The Building Safety Act Changed Everything

The Building Safety Act, which was granted Royal Assent in April 2022, is arguably the most important piece of legislation the UK construction industry has ever seen. Introduced following the 2017 Grenfell fire and subsequently Dame Judith Hackitt's independent review into building regulations and fire safety, the Act is a direct response to what she described as a system that was "not fit for purpose." A system characterised by a lack of audit trails, unclear accountability, inadequate enforcement and what she called a "race to the bottom" in building safety culture.

It fundamentally changes how buildings are designed, constructed and managed, and its implications extend far beyond the cladding and fire safety debates that dominate the headlines. The Act affects every professional involved in the design and construction of higher-risk buildings: clients who commission work, architects who design it, MEP engineers who service it, contractors who build it, and the people who design the buildings we all live and work in yet rarely make the news: structural engineers.

This is a piece about what the BSA actually means for structural engineering practice, why the industry isn't ready for it, and what we think it takes to close the gap.

The BSA applies primarily to higher-risk buildings (HRBs): residential buildings at least 18 metres tall or 7+ storeys with at least two residential units, plus hospitals and care homes. But the competence and compliance requirements reach much further than that. The Act establishes a dutyholder regime that places legal responsibility on specific named individuals throughout a project's lifecycle. Clients are responsible for ensuring that the right people are in the right roles and that safety information is properly managed. Principal designers are accountable for managing design compliance. Principal contractors are responsible for managing safety during construction. And once the building is occupied, an accountable person takes over responsibility for ongoing safety management. For structural engineers, who are classified as designers under the Act, this means personal legal duties that apply regardless of the size of the project.

At the core of the Act is the golden thread: a comprehensive, digital, version-controlled record of every safety-critical decision made about a building, maintained from design through construction and into occupation. Every design change must be traceable. Every material decision must be documented. Every approval must be logged. The client is ultimately responsible for creating and maintaining this record, though in practice the obligation cascades down to every decisionmaker in the building design process.

The Act also introduces a three-gateway approval system at the planning, pre-construction and completion stages. For structural engineers, the critical ones are Gateways 2 and 3. Gateway 2 requires the Building Safety Regulator (BSR) to approve the full design before construction can begin. Gateway 3 requires proof that the building was built as designed before it can be occupied. If a major design change occurs during construction, work on that change must stop until the BSR approves a change control application, a process that can take six weeks or longer.

The penalties for getting this wrong are no longer trivial. The previous regime capped fines at £5,000. Under the BSA, fines are unlimited, imprisonment of up to two years is on the table, and the enforcement window has been extended from 12 months to 10 years. Where a breach is committed with the consent or neglect of a director or senior officer, that individual can be personally prosecuted. This is not a theoretical risk sitting in the background. It is a live liability that attaches to named people.

We spend most of our time working alongside structural engineering teams, and the conversations we have tell a consistent story.

A senior engineer at a major UK structural engineering firm told us that the BSA means "a lot more boxes to tick at Stage 4" and that calculation packs, models and drawings now need to be "absolutely bulletproof" before a Gateway submission. The Act hasn't fundamentally changed the engineering workflow, but it has front-loaded an enormous amount of rigour into a stage that was already demanding.

At another firm, a director described how constant design changes combined with these documentation requirements mean that buildings they expected to complete five years ago are still being worked on. The design keeps evolving, and every evolution now requires a level of formal documentation that simply didn't exist before.

Structural engineers sit at a particularly acute intersection of safety-critical decisions, design changes coming in from every other discipline, and a fragmented software stack that has to be reconciled manually every time something moves. When we asked one firm what mattered most for compliance, the answer came back in two words: paper trail.

The truth is that no standardised product or process exists that comprehensively addresses BSA compliance for structural engineers. The existing tools in the market were designed for document management, BIM coordination or data exchange. They are good at what they do, but none of them were built to track design changes across analytical models, spreadsheets and drawings with an automated audit trail. None of them provide the change-to-impact traceability that the golden thread demands.

The result is that every firm is independently trying to figure out how to meet these requirements. Some are building ad hoc processes using shared drives, Excel trackers, and manual logging. At one firm, design changes on a £300M project are tracked in a shared Excel sheet with screenshots of models and markups. It mostly works, but it was never designed to be an audit trail. As the director put it: 'if we can get a log of what's been changed, then we can tick stuff off the list.' Others are hoping that their existing tools will be close enough. None of them can demonstrate, with confidence, that their approach would survive a rigorous regulatory inquiry. The burden of figuring this out falls on engineers who are already stretched, on projects that are already tight, using processes that were never designed for this level of scrutiny.

Some firms are simply choosing to avoid the regime altogether, designing below the height threshold or rushing to start construction before the new rules took effect. To date, no fines have been issued, but the 10-year enforcement window means that is a matter of when, not if, unless the industry finds a better way to keep up.

At Bite, we believe that the structural engineering industry needs a purpose-built and compliant change management layer that integrates with how engineers already work. A tool that sits across the disconnected software stack that structural engineers use every day, monitors changes as they happen, identifies every downstream impact, and maintains a continuous, auditable record of what changed, when, what it affected and who acted on it.

When a design change occurs in a structural model, Bite identifies every affected calculation, drawing and document across the project. Every change is logged automatically. The audit trail builds itself as a byproduct of how engineers already work.

We are developing this in close collaboration with structural engineering firms of varying sizes, from 20-person practices to 200-person firms. Their feedback is shaping every aspect of how the product works. We are not building in isolation and then asking engineers to adapt. We are embedding with teams, mapping their workflows and building to their specifications.

From a societal perspective, the Building Safety Act is a net positive. Higher standards, greater accountability and a robust audit trail to ensure buildings are designed and constructed well are long overdue. But for the engineers living with these requirements day to day, the reality is that an already demanding job just got significantly harder. The increased documentation, rigour and auditability required at every stage translates directly into more hours, tighter deadlines and greater pressure on teams that were already stretched. For directors, the concern is twofold: the personal criminal liability that now attaches to non-compliance, and the fact that these additional requirements place real pressure on project margins and, at scale, on the financial health of the business. An automated audit trail is not a productivity feature. It is both the minimum defensible position and the most practical way to absorb the compliance burden without it consuming the capacity of the team.

If your team is grappling with how to meet these requirements, please get in touch. We work closely with every firm we partner with to map their workflows, tools and pain points before we build anything. The result is a setup that's bespoke to how your team actually operates, plugging into the toolstack you already use and building your audit trail in the background without adding a single step to your workflow.

Get in touch at [email protected], or reach out to any of us directly. We'd love to hear from you.