The Building Safety Act 2022 is the law passed after the Grenfell Tower fire to overhaul how building safety is managed in England. It created the Building Safety Regulator, a stricter regime for higher-risk buildings, and a set of duties that run across the whole life of a project.
For construction it introduced three gateways (at planning, before work starts, and before occupation), a dutyholder and competence regime modelled on the CDM Regulations, and the golden thread of information. The dutyholder and competence duties apply to ordinary building work, not only to tall or higher-risk buildings, which is why the Act reaches small contractors and subcontractors as well as tier-one firms.
In day-to-day terms the Act rewards organised, contemporaneous evidence and exposes disorganised paperwork. The information a project is required to keep now has to be accurate, current, accessible and capable of being handed over.
Construction Metric keeps a plain-English guide to what the Act asks of contractors, and how an automatically kept record meets it, on its Building Safety Act page.