Neutron Tower in East London was set ablaze on 12th September. The 22-storey residential block on Blackwall Way, Poplar, caught fire early Saturday morning, resulting in one death and more than 50 people temporarily without homes.
The fire broke out on the 17th floor. Although the cause remains under investigation, some are looking into reported delays caused by the Building Safety Regulator. An application for fire-safety remediation had been under consideration for some 31 weeks before approval was granted, just a day before the fire. The application had reached Gateway 2, the BSR’s pre-construction approval stage for higher-risk buildings, before being signed off.
If this is true, it raises questions about the safety implications of delays in such remediation approvals, which ordinarily would be estimated to take 8 weeks. It has to be discussed whether surveyors should consider more carefully the interaction between remediation design, regulatory approval and live occupancy risks. A 31-week wait doesn’t just delay paperwork — it means residents continue living in a building with outstanding fire-safety work, for the better part of a year, before that work can begin.
The delay carries different consequences depending on where you sit. Residents carry the safety exposure. Building owners and managing agents carry the liability, reputational and cost exposure. Contractors carry the disruption to programme and resourcing, often without a firm date to plan around.
Approval wait times rise, as discussions online seem to suggest, and pre-construction rejection rates remain high. This speaks of a systemic issue, rather than an unfortunate and unlucky one-off. Fire safety failures in occupied residential towers are exactly what the BSR regime was created to prevent, which makes cases like this worth taking seriously rather than treating as an isolated delay. Cases involving occupied buildings may be worth flagging for faster review, rather than being processed on the same timeline as unoccupied or pre-construction work.
These kinds of delays aren’t just red tape, but cause interruptions to construction project programmes and budgets, guaranteed to affect resources and timelines as well if not managed and accounted for.
Contractors and consultants can’t control how long a regulator takes to respond. What they can control is how well they track their own applications, documents and compliance milestones. Knowing early that an approval is taking 31 weeks instead of 8 gives a project team time to plan around it, rather than being caught out by it later, when it affects programme and budget without warning.
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