The resident voice in building safety

For years the resident in a tall building was treated as someone to be managed rather than heard. They received notices, paid service charges and were told what had been decided. The reforms that followed Grenfell changed the premise. Building safety law now treats residents as people with a stake in how their building's safety is run, with a right to information and a route to raise concerns that the Accountable Person has to take seriously. The voice is not decorative. It is a duty, and like every duty it has to be evidenced.

Why the resident voice became a legal matter

The Grenfell Tower Inquiry made plain that residents had raised concerns about their building and had not been heard, and that the regime around them was, in the inquiry's words, too complex and fragmented. The Phase 2 report, published on 4 September 2024, ran to seven volumes and 58 recommendations across government and other bodies, and its direction reinforced a shift already underway: that those who live in a building are a source of safety information, not merely recipients of it.

The Building Safety Act 2022 carried that shift into duty. For an occupied higher-risk building, the Accountable Person has to give residents the information they need about their building's safety and has to operate a way for residents to raise building safety concerns and have them addressed. The point is not consultation for its own sake. It is that the people in the building often notice the propped fire door, the failed lighting, the damp, the alarm that did not sound, before any inspector does.

What residents are owed

The resident's entitlement under the regime has a practical shape, and it helps to be concrete about it.

• Information about the building's safety, in a form they can actually use.
• A clear, accessible route to raise a building safety concern.
• A response to that concern, rather than silence.
• A way to escalate if the concern is not dealt with.

These are not favours an organisation grants when convenient. They are duties, and an Accountable Person who treats resident engagement as optional is misreading the regime. We set out the wider scope of the role in what an Accountable Person actually signs up to.

Listening as a safety control

The most useful way to think about the resident voice is as a safety control in its own right. A building generates information about its own condition constantly, and a large share of that information lives with the people who use it daily. A resident reporting a fire door that no longer closes is, in effect, an early-warning system for a compartmentation failure that a six-monthly inspection might not catch for months.

Treating residents this way changes how their reports are handled. A concern is not a complaint to be deflected; it is a finding to be logged, assessed and, where it bears on safety, acted on with the same discipline as an audit finding. The building that listens well has more eyes on its condition than any inspection regime could provide.

The right-hand column is not more bureaucratic for its own sake. It is the difference between a building that learns from its residents and one that lets their knowledge go to waste.

Evidencing that they were heard

The duty is not only to listen but to be able to show that you listened. A resident concern that was raised and addressed should leave a trail: what was reported, when, what was done about it, and when it was closed. That record protects everyone. It protects residents, because their concerns cannot quietly vanish, and it protects the Accountable Person, because it demonstrates the engagement duty was met rather than merely asserted.

This connects directly to the wider obligation to manage hazards promptly. In social housing the principle is now explicit under Awaab's Law, whose first phase came into force on 27 October 2025 for damp and mould and emergency hazards, with timescales for investigating, summarising and acting that put a clock on the landlord's response. The detail of that regime is specific to social housing, but the underlying expectation, that a resident's report of a hazard is acted on promptly and on the record, is the direction of travel across the sector. We cover it in managing damp and mould before it manages you.

A voice that changes the building

The resident voice is worth taking seriously not because the law requires it, though it does, but because the building is genuinely safer when the people in it are heard and their reports are acted on. The Accountable Person who treats engagement as a duty to be evidenced ends up with a building that surfaces its own problems early and a record that proves the concerns were addressed. The one who treats it as a box to tick is throwing away the best information source the building has.

SAMRISK lets resident concerns be logged against the building, raised as tracked actions and closed with a dated trail, alongside the building's risk assessments and safety case. This is general guidance rather than legal advice, and any building's specific duties to residents should be confirmed against the current rules.