Feature
Building Safety Levy: Tax without integrity
On October 1 2026, the Government implements a tax on the development industry to fix problems most did not cause. The Building Safety Levy( BSL) industry will fund building defects in high rise buildings, raising £ 3.4bn over a ten-year period, which we predict will be increased due to Michael Gove extending the Defective Premises Act( DPA) from 10 to 30 years.
We have covered the perverse nature of this policy many times. From its targeting of builders who have never worked on a high rise and in areas without high-rise to the acceptance that SMEs should not pay and then change of mind because Treasury wanted the cash, it is a horrible, backward, quite frankly nasty policy which the Conservative and Labour party must own.
If you head to our website AskNFB you can use our BSL Calculator to find out how much the Government is going to take from you before you have realised any cashflow but the point of this piece is to bring up the two most egregious elements of the BSL, one sometimes discussed, the other seemingly going under the radar.
Why is it just developers that are paying?
Why are architects, building control, designers, product manufacturers, surveyors and others mentioned in the Grenfell Report not paying a levy? How have we gone four years of discussions and pushback without a single MP or opposition party seriously challenging the logic of only targeting innocent builders?
Why on earth did the Johnson government not borrow at zero interest rates and sort this with pace?
Sometimes the obvious answer is the right one. Politicians created this mess through regulatory ignorance and incompetence, therefore many parties pushing back might just expose their failures.
Where is the money going?
Every LPA is charging the tax but what if you have no high-rise liability locally? Local Building Control administers the levy and transfers the revenue( net of administration costs) to central government to fund building safety remediation.
Who then completes the remediation work? Will it be the very companies which caused this mess? How much will the Government take for administrative purposes? Will it be used to fund the functions of the Building Safety Regulator( BSR)? Which areas will be targeted and after their area has all defects fixed, will they stop paying the levy?
And when the money runs out, will there be a shortfall in some of the bodies overseeing it, eg: BSR, which needs filling in another way?
Industry is used to being treated as cash-cows but the BSL takes tax injustice to a new level. October 1 2026 marks the UK Government’ s‘ Emperors new clothes’ moment and we should not fear calling them out for it.
Rico Wojtulewicz, NFB Director of Policy and Market Insight
64 www. britbuild-magazine. co. uk