As of February 2021, the UK government had pledged over £5 billion towards remediation works, but extensive costs were still falling on the shoulders of individual leaseholders of flats who had unwittingly purchased unlawfully constructed homes.

[1]: 41–42 Shortly after the Grenfell fire, the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG) established the Building Safety Programme.

[2][3] In June 2020, the Housing, Communities and Local Government Select Committee estimated that thoroughly remediating fire safety defects in UK buildings over 18 metres alone might cost around £15 billion.

[5] While Welsh and Northern Irish law was similar to English, Wales had relatively few examples of ACM-clad high-rises,[6] and by December 2018 had arranged remediation of them all, at the expense of the developers or building owners rather than leaseholders.

[10] As of January 2021, the Government had identified 461 residential and publicly owned buildings in the same category; by that time, 329 had at least removed the cladding, including 231 that had completed remediation works, mostly social-sector and student accommodation blocks.

[13] Investigations in the wake of the Grenfell Tower inferno, the Barking Riverside fire in June 2019, and the Bolton Cube fire in November 2019 (which enveloped a building under 18 metres tall, which used combustible materials other than ACM cladding) led to the realisation that far more UK buildings than the ACM-clad ones were not fire-safe, partly due to materials being marketed as meeting regulations which in fact did not, and partly due to builders' failures to comply with regulations in design and construction.

[15] In June 2020, the UK government offered what the trade magazine Inside Housing characterised as 'a very loose estimate of 1,700 buildings' in England alone which were over 18 metres and high-risk, requiring urgent remediation, despite the ACM-remediation works that had taken place up to that time.

[10] In July 2023, the UK government launched the Cladding Safety Scheme with £5.1 billion allocated and now covering all buildings over 11 metres in height.

[19] A key short-term response to identifying unsafe construction in tall buildings was to change the fire evacuation policy.

A key problem with this change was that buildings' alarm systems were not designed to alert all residents to a fire and facilitate total evacuation.

In January 2021, the Ministry of Housing, Communities & Local Government found the median waking watch cost in England to be £11,361 per affected building per month, or £137 per dwelling.

[20] As the realisation grew, during 2019, that large numbers of buildings, of all heights, were likely to be subject to unknown fire-risks and remediation costs, mortgage-lenders concluded that they could not reliably lend money for the purchase of such properties.

[2][21][16][22] In December 2019, UK Finance, the Building Societies Association, and the Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors introduced the requirement for an External Wall Fire Review (EWS1) of blocks 18 metres or taller to assess whether a property contained potentially dangerous materials.

[21][16][22][23] The number of properties needing an EWS1 form was roughly halved in November 2020 by a Government agreement with the relevant bodies that requirements for an EWS1 could be made less stringent.

[2][24][25] In January 2023, following new guidance by the Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors, six major UK banks began lending on medium and high-rise flats affected by cladding.

[26] However, many individuals have reported continued difficulties in having mortgages accepted, with few sales successfully completing without cash buyers or significantly reduced valuations.

[16] A Financial Conduct Authority report ascertained insurance premiums on multi-occupancy buildings with flammable cladding increased 187% from £26,300 in 2016 to £75,600 in 2021.

[34] In July 2020, the Government estimated that the average cost to leaseholders to implement remediation in unsafe buildings over 18 metres tall would be £9,000.

[35]: §318  By contrast, a survey of 1,342 leaseholders by Inside Housing in February 2021 found that around 90% of respondents expected to pay over £10,000, with 62.5% facing a total bill of above £30,000.

[36] December 2020 saw the first case of a leaseholder being bankrupted by costs associated with the crisis,[37][38] and according to Inside Housing's survey, 17.2% were exploring bankruptcy options.

This paid for buildings to install alarm systems consistent with evacuating residents in the event of a fire rather than them staying in place (though not for the cost of waking watches themselves).