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Dozens of court battles are raging over who will foot the bill to fix unsafe buildings across the UK after the devastating Grenfell Tower fire nine years ago.
Almost 100 cladding, building and fire safety cases are active in London’s High Court, mostly under a new law introduced in response to the disaster that has upended liability in the construction sector.
Developers, builders, architects and material manufacturers are suing one another to recover vast sums spent to replace unsafe cladding and fix other problems exposed by the blaze at the west London high-rise block in 2017, which killed 72 people.
Housebuilders including Barratt Redrow, Crest Nicholson and Taylor Wimpey — as well as several big social housing providers — form part of the complex web of litigation.
The disputes, which span luxury developments, student flats and social housing portfolios, as well as commercial properties such as hotels, have a combined value of about £1.2bn, according to data compiled by litigation intelligence platform Solomonic.
People gather at the memorial wall next to Grenfell Tower on the ninth anniversary of the disaster in June this year © Vuk Valcic/ZUMA Press Wire via Reuters
“There are plenty of opportunities for people to point the finger or pass the buck,” said Andrew Parker, partner in construction disputes and building safety at law firm Forsters.
“The contractor says I was working off the design from the architect, the architect says I spoke to the facade engineer, the facade engineer says I told the subcontractor what to do. And everyone says building control signed it off.”
The legal wrangling had added to financial strains on construction companies that already operate on wafer-thin margins, threatening to tip losers into insolvency, lawyers said.
Those on the receiving end of some of the lawsuits say they are being forced to litigate projects that finished many years ago. Lawyers representing some of the defendants say it has made fair trials impossible and breaches human rights law.
An example of the tangled web of litigation trailing in Grenfell’s wake originates 120 miles away from the tower.
Developers of the Eclipse Tower in Bristol, among the city’s tallest residential blocks, knew they had a problem in the wake of the 2017 disaster.
Cladding at the 18-storey building, above department store Harvey Nichols in the city centre, was similar to that used in the West London tower.
The 18-storey Eclipse Tower in Bristol, which used cladding similar to that used in Grenfell © Mark Hathaway/Alamy
According to court documents, inspectors who opened sections of the walls to see what lay underneath found various combustible materials.
In response, developer Bristol Alliance paid the main contractor on the construction, Sir Robert McAlpine, £19mn to undertake remedial work. But it reserved a right to sue once the building was made safe.
Bristol Alliance in 2023 sued McAlpine, which in turn brought lawsuits against architect Benoy and subcontractor Richardson Roofing.
Benoy then sued subconsultant Arup Façade Engineering, claiming it should have spotted flaws with the building. Richardson Roofing, meanwhile, dragged insulation manufacturer Kingspan into the lawsuit, alleging it was deceived by marketing about the materials.
With everyone pointing fingers, the High Court in London has ordered a blockbuster multi-party trial for next year.
Construction lawyers said it was a classic example of the post-Grenfell chain reaction of litigation, with liability passed through each stage.
Such disputes have been fuelled by post-Grenfell legislation that has given developers and building owners powers to reach much deeper into the construction supply chain to demand compensation.
“We can now pursue parties that we never would have been able to pursue before,” said Mark London, senior partner at Devonshires Solicitors.
In Portsmouth, Crest Nicholson has sought to use new powers to claw back millions in fire-safety costs at the 19-building Admiralty Quarter development © Jim Gibson/Alamy
For decades, it was standard practice for developers to limit legal exposure by ringfencing particular projects in special purpose vehicles.
Once the block was completed, the SPV would be wound down. If defects came to light years later, as they did after Grenfell, there was little or nothing left to sue.
The Building Safety Act 2022 has changed that. Now, if a subsidiary that built an unsafe block is dissolved or goes into administration, a court can hold a parent company liable.
“The BSA is reshaping liability across the construction sector,” said Simon Tolson at law firm Fenwick Elliott.
In Portsmouth, developer Crest Nicholson has sought to use the new powers to claw back millions in fire-safety costs at the 19-building Admiralty Quarter development.
Last August, the contractor Ardmore Construction fell into administration, just a day before an adjudicator ordered it to pay Crest about £15mn to rectify fire safety defects.
Under the old rules, the insolvency would have severely hampered Crest’s hopes of any financial recovery.
But the BSA has allowed it to try to circumvent the insolvent company and pursue several entities behind the wider group, which, according to a High Court judgment in April, is ultimately owned by the Byrne Family Trust, controlled by construction industry veteran Cormac Byrne.
Crest’s lawyers argued profitable contracts were moved to other parts of the group and Ardmore Construction became, in effect, a shell.
The defendants fought back, arguing that Crest undertook unnecessarily expensive work and that pursuing the associated entities were not “just and equitable” under the BSA.
In April, the High Court sided with Crest, opening the door for enforcement against the wider entities, though they are appealing.
In Cardiff, Taylor Wimpey is locked in a £30mn battle over the cost of repairs at Victoria Wharf, a development of seven apartment blocks © Commission Air/Alamy
Anthony Field, a partner at law firm Rosenblatt who previously acted for the associated Ardmore entities, said the judgment was likely to encourage other lawsuits.
“In my view, unless the judgment is overturned or parliament intervenes, this could have devastating consequences to the construction industry with more business going into insolvency,” he said.
The new law has put companies at risk of being sued for work that was completed decades ago. The BSA retrospectively extended the time limit for bringing lawsuits from six or 12 years (depending on the nature of the claim) to 30 years.
In Cardiff, Taylor Wimpey is locked in a £30mn battle over the cost of repairs at Victoria Wharf, a waterfront development of seven apartment blocks.
Previously, Taylor Wimpey’s right to sue for defects at the development, completed in stages between 2005 and 2008, would have expired.
However, the newly extended 30-year window has allowed it to demand that contractor Taylor Woodrow and ultimate parent company Vinci Construction foot the bill.
Taylor Woodrow and Vinci Construction have yet to file their defence with the court.
But lawyers for other companies facing claims for work done years ago say the historic cases present practical problems, with paper records missing and witnesses who have long since retired.
While private-sector companies fight it out, the UK government has also launched its own legal offensive to reclaim public money.
Remediation work at larger buildings was initially funded by the UK government through the taxpayer-backed Building Safety Fund, before ministers in 2022 capped taxpayer liability at £5.1bn. Large housebuilders and developers then committed to carry out repairs at thousands of other buildings.
Among the cases ministers are pursuing is a £48mn lawsuit against Urban Splash, co-founded by Manchester regeneration entrepreneur Tom Bloxham.
The government is trying to recover funds it spent on remediation at Urban Splash properties across Manchester. As part of its defence, Urban Splash argued the “retrospective” demands breached human rights law. A judgment is pending.
The High Court litigation is only part of the post-Grenfell legal fallout. Cases are also being fought at the first-tier tribunal, some by flat leaseholders left trapped in unsellable homes.
Leaseholders are supposed to be protected from the costs of removing unsafe cladding, but some have resorted to legal action over the speed and scope of the work.
Across the private and public sectors, the estimated total bill to fix unsafe blocks is expected to come to anything between £12.6bn and £22.4bn, according to a parliamentary report last year.
The legal reforms may have achieved their main goal of accelerating repairs and helping to protect leaseholders, but they have done so by upending longstanding principles.
Despite the high stakes, only a few judgments have been handed down, leaving the ultimate question of who will foot the bill largely unresolved.
“All these far-reaching measures — piercing the corporate veil, 30-year limitation periods — it’s all happened in such a rush,” said Parker, the partner at Forsters. “We’ve been trying to fix a 40-year problem in just a few years.”