I welcome the actions the new Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities, the Rt Hon Greg Clarke MP has taken on building safety. The 3 principles underpinning his recent work echoes with what Stephen McPartland, and I have been campaigning for.

1. We must protect leaseholders.

2. We must ensure those responsible pay to fix the problems they created.

3. We must restore common sense to the assessment of building safety risks, speeding up fixing the highest risk buildings and stopping buildings being declared unsafe unnecessarily.
The new Secretary of State has also said, “Qualifying leaseholders should not pay outstanding invoices for historical building safety remediation costs that were issued prior to 28 June 2022. These leaseholders are now protected from all cladding-related building safety costs and most non-cladding costs. This means existing invoices are, in most cases, no longer valid and any landlord or agent who seeks to enforce them could be committing a criminal offence. Landlords must provide a completed landlord certificate demonstrating that they can pass on costs to leaseholders, before they can do so, or demonstrate that the costs do not relate to works covered by the Building Safety Act 2022.”
Leaseholders should confirm their qualifying status and new legal rights through a short certificate they must provide to their landlord, which is now available here: https://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/2022/859/pdfs/uksi_20220859_en.pdf
A new online Leaseholder Protections Checker allows leaseholders to check their eligibility for building safety protections at http://www.gov.uk/check-building-safety-costs
The housing market for thousands of leaseholders has also been unlocked. The six largest mortgage lenders have confirmed that they will now lend on buildings that will be remediated by the developers that built them or are in a government funded remediation scheme, or where leaseholders are covered by the Government’s new statutory protections.