Developers to remove unsafe high-rise cladding
Leaseholders are now protected by the fully enacted Building Safety Act 2022, which legally mandates that developers and manufacturers (not residents) foot the bill for remediating dangerous cladding. As of 2026, the government’s enforcement powers are in full effect: over 55 major developers have signed legally binding remediation contracts. According to the latest 2025/2026 data, remediation work has been completed on over 1,400 high-rise buildings, while the Responsible Actors Scheme (RAS) successfully blocks non-compliant developers from obtaining planning permission or building control sign-off.
Some property owners were facing bills of more than £200,000, despite structural maintenance being the responsibility of the freeholder.
Developers or landlords owning a building worth more than £11 million will be forced to pay the entire cost to fix historic building safety issues. And where a building owner doesn't have the resources to pay, there will be a cap in place for what leaseholders can be charged—£15,000 for London and £10,000 in the rest of England.
The government said this should only be needed for a small number of cases.
Under the Building Safety Act 2022, statutory legal protections now prevent leaseholders from being charged for any cladding remediation. For non-cladding defects (such as fire doors or structural flaws), the Act successfully implemented the 'waterfall' payment system, which capped leaseholder contributions at £15,000 in Greater London and £10,000 across the rest of England, spread over ten years.
In practice, these caps (often significantly lower or zero if the landlord meets certain wealth criteria) have drastically reduced the financial burden on residents, while Remediation Orders now allow leaseholders to take direct legal action through the First-tier Tribunal to compel building owners to fix safety issues.
Jenni Garratt, of the End Our Planning Scandal group, who lives in a building more than 18 metres high in Sheffield, said:
"Up until now all of the support, all of the focus has been specifically on removal of cladding, so the fact Michael Gove is now saying that developers, freeholders in the first case, will be pursued to fix the non-cladding defects, to be completely honest I called my parents and cried. I was so taken aback by how much of a 180 change this has been.
"It's not right that innocent people should be paying anything towards this, but I can't escape the fact that up until now the unwritten cheque that was hanging above my head could have been £50,000."
Liam Spender, a trustee of the charity Leasehold Knowledge Partnership, was told he and his fellow leaseholders would have to pay for changes to the 14 metre high building he lives in.
He said:
"We were never given a figure, we were just told we'd have to pay whatever they asked for. So it could potentially have been huge. I could have easily been looking at low to mid-tens of thousands to do the work".
"I think there is a sense of relief. It's cautious, it's tempered, because I know how complicated the legislative intervention is."
When these measures were first introduced in 2022, then-Secretary of State Michael Gove described them as the beginning of the end for the cladding scandal. By 2026, this stance has evolved into a multi-billion pound enforcement operation.
The current Ministry (now the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government) has overseen the rollout of the Building Safety Levy, which is expected to raise £3 billion from the industry over the next decade.
Recent 2026 ministerial statements have shifted focus toward 'orphan buildings' where no developer can be found, utilizing the Cladding Safety Scheme (CSS) to ensure no building (regardless of height) is left unsafe due to lack of funding.