Shilpa Mathuradas

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The Building Safety Act 2022 explained

The Building Safety Act 2022 changed how residential buildings in England are built, managed and kept safe, and it changed who pays when historical safety defects are found. If you are a leaseholder who has been asked to contribute to building safety works through your service charge, or a landlord or management company working out what the Act requires of you, this guide explains where the law stands now.

The Act is no longer new legislation working its way into force. It has been fully in force since April 2024, and the regulatory system it created has continued to develop since. This guide sets out what the Act does, which buildings and leases it protects, and what has changed most recently.

What is the Building Safety Act 2022?

The Building Safety Act 2022 received Royal Assent on 28 April 2022, following the Hackitt Report on Building a Safer Future after the Grenfell Tower fire. It overhauls the rules on how residential buildings are constructed, maintained and kept safe.

The Act has three main aims:

• Protecting qualifying leaseholders from the cost of fixing historical building safety defects, and holding those responsible to account instead.
• Setting clearer rules for how residential buildings should be constructed, maintained and made safe.
• Creating new bodies to oversee the system, including the Building Safety Regulator.

What counts as a higher-risk building?

The Act reserves its strongest regulatory duties for higher-risk buildings, generally those over 18 metres or seven storeys.

Residents of higher-risk buildings have a stronger say in how their building is kept safe. You can raise safety concerns directly with your building’s accountable person, and if those concerns are ignored, you can escalate them to the Building Safety Regulator.

A different and lower threshold applies to the leaseholder cost protections, which is where most disputes actually arise. That is covered below.

Who is the accountable person?

Every higher-risk building must have an identifiable accountable person. This is whoever owns a legal obligation to repair the building’s common parts, which could be a freeholder, landlord, management company, resident management company or right to manage company.

An accountable person must:

• Put measures in place to prevent building safety risks and reduce the severity of any incident.
• Report certain fire and structural safety issues.
• Engage with residents about the building’s safety, including everyone over 16.
• Keep and update the building safety case, a record of information such as the building’s height, design and plans.
• Notify the Building Safety Regulator of any change to the accountable person.

If you sit on a resident management company or a right to manage company, these duties fall on you. Getting the building safety case and the resident engagement strategy wrong is a regulatory risk, not merely an administrative one.

Which buildings are covered by the cost protections?

The leaseholder cost protections do not apply to every block. Under section 117 of the Act, a relevant building is a self-contained building, or self-contained part of a building, in England that contains at least two dwellings and is either at least 11 metres high or has at least 5 storeys.

Some buildings are expressly outside the definition. A building is not a relevant building where:

• the tenants’ right of first refusal, or compulsory acquisition of the landlord’s interest, under the Landlord and Tenant Act 1987 has been exercised
• the right to collective enfranchisement has been exercised
• the freehold estate is leaseholder owned
• the building is on commonhold land

This catches people out. A block whose leaseholders have already bought the freehold sits outside these protections, because there is no third-party landlord for the Act to shift the cost onto. If you are weighing up leasehold enfranchisement in a building with known safety defects, this is a point to take advice on before you commit.

Which leases are protected?

The protections attach to qualifying leases. Under section 119, a lease is a qualifying lease if:

• it is a long lease of a single dwelling in a relevant building
• the tenant is liable to pay a service charge
• the lease was granted before 14 February 2022, and
• at the qualifying time, which is the beginning of 14 February 2022, the dwelling was the tenant’s only or principal home, or the tenant owned no other dwelling in the United Kingdom, or owned no more than two other United Kingdom dwellings besides the one held under the lease

The date is fixed and it does not move when a flat is sold. The protection runs with the lease, so a buyer can inherit it, but it is assessed by reference to the position on 14 February 2022 rather than the position today.

Can building safety costs be passed to leaseholders?

Often not. This is the question that drives most of the disputes we see.

Section 122 and Schedule 8 to the Act make certain service charge amounts relating to relevant defects unrecoverable from tenants under qualifying leases. Where the protections apply, a landlord cannot simply put the cost of remedying a historical safety defect, including cladding removal and replacement, onto the service charge. Related costs, including interim measures such as waking watches, can also be caught.

Qualifying leaseholders also have the right to:

• Information about their building’s safety.
• Challenge decisions made by the building owner.
• Compensation for the cost of making the home safe, in some circumstances.

Whether a particular demand is recoverable turns on the building, the lease, the nature of the defect and who the landlord is. It is a question worth answering properly before paying or before refusing to pay, because both carry consequences.

Remediation orders and remediation contribution orders

The Act also gave the First-tier Tribunal two powers that matter when a building is not being fixed, or when someone other than the leaseholders should be paying for it.

Remediation orders under section 123 require a relevant landlord to remedy specified defects in a specified building, or take specified steps, by a set time. An interested person applies, which includes the regulator, a local authority, a fire and rescue authority, and people with a legal or equitable interest in the building.

Remediation contribution orders under section 124 require a specified body corporate or partnership to pay towards the cost of remedying relevant defects, where the tribunal considers it just and equitable. These can be made against landlords, former landlords, developers and associated persons, which is what makes them useful where the current landlord is a thinly capitalised vehicle.

These are tribunal applications rather than correspondence, and they take preparation. Where a building has stalled because nobody will fund the work, they are frequently the route that unlocks it.

How long do I have to bring a claim?

The Act extended the time limits for certain building safety claims, which matters if your building’s defects date back further than you might expect.

• For works on an existing dwelling, or breaches of building regulations, you generally have 15 years from the date the right to claim arose.
• For claims relating to the original construction of a dwelling, the period is 30 years if your right to claim existed before 28 June 2022, or 15 years if it arose after that date.
• If a 30-year period would otherwise have expired within a year of the law changing, you were given a one-year window from commencement to bring the claim.

These are the outer limits. If you think you may have a claim, it is worth getting advice promptly rather than waiting.

What has changed since the Act came into force?

The Act came into force in stages from 2022 to 2024, and the system it created has kept developing since. Two recent changes are worth knowing about.

A new regulator. From 27 January 2026, the Building Safety Regulator moved out of the Health and Safety Executive and became its own independent body, sponsored by the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government. Existing applications, inspections and enforcement cases transferred across automatically, so this should not affect any live case, but it means the regulator you deal with now has a new structure.

A new levy on developers. From 1 October 2026, a Building Safety Levy applies in England. This is paid by developers on new building control applications, not by leaseholders, and is expected to raise funds towards remediation costs over time.

How we can help

Our leasehold dispute solicitors advise leaseholders, resident management companies and right to manage companies on the leasehold consequences of the Building Safety Act. That includes:

• whether a service charge demand for building safety work is recoverable under the lease and under the Act
• challenging service charge demands at the First-tier Tribunal on recoverability, reasonableness and consultation
• applications for remediation orders and remediation contribution orders
• the duties that fall on an accountable person, and the consequences of not meeting them

We also act in related leasehold disputes, including lease extensions, leasehold enfranchisement, right to manage and breach of tenancy obligations.

Our work here is leasehold and service charge litigation. We do not handle personal injury or group claims arising from building safety defects.

Call us on 020 7485 8811 or fill in the contact form below to speak to one of our property dispute solicitors.