The Remediation Bill: What It Really Changes, and What It Doesn't

The King’s Speech 2026 gave it one sentence. One hundred and twenty-four characters. “My Government will bring forward a Bill to speed up remediation for people living in homes with unsafe cladding.”

That brevity is misleading. Behind it sits a substantial new addition to the building safety legislative programme that has run since Grenfell. In places it goes further than its predecessors. In others, it leaves some of the most pressing issues exactly where they were.

The Remediation Bill deserves a closer read than the headlines have given it.

A Bill in a Sequence, Not a Reset

It is worth being clear about what the Remediation Bill is, and what it is not.

It’s not the first piece of major building safety legislation in recent years. Rather, it sits in a sequence that includes the Fire Safety Act 2021, the Building Safety Act 2022, the Higher-Risk Buildings (Descriptions and Supplementary Provisions) Regulations 2023, and the Leasehold and Freehold Reform Act 2024. Each has incrementally extended the duties, the protections, and the regulatory architecture around building safety in England.

The Remediation Bill is the latest addition to that programme — and, on the basis of the government briefing papers published alongside the King’s Speech, an important one. But it is not the moment the building safety picture becomes settled. Anyone reading the headlines and assuming otherwise should read the supporting papers instead.

What the Bill, as Announced, Changes

Strip away the political language and the briefing papers point to three structural failures the government has acknowledged.

A statutory duty to remediate unsafe cladding. For the first time, landlords of in-scope buildings would carry a statutory obligation to identify, assess and remediate unsafe cladding — not an incentive, not a moral pressure, not a funding eligibility criterion. A duty. Breach it without good reason and the consequences, as announced, include unlimited fines and, in the most serious cases, imprisonment.

Specific enforcement powers for cladding remediation. The Building Safety Regulator already holds substantial enforcement powers under the Building Safety Act 2022, but those powers are broadest in relation to higher-risk buildings and their wider safety case regime. The new Bill, as announced, would give the BSR specific powers to compel cladding remediation across a wider scope of buildings, with backstop powers for Homes England and local authorities to step into stalled projects, complete the works and bill the freeholder. Legal analysis published by Pinsent Masons notes that cost recovery extends, in the most serious cases, to the sale of the building owner’s interest.

A consistent assessment method, set in law. This is the provision that has been least reported and, in my view, matters most. The Bill is expected to mandate a nationally consistent methodology for external wall assessment. The wild-west period of the early EWS1 years — where assessors disagreed on scope, on testing, on conclusions, and where managing agents and lenders were left to arbitrate between conflicting reports — is being legislated out of existence.

For those of us who have spent years arguing that fire safety assessment must be evidence-led, proportionate and defensible — and grounded in the methodology of PAS 9980:2022 — this provision is, quietly, a vindication.

The New Economics

Less noticed but equally important: the Bill, as proposed, simplifies the route by which freeholders, developers and contractors can recover costs from the construction product manufacturers whose materials caused the problem.

The construction products civil liability regime created under section 148 of the Building Safety Act 2022 already exists in statute. In practice, however, it has been hampered by what the government’s own briefing papers describe as “technical legal barriers”. The new Bill aims to remove them.

This changes the calculus for any landlord still hesitating. Building owners who act early — commissioning the assessment, mobilising the works — can increasingly recover those costs downstream. The cost of waiting cannot. Delay forfeits the recovery route and, under the new regime, exposes the freeholder to the new sanctions.

It is, perhaps for the first time, cheaper to act than to wait.

What the Bill Does Not Change

It would be dishonest to read the Bill as the end of the building safety issue. Four significant gaps remain.

Buildings under 11 metres. The statutory deadlines, as announced, apply to buildings above 11m. Buildings below that height — some of which still carry combustible cladding, balcony defects or compartmentation issues — sit outside the new duty regime. They continue to fall under the Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005 and existing common law, neither of which carries the new Bill’s hard deadlines or financial penalties.

Non-cladding fire safety defects. The Bill, as announced, is framed around external wall cladding. Defective fire doors, missing cavity barriers, broken compartmentation, and the wider universe of fire safety defects in internal construction sit outside its scope. They continue to be governed by the RRO 2005 and the wider Building Safety Act 2022 regime. A building can comply fully with the new cladding duty and still be fundamentally unsafe.

Structural defects. The Bill addresses cladding. It does not address the structural concerns now sitting with building owners, accountable persons and duty-holders — Reinforced Autoclaved Aerated Concrete (RAAC) in buildings constructed between the 1950s and 1990s, post-tensioned slabs and transfer structure condition reviews, and the wider question of how structural defects in modern high-rise stock are identified, assessed and remediated. These remain governed by the Building Regulations, the Building Safety Act 2022 building safety case regime where applicable, the duty-holder’s obligations under common law, and — for RAAC specifically — the Health and Safety Executive’s published guidance and IStructE technical assessment standards.

Leaseholders outside the qualifying regime. The leaseholder protections under Schedule 8 of the Building Safety Act 2022 continue to apply. The new Bill, as announced, does not extend them. Leaseholders without a qualifying lease (BSA 2022 s.119), or those facing matters outside the “relevant defect” scope (s.120), remain in the same patchwork they were navigating before. Campaign groups, including End Our Cladding Scandal, have been clear that this is a gap the Bill should have closed and did not.

What This Means for Building Owners Now

Three things, in order of urgency.

Assume the deadlines start counting today. End of 2029 sounds distant. It is not. A typical assessment-to-completion critical path — survey, strategy, procurement, works, sign-off — for an 18m+ building runs into multiple years even when well-managed. Building owners without an active assessment programme by the end of 2026 are already at the back of the queue.

Use the consistency clause to your advantage. Commissioning an assessment that already follows the methodology the statute is expected to codify — an evidence-led Fire Risk Appraisal of External Walls (FRAEW) to PAS 9980:2022, with a clear scope and a defensible conclusion — means you should not need to redo work when the regulations land. Commissioning a cheaper, less rigorous report now risks costing you twice.

Treat manufacturer cost-recovery as a programme, not an afterthought. The clarified statutory route under the new Bill is a meaningful financial lever, but only for landlords whose assessment, procurement and works records support it. Build the evidence trail from the first survey onwards.

The DALA View

We have argued, consistently, that building safety would not be resolved by deadlines alone. Method will resolve it — evidence-led assessment, qualified assessors working to consistent standards, and remediation programmes designed around actual risk rather than the political pressure of the day.

The Remediation Bill, for all its limits, is the clearest acknowledgement to date that methodology and accountability — not just funding and timelines — are part of the answer. That is worth saying clearly, even while we hold the government to account on what it has not yet done.

Detailed pieces from our specialist teams will accompany this article and will be released over the coming weeks.

The Remediation Bill: What It Really Changes, and What It Doesn’t