Embankment House and Temple House - building safety

Latest update - 6 November 2023

Thank you for your ongoing patience. We’ll provide you with a further update at the beginning of December, unless there’s anything we can share before then.

In the meantime, Bouygues’ legal team has shared the following update, which has been agreed by our legal team.

Statement from Bouygues’ legal team (Embankment House & Temple House) (PDF, 22KB)

Issuing of Section 20 notices regarding Waking Watch (and other) costs

As well as pursuing Bouygues UK for the costs, we’ve also applied to recover them through the Government’s Building Safety Fund.

To provide assurance to leaseholders, we’re able to confirm that, in respect of Embankment and Temple House where Hyde is the current landlord, Hyde was the developer or was associated with the developer for the purposes of the Building Safety Act 2022. By ‘developer’ we mean that Hyde was the party that appointed Denne Construction Ltd (a subsidiary of Bouygues UK) as the Principal Contractor who was responsible for designing and constructing the buildings.

The fact that Hyde is a ‘developer’ in this context means that Hyde can’t pass service charges which relate to the costs of remediating known relevant defects to relevant leaseholders of Embankment and Temple House where Hyde is the landlord. It’s important to note that this is the case irrespective of whether Hyde provides a Landlord’s Certificate when requested or not, because Hyde is restricted from passing down such costs as service charges because of the provisions of the Building Safety Act 2022.

We can also confirm that we will not be recovering the costs detailed in the S20B notice dated 26 April 2022 relating to the waking watch service, or the costs incurred from the subsequent alarm installation.

We haven’t issued any charges to customers for the cost of major fire safety remediation or waking watch, and we continue to recover the costs from Bouygues UK and parties other than our customers

The sale of the freehold from Hyde Vale to Hyde Housing

The internal transfer of the freehold from Hyde Vale Ltd to Hyde Housing Association Ltd was always the intention. It just reflects the most appropriate structuring of assets within the Hyde Group for managing buildings, and has no impact on the customers of Embankment House and Temple House.

Status of the Building Safety Fund application

We’re waiting for a decision from the Building Safety Fund to know if our proposal has been accepted.

​Next customer meeting: TBC

We’ll update you when a new meeting date has been confirmed.

We'll use the same Zoom link as previous meetings. Invitations will be sent out in advance.