UK government bill is an opportunity to make homes safer and more energy-efficient

Nine years after the Grenfell fire, the government is finally setting a legal deadline for fixing the buildings it exposed as unsafe. A new Remediation Bill, confirmed in May’s King’s Speech and due before parliament this year, is anticipated to require landlords to complete work on residential buildings more than 18 metres by the end of 2029, with criminal prosecution for those who fail without good reason.

As of March 2026, as many as 3,700 buildings fall into this category, with much of the remediation work held up in long complex legal disputes between developers, freeholders and residents.

“The building works we were told would take six months ended up taking four-and-a-half years to complete,” says Giles Grover, the leaseholder of a flat in Manchester. “This not only increased our insurance costs but also meant it was impossible to sell or remortgage.”

The government’s response has grown into a remediation programme that could cost between £12.6bn and £22.4bn. The toll goes well beyond bricks and mortar. Research by the University of Sheffield found that nine in 10 leaseholders report their mental health has deteriorated as a result of the cladding crisis.

So what’s causing the backlog? “It took a considerable amount of time for the government to understand the scale of the work required and to put the necessary funding in place,” says Professor Leonard, who co-runs a research centre on future homes at Birmingham City University. “As projects have proceeded, their scope has also extended because there are other problems in the building that only come to light once you take the cladding off.”

The most common is missing or wrongly installed cavity barriers and fire breaks – the horizontal and vertical barriers meant to stop fire spreading between flats and up the facade. A Housing, Communities and Local Government Select Committee survey found more than a third of respondents (34%) had missing or inadequate fire breaks, and a further 30% reported combustible or missing insulation.

While the Remediation bill is expected to address these issues, new policies to improve energy efficiency across British residential blocks are also picking up pace and creating an opportunity to consider the two together. Changes to the rules governing Britain’s Energy Performance Certificates (EPCs), for example, could take greater account of the fire-safety implications of measures designed to improve a building’s thermal performance.

However, failing to align environmental and fire policies risks opening new fire safety issues, explains Leonard. “Think about Grenfell Tower: that was a perfectly safe building that we intervened in, predominantly for climate change reasons, to improve its thermal performance. But in doing so, we changed a perfectly safe building into an unsafe one.”

Aligning the two would help find solutions that make British buildings safer and more energy efficient. Non-combustible insulation such as stone wool, for example, can reduce heating needs by up to 70%, improve acoustics, and protect against fire spread simultaneously. Treating fire safety and energy efficiency as one integrated job would help reduce disruption, lower total cost, and deliver homes that are warm, quiet and safe. Renovating homes and buildings simultaneously for energy efficiency and fire safety is a once-in-a-generation opportunity to future-proof today’s building stock.

Treating environmental policy and building policy as separate is unacceptable, says Professor Leonard. “We are very clear that dealing with the transition to climate change, in both new build and existing buildings, sits alongside the absolute need to consider building safety.”