CareHomeDeskCareHomeDeskThe Building Safety Regulator is now fully operational. Here is what care home operators need to understand about their duties and how the Act interacts with existing fire safety obligations.
The Building Safety Act 2022 introduced a new regulatory framework for building safety in England, created the Building Safety Regulator, and established the concept of the Golden Thread -- a continuous, accessible digital record of information about a building's design, construction and ongoing management that is intended to persist throughout the building's life. While the Act's most stringent duties initially focused on higher-risk residential buildings, its principles around proactive risk management and information governance are increasingly referenced as good practice expectations across regulated premises, including care homes.
The Building Safety Act 2022 does not replace the Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005, which remains the primary legal basis for fire risk assessment and management in care homes; instead, it adds a further layer focused on structural and building safety risk management and information continuity, working alongside rather than instead of existing fire safety obligations. Care home operators need to understand both frameworks and how records maintained for one -- such as fire risk assessments and remedial action logs -- feed into the broader building safety information expected under the newer Act's principles.
The Golden Thread is the idea that accurate, up-to-date information about a building -- its construction, materials, safety-critical systems, and any changes made over time -- should be maintained continuously and be readily accessible to those managing the building, rather than being scattered across multiple contractors, historic paper files or individual staff knowledge. For a care home, building this in practice means consolidating building fabric records, asbestos registers, fire safety documentation, lift and pressure system certificates and maintenance history into a coherent, accessible record rather than relying on institutional memory.
With the Building Safety Regulator now fully operational, care home operators should expect a more active regulatory posture around building safety risk management generally, including greater scrutiny of how providers manage ongoing risks as a continuous process rather than a series of periodic compliance events. Operators should not assume the Act is irrelevant simply because their building falls outside the higher-risk residential building definition -- the direction of travel across UK building safety regulation is towards higher expectations of proactive, documented risk management for all regulated premises.
Practical alignment with the Act's principles does not require a wholesale overhaul of existing systems -- it means ensuring building safety information is centralised and current, that responsibility for maintaining it is clearly assigned, and that risks are managed as an ongoing process with a clear audit trail rather than addressed only when a problem arises. Providers who can demonstrate this approach are better positioned both for CQC readiness and for any future extension of Building Safety Regulator oversight into the care sector.
CareHomeDesk gives you compliance checklists, maintenance logs, and contractor management tools built around exactly this kind of knowledge.