Waking watch costs sit outside the headline Building Safety Act protections most people know about — and they can quietly drain thousands of pounds a year while a building waits for remediation.
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.
These interim costs sit in a genuinely different legal category from the cladding removal and historical defect costs covered by the core Building Safety Act 2022 protections, and it's an area where leaseholders are frequently overcharged, sometimes for measures that stopped being necessary long before they stopped being billed.
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.
This is the single most important, and most commonly misunderstood, point in this whole area: waking watch and other interim safety costs are generally treated separately from the cladding and historical-defect costs covered by the core Building Safety Act 2022 leaseholder protections. The absolute ban on cladding costs, and the £15,000/£10,000 caps on other historical defects, were designed around the cost of permanent remediation work — not the ongoing monthly cost of temporary safety measures while that remediation is pending.
This doesn't mean waking watch costs are automatically fair game for a landlord to charge in full without scrutiny — it means the challenge route is different, generally through the standard service charge reasonableness test at the First-tier Tribunal, rather than the specific statutory caps that apply to cladding and historical defects.
Service charges, including waking watch costs, must be reasonable and reasonably incurred under the Landlord and Tenant Act 1985. A leaseholder can challenge a waking watch charge at the First-tier Tribunal on the grounds that it's excessive, that a cheaper alternative (like a common fire alarm) should have been installed sooner, or that the watch has continued longer than genuinely necessary.
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.
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.
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, entirely separate from and additional to any capped contribution toward the eventual permanent works.
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.
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.
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.
A waking watch is a team of trained fire safety patrol staff who continuously monitor a building for fire risk, used as an interim measure where a building's cladding or fire safety defects mean the normal fire strategy can't be safely relied upon, pending permanent remediation.
Generally no. Waking watch and other interim safety costs sit outside the core Building Safety Act protections, which are designed around permanent cladding and historical defect remediation costs, not ongoing interim measures. They're instead subject to standard service charge reasonableness rules.
Yes. Leaseholders can challenge waking watch costs at the First-tier Tribunal (Property Chamber) on the grounds that the charge is excessive, that a cheaper alternative like a common fire alarm should have been installed sooner, or that the watch has continued longer than necessary.
In most cases, yes, often dramatically so - a one-off installation cost against months or years of continuous patrol staffing. If a building has maintained waking watch for an extended period without evidence a common alarm system was properly costed as an alternative, this is a strong basis to challenge the ongoing charges.
Part of our guide to cladding costs and building safety for UK leaseholders.
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