What the Building Safety Act means for your next cladding specification

The Building Safety Act 2022 represents the most significant change to how buildings are designed, constructed and managed in a generation.

For those procuring or delivering facade packages – particularly on residential buildings above 18 metres – the implications are already being felt and the full weight of the regime is still being absorbed across the industry.

The starting point is understanding what has changed and why. The Grenfell Tower fire exposed fundamental issues not just in the materials used but in how buildings were specified, how information was managed and how accountability was distributed across a fragmented supply chain.

The Building Safety Act is the legislative response to this – introducing a new duty holder framework, a “Gateway” process for higher-risk buildings and a requirement for a golden thread of information to be maintained throughout the life of a building.

For facade contractors, the implications fall into three broad areas.

The first is specification

The prohibition on combustible materials in the external walls of higher-risk buildings is now well established but the definition of what constitutes a compliant system – and how compliance is evidenced – continues to evolve.

Selecting a facade system that was compliant when it was specified is no longer sufficient. Contractors and clients need to be confident that the system they are procuring will remain demonstrably compliant through the “Gateway” process and beyond.

The second is documentation

The golden thread requirement means that information about the building – including the facade specification, test evidence, installation records and O&M documentation – must be created, maintained and handed over in a form that can support the building’s ongoing safety management.

This is a significant burden – and one that many supply chains are not yet fully prepared for.

The third is accountability

The Act introduces duty holders with explicit legal responsibilities for building safety.

On facade packages, this means the relationship between main contractor and specialist subcontractor needs to be defined more carefully than before — in terms of who is responsible for what and how that responsibility is evidenced.

What all this means

The honest message for anyone procuring a cladding or facade package on a higher-risk building is this: the specialist contractor you appoint needs to understand this regime operationally, not just technically.

Their ability to produce and maintain the right documentation, to select and evidence compliant systems and to work transparently within the duty holder framework will matter as much as their price.

In a post-Grenfell world, choosing the right specialist is not purely a procurement decision – it is a risk management one.