Building Remediation Bill: An attempt to improve the BSA?

The Government has published the Building Safety (Remediation of Unsafe Cladding etc) Bill (Building Remediation Bill) and its corresponding guide. The Building Remediation Bill was introduced to Parliament on 14 October 2026.

There is plenty of detail to work through and we will be providing more thoughts as we do so. In the meantime, the Government’s guide gives us a good indication of where the reforms are heading.

There are some significant changes proposed, most of which seem to be aimed at sorting the wrinkles and issues in the rushed drafting which produced the Building Safety Act 2022 (BSA).

Here are a few of the points that particularly caught our attention.

No limitation period for ROs, RCOs or BLOs.  

Perhaps one of the most striking proposals is that the Limitation Act 1980 will not apply to Remediation Orders (ROs), Remediation Contribution Orders (RCOs) or Building Liability Orders (BLOs).

If enacted as proposed, this should resolve much of the uncertainty that has surrounded the limitation position for these relatively new statutory remedies. In particular, it appears intended to remove arguments over whether an application is subject to an independent six-year limitation period as an action founded on a statutory obligation, or whether the availability of relief is tied in some way to the limitation period applicable to the underlying liability. In practical terms, this would make these claims much more straightforward to advance (given many of them concern legacy projects where limitation is always waiting in the wings).

This is a bold move. Limitation periods are a well-established feature of civil claims and serve an important purpose in providing finality and protecting defendants against claims brought after evidence has been lost or memories have faded. While limitation periods can, of course, be extended or postponed in certain circumstances, expressly taking ROs, RCOs and BLOs outside the Limitation Act altogether is a significant step.

That does not mean that historic claims could be pursued entirely without constraint. Depending on the final wording of the Bill, issues such as fairness, the availability of evidence and prejudice caused by the passage of time may still be relevant to the court or tribunal's exercise of its discretion, particularly where the statutory test requires it to consider whether making an order would be “just and equitable”.

Construction product manufacturers: reform of s149 BSA

The provision of the BSA which allows claims against product manufacturers (section 149) is to be tightened up as it has, as the Government admits, “not worked as intended”. It is “too complex, difficult to evidence and too easily allows liability to be avoided in practice.” The Bill will make various provisions including:

• a. A broader basis of liability
  • Liability will turn on whether a product was unsafe or whether there was misleading conduct, rather than narrow technical compliance arguments about defectiveness.
• b. A simplified causation test
  • It will be enough to show that a product made more than a trivial contribution to a building being unsafe.  This appears intended to reduce the evidential burden on claimants where several products, design decisions or workmanship issues contributed to the overall condition of the external wall system. 
• c.    A wider class of claimants
  • The Bill would extend the categories of persons entitled to bring a section 149 claim. This would include developers and others who have funded remediation, enabling them to pursue manufacturers directly.

The Government expressly states that the Bill is intended to make claims against manufacturers of unsafe construction products easier and to expand the pool of potential claimants, including developers who have themselves incurred remediation liabilities and costs. Given the myriad defences being advanced in response to claims brought under section 149 BSA, these amendments will undoubtedly make these claims easier to pursue and harder to defend.

The Remediation Backstop

The Bill makes it clear where remediation costs have to land when there is nowhere else for them to go, attempting to deal with the issue of “orphaned buildings” and ensuring they are made safe. Where a responsible party has failed to carry out the required works, a local authority or Homes England, acting as a remediation authority, could step in to undertake the remediation.

Before doing so, the remediation authority would be required to serve a remediation notice on the duty-holder. If the works remained outstanding and the authority decided to activate the backstop, it would need to apply to the First-tier Tribunal for a Remediation Management Order.  The Government describes this as a mechanism through which a tribunal may permit a relevant authority to take control of remediation works and recover the associated costs from the responsible party.

The Bill also proposes to give the existing remediation regime some more teeth, including civil financial penalties of up to £500,000 for landlords who fail to comply with a Remediation Order. This is a significant potential sanction aimed, presumably, at those for whom exclusion from the industry by a Prohibition Order is not enough punishment.

Register of medium-rise buildings

The Bill will give the Secretary of State the power to create a register of occupied ‘medium-rise buildings’ (MRBs) in England. MRBs will be residential buildings with 2 or more dwellings, that are between 11 and 18 metres tall, or which have at least 5 storeys but fewer than 7. It is as yet unclear as to what duties will flow from that, including who will be responsible for registration of the MRBs and the consequences of failing to register or providing incomplete information, but it would be odd to maintain a register without a corresponding set of duties, dutyholders, and a regulator (presumably the Building Safety Regulator).

Conclusion

This additional raft of proposed regulation will need detailed analysis once more information is available, but our initial view is that the Building Safety Remediation Bill seeks to paper over the cracks that have appeared in some of the drafting in the BSA. We will issue further updates following our review of the Bill and its Explanatory Notes.