No height threshold, no easy service charge escape route, and no hiding behind the managing agent’s PDF.
There is a particular kind of legal answer that is both technically correct and immediately annoying. In building safety, it often arrives holding a tape measure. The building is measured, storeys counted, lease is interrogated, and the certificates are examined. The leaseholder, who did not design the building, build the building, specify the materials, sign off the works or lose the historic fire-stopping records in a cupboard marked “miscellaneous”, is then told that their position may depend on whether the building is 11 metres high.
That may be law. It is not always justice.
The Leaseholder Remediation (Building Safety) Bill is a direct challenge to that way of thinking. It is not law. As at 29 June 2026, it is a House of Lords Private Member’s Bill, introduced by The Baroness Pinnock, with first reading having taken place on 9 June 2026 and second reading not yet scheduled. That matters. Private Members’ Bills, especially those starting in the Lords, do not glide effortlessly onto the statute book. They are more often found later in the parliamentary long grass, slightly damp, while still wearing good intentions.
But this Bill should not be dismissed merely because its prospects are uncertain. Sometimes the importance of a Bill is not that it will become law in precisely the form introduced.
Sometimes its importance is that it says the quiet part loudly. This one does. It looks at the current building safety regime, with its thresholds, categories, certificates, caps and exceptions, and proposes a much blunter idea: if a residential leasehold building has a serious systemic defect, and the leaseholder did not cause it, the leaseholder should not be the person funding the clean-up.
That is the growl at the heart of the Bill. It is an attempt to move building safety away from service charge recovery and towards responsibility enforcement.
The current regime has helped, but it has hard edges
The Building Safety Act 2022 did a great deal (understatement, I know…). It created leaseholder protections. It introduced remediation orders and remediation contribution orders. It forced lawyers, landlords, developers, lenders and managing agents to learn a new vocabulary of “relevant buildings”, “qualifying leases”, “relevant defects”, “landlord certificates” and “leaseholder certificates”. Nobody can sensibly say the Act did nothing. It changed the terrain. But the terrain is not always kind to the person standing on it.
The current leaseholder protection regime depends heavily on statutory gateways. For many purposes, the building must be at least 11 metres high or have at least five storeys. It must contain at least two dwellings. It must not be leaseholder-owned in the relevant sense (though why this does not apply to a head-leasehold has always baffled me). The landlord’s status, the leaseholder’s position, the property value and the nature of the remediation can all matter.
That is what happens when Parliament tries to turn a moral crisis into a statutory machine. The machine has to have parts and switches. It has to have start and stop points. The difficulty is that people live inside the machine.
The Bill takes aim at those hard edges. It does not merely ask whether the existing framework might be widened politely. It appears to say that the framework has become too clever by half. The present regime often starts with the building’s height. The Bill starts with the defect and the people responsible for it.
The end of “just too short”
The most striking proposal is the removal of the height threshold for the Bill’s core cost protection. Under the Bill, a relevant building would be any residential building in England or Wales containing one or more leasehold properties. No minimum height. No five-storey test. No sub-11 metre exile. No building safety version of being turned away from a nightclub for wearing the wrong shoes.
That is a major shift. It would bring smaller blocks, converted buildings, awkward mixed-use arrangements and the less photogenic corners of the leasehold world into the conversation. It recognises something obvious to anyone who has acted for leaseholders in distressed buildings: safety defects do not become imaginary because the building is too short to satisfy the current statutory threshold.
This is where the Bill has political force. The current regime can produce results that are explicable in law but difficult to defend at a human level. A leaseholder in a defective four-storey building does not feel greatly comforted by being told that Parliament had to draw a line somewhere. They are still trapped in a defective building. They still did not cause the problem. They may still face a service charge demand, a failed sale, a nervous lender, increased insurance or years of uncertainty while various parties exchange letters with the enthusiasm of Victorian generals moving troops across a map.
The Bill’s answer is blunt. Stop making the leaseholder the emergency credit facility.
“Systemic defect” means more than cladding
The Bill does not confine itself to cladding. That is important, because public debate still tends to treat building safety as if it begins and ends with the external wall. Cladding remains central, for obvious reasons, but it is only part of the story.
The Bill uses the phrase “systemic defect”, and the definition is broad. It includes unsafe cladding systems, but also deficient or installations forming part of the common parts or building fabric.
That matters because some of the most serious building safety problems are not visible from the pavement. They sit behind walls, above ceilings and in places where the original records have apparently gone to live with Lord Lucan. A building can look perfectly respectable from the outside while behaving, legally and physically, like an argument waiting to happen.
The Bill would also cover defects arising from design, construction, conversion, alteration, or refurbishment. This is not simply a new-build cladding Bill in a different coat. It potentially reaches conversions, refurbishments, later works and historic decisions that have been quietly ageing inside buildings while everyone argued about the reserve fund.
For conveyancers, that is the bit to underline. A defect does not need to be photogenic to be serious. A management pack that says very little may be concealing quite a lot. An EWS1 form may not answer the right question. A technically clean title can still sit inside a commercially contaminated building.
The burden shifts away from the leaseholder
One of the most significant parts of the Bill is its proposed evidential shift. The burden would not sit on the leaseholder to prove that the defect falls within the regime. The building owner or responsible person would have to demonstrate that it does not. That is not a small procedural flourish.
The leaseholder usually does not have the design files, the tender documents, the product specifications, or the internal emails where someone decided that a cheaper option would be “fine”. The leaseholder usually has a flat, a mortgage, a service charge account and a managing agent’s letter written in that peculiar dialect where every sentence appears calm and none of them explains anything useful.
The Bill recognises that imbalance. It does not ask the leaseholder to conduct forensic archaeology with a plastic spoon. It places the explanatory burden closer to the people who own, manage, built, supplied or controlled the relevant parts of the building.
That is one of the Bill’s more attractive instincts. Information asymmetry has been one of the quiet scandals of the building safety crisis. Too often, leaseholders are told enough to worry but not enough to understand.
The service charge guillotine
The heart of the Bill is the proposed prohibition on passing remediation costs to protected leaseholders. If a remediation cost relates to a systemic defect in a relevant building, 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, nor is it 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 then work out whether the lease is wide enough. The Bill would change the first question. The issue would not be whether the leaseholder covenanted to pay. The issue would be whether the law permits the demand to be made at all. That is a much less comfortable question for the person issuing the invoice.
“We did not build it” may not save the current owner
The Bill would make responsible persons jointly and severally liable for remediation costs. That category would include developers, building owners at the time of the relevant works, contractors who carried out the works, and manufacturers or suppliers of components or materials that constitute or contribute to the systemic defect.
The current building owner could also be liable unless it can show that it had no knowledge of the defect, could not reasonably have discovered it at acquisition, and has taken all reasonable steps to identify and pursue those responsible.
A freeholder or investor landlord may not be able to shrug and say that it did not build the thing. Buying the income stream may mean buying the problem. Those acquiring freehold reversions, mixed-use blocks, residential portfolios or development companies would need to treat historic building safety risk as a live acquisition issue, not background noise to be swept into a general warranty schedule and forgotten until the first angry leaseholder meeting.
The Bill appears to make knowledge and reasonable discoverability central. That should make purchasers, funders and their lawyers nervous in the correct way. It is not just what the current owner knew. It is what it ought to have found out.
Developers would have a planning problem
The Bill’s most commercially aggressive proposal is the restriction on new development by non-compliant developers. A developer responsible for an unremediated systemic defect would not be able to commence, continue or complete new residential development, or apply for planning permission for new residential development, until the defect is remediated. Planning authorities would be required not to grant permission where the prohibition applies.
That is more than liability, It is a choke chain.
The Bill would turn historic building safety failure into a live development risk. A developer would not merely face a claim about an old building. It could face interference with tomorrow’s pipeline. For a business built on development cycles, planning permissions, funding timetables and forward sales, that is not a gentle nudge. It is a boot on the windpipe.
There is already a policy flavour of this in the Responsible Actors Scheme, where eligible developers who do not join and comply can face planning and building control prohibitions. The Bill would push the principle further. The message is plain enough: no fixing the old mess, no building the new one.
Developers, funders and purchasers of development businesses would therefore need to look at historic building safety exposure as something capable of affecting future activity. That has obvious force as policy. It also has obvious potential to create difficult disputes about responsibility, causation, corporate structure, connected parties and whether a developer is being punished for a problem it genuinely did not control.
(Nobody said the Hound had to be cheerful about implementation…)
Manufacturers are dragged closer to the fire
The Bill also creates a route for developers or responsible persons who have paid remediation costs to claim against manufacturers or suppliers where defective products contributed to the systemic defect. Again, the direction of travel is clear. The cost should move away from leaseholders and towards the development, construction and supply chain.
That may be morally satisfying, but it will not be simple. Historic product records may be incomplete. Some manufacturers may be overseas. Buildings may contain multiple defects caused by multiple parties across multiple phases of work.
Still, the policy point is important. The leaseholder is to be removed from the centre of the cost recovery exercise. Everyone else can fight in the car park.
Information rights may be the quiet prize
The Bill would give protected leaseholders a statutory right to remediation information. That could include fire and structural safety assessments, BSR correspondence, warranty and insurance documents, the identity of responsible persons, and the remediation programme and timetable. The building owner would have 28 days.
This may be one of the most useful parts of the Bill.
Leaseholders are often trapped in fog. They are told there is a problem, but not always what the problem is. They are told works are required, but not always when. They are told costs may be significant, but not always why. They are told matters are “ongoing”, which is managing-agent code for “please stop asking before the next AGM becomes legally interesting”.
A flat can become hard to sell, hard to mortgage and hard to insure while the leaseholder is still waiting for someone to explain what is actually wrong with the building. A right to information does not fix the building, but it does turn the lights on. In a crisis that has often thrived on opacity, that is not a minor thing.
The harm is bigger than the works
The Bill also looks beyond the remediation invoice. Protected leaseholders would be able to bring claims for losses arising from systemic defects. Those losses could include increased insurance premiums, interim safety measures, mortgage or remortgage costs attributable to the defect, and diminution in value.
That matters because building safety defects do not only produce one bill. They produce a cloud. There is the failed sale. The nervous lender. The insurance hike. The waking watch. The trapped equity. The buyer who disappears after one conversation with their broker. The years spent owning an asset that behaves less like a home and more like an unresolved litigation exhibit.
The Bill appears to recognise that the financial damage spreads. That will please leaseholders. It will not please anyone hoping to keep the argument neatly confined to the cost of physical works.
Conveyancers cannot treat this as someone else’s problem
This is not just a litigation story. It is a conveyancing story (otherwise why would I be writing about it?!)
If the Bill progresses, due diligence on affected buildings will need to become sharper and less deferential. The conveyancer will need to look beyond the comfort blanket of an EWS1 form and ask what is actually happening in the building. Known systemic defects, BSR correspondence, remediation notices, information requests, historic service charge demands, repayment risk, claims against developers or manufacturers, exposure of the current building owner, impact on insurance, mortgageability and resale — all of that becomes part of the risk picture.
The awkward part is that a buyer may not want a long lecture on statutory uncertainty. They want to know whether they can buy the flat. The answer may be that title is technically fine, the lease is perfectly normal, the replies are thin, the building has an unresolved defect, the law is moving, the lender may be nervous, the service charge position is uncertain and the freeholder’s update letter has the nutritional value of tissue paper.
That is the part clients do not always want to hear. It is also the part they pay us to notice.
The awkward bit
The Bill is bold. It is also heavy machinery.
It creates wider protections, wider liability, wider enforcement powers, wider information rights and wider compensation routes. That may be morally attractive, but it requires a system capable of delivering it. The BSR would need resources. The Tribunal would need capacity. Building owners would need records. Developers would need to face historic exposure. Contractors and manufacturers would lawyer up. Leaseholders would still need the actual works done.
This is the recurring danger in building safety law. The statute book gets thicker. The scaffolding still does not arrive.
There is also a risk of unintended consequences. Building owners could be swamped with information requests. Developers could face pipeline paralysis. Litigation could multiply. Funders could become nervous. Transactions could slow. Leaseholders could win better rights and still spend years waiting for dust sheets and competent contractors.
None of that defeats the Bill’s basic point. It simply means the point has to be delivered through machinery that works. Good intentions are not enough. In building safety, they have a bad habit of being turned into another portal, another certificate and another letter saying that further updates will follow in due course
The Hound’s view
The Leaseholder Remediation Bill is not law, and it may never become law. It may be amended, absorbed into Government legislation, delayed or quietly buried. But I don’t think it should be ignored.
It captures a certain mood, and the direction of travel seems to be away from asking how much of the mess can be pushed through the service charge, and towards asking who created the mess in the first place.
The existing regime has helped many leaseholders, but it still contains thresholds, categories and eligibility traps that can produce very hard edges. The Bill attacks those hard edges with very little subtlety and a very large stick. Some of it may be too much, and some of it may never survive scrutiny. Some of it may terrify exactly the people it is designed to chase.
But the basic proposition is difficult to resist.
Building safety law should not begin with a tape measure. It should begin with responsibility. Height still matters for regulation, risk and fire safety. It should not have a monopoly on justice.
The Hound’s verdict: if the building is wrong, the bill should follow the wrongdoer.
Need help?
This article is intended as general commentary only. It is not legal advice. The law and Bill position stated above are accurate as at 29 June 2026, but building safety, leasehold and conveyancing issues are highly fact-specific. The correct answer will depend on the building, its height, use, structure, fire-safety history, the nature of any defect, the lease terms, the ownership structure, any landlord or leaseholder certificates, the service charge demands, the remediation history, the available technical reports and the documents disclosed by the freeholder, managing agent or responsible person.
The Leaseholder Remediation (Building Safety) Bill is not currently law. It may be amended, delayed or not enacted at all. It should not be relied on as changing the present legal position unless and until it progresses through Parliament and comes into force.
If you are buying, selling, lending against, managing or advising on a flat in a building with possible fire-safety, structural or remediation issues, take proper advice before relying on assumption, a short management-pack reply, or the comforting phrase “we are not aware of any issue”.
Contact our Residential Property team
For more information about Bishop & Sewell’s residential property services please contact Charlie Davidson Senior Associate in the firm’s Residential Property team: cdavidson@bishopandsewell.co.uk or follow Charlie on LinkedIn.
