Living with the Act: higher-risk buildings in occupation
Once a higher-risk building is occupied, the Building Safety Act regime changes cast: the accountable person, led by the principal accountable person, must register the building, maintain a safety case, engage residents, and report safety occurrences. The golden thread handed over at Gateway 3 becomes the operating manual.
What changes when the building is occupied?
The gateways end, and stewardship begins. Part 4 of the Act governs higher-risk buildings in occupation, and it moves responsibility from the construction dutyholders to the accountable person or persons: broadly, whoever owns the building or holds repairing obligations for its common parts. Where several exist, the principal accountable person carries the lead duties. The regime is deliberately continuous with what came before: the golden thread assembled through design and construction, and handed over at Gateway 3, becomes the information base on which the building is run.
What are the occupation-phase duties?
Four pillars. Registration: every higher-risk building must be registered with the BSR before occupation, existing buildings had a 30 September 2023 deadline, and registration is the PAP's job. The safety case: the accountable person must identify the building's major fire and structural hazards and manage the risks, demonstrating it in a safety case report the regulator can demand and assesses when issuing a building assessment certificate. Resident engagement: a strategy for informing and involving the people who live in the building in safety decisions. And mandatory occurrence reporting: structural and fire safety occurrences meeting the threshold must be reported to the BSR.
Each pillar is a page of its own as this section grows; the spokes below track what is live now and what is in production.
Why does this section matter to construction teams too?
Because the occupation regime is the customer for everything the project produced. The safety case leans on the design intent, the fire strategy and the as-built records; the resident engagement strategy inherits the building's actual systems; occurrence reporting presumes someone can tell what the building was supposed to be. A golden thread that arrives at handover accurate, structured and digital makes the accountable person's duties tractable. One that arrives as boxes of PDFs makes every occupation-phase duty harder, forever. If you are on the construction side, the occupation regime is the sharpest argument for site records discipline you will meet: the building outlives the project, and so does its evidence.
In this section
Registering an HRB
PAP duties before anyone moves in.
In production
Safety case reports
Safety cases and building assessment certificates.
In production
Resident engagement
The strategy the Act requires.
In production
Mandatory occurrence reporting
What must be reported, by whom, and when.
In production
Frequently asked questions
- Who is the accountable person for a higher-risk building?
- The organisation or person who owns or has repairing obligations for the common parts. Buildings can have several accountable persons; where they do, one is the principal accountable person, with lead duties including registering the building and coordinating the safety case.
- What must happen before residents move in?
- Two things, and both are hard requirements: the BSR must have issued the Gateway 3 completion certificate, and the building must be registered. Occupying a higher-risk building without them is a criminal offence.
- What is a safety case report?
- The document in which the accountable person demonstrates they have identified the building's major fire and structural hazards and are managing the risks so far as reasonably practicable. The BSR can call for it at any time and assesses it when issuing a building assessment certificate.
Related
This page is information, not legal advice. It is written and maintained by a practitioner, verified against primary sources on the date shown above, and corrected fast when the regime moves. Spotted something out of date? Tell us.