The Grenfell Tower tragedy in 2017 has been the catalyst for the most important piece of legislation in my time as a construction lawyer – the Building Safety Act 2022. If you work in the construction industry, you need to know about the Act.
The Act dwarfs all other construction legislation. It is vast in scope. It looks backwards: at how to rectify cladding and other fire and structural issues and who will pay for the remedial works. It also looks forward: how do we make our buildings safer for the future. It is also radical…very radical, throwing many established principles into doubt. It increases limitation periods (the period of time in which a party can be found liable) in some cases from the established 6 or 12 years to 30 year and it challenges the traditional protection given to those associated with companies who have committed wrongdoing. Traditionally, it was only the company which was liable with the others protected by the rather grandly title “corporate veil”. The Act potentially breaks through that protection (what lawyers call piercing the corporate veil)
The Act is so important that we will be providing a series of weekly blogs on it over the coming months. The Act has become law only 5 years after the Grenfell tragedy. This means that much of it is planned to come into effect by way of secondary legislation over the next 12 months or so. Our blogs will keep you up to date about what is already in force and what is coming into force and when.