"At the heart of the matter, this is a human story. Every building that has been identified for remediation but hasn’t received any remediation represents dozens if not hundreds of people and families whose lives are at risk"
- Sian Metcalfe - Property Inspect
The latest government figures show the UK is tracking more high-rise residential buildings with potential cladding risks than at any point since the building safety remediation programme began. However, fewer of those buildings are moving into active remediation, a divergence that Property Inspect UK argues highlights long-standing structural problems in how remediation is managed, checked, and signed off.
As of October 2025, the most recent data available, 5,570 residential buildings over 11 metres are under monitoring through the Ministry of Housing, Communities & Local Government building safety remediation programme. That total marks a 15.2% increase year on year.
Growth is strongest among mid-rise buildings. Monitoring of buildings between 11 and 18 metres rose by 23.5% compared with the previous year, while the number of higher-rise buildings above 18 metres increased by 9.5%. The data suggests that identification efforts continue to widen, particularly for buildings previously considered lower risk.
Progress on remediation, however, has moved in the opposite direction. The number of buildings with remediation works actively underway on site fell by 22.8% between October 2024 and October 2025, indicating that fewer schemes are advancing beyond assessment and planning stages.
There is a partial counterbalance in the figures. Over the same period, completed remediation projects increased by 35.5%, pointing to faster delivery once work actually starts. The pattern suggests that bottlenecks are forming before construction begins, rather than during physical works.
Sián Hemming-Metcalfe, operations director at Property Inspect, said the data reflects deeper process failures rather than a lack of construction capacity. “More buildings than ever are entering monitoring, yet fewer are moving into the remediation pipeline,” she explained. “This doesn’t point to a simple construction capacity issue, but instead to an ingrained workflow inefficiency. The system still relies too heavily on fragmented documentation processes, inconsistent evidence standards, and slow, manual review procedures that delay sign-off even when physical work is complete.”
She added that the company has raised concerns about remediation procedures for years. “At Property Inspect, we have been beating the drum for years on this issue, trying to increase awareness around the flawed procedures around unsafe cladding remediation and the impact it is having on the property industry.”
Hemming-Metcalfe said the consequences extend beyond market disruption. “We’re not going to stop banging this drum because it’s not just the industry that is being negatively impacted,” she noted. “At the heart of the matter, this is a human story. Every building that has been identified for remediation but hasn’t received any remediation represents dozens if not hundreds of people and families whose lives are at risk. If we didn’t learn our lesson from Grenfell, we only have to look at the more recent tragedy in Hong Kong to know that fire safety measures on high-rise buildings are literally a matter of life or death that we cannot afford to get wrong.”
Property Inspect argues that addressing the gap between monitoring and remediation requires changes at a system level rather than incremental fixes. The company points to three areas where reform could reduce delays and improve accountability:
Standardised, digitised evidence packs, requiring all remediation projects to follow a single submission format covering photographic records, contractor certifications, inspection reports, and time-stamped metadata to confirm authenticity and sequence.
A national remediation tracker, providing a publicly accessible dashboard with live status updates for individual buildings, is designed to reduce duplicated submissions, expose delays, and improve oversight across stakeholders.
Funding tied to compliance standards and SLAs, linking future financial support to clear progress milestones and complete documentation, while enforcing service level agreements for both submissions and regulatory reviews, so projects do not stall due to administrative delays.
Together, Property Inspect says these measures would shift remediation away from fragmented, paper-heavy processes toward a more transparent and verifiable system, helping more buildings move from identification into completed works.
