BSR Assessment Outcomes: What the First Wave of Building Inspections Tells Us

TL;DR: This piece consolidates three primary-source datasets — the BSR's Part 4 register FOI release (FOIBSR-123, 19 May 2026), the National Fire Chiefs Council Public Register of Enforcement Notices (snapshot 25 April 2026), and the BSR's earlier aggregate FOI (FOIBSR-088, 23 April 2026) — into a single read of where the Building Safety Regulator is six months into running standalone. The headline finding is that leaseholder-led PAPs (RTM, RMC, Commonhold) show approval rates of 16–35 percent on decided BAC applications, against 50 percent for social-housing providers and 86 percent for Public Sector Building Control Bodies. The deeper finding is that the regulator does not record refusal reasons, does not capture managing-agent identity, and treats over a third of the register's PAP categorisation as free text. This piece is the longer cut of the May companion analysis on 9,565 fire-safety notices.

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#The data behind this piece

No single FOI release answers the question this piece asks. The Building Safety Regulator publishes aggregate counts; it does not publish a running commentary on its own decision-making. So this analysis triangulates three primary-source datasets, each released or captured between late April and mid-May 2026, and reads them against each other.

1. FOIBSR-088 (BSR FOI response, 23 April 2026) — total HRB count, PAP-type breakdown, BAC application status totals.
2. FOIBSR-123 (BSR FOI follow-up, 19 May 2026) — PAP × BAC application status cross-tab on the full 13,699-building register, plus a 5,971-row register slice with named structures, addresses, postcodes, UPRNs, and current BAC stage. Plus three "not held" confirmations on refusal reasons, managing-agent identity, and "Other" PAP sub-classification.
3. NFCC Public Register of Enforcement Notices (snapshot 25 April 2026) — 9,565 statutory notices served by Fire and Rescue Authorities under the Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005 and the Fire Safety (England) Regulations 2022. 1,347 are on Purpose Built Flats four storeys or higher.

All three are publicly available. The FOIBSR-088 and FOIBSR-123 cover letters are available on request; the NFCC register is published at nfcc.org.uk/our-services/enforcement-register.

#The cross-tab — what PAP × BAC says

The single most useful artefact in FOIBSR-123 is the summary tab: every Principal Accountable Person type on the register, cross-tabulated against Building Assessment Certificate application status. It is reproduced in full below.

Read down the approval-rate column and the gradient is steep. Public Sector Building Control Bodies clear the bar 86 percent of the time on decided applications. Social-housing providers sit around 50 percent. The three leaseholder-led categories — Commonhold, RMC, RTM — sit at 35, 19 and 16 percent. The aggregate of 35 percent approval across all decided applications is pulled down by the large "Other" and "Local Authority" buckets.

Of the 1,012 Building Assessment Certificate applications the BSR has decided, 658 were refused — a 65 percent refusal rate of decided applications.

The obvious reading is that leaseholder-led PAPs find the bar harder, and there is something to that. But it is not the whole story. Local Authority applications sit at 20 percent approval of decided, lower than RMC, and Local Authorities are not leaseholder-led. Whatever is happening at the 20-percent end of the table is not a story about resident directors being out of their depth. It is more likely a story about building age, building complexity, and the order in which the regulator has worked through its queue. The Commonhold row carries a different caveat: 20 decided applications is a small enough sample that two or three more decisions move the rate by several points. Treat the 35 percent as indicative, not settled.

The decided column is 1,012 rows. The not-yet-directed column is 11,717. For RTM that split is 37 decided against 530 waiting; for RMC, 96 against 1,801. The cross-tab describes the buildings the regulator has already worked through, and the order it worked through them in is not random — early call-ins tend to be buildings already flagged through other channels. The rates for the buildings still in the queue are genuinely unknown.

#The three "not held" findings — what BSR doesn't capture

Three of the questions put to the BSR in FOIBSR-123 came back not with data but with a confirmation that the data is not held. Each one is worth reading carefully, because each describes something structural about how the register and the assessment process are built.

#Refusal reasons are not tracked as structured data

"We DO NOT track Refusal reasons." — BSR FOI response FOIBSR-123, 19 May 2026

For a director whose application has been refused, this is less of a problem than it sounds. A refusal comes with correspondence from the assigned inspector setting out the specific grounds for that building. The applicant knows why their submission did not pass. What does not exist is the aggregate: there is no dataset of the ten most common reasons a BAC is refused, because the regulator does not record refusal grounds as structured fields. For the 11,717 buildings not yet directed to apply, that means there is no published pattern to prepare against and no way to see which evidence gaps recur. There is a reasonable case for the BSR to publish anonymised refusal categories once the decided cohort is large enough to do so without identifying individual buildings. It would turn 658 individual refusal letters into something the whole sector could prepare against. Today that aggregation does not exist.

#Managing-agent identity is not captured at registration

"No information held." — BSR FOI response FOIBSR-123 on whether managing-agent identity is captured

The Part 4 registration form records the Principal Accountable Person and the PAP type. It does not record who runs the building day to day. An RMC is the PAP; that RMC may manage the building through its own directors, or it may have appointed an external managing agent to do the operational work. The register cannot tell the two apart. This matters for any analysis — including this one — that wants to ask whether agent-supported buildings prepare stronger BAC submissions than self-managed ones. The honest answer is that the data cannot say. It also matters for the regulator's own ambitions: if the BSR ever wants to track competence across the people actually preparing safety cases, the registration form as it stands does not capture the field that question depends on.

#The "Other" PAP bucket is uncontrolled free text

"There are no internal sub-classifications, tags, or controlled descriptors used within the Other bucket." — BSR FOI response FOIBSR-123

The "Other" bucket holds 4,997 buildings — over a third of the register. It exists because the registration form lets a PAP describe itself in free text when none of the named categories fit. There are no controlled descriptors inside it. That is not a small housekeeping gap. Any onward analysis that tries to size the leaseholder-led share of the register, or the developer-as-freeholder share, or the purpose-built student accommodation share, has to reckon with a third of the data being unstructured text. The next section is Brocade's attempt to read that bucket.

#The "Other" bucket — where the leaseholder-led share is hiding

The FOIBSR-123 register slice includes 1,391 rows with an "Other" PAP, carrying 763 unique entity names. Brocade pattern-classified all 763 by the signal in the company name.

The classification is approximate — a company name is a weak signal, and "Generic Ltd / LLP" plus "Unclassified" together cover well over half the bucket. But the RMC-adjacent rows are readable: roughly 70 of the 763 unique names (around 9 percent) carry RMC or RTM-style naming, such as "Management Company Limited" or a building name followed by a company suffix. Extrapolated across the full 4,997 "Other" HRBs, that points to roughly 460 leaseholder-led entities sitting in the free-text bucket rather than in the named RMC and RTM rows. Add those to the 2,632 named RMC and RTM buildings, and the true leaseholder-led share of the register is closer to 22 percent than the 19.2 percent the named categories show.

This is Brocade's estimate, not a BSR figure, and it is only as reliable as the name-pattern method behind it. But it points one direction: the register understates how much of the higher-risk stock is resident-led.

How the BSR call-in process actually works →

#The NFCC intersection — buildings facing both regulators

The FOIBSR-123 register slice covers 5,971 of the 13,699 HRBs. Cross-referenced against the NFCC Public Register of Enforcement Notices, 121 of those buildings appear on both — a confirmed higher-risk registration and a fire-service enforcement notice on record. Filtered to leaseholder-led PAPs, 33 are RTM, RMC or Commonhold. They fall into three groups.

#Double-acute — BAC refused AND open FRA notice (3 buildings)

• An RMC-led building — London FRA enforcement notice in force since April 2025
• An RMC-led building — London FRA enforcement notice complied with since October 2023
• An RMC-led building — Kent FRA alterations notice in force since April 2022

Three buildings have had a Building Assessment Certificate refused and also carry a Fire and Rescue Authority enforcement notice. This is the hardest position a building can be in: two regulators, two open files, overlapping evidence. The route out is the same route any refused applicant takes. The inspector's correspondence sets out what the BAC submission lacked; the FRA notice sets out what the fire-safety works require; and in practice the two lists overlap heavily, because both turn on the same fire-safety fundamentals. Where the enforcement notice has already been complied with, as in one of the three, the building has effectively done the harder half of the work, and the BAC resubmission can lean on that evidence.

#BAC in progress with open FRA notice (3 buildings)

• Three RMC-led buildings, all with London FRA enforcement notices currently in force.

Three more buildings have a BAC application in progress and an FRA enforcement notice in force at the same time. The window between application and decision is the window to get the compliance scaffolding in place. The FRA notice tells the building exactly where the fire-safety gaps are, and closing those gaps with dated evidence before the BAC decision lands is the most direct way to strengthen the submission. A building in this position is not behind — it has been handed a checklist by one regulator that maps closely onto what the other regulator will assess.

#Pre-emptive — FRA-enforced, BAC not yet directed (27 buildings)

The largest group is 27 leaseholder-led HRBs that have not yet been directed to apply for a BAC but already carry an FRA enforcement notice, active or historic. Five of those are in NOT COMPLIED or PROHIBITION status; the oldest of those prohibition notices has been in force since March 2021. For these buildings the FRA notice is an early warning. The fire-safety issues a Fire and Rescue Authority has already identified are, with high likelihood, the same issues a BAC submission will need to evidence. The directed-to-apply letter has not arrived yet, but the preparation work is already specified.

#What this tells us about the system

Six observations follow from reading the three datasets together.

One. The Building Assessment Certificate is the first substantive test a higher-risk building faces, not a formality. Getting onto the Part 4 register is a registration step: the Principal Accountable Person submits the building's details and key safety information, and the BSR reviews them to confirm the building belongs on the register. It is not a pass-or-fail safety assessment. The BAC is where the regulator examines the safety case in depth. The cross-tab is consistent with a regulator finding substantive issues in most of the submissions it has assessed so far.

Two. Leaseholder-led PAPs face a steeper effective bar than the aggregate. Some of this is structural — RMCs and RTMs lack the in-house compliance functions of larger landlords. Some may be artefactual — the small N of decided RTM applications can move materially with a few more decisions. The regulator's own data does not currently disambiguate the two.

Three. The regulator runs case-by-case rather than dataset-by-dataset. The "not held" confirmations on refusal reasons and managing-agent identity are not an evasion; they are a description of how Part 4 registration and BAC decisions are recorded — at the unit level rather than the cohort level.

Four. "Other" being a free-text bucket at over a third of the register is a categorisation gap that propagates downstream. Any onward analysis that tries to size the leaseholder-led cohort, the developer-as-freeholder cohort, or the student-accommodation cohort runs into the same limitation.

Five. The NFCC intersection suggests the two regulators see different sides of the same buildings. A building with an active FRA enforcement notice and a pending BAC application is dealing with two regulators on overlapping evidence — the same Fire Safety Order articles drive both.

Six. The data is fresh. FOIBSR-088 dates to 23 April 2026; FOIBSR-123 to 19 May. The picture will move. The current shape is a six-month-in read on a regulator that became a standalone body on 27 January 2026.

#For directors, managing agents, and policymakers

The same data reads three ways depending on who is holding it.

#For RTM and RMC directors in the not-yet-directed cohort

If your building has not been directed to apply, the cross-tab is a directional signal, not a probability for your building. The useful preparation is specific. The four Fire Safety Order articles that drive most FRA enforcement — Article 8 (general fire precautions), Article 14 (emergency routes and exits), Article 9 (risk assessment) and Article 17 (maintenance) — are the same areas a Building Assessment Certificate submission has to evidence. Walk the escape routes with your fire risk assessment in hand. Date and photograph the fire-door maintenance log. Build the Safety Case Report around those four articles. A refused BAC is not a shutdown event: the applicant gets the inspector's grounds and the option to resubmit. The path back exists for every building that has taken one.

#For managing agents handling RTM and RMC portfolios

The data does not split RMC and RTM submissions by whether a managing agent or the directors prepared them — the BSR does not capture that field. So the 81 percent RMC refusal rate of decided applications says something about the bar, and nothing about who held the pen. For an agent with RMC buildings in the portfolio, the practical implication is straightforward: a BAC submission for a small resident-led building deserves the same preparation rigour as a submission for an enterprise client, because the regulator assesses both against the same standard. The four-article focus and the Safety Case discipline apply regardless of building size or who manages it. An agent who builds that preparation into the client's BAC runway is doing the thing the data says the bar rewards.

#For policymakers and MHCLG

Three changes would make the next year of this data more useful, and none requires primary legislation. First, capture managing-agent identity at registration: a single field on the Part 4 form would let the regulator, and everyone else, tell self-managed buildings apart from agent-managed ones. Second, publish anonymised refusal categories once the decided cohort is large enough to do so safely — 658 refusal letters carry a pattern the whole sector could prepare against. Third, introduce a controlled vocabulary for the "Other" PAP field at the next re-registration cycle, so a third of the register stops being free text. All three are amendable in the registration form and the data-publication framework.

Read the May companion piece →

#Questions

#What does the BSR's first wave of Building Assessment Certificate decisions tell us?

Of the 1,012 BAC applications BSR has decided to date, 354 were approved and 658 refused — a 65 percent refusal rate of decided applications. RTM-led applications run at an 84 percent refusal rate of decided (31 of 37), RMC-led at 81 percent (78 of 96). Public Sector Building Control Body applications run at 14 percent. Source: BSR FOI response FOIBSR-123, 19 May 2026, on the full 13,699-building Part 4 register.

#Does the BSR record reasons for BAC refusals?

No. The Building Safety Regulator confirmed in its FOIBSR-123 response of 19 May 2026 that it does not track refusal reasons as structured data. 658 applications have been refused since BAC opened. Individual applicants receive correspondence from their inspector; the grounds are not aggregated.

#Does the BSR know who manages each registered HRB day-to-day?

No. The Part 4 registration form captures Principal Accountable Person type only. It does not record whether the building is self-managed by the PAP (for example, RMC or RTM directors managing directly), managed by an external managing agent, or operating under a mixed arrangement. BSR confirmed this in writing on 19 May 2026.

#How much of the BSR register is RTM, RMC, or Commonhold?

On the 13,699-building Part 4 register, 607 are registered with a Right To Manage company as Principal Accountable Person, 2,025 with a Resident Management Company, and 485 are Commonhold Associations. Combined: 3,117 buildings or 22.7 percent. Brocade's analysis of the 4,997 "Other" free-text PAP bucket suggests an additional ~460 leaseholder-led entities are mis-categorised there.

#How does BSR enforcement relate to Fire and Rescue Authority enforcement?

The two regulators run in parallel. BSR decides Building Assessment Certificates under the Building Safety Act 2022; Fire and Rescue Authorities serve enforcement notices under the Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005. 121 of the 5,971 HRBs in the BSR register slice released via FOIBSR-123 also have NFCC enforcement-register entries, including 33 RTM/RMC/Commonhold-owned buildings.

#What should an RTM or RMC director do if they have not been directed to apply yet?

The cross-tab is a snapshot of buildings the regulator has already adjudicated, not a prediction for buildings still in the queue. The four Fire Safety Order articles that drive most FRA enforcement (Articles 8, 14, 9, 17) are the same areas a BAC submission needs to evidence. Use the lead time to walk the escape routes, date the fire-door maintenance log, and align the Safety Case Report to those articles.

#What should a managing agent take from the data?

The data does not split RTM/RMC submissions by whether they were prepared by an MA or by the directors directly — BSR does not capture that field. For MA portfolios, the implication is that any RMC building being prepared for BAC submission deserves the same level of preparation an enterprise client would receive. The 81 percent RMC refusal rate of decided applications is a marker of the bar, not of who held the pen.

#Further Reading

• Three Regulators, Four Duties: 9,565 Fire-Safety Notices and 658 BAC Refusals — May companion piece on the FRA enforcement layer
• The BSR Has Refused 31 of 37 Decided RTM BAC Applications — May W4 short-form analysis of the same data
• BSR Assessment Process: How to Prepare Your Building — what a call-in looks like in practice
• How to Write a Building Safety Case for RTM Companies — the document underlying every BAC submission
• Building Assessment Certificate Guide — the form-and-evidence walkthrough
• Primary source: Building Safety Act 2022 on legislation.gov.uk
• Primary source: Fire Safety Order 2005 on legislation.gov.uk
• Building Safety Regulator on gov.uk
• NFCC Public Register of Enforcement Notices

This piece consolidates three primary-source datasets: BSR FOI responses FOIBSR-088 (23 April 2026) and FOIBSR-123 (19 May 2026), and the National Fire Chiefs Council Public Register of Enforcement Notices (snapshot 25 April 2026). Brocade's analysis of the FOIBSR-123 register slice and the "Other" PAP classification, and the underlying source documents, are available on request.

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