*Under the Building Safety Regime, the term minor change has no formal standing. If a change affects approved drawings, specifications, or safety-critical elements, it is legally treated as a controlled change, regardless of perceived impact. This article uses minor to reflect site language, but the regulatory threshold is stricter. For Higher-Risk Buildings, the BSR distinguishes between Notifiable Changes and Major Changes, both of which fall under controlled change. 

  

It always starts the same way. A detail on site doesn’t quite match the drawing, a supplier delivers a slightly different component or a trade spots a quicker way to get something done.

Someone, usually under pressure, says the magic words: It’s minor. We’ll sort it later.

No alarms go off, no meeting is called, the job keeps moving. In the moment, it feels like a small deviation, later, it quietly becomes a big problem.

What People Think Minor Means

On site, minor isn’t a technical category. It’s a coping mechanism. When someone calls a change minor, what they usually mean is:
 

• It won’t affect safety - even though nobody has actually checked.
• We don’t need to update the paperwork - because the paperwork is already behind
• Everyone understands what we’re doing - until they don’t
• We’ll document it later - later rarely arrives
• It’s too small to escalate - until the BSR asks who approved it

This isn’t laziness, it’s the natural instinct to keep momentum when the programme is breathing down your neck. But under the Building Safety Regime, minor is not a feeling, it’s a risk category and it carries consequences.

What the Building Safety Regime Actually Cares About

Under the Building Safety Regime, the issue isn’t whether a change felt minor on site. The regime isn’t judging intent, effort, or pressure. It’s looking for something much simpler: Was the change controlled, traceable, and evidenced? That’s the whole game.

From the regulator’s perspective, even a small deviation can create serious uncertainty if:

• nobody recorded who approved it
• the fire strategy wasn’t checked
• the design team didn’t confirm the impact
• the evidence trail stops at a photo with no context
• the as-built record no longer matches reality

It’s not about punishing teams, it’s about ensuring that, years from now, someone can look at the building and understand:

• what changed
• why it changed
• who agreed to it
• and whether it still meets the intended safety performance

The regime assumes buildings evolve during construction. What it does not accept is evolution without documentation. That’s why minor changes still trigger scrutiny, not because the change itself is dangerous, but because undocumented decisions create blind spots. And blind spots are exactly what the new system was designed to eliminate.

In short, the BSR isn’t asking for perfection, it’s asking for traceability.

What Actually Goes Wrong

This is where reality catches up. A minor change becomes a problem the moment someone needs to prove:

• who authorised it
• why it was acceptable
• how it aligns with the fire strategy
• whether it affects compliance
• and where the evidence is

That moment usually arrives at the worst possible time. At Gateway 3, drawings don’t quite match the build as the evidence trail is thin. The explanation sounds more like a memory test than a record.

A regulator asks for documentation to support a deviation, there’s a pause, then a scramble through emails, photos and WhatsApp messages. Internally, everyone remembers the change differently, nobody remembers who actually said yes. At handover, the as-builts tell one story and the building tells another.

None of this is dramatic, it’s slow, administrative friction, the kind that delays approvals, erodes trust and forces rework long after the scaffolding is down. The change wasn’t the problem, the lack of evidence was.

Why This Keeps Happening

If minor changes keep slipping through the cracks, it’s not because people don’t care. It’s because construction operates in constant tension between programme pressure, coordination lag and the human instinct to keep work moving.

On a live site, stopping to reassess a detail feels disproportionate when the change looks harmless. Teams are juggling deadlines, sequencing, material lead times and the reality that dozens of decisions need to be made just to keep the job flowing. In that environment, minor becomes shorthand for let’s not lose momentum.

There’s also the normalisation of deviation, small workarounds become familiar and familiar becomes acceptable. Nobody sets out to ignore process, it just becomes harder to spot when a deviation has crossed the line from practical to consequential. Then there’s documentation lag.

Paperwork rarely keeps pace with the build. By the time someone sits down to update drawings or records, the memory of who agreed what and why has already softened. Not out of negligence, but because the day moved on.

All of this creates a system where good people make reasonable decisions in the moment that become difficult to justify later. The Building Safety Regime wasn’t designed to punish this reality, it was designed to counteract it. And the gap between how work happens and how it needs to be evidenced is exactly where minor changes turn into major problems.

What to Do Differently Next Time

You don’t need to stop the job every time a detail shifts, but you do need to slow the decision just enough to keep control.

A practical approach looks like this. Pause briefly, not for a meeting. Before calling something minor, take a moment to check whether the change touches fire strategy, structure, services, or anything already signed off. Most issues reveal themselves in that short pause.

Capture the decision while it’s fresh. A quick note, a marked-up photo, or a short message to the design lead is enough to anchor the evidence. It doesn’t need to be perfect, it just needs to exist.

Check alignment with the people who will be asked later. A brief confirmation from the designer, principal contractor, or building control body can prevent days of backtracking at Gateway 3. London projects move fast; alignment prevents drift.

Keep the as-built story consistent. If the change affects what will eventually be handed over, flag it early so drawings and records don’t fall behind the build. Small updates made in real time save huge effort at the end.

Treat minor as a prompt, not a conclusion. If everyone agrees it’s genuinely low-impact, fine. If not, you’ve caught the issue before it becomes a problem.

None of this slows the programme in any meaningful way. It simply replaces assumptions with traceability, which is exactly what the Building Safety Regime expects and what future you will be grateful for.

 

This article is an operational analysis of common site-level behaviours under the Building Safety Regime. It does not replace project-specific change control procedures, Principal Designer responsibilities, or formal BSR approval requirements. Where a change may affect compliance, teams should follow their agreed change control process and seek confirmation from the appropriate dutyholders or the Building Safety Regulator.

Image © London Construction Magazine Limited

Expert Verification & Authorship: Mihai Chelmus Founder, London Construction Magazine | Construction Testing & Investigation Specialist