Building safe foundations: The Building Safety Act 2022 and the Landlord and Tenant relationship

It is over four years since the Building Safety Act (BSA) became law on 28 April 2022. Its aim was to make homes across England and Wales safer by improving standards and regulating how the safety of certain buildings is to be managed.

The BSA therefore includes provisions governing the construction and maintenance of new and existing buildings but also ones setting out who should shoulder the cost associated with these new obligations and, also, of historic safety defects. In many cases it seeks to protect leaseholders from the burden of such remediation costs. A number of the provisions introduced by the BSA  fundamentally alter the landlord and tenant relationship where it comes to the recovery of certain costs, reallocating the burden in some cases and introducing new liabilities in others.

Most of the BSA is now in force, although we still await some regulations that will bring into effect parts of the BSA. For example, we await regulations to bring into force the provision in the BSA which will require landlords to give certain building safety information in rent demands.

Our understanding of the BSA has also evolved as a body of case law has developed, offering guidance on the interpretation of various provisions and how they interact with existing laws.

This note provides an overview of the key changes from a landlord and tenant point of view, focusing on how the BSA affects serve charge obligations in certain leases where the property concerned is in England. Different considerations may apply where the property is in Wales where the building safety approach has been slightly different, with many developments starting to apply from 2027.

Read the full note here