For leaseholders who have spent years living in flats they cannot sell, the government’s newest piece of building safety legislation offers something they have rarely had: a mechanism that does not rely on the goodwill of whoever happens to own their building.
The Building Safety (Remediation of Unsafe Cladding etc) Bill was introduced in the House of Commons on 14 October 2026. It would place a specific legal duty on responsible entities to assess and fix dangerous external walls, back that duty with criminal sanctions and substantial financial penalties, and, most significantly, allow a public authority to take control of the works where the owner will not or cannot act.
None of this is law yet. The Bill must pass through both Houses of Parliament, and several of its central measures will need secondary legislation before they can operate. Even on the government’s proposed timetable, the core duties would not take effect until two months after Royal Assent, while deadlines for assessments and remediation plans would extend further.
The question leaseholders are entitled to ask is not whether the Bill sounds tough, but whether it removes the obstacles that have kept their buildings unrepaired and their homes unsellable.
A problem still measured in thousands of buildings
The government’s case rests on the pace of progress so far. Its August 2026 building safety remediation figures show 4,724 residential buildings of at least 11 metres with unsafe cladding being tracked through its remediation programmes at the end of August. Of those, 1,849 had completed remediation, including buildings awaiting building control sign-off. A further 722 had work under way. The remaining 2,153, around 46%, were recorded as not having started, although that figure includes 86 buildings whose remediation status was unknown.
That 46% figure needs reading carefully. It describes the buildings the government is monitoring, not every affected building in England. The same release estimates that between 5,900 and 7,400 residential buildings of at least 11 metres in England have or have had unsafe cladding requiring work, a range that includes buildings expected to be fixed privately and outside the monitored programmes. The monitored set is therefore a large share of the problem, but not all of it, and a building absent from the figures is not thereby a building without a defect.
What the numbers do show is that, years after the risks were identified, a substantial proportion of known buildings are still waiting for work to begin. The obstacle has rarely been simply finding the unsafe material. It has been the tangle of freeholders, management companies, developers and other parties with repairing obligations, any of whom can slow the process through dispute, inertia or a shortage of money. The National Housing Federation has itself identified complex ownership and management structures as an important consideration in making the new duties workable.
For affected residents, the distinction between identifying a dangerous building and securing a credible programme to make it safe is often the difference between knowing there is a problem and seeing any prospect of an end to it.
What the Bill would actually require
According to the government’s explanatory guide to the Bill, the main legal duty would apply to multi-occupied residential buildings in England that are over 11 metres high or have at least five storeys, and that were completed before 28 June 2022. It would cover private and social sector buildings alike, including enfranchised and commonhold blocks. Buildings already covered by the developer remediation contract would be excluded from this particular duty, because equivalent obligations already bind the developers concerned.
Responsible entities would have to assess qualifying external-wall fire risks under a more consistent methodology, subject to independent audit, and then take the required steps to mitigate and remediate them. Assessments would follow the PAS 9980 methodology, with mandatory auditing of assessments recommending mitigation or remediation and provision for audits of a proportion of assessments finding no work necessary.
Where an assessment recommends remedial work, the responsible entity would have to produce a Remediation Compliance Plan setting out the steps to be taken and a timetable. For companies, the plan would also have to name the responsible director, identify beneficial owners and provide information about the wider corporate group. It would have to be published and shared with residents, and the cost of producing it could not be passed on to qualifying leaseholders.
That disclosure requirement deserves more attention than it is likely to receive. Many leaseholders know their building has a problem but have no reliable information about who is responsible for fixing it, whether the money is available or when work will begin. A published plan with a named director attached changes the nature of that conversation.
The deadlines, however, are not completion guarantees. Under the proposed arrangements, buildings would need to have undergone the required assessment within a period ending 12 months after Royal Assent, with Remediation Compliance Plans due by 15 months after Royal Assent. Existing assessments could satisfy the requirement where they meet the applicable conditions. The overriding obligation to carry out required remediation steps would be to act as soon as reasonably practicable, rather than to complete every building within a single fixed period.
The sanctions are considerable. A deliberate failure to take required steps to remediate or mitigate without reasonable excuse could lead to prosecution and up to two years’ imprisonment or, as an alternative, a financial penalty of up to £500,000. Non-compliance with a Remediation Order could also attract civil penalties of up to £500,000 under the proposed enforcement framework. Unreasonably obstructing lawful assessment or remediation would itself become an offence.
A new register of medium-rise residential buildings, broadly those between 11 and 18 metres or with five or six storeys, would bring more properties into the authorities’ line of sight. Crucially, registration would not be confined to buildings already known to contain dangerous cladding.
New ownership-information powers would also allow councils, fire and rescue authorities, the Building Safety Regulator and Homes England to identify who ultimately stands behind a building’s owning company.
These measures could make it considerably harder for a responsible party to claim that the problem is someone else’s responsibility. They do not, however, expand the central new cladding-remediation duty into a guarantee that every other fire safety defect within a building will be resolved. Internal defects and other outstanding safety issues can still affect costs, management and the confidence of purchasers.
The backstop is the reform that could change outcomes
Penalties punish failure. They do not repair a wall. For leaseholders in buildings where the owner has disappeared, run out of money or simply refused to engage, a larger fine is of limited practical comfort.
The proposed remediation backstop is designed for exactly those cases. Where a regulator sees no realistic path to remediation by the current duty-holder, a remediation authority, meaning a local council or Homes England, could serve notice and then apply to the First-tier Tribunal for a Remediation Management Order.
The authority could then arrange and manage the works itself, using funding from existing government remediation schemes. Additional recoverable costs, such as certain management and legal expenses arising from the intervention, could become a debt owed by the duty-holder. That debt could attract interest, be secured against a relevant property interest and, in appropriate circumstances, be recovered through redirected rent payments.
The government’s announcement of the Bill estimates that the legislation could accelerate remediation for around 12,000 residents, including approximately 3,000 whose buildings would benefit from the backstop and might otherwise never have been remediated.
Those are government projections, not outcomes that have been demonstrated. If they prove realistic, however, the backstop could make the greatest difference to residents in precisely those buildings where conventional enforcement has failed.
The limits are equally important. The backstop is a last resort, not an automatic takeover whenever works fall behind. It requires a remediation notice allowing three months for the duty-holder to provide information and for relevant parties to make representations, followed by a tribunal application if the authority decides to proceed. The process is intended to be proportionate, with a chance for the existing duty-holder to explain why intervention is unnecessary or inappropriate.
And it would only work if the authorities responsible have the specialist staff, legal capacity and practical resources to use it.
The government expects Homes England to operate much of the backstop centrally, drawing on outside specialists where necessary. That may make interventions more manageable than leaving every individual council to organise complex construction projects, but it does not remove the demands of procurement, assessment, project management and securing access to the buildings concerned.
There is a further commercial consequence. An owner that allows the backstop to be imposed would not necessarily escape the original liability for failing to act, and could face additional recoverable intervention costs. For corporate freeholders that have delayed through inertia rather than genuine inability, the prospect of losing control of the works while still facing financial consequences may provide a stronger incentive than another enforcement warning.
The tension inside the timetable
There is a quieter feature of the Bill that will matter a great deal in practice. The proposed reasonable-excuse defence, which protects duty-holders acting in good faith, explicitly covers delays outside their control, including severe supply-chain problems and contractor shortages.
That is a fair safeguard. It would be unjust to prosecute a resident-controlled management company because no suitably qualified contractor could start until next year. The guide is clear that enforcement should focus on persistent inaction rather than resident-led bodies taking reasonable steps, and regulators would have to consider statutory guidance before penalising a leaseholder-controlled company.
But it also means the Bill’s sharpest tools could be less effective where delays arise from shortages of specialist assessors, fire engineers and façade contractors rather than unwillingness to act. If demand for those services exceeds available capacity, stronger duties may result in fuller remediation plans without a corresponding increase in the speed at which work is completed.
There is a second tension in the government’s approach. Standardised assessments and compulsory auditing should improve confidence in decisions about what needs fixing. But the process will also require qualified professionals to review assessments, resolve disagreements and, where necessary, investigate buildings previously thought to require no work.
That scrutiny is justified where it identifies genuine danger or prevents unnecessary remediation. It may nevertheless introduce additional demands on the same specialist expertise needed to deliver the work.
Legal deadlines can concentrate minds. They cannot manufacture capacity.
Will affected flats become easier to sell?
Possibly, but only indirectly, and not quickly.
A buyer and their mortgage lender need confidence on three questions: is the building safe, what will it cost the owner of this flat, and will the outstanding work actually be finished? A standardised, audited assessment, a published remediation plan with a timetable and visible progress on site all help answer them. In buildings where the owner has stalled for years, the prospect of a backstop may itself push matters forward.
But the Bill does not require lenders to accept affected properties, does not guarantee that any flat will become mortgageable and sets no timetable for unblocking individual sales. Lenders will continue to make their own decisions, building by building and application by application, weighing documentation, remediation arrangements, potential liabilities and the physical condition of the property.
Importantly, this does not mean that every flat awaiting cladding remediation is currently unmortgageable. Under the existing UK Finance industry arrangements, participating lenders can consider applications on affected flats where appropriate evidence shows that remediation will be undertaken through a recognised scheme, a developer’s commitment or relevant statutory leaseholder protections.
The arrangements, updated in April 2025, also allow greater flexibility over older EWS1 forms and certain concerns about their signatories, subject to individual lender policies. Some lenders can consider other evidence, including a suitable Fire Risk Appraisal of External Walls, or FRAEW.
This matters because the Bill’s proposed assessment regime is not the only development affecting the mortgage market. The Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors has already published updated valuation standards, due to take effect on 1 November 2026, which seek to make requests for EWS1 forms more proportionate.
Under that guidance, a suitable summary of a properly conducted external-wall fire-risk appraisal may be accepted in place of an EWS1 form in certain circumstances, provided it contains the necessary conclusions and is signed by an appropriately qualified professional.
The distinction is important. An EWS1 form is primarily a valuation and lending document, not a certificate declaring the entire building safe. A FRAEW examines external-wall fire risks. Neither should be mistaken for an assurance that all possible building safety problems have been resolved.
The revised RICS approach therefore offers a potential nearer-term improvement for some transactions, independently of whether or when the new Bill becomes law. It does not, however, override the individual requirements of lenders or eliminate the consequences of unresolved defects.
For estate agents, this is more than a technical distinction. A flat may be capable of being marketed and sold while still presenting significant difficulties during mortgage underwriting and conveyancing. Knowing that a building has entered a remediation programme is useful, but it does not necessarily establish what documents are available, whether the work is funded or what risks a buyer might inherit.
Agents dealing with affected flats have good reason to establish those details before a transaction is well advanced. Conveyancers and mortgage brokers will need to consider the applicable protections, documentation and lending requirements in their own roles. A sale that collapses late because the necessary evidence cannot be produced wastes time for the seller, buyer and the professionals involved.
The consequences are not confined to owner-occupiers. A buy-to-let investor may continue receiving rent from an affected flat while finding that its refinancing options or eventual resale are constrained. A purchaser considering such a property must distinguish an existing remediation plan from proof that a lender will accept the flat as security.
The more realistic expectation is incremental. Better evidence and clearer accountability should reduce some of the uncertainty that prevents transactions progressing. They will not, on their own, restore the market value of a flat in a building where the work has not yet been done.
Owners, developers and manufacturers
For freeholders and managing agents who have delayed, the cost of continued inaction would rise sharply, and the ownership-disclosure powers would make it harder to hide behind layered corporate structures. Penalty notices could, in defined circumstances, extend to controlling companies rather than stopping at the immediate responsible entity.
For responsible owners and management companies, the implications are different. The Bill would place greater emphasis on being able to demonstrate that assessments have been completed, remediation steps identified, funding pursued and appropriate progress made. Resident-led management companies would remain within the scope of the legal duty where they hold the relevant repairing obligations, although the proposed safeguards recognise that volunteer-led bodies should not be treated in the same way as deliberately obstructive commercial owners.
The financial protections for leaseholders also require care. Under the existing Building Safety Act leaseholder protections, qualifying leases are protected from cladding remediation charges in relevant buildings, while certain other historical building safety costs are restricted.
Those protections are attached to qualifying leases under conditions determined by the position at 14 February 2022, rather than being reassessed solely by reference to who owns the property today. Where a lease qualified, its protections generally pass to a future purchaser. A lease that did not qualify does not automatically become protected simply because a new buyer intends to occupy the flat as their main home.
That difference is particularly relevant to investors and purchasers of affected leasehold properties, who should establish the applicable protection rather than assume it follows from the intended use of the flat.
The government says remediation funding is available for work required under the proposed new legal duty and that leaseholders should not pay towards such work. But that does not mean every administrative expense arising from the new framework would be prohibited. Registration charges and certain associated costs under the proposed medium-rise building register could be recoverable through service charges, with the amounts and detailed arrangements still to be set through secondary legislation.
Developers already funding remediation stand to gain from changes to construction product liability. Under the proposals, a claim against a manufacturer would turn on whether a product was unsafe or the conduct misleading, rather than on narrow arguments about technical defectiveness. A claimant would need to show that the product made more than a trivial contribution to the building being unsafe.
The Bill would also make it easier for developers and others who have paid for remediation to pursue manufacturers directly for recovery of those costs. Those claims would still have to be proved through the courts; liability would not arise automatically and the ability to bring a claim would not guarantee successful recovery.
This is not simply a matter of moving money around between businesses. Developers, freeholders and other parties may have funded substantial repairs without obtaining corresponding contributions from manufacturers whose products contributed to the underlying defects. Clearer recovery rights could change the eventual allocation of those costs, while increasing the potential financial exposure of manufacturers and associated companies.
Importantly, the manufacturer-redress reforms would apply across the UK, including Northern Ireland, whereas the principal new remediation duty, the backstop and the medium-rise register are focused on England. The Bill also includes certain provisions concerning Wales, and the wider building safety framework continues to differ between the four nations.
The immediate obligation to progress necessary work would remain. A developer could not treat the possibility of recovering money from a manufacturer years later as a reason to delay making a building safe.
What leaseholders should watch
The government has said that by the end of 2029 every building over 11 metres with unsafe cladding should either have been remediated or have a clear completion date. The Bill is intended to give that ambition teeth. Whether it does will depend on its passage through Parliament, the content of the secondary legislation, the resources given to enforcing authorities and, above all, on scaffolding going up.
There are several different timetables to keep in mind. The revised RICS valuation standard takes effect on 1 November 2026, independently of the Bill. The next government monthly remediation figures are scheduled for 28 October 2026. The proposed statutory assessment and compliance-plan deadlines would only become relevant following Royal Assent, while the remediation backstop would require further implementation arrangements.
The distinction matters because an affected leaseholder’s immediate options may improve through better mortgage documentation or progress under an existing remediation programme long before the new law can be enforced.
For an affected leaseholder, the useful questions have not changed, but the Bill may eventually make them easier to answer. Has the building been appropriately assessed? Who is responsible for fixing it? Is the funding confirmed? Is there a credible timetable, supported by documents that can be shown to a buyer and their lender?
Leaseholders whose buildings are not progressing should raise the position with the organisation responsible for managing the building and, where appropriate, the relevant local regulator. Waiting for the new legislation is not a substitute for using existing routes to obtain information or pursue action.
For owners and managing agents, the sensible response is to establish responsibilities, maintain reliable records and demonstrate the steps being taken towards remediation. If the legislation is enacted as proposed, a responsible entity that cannot account for its building’s condition, proposed repairs or progress will be in a considerably weaker position than it is today.
The real test of this legislation will not be its penalties or its powers. It will be the moment a leaseholder who has waited years can show a buyer that the necessary repairs have been completed, provide the evidence their lender requires, and move.
This article provides general information and analysis of proposed building safety legislation as at 15 October 2026. The principal remediation measures discussed concern England, while certain provisions have wider territorial application. The Bill and its implementation arrangements may change during the legislative process. Individual buildings, leaseholder protections, financial liabilities and mortgage lending decisions depend on their circumstances. Appropriate professional advice should be obtained before making legal, financial or property decisions.
