Milestone

Fire safety remediation completed at nine Salford tower blocks

By Staff Writer  |  18 August 2026

Fire safety remediation has been completed at nine residential tower blocks in Salford for Together Housing Group, replacing aluminium composite material cladding identified during the national testing programme carried out in 2017.

Completion was announced on 17 August 2026. The nine blocks are Thorn Court, Beech Court, Whitebeam Court, Malus Court, Salix Court, Spruce Court, Holm Court, Hornbeam Court and Plane Court, managed by Pendleton Together Operating Ltd. Two of the blocks are 22 storeys.

The scheme delivered replacement cladding, insulation and fire compartmentation, together with new fire alarm systems and sprinklers. Aluminium composite material cladding was identified on the nine blocks during the national testing programme undertaken in 2017.

Pick Everard acted as lead designer and principal designer under the Construction (Design and Management) Regulations, working alongside Pendleton Together Operating Ltd and principal contractor Quaysquare Consult. Buro Happold and Wintech also worked on the programme.

The project team was required to address different building configurations across the nine blocks, and to work around alterations made to the buildings in earlier years. Alongside the fire safety work, improved insulation is expected to reduce energy costs for residents.

What the practitioner should take from this

Completion of a remediation programme is the point at which the limitation questions become live rather than theoretical, and the dates are not the ones most people assume. The Building Safety Act 2022 amended section 1 of the Defective Premises Act 1972 so that claims in respect of dwellings completed before the Act commenced carry a 30 year retrospective limitation period, with 15 years running prospectively. For a block clad in the years before 2017, that reach is long enough to capture the original installation, and the practical constraint on a claim is usually evidence rather than time.

That places a particular value on the record created during the remediation itself. When cladding is stripped, the build up behind it is exposed and photographed, and the resulting evidence of what was actually installed, as against what was specified, is frequently the best material any later claim will ever have. Where the opening up records are kept by the principal contractor or by a specialist subcontractor and are not called for at completion, they can be lost within a few years. The building owner who wants to preserve a recovery action should be securing that record now, not when a claim is contemplated.

The design roles are worth separating carefully. Lead designer is a contractual appointment concerned with coordinating the design; principal designer under the Construction (Design and Management) Regulations is a statutory function concerned with health and safety in the pre-construction phase. A different principal designer duty now also arises under the Building Regulations for higher risk work. The three are commonly conflated in correspondence and occasionally in appointments, and the confusion becomes expensive when a duty is alleged to have been owed by whoever held the title.

Two of these blocks are 22 storeys, which places them in the higher risk building category, so completion will have engaged the gateway and golden thread obligations that attach to it. The information handed over at completion is not simply a set of operation and maintenance manuals. It is a regulated record that the accountable person has to maintain and be able to produce, and a gap in it is a continuing compliance problem rather than a snagging item.

Nothing here indicates any difficulty on this programme, which has been reported as complete. These are the ordinary consequences of finishing remediation work on occupied high rise residential buildings, and the weeks after completion are when they are cheapest to deal with.