ARB CEO Hugh Simpson Issues Stark Warning: Grenfell Has Not Delivered the Cultural Change the Construction Industry Needs
Nine years have passed since the Grenfell Tower fire claimed 72 lives in one of the most devastating disasters in modern British history. Yet according to Hugh Simpson, Chief Executive Officer of the Architects Registration Board (ARB), the construction industry has still not undergone the deep, systemic cultural transformation that the tragedy demanded. His words are a sobering reminder that legislative reform, however necessary, is not enough on its own — and that the profession faces a long road ahead.
A Damning Assessment from the Top of the Profession's Regulator
Hugh Simpson's comments carry particular weight given his role at the ARB, the statutory body responsible for regulating architects in the United Kingdom. As the person at the helm of the organisation charged with upholding professional standards, his assessment that "there has not been cultural change as a result of Grenfell" is not a casual observation — it is a carefully considered indictment of an industry that, in his view, has not truly reckoned with what went wrong.
The Grenfell Tower fire of June 2017 exposed catastrophic failures not just in materials specification and fire safety compliance, but in the broader culture of how buildings are designed, procured, constructed, and managed. The subsequent inquiry, led by Sir Martin Moore-Bick, produced a comprehensive final report that pointed to systemic negligence, poor communication between professionals, and a culture in which safety concerns were routinely marginalised in favour of cost-cutting.
Simpson's position suggests that despite the years of inquiry, legislation, and public debate that have followed, the industry has not fundamentally changed the way it thinks and operates. That is a troubling conclusion, and one that demands serious attention from architects, contractors, developers, and regulators alike.
What Cultural Change in Construction Should Look Like
When we talk about cultural change in the construction industry, we are referring to something far deeper than compliance with new rules. It encompasses the attitudes, habits, and unspoken assumptions that govern how professionals behave when no one is directly watching — how they prioritise safety against budget pressures, how openly they communicate concerns up and down the supply chain, and how seriously they take their duty of care to the people who will ultimately live and work in the buildings they create.
Genuine cultural change would mean architects routinely raising safety concerns without fear of losing contracts. It would mean contractors refusing to substitute specified materials without proper sign-off. It would mean developers treating fire safety not as a box-ticking exercise but as a moral and professional imperative. And it would mean every party in the construction process understanding their individual accountability within a complex, interconnected system.
If Simpson is correct that this shift has not occurred, then the industry remains vulnerable to repeating the conditions that led to Grenfell — even as new legislation and guidance theoretically make such failures less likely.
The Role of the ARB in Driving Change
The ARB has itself undergone significant change in recent years, with new powers granted under the Architects Act reforms to take a more proactive role in professional standards. The organisation has moved away from a purely reactive, complaints-led model towards a more anticipatory approach that aims to shape professional culture before failures occur rather than merely punishing them after the fact.
This includes updated competency frameworks, revised educational requirements, and closer engagement with professional development across an architect's career. The aim is to embed safety awareness, ethical responsibility, and effective communication as foundational skills — not optional extras — within the profession.
But as Simpson himself implicitly acknowledges, the ARB can only do so much. The regulator oversees architects, while the broader construction industry involves many other players — structural engineers, fire engineers, quantity surveyors, contractors, subcontractors, and clients — each with their own regulatory frameworks, professional bodies, and cultural norms. Achieving genuine industry-wide cultural change requires alignment across all of these groups, and that remains an enormous challenge.
Building Safety Act 2022: Legislation Without Culture Change
The Building Safety Act 2022 was widely described as the most significant overhaul of building safety regulation in a generation. It introduced new dutyholder roles, stricter oversight of higher-risk buildings, a new Building Safety Regulator within the Health and Safety Executive, and strengthened mechanisms for accountability throughout the design and construction process.
These are meaningful reforms. But legislation, however well-drafted, cannot by itself change the values and behaviours of tens of thousands of professionals working across a fragmented industry. Rules can change what people do when they know they are being watched; culture changes what they do when they are not. Simpson's warning is essentially that the industry has updated its rulebook without yet updating its soul.
What Needs to Happen Next
If the construction industry is to achieve the cultural transformation that Grenfell demanded, several things need to happen in parallel. Leadership at every level — from the heads of large practices to site managers on individual projects — must actively model the behaviours they want to see. Professional education needs to treat ethics and safety as core disciplines, not peripheral concerns. Procurement models need to stop rewarding the lowest bid at the expense of quality and accountability. And the industry needs honest, ongoing conversations about where culture is still falling short, rather than self-congratulatory narratives about how much has already changed.
Hugh Simpson's willingness to speak plainly about the gap between where the industry is and where it needs to be is itself a contribution to that conversation. The Grenfell Tower fire must not become a historical event that the construction industry references to demonstrate its own reform — it must remain a present-tense moral obligation to do better, every day, for every building and every person who depends on the professionals who design and build them.
Conclusion
Nine years on from Grenfell, the UK construction industry has new laws, new regulators, and new frameworks. What it still lacks, according to the ARB's own chief executive, is the cultural transformation those frameworks were meant to enable. That gap between policy and practice — between what the rules say and what professionals actually do and believe — is the defining challenge of building safety in the years ahead. Closing it will require honesty, sustained effort, and a willingness to hold the whole industry, not just its most visible failures, to account.