The government has announced that the role of Building Safety Manager – a key part of the Building Safety Bill – will be scrapped in response to complaints from leaseholder groups about the potential costs.

The change, it says, will “provide a more proportionate and flexible approach that will enable Accountable Persons (APs) – typically the building owners – to meet their obligations in a way that that is most effective for their buildings and residents”. It will be the responsibility of APs to ensure they have the necessary arrangements in place to manage and maintain building safety risks in their buildings. Guidance will be available to support APs meet their obligations set out in the Bill.

The Building Safety Bill – which is at an advanced stage in the parliamentary process – has been designed to implement the recommendations of Dame Judith Hackitt in the wake of the Grenfell Tower fire. The bill originally included the provision that landlords managing high rise residential blocks must recruit a Building Safety Manager to oversee fire and structural safety.

The amendments remove this requirement and will potentially block the government’s aim to ensure there are clearly identified people responsible for safety of high-rise residential buildings.

The Building Safety Manager would have been the person appointed by the Accountable Person to plan, manage and monitor fire and structural safety duties. Additionally, individuals could only be appointed Building Safety Managers if they had the “skills, knowledge, experience and behaviours” to carry out such duties.

Many landlords have already hired building safety managers, but leaseholders raised concerns that these managers, who can be paid salaries of £60,000 per year, will be an expensive cost for them to cover. Landlords would have been allowed to recover some of the cost of hiring these managers through the building safety charge, which was to be charged to leaseholders in addition to their service charge.

Announcing the changes, Levelling Up Secretary, Michael Gove, said:

“No leaseholder should pay the price for shoddy development and we have listened to their concerns, removing the requirement for a separate building safety charge and scrapping compulsory building safety managers, to help avoid unnecessary costs.”

Other amendments include extending protections to leaseholders who own up to three properties, scrapping the standalone Building Safety Charge, and expanding leaseholder protections so that those in lower value properties pay nothing for non-cladding remediation works.