Building Safety Act 2022

The Building Safety Act 2022 sets out safety requirements for landlords of higher-risk buildings.

Higher-risk buildings are:

at least 18m or 7 storeys high,
with 2 or more residential units.

The safety rules cover the different stages of building:

design stage
planning stage
construction stage
whilst tenants and leaseholders live in a building

When did the Building Safety Act become law?

The Building Safety Bill became legislation known as the Building Safety Act 2022. It received Royal Assent on the 28^th April 2022.

Full implementation of the Building Safety Act is October 2023, which means each building owner should have their building safety regime in place by this time.

Tenants and leaseholders

The Act outlines what tenants and leaseholders must do around:

personal building safety responsibilities for your home and communal areas,
ongoing building safety costs (payable by leaseholders who have leases for at least 7 years.)

Tenants and leaseholders in higher-risk blocks will receive a resident engagement strategy.

The Act has also introduced protections for qualifying leaseholders.

This includes:

Not paying towards the cost of removing dangerous cladding on buildings.
Capping the amount that leaseholders will contribute to the cost of fixing non-cladding defects on buildings.

Building Safety Related Complaints

If you are a tenant or leaseholder living in a higher-risk council-owned building and have a building safety-related concern and is dissatisfied with how the council has addressed it, you have the option to raise the concern as a building safety complaint.

More information can be found here on this page.

If you live in a private building managed by a housing association or private building owner, you can find more information regarding how you can make a building safety related complaint on your landlord's website.

Landlords

A new Building Safety Regulator will be set up to oversee building owners of higher-risk buildings are carrying out their building safety responsibilities. These are laid out in the Building Safety Act 2022.

This regulator will be run by the Health and Safety Executive (HSE).

Download the landlord or building owner's responsibilities under the Act.

New Homes Ombudsman

The Act has created a New Homes Ombudsman. They will help with disputes that new homeowners may have with their building’s developers.