Building Safety
The RFA and its members remain committed to working with all parties to help resolve the building safety crisis.
Despite playing no role in the development of affected buildings, professional freeholders and leaseholders are being made liable to fund remediation. To ensure remediation work is progressed at pace, the RFA maintains those responsible for creating the crisis must deal with remediation in full.
Issues with the current building safety regime
Since the passage of the Building Safety Act 2022 and subsequent regulations and funding programmes, approaches to the remediation of buildings have lacked cohesion.
Fundamentally, there is an inconsistency between definitions used in the Act and the terms of the Government’s Developer Pledge.
Under the Pledge terms, developers are only obligated to fix life critical fire safety defects, however the Act places wider obligations on building owners around the structural integrity of the building.
Every building owner must now negotiate its own delivery agreement with individual developers, resulting in deadlock over the terms of remediation. This has caused unnecessary delays with no route to resolution provided by Government.
Ways to expedite remediation
The RFA is calling for the ‘rule of one’ principle to be implemented across all building safety remediation projects. This would guarantee that each leaseholder can expect to receive a building remediated to a single standard set by Government which is then applied by an independent appointed fire engineer.
For this to happen, developers must have the same liabilities placed on them as set out in the overarching Building Safety Act 2022, making them expressly obligated to deal with structural remediation.
To ensure that buildings are being properly assessed and being made safe, developers should also be obligated to complete a Type 2 survey of the internal common parts compartmentation. Where such a survey reveals any defects, further Type 4 surveys should be completed within the flats.
