Waking Watch and Interim Safety Costs: Can They Be Charged to Leaseholders?

Waking watch and other interim fire-safety costs are covered by the Building Safety Act leaseholder protections for qualifying leaseholders — but only if your landlord actually applies them, and these charges can run into thousands of pounds a year while a building waits for remediation.

The Cost That Often Goes Unchallenged

Most coverage of building safety costs focuses on the big number: who pays for cladding removal, and how much other defects are capped at. But for leaseholders in buildings waiting years for remediation, a different cost has often been quietly draining money every single month in the meantime — waking watch, temporary fire alarm systems, and other interim safety measures, charged through the service charge while the building waits.

Interim costs are covered by the same statutory protections as other building-safety defect costs, but they are billed month by month through the service charge, which makes it easy for them to be passed on without anyone checking the protections have been applied. Leaseholders are also sometimes charged for measures that stopped being necessary long before they stopped being billed.

What Is a Waking Watch?

A waking watch is a team of trained fire safety patrol staff who continuously monitor a building for signs of fire, providing an early warning to residents in place of a functioning fire safety system — typically required where a building's cladding or fire safety defects mean the normal "stay put" fire strategy can no longer be safely relied upon. It's an interim measure, intended to keep a building safe while permanent remediation or a fire alarm upgrade is completed, not a long-term solution.

The problem: waking watch is extremely expensive — often running into thousands of pounds per month for a single building, split across leaseholders through the service charge — and some buildings have kept it in place for years longer than genuinely necessary, either due to remediation delays or because switching to a cheaper permanent fire alarm system (a "common fire alarm" or "simultaneous evacuation alarm") wasn't prioritised.

Are Waking Watch Costs Covered by the Building Safety Act Protections?

Yes, for qualifying leaseholders. According to government guidance, costs for interim fire safety measures such as waking watch are covered by the leaseholder protections that came into force on 28 June 2022. They are treated like other non-cladding building-safety defect costs:

• Nil charge for lower-value flats: if your flat was worth less than £175,000 (£325,000 in London) on the relevant valuation date, your cap is set at zero and you cannot be asked to contribute.
• Otherwise a cap: generally £10,000 (£15,000 in Greater London), as a last resort, with payments spread over time. Interim costs you have already paid over the last five years count towards that cap.
• Above the cap: the building owner has to pay the remaining costs, including interim measures.

The protections only apply to qualifying leaseholders in buildings of at least 11 metres or five storeys, and not to buildings under 11 metres or to those where leaseholders have collectively enfranchised and own the building. Check where you stand with our qualifying leaseholder quiz.

The ordinary service charge reasonableness test still sits alongside these protections, so even where something is chargeable it can be challenged as excessive. If you are not a qualifying leaseholder, the reasonableness route below is your main protection.

Common Fire Alarms: The Cheaper Alternative

In many cases, installing a common (simultaneous evacuation) fire alarm system is both safer and dramatically cheaper than an ongoing waking watch — a one-off installation cost against months or years of continuous patrol staffing. Fire safety guidance has increasingly pushed buildings toward this switch specifically because of the cost burden waking watch places on leaseholders. If your building has maintained a waking watch for an extended period without evidence that a common alarm system was properly considered or costed, this is a strong, specific angle to raise with your freeholder or managing agent — and a strong basis for a Tribunal challenge if they haven't engaged with it.

Questions to Ask Your Freeholder or Managing Agent

• Has a common fire alarm system been costed as an alternative to waking watch, and if so, why hasn't it been installed?
• What is the actual monthly or annual cost of the waking watch, broken down per leaseholder, and how does this compare to typical rates for similar buildings?
• What is the expected timeline for either remediation or a switch to a permanent alarm system — an open-ended "as soon as possible" answer, repeated over multiple years, is itself worth challenging.
• Has the freeholder applied for any funding scheme that might accelerate remediation and therefore end the need for waking watch sooner? See our guide to current funding schemes.

Challenging Interim Costs at the Tribunal

The First-tier Tribunal (Property Chamber) can determine whether a service charge, including waking watch costs, is reasonable. Leaseholders don't need to wait for a formal demand dispute to escalate — an application can be made proactively to challenge ongoing or anticipated charges. Given the sums genuinely involved (waking watch costs accumulating over years can run into many thousands of pounds per leaseholder), this is an area where the cost of proper advice is frequently justified relative to what's at stake, unlike some smaller service charge disputes where challenging isn't cost-effective.

A Worked Example

Consider a 12-storey building with unsafe cladding identified in 2021, put on a waking watch costing £8,000 per month, split across 60 flats — roughly £133 per flat, per month, or around £1,600 per year, per leaseholder. If this arrangement continues for three years while remediation funding is arranged, that's approximately £4,800 per leaseholder in interim costs alone. For a qualifying leaseholder those charges are not simply on top of everything else: they fall within the nil charge or cap described above, so a landlord who bills them in full without applying the protections may be getting it wrong.

If a common fire alarm system could have been installed in year one for a one-off cost equivalent to roughly four months of waking watch, and wasn't, that's a genuinely strong basis for a Tribunal challenge on the remaining charges — not because waking watch itself was unreasonable when first implemented, but because continuing it long-term without properly costing the cheaper alternative is where the "reasonably incurred" test starts to bite.

How This Interacts With Buildings Insurance

Waking watch arrangements sometimes appear alongside, or are sometimes justified by reference to, a building's insurance requirements — insurers may require certain fire safety measures to be in place to maintain cover, and this is occasionally cited as a reason interim costs can't be reduced. Where this is the stated justification, it's worth asking for the specific insurer requirement in writing, since it's not always accurate that insurance genuinely mandates the most expensive option available, particularly once a common alarm system is presented as a viable, safety-equivalent alternative.

How This Connects to the Wider Building Safety Picture

Interim costs like waking watch are, in a sense, a symptom of remediation delay rather than a separate problem — the longer a building waits for its cladding or fire safety works to be funded and completed, the longer these interim costs keep accumulating. This is one more reason actively pushing for progress on a funding application (see our funding schemes guide) matters beyond the remediation cost itself: it's often also the fastest route to ending an expensive waking watch arrangement.

Frequently Asked Questions