Introduction

On 7 July 2025, the Welsh Government set out its new, landmark Building Safety (Wales) Bill (“the Bill”) in response to the Grenfell Tower disaster in 2017 and the following Hackitt Review. As with the Building Safety Act (“BSA”), introduced by the UK Government in 2022, the Bill seeks to introduce a new building safety regime for residential buildings in Wales to improve the landscape within which building regulations and fire safety measures operate.

The new Welsh regime aims to establish a ‘robust and coherent’ regulatory system which imposes a number of statutory duties on relevant duty holders and creates clear lines of accountability.

In this article, we will examine the substantive content of the Bill, broken down into parts corresponding to those in the Bill, and consider some of the key similarities and differences compared to the BSA.