Three years after the Building Safety Act received Royal Assent, one question still doesn’t have a good answer: why do hotels, student accommodation blocks and hospitals sit outside its protection, when their occupants often face equal or greater risk than residents in a qualifying residential building?
Who the Building Safety Act Protects, and Who It Misses
The higher-risk building regime covers residential buildings of 18 metres or more. The Act defines “residential” narrowly: buildings containing flats, where people live permanently, pay service charges, and depend on a freeholder or managing agent to keep them safe.
That definition excludes hotels. It excludes purpose-built student accommodation, a sector that now houses hundreds of thousands of students across the UK. It excludes NHS and private hospitals too, many of which carry the same HPL and ACM cladding systems that triggered the post-Grenfell regulatory response in the first place.
Each building type falls back on its own regime. Hotels and hospitals operate under the RRO 2005, relying on operator-led fire risk assessments. Student accommodation follows a similar path, with some additional obligations under housing legislation.
None of them carry a safety case obligation. They don’t require registration with the Building Safety Regulator. Nor do they trigger the Principal Accountable Person duty, mandatory occurrence reporting, or the external wall assessment framework the Act built for residential buildings.
The Vulnerability Argument
Government justified the Act’s residential focus by pointing to barriers permanent residents face: they can’t easily move, can’t easily challenge a landlord, and depend on others to manage risk on their behalf. That reasoning holds inside the residential sector. It breaks down once you look at who actually occupies the buildings the Act leaves out.
Take student accommodation. Purpose-built blocks routinely exceed 18 metres, and developers built many of them during the 2000s and 2010s, when cladding choices prioritised cost and appearance over fire performance. Their occupants are mostly 18 to 21 year olds, often living away from home for the first time, in buildings they barely understand. Add a well-documented drinking culture into the mix, and you get elevated risk at night, reduced awareness in the small hours, and evacuation behaviour no fire strategy can reliably predict. Nobody could credibly argue a student living in a PBSA tower manages fire risk better than a leaseholder next door.
Hospitals make the case even harder to ignore. NHS and private hospital buildings constructed or refurbished between 1990 and 2015 frequently carry HPL or ACM systems that operators chose for appearance and ease of maintenance, not fire safety. At any given moment, their occupants include sedated patients, people who can’t move unaided, and people in intensive care. Evacuating a hospital during a fire isn’t a managed walk to a muster point, it’s one of the most complex emergency scenarios a fire service can face. Yet the external walls of these buildings carry no FRAEW obligation, no PAP accountability, and no BSR oversight.
Why the Drafters Drew the Line Where They Did
The exclusion wasn’t an oversight. The Act builds its entire architecture around the Principal Accountable Person: an entity with a legal interest in the building that carries the safety case obligation. That concept maps neatly onto the leasehold structure of residential blocks, where a freeholder or head leaseholder holds both the legal interest and the ongoing relationship with residents.
Hotels, student accommodation and hospitals typically sit under single freehold ownership, with one operator managing the whole building. Government assumed a well-run operator already carries equivalent safety obligations under existing fire safety and sector-specific frameworks.
That assumption isn’t wrong for every operator; some run exemplary buildings. But the Act’s real power comes from its enforcement architecture, not from the existence of a regime on paper. The BSR, the safety case requirement, mandatory occurrence reporting, the registration duty, none of it reaches buildings outside scope, regardless of how well or badly an operator runs them. A framework that depends on operator goodwill rather than regulatory accountability isn’t a safety regime. It’s an aspiration.
The Question the Sector Needs to Ask
None of this argues the Act got its priorities wrong. Residential remediation alone represents an enormous challenge, and the regulatory infrastructure to manage a wider scope didn’t exist when the Act commenced. But the current boundary should mark a starting point, not a resting point.
Students living in a 22-storey HPL-clad block deserve the same external wall assessment, the same management accountability and the same regulatory oversight as residents next door. A patient on a ward surrounded by unverified cladding deserves better protection than a fire risk assessment framework built for buildings where everyone can walk out unaided.
Dame Judith Hackitt envisaged a risk-based regulatory regime, one that follows the risk rather than the tenure model. Hotels, student accommodation and hospitals represent a significant cohort of higher-risk buildings that current legislation still leaves outside its most rigorous protections.
That position won’t hold indefinitely. When the conversation about scope extension begins in earnest, and it will, organisations that already operate to the Act’s standard will find themselves well placed. Those that treated their exclusion as a permanent exemption won’t.
The risk doesn’t stop at the boundary of the legislation. The legislation needs to catch up with the risk.
This article is written by Dorian Lawrence, Chairman of The DALA Group. It draws on The DALA Group’s white paper, The Buildings We Left Behind: Why Hotels, Student Accommodation and Hospitals Fall Outside the Building Safety Act, which sets out the full regulatory analysis. Tap here to read it in full: The Buildings We Left Behind Why Hotels, Student Accommodation and Hospitals Fall Outside the Building Safety Act (DALA White Paper).
