Hackney Awards £15.6m in Fire Safety Consultancy Contracts as 2029 Deadline Looms
Hackney Council has awarded a £15.6 million pair of fire safety consultancy contracts to Frankham Risk Management and Airey Miller, fully funded by the Cladding Safety Scheme, to assess and design remediation across its high-rise and mid-rise housing stock by 2029.
INFIRISK Team·5 min read·
Hackney Council has awarded a pair of fire safety consultancy contracts worth £15.6 million between them, the largest single procurement of fire safety advisory services by a London borough since the Building Safety Act 2022 came into force. The contracts, awarded on 21 April 2026, will fund a four-year programme of fire risk assessments and remediation design across the council's high-rise and mid-rise housing stock, fully covered by central government grant.
The structure of the deal matters. The £15.6 million figure is not new money, but the result of an £11 million contract first agreed in July 2025 being topped up by £4.4 million to accelerate the programme. The acceleration is needed so that Hackney can secure works delivery within the central government grant window, which runs to 2029 for higher-risk buildings.
What the £15.6 million actually buys
The contracts cover fire safety reviews and remediation design across Hackney's high-rise and mid-rise residential blocks. In practice that means a programme of intrusive Type 4 fire risk assessments, external wall surveys aligned with PAS 9980, and the design packages that follow when remediation is required. The work also covers blocks in the 11 to 18 metre band, which became a particular regulatory focus once the Cladding Safety Scheme was extended to cover medium-rise buildings.
The procurement does not, by itself, fund any physical works. It funds the assessment and design phase that precedes them. Actual construction and remediation will sit under separate contracts and will draw on the same Cladding Safety Scheme grant pool, subject to the assessment outcomes.
The 2029 backdrop
The deadline driving Hackney's acceleration is the government's Remediation Acceleration Plan. As set out by the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government, landlords of buildings 18 metres and over with unsafe cladding must complete remediation by the end of 2029. For buildings between 11 and 18 metres the deadline is the end of 2031. Buildings in any government-funded scheme that miss those deadlines face severe penalties, including unlimited fines and, for the relevant cohort, potential criminal liability for the responsible person.
Funding for Hackney's consultancy work flows from the Cladding Safety Scheme, administered by Homes England. The scheme covers buildings over 11 metres outside London and 11 to 18 metres in London where the responsible person cannot reasonably afford the works or where responsibility is contested. The fact that an entire £15.6 million consultancy programme can be drawn down in this way underlines how heavily the scheme is being relied on by local authorities to bridge the gap between regulatory deadlines and in-house capacity.
The new contracts sit on top of an already substantial in-house programme. Hackney owns roughly 22,000 council homes across hundreds of blocks. The council's published fire safety information confirms that the highest-risk buildings are subject to annual fire risk assessments while the lowest-risk buildings are reassessed every four years, with hazards categorised as critical, high, medium, low or advisory. The council is also installing 4,510 new fire-rated flat entrance doors by March 2026 and is replacing external wall insulation on four estates: Lincoln Court, Nightingale Estate, Hugh Gaitskell House and Nye Bevan Estate, although the council notes that the cladding being replaced was not the same type used at Grenfell Tower.
What this signals for fire safety professionals
Hackney's £15.6 million is the visible part of a much larger market that is opening up across London and the major urban authorities. Several practical implications follow.
Demand for Type 4 fire risk assessors, façade engineers and PAS 9980 competent professionals is going to outstrip supply between now and 2028. Firms with the right competencies, particularly those on framework agreements with London boroughs, will be in a strong position.
The 11 to 18 metre band is no longer a quiet corner of the regulatory map. Responsible Persons for medium-rise blocks should expect commissioning bodies, lenders and insurers to ask the same questions they have been asking about high-rise stock since 2018.
Councils are turning to external consultancy because they cannot recruit and retain the in-house specialists fast enough. Where private landlords and large freeholders are still trying to manage assessment work in-house, that gap will become harder to defend in front of the Building Safety Regulator.
If you advise clients on procurement, look at how Hackney structured the deal: a four-year package, two suppliers running in parallel rather than a single appointment, scoped specifically against the 2029 grant deadline. That pattern, fixed window plus parallel capacity, is likely to spread.
The headline figure is striking, but the more interesting story is what it represents. Six years on from Grenfell, the scaffolding around the regulatory regime is now firm enough that local authorities are prepared to commit eight-figure sums to the assessment phase alone. That is a vote of confidence in the framework. It is also a clear signal that the sector still has years of remediation work ahead of it, with consultancy capacity as the binding constraint.
