UK Government sets up building products regulator
The UK government is setting up a new regulatory body to oversee the safety of construction materials.
The construction products regulator will be a division of the Office for Product Safety & Standards within the Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy and have an initial £10m to get going.
The introduction of a new tier of bureaucracy has been deemed necessary because of the failure of the construction industry to regulate itself, as proven by the nationwide cladding scandal that was exposed by the 2017 Grenfell Tower fire.
Time and again products have been used in buildings, including high-rise residential buildings, that have supposedly been independently certified as fit for purpose, only for the whole system of certification to have been exposed as a sham.
The job of the new national construction products regulator is to make sure that structures are built only from safe materials.