England Building Safety Amendment Fixes 2023 Rules
Most people will never sit down and read a statutory instrument, but this one matters because a few words in the wrong place can change what happens to homes, repairs and sales. The Building Safety (Responsible Actors Scheme and Prohibitions) (Amendment) Regulations 2026 were made on 11 May 2026 and come into force on 1 June 2026. The official text on legislation.gov.uk says they were made because of a defect in the 2023 regulations and are being issued free of charge to all known recipients of that earlier instrument. That tells you something straight away. This is not a brand-new policy dreamt up from scratch. It is a correction. Parliament approved the draft before it was made, and the aim is to make the law say more clearly what the government appears to have meant in the first place.
To understand why this matters, you need the back-story. The 2023 regulations created the Responsible Actors Scheme under the Building Safety Act 2022. In simple terms, the scheme is meant to deal with developers linked to life-critical fire safety defects. Those developers are expected to identify the relevant buildings they are responsible for, fix the defects or pay for the work, and comply with the scheme’s conditions. If they do not, the consequences can be serious. The government can use planning and building control prohibitions, which can stop key steps in development and sign-off. That is why this is not just a lawyer’s drafting exercise. When these rules bite, they affect builders, local authorities, buyers and people already living in the building.
One of the clearest changes is also the easiest to explain. Regulations 13, 15 and 16 of the 2023 version used a double negative. The 2026 amendment replaces wording saying a person “does not fall within” certain categories with wording saying the person “falls within the categories of person described in” them. **Why the defect mattered:** double negatives are not just ugly drafting. They can create real uncertainty about who is covered and who is not. In a scheme built around responsibility for dangerous defects, that is a problem. If the wording is muddy, arguments about grammar can get in the way of repairs, enforcement and accountability. The new instrument also removes regulation 30 altogether, which forms part of the wider clean-up of the 2023 text.
A bigger set of changes sits inside regulation 33, which deals with the building control prohibition. The amendment updates the wording so that applications for building control approval with full plans are clearly included, and it refreshes references to notices under the Building Regulations 2010. Put simply, the law now spells out more precisely which applications and notices cannot be given or received when a prohibition applies. That may sound procedural, but procedure is how building control works in real life. If a person caught by the prohibition cannot submit the right approval paperwork, or if an authority cannot process it, a project can stall. For developers, that has commercial consequences. For purchasers and residents, it can mean delay, uncertainty and a longer wait for problems to be resolved properly.
The amendment also makes room for common sense in urgent situations. Regulation 34 now makes clearer that when the work is emergency repair work, giving a building notice or certain related notices is not treated as breaching the prohibition. Just as importantly, the change adds that where this emergency repair exception applies, the local authority is not blocked from issuing a completion certificate. **What this means for residents:** if urgent repair work needs to happen, the paperwork should not trap people in a half-finished or half-recognised position. The same practical thinking appears in regulation 35 for work to existing occupied buildings. The new wording allows for amendment notices, completion certificates, and decisions on plans certificates in situations where people are already living in the building and work still needs to move ahead.
Another important change sits in regulation 36. Before this amendment, the route to ask the Secretary of State for an exception to the building control prohibition focused on an applicable person. The 2026 instrument adds a purchaser as well. It also defines a purchaser as someone who has exchanged a contract to buy a dwelling in the building, or the whole building if it contains a single dwelling. That is a small-looking change with a clear human impact. A buyer may already have money committed, a move planned and a chain depending on the transaction. If building control issues are stopping progress, that buyer now has a recognised way to ask for an exception. In other words, the law now admits that purchasers are not just bystanders in these disputes.
Taken together, these amendments do three jobs at once. They fix wording that should have been clearer, they tighten the rules around what a building control prohibition actually catches, and they create better routes for emergency work, occupied buildings and purchasers. According to the explanatory note published with the instrument, the government does not expect a significant impact on the private, voluntary or public sector and has not produced a full impact assessment. Even so, there is a wider lesson here. Building safety law is not only about dramatic headlines after a crisis. It is also about whether the legal wording is clear enough for people to use. If you are a developer, these changes matter because they affect what can and cannot move through building control. If you are buying, selling or living in a home touched by these rules, they matter because clarity in the law can mean fewer delays and fewer dead ends. Sometimes the most technical amendment is really about making the system usable again.