Robert Jenrick

The Building Safety Bill, to be published today, will create a clear pathway for how residential buildings should be constructed and maintained.

It will propose an extensive overhaul to building safety legislation to give residents more power to hold builders and developers to account where there are issues of safety.

A new Building Safety Regulator will oversee the new regime and will be responsible for ensuring that any building safety risks in new and existing high-rise residential buildings of 18 metres and above are effectively managed and resolved, taking cost into account.

The new regime will set specific checkpoints to ensure that safety is considered at every stage of a building’s construction and that safety risks are considered from the planning stages.

Pressure for such legislation has been increasingly felt following the Grenfell Tower tragedy of 2017 which exposed that thousands of people were living in potentially unsafe buildings as a result of cost cutting cladding solutions.

The new bill also follows Dame Judith Hackitt’s review of building regulations and fire safety, which highlighted a need for significant cultural and regulatory change.

Announcing the bill, housing secretary Robert Jenrick said: “This bill will ensure high standards of safety for people’s homes, and in particular for high rise buildings, with a new regulator providing essential oversight at every stage of a building’s lifecycle, from design, construction, completion to occupation.

“The new building safety regime will be a proportionate one, ensuring those buildings requiring remediation are brought to an acceptable standard of safety swiftly, and reassuring the vast majority of residents and leaseholders in those buildings that their homes are safe.”

Under the proposals, the government is more than doubling the amount of time, from six to 15 years, that residents can seek compensation for substandard construction work.

The changes will also apply retrospectively and means that residents of a building completed in 2010 would be able to bring proceedings against the developer until 2025.

The government has also announced a £5 billion investment into building safety, which will include paying for dangerous cladding to be stripped from residential apartment blocks.

The bill also contains measures to protect leaseholders by providing a legal requirement for building owners to explore alternative ways to meet remediation costs before passing these onto the leaseholders.

The proposals have faced some criticism though, as shadow housing secretary Lucy Powell said the extension of the deadline to bring legal action will “bring little relief to [those] trapped in unsellable, unmortgageable homes, as those already in the scope of the deadline have found barriers to mount legal action too high and costly, and outcomes ineffective.

“Rather than doing the bare minimum and washing their hands of the problem, the government needs to establish a building works agency to assess, fix, find and certify every building. Leaseholders should be legally protected from costs, and the agency should then take over the rights to pursue developers themselves.”