The Building Safety Act 2022 was the most consequential piece of leasehold legislation in a generation, and four years on its working consequences for the Bath portfolio are now visible. The headlines, written hastily in the months after Royal Assent, framed the Act as a clear reallocation of remediation cost from leaseholder to freeholder. The settlement on the ground is more careful than that, and on a Bath portfolio of mixed Georgian and post-war stock, the careful reading is the one that matters.

The Act does not say what most clients believed it said when they first read the press coverage. It defines a “qualifying lease” in narrow terms, sets a specific protection regime for “relevant defects”, and leaves a substantial body of work outside its scope. For a Bath portfolio, the ratio of in-scope to out-of-scope work is roughly two to five, by our counting.

The numbers, briefly.

From a working population of approximately one hundred and twenty mixed-use blocks across our Bath leasehold instructions, the breakdown by Act-scope settles roughly as follows.

38 in scope

Of the 120 blocks reviewed since the Act, 38 contained “relevant defects” within Section 120 of the Act, and the qualifying-lease test was met by the lessee.

What the headlines missed.

The Act was reported as a transfer of cost. In practice it is a transfer of primary responsibility for remediation, with cost following responsibility but not always cleanly. Where the freeholder has the means and the building qualifies, the cost moves. Where the freeholder is a single-purpose entity with no working capital, the position is materially less helpful to the leaseholder than the headlines suggested.

The relevant section is short enough to quote, and worth re-reading.

A leaseholder is not liable to pay a service charge in respect of a relevant measure relating to a relevant defect, unless the conditions in subsection (3) are met.

Building Safety Act 2022, Section 122(2)

The “unless the conditions in subsection (3) are met” clause is where most of the work happens. We have taken thirteen Bath matters to determination on this point alone. Five resolved on negotiation, six on settlement, two on the First-tier Tribunal.

A note on the qualifying-lease test.

The qualifying-lease test catches more leaseholders than the original drafting suggested. The owner-occupier requirement is the principal filter; the second-home and short-let positions are now well established. We have written elsewhere about the position for trusts holding qualifying leases (see our note of November 2025); the short version is that the holding structure does not by itself disqualify the lease.

Section 119 (qualifying lease):
(2) A long lease is a "qualifying lease" if:
    (a) it is a residential lease for a term of more than 21 years, and
    (b) at the relevant time, the leaseholder owns no more than three
        UK dwellings (including the dwelling under the lease).

The “relevant time” for a qualifying-lease assessment is 14 February 2022. The position is fixed on that date and does not roll forward with subsequent transactions.

Listed-building considerations.

The position for listed buildings sits awkwardly with the Act and the headlines did not address it. A listed building cannot be remediated in the manner contemplated by the Act without listed-building consent, and listed-building consent is not in the gift of the freeholder. The Act does not displace the consent regime; it sits alongside it.

What we recommend.

For Bath leasehold clients, we currently advise the following sequence:

1. Establish whether the lease is qualifying as at 14 February 2022.
2. Identify which (if any) defects are “relevant defects” within Section 120.
3. Confirm the building height threshold and the building age.
4. Obtain a freeholder solvency statement before agreeing to any remediation cost.
5. Where the building is listed, open the consent track in parallel with the cost track.

The work is procedural. It is not, in our view, the kind of matter that benefits from speed; it benefits from sequence. Most of our Bath instructions take eight to fourteen weeks to settle the scope question, and a further six to nine months to resolve the cost-allocation question.

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