He said something he sees “repeatedly” is landlords unable to provide adequate records to “demonstrate they know what is going wrong”.
“It is simply not credible that a failure in records of knowledge and information management in one area is isolated and everything else is brilliant”, Mr Blakeway said. “There are probably 20 providers, housing associations and local authorities in London, and some outside London, large and small, who are repeatedly appearing in our case work in different ways for different indicators.
“Whether it’s the range of complaint categories that we see, whether it is not handling a complaint effectively in pre-investigation, whether it’s not complying with our orders.”
Tim Galloway, deputy director of building safety at the Health and Safety Executive, spoke of the challenges of the new building safety regime.
Legal experts have previously called for more capacity at the Building Safety Regulator (BSR) as sign-off delays are “causing real problems”.
Mr Galloway said it has been a “challenging six to 12 months” for the BSR for two reasons.
He said that “our assumptions and modelling”, some of which was “tested and very long-standing” have “not survived first contact with reality”.
“There have been different building control applications and different numbers to those we expected; that has affected the resources that we have and how we’ve worked.
“And there have also been more demands upon us from external sources than I think we anticipated. External stakeholders of all varieties have asked us questions, expected us to have done things, thought about things, and we have been running around setting the thing up.”
He warned that some in the industry, including the social housing sector, are “starting to focus on the process rather than the outcomes to be achieved”.
Mr Galloway said: “We are asked ‘how do you want us to complete this building control application?’
“That worries me, because to me, the question that ought to be asked is ‘have I assured myself that the design I’m submitting to the Building Safety Regulator on this high-risk building will meet the functional requirements of the building regulations?”
He added: “Together we will learn how to make that process more efficient, believe me, but right now I’d be asking you to focus on getting the outcomes right.
“Because if we look back to Grenfell, there was not a focus on outcomes and we’ve seen how that turned out.”
He also urged the sector to read and learn from the second and final Grenfell report.
Helen Shaw, director of regulation at the Scottish Housing Regulator (SHR), told the conference about the pressures facing the sector in Scotland, where a housing emergency has been declared.
Ms Shaw said: “There are record numbers of homelessness applications in Scotland. There are record numbers of people living in temporary accommodation and record numbers of children living in temporary accommodation for increasingly long periods of time.
“We’ve seen the number of homelessness applications continue to rise, and we’ve seen a significantly marked increase in failures by local authorities to meet their statutory duties.”
She said those statistics are “very much reflected” in what the SHR has seen through its engagement with councils.
“At this point in time, there is a real risk that most statutory failures become endemic in some council areas. In our view, systemic failure requires systemic intervention, and over the longer term, that’s about reducing the demands on the system by preventing homelessness.”
The Scottish government is looking to introduce further legislation around homelessness prevention in the forthcoming Housing Bill.
But Ms Shaw said that “for now, the immediate focus has to be about increasing the capacity in the system to meet the current level of demand and need”.
