Four stories today, and every one of them turns on who is actually checking the work. The Grenfell Inquiry’s latest progress report has government marking its own homework on building safety, one of the country’s biggest retrofit accreditation bodies is telling ministers not to bury consumer protection under more layers of oversight, and Southampton has just shown what proactive landlord enforcement looks like once a council stops waiting to be tipped off. Underneath it all sits a housing-stock story nobody is really auditing: £88.6 billion of homes standing empty while everyone argues about supply.
Half the Grenfell recommendations are done — the one that hits my desk isn’t
MHCLG published its latest Grenfell Tower Inquiry progress report on 10 September, tracking government’s response to the Inquiry’s 61 recommendations. Thirty are now complete, thirty-one are in progress, and ministers still expect full implementation by the end of 2029. On remediation, 4,697 buildings over 11 metres are being monitored for unsafe cladding, 2,551 of them (54 per cent) have started work and 1,833 (39 per cent) have finished. The construction-industry section of the same report confirms the Building Safety Regulator formally completed its split from the Health and Safety Executive in June, the foundation for the single construction regulator promised in a consultation response published back on 9 July.
The recommendation that actually changes how I work is stuck, though. Approved Document B — the fire safety guidance surveyors and building control use every day — closed its consultation on 1 July with over 500 responses, more than double the number the second-staircase consultation drew, and the regulator isn’t due to report back until March 2027. An interim update from the wider Fundamental Review of Building Regulations guidance is pencilled in for this quarter, and separately, mandatory accreditation for fire risk assessors, consulted on in the spring, doesn’t get a government response until Q4 2026.
Read that gap correctly: the plumbing is genuinely improving — a proper regulator with statutory teeth is replacing what was effectively an HSE add-on — but the actual document surveyors write fire safety advice against is the 2022 vintage, and it is staying that way well into 2027. If you’re advising on a building over 11 metres, flag the open Approved Document B review as a live risk factor in your report rather than treating current guidance as the last word.
Retrofit’s own watchdogs are telling government: simplify, don’t stack
Elmhurst Energy — one of the accreditation bodies that actually runs PAS 2035 retrofit coordinator and EPC assessor schemes — published its response to a government consultation on retrofit consumer protection on 10 September. Managing director Stuart Fairlie put it plainly: reform “must get the fundamentals right: competent professionals, accurate property assessments and clear accountability.” Elmhurst backs a single consumer protection service, one point of contact for complaints, and better data-sharing between schemes — but explicitly warns against duplicating oversight across DESNZ, TrustMark and the proposed Warm Homes Agency, and points out these quality problems were flagged nearly a decade ago in the Each Home Counts review and still haven’t been fixed.
I coordinate PAS 2035 jobs, and the redress landscape a homeowner faces when something goes wrong is already a maze: TrustMark, the insurance-backed guarantee provider, the manufacturer warranty, and soon a Warm Homes Agency on top, each with its own complaints route for the same installation. A homeowner with a failed heat pump genuinely doesn’t know which door to knock on first, and Elmhurst is right that the fix is fewer, clearer routes rather than a new one bolted onto the pile.
Retrofit coordinators and installers should point clients to the existing TrustMark or ombudsman route now rather than waiting on a reform that, on this timetable, won’t land before 2027 at the earliest. Anyone commissioning ECO or Warm Homes work should get the redress route confirmed in writing before work starts, not after something goes wrong.
Southampton isn’t waiting for a tip-off any more — it’s opened 30 files at once
Landlord Today reported on 11 September that Southampton City Council is actively investigating 30 private rented sector cases using Renters’ Rights Act powers to enter properties, demand documents from landlords and agents, and issue civil penalties of up to £40,000. The council received £610,163 in government enforcement funding and has doubled its enforcement team from one officer to two, covering an estimated 6,000–7,000 HMOs across the city. A council officer told the outlet fines will be “quite hefty” within three to six months, having deliberately held off on financial forecasts to see “how the playing field kind of developed” over the Act’s first year. Pre-Act fines in Southampton averaged around £2,000; the new civil penalty regime — as Bristol demonstrated this week with a £13,090 notice — now starts from a government baseline of £17,000 before adjustment.
This is a different posture from Bristol’s case, which was one HMO caught and fined after the fact. Southampton is running 30 investigations at once, backed by dedicated funding and headcount, and would rather sit on those files for a year building them properly than rush out a headline fine early. That patience is the tell — once a council proves the funding model works, others will copy it.
Anyone letting HMOs or licensable properties in a city running an active licensing scheme should assume they could already be one of thirty open files, not that enforcement is theoretical. Get the licence application in now; the gap between a few hundred pounds and a five-figure fine has never been wider.
£88.6 billion of housing is standing empty, and it isn’t spread where you’d think
Landlord Today reported on 11 September on analysis by House Buyer Bureau putting 754,264 vacant homes in England, of which 303,185 — 40 per cent — have sat empty for six months or more and now qualify as long-term vacant, with a combined estimated value of £88.6 billion at regional average prices. London alone accounts for 47,287 long-term vacant homes worth an estimated £25.8 billion, and the concentration in its priciest boroughs is striking: Westminster (61.2 per cent of its vacant stock long-term empty) and Kensington and Chelsea (59.7 per cent) both sit well above the 40 per cent national average. Birmingham, by contrast, has 7,060 long-term vacant homes worth a comparatively modest £1.64 billion.
The “housing crisis” framing tends to obscure a simpler point: a lot of that stock isn’t hard-to-let, it’s just sitting there, often for reasons that have nothing to do with local demand — probate delays, disputed estates, investment holding. For a landlord or investor prepared to do the work, a long-term empty home is usually the cheapest route into a portfolio, because it near-certainly needs a full building survey and an EPC and retrofit uplift before it can be let or sold — exactly the sequence a surveyor gets called in for — and the purchase price already reflects that condition.
Anyone looking at an empty-homes purchase should budget survey, EPC and retrofit costs into the acquisition from day one rather than as an afterthought, and check the local council’s empty homes council tax premium: in boroughs like the two above, it’s now a running cost that can make fixing the property up cheaper than continuing to hold it empty.
What I’d actually do
- Advising on fire safety in a building over 11 metres? Flag the still-open Approved Document B review in your report — the current guidance is what’s enforceable, but don’t present it as settled.
- Coordinating or commissioning PAS 2035 retrofit work? Get the redress route confirmed in writing before work starts — don’t wait on a consumer protection reform that’s years off.
- Managing or letting HMOs anywhere with an active licensing scheme? Apply for the licence now — assume enforcement is already looking at you, not waiting to catch you.
- Considering a long-term empty home as a purchase? Price in the survey, EPC and retrofit costs from day one — that’s usually where the real bargain sits.
Today’s stories share a theme: the systems meant to hold building safety, retrofit quality and landlord standards to account are all still mid-build themselves. The practice carries out Building Surveys and PAS 2035 retrofit assessments across the South East for clients who’d rather understand where the gaps are than find them the hard way. Get in touch.
Small print. General commentary, not advice for your specific circumstances — regulations, schemes and deadlines change, and your property is not the average property. Sources linked were accurate when read on 14 September 2026.