The government's new cladding Bill exempts developers already bound by its 2023 contract, calling the contract's duties equivalent to its own. The department's own figures, measured for the same month the 80 percent target fell due, show that contract at 50 percent, not 80.
Estimated reading time: 6 minutes
In short. The Building Safety (Remediation of Unsafe Cladding etc) Bill, introduced to Parliament on 14 October 2026, creates a direct legal duty to remediate unsafe cladding, backed by criminal offences and civil penalties up to 500,000 pounds [[1]] [[2]]. Buildings covered by the Developer Remediation Contract are excluded from that duty because, the government's own guide says, "equivalent requirements are already in place" [[1]]. MHCLG's own data for the exact month the contract's 80 percent stretch target fell due puts developers at 50 percent [[3]] [[4]]. The same guide admits the manufacturer-liability power it is reforming "has not worked as intended" and attaches no reporting duty to its replacement [[1]], and names a government department, for the one safeguard on its parent-company fining power, that does not exist [[1]] [[5]]. Three documented mistakes: four stars.
Angela Rayner's department does not pretend the current system works. The guide to the bill it introduced on 14 October 2026 says enforcement today "only results in penalties once failure to comply with a statutory notice has been prosecuted," a process it calls "slow, costly and often litigious" [[1]]. Nine years after Grenfell, the answer is a new legal duty on building owners, new criminal offences, and a tribunal power to fine landlords up to 500,000 pounds for ignoring a remediation order [[1]] [[2]]. One category of building is carved out of the new duty altogether: anything already covered by the Developer Remediation Contract, the pledge the government got 53 developers to sign from January 2023 [[1]]. The guide's reasoning is that the contract already does the job. The government's own numbers, published three weeks before the bill, say it is a long way from doing that job on schedule.
The claims, tested
| The guide's own words | What the record shows | Verdict |
|---|---|---|
| "Buildings subject to the developer remediation contract will be excluded from the legal duty to remediate because equivalent requirements are already in place. Under the developer remediation contract, developers have committed to assess and remediate life-critical fire safety defects in buildings for which they are responsible, where remediation is necessary" [[1]] | MHCLG's December 2024 Remediation Acceleration Plan set developers a "stretch target to start or complete remedial works on 80% of the buildings for which they are responsible by July 2026" [[3]]. The department's own August 2026 data release, reporting developer figures "as at 31 July 2026", the target's own month, found 914 of the 1,840 buildings developers have reported as having unsafe cladding "are reported to have started or completed remediation", 50 percent [[4]] | A duty the bill treats as already equivalent missed its own target month by 30 percentage points, on the department's own count |
| Guide's introduction: "Construction product manufacturers have yet to contribute" [[1]]. Guide's own section on manufacturer liability: "Section 149 has not worked as intended. Very few claims have been made and stakeholders report that the regime is complex, difficult to evidence, and too easily allows liability to be avoided in practice" [[1]] | The bill lowers the evidence threshold for a civil claim against a manufacturer and widens who can sue, but its implementation note for the same reform states plainly: "No secondary legislation or statutory guidance is planned" [[1]], with no reporting duty, target figure or date attached | The guide diagnoses, in its own words, why the existing power collected almost nothing from manufacturers, then proposes a fix with no stated way to check whether it is working |
| "These powers are time limited and will be reviewed on a regular basis by both the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG) and the Department for Business Innovation, Science and Trade to make sure they remain fit for purpose" [[1]] | The department responsible for business and trade policy is the Department for Business and Trade, created February 2023; GOV.UK's own organisation page carries that name, not the one the guide uses [[5]]. No time limit or review date appears anywhere else in the guide | The one stated safeguard on a power that can extend fines to a parent company names a department that does not exist, with no date given for the review it promises |
The mistakes, counted
A carve-out built on a target the government's own data says is missing by 30 points (1). The Remediation Acceleration Plan named a specific developer commitment: 80 percent of the buildings developers are responsible for started or completed by July 2026 [[3]]. The bill's guide leans on that same contract to justify exempting its buildings from the new legal duty, calling the contract's requirements "already in place" [[1]]. But the department's own August 2026 release, the first monthly data release to actually cover the target's own month, puts developers at 50 percent on buildings with unsafe cladding specifically, and 53 percent on the wider life-critical-defects count that includes non-cladding work [[4]]. A bill built to close gaps in enforcement assumes, for this one category of building, that a contract running 30 points behind its own target is doing the job a legal duty is meant to do.
A self-diagnosed enforcement gap, patched with no way to check whether it closes (2). Section 149 of the Building Safety Act 2022 was supposed to make manufacturers of unsafe cladding products pay. The guide says plainly that it "has not worked as intended" and that claims are "difficult to evidence" [[1]]. The bill's fix, a lower evidence bar and a wider pool of claimants, is reasonable on its face. But the guide's own implementation note for that fix says "no secondary legislation or statutory guidance is planned" [[1]], and nowhere in the document is there a reporting duty, a target number of claims, or a date by which manufacturers are expected to start contributing to the 5.15 billion pounds the guide says the government has already committed [[1]]. The same gap the guide diagnoses in the old power, no visible way to tell if it is working, carries over to the power that replaces it.
A review clause that names a department that does not exist (3). The guide's most far-reaching single power, fining a parent company for a subsidiary's failure to remediate, comes with one stated safeguard: the power is "time limited" and will be "reviewed on a regular basis" by MHCLG and what the guide calls "the Department for Business Innovation, Science and Trade" [[1]]. GOV.UK's own department list has no such body; the current department for business and trade policy is the Department for Business and Trade, formed in February 2023 [[5]]. Neither a sunset date for the time limit nor a date for the first "regular" review appears anywhere else in the guide. The error does not change what the power does, but it is the only safeguard the document names for a power reaching past the company actually being fined.
Credit where due
The guide does not dress up the current system's failures to make the new bill look better by comparison. It says outright that section 149 "has not worked as intended" [[1]], and that today's enforcement route only bites after a prosecution most leaseholders have no way to force. The leaseholder protections in the 2022 Act are carried over explicitly into the new powers: the guide states that costs recovered through the Remediation Backstop should not leave qualifying leaseholders facing "new or additional costs" [[1]]. And on at least one point the department checked its own reach rather than assuming a national power applied automatically to London: Homes England's new audit function over fire-risk assessments runs directly in the capital only because "the Mayor of London has agreed" to it [[1]], a jurisdictional question the guide answers by naming who was actually asked.
Verdict
Four stars, from three documented mistakes. The underlying bill tackles a real and well-evidenced problem: a 2022 Act whose own enforcement tools barely register in the government's monthly reporting, and a manufacturer-liability power that, by the guide's own account, has not worked. What undercuts the guide is the places it treats an assumption as a settled fact. A contract used to justify exempting developers from the new duty is 30 points behind its own target, on the department's own numbers, for the exact month that target fell due. A manufacturer-liability fix inherits the old power's main weakness, no way to check it is working, without acknowledging that it does. And the one safeguard named for the bill's most far-reaching power points to a department that does not exist.
The star score counts three documented mistakes. First, the bill excludes buildings covered by the Developer Remediation Contract from its new legal duty because the contract's requirements are "already in place", but the government's own August 2026 data, measured for the month its 80 percent stretch target fell due, puts those developers at 50 percent on buildings with unsafe cladding. Second, the guide's own section on manufacturer liability states the existing power "has not worked as intended" and that "very few claims have been made", but attaches no reporting duty, target or date to the power that replaces it. Third, the guide's only stated safeguard on the power to fine parent companies names "the Department for Business Innovation, Science and Trade", a department that does not exist, with no review date given. Three falls in the 1 to 3 band: four stars; the bands are on the ratings page. This piece makes no finding about the competence of any named individual; the carve-out, the section 149 reform and the review clause are the department's drafting, not any one official's decision. Checked directly against the live guide, the Remediation Acceleration Plan, the August 2026 monthly data release, the Bills API record and GOV.UK's own department list, all fetched 15 October 2026.
Sources
- Guide to the Building Safety (Remediation of Unsafe Cladding etc) Bill, GOV.UK / Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government, published 14 October 2026
- Building Safety (Remediation of Unsafe Cladding etc) Bill, record for Bill 4305, UK Parliament Bills API, accessed 15 October 2026
- Remediation Acceleration Plan, GOV.UK / Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government, published 2 December 2024
- Building Safety Remediation: monthly data release - August 2026 (Accessible Version), GOV.UK / MHCLG, published 30 September 2026
- Department for Business and Trade, GOV.UK organisation page