Problems found after you bought · Cladding, EWS1 and building safety
When I bought this property, I didn’t know Cladding or a missing EWS1 could hold up a sale or a remortgage. Now I’m stuck.
Would you have bought the property if you had known?
If you had known about the building’s safety position before you committed, and understood the problems it could cause when you later came to sell or remortgage, would it have changed your decision?
- Would you have paid the same price?
- Would you have wanted it investigated first?
- Would you have walked away?
If knowing about the problem might have changed what you did, the next question is obvious.
Did you receive the right advice when you bought?
You may not know the answer yet. But if nobody explained the problem, or you are now questioning what you were told at the time, that is worth looking at.
You don’t need to know whether anyone was at fault. Tell us what happened and when you bought. We’ll talk it through with you.
Why cladding, EWS1 and building safety can hold up a sale or remortgage
Since the Grenfell Tower fire in 2017, the external walls and fire safety of blocks of flats have become a transaction issue in their own right. Two separate things get muddled. One is whether a lender’s valuer needs assurance about the external wall system, which is what the EWS1 form was created to provide. The other is who pays for putting historical safety defects right, which is what the Building Safety Act 2022 addresses.
In England, the Building Safety Act 2022 provides financial protections against certain historical building-safety remediation costs in relevant buildings. Whether those protections apply depends on statutory tests concerning the building, the defect and the lease, including circumstances at the statutory qualifying date. Qualifying leaseholders are protected from cladding-remediation costs, while contributions towards some non-cladding defects and interim measures may be capped. Other parts of the building-safety regime use different definitions and thresholds.
That uncertainty is what holds up transactions. A lender may expect its conveyancer to check things that have not yet been documented for the building, and where the information does not exist the practical answer is often to report the position and ask. Requirements differ between lenders.
How the problem usually surfaces
The lender or valuer asks for an EWS1
External-wall evidence is required for the valuation or mortgage application, but no current form meeting the lender’s and valuer’s requirements can be produced.
The lease may not qualify for full protection
Qualification depends on the statutory tests concerning the building and lease and on circumstances at the qualifying date. A later buyer’s personal circumstances are not the sole test.
The leaseholder or landlord certificate is unavailable
The leaseholder deed evidencing qualifying status, or the landlord’s certificate dealing with responsibility for remediation costs, cannot be produced.
The landlord or managing agent does not respond
Enquiries about the building’s safety position, the certificates or any assessment go unanswered, leaving the seller unable to provide the information requested by the buyer’s solicitor.
Remediation arrives in the service charge
A demand or an estimate for safety work appears in the service charge, and it is unclear what is recoverable from you and what is not.
Nobody has the information asked for
A lender’s requirements assume documents that do not yet exist for this building, so the enquiry cannot simply be answered.
What is an EWS1, and does the building need one?
An EWS1 is a valuation document rather than a statutory approval or life-safety certificate. Not every building requires one: whether it is requested depends on the building, the external wall system, the valuer’s professional judgement and the lender’s requirements. One form normally relates to the whole block rather than an individual flat. It is sometimes called an “EWS1 certificate”, although it is a form and does not certify that the building is safe.
What you can do about it now
Establish where your building stands. Ask your conveyancer and the landlord or managing agent what the building’s height and storeys are, and what documents exist: any fire risk assessment, Fire Risk Appraisal of External Walls (FRAEW), PAS 9980 assessment, EWS1 form and cladding remediation plan. Ask also whether the building is in any remediation scheme or has a developer commitment.
Establish which documents are required. A leaseholder deed of certificate is used to demonstrate qualifying status and should be passed to future owners through the conveyancing process. The landlord’s certificate serves a different purpose and contains information relevant to whether remediation costs can be passed on. Their absence or invalidity can have different consequences, so they should not be treated as interchangeable.
Where information genuinely does not exist, identify precisely what is missing. On a sale, the seller’s conveyancer can explain the position and provide the available evidence to the buyer’s solicitor. The buyer’s conveyancer, or your own conveyancer on a remortgage, can then consider the lender’s instructions and make any required report. Reporting the position does not guarantee that the lender or valuer will proceed.
If you are selling, your conveyancer can ask the buyer’s solicitor what remains unresolved and whether it arises from the buyer’s lender’s requirements. If you are remortgaging, your conveyancer can check your proposed lender’s requirements directly.
What happened when you bought?
This topic has a sharper timeline than most. The Grenfell Tower fire in 2017 fundamentally changed the attention given to external walls and fire safety, while the EWS1 form was introduced in December 2019 and the English leaseholder cost protections came into force in 2022. Before those developments, external-wall issues were not investigated through today’s standardised documents and statutory framework. However, known defects, existing fire-safety information, proposed remediation and possible service-charge liabilities could still have been relevant. What could reasonably have been identified therefore depends on the purchase date, the information then available and the professional standards operating at the time.
Several records from the time may matter, and some may survive. The management pack or LPE1 obtained then may show what the landlord said about fire safety and the external walls. The replies your conveyancer received may show what was asked. There may be an EWS1 form, a fire risk assessment, or correspondence reporting the position to your lender. The lender’s historical written instructions may also be difficult to recover, because they are revised regularly and superseded versions disappear from public view.
Was this property really mortgageable when you bought?
Getting a mortgage when you bought does not necessarily tell you how readily mortgageable the property was across the wider market. There are two historical questions worth asking.
What did your own lender’s written requirements say about external walls and building safety when you bought? And what express requirements did other lenders have recorded at the same time?
Lenders’ written requirements were not necessarily uniform, and their wording changed over time. That means both which lender you used and when you bought can matter.
Lenders set out in writing what they expect a conveyancer to do about particular features of a property. Those instructions are revised regularly, and superseded versions drop out of public view, which can make a question as simple as what was my conveyancer told about building safety in the year I bought? surprisingly difficult to answer from the sources available today. Lexsure has retained historical lender-specific conveyancing requirements since April 2007, so where the records permit they can help reconstruct what your lender’s requirements said at the time and how that compared with the wider lending market.
Across that period, 39 lenders in our covered archive population have had express requirements about external walls or building safety on record, addressed across 4 separate places in their instructions. The earliest express appearance we can identify in the material we hold dates from 2022; the most recent recorded change of wording is 2026.
Two points of precision, because they matter. “Earliest identified” means the earliest express appearance in the material we hold, not the date any requirement began. And where our material for a particular lender and period is incomplete, that lender is left out of these figures rather than counted as having said nothing. We do not treat an incomplete record as showing that the lender had no requirement.
So, when did you buy?
Changing the year here doesn’t send us an enquiry or tell us who you are.
An example of the kind of wording in force 2007 to 2011
One lender’s requirements, not named, by way of illustration. Requirements were not uniform and this is not the wording that applied to your purchase — that depends on your lender and your completion date.
No lender handbook Part-2 (specific) requirements were published prior to . But professionals were still under a duty of care on this topic. It is still worth speaking to us even if the purchase predates .
If we find no express requirement for your lender
Where our material for your lender and period is complete, the answer may simply be that no express wording about building safety appears in it. Where our material is incomplete, we treat that as a gap in what we hold, not as evidence that your lender said nothing.
Either way, the lender’s instructions are only one part of the record from the time.
The wider picture
Historical lender requirements can help us understand how mortgageable the property was when you bought. The conveyancing file and the advice given to you also matter.
Lexsure holds historical Report on Title material: the reports conveyancers sent to homebuyers, going back years. That material shows the kinds of building safety issues that were being addressed when firms reported to buyers, and it is a second and separate record from what lenders required.
Whether the external walls were investigated
Were enquiries raised about the external wall system or any assessment of it, and were you told what came back?
The statutory-protection position, where relevant at the time
If you bought after the protections and associated documents became relevant, was the lease’s qualifying position investigated and was the available certificate evidence obtained?
What it could cost you
Were you told what remediation might be charged through the service charge, and what was and was not recoverable from you?
What was reported to your lender
Where information was unavailable, was the position reported to your lender in writing and its response obtained?
Whether the effect on selling was explained
Were you told the building’s safety position would be raised again on a future sale, and could matter to a buyer’s lender?
These are examples of issues addressed in historical conveyancing material, not a checklist of what every purchaser should have been told. What mattered in an individual purchase depended on the circumstances and on what was known at the time.
So even if your mortgage completed, or there is nothing unusual in your lender’s historical requirements, it can still be worth talking to us about what happened.
Could this problem have been seen coming?
The relevant starting point is what was known, or could reasonably have been identified, when you bought.
What did the management pack say? What was asked of the landlord? What was in the conveyancing file? What were mortgage lenders requiring at the time? What kinds of building safety issues were conveyancing firms addressing with homebuyers? And what were you actually told?
Taken together, that can help build a picture of whether the problem you are facing today was already something that should have been considered when you bought.
Did you receive the right advice?
What the historical evidence can tell us
Where the relevant lender and period are covered, we may be able to establish what that lender’s conveyancing requirements said when you bought, and how that compared with the wider record at the time.
- That does not by itself establish that anyone was negligent, or that you have a claim. Those questions need the original file and legal advice.
- The absence of express wording does not establish that the lender accepted the issue.
- What your conveyancer had to tell your lender and what they had to tell you are different questions, and the second depends on the retainer and the circumstances.
Time limits apply, and in some cases the date on which you first knew enough about the problem matters as well as the date you bought, which is why we ask about both. Our full methodology, including how we treat gaps in the record, is set out in the archive and its limits. Where a solicitor later needs formal historical evidence, Lexsure can provide source-evidenced historical lender information.
Sources and review
This page is about external wall systems, cladding and the statutory building safety regime. Where the question is the service charge generally or the cost of other major works, see service charges and major works; where the landlord or managing agent is the obstacle, see management company problems. Guidance here about the present problem is general information. It is not legal advice about your property, and questions about the building itself are for a suitably qualified professional.
The Building Safety Act 2022 leaseholder cost protections described on this page apply in England. Wales has a separate and developing regime under the Building Safety (Wales) Act 2026. The current position must be checked for the jurisdiction in which the property is situated. The statutory tests, qualification criteria and caps are set by statute and secondary legislation and have changed since the Act was passed; this page states no figures or thresholds. Valuation practice on external wall systems, including the EWS1 form, is a matter for RICS guidance rather than statute, and revised RICS secured-lending valuation guidance takes effect from 1 November 2026, so this page must be reviewed again then. It states no lender requirement as a general rule, because requirements differ between lenders and change.
Historical lender information is drawn from Lexsure’s archive of lender-specific conveyancing requirements, maintained since April 2007. Figures on this page state the population they are drawn from.