Building Safety Act 30-Year Limitation 2026: URS v BDW Explained

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What URS v BDW Decided and Why It Matters

This is the first time the Supreme Court has considered the Building Safety Act 2022, and the judgment answers four questions the construction industry had been litigating since the Act passed: whether voluntary repairs can be recovered, how far section 135 reaches back, whether a developer is owed duties under the Defective Premises Act 1972, and when a contribution claim arises. Every answer went against the consultant.

The dispute itself is a familiar post-Grenfell story. BDW Trading developed the Capital East and Freemens Meadow high-rise schemes, completed between 2007 and 2012, with URS Corporation as structural design consultant. Safety investigations in late 2019 revealed serious design defects — and BDW repaired the buildings at its own cost, despite no longer owning them and despite no homeowner having sued. The question was whether it could recover that cost from the designer.

Case Background and Outcome

URS Corporation (structural design consultant) and BDW Trading (developer) fought over who pays for remedial works to high-rise residential buildings whose structural defects surfaced years after completion. BDW's claim began in negligence in March 2020 — before the Building Safety Act existed — and was amended in October 2022 to add Defective Premises Act and Contribution Act claims once section 135 had retrospectively revived the limitation position.

URS lost at every level: at first instance, in the Court of Appeal before Coulson LJ in July 2023, and finally in the Supreme Court on 21 May 2025.

The Case at a Glance

Timeline of the URS v BDW Case

The Four Grounds of Appeal

Lords Hamblen and Burrows delivered the joint lead judgment on Grounds 1 to 3, Lord Leggatt on Ground 4, and all seven justices agreed on every point. The table gives the shape of each ground; the sections below give the reasoning that matters in practice.

Grounds and Decisions Compared

Ground 1: Voluntary Repairs and the "Voluntariness Principle"

URS's central argument was that BDW's losses were self-inflicted: it no longer owned the buildings, no one had sued it, and it repaired them anyway. On that footing the losses were said to fall outside the scope of URS's duty of care, or to be too remote. URS needed the court to recognise a "voluntariness principle" — a rule that voluntarily incurred losses are irrecoverable.

The court found no such principle in law. Losses voluntarily incurred can be recovered where they fall within the scope of the assumed responsibility — and the justices doubted the repairs were voluntary in any real sense at all. A developer facing a risk of death or serious injury to residents, with its own name on the buildings, is not exercising free choice in the way the label suggests.

Ground 2: Retrospective Application of Section 135 Building Safety Act

Section 135 of the Building Safety Act 2022, in force from 28 June 2022, retrospectively extended limitation for claims under the Defective Premises Act 1972 from six years to 30 for work completed before that date. URS argued the extension applied only to claims brought directly under section 1 of the DPA — not to negligence claims or contribution claims that merely depend on the DPA position.

The court read the section the other way: it covers any action "by virtue of" the Defective Premises Act, whatever the pleaded cause of action. That reading follows the Act's purpose — those responsible for building defects should answer for them whenever the defects come to light — and it stops limitation technicalities defeating claims the Act was passed to enable.

Ground 3: Is a Developer Owed a Duty Under the Defective Premises Act?

URS argued that section 1 of the Defective Premises Act protects buyers of homes, not the developer who commissioned them. The Supreme Court rejected that reading. Section 1(1)(a) is owed to the person who orders the dwelling, and BDW ordered these buildings, so the duty was owed to BDW as well as to the eventual homeowners.

The court saw no inconsistency in a developer being owed a duty while also owing one. Developers are not, as it put it, uniquely privileged — BDW carried the same exposure to its own purchasers throughout. The practical result is that a developer now has a direct statutory claim against its designers and contractors, carrying the Defective Premises Act limitation period rather than the shorter contractual one.

Ground 4: Contribution Without a Judgment or Settlement

The last ground asked when the right to claim contribution under the Civil Liability (Contribution) Act 1978 actually arises. URS said it needed a judgment against BDW, or at least a settlement. The court disagreed: the right arises once damage has been suffered for which both parties are liable and the claimant has paid, agreed to pay, or been ordered to pay compensation for it.

Critically, payment includes payment in kind. Carrying out the remedial work yourself counts, provided the work can be valued in money. BDW had therefore already triggered its contribution right by doing the repairs, without any homeowner ever suing it. The two-year contribution clock runs from the point the amount is fixed, not from the original construction.

The 30-Year Limitation Period Explained

Section 135 rewrote limitation for Defective Premises Act claims: 30 years, retrospectively, for work completed before 28 June 2022, and 15 years prospectively for work completed after. The retrospective limb reaches every residential project completed since 1992 — and after URS v BDW, it carries related negligence and contribution claims with it, not just direct DPA claims.

Understanding Section 135 of the Building Safety Act

The section operates by treating the 30-year period as having always applied, which revives claims that had expired under the old six-year rule. The one hard boundary the Act draws: claims finally determined by a court, or settled, before 28 June 2022 stay closed — everything else within the window is open.

Who's Affected by the 30-Year Limitation Period

Anyone involved in the design, construction, conversion or enlargement of dwellings completed since 1992. Design consultants — architects, structural engineers, specialist designers — carry the sharpest exposure, because design defects stay latent longest and tend to surface only when a building ages or a safety investigation goes looking. The same extension that exposes consultants also arms building owners: freeholders and leaseholders weighing their position after the Leasehold and Freehold Reform Act 2024 now have three decades of claim to work with, not six years.

Contractors, subcontractors and suppliers face the same window, and professional indemnity insurers now underwrite a 30-year tail on historic work — five times the exposure their pricing models were built on. Where a building insurance claim is also in play, the interaction needs handling together: our note on the Trocadero building insurance litigation covers the insurance side of the same post-Grenfell picture.

Design Defect Liability for Developers and Consultants

What the Ruling Changes for Design Consultants

Three of the four holdings bear directly on consultants. A designer can be pursued under the Defective Premises Act by the developer, not only by homeowners. Section 135 pulls historic work into a 30-year window. And a contribution claim can be brought once the developer has done the repairs, without waiting for anyone to sue.

Taken together, these remove the assumptions a consultant could previously rely on: that limitation had run, that no claimant had emerged, and that a developer fixing its own building was volunteering. None of those now ends the exposure.

Which Design Defects Are Caught

The case concerned structural design of high-rise residential blocks, but nothing in the reasoning confines it to structure or to tall buildings. The Defective Premises Act duty is to see that a dwelling is fit for habitation when completed, so any design failing that standard — fire compartmentation, external wall build-ups, load-bearing calculations, drainage causing damp — falls within the same analysis. Where the argument turns on what competent design required at the time, building surveying standards are usually where the expert evidence starts.

What matters is whether the dwelling was unfit on completion, not whether the defect has yet caused harm. A latent defect that has injured nobody still founds a claim.

The ruling matters most to the consultant who produced the design. BDW had already paid for remedial work when it sued URS, and the court held that a developer which repairs voluntarily does not lose its claim against the designer who caused the defect.

Frequently asked

Questions about URS v BDW and the Building Safety Act