Accountable Persons: Who Carries the Building Safety Duties

The Building Safety Act's quietest revolution is a question of names. Before it, responsibility for a tall residential building's safety was spread across leases, contracts and assumptions, and when something failed, everyone had somebody else to point at. The Act replaced that with a legal fact: every occupied higher-risk building has one or more accountable persons, identifiable in advance, carrying duties that cannot be delegated away. If you own, manage or live in a residential building of 18 metres or seven storeys, this is who now holds the file.

An accountable person is anyone who owns or has a legal obligation to repair the common parts of a higher-risk building. Many buildings have several: a freeholder here, a head lessee there, a management company for the amenity floors. The Act then names one of them the principal accountable person: the one responsible for the structure and exterior of the building, or, where the same body holds everything, simply the owner. In a typical London block that is the freeholder, a resident management company or a housing association. The principal accountable person carries the heaviest duties, but every accountable person has legal obligations for their part of the building.

The core duties for an occupied higher-risk building are these:

• Register the building with the Building Safety Regulator, and keep the registration current. Occupying an unregistered higher-risk building is an offence.
• Assess the building safety risks, meaning the spread of fire and structural failure, and take all reasonable steps to manage them.
• Prepare and maintain the safety case report that evidences those steps, and provide it to the regulator when required.
• Apply for a building assessment certificate when the regulator directs, and display it.
• Report mandatory occurrences: safety events serious enough that the regulator must know.
• Engage residents: a residents' engagement strategy, real information, and a route for complaints.
• Keep the golden thread: the building's key information, current, accurate and accessible.

These duties carry criminal liability: failures can be prosecuted, and officers of corporate accountable persons can be personally exposed where failures happen with their consent, connivance or neglect. That is deliberate. The regime was designed so that the question every board and every freeholder should be able to answer at any moment is: who is accountable for this building's safety, and can they prove they are managing it? If the honest answer is a shrug, the building is carrying unmanaged legal risk on top of unmanaged physical risk.

The duties do not pause for a refurbishment; they intensify. Works in an occupied higher-risk building need building control approval from the regulator before they start, under the same regime that governs new towers. The accountable person sits on both sides of that process: as the building's duty holder, whose safety case the works will change, and often as the client, who now carries explicit competence duties, the obligation to appoint designers and contractors capable of the work and to check that they are. Choosing a contractor for a higher-risk building is therefore a compliance decision, not just a commercial one: the regulator will, in effect, ask whether your team could evidence compliance before a trade started.

The well-run buildings we see share a pattern. The principal accountable person knows exactly which duties are theirs and which are shared. The safety case is current, and every project is planned as an update to it. Works go to teams who understand that in this regime the drawings, the fire strategy and the compliance statements are one document set describing one building. That is the standard MVV works to in occupied London blocks, with fire and structural engineering partners in the team from the first sketch. If you are an accountable person planning works, or a leaseholder whose building is gearing up for them, the cheapest moment to get this right is before the programme exists.