Can a housing association sue you for building safety defects years later?

The Building Safety Act reopened claims most contractors had written off as time-barred. Thirty years is not a typographical error, and the corporate structure that used to absorb the risk no longer does.

A managing director of a mid-sized contractor said something to me last year that I have heard in various forms since: "We finished that scheme in 2009. Surely it is gone."

It is not gone. For a great many buildings it will not be gone until the 2030s, and for some until the 2050s.

The Building Safety Act 2022 did something unusual in English law. It did not merely change the rules going forward — it reached backwards and revived claims that had already expired. If your business built, refurbished or worked on dwellings in the last three decades, the question is no longer whether the limitation clock has run out. It is whether you can still prove what you did.

What actually changed

Claims under the Defective Premises Act 1972 used to carry the ordinary six-year limitation period. Six years from completion, and the exposure was over. That was the assumption most contractors, their accountants and their insurers built into how long records were kept and how long dormant companies were left standing.

The Act replaced that with two periods. For work completed before the end of June 2022, the limitation period is thirty years. For work after, it is fifteen. The thirty-year period is retrospective — it applies to claims that were already time-barred on the day the Act commenced, and it revived them.

The practical effect is easiest to see in an example. A block of flats completed in 1998 was, under the old law, beyond challenge from 2004. Today it sits comfortably inside the thirty-year window. A housing association that discovers a fire-safety defect during a remediation survey can bring a claim about workmanship carried out when the site manager on that job was in his twenties.

Why this is landing on contractors now, not in 2022

The Act commenced in 2022, but claims take time to arrive. Building owners had to survey their stock first, then establish what was defective, then work out who to pursue. Housing associations and local authorities have spent the intervening years doing exactly that, often funded by remediation programmes that require them to demonstrate they have pursued the original parties.

That last point matters more than it sounds. A building owner seeking public remediation funding is frequently expected to show it has attempted recovery from those responsible. The claim against you may not be driven purely by commercial appetite; it may be a condition of the money.

The corporate structure will not save you

The traditional answer to long-tail construction risk was structural. Each project sat in its own special purpose vehicle, the SPV was wound up once the retention was released, and the exposure died with it.

The Act anticipated that. It introduced building liability orders, which allow the court to extend a liability relating to a building to an associated company. Associated is defined broadly. A dormant SPV with no assets is no longer the end of the enquiry — the court can look at the group behind it, including companies that never touched the site.

For founder-led construction businesses this is the single most under-appreciated change. Groups were often structured on the assumption that yesterday's project could never reach today's trading company. That assumption is now unsafe, and it is worth knowing which of your entities would be caught before somebody else works it out for you.

What the exposure actually turns on

In practice, three things decide how a claim of this kind goes.

Records. A defect claim about 2011 workmanship is largely a documentary exercise. If you hold the drawings, the specification, the instructions you were given, the sign-offs and the correspondence about variations, you are defending a case. If you do not, you are accepting a number. Most contractors' document retention policies were written around a six-year horizon and quietly destroyed the evidence that would now exonerate them.

Contract chain. Whether you can pass liability down to a subcontractor depends on what your subcontracts said, whether they contain equivalent obligations, and whether those subcontractors still exist. Collateral warranties, third-party rights, and the presence or absence of a net contribution clause all change the answer. A contractor with a strong chain is in a negotiation; one without is in a queue.

Insurance. Professional indemnity and contractors' all risks policies are usually written on a claims-made basis, so the policy that responds is today's, not the one in force when the work was done. Fire safety exclusions have become common since 2019. It is entirely possible to face a revived claim with a current policy that expressly excludes the thing you are being sued about.

What to do about it before a letter arrives

The work here is unglamorous and cheap compared with the alternative.

Start with a schedule of every residential scheme your group has worked on since the mid-1990s, with completion dates and the entity that held the contract. Most businesses cannot produce this quickly, which is itself the finding.

Then check what survives. For each scheme, establish whether the contract documents, drawings and instructions still exist and where. Change your retention policy so that residential project records are kept for the full statutory period rather than the old six years — this costs almost nothing and is the highest-value single step available.

Then look at the group. Identify which companies would be caught as associated, and take advice before restructuring, because a reorganisation carried out in the shadow of a known claim invites its own arguments.

Finally, read your policy wording rather than your broker's summary, and ask specifically how it responds to a revived Defective Premises Act claim about historic work. Ask in writing.

Where a specialist is needed

Contentious claims are conducted by regulated litigators, and a live claim against your business needs one. Coverage disputes with an insurer need specialist coverage counsel. Where a defect raises questions of criminal liability under the building safety regime, that is a different sort of adviser again.

What Dinmore Bell does is the part before and around that: mapping the exposure across the group, getting the records and retention policy right, reading the contract chain to see what can be passed on, and instructing and coordinating the specialists when they are needed — holding the budget and staying accountable for the outcome, rather than handing you a list of people to call.

The businesses that come through this well will be the ones that did the boring exercise early. Thirty years is a long time to be exposed to a filing cabinet somebody emptied in 2015.