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Building Safety Act 2022 — What Principal Contractors Need to Know

Updated May 2026 — Covers the Building Safety Act 2022 and Building Safety Regulator requirements

The Building Safety Act 2022 introduced the most significant change to construction regulation in a generation. While its headline provisions focus on higher-risk buildings (HRBs), the Act's cultural and administrative expectations — auditable records, demonstrated competence, clear accountability — are shaping how clients, regulators, and courts will assess principal contractor behaviour across all project types. Understanding what the Act requires, and how it intersects with subcontractor management, is increasingly important for any main contractor operating in the regulated space.

Which buildings does the Act focus on?

The Act's most prescriptive requirements apply to higher-risk buildings — defined as residential buildings in England that are at least 18 metres tall (or seven or more storeys) and contain at least two residential units. However, the Act also introduces obligations and cultural expectations that affect a wider range of construction work:

• The dutyholder framework applies to all buildings in scope of building regulations
• The golden thread concept — a documented, auditable information trail — is being adopted as best practice well beyond HRBs
• The Building Safety Regulator's stated ambition is to raise standards across the whole built environment, not just the tallest buildings

The dutyholder framework

The Act introduces formal dutyholder roles that mirror and extend the CDM 2015 framework:

• Client — has overall responsibility for project standards and for ensuring that dutyholders are appointed and carrying out their functions
• Principal Designer — leads design work and manages building safety risks during the design phase; must be registered with the Building Safety Regulator for HRBs
• Principal Contractor — manages building safety during the construction phase; must be registered with the Building Safety Regulator for HRBs and must demonstrate competence as an organisation
• Contractors — all contractors (including subcontractors) have duties to plan, manage, and monitor their work to ensure building safety

For principal contractors, the key shift is from informal competence assessment to demonstrable organisational competence — not just that individuals have the right qualifications, but that the organisation has systems, processes, and culture that support safe construction.

What "competence" means under the Act

The Act places significant emphasis on competence at both individual and organisational level. For subcontractors, this means a principal contractor should be able to demonstrate that:

• Subcontractors were selected through a process that considered their competence for the specific work, not just their price
• Individual workers held appropriate qualifications, accreditations, and certifications for the tasks they were carrying out
• Documentation of competence was collected and retained before work commenced
• There was an ongoing process to monitor whether competence requirements remained met

This is materially more demanding than the CDM 2015 "reasonable steps" standard, particularly for HRB projects where the Building Safety Regulator may scrutinise the construction phase plan and competence records as part of the Gateway 2 and Gateway 3 processes.

The Gateway process and subcontractor documentation

For higher-risk buildings, the Act introduces a Gateway process that requires regulatory approval at key stages:

• Gateway 1 — planning stage; fire safety considerations in the design
• Gateway 2 — before construction begins; the Building Safety Regulator must approve the building control application including the construction control plan
• Gateway 3 — before occupation; a completion certificate is required confirming the building has been built in accordance with the approved plans

Gateway 2 submissions are expected to include details of how the principal contractor will manage competence throughout the construction phase. A principal contractor without a documented approach to subcontractor competence management — including how documents are collected, verified, and tracked — is likely to face challenge at Gateway 2.

The golden thread of information

The "golden thread" is one of the Act's most distinctive concepts. It refers to the structured, digital record of information about a building that is created during design and construction and handed over to the building's owner or responsible person at completion. The golden thread must be:

• Accurate and up to date throughout the project
• Maintained in a structured, searchable, digital format
• Accessible to the Building Safety Regulator on request
• Passed to the accountable person when the building becomes occupied

For subcontractor compliance records, the golden thread concept suggests that documentation should be structured and digital rather than paper-based and informal. Records of which subcontractors worked on which parts of a building, when, and what their qualifications were at the time, form part of the building's permanent record.

Mandatory occurrence reporting

The Act introduces a requirement for mandatory occurrence reporting during the construction of higher-risk buildings. Any event or occurrence that may affect the safety of the building must be reported to the Building Safety Regulator. This includes situations where non-compliant work was carried out — which may include instances where a subcontractor worked without the required qualifications or certifications.

How this affects subcontractor document management

In practical terms, the Building Safety Act raises the bar for what a principal contractor needs to be able to demonstrate in relation to subcontractors:

• Pre-appointment competence assessment — not just collecting documents at onboarding, but assessing whether the subcontractor is suitable for the specific work
• Structured digital records — paper files and email threads are harder to include in a golden thread; digital records with timestamps and audit trails are increasingly expected
• Ongoing monitoring — documents collected in January that expire in June need to be tracked and renewed; a lapsed certificate on an HRB project is a compliance event, not just an administrative oversight
• Traceability — the ability to identify which workers carried out which elements of work and what their competence evidence was at the time

The Building Safety Levy

From 1 October 2026, the Building Safety Levy applies to new residential developments in England requiring building control approval. The levy is charged on a per-unit basis and contributes to the costs of remediating unsafe cladding on existing buildings. While this does not directly affect subcontractor compliance management, it is a material cost consideration for residential developers and their principal contractors.