Building Safety Act

The Building Safety Bill received Royal Assent on the 28 April 2022 and is now an Act of Parliament. The Building Safety Act reforms building safety by improving building standards, introducing a new building safety regulator and, critically, giving residents a greater voice.  

Key points of the Act include:

• A National Regulator of Construction Products will be established.

• Gives powers for the establishment of a New Homes Ombudsman Scheme which will be mandatory (for a time period to be specified later). 

• Includes measures to protect leaseholders (and some landlords) from costs related to cladding remediation. 

• Gives leaseholders the power to make retrospective claims for building safety defects going back 30 years or 15 years for new works. 

• Grants the power for the introduction of secondary legislation to implement new building safety standards. Draft proposals for new regulations can be found here. 

• Establishes a Building Safety Regulator within the Health and Safety Executive which will be responsible for enforcing regulations for high-rise buildings, within the scope of the Bill. 

• Gives the Government powers to prevent companies building out homes or receiving building control approval. This is to be used as an enforcement mechanism for developers who do not cooperate with the government on funding building safety remediation. 

• The plans for a mandated “Fire Safety Manager” have been scrapped.

• Implementation of a “Golden Thread” where developers will be required to provide data on buildings and their safety specifications to the Building Safety Regulator. 

Some of the measures will take around 18 months to be implemented as secondary legislation needs to be introduced. A full (but approximate) timeline for implementation can be found here.

Mary Gibbons, Moat’s Chief Executive, said: “This is an important milestone in the journey to ensuring that people across the country live in safe homes. While many provisions will not come into effect immediately, we are working with our contractors, partners, and customers to make sure all the buildings we own and manage are safe. We are in the final stages of completing fire safety remediation works at one of the buildings we own and manage, and work is also underway on two additional high-rise buildings we own.”