Cladding remediation, and the deadlines now going into law

For most of the last few years the story on unsafe cladding was about pace. The buildings had been found, the funding routes existed on paper, and yet the count of blocks actually fixed moved slowly. The change in 2026 is that there are now dates in the ground, and penalties attached to missing them.

Where the numbers stand

The clearest picture comes from the government's monthly Building Safety Remediation data. As at the end of May 2026, there were 4,411 residential buildings 11 metres and over in height with unsafe cladding whose progress is being reported on, estimated to be somewhere between 61 and 76 per cent of all the buildings in that height band expected to enter the remediation programmes (MHCLG, Building Safety Remediation monthly data release, May 2026).

Of those identified buildings, 2,331 (53 per cent) had started or completed remediation of the unsafe cladding, and 1,672 (38 per cent) had finished the work. A further 2,179 buildings sat in the earlier stages of the Cladding Safety Scheme, either going through eligibility checks or waiting to apply.

Read plainly, that is real movement and a long way still to go. More than a third of the known buildings are done. Well over half have not yet started.

The deadlines that changed the conversation

What shifted the tone was the Remediation Acceleration Plan, first published in December 2024 and updated in July 2025, and the Remediation Bill that puts its hardest parts into statute. The headline is two dates.

Buildings over 18 metres with unsafe cladding are to be remediated by the end of 2029. Buildings between 11 and 18 metres are to be remediated, or at least have a date set for completion, by the end of 2031. For the taller band the duty falls on those responsible for the highest risk buildings first, and failing to meet it without a reasonable excuse is set to carry serious consequences, up to unlimited fines and, in the most serious cases, imprisonment (MHCLG, Remediation Acceleration Plan update, 2025).

The plan also hands backstop powers to bodies such as Homes England and local authorities, so a building can be remediated by someone else if the owner will not act, and commits over £1 billion so that social landlords can reach the same funding schemes as private owners. The point of all of it is to remove the excuse that nothing could be done, and to make the passage of time itself a compliance failure.

What a building owner is now expected to show

Deadlines change what a good record looks like. It is no longer enough to know that a building has a cladding problem. An owner is expected to be able to show, at any point, where that building sits in the process: what the fire safety assessment found, what the remediation plan is, which works have a contractor and a date, and what interim measures are holding the risk in the meantime.

That is a documentation problem as much as a construction one. A building that misses a deadline because the works genuinely could not be completed is one thing. A building that misses it because nobody could produce the current assessment, the scope of works, or the correspondence with the funding scheme is a different and avoidable failure.

Where SAMRISK fits

SAMRISK is built to keep that thread in one place rather than scattered across inboxes and drives. A building's fire safety record and its risk assessments live alongside the documents that evidence them, each versioned and dated, so the assessment you rely on is the current one. The compliance calendar holds the dates that now matter, the interim review, the works milestone, the statutory deadline, and chains them so a slip is visible early rather than at the end.

The national numbers will keep moving through the rest of 2026. For any single building the question is narrower and more useful: can you show where it is, and what happens next. The owners who can answer that are the ones the new deadlines were written to protect.