Building Safety Act 2022: What Homeowners Should Know

Written in the shadow of Grenfell, the Building Safety Act 2022 rebuilt swathes of construction law, and while its headlines concern high-rise cladding, several of its provisions quietly changed the position of every homeowner with a defective extension, conversion or self-build. Here’s the Act with the tower-block chapters set aside.

The limitation revolution

The change with the widest reach: claims under s.1 of the Defective Premises Act 1972, work connected with providing a dwelling, done improperly, home unfit for habitation, had their time limits transformed:

• 15 years for work completed on or after 28 June 2022 (was six);¹
• 30 years, retrospectively, for work completed before that date.¹

Retrospective revival of dead claims is close to unheard-of in English law, which signals how deliberate this was. Practically: serious defects in work done since the mid-1990s may be actionable today where the responsible firm still exists, the calculation homeowners with old botched conversions should now run with a solicitor before assuming they’re out of time. The Act also added a new s.2A duty covering work done in the course of a business on an existing building that contains a dwelling, with the same 15-year limit for work completed after 28 June 2022.²³

Building control, toughened

The Act restructured the building control world that domestic projects move through: a national Building Safety Regulator now oversees the profession, private approved inspectors became registered building control approvers under tighter rules, and, the piece with homeowner teeth, enforcement stretched.⁴ Breaching the regulations became an either-way offence, triable in the Crown Court with up to two years’ imprisonment.⁵ The old two-year limit on bringing a prosecution in the magistrates’ court was repealed.⁶ Enforcement notices requiring non-compliant work to be altered or removed can now be served up to 10 years after completion, up from 12 months.⁵ For buyers, this widens the window in which a house’s unauthorised work can attract formal action, making regularisation or indemnity insurance diligence more important, not less.

New routes to the money

Two mechanisms aimed at the “builder’s company conveniently dissolved” problem:

• Building Liability Orders let the High Court extend liability under the Defective Premises Act, or for a building safety risk, to associated companies, the group parent behind the £100 SPV that built your development, even where the original company has been dissolved.⁷ The corporate veil, in this corner of law, is thinner than it was.
• Remediation orders and contribution orders (mainly for taller residential buildings) compel landlords and developers to fix or fund defects, the machinery behind the leaseholder protections in blocks at least 11 metres high or of at least five storeys, which is where flat-owning readers meet the Act’s famous chapters: qualifying leaseholder cost protections, developer remediation contracts and the rest.⁸

What it means for a project you’re running now

Nothing in the Act changes the day-to-day of commissioning an extension, but it sharpened the consequences around it. Your builder and designers now carry 15-year DPA exposure for dwelling work, which well-run firms answer with better documentation and insurance (worth asking about when vetting); building control compliance has a longer memory; and your own paperwork, contracts, drawings, completion certificates, the site diary, is what future claims (yours or a buyer’s) would be built from. Keep the file like the 15-year document it now is, and see the construction law pillar for how the Act slots alongside the CRA, the DPA and the ordinary limitation rules.

This guide is general information for homeowners in England and Wales, not legal advice.