Land ownership in the UK is really weird and to be honest I don't know a great deal about the law in general or how it applies in this specific case. Our land is all bought up. If you want to own land here it is expensive as fuck, and a lot of the people who own it have owned it for a very very long time. We didn't have the clean break with feudalism that North America did.
It actually still plays a part in our government. We have a parliamentary body here called the House of Lords. They are not elected, and up until recently membership was passed down through families. They used to be able to draft and change legislature without oversight, but around 100 years ago there was an incident where a bill that would have enforced restrictions on land owners passed through every part of the government and was then almost unanimously defeated by the House of Lords, because they were all land owners.
So the government changed their function and now they can not draft legislature, they can only propose changes. It still means that they can effectively block legislature from passing, because they can make changes indefinitely. Some memberships are still passed down, and the others are all appointed by members of the House of Lords, although appointed members can only be there for 15 years. Every time there is a proposal on restricting land owners in any way, they just propose amendments constantly because they still all own land.
There have been a number of attempts to scrap hereditary members and appointed ones and replace them with elected ones, or at least a certain amount of elected ones, but every time it is proposed nobody can agree on it. So until that happens, we still have a weird situation with land ownership because the House of Lords will never agree to it, they don't run the risk of losing an election if they keep stalling forever.
It's usually a lot simpler. Elsewhere condos are owned by the people who live there.
The interior of each unit is owned by that individual, and maintenance/repairs that affects only that unit are their responsibility.
The exterior, and shared areas are owned by a corporation that is typically made up of the residents.
So I'm a little confused as to who the 'land owner' is in this case, and why they would want to own the exterior of a building?
I tried googling who owned the building, and it seems to be similar to what we do, but the corporation is jointly owned by the residents, a management company, and 'the counsel'.
So I guess that explains the debate and arguing.
If this was in North America, it would probably only be two entities involved, the owners and the original builder. Caretaker companys generally just clean-up and do the work, they don't own the buildings.
If those materials were approved at the time of construction, then the builder is off the hook, and the cost falls entirely on the homeowners.
In BC we went through a somewhat comparable indecent when the government changed the building code to a new building envelope designs. The designs turned out to be flawed, and a few years later buildings all over were leaking and needed very costly repairs.
It was all on the home/building owners to pay for repairs.
The construction companys were following law at the time, so were clear. The government makes the rules, so the rules always clear them. That just leave the residents.
As a homeowner, sometimes shit happens and you have to eat the cost. It's not fair, but that's life, buy insurance.
If a tree falls on a home, the owner can't demand that the tree, or taxpayers, pay for repairs.