The Leaseholder Remediation Bill
When the tape measure stops working
Building safety law has developed an unhealthy attachment to the tape measure, argues Charlie Davidson of Bishop & Sewell
Is the building 11 metres high? Does it have five storeys? Does it fall inside the right statutory box, with the right lease, on the right date, supported by the right documents?
These questions matter. Height matters for fire safety, and definitions matter for lawyers. But they are a miserable place to begin when the person asking owns a flat in a defective building and wants to know whether they are about to be billed for somebody else’s failure.
The Leaseholder Remediation (Building Safety) Bill is not law. It may never become law. It is a House of Lords Private Member’s Bill, introduced by Baroness Pinnock, and it should not be confused with the government’s own Remediation Bill trailed in the King’s Speech. The government bill is the serious legislative vehicle. The Pinnock Bill has weaker prospects.
But weak prospects do not make it pointless. It matters because it says the quiet part loudly: if the leaseholder did not design the building, build it, specify the materials, omit the fire stopping, approve the works or lose the records in a cupboard marked ‘miscellaneous’, why are they being treated as the emergency credit facility?
The hard edges of the current regime
The Building Safety Act 2022 did a great deal. It created leaseholder protections, remediation orders and remediation contribution orders. It also gave the property world a new vocabulary of pain: relevant buildings, qualifying leases, relevant defects, landlord certificates and leaseholder certificates.
But the terrain still has cliffs. The building must generally be at least 11 metres high or have at least five storeys. The lease must qualify. The defect must fit. The paperwork must behave.
That is what happens when Parliament turns a moral crisis into statutory machinery. The machine needs switches and stops. The trouble is that people live inside the machine.
The Pinnock Bill attacks that structure with very little subtlety and a large stick. For its purposes, a relevant building would be any residential building in England and Wales containing one or more leasehold properties. No minimum height. No five-storey test. No sub-11 metre exile. Safety defects do not become fictional because a building is too short.
Height matters, but it should not decide blame
Of course, 11 metres and 18 metres were not invented by someone in Whitehall having a difficult afternoon – height has always mattered in fire safety. Taller buildings make escape harder, firefighting more complex and external intervention less straightforward.
The 18-metre line is the familiar high-rise marker in the Building Safety Act. The 11-metre line is more recent. Post-Grenfell, Approved Document B reduced the sprinkler trigger for new blocks of flats from 30 metres to 11 metres, and the Fire Safety (England) Regulations 2022 use 11 metres for additional fire-door checks. So, 11 metres is not random – it sits within a wider post-Grenfell structure. That is the logic. The problem is that logic and justice do not always shake hands.
Height is a sensible way to organise regulation. It is a rough way to organise blame. A leaseholder in a defective four-storey building is not comforted by being told that Parliament needed a threshold. They are still stuck with the defect. They still did not cause it.
Wider than cladding
The Bill uses the phrase ‘systemic defect’, and it casts the net widely. It includes unsafe cladding, but also missing or deficient fire stopping, fire breaks, unsafe balconies, structural deficiencies, compartmentation failures and defective services forming part of the common parts or building fabric.
In plain English: not just the dangerous shiny stuff on the outside, but also the hidden dangerous stuff inside.
Some of the worst building safety problems are not visible from the street. They sit behind walls, above ceilings, inside risers and in the places where construction records apparently go to die.
The bill would also cover defects arising from design, construction, conversion, extension, alteration, refurbishment or repair. For conveyancers, this is the uncomfortable bit – a technically clean title can still sit inside a commercially contaminated building.
The Pinnock Bill may never become law. It may be amended, absorbed, delayed or quietly buried…. But the instinct is right.
The service charge guillotine
The core proposal is brutal. If a remediation cost relates to a systemic defect, it could not be passed to a protected leaseholder by service charge, under the lease or otherwise. Any lease or contract term attempting to make the protected leaseholder liable would be void to that extent.
That is not a cap. It is not a contribution mechanism. It is not a statutory discount code for disaster. It is a guillotine. If the cost is caught, the demand dies.
The usual instinct in long leasehold is to reach for the service charge provisions and ask whether the lease is wide enough. This Bill changes the first question. The issue becomes whether the law permits the demand at all.
Follow the wrongdoer
The bill would make responsible persons jointly and severally liable for remediation costs. That includes developers, building owners at the time of the relevant works, contractors, and manufacturers or suppliers whose components or materials constitute or contribute to the defect.
The current building owner could also be liable unless it can show that it did not know about the defect, could not reasonably have discovered it at acquisition, and has taken reasonable steps to identify and pursue those responsible.
That is due diligence with teeth. A freeholder or investor landlord may not be able to shrug and say it did not build the thing. Buying the income stream may mean buying the problem. No fixing the old mess. No building the new one.
The instinct is right
The Pinnock Bill may never become law. It may be amended, absorbed, delayed or quietly buried. Implementation would be difficult, expensive and messy. But the instinct is right.
Building safety law has spent too long asking how much of the mess can be pushed through the service charge. The better question is who created the mess in the first place.
The existing regime has helped many leaseholders, but it still contains thresholds and categories that produce hard edges. The Pinnock Bill attacks those hard edges because it starts from responsibility rather than recoverability.
Height still matters for regulation, risk and fire safety. It should not have a monopoly on justice.
The verdict is simple: if the building is wrong, the bill should follow the wrongdoer.