The introduction of the Building Safety (Remediation of Unsafe Cladding etc) Bill (Remediation Bill) marks the latest stage in the Government's efforts to accelerate remediation across England. The Bill imposes duties to assess and remediate external wall fire safety risks, introduces remediation compliance plans, expands enforcement powers and creates mechanisms for regulators to step in where responsible entities fail to act. The policy objective is clear: unsafe cladding must be identified and fixed.
Published: 5 November 2026
Authors: Sam Mullender
Yet the Bill also exposes an increasingly difficult question: what about internal fire safety defects?
Almost every recent Government initiative has focused overwhelmingly on external walls. The Building Safety Fund, Cladding Safety Scheme and now the Remediation Bill are all directed primarily towards the assessment and remediation of external wall systems.
That focus is understandable, but it risks creating a misleading impression that external wall defects are synonymous with building safety. They are not.
A building does not become safe simply because its cladding has been replaced. Internal fire safety defects can be equally serious. Missing compartmentation, defective fire-stopping, inadequately protected structural elements, defective fire doors, poorly designed means of escape and failures within smoke control systems may all materially increase the risk to life. In many cases, those defects are capable of allowing fire and smoke to spread throughout a building even where the external wall system is fully compliant.
Indeed, many of the failings exposed by the Grenfell Tower Inquiry were internal rather than external. Any suggestion that external walls alone define building safety risks therefore oversimplifies the lessons of Grenfell.
The difficulty is that Government policy now appears inconsistent.
On the one hand, and as noted above, public funding schemes generally exclude internal fire safety defects from recovery. The new Remediation Bill likewise concentrates almost entirely on external wall remediation.
On the other hand, the remediation of internal defects falls within the scope of other Government measures. The Developer Remediation Contract requires developers to address both internal and external fire safety defects. Likewise, the Building Safety Act 2022 permits remediation orders, remediation contribution orders and building liability orders in respect of both categories of defect.
The result is an uncomfortable question: are internal fire safety defects important enough to remediate, or not?
The Remediation Bill creates further uncertainty in respect of this question by only focussing on the remediation of external defects rather than approach each individual building’s defects holistically.
This is not merely an academic question. Internal defects have, in numerous cases, led to waking watches, enforcement action, major remediation projects and even the temporary decant of residents. Responsible entities are routinely told that such defects present life-safety risks requiring urgent attention. Yet the Government's latest flagship legislation largely proceeds as though they are peripheral.
Nine years after Grenfell, few would argue that unsafe cladding should not be fixed. The more pressing question is why the same clarity has not been provided for internal fire safety defects. If those defects are sufficiently serious to justify developer liability, Building Safety Act recovery claims and regulatory intervention, the Government should explain why they are largely absent from its remediation legislation. Responsible entities, housebuilders and residents alike deserve a coherent answer.