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Building safety round-up: August 2025
A round-up of the key news stories, guidance documents and new thinking for those involved in building safety issues, gathered by Peter Apps
Building safety round-up: August 2025 #UKhousingA round-up of the key news stories, guidance documents and new thinking for those involved in building safety issues, gathered by @PeteApps #UKhousingNews
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The English government published its remediation acceleration plan, which aims to speed up the process of fixing dangerous buildings and has a target to complete all the work for buildings taller than 18 metres by 2029 and all those below 18 metres by 2031. The plan came with a cut in the estimated number of unidentified dangerous mid-rise buildings from up to 7,000 to between 500 and 3,400. The government plans to legislate new powers to compulsorily purchase buildings where freeholders are delaying work and impose fines and prison sentences on responsible parties that do not act quickly enough.
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The government also published a joint remediation plan with the English social housing sector, under which the sector commits to accelerating the remediation of buildings it owns. The sector has also committed to regular communication with residents and more flexibility for leaseholders to sub-let. The full agreement can be read here. The plans were announced in an op-ed in Inside Housing here.
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An architecture firm has launched legal action against insulation manufacturer Kingspan. BDP is being pursued for compensation by a contractor for a building in Lancashire that needs to be reclad. But the firm has now taken separate legal action against the insulation manufacturer, claiming Kingspan should not have marketed its combustible insulation as suitable for use on a high rise.
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New regulations covering ‘residential personal emergency evacuation plans’ for disabled residents of high and some medium-rise buildings have been published by the government. The plan will involve ‘person-centred fire risk assessments’ and notification of the presence of people who would struggle to evacuate to fire authorities. The impact statement estimates that 28.3% of social housing residents are likely to be evacuation-impaired, making this major new legislation for the social housing sector.
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MPs have accused the former owners of an east London building so seriously damaged by a fire last year that it had to be demolished of keeping residents in the dark over the course of the blaze. A London Fire Brigade report previously said scaffolding “assisted the spread” of the fire over the Spectrum building.
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The Building Safety Regulator (BSR) published performance data, which showed that it was making building control decisions in an average of 17.7 weeks between January and March 2025. The regulator was slowest at processing applications for new build (21 weeks) and remediation projects (22.7). It had a case load of 152 new build applications, 205 remediation jobs and 1,276 projects overall.
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The BSR also agreed to closer working with the Regulator for Social Housing on building remediation.
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House builder Taylor Wimpey sank to a £92m loss after accounting for major fire safety remediation work, mostly relating to poorly fitted or missing cavity barriers.
- Triathlon Homes, a joint venture between housing associations Southern Housing and L&Q, which manages affordable housing at Olympic Park in east London, has won a legal case against Get Living, the build-to-rent landlord that owns the park’s East Village housing development where the affordable homes are located. Get Living was appealing against a remediation order, which said it had to pay £18m to fix the affordable homes. The appeal was dismissed.
- L&Q settled a claim against the contractor Bouygues UK, in a dispute over a building where it alleged a company acquired by the contractor had installed flammable cladding.
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Collaborative Reporting for Safer Structures UK (CROSS-UK), a source for construction professionals to raise anonymous concerns, has been named the official voluntary reporting system for structural and fire safety until at least 2028. Voluntary occurrence reporting is a means for reporting incidents, such as near misses, which are not covered by mandatory reporting regimes. Establishing a system for the UK is part of the response to the Grenfell Inquiry. CROSS-UK was appointed to run it until 2028 by the Health and Safety Executive following a competitive tender.
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Construction product Sentrin FRI Plywood has been recalled from the market after doubts emerged about its fire performance. The Office for Product Safety and Standards said the product does not have a compliant declaration of performance or evidence of initial type testing to verify the reaction to fire performance.
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The government’s plan to debar certain companies involved in the Grenfell Tower fire from public contracts has been paused. It said its investigation risked compromising the ongoing police probe into the blaze.
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The government’s new panel on reforming building control published its “problem statement”, which attempts to clarify the problem it will seek to solve. The panel said it would consider whether the commercial building control model produces the right incentives, as well as explore serious concerns about capacity within local authorities. The Building Control Independent Panel has launched a call for evidence.
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A construction firm was fined £165,000 for “blatant disregard” for fire precautions when converting a warehouse in Preston into flats in May 2023. The fine was served by the Health and Safety Executive, after the local fire service issued a prohibition notice ordering residents out of the building.
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A developer and its director were sentenced for fire safety failures in the conversion of a former office block in Felixstowe into luxury flats.
There was a revelation of a lucky escape in Nottingham, after a building which suffered a serious arson attack last year has now been found to have combustible cladding – which did not ignite during the blaze.
Research for the Sennedd, the home of the Welsh government, looked into whether private developers are dragging their feet in repairing high-rise buildings. Just four of the 161 buildings in the country where major developers are responsible for repairs have completed works.
The latest data on cladding remediation work in Scotland – which is progressing differently from the rest of the UK – was published here. Buildings in Scotland undergo a single building assessment, usually funded by the government, before remediation work is decided upon. Three assessments have been completed with a further 12 underway.
The government published an update on its work to bring down Grenfell Tower, which will be led by the contractor Deconstruct UK. The tower will be taken down from behind its covered sheeting, with a crane being erected over the summer.
A serious blaze which gutted a building in Paris provided a reminder of the fire risk during the construction phase of a development.
Three days of mourning were declared in Iraq after a fire in a shopping centre left 61 dead and many more missing.
Guidance
The Construction Leadership Council has published guidance, produced in collaboration with the BSR and industry stakeholders such as the G15, on making good applications for the Gateway 2 phase of constructing a high-rise building.
New guidance for fire door manufacturers has been published by the Office for Product Safety and Standards.
The LPC Rules for Automatic Sprinkler Installations, a technical bulletin on sprinklers, was updated at the end of last year. In this article, the author discusses the updates.
Guidance has been published covering the safety of solar panel insulations on flat roofs – a move which comes with an under-appreciated fire risk.
Thinking
Fire safety expert Dr Jim Glockling looks into the measures necessary to ensure timber structures are safe – not just from a life safety perspective, but from an insurability perspective and as a long-term home for residents.
Presentations from the recent Tall Buildings Fire Safety Conference, which cover matters from smoke toxicity to AI to the positioning of firefighting outlets in staircases, have been made available here.
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