Urban Splash to fight £48m fire safety bill on human rights grounds
The Secretary of State is seeking nearly £50 million from Urban Splash and ten co-respondents under section 124 of the Building Safety Act 2022. The developer is challenging the regime under Article 1, Protocol 1 of the ECHR.
INFIRISK Team·4 min read·
The Government has launched what could become the defining test case of post-Grenfell cost recovery, and Urban Splash, the Manchester regeneration specialist, is contesting the bill on human rights grounds. The Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government is asking the First-tier Tribunal to make remediation contribution orders worth close to £50 million against Urban Splash and ten other respondents, in connection with fire safety defects across seven Manchester residential developments.
The dispute
The claim is brought under section 124 of the Building Safety Act 2022, which lets the Tribunal order an associated body to pay towards the cost of remedying relevant defects in a relevant building where it is just and equitable to do so. According to Place North West, the buildings include the New Islington landmark Chips, completed by Urban Splash in 2009 and later found to have non-fire-retardant cladding after the post-Grenfell wave of inspections in 2018. The remaining six Manchester buildings have not all been publicly named, but the joined claims total roughly £48 million in Building Safety Fund expenditure that the Department now wants to recover.
The case is run by Walker Morris for the Secretary of State, with Kerry Bretherton KC of 39 Essex Chambers and Alexander Burrell of 4 Pump Court instructed. Urban Splash Residential and Urban Splash UK Residential are represented by Catherine Gibaud KC of Three Verulam Buildings, with Charles Russell Speechlys advising. The dispute has been listed in The Lawyer Top 20 Cases 2026, reflecting the size of the claim and the precedent it will set.
What Urban Splash is arguing
Urban Splash is challenging both the factual basis of the alleged defects, which is normal in any contribution claim, and the compatibility of the recovery regime itself with the European Convention on Human Rights. The argument turns on Article 1 of the First Protocol, which protects the peaceful enjoyment of possessions and limits the State's ability to deprive private parties of property without proper justification or proportionate process.
The Building Safety Act 2022 created the section 124 power years after the works at most of these buildings completed, and it lets the Tribunal reach across companies in the corporate group structure. Urban Splash's position is that asking the Tribunal to attribute, retrospectively, a multi-million-pound liability to entities that were not contracted to carry out remedial works, and were not themselves the building owner at the time, exceeds what is fair and proportionate under A1P1. If accepted, that argument could narrow the practical reach of section 124 considerably.
Why this case matters
The Building Safety Fund is the £5.1 billion programme the Government committed to remove dangerous cladding from buildings where developers or freeholders have not stepped in voluntarily, alongside the related Cladding Safety Scheme. Recovering that money is now a stated policy priority, and the Department has signed remediation contracts with most major UK housebuilders that commit them to refund Government spend on their buildings. This is one of the first occasions on which the Department has gone to the Tribunal directly to enforce that recovery against a developer.
A win for the Secretary of State would establish that a remediation contribution order is a workable, scalable mechanism for clawing back Building Safety Fund expenditure across the sector, well beyond developers that have signed the contract. A win for Urban Splash, even on a narrow A1P1 ground, would force the Department either to revisit the Act or to accept that significant tranches of the £5.1 billion are unrecoverable through the Tribunal route, pushing more cases into negotiated settlement or the High Court.
What it means for fire safety professionals
Expect remediation contribution orders to become a more common feature of building safety casework, particularly on legacy mid-rise stock that did not qualify under the developer remediation contract.
Building owners and managing agents who have already drawn down Building Safety Fund money should keep clear records of who specified, supplied and signed off the original cladding system, because those records will be the starting point for any contribution claim.
Fire risk assessors and fire engineers acting on section 124 instructions should expect tighter scrutiny of historic compartmentation, cavity barrier and external wall system reports, since these will form the evidential base for the Tribunal's relevant defect finding.
Insurers and lenders watching this case should price in the possibility that the recovery regime is narrowed on human rights grounds, which would slow the rate at which Building Safety Fund spend is replenished.
