We will be setting that up very soon indeed. I expect the chair’s announcement any day now – it is going to be Dame Judith Hackitt.”
The minister said the process of filling the panel was underway. “We are pulling together people to sit on it; we want to get on with it,” he said.
He added: “We’ve asked Judith to convene her own team. She leads an industry group, a coalition of the willing within the construction industry who want to raise and change standards.
“She is going to pull her group of people from that, so it will be senior leaders from the industry who have put their hands up and said the industry needs to change. That is very positive.”
Norris did not clarify exactly which group he was referring to. Construction News has asked the Department for Housing, Communities and Local Government to confirm.
Hackitt, who wrote a hugely influential 2018 review of Building Regulations in the wake of the Grenfell Tower blaze that killed 72 people the previous year, chairs an Industry Safety Steering Group that published its fourth report last year.
Its members were not listed in that paper, but in 2022 included the Chartered Institute of Building’s former president Paul Nash alongside safety, standards and social housing representatives.
Norris told MPs today there was a “real challenge” in achieving sufficient construction-oversight skills – and it could be expensive to overcome.
“Unless you have enough high-quality building control professionals, in an environment where they don’t have conflicts or perverse incentives, you will not have a safe environment,” he said. “We are highly motivated in this space. Money has been put in previously to develop more building control professionals, it may well be we have to do more of that.
“The sadness for me is these should be brilliant careers,” he added. “Problem solving, varied, work for yourself if you want to, it’s skilled, important work. But we have a workforce profile that means not only do we have problems now we will have very significant problems if we don’t act now.”
The head of the Building Safety Regulator last month warned that the construction industry still had “a long way to go” to change its culture and processes amid “serious failings” in applications for gateway two approvals under the Building Safety Act.