Building Safety Regulator statement on ‘Potential risks from transfer slabs in buildings’
It All Begins Here
On 19th December 2025, the Building Safety Regulator (BSR) raised a significant concern regarding punching shear in reinforced concrete ‘transfer slabs’*, notably questioning "the adequacy of historic engineering design methods". BSR’s scepticism towards widely used legacy design methods is quite striking.
Building owners are prompted to seek professional advice if there are visible signs of distress or specific concerns regarding the building’s condition and/or design.
For legal and insurance professionals, this is one to watch because it may influence how parties frame causation, standard of care, and what proportionate investigation/remediation might look like.
* Structural engineers love continuous, vertically aligned load paths – columns stacked floor-to-floor, efficiently taking gravity loads from the superstructure to the foundations. When layouts change from one floor to the next (typically in transitions from residential to podium/parking/retail levels, or due to building setbacks), columns often cannot align. The load from an ‘interrupted’ column must then be picked up by a slab and be ‘transferred’ to a different column/wall arrangement below, thus the slab becomes a transfer slab. The critical safety risk to manage is then ‘punching shear’, the risk of a column ‘punching through’ the slab, leading to loss of support and potentially a collapse.