140,000 Homes, 36-Week Waits: The Scale of the BSR's Remediation Challenge

It is almost nine years since the Grenfell Tower fire killed 72 people and exposed the scale of the combustible cladding crisis affecting residential buildings across England. In that time, there has been legislation, inquiry, public commitment and significant expenditure. Yet today, over 140,000 homes still have combustible cladding on their external facades.

The Building Safety Regulator's recently published remediation improvement plan sets out how it intends to address the regulatory backlog that is slowing down the remediation of these buildings. It is a more structured response than anything that has come before it. Whether it is sufficient is a question the industry is debating with some urgency.

Where Things Stand

The numbers are sobering. There are 299 live remediation cases currently awaiting decision at the BSR. Those cases collectively affect approximately 26,000 homes whose residents are waiting for the regulatory clearance that will allow remediation work to start or conclude. The median decision time for those cases is 36 weeks — against a statutory target of 8 weeks, and a practical ambition of 12 weeks that the BSR has now set for December 2026.

The statutory 8-week target has not been met consistently for remediation applications since the regulatory regime came into force. The gap between target and reality has persisted not through lack of effort but through a fundamental resource constraint: the BSR has never had sufficient staffing to process the volume of applications it receives at the pace the legislation envisages.

Industry voices have reacted to the new plan with a mixture of cautious welcome and continued frustration. Some have described the plan as sensible and the proposed measures as practical. Others have been more direct: the plan does not come close to addressing the scale of the problem, and without a step change in resourcing, the 12-week target will remain aspirational rather than operational.

What the New Plan Proposes

The improvement plan centres on a dedicated multi-disciplinary task force specifically for external remediation cases — the category that accounts for the majority of the backlog and the most complex technical assessments. This is a meaningful structural change. Previously, remediation cases competed for attention alongside new build applications and other regulatory functions. A dedicated team with a clear mandate and defined caseload limits should produce measurable improvements.

The plan also proposes reducing caseloads from around 25 cases per regulatory lead to 10. This is significant. The current caseload concentration means that individual officers are managing a volume of complex technical work that makes sustained quality of assessment difficult. Reducing that concentration should improve both the speed and the consistency of decisions.

The proposed approvals "with requirements" mechanism — allowing work to start on aspects of a project that have been approved while residual technical queries are resolved — addresses one of the most frustrating features of the current system. Under the existing regime, a single unresolved query can prevent work starting on any part of a project. The new approach would allow phased starts, reducing the real-world impact of technical queries that do not affect the early-stage works.

The Resourcing Question

The honest assessment of the plan is that its ambitions are directly dependent on resourcing that has not yet been confirmed. A dedicated task force requires people. Reduced caseloads require more people than the BSR currently has. Online tracking systems require investment. The flexible approvals mechanism requires assessment capacity to process the additional administrative complexity it creates.

The BSR has operated under a resource constraint since its inception. The structural challenge — a new regulator with a novel and complex function, handling a national caseload of significant technical complexity, with staffing levels that have not kept pace with demand — has been visible for some time. The improvement plan acknowledges the constraint implicitly. What it does not do is guarantee the additional resourcing that would make its targets achievable.

This is not a criticism specific to the BSR. It reflects a broader pattern in which regulatory functions are established or expanded without the staffing investment that effective delivery requires. The same concern is now being expressed loudly in the context of the proposed single construction regulator — a point we address in a separate article.

The Non-HRB Gap

One dimension of the remediation challenge that the BSR's plan does not fully address is the position of buildings that do not meet the higher-risk building definition — typically those below 18 metres — but which nonetheless have combustible cladding or other significant fire safety defects. These buildings sit outside the BSR's direct regulatory jurisdiction and are subject to a patchwork of local authority oversight, building insurance mechanisms and funding schemes that lacks the coherence of the HRB regime.

The absence of a clear regulatory pathway for non-HRB remediation means that residents in affected buildings below 18 metres continue to face significant uncertainty about when, and by whom, their buildings will be made safe. This is a gap that the current improvement plan does not close, and it represents a substantial proportion of the 140,000 homes that still have combustible cladding.

What This Means For Your Project

For clients with remediation projects currently in or approaching the BSR's queue, the improvement plan changes the regulatory context but not the fundamental dynamic. The measures being introduced should improve throughput over time. But the scale of the backlog, and the resource constraints that created it, mean that improvement will be gradual rather than immediate.

In that context, the quality of your submission is the only variable you can directly control. A complete, well-evidenced application that allows the BSR to make a decision without requisitions will move through the system more quickly than an incomplete one, regardless of the structural improvements the regulator is making.

The practical implications for projects currently in preparation:

• Do not submit a remediation application until the submission is genuinely complete. The temptation to submit early to start the clock is understandable but counterproductive if the submission will attract requisitions.
• Commission a pre-submission review. An independent check of the application package before submission is the single most effective way to reduce the risk of requisitions.
• Engage specialist compliance support early in the remediation design process. Remediation applications are technically demanding and the BSR's scrutiny is rigorous. The competence requirements apply as fully to remediation projects as to new builds.
• If your application is already in the queue and has drawn requisitions, respond to them completely and promptly. Partial responses extend delay and generate further queries.

The plan is a step in the right direction. The scale of the challenge requires more than incremental improvement — it requires sustained investment in regulatory capacity that matches the ambition of the legislation. Until that investment is confirmed, the practical advice for applicants remains the same: make your submission as strong as it can be, and take nothing for granted about processing times.