The Building Safety Act in 2026: What Changed for Plumbers and Electricians in London

"Building Safety Act" sounds like something that only concerns the people who run thirty-storey towers. For the most part, that impression is right — the loudest parts of the Act were written to stop another Grenfell, and they bear down on tall residential blocks and the people who own and manage them. But buried in the same reform programme is a quieter change that touches every London home, every boiler swap and every consumer-unit upgrade: a legal duty that the people doing building work must be competent, and that the work must be planned, notified and certificated properly. In 2026, with the new Building Safety Levy about to start and the competence regime now bedded in, it's worth understanding what actually applies to you — whether you own a terraced house in Walthamstow, rent out a flat in Hackney, or lease an apartment in a Nine Elms tower. This is the plain-English version, written from the trade side of the clipboard.

What the Building Safety Act Actually Is

The Building Safety Act 2022 received Royal Assent in April 2022 and is the legislative answer to the 2017 Grenfell Tower fire and Dame Judith Hackitt's review that followed it. Hackitt's verdict was blunt: the system that was supposed to keep buildings safe was broken — responsibilities were unclear, competence was assumed rather than checked, and nobody owned the safety of a building across its whole life. The Act rebuilds that system around a new regulator and a much clearer chain of accountability.

At the centre sits the Building Safety Regulator (BSR), which is part of the Health and Safety Executive. It oversees the safety of higher-risk buildings, drives up the competence of everyone in the construction and building-control system, and has real enforcement teeth. Around it the Act creates new dutyholder roles, a stricter approval process for the riskiest buildings, and a requirement to keep a reliable record of safety information — the so-called "golden thread" — so the next person who works on a building inherits the truth about it rather than a guess.

Most of that machinery is aimed at large buildings. But the Act also reached down into the everyday Building Regulations that govern ordinary work in ordinary homes — and that's the part a homeowner or landlord in London actually meets.

The Competence Regime That Reaches Domestic Work

On 1 October 2023, the Building Regulations etc. (Amendment) (England) Regulations 2023 inserted a new Part 2A into the Building Regulations 2010. It created dutyholder roles — client, designer, principal designer, contractor and principal contractor — modelled on the long-standing CDM health-and-safety regime, and it set a clear competence test for all of them.

The crucial, widely-missed point is its scope. This regime applies to all building work, not just higher-risk buildings, and it applies to domestic projects too. A small practice or a one-van trade that assumed "this is for the tower-block people" is mistaken: the duties bite on a kitchen rewire in a maisonette just as they do on a development. The competence standard is defined in human terms — the right skills, knowledge, experience and behaviours for the task in hand, plus, for a firm, the organisational capability to deliver it.

For a domestic job there's an important wrinkle. A homeowner is a "domestic client", and the Regulations sensibly don't expect you to run a construction project. Instead, the duties to plan, manage and monitor the work so it complies with the Building Regulations fall on the contractor (or principal contractor, if there's more than one). In plain terms: the responsibility for doing it right, and for being able to show it was done right, sits with the trade you hire — which is exactly where it should be.

What It Means for Who You Hire

If you've always used registered, certificated trades, the competence regime changes very little about your day — it simply gives legal backing to the instinct that the cheapest quote isn't always the safe one. Here's how it translates on the ground:

• Gas work must be done by a Gas Safe registered engineer. Replacing or installing a boiler is notifiable under the Building Regulations, and the engineer should notify it and issue you a Building Regulations compliance certificate alongside the appliance paperwork.
• Notifiable electrical work in a dwelling — a new circuit, a consumer-unit (fuse board) change, work in a bathroom — falls under Part P of the Building Regulations. A registered electrician (NICEIC, NAPIT and similar competent-person schemes) self-certifies it through their scheme and you receive a Building Regulations compliance certificate, usually within a few weeks.
• Certificates are the proof. An Electrical Installation Certificate for the work, a compliance certificate from building control, a gas record — these are what a surveyor, insurer or future buyer will ask for. Keep them with the house papers.

The simplest filter is a question: "How will this work be certificated and notified to building control?" A competent trade answers it without hesitation. If you're booking electrical work, our Part P electrical service handles the notification and certification as standard, and for rented homes the five-yearly EICR is the report that proves the installation is safe.

If You Live in a Flat or Block

If your home is in a Higher-Risk Building — defined for the in-occupation regime as a building at least 18 metres tall or with at least seven storeys, containing two or more residential units — a much stricter layer applies, and a great many Londoners live in exactly these buildings.

For new work and major refurbishment of these buildings there's a three-gateway approval process: Gateway 1 at planning, Gateway 2 before construction starts (the BSR must approve the design before a brick is laid), and Gateway 3 before occupation. Once occupied, the building must have a registered Principal Accountable Person — usually the freeholder or managing agent — who holds a safety case report demonstrating that fire and structural risks are being managed, keeps the golden thread of information up to date, and gives residents clear safety information.

As an individual leaseholder you don't have to produce any of this yourself, but two things are worth doing: find out who your Accountable Person is, because they carry the legal duty for the shared parts of your building, and understand the building's safety arrangements (evacuation strategy, what to report and to whom). When a plumber or electrician attends a flat in an HRB, the work in your own demise is governed by the normal Building Regulations, but anything touching the shared structure, fire compartmentation or building systems may need to go through the building's own controls — which is why a competent trade will ask about the building before drilling through a party wall or a riser.

The 1 October 2026 Building Safety Levy

The newest piece of the picture, and the reason "2026" belongs in the title, is the Building Safety Levy. It comes into operation in England on 1 October 2026 and is a charge designed to help fund the remediation of unsafe buildings — making the development industry, rather than the taxpayer alone, pay to fix the legacy cladding and fire-safety problems the Act exists to prevent.

The key facts:

• Who pays: developers of major residential schemes — broadly those creating 10 or more dwellings, or 30 or more bedspaces in purpose-built student accommodation.
• How much: a rate per square metre of chargeable floorspace, set by each local authority and ranging from roughly £12 to £100 per square metre, with a lower rate for building on previously developed (brownfield) land — which covers much of London.
• When: payable to the collecting council before the earlier of completion and occupation.
• What's exempt: affordable housing, supported housing, and homes built by non-profit registered providers and their wholly-owned subsidiaries.

For a homeowner commissioning repairs, an extension or a single new dwelling, the levy doesn't apply. It matters if you're a developer or you're buying a new-build flat or house in a larger scheme, where the cost is part of the development's numbers and may be reflected in the price. It's a structural change to how building safety is funded rather than something that lands on your next plumbing bill — but it's the headline 2026 development, so it's worth knowing what it is.

The Compliance Trio Landlords Still Can't Skip

Amid all the new machinery, it's easy for landlords to lose sight of the duties that were already mandatory and remain so. The Building Safety Act adds to the existing private-rented-sector rules; it doesn't sweep them away. Three obligations sit at the core, and we see all three regularly missed:

• Annual gas safety check. Under the Gas Safety (Installation and Use) Regulations 1998, every gas appliance and flue in a let property must be checked every 12 months by a Gas Safe registered engineer, and the record given to the tenant. This is the certificate often still called a "CP12".
• EICR at least every five years. The Electrical Safety Standards in the Private Rented Sector (England) Regulations 2020 require an Electrical Installation Condition Report on the fixed wiring at least every five years for all tenancies, with any C1 or C2 (urgent) remedial work completed within 28 days and confirmation supplied to the tenant and council.
• Smoke and carbon monoxide alarms. Since October 2022 the rules require at least one smoke alarm on every storey used as living accommodation and a carbon monoxide alarm in any room with a fixed combustion appliance (a gas boiler or solid-fuel stove — gas cookers are excluded), with alarms repaired or replaced once a fault is reported.

We unpick how these three certificates fit together — and which one landlords most often confuse — in our three-certificate landlord audit, and the broader picture of a landlord's statutory repair duty is covered in our guide to Section 11 obligations. If you'd rather have one team keep all of it current, that's exactly what our landlord service is built for.

Why London Feels This More Than Anywhere

London sits at the sharp end of every part of this. It has by far the largest concentration of tall residential buildings in the country, which means more Higher-Risk Buildings, more Accountable Persons, more safety cases and more leaseholders living inside the strict regime. It has an enormous private rented sector, so the gas-EICR-alarm trio applies to hundreds of thousands of tenancies, often in older converted houses where the wiring and the flue arrangements need a careful eye. Much of inner London is brownfield, which puts a lot of new development into the lower levy band but still inside the charge. And the sheer density — shared risers, party walls, converted flats stacked in Victorian terraces — means that "simple" plumbing or electrical work more often brushes up against shared structure than it would in a detached suburban house.

The thread running through all of it is competence and paperwork. The Building Safety Act, in the round, is a long correction to years of assuming things were fine without checking. For a London homeowner or landlord the response is reassuringly ordinary: hire trades who are registered and can prove their competence, make sure notifiable work is notified and certificated, keep every certificate, and — if you're in a tall block — know who carries the safety duty for the building you share. Do that, and the Act is on your side. We work to it every day; if you want any job done so that it stands up to a surveyor, an insurer or the regulator, that's the standard to ask for.