The Building Safety Act 2022
The Building Safety Act 2022 is described by the UK Government as the most significant reform to building safety regulation in a generation, and three years on from Royal Assent it has reshaped the legal framework within which managing agents operate. A good many of the managing agents we work for remain uncertain about what the Act requires of them, which is understandable given that even the industry bodies were openly cautious when it passed, with the Fire Protection Association welcoming the legislation while warning that important details remained unsettled and that the regime would need substantial resourcing to work in practice.
Some of that early confusion was warranted, since the Bill was amended repeatedly during its passage and one widely anticipated role, the Building Safety Manager, was removed before the duties came into force. This article sets out, in plain terms, the provisions most likely to affect professional property managers overseeing residential blocks, commercial premises and mixed-use developments in places such as Chester, Liverpool and Manchester, and it draws throughout on the primary legislation and on guidance from RICS, the Law Society and the FPA so that you can see where each obligation comes from.
The context: why the Act exists
The Building Safety Act 2022 was Parliament's response to the Grenfell Tower fire of June 2017, in which 72 people lost their lives. The Hackitt Review, commissioned in the aftermath, concluded that the regulatory framework for building safety was not fit for purpose, characterised by a race to the bottom on cost, a confusion of responsibilities, and a culture of poor compliance, and the Act was the attempt to dismantle that framework and put something more accountable in its place. You can read the legislation in full on the official legislation.gov.uk record of the Act, which runs to six Parts and eleven Schedules, with Part 4 covering higher-risk buildings and Schedule 8 covering the protections for leaseholders that we discuss below.
The core principle running through the Act is the idea of a clear, accountable duty-holder at every stage of a building's life, from design and construction through to occupation and ongoing management, and for managing agents it is the occupation phase that matters most.
Higher-risk buildings: the new regime
The Act introduces a distinct regulatory tier for what it calls higher-risk buildings, defined for the occupation phase as residential buildings of at least 18 metres in height or at least seven storeys, containing two or more residential units. According to RICS guidance on the Act, there are roughly 12,500 of these buildings across England, and those responsible for them were required to register them with the Building Safety Regulator from April 2023, with registration becoming a hard legal requirement rather than a matter of good practice.
The Building Safety Regulator sits within the Health and Safety Executive, and a managing agent acting as the Principal Accountable Person, meaning the party responsible for the structure and external walls, must ensure its buildings are on the register and must maintain a suite of documents known as the golden thread, which is a living, digital record of the building's design, construction and ongoing safety management. The golden thread has to be updated whenever works are carried out, whenever safety-critical information changes, and whenever the building's safety case is reviewed, so for managing agents accustomed to periodic, static files, the move to continuous, accountable record-keeping represents a real change in day-to-day practice.
- Register the building with the Building Safety Regulator.
- Identify and document the Principal Accountable Person and any other Accountable Persons.
- Establish and maintain the golden thread of building information.
- Produce and regularly review a Safety Case Report, which the Regulator calls in before issuing a Building Assessment Certificate.
- Prepare and maintain a mandatory Residents' Engagement Strategy.
- Report mandatory occurrences and notify the Regulator of changes to the building's safety information.
The gateway regime, in brief
For agents involved in development or major refurbishment, it is worth understanding the three gateways that the Act introduced for higher-risk buildings, because they change the rhythm of a project. Speaking to the FPA in its feature on the new building safety regime, the Regulator's leads explained that Planning Gateway One brings fire safety into the planning stage, Gateway Two is a stop-go point before construction can begin, since no work may start until the detailed design is approved, and Gateway Three is the completion check that must be passed before anyone can occupy the building. The thread running through all three is that fire safety can no longer be treated as a finishing touch added near the end, since it shapes the layout, the staircases and the access from the very first drawings.
Relevant buildings and the leaseholder protections
One area that managing agents cannot afford to overlook, because it bears directly on service charges, is the set of leaseholder protections that apply to what the Act calls relevant buildings, meaning self-contained residential buildings of at least 11 metres or at least five storeys containing two or more dwellings. These protections, set out in Schedule 8 to the Act, limit the extent to which long leaseholders can be asked to pay for the remediation of historic safety defects, and they sit alongside the developer remediation contracts under which most major developers have agreed to fix life-critical fire safety defects in buildings over 11 metres without recourse to leaseholders.
The detail matters for anyone administering a service charge account. As the Law Society's guidance for conveyancers explains, the protections turn on whether a lease is a qualifying lease, broadly one held by a leaseholder who lived in the property or who did not own more than three UK properties on 14 February 2022, and the position is evidenced through a system of certificates, namely a leaseholder deed of certificate and a landlord's certificate. Where cladding is the defect, no service charge for its removal or replacement is payable by qualifying leaseholders, and a separate contribution condition applies to non-cladding works, so that where the landlord group's net worth exceeded two million pounds for the relevant building on the qualifying date, no service charge for those works can be passed on at all. For managing agents, the practical consequence is that demands for safety-related works need to be checked against these protections before they are issued, since a charge raised in error can be challenged and can expose the landlord, and by extension the agent, to dispute.
Lower-rise buildings: do not assume exemption
It is tempting, and mistaken, to conclude that the Act's demands fall only on high-rise blocks and that lower-rise buildings are largely untouched. The Fire Safety Act 2021, a precursor to the 2022 legislation, had already confirmed that the scope of the Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005 extends to the structure, external walls and flat entrance doors of all multi-occupied residential buildings regardless of height, a category that takes in many smaller converted blocks and houses in multiple occupation, and Section 156 of the Building Safety Act went further by strengthening the duties under that Order, including clearer record-keeping and cooperation requirements that took effect from October 2023. A managing agent overseeing two-storey purpose-built flats in Chester, a converted Victorian house split into flats on the Wirral, or a low-rise apartment block elsewhere across Merseyside is squarely within this framework, and the consequences of treating compliance as optional have become considerably more serious.
The Accountable Person and the Principal Accountable Person
The Act introduces two related concepts, the Accountable Person and the Principal Accountable Person. In a building with a single Accountable Person, typically the freeholder or head leaseholder responsible for repair and maintenance, that person is also the Principal Accountable Person, whereas in buildings with several Accountable Persons the one responsible for the structure and external walls takes the principal role. For managing agents, the question of whether they are themselves an Accountable Person, or whether they act on behalf of one, has direct implications for liability, because an agent who holds management responsibilities under a long-term agreement and who exercises real discretion over safety management may find itself characterised as an Accountable Person in its own right, which is a point that warrants explicit legal advice and careful contractual drafting rather than assumption.
Residents' rights, longer liability and a cautionary example
One of the most practically significant changes is the strengthening of residents' rights. Leaseholders and tenants in higher-risk buildings now have statutory rights to information about their building's safety, to be consulted through the residents' engagement strategy, and to raise concerns with the Building Safety Regulator directly, which creates a channel of scrutiny that runs past the agent entirely, since a resident who believes safety obligations are not being met can escalate to a national regulator that has real enforcement powers. Alongside this, the Act extended the limitation period under the Defective Premises Act 1972, so that claims for sub-standard construction work can now be brought up to thirty years retrospectively and fifteen years prospectively, which widens the window of potential exposure for everyone in the chain and is one reason a defensible documentary record has become so valuable.
The enforcement powers are not theoretical. In July 2025 Merseyside Fire and Rescue Service served a formal prohibition notice on Beech and Willow Rise in Kirkby, ordering residents to leave immediately, and the video below by Liverpool content creator Scouser With A Drone shows how those buildings have degraded in the time since.
Beech and Willow Rise, Kirkby, filmed by Scouser With A Drone.
The implication for managing agents is that fire safety documentation, which was once treated as an internal administrative matter, should now be kept as a transparent and defensible record that could at any point be subject to external scrutiny by residents or by the Regulator.
A note for our North Wales clients
Agents managing property across the border should be aware that the position in Wales is diverging. The Building Safety Act applies in Wales mainly to the design and construction phase, and the Welsh Government has now legislated separately for the occupation phase through the Building Safety (Wales) Act 2026, which the RICS guidance notes was enacted in April 2026 and which brings all multi-occupied residential buildings containing two or more units into scope regardless of height. Under the Welsh regime, local councils will act as building safety authorities rather than a single national regulator, so a managing agent with a portfolio spanning the North West and North Wales will, in practice, be working to two related but distinct sets of duties, and it is worth confirming which applies to each building.
What managing agents should do now
For a managing agent, the first step is to audit the portfolio, identifying for every building whether it meets the definition of a higher-risk building and, if so, whether it has been registered with the Building Safety Regulator, while also flagging the relevant buildings between 11 and 18 metres where the leaseholder protections and certificates come into play. The second step is documentation, since the golden thread concept of a live, accessible safety record is sound practice for all buildings and not only the highest-risk ones, and an agent that can demonstrate a coherent, up-to-date record stands in a far stronger position, both legally and reputationally, than one that cannot. The third step is professional advice, because the Act is complex, its secondary legislation continues to evolve, and no single article, including this one, should be relied on as a complete guide, so you should ensure that your fire risk assessments are carried out by competent assessors who understand the post-Act landscape, and that your fire safety policies and compliance frameworks are reviewed in light of the Act's requirements.
Ensure your buildings are Building Safety Act compliant
Fletcher Risk provides fire risk assessments and fire safety consultancy for managing agents across the North West, North Wales and the West Midlands. Our assessors understand the post-Building Safety Act landscape and can help ensure your portfolio is compliant, well documented and defensible. If we can help, please get in touch.
We work with managing agents and property managers right across our coverage area, including Cheshire West, Cheshire East, Merseyside, Greater Manchester, Lancashire, Flintshire & Wrexham, the North Wales Coast, Gwynedd, Shropshire and Staffordshire.
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