The Cladding Bill eases claims against manufacturers. Can your records prove what was installed?
Every façade claim eventually comes down to a question a site team should be able to answer in an afternoon and usually cannot: which product went on which elevation, when, who fixed it, and what has happened to it since. The Building Safety (Remediation of Unsafe Cladding etc) Bill, introduced to Parliament on 14 October, is designed to make claims against product manufacturers easier to bring. It does nothing to make them easier to prove. That part depends on records made years earlier, by people who had no idea they would be read in court.
Part 1 | The Bill
What would the Cladding Bill change for contractors?
It would open a more direct route to recover remediation costs from the companies that made the products. As Construction Enquirer reported on 15 October, ministers say the existing claims regime under section 149 of the Building Safety Act has seen few cases. Under the Bill, firms that paid for remediation could claim directly against a manufacturer by showing a product made "more than a trivial contribution" to the building being unsafe. The test would centre on whether a product was unsafe or the manufacturer misled, not on arguments over technical compliance. Courts could extend liability to associated companies where that is just and equitable, and could order product information to be disclosed. Claims already running, as well as new ones, would be covered, inside the 30-year limitation period that already applies.
Two conditions matter to anyone thinking of a claim. Nothing is won automatically: the case still has to be made in court. And remediation cannot be paused while a claim against a manufacturer runs. The Bill's page on the Parliament website and the government's guide to the Bill are the places to follow its progress. This article is about records, not legal advice on any claim.
Why does a part-built hospital matter to this?
Because it shows what happens to the record when the people who made it leave. The same day, Construction Enquirer reported that the M&E and cladding are to be stripped from a part-built hospital in Berwick: a £35m community hospital of more than 600 modules, halted when its contractor went into administration in November 2025. The replacement contractor starts removing services, pipework and internal walls on 19 October, then the façade and steel frame system from late November, keeping the main structural steelwork. The trust hopes that work will be done by spring 2027.
The report did not give the reasons for the strip-out, and this is not a comment on them. The general point stands on any job: an incoming contractor, a client's adviser or an expert witness can only rely on what the outgoing team wrote down, filed and can still find.
Part 2 | The record
What evidence does a claim against a manufacturer rest on?
A chain of records from specification to installation, and then everything that happened afterwards. On a rainscreen package for a twelve-storey residential block, every link in that chain is created during the job. The trouble is that they live in six different places, and the fifth link is usually missing altogether.
Where the evidence lives, and what software can do with it
| Evidence | Where it usually lives | What AI can do with it | Who judges it |
|---|---|---|---|
| The specified product and its stated performance | Specification, tender pack, design drawings | Pull out every product reference and performance clause | Design team |
| What the manufacturer said at the time | Data sheets, test reports, certificates, brochures attached to emails | Index each by product and date, keep the version current at specification | Design team, lawyers |
| What was submitted and approved | Technical submittals, approval logs, the CDE | Link each approval to the product and any substitution | Package manager |
| What arrived | Delivery tickets, batch labels, declarations of performance | Read photographed tickets and labels, match batches to orders | Site and commercial team |
| Where and when it was fixed | Site diaries, inspection records, photo libraries, WhatsApp groups | Tag photos by elevation and level, tie them to diaries and inspections | Site manager |
| What changed afterwards | Maintenance records, remedial packages, later works | Flag elevations with later work and no record of what was used | Building owner, accountable person |
Because the Bill puts weight on misleading conduct, the second row matters more than it used to. What a manufacturer's literature said when the product was specified may not be what its website says today, so the copy that sat in the design team's inbox at the time is evidence worth keeping, dated and filed against the product it described.
Part 2 | Building it now
How can AI help a façade contractor build that record now?
By doing the reading and linking as the job happens, rather than leaving it for an expert to reconstruct a decade later. In practice: every delivery ticket and pallet label photographed on arrival is read and matched to the order and the elevation it was called off for. Every site photograph is tagged by elevation, level and date. Data sheets and certificates are captured as received and filed against the product. A product register builds up for each elevation, and anything that does not match, a ticket for a product the specification does not name, a substitution with no approval, an elevation with no photographs, is flagged to the package manager that week.
None of that needs a new platform. It runs on the photographs and documents the team already produces, which is why the WhatsApp site assistant and the guidance on WhatsApp groups as project records are relevant here. On higher-risk buildings it is also the golden thread the regulator expects, covered in Gateway 3 readiness. The CIOB and i3PT golden thread survey in 2020 found 85 per cent of built environment professionals thought a digital golden thread would make accountability clearer. A product claim is accountability with a price on it.
Part 2 | The limits
Where does the software have to stop?
At cause, liability and safety. Whether a product made a building unsafe is a question for fire engineers and experts, and whether it supports a claim is for lawyers and the court. AI can assemble and index the evidence; it should not be presenting conclusions about either. Summaries it produces need labelling as summaries, with the originals kept, because courts can order disclosure and an index that cannot be traced back to source is worse than no index.
Where a surveyor or other RICS member relies on AI output with a material impact on their service, the RICS standard on responsible AI use requires a written decision, by or under a named surveyor, on whether that output is reliable. The same discipline is sensible for any contractor building an evidence record: decide in advance who checks what the software has linked, and write it down, as set out in AI cannot be the dutyholder.
Part 3 | Where to start
What should a façade contractor do this month?
Pick one live envelope package and start the product register there: tickets, labels, data sheets and photographs, linked by elevation, from this week forward. Then test the same approach on one completed job, to see how much of the chain can still be rebuilt from what is on file. That back-test tells you more about your exposure than any policy document will.
We do this work for façade engineers and envelope contractors, inside their own systems, as a document automation project. The cost of reading every ticket and photograph has fallen sharply this autumn, as covered in the latest model releases. If a claim, a remediation or a handover is coming your way, book a call.
Sources
Which sources is this article built on?
Every figure above resolves to one of these, each read at source before publication.
- Construction Enquirer, Contractors get easier route to claw back recladding costs, 15 October 2026
- Construction Enquirer, M&E and cladding to be stripped from part-built hospital, 15 October 2026
- UK Parliament, Building Safety (Remediation of Unsafe Cladding etc) Bill, introduced 14 October 2026
- GOV.UK, Guide to the Building Safety (Remediation of Unsafe Cladding etc) Bill, 14 October 2026
- Building Safety Act 2022, section 149
- RICS, first standard on responsible AI use now in effect
- CIOB, CIOB and i3PT launch Golden Thread report
Photograph by Tsuyoshi Kozu on Unsplash, used under the Unsplash Licence.