A key premise of the Building Safety Act 2022 was that qualifying leaseholders would not pay to remedy historic building safety defects. But legislation has its limits. While the Act can identify who should pay, it cannot find monies where the culpable parties and their associated companies simply don’t have them.

A government-backed remediation loan facility could help bridge that gap. Where responsibility for building safety defects is established or accepted but the party cannot manage their immediate cost without jeopardising its financial survival, finance would be available for them. Commercial lenders could assess creditworthiness and administer the loans, with the government sharing or guaranteeing the risk. The culpable party would repay the loan, with interest, from future income.

Admittedly, there are hurdles with such an idea. But flaws also exist in the current system. Building safety defects are often highly expensive and their remediation consumes labour, management time and supply chain resources that can’t then be deployed on the new and ongoing projects necessary for the business to continue. Contrast that level of expenditure with the economics of contracting: this magazine’s Top 150 Contractors & Housebuilders analysis put contractors’ average operating margin at just 2.3%.