A waking watch — the round-the-clock fire patrol posted in blocks with unsafe cladding so residents can keep “staying put” while their building waits for remediation — cost a median of £11,361 per block per month in England, according to the government’s only national cost survey. This page pulls the UK waking watch statistics together in one place: the cost data from MHCLG’s Building Safety Programme survey, the funding and building counts from MHCLG’s monthly Building Safety Remediation release and its 2025 fund announcements, and the prevalence figures from the London Assembly, Hansard written answers and the National Audit Office.
It is written for leaseholders, block managers, campaigners and reporters who need citable numbers on what interim fire measures cost and how the government funding built to replace them has grown. Every figure is dated. The flagship cost averages are honestly flagged as a 2020 baseline that has not been re-surveyed; the funding and building counts are current to 2024–2025. Cladding remediation progress and high-rise fire incidents sit on our companion high-rise fire statistics page — here the focus is the interim measure itself: its cost, how many buildings still need one, and the funds paying to switch it off.
Key facts and figures
- £11,361 was the median waking watch cost per building per month in England (survey data collected June to September 2020).
- £17,897 was the mean monthly cost per building across England, rising to £20,443 in London (2020 data).
- £137 was the median cost per dwelling per month in England; the London mean reached £499 per dwelling (2020 data).
- £13.99 an hour was the median pay for a waking watch guard, within a range of £12.00 to £30.00 (2020 data).
- 801 buildings have had alarm installations backed by the Waking Watch Replacement Fund, worth about £71.7 million of grant (as at July 2025).
- ~£273 a month is the average saving to leaseholders when a common alarm replaces a waking watch (GOV.UK, July 2025).
- £62.7 million was the new Interim Measures Alarm Fund announced in July 2025 to keep replacing waking watches.
- 590 London buildings needed a waking watch in early 2021, costing Londoners roughly £145 million a year (London Assembly).
All figures are the latest available as of July 2026. This page is refreshed when new data lands — MHCLG publishes the Building Safety Remediation data release monthly (around the 20th), with Waking Watch Replacement Fund progress carried in its management-information tables, and the funding announcements are tracked as they are made.
How much does a waking watch cost per month in the UK?
The median waking watch cost was £11,361 per building per month in England, with a mean of £17,897, according to MHCLG’s Building Safety Programme survey of waking watch costs — the only national dataset on the subject, collected between June and September 2020. The gap between the median and the mean is the tell-tale sign of a skewed distribution: a cluster of very expensive blocks drags the average well above the typical case.
London was consistently dearer. The mean monthly cost per building in the capital was £20,443, against £17,897 for England as a whole. On a per-dwelling basis — the number leaseholders actually feel on their service charge — the median across England worked out at £137 per dwelling per month, while the London mean was £499 per dwelling. In other words, a resident in a smaller or pricier London block could be paying several hundred pounds a month purely for a temporary patrol that adds nothing permanent to their home.
Those economics start with the guards. Waking watch staff were paid a median of £13.99 per hour in the 2020 survey, within a range of £12.00 to £30.00. Running one guard around the clock, every day, is what turns a modest hourly rate into a five-figure monthly bill.
| Waking watch cost measure | Median | Mean | Data period |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cost per building per month (England) | £11,361 | £17,897 | Collected Jun–Sep 2020 |
| Cost per building per month (London) | — | £20,443 | Collected Jun–Sep 2020 |
| Cost per dwelling per month (England median / London mean) | £137 | £499 (London) | Collected Jun–Sep 2020 |
| Waking watch guard pay per hour | £13.99 | Range £12.00–£30.00 | Collected Jun–Sep 2020 |
How reliable is the 2020 cost data?
The headline cost averages rest on a small, non-random sample of just 71 buildings for the per-building figures and 65 buildings for the per-dwelling figures, collected in a single window in 2020 and never re-surveyed. MHCLG’s own publication is explicit that the sample was not randomly selected and may not be nationally representative — an important caveat to attach whenever these numbers are quoted.
That matters because the £11,361 median is, by a wide margin, the most-cited waking watch statistic in the UK, and it is now several years old. Costs will have moved with wages, inflation and the shrinking pool of buildings still on a patrol. So the honest framing is this: treat the 2020 survey as the definitive baseline for the scale of the problem, and lean on the more recent funding and building counts below for the current state of play. When you cite £11,361, cite the date with it.
How many buildings still have a waking watch?
590 buildings in London required a waking watch in early 2021, according to the London Assembly, which is the clearest single prevalence figure on record — and the capital has always carried the bulk of the caseload. Nationally, there has never been a clean, regularly published count of live waking watches, which is part of why the interim-measures story has been so hard to track.
What can be counted is how many buildings the funding has reached. A Hansard written answer of 25 July 2024 recorded that 423 London buildings and 315 buildings outside London had had building-safety grant funding approved for alarm work — 738 in total at that point. By July 2025 the Waking Watch Replacement Fund had backed alarm installations in 801 buildings (see below). Those grant-funded counts are a floor rather than a total: a building only appears once it has secured funding to switch its watch off, so the number of blocks that have ever run a patrol is higher.
The precise count of buildings still on a live patrol today is not something the published data pins down cleanly, which is why prevalence here leans on the London figure and the grant-funded totals rather than a single national headline. As remediation completes, buildings leave the patrol population; the direction of travel is downward.
What is the Waking Watch Replacement Fund, and is it still open?
The Waking Watch Replacement Fund has approved about £71.7 million of grant to install common fire alarms in 801 buildings since 2021, according to the government’s July 2025 announcement. The fund pays for a common alarm system — the permanent fix that lets a building retire its round-the-clock patrol — and has run through several rounds with growing budgets.
The sequence, drawn from GOV.UK and the National Audit Office, runs roughly like this: the initial Waking Watch Relief Fund allocated £35 million in 2021; a 2022 fund added £27 million; and the Waking Watch Replacement Fund 2023 was worth £41.71 million after an April 2025 extension added up to £21.11 million and ran the scheme to 31 March 2026. Cumulatively, the NAO put the programme’s funding history at around £35 million growing to £47.6 million before the later top-ups. The 2023 guidance page was scheduled to be withdrawn in June 2026 as that round closed, so anyone checking eligibility should confirm the current fund status on GOV.UK rather than relying on an archived page.
| Fund / round | Budget | Announced / status |
|---|---|---|
| Waking Watch Relief Fund (initial) | £35 million | 2021 |
| Waking Watch fund (second round) | £27 million | 2022 |
| Waking Watch Replacement Fund 2023 | £41.71 million (incl. +£21.11m extension) | Extended Apr 2025, ran to 31 Mar 2026 |
| Replacement Fund total to date | ~£71.7 million (801 buildings) | As at July 2025 |
| Interim Measures Alarm Fund (new) | £62.7 million | Announced July 2025 |
What is the new £62.7 million Interim Measures Alarm Fund?
The government announced a new £62.7 million Interim Measures Alarm Fund in July 2025 to carry on replacing waking watches with common alarms as buildings move through the remediation programme. It is the successor to the earlier Replacement Fund rounds and signals that the interim-measures story is still live policy rather than a closed chapter — a point worth making when the underlying cost data dates back to 2020.
The rationale is straightforward economics: a permanent common alarm pays for itself against the running cost of a patrol and takes the recurring charge off leaseholders. On the department’s own figures, switching from a waking watch to a common alarm saves leaseholders roughly £273 per month on average. Multiply that across hundreds of buildings and the case for funding the swap, rather than leaving residents to fund patrols indefinitely, becomes obvious.
Is a common fire alarm cheaper than a waking watch?
Yes — the 2020 survey found that employing a single waking watch guard exceeds the average cost of installing a common alarm system within three to seven months. After that break-even point, every further month on a patrol is money that a one-off alarm installation would have saved. That finding is the whole reason the Replacement and Alarm Funds exist.
The saving compounds over time. Where a patrol might cost a block £11,361 a month at the 2020 median, a common alarm is a capital cost paid once, after which the recurring bill largely disappears — hence the ~£273-per-month average saving to leaseholders quoted by the government in 2025. A common alarm also removes the human-reliability problem of a lone guard on a night shift across a large building.
What a common alarm does not do is anything about the cladding underneath; it changes the evacuation strategy (often from “stay put” to simultaneous evacuation) while the building waits for permanent remediation. The detection and effectiveness data for fire alarms themselves — how reliably they alert occupants — belongs to our sister site’s fire alarm statistics guide, which covers alarm reliability rather than the funding to install them.
How does this fit the wider cladding picture?
The National Audit Office’s best estimate of the total cladding remediation bill is £16.6 billion (range £12.6 billion to £22.4 billion), against an estimated 9,000 to 12,000 buildings needing work (NAO, November 2024). Waking watch costs and the funds that replace them are a small but visible slice of that far larger programme — the interim measure that keeps people safe while the permanent fix is arranged.
For scale context only: as at 31 October 2025, MHCLG’s monthly data release recorded 5,570 buildings identified with unsafe cladding, of which 2,705 (49%) had started or completed remediation. This page does not track that remediation portfolio — the building-by-building progress, the height bands and the cost breakdown live on our high-rise fire statistics page. Where a landlord fails to act on interim measures and faces enforcement, that is a matter for the fire and rescue service and the courts; our sister site covers fire safety prosecutions and the penalties involved.
Frequently asked questions
How much does a waking watch cost per month in the UK?
The median waking watch cost was £11,361 per building per month in England, with a mean of £17,897 (MHCLG Building Safety Programme survey, data collected June to September 2020). On a per-dwelling basis the England median was £137 per month, while the London mean reached £499 per dwelling. The figures are a 2020 baseline and have not been re-surveyed.
How many buildings still have a waking watch?
There is no clean national count of live patrols. The London Assembly recorded 590 London buildings needing a waking watch in early 2021, and by July 2025 the Waking Watch Replacement Fund had backed alarm installations in 801 buildings across the UK. As remediation and alarm installations complete, the number of buildings on a live patrol falls.
What is the Waking Watch Replacement Fund and is it still open?
It is a government grant that pays to install a common fire alarm so a building can retire its waking watch. It has approved about £71.7 million of funding across 801 buildings since 2021, and the 2023 round ran to 31 March 2026 before being succeeded by the £62.7 million Interim Measures Alarm Fund announced in July 2025. Confirm the current fund status on GOV.UK, as the 2023 guidance page was scheduled for withdrawal in June 2026.
Is a common fire alarm cheaper than a waking watch?
Yes. The 2020 survey found that employing one waking watch guard exceeds the average cost of installing a common alarm within three to seven months, after which the alarm keeps saving money. The government estimates the switch saves leaseholders roughly £273 per month on average.
Why does a building need a waking watch at all?
A waking watch is an interim measure in blocks where a fire risk assessment has found the building can no longer safely rely on its “stay put” strategy — usually because of unsafe cladding — and needs continuous human monitoring to raise the alarm and start an evacuation until a permanent fix, such as a common alarm or full remediation, is in place.
Where do UK waking watch statistics come from?
The cost figures come from MHCLG’s Building Safety Programme survey of waking watch costs (2020). Funding and building counts come from MHCLG’s monthly Building Safety Remediation release and its 2025 fund announcements, prevalence figures from the London Assembly and Hansard written answers, and the wider cost estimates from the National Audit Office.
If you help run a block, an office or any multi-occupied building, the waking watch story is a reminder of what competent people on the ground are for: interim measures only work when someone knows the evacuation plan and can act on it. Our Fire Warden Training course covers evacuation procedure, sweeps, assembly-point management and helping vulnerable occupants — £18 per learner, RoSPA approved and CPD accredited, 60 to 90 minutes online with an instant certificate on passing, and bulk discounts from 10 delegates upwards.
Related guides
- High-Rise Fire Statistics UK: Fires in Tall Buildings & Cladding Remediation Data
- Fire Evacuation Statistics UK: Rescues, Drills & Evacuation Behaviour Data
- Fire and Rescue Service Statistics UK
- Fire Door Statistics UK: Failure Rates, Inspections & Compliance Data
- Fire marshal responsibilities: the complete UK duties list
Sources & references
- MHCLG — Building Safety Programme: Waking Watch costs (data collected June–September 2020)
- MHCLG — Building Safety Remediation: monthly data release, October 2025 (as at 31 October 2025)
- GOV.UK — New £62m fund for fire alarms (Interim Measures Alarm Fund), July 2025
- GOV.UK — Waking Watch Replacement Fund 2023 guidance (last updated 11 April 2025)
- London Assembly / GLA — Waking watches costing Londoners £16,000 an hour (February 2021)
- UK Parliament / Hansard — Waking Watch Replacement Fund written answer (25 July 2024)
- National Audit Office — Dangerous cladding: the government’s remediation portfolio (November 2024)
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Mark writes about workplace health & safety, fire safety and accredited online training for Fire Warden Training, part of Online CPD Academy.