Written by the Brady Solicitors Litigation Team. Brady Solicitors advises managing agents, freeholders, leaseholders and residential property professionals on Building Safety Act obligation, fire safety compliance and residential property disputes.
Few service charge items generate as much friction as waking watch. For leaseholders the sums are large and the explanation is often thin. For freeholders and managing agents the measure is frequently unavoidable, yet the cost may not be recoverable in full. The rules on who ultimately pays are not intuitive, and they have changed significantly since 2022.
The short version
- Waking watch is usually a legal necessity rather than a discretionary charge, but it is meant to be temporary.
- Where the leaseholder protections apply, recovery is capped rather than prohibited. Protected does not mean free.
- Whatever cannot be recovered falls on the freeholder, who may have a claim of their own further up the chain.
- Government funding is now available for the alarm system that replaces it.
Why waking watch gets imposed
Waking watch is a system of trained patrols, operating around the clock, whose job is to raise the alarm if a fire starts. It is used where a building’s existing alarm cannot manage a fire risk that has been identified, most often while remediation is awaited.
The duty sits with the ‘responsible person’ under the Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005: usually the freeholder, the managing agent or an RTM company. In practice the decision to introduce a waking watch is rarely a free one. It usually follows a fire risk assessment, and in some cases a fire and rescue authority enforcement notice. A responsible person who declines to act on an identified risk is exposed to enforcement and, in the worst cases, prosecution.
Waking watch was never designed to run indefinitely. Current National Fire Chiefs Council guidance discourages prolonged or disproportionate use of it and expects a common fire alarm to be installed in its place. In practice, both sides of a dispute tend to return to that point.
What it costs
The most recent national data, published in 2020, found that the typical waking watch cost was £11,361 per building per month, or around £137 per leaseholder. Costs varied significantly, however, with some buildings facing much larger bills. As a result, the average across all buildings was higher at £17,897 per month, equivalent to £331 per leaseholder, rising in London to £20,443 per building and £499 per flat.
Although these figures are now several years old, they remain the latest national dataset and illustrate the scale of the costs involved. On a building waiting two years for remediation, the total can easily run into six figures.
Who pays, and how much can be recovered
The Building Safety Act 2022 changed the position. Since 31 October 2024 waking watch has been expressly treated as an interim measure within the Act’s remediation framework, which brings it inside the leaseholder protections in Schedule 8.
A common misunderstanding on both sides is that those protections make waking watch free. They do not. Cladding remediation costs cannot be passed to a qualifying leaseholder at all but waking watch is capped rather than prohibited: £10,000 outside London and £15,000 in London, rising to £50,000 and £100,000 for higher-value leases, spread over ten years, with service charges already demanded since 28 June 2017 counting towards the cap.
The contribution falls to zero only in defined circumstances, which are: where the freeholder was responsible for the defect or is associated with whoever was; where the freeholder’s group was worth more than £2 million per building in February 2022; or where the lease was worth less than £325,000 in London or £175,000 elsewhere at that date. The first of those is not limited to qualifying leases.
Whether a lease qualifies depends on the leaseholder’s position as at 14 February 2022 and on the building being at least 11 metres tall or at least five storeys. Where leaseholders have collectively enfranchised or already own the freehold, the protections do not apply at all. These distinctions are important because they decide the outcome and are easy to get wrong in either direction.
Whatever costs are not recoverable fall on the freeholder. That is the intended effect of the legislation, but it leaves many freeholders funding a measure made necessary by defects they did not create.
Where disputes arise
Reasonableness. Service charges must be reasonably incurred and the service must be of a reasonable standard. In waking watch cases the argument usually concerns duration: whether the measure ran longer than the risk required, and whether installing a common alarm was considered promptly. The NFCC guidance often acts as the yardstick in these cases. Responsible persons who document the assessment, the alarm timetable and the reasons for any delay are likely to be in a considerably stronger position.
Consultation. A waking watch contract entered into for a term of more than 12 months is likely to be a qualifying long-term agreement, which requires consultation once any one leaseholder’s share exceeds £100 in an accounting period, rather than the £250 threshold that applies to works. Contracts written to run for a year and then continue until terminated on notice may carry particular risk: the Court of Appeal has held that such wording creates a longer minimum term. Without consultation, recovery is limited to the threshold however reasonable the cost.
Dispensation. Where consultation is impractical, possibly because the risk is urgent, the tribunal can dispense with it, as long as the leaseholders did not suffer any real disadvantage or prejudice because consultation was not carried out. The costs of the dispensation application itself, however, cannot be recovered from qualifying leaseholders, as the Court of Appeal has held that paragraph 9 of Schedule 8 prevents the relevant legal and professional costs of a dispensation application from being recovered through the service charge from qualifying leaseholders. The Supreme Court has granted permission to appeal on the question of whether that prohibition applies to costs incurred before the Building Safety Act came into force.
Recovering the cost from those responsible
The First-tier Tribunal can order a freeholder, developer or associated company to contribute towards remediation costs, and the Court of Appeal has confirmed that interim measures including waking watch fall within that power, including costs already incurred.
This route is often described as a leaseholder remedy, but it is not confined to leaseholders. Anyone with a legal or equitable interest in the building can apply, which includes freeholders and management companies. A freeholder left carrying uncovered waking watch costs because of defects introduced during construction may have a claim against the developer or an associated company. Resident management companies and RTM companies can also recover the legal costs of bringing an application through the service charge, where the lease permits it.
Parts of the leading decision are under appeal to the Supreme Court, so the position on historic costs may yet develop.
Funding the alarm
Since 1 April 2026 the Interim Measures Alarm Fund, run by Homes England, has provided grant funding for common fire alarm systems in residential and student buildings in England. There is no minimum height and no minimum number of flats, and a waking watch does not have to be in place already: what is needed is a fire risk assessment, or a fire risk appraisal of external walls, identifying the need for an alarm.
The fund pays for the alarm, not for the waking watch itself. Applications must come from the building owner, managing agent or other responsible person, as leaseholders cannot apply directly. For a responsible person, an early application is both the quickest route out of a recurring cost and useful evidence of a proportionate response if the charge is later challenged.
Talk to us
Waking watch disputes often hinge on detail: the date of the lease, the height of the building, the wording of the contract, who owns the freehold, and what was done and when. Those details decide how much is recoverable, from whom, and whether anyone further up the chain can be made to contribute.
