Corporate report

BSR annual statement of resident engagement 2024 to 2025

Published 24 October 2025

Applies to England

In this transformative year for building safety in England the Building Safety Regulator (BSR) has become fully operational. Implementing the new frameworks and principles from the Building Safety Act 2022 (the act) has required fresh thinking and new ways of working to kick-start the change required in industry to achieve compliant and safe high-rise buildings. Resident safety lies at the heart of all this work and BSR continues to engage with residents.

In the last year the customer service team has received over 20,000 enquiries via online form and phone calls. These enquiries have covered the full range of BSR’s responsibilities, such as higher-risk building (HRB) building control, HRB registration and competence.

As many enquiries as possible were resolved at the first point of contact. More complex enquiries, however, were resolved through collaboration with relevant specialists who formulate a response or refer the case for further investigation.

Around 1,300 of these enquiries were received from residents of HRBs raising concerns about fire control, structural concerns or lack of engagement with their principal accountable person (who is responsible for managing building safety), and those found to be highest risk were sent on to BSR’s Investigation and Intelligence Unit (IIU).

These concerns, totalling approximately 300, span crucial areas such as delays in remediation work, deficient fire safety measures, structural integrity, unauthorised building work and failure to implement aspects of the new regime.

IIU has worked diligently to investigate and resolve the issues raised by residents. Although some cases have not been upheld, in many cases those responsible have subsequently taken the necessary remedial action. In a small proportion it has been necessary for BSR to take formal enforcement action.

At the conclusion of each investigation residents were given the opportunity to raise any concerns if they were not fully satisfied with the outcome. This approach has provided residents with a voice in the process.

BSR also received many resident enquiries that were outside its direct remit, such as those relating to vandalism, faulty lifts, or antisocial behaviour. In such cases residents were directed to the appropriate body who could help them.

Formed in January 2023, BSR’s statutory Residents’ Panel continues to provide invaluable resident insight, ensuring that the voices and lived experiences of those living in high-rise residential buildings shape our work and decisions.

The panel met 5 times during 2024 to 2025 and has contributed to work in a number of important areas, including considering trends in the resident concerns reported to BSR. They have contributed to early thinking on resident-related evaluation research and were closely engaged in developing the resident communication campaign, including development of the narrative and the mechanism of delivery.

The panel also commented on the Code of Practice for Remediation Work, owned by the Ministry for Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG), feeding into a subsequent review of the document and helping inform future management of resident expectations.

As one of BSR’s statutory committees under the act, the panel devoted a meeting to considering the Grenfell Tower Inquiry Phase 2 Report. Their thoughts and opinions were fed back to MHCLG along with the thoughts of others for consideration in formulating the government response.

We continue to mirror the work of the Residents’ Panel in engaging with a wider group of relevant stakeholders with an interest in residents. This includes representatives of landlords, managing agents, student housing, and social and local authority housing. We have also engaged with a number of stakeholders in relation to the interests and concerns of disabled residents.

In the final quarter of the year we ran a recruitment exercise to refresh membership of the Residents’ Panel. This aimed to attract new members to the panel. In particular our advertising focused on attracting disabled, social housing and private rental tenants of HRBs to ensure a range of backgrounds on the panel.

We have continued to engage with leaseholders affected by the building safety crisis and have redoubled our efforts to engage with and provide material for residents who are directors of resident-managed HRBs, based on their specific needs. This included a well-attended session at the BSR National Conference on 21 May 2024.

We have assisted other government departments and bodies, contributing to their resident engagement plans and initiatives, for example on cladding remediation and residential personal emergency evacuation plans.

In the first half of the year the ‘Your Home, Your Safety’ campaign helped HRB residents in England understand their new rights under the act. Phase 2 of the campaign commenced in the last quarter of the year. This focused on raising awareness of BSR among residents, while continuing to make sure they understood their new rights and responsibilities.

To support the campaign the Health and Safety Executive’s (HSE) social media accounts were used to send resident specific messages, and a new webpage was added to the ‘Making Buildings Safer’ microsite covering residents’ rights and responsibilities and linking to pages with resident FAQs and on how to raise a building safety concern. As a result of the campaign the resident page on the microsite has had over 8,000 views, with over 40% finding the page through our social media campaign.

A physical leaflet has been produced for residents setting out in clear and simple terms how to raise a building safety concern. This will be made available at Citizens’ Advice Bureaus and job centres, and will also be available digitally in the 12 most spoken languages in England, including Polish, Romanian, Punjabi and Portuguese.

Seven region-specific press releases (based on density of HRB numbers) focused on BSR’s role in improving building safety and a tailored press release was sent to targeted general interest publications to help maximise reach.

BSR’s Insight and Service Design Team (ISD) conducted research programmes focused on residents and worked to increase the level of awareness of residents’ perspectives and experiences.

ISD co-delivered a session at the BSR National Conference on the best practice of engaging with residents, including practical recommendations for engaging with disabled residents and non-English speaking residents. They have also shared the findings and recommendations from research programmes on engaging with residents, including vulnerable residents, at industry events.

ISD have recently completed a research programme where the residents’ engagement journey was explored, in particular their contact with accountable persons and experience of raising concerns. This study was designed to have a focus on the experiences of disabled residents (by applying minimum quotas of disabled residents in data collection) to identify specific issues and challenges in their engagement with their building and their building management. ISD have started to share the learning from this research with relevant industry stakeholders.

As an early part of the evaluation of the building safety regime, HSE has commissioned research to establish baseline measures of both resident and accountable person perceptions of management of risk in HRBs and the new building safety regime. This research will be repeated in coming years to measure change over time. HRB residents have been consulted on development of the research and will be informed of the findings.