The Remediation Bill: A new era of compulsory remediation

Nearly a decade on from Grenfell, thousands of buildings in England still have unsafe cladding. Despite the enactment of the Building Safety Act (“BSA”) in 2022, which was introduced with the aim of improving building safety standards and ensuring effective remediation, the pace of remediation and replacement of unsafe cladding has been unsatisfactory. In order to bridge the gap between establishing liability and enforcing remediation, the Government published the Remediation Acceleration Plan in 2024, which they aim to enforce through the progression of the new Remediation Bill announced in May this year.

The Bill's central promise is a philosophical shift: from a system preoccupied with establishing who is liable to one focused on ensuring remediation works are actually carried out.

How will the Remediation Bill encourage work to be done?

The primary aim of the bill is to fix issues on buildings already known to be unsafe at a quicker pace. Whilst the BSA provided new legal tools designed to identify who should ultimately pay for the remediation (Remediation Orders, Remediation Contribution Orders and Building Liability Orders), the legislation did not provide a process to expedite the remediation itself.

One way in which the Government aim to enforce this is to put in place clear deadlines. Landlords will have a duty to remediate and will face financial penalties or prosecution if they fail to do so within a specified timeframe. Under the proposed legislation, buildings that are over 18 metres in height must be remediated by the end of 2029, and buildings between 11-18 metres must be remediated by 2031. The set deadlines and penalties signal a move away from voluntary compliance towards strict enforcement.

The Building Safety Regulator (BSR), a role established by the BSA, is set to be empowered under the Bill to issue remediation notices which would require emergency or interim works to be completed within 6 months, preventing responsible persons from delaying the works unnecessarily.

The Remediation Bill also puts provision in place for remediating buildings where a freeholder or developer is dragging its feet - the remediation backstop. This will allow local authorities and Homes England to apply to the First Tier Tribunal in order to carry out the works themselves, the costs of which can be recovered from the party responsible. The backstop is a key example of how the bill goes a step further than the BSA by ensuring practical steps are being taken to remediate the unsafe buildings rather than just establishing liability.

Potential limitations

Despite its ostensibly proactive approach, there are some things that the Remediation Bill does not propose to change. For example, buildings under 11m high sit outside of the proposed regime. Some of these buildings still have unsafe cladding and defects, but will still not be covered by the penalties and enforcement of the Bill.

Whilst the Bill’s aim is to compress the timeline for compliance by imposing strict deadlines and threatening criminal sanctions, this is likely to cause disputes to be front-loaded, rather than eliminated. Parties will still dispute what work is necessary, who should carry it out, and who should pay. The difference is that they will be doing so under significantly greater time pressure. This creates a real and immediate cashflow risk on landlords and freeholders.

The Bill also cannot solve the practical obstacle of industry capacity; the pool of competent cladding remediation contractors remains limited. Qualified fire engineers are in high demand. Regulatory approval processes, particularly through the BSR, involve backlogs that the Bill does not and cannot shortcut. Unless the Bill successfully separates the imperative of doing the work from the question of who ultimately pays for it, there is a genuine risk that it accelerates disputes faster than it accelerates remediation — precisely the opposite of its stated purpose.

Concluding thoughts

Several mechanisms in the Remediation Bill are genuinely promising. The proposed remediation backstop is among the few proposals that should tackle the delivery problem head-on. The statutory deadlines for compliance, reinforced by criminal sanctions for non-compliance, should also help close the current "voluntary compliance" gap.  As ever, the devil will be in the detail as to how this is achieved in practice.

In practical terms, freeholders and landlords should be reviewing their portfolios now to identify potentially affected buildings, establish the nature and status of any outstanding defects and look to preserve and pursue any available claims for recovery of costs. Whilst the precise scope of the new regime will depend on the legislation ultimately introduced, a passive approach is likely to carry significant financial and regulatory risk. 

 

[Adapted from an article in Facilities Management UK by Sarah Maylor]