Developers Promised to Start Work on 80% of Their Unsafe Buildings by This Month. Government Data Puts Them at 48.5%.

TL;DR: In December 2024, developers signing the government's joint plan committed to start or complete works on 80% of their buildings requiring remediation by end July 2026. MHCLG's latest data puts them at 48.5%, a rise of 1.2 percentage points since the baseline the plan itself cites. The commitment carries no legal force, and 957 of those buildings have no remediation plan in place at all.

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#A Deadline Nobody Is Talking About Falls This Month

The Property Institute published research this month warning that housebuilders are on course to take another decade to fix unsafe buildings. It drew on 511 buildings its members manage, and it prompted us to go back to the government's own dataset.

The government's own dataset carries a sharper number. Developers set themselves a deadline that falls in three weeks, and on the published figures they are on course to miss it by a wide margin.

That deadline does not sit in the legislation everyone is watching. It sits in a voluntary plan published nineteen months ago.

#What the Commitment Actually Says

On 2 December 2024, MHCLG published the joint plan to accelerate developer-led remediation, alongside the wider Remediation Acceleration Plan. Commitment 4(a) is unambiguous.

"start or complete works on at least 80% of their buildings requiring works by end July 2026 (to be reflected in developers' August 2026 quarterly data returns to MHCLG)"

— Joint plan to accelerate developer-led remediation, 2 December 2024

Two details matter. The measure is "start or complete", so a building counts the moment scaffolding goes up. And progress is assessed on developers' August 2026 quarterly return to MHCLG.

The plan also states its own legal weight plainly:

"This plan is not intended to create binding legal rights or obligations or to vary in any way the terms of the developer remediation contracts."

The statutory scheme sitting behind it, the Responsible Actors Scheme (Building Safety Act 2022, sections 126 to 129), can bar a developer from planning permission and building control approval. It contains no remediation completion deadline at all.

#Where the Numbers Stand

MHCLG's Building Safety Remediation monthly data release for May 2026 was published on 24 June. Its data table Developer_1, headed Remediation status of buildings requiring works under the developer remediation contract, records 2,604 such buildings. These are developers' own self-reported returns, current to 30 April 2026.

To reach 80% of 2,604 buildings, developers need 2,083 started or complete. They are 819 short.

The accompanying tables record how fast starts actually happen. Across the trailing twelve months to April 2026, developers started work on 252 buildings. Closing an 819-building gap before the August return would need roughly thirteen times that rate, sustained through the summer.

The August return will show whether MHCLG's accepted exceptions close any of that distance.

#Twenty-Two Months, 1.2 Percentage Points

The joint plan set the 80% figure against a stated baseline:

"as of July 2024 remedial works had started in fewer than half of buildings known to require remedial works under the developer remediation contract"

That baseline, July 2024, was 47.3% started or complete. The latest return, April 2026, is 48.5%.

Over twenty-two months the figure gained 1.2 percentage points, against a target of 80%.

The reason the percentage barely moves is not that nothing is happening. Developers started 495 more buildings over that period, a 64% increase in absolute terms. But the number of buildings requiring works grew from 1,626 to 2,604 over the same window, a 60% increase, as assessments kept finding buildings nobody had counted.

Assessment finds buildings faster than construction starts them. Over the same period the no plans in place category more than doubled, from 402 buildings to 957.

#The Counter-Argument, and Why It Only Goes So Far

The commitment has an escape hatch, and it is the first thing anyone defending these numbers will reach for. The 80% target excludes any building where the developer has shown MHCLG "compelling evidence that a start cannot be achieved due to factors outside the developer's control", and MHCLG agrees.

Those exclusions are real. Access disputes with freeholders, unresolved third-party liability, and responsible entities that will not sign a works contract are genuine blockers, and the joint plan devotes a section to unsticking them.

The question is scale. Against the earlier July 2025 target for completing assessments, MHCLG accepted 55 such exceptions across all developers. To close a gap of 819 buildings, the accepted exceptions would need to number in the hundreds. MHCLG does not publish the count of exceptions accepted against the start target, which is itself worth asking about. Even generous assumptions leave the target out of reach at the observed pace.

There is a second pattern in the data that is harder to explain away. Determinations, the assessments that decide whether a building needs works, ran at 406 in the quarter ending July 2025, the exact quarter the joint plan's first target fell due. In the three quarters since: 182, then 154, then 106.

Determinations peaked at 406 in the quarter the previous target fell due, and have fallen to 106 across the three quarters since.

— MHCLG, Building Safety Remediation data tables, May 2026

MHCLG offers no explanation for the decline in the release.

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#The Bottleneck Is Not Construction

It would be easy to assume remediation is slow because the building work is slow.

MHCLG publishes no figure at all for how long remediation works take. It does not appear in the May 2026 release, nor in any of its 67 accompanying data tables.

Brocade requested it under the Freedom of Information Act 2000 on 10 April 2026. MHCLG replied on 26 May 2026, reference FOI2026/11188: for Building Safety Fund buildings completed as of 31 March 2026, the median elapsed time from approval of full works funding to practical completion was 651 calendar days.

MHCLG does not hold the equivalent figure for the Cladding Safety Scheme and referred the request to Homes England, which administers it. Homes England replied on 24 June 2026, reference RFI5723: the CSS median is 258 calendar days, across 83 of its 112 recorded practical completions. It excluded 29 projects where funding was claimed after the work had finished.

As a check: Homes England counts 112 CSS practical completions at end-May 2026, and MHCLG's published release counts 112 CSS completions at 31 May 2026. Two bodies, two datasets, one number.

The median Building Safety Fund building takes 651 calendar days from works-funding approval to practical completion. In the Cladding Safety Scheme the median is 258 days.

— MHCLG FOI2026/11188 and Homes England RFI5723

Set that against the Cladding Safety Scheme's 8% completion rate. Its works run in under half the Building Safety Fund's clock, yet its pipeline has barely cleared. The constraint sits in assessment, scoping, funding agreement and procurement, all of which precede the works.

The same logic applies to the developer cohort. Of the 1,340 buildings not yet started, 957 have no plan in place. A deadline that compels a start does nothing about the queue in front of it.

MHCLG's Combined_9 table records that of 1,510 buildings known to government remediation programmes by December 2020, 385 had still not started remediation by 30 April 2026. One building in four, more than five years on.

At the trailing twelve-month rate of 252 starts a year, the 1,311 developer-cohort buildings not yet under way would take a little over five years to begin. It is an extrapolation, and 928 of those buildings have no plan in place today. Treat it as the optimistic end of the range.

#What This Means for Building Managers

If you are an RTM or RMC director, or a managing agent with a building in the developer remediation contract, three things follow.

First, your building's status is a data point in someone's quarterly return. The 2,604 figure is self-reported by developers. No plans in place is a defined reporting category with 957 buildings in it. A building enters it by having no scheduled works, and it can sit there indefinitely.

Second, get the determination in writing. A determination is the assessment that decides whether your building requires works under the contract. Ask the developer, in writing, whether one has been made for your building, on what date, and what it concluded. If the answer is that assessment is ongoing, ask when it began. Determinations across the whole cohort have fallen from 406 a quarter to 106.

Third, build the correspondence file now. A building with 40 unanswered emails to a developer and no works date is in a very different position, before a tribunal or a lender, than one with a dated log of requests, responses and escalations. If the forthcoming Remediation Bill lands as drafted, its new duty to remediate falls on "those responsible for the safety of their buildings, such as freeholders", and the backstop lets Homes England step in where the responsible party ignores that duty. Developers are not the duty-holders. We covered what that means for existing leaseholder-managed buildings in our piece on the Commonhold and Remediation Bills.

Keep those records as you go, contemporaneously, the way the golden thread requires everywhere else in the Act.

This article is for informational purposes. For building-specific advice, consult a qualified fire safety professional.

#Common Questions

What did developers commit to by July 2026?

Under the joint plan published on 2 December 2024, developers committed to start or complete works on at least 80% of their buildings requiring works by end July 2026, and 100% by end July 2027. Progress is measured in developers' August 2026 quarterly data returns to MHCLG.

How many developer buildings have started remediation?

Of the 2,604 buildings requiring works under the developer remediation contract, developers self-report that 1,264 (48.5%) have started or completed remediation. That is from MHCLG's Building Safety Remediation monthly data release for May 2026, published 24 June 2026.

Is the 80% target legally binding on developers?

No. The joint plan states it "is not intended to create binding legal rights or obligations or to vary in any way the terms of the developer remediation contracts." The Responsible Actors Scheme, which is statutory, contains no remediation completion deadline.

How long does cladding remediation actually take once it starts?

Brocade obtained the figures by Freedom of Information request. The median time from full-works funding approval to practical completion is 651 calendar days in the Building Safety Fund and 258 calendar days in the Cladding Safety Scheme. Neither figure is published in MHCLG's routine statistics.

Does the forthcoming Remediation Bill impose a deadline on developers?

Not on developers. The Bill's new legal duty to remediate falls on those responsible for the safety of their buildings, described in the King's Speech briefing as freeholders. The backstop lets a third party, such as Homes England, step in where the responsible party fails to act.

What should an RTM director or managing agent do if a developer is remediating their building?

Establish in writing which remediation route covers the building, whether a determination has been made, and whether the building has a works start date. Record every request and response. A building sitting in no plans in place is invisible in national statistics but visible in your correspondence file.

#Further Reading

• The Commonhold Reform Bill and Remediation Bill: What's Coming for RTM and RMC Directors
• The BSR Has Refused 31 of 37 Decided RTM Building Assessment Certificate Applications
• The Building Safety Levy: What Managers Need to Know
• MHCLG, Building Safety Remediation monthly data release, May 2026
• Joint plan to accelerate developer-led remediation, 2 December 2024

Figures in this article are drawn from MHCLG's May 2026 data release and its accompanying management information tables (Developer_1, Developer_10, Developer_11, Combined_9), published 24 June 2026. Developer remediation figures reflect developers' own returns as at 30 April 2026. Duration figures are from MHCLG FOI2026/11188 and Homes England RFI5723, obtained by Brocade.

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