In April, the Building Safety Act came into force. It has been described in some quarters as the biggest piece of legislation to affect construction since the Second World War. Introduced in response to the 2017 Grenfell Tower blaze, it dramatically increases the scope of potential liability for defective buildings.
It is fair to say that, at the end of the year, the contracting industry is still getting to grips with the full implications of the act and how best to respond to its strictures. Lawyers are certainly not short of work interpreting the dozens of pages of secondary legislation accompanying it – much of which did not drop until August.
The act’s provisions relating to approvals for higher-risk buildings (HRBs) came into effect on 1 October 2023. These fundamentally alter the building-control process for residential buildings above 18 metres in height, with potentially significant ramifications for those working in this sector. The new regime prohibits work from starting on site without the new Building Safety Regulator signalling its satisfaction.
Meanwhile, the financial impact of making buildings safe continued to reverberate around the sector this year. Tier one contractors with exposure to buildings clad with unsafe materials set aside tens of millions of pounds during 2023 to deal with the issue.
Further costs arose later in the year as schemes were hastily redesigned in response to a new government requirement for second staircases to be incorporated into all HRBs.
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