Grenfell Tower Inquiry Report – will government responsibility impact on building safety liability?

Today’s publication of the Grenfell Tower Inquiry Report phase 2 concludes seven years of investigation and consideration, concluding that many parties’ failings contributed to the disaster. Crucially, the report concludes that the Grenfell tragedy was a “…culmination of decades of failure by central government…” but there has been no recognition of that in the actions government has taken post-Grenfell, which have focused on creating routes for claims against those who designed or built.

Building Safety – targeting construction

The government, in response to the concerns which the Grenfell tragedy brought about, legislated to comprehensively change the way buildings are planned, built and occupied in the Building Safety Act 2022 (“BSA”) – the biggest shift in building legislation in a generation. The BSA also created a series of new causes of action and extended limitation periods, allowing parties involved in the construction of a building which included dwellings which were unfit for habitation when built (i.e. posed a risk to life safety) to face claims up to 30 years after the building was completed.

Alongside the BSA, the government has also set up the Building Safety Fund (“BSF”) to allow buildings to be remediated without leaseholders having to front the cost. However, those applying for that funding must agree to use all reasonable endeavours to recover the money spent and pay it back to government. The BSF is a loan, and not a grant. The target for those claims is most often those in the construction industry. That is even more the case since the advent of the Responsible Actors Scheme and the Self-Remediation Terms contracts between developers and the government. Those measures require developers involved in the development of unsafe buildings to reimburse the BSF for the remediation costs within 90 days of the presentation of a reimbursement statement. Those claims then inevitably flow down to the construction industry as a whole.

What comes next?

Liability and responsibility for the work needed to ensure that the Grenfell tragedy or something like it cannot happen again has been brought to the construction industry’s door, but should there not also be recognition from government that it shares that liability and responsibility? It will be up to the new Labour government to decide whether it is willing to change the regime for liability which the BSA brought in to reflect that government and regulatory failures have now been found to have contributed to the need for an estimated 3,000 more buildings to be made safe.