A Grenfell Expert Takes the Helm at the Building Advisory Committee

Barbara Lane has been appointed as the first independent chair of the Building Advisory Committee — the body established under the Building Safety Act 2022 to advise the Building Safety Regulator on the exercise of its functions. The appointment is significant for reasons that go beyond the individual: it marks a structural shift in how the BAC operates and signals the direction of travel for building safety governance.

Until now, the BAC was chaired by a BSR representative. Lane's appointment as an external, independent chair severs that internal link and changes the fundamental character of the committee's relationship to the regulator it advises. This is a meaningful governance change, and the industry should understand why it matters.

Who Barbara Lane Is

Lane's credentials in the field of building safety are not generic. She is a Fellow at Arup, a chartered senior engineering executive, and brings thirty years of experience in the built environment. She served as an expert witness during the Grenfell Tower Inquiry's phase 2 hearings, which ran from 2017 to 2024 — one of the most technically demanding and consequential expert appointments in the history of UK construction regulation.

Her time at the Inquiry gave her direct engagement with the full breadth of the systemic failures that led to the fire: cladding system design, fire testing inadequacies, the regulatory approval process, the behaviour of the building's envelope under fire conditions, and the quality of advice given to the residents and managers of the building. She understands not just what went wrong at a technical level, but how institutional and regulatory failures enabled it to go wrong.

That background is precisely the lens through which an independent chair of the BAC should view the BSR's functions. It is not a coincidence that Lane was chosen. It is a deliberate signal.

Dr Hywel Davies as Deputy Chair

Alongside Lane's appointment, Dr Hywel Davies has been named as deputy chair. Davies heads technical insight at the Chartered Association of Building Engineers (CABE), was awarded an OBE in the 2026 New Year Honours, and previously chaired the Building Regulations Advisory Committee from 2020 to 2023. His background provides the BAC with deep expertise in building regulations and the technical standards that underpin them — a complementary pairing to Lane's fire engineering and safety case expertise.

What the BAC Does and Why Independence Matters

The Building Advisory Committee was created by the Building Safety Act to provide independent advice to the BSR on the discharge of its regulatory functions. This covers a broad remit: the development of guidance, the approach to technical assessment, the BSR's engagement with industry, and the policy positions it takes in relation to higher-risk buildings and the wider construction sector.

The BAC operates through specialist technical working groups and sits alongside two other advisory structures: the Industry Competence Committee and the Statutory Residents' Panel. Its remit explicitly excludes competence matters (which fall to the ICC), but covers the rest of the BSR's operational landscape in substantial breadth.

Until Lane's appointment, the BAC was chaired internally — which created, at minimum, an appearance of circularity: the BSR advising itself, through a committee it chaired, on how it should operate. That arrangement may have been pragmatic in the early days of a new regulatory body finding its feet. It is not appropriate for an institution that is now operational and needs to demonstrate that its advisory structures provide genuine independent challenge.

An independent chair from outside the BSR changes this dynamic fundamentally. Lane's mandate is to provide scrutiny of the BSR's functions, not to support them. That distinction matters for the credibility of the BAC's outputs and, by extension, for the confidence that the industry and the public can have in the regulatory framework.

What It Signals

The appointment reflects a maturation of the building safety regime that should be welcomed. The post-Grenfell regulatory architecture was always designed to be self-critical — to prevent the institutional complacency that allowed unsafe building practices to persist unchallenged for decades. An independent chair with Lane's particular background embodies that principle in the governance structure of the BSR's primary advisory body.

It also sends a message to the industry about the direction of scrutiny. A BAC chaired by a Grenfell Inquiry expert witness is unlikely to treat fire safety strategy, cladding remediation timelines, or the quality of Gateway 2 assessments as anything other than matters of the highest importance. For those who work in or around higher-risk buildings, the governance environment is becoming more rigorous, not less.

What This Means For Your Project

The BAC's work is strategic rather than project-specific — it does not assess individual applications or issue guidance on particular buildings. But the policies and approaches it advises on flow through into the BSR's operational practice, and a more independently scrutinised BSR is likely to be a more consistent and principled one.

For practitioners preparing Gateway 2 applications or managing BSR relationships on live projects, the practical implications are indirect but real:

• The BSR operates in an environment of increasing external scrutiny. Decisions that appear inconsistent with the stated purposes of the regime are more likely to be challenged and corrected through the BAC and other advisory structures.
• The BAC's focus on fire safety and the lessons of Grenfell will reinforce the BSR's already rigorous approach to fire strategy in Gateway 2 submissions. Weak fire safety strategies will continue to be the most common trigger for requisitions.
• The strengthened independence of the advisory architecture is a further signal that the regulatory environment is not becoming more relaxed. The trajectory is toward greater rigour, greater consistency and greater accountability — for the regulator and for those it regulates.

The appointment of Barbara Lane is, in a narrow sense, a governance change. In a wider sense, it is a statement about the values that the building safety regime is trying to embody: independent challenge, expert scrutiny, and an unrelenting focus on the lessons of Grenfell. For an industry that is still, nearly nine years on, working through the consequences of those lessons, that commitment is exactly what is needed.