Meeting of the Parliament 12 March 2024
We welcome the debate and support the bill’s general principles, as we would any serious attempt to speed up cladding remediation in Scotland. For seven years, we have been urging the Scottish Government to take ownership and to urgently start removing the dangerously combustible materials from Scotland’s homes. Indeed, the minister has spent the vast majority of his time in Parliament as a member of the Local Government, Housing and Planning Committee, urging the Government to take such action, alongside the convener, Mr Briggs and others who have come and gone from the committee. The minister is now charged with delivering the action that he was urging the Government to take.
I thank the clerks of the committee and all the organisations that gave evidence on the issue.
The bill raises a variety of complex and technical issues relating to fire safety and building standards, but it is important to recognise what brought us to this point and why we are here today: the Grenfell disaster, which was a preventable tragedy that caused the death of 72 people. It is imperative that, in Scotland, we do everything that we can to avoid a repeat of the events of that night in June 2017.
Can the Government say that everything that can be done to remove dangerous cladding from homes is being done? It has been claimed that the bill is being pushed through Parliament with no public consultation in order to expedite work starting on cladding removal. That is all well and good, but it has taken seven years to develop a bill and to get to this point, when England and Wales have been powering ahead—not developing legislation, but fixing buildings and making them safe.
The figures speak for themselves. In England, remediation work has started on 1,608 buildings, with 797 of those now having had cladding removed or remediated completely. In Wales, work on 37 buildings that were in need of remediation has now been completed, with work on a further 86 due to start in the coming year. In Scotland, the total number of buildings that have been made safe comes to just two. The only thing that the Scottish Government has committed to doing is putting buildings on a pathway to a single building assessment by the summer of 2024, which is a million miles away from remediation. Where is the drive and leadership that we need to fix Scotland’s unsafe housing? I am not entirely sure that the bill demonstrates that.
Cladding remediation is not a theoretical exercise. The issue of cladding has absolutely consumed people’s lives, causing them long-term worry and stress about the safety of their homes. It has a financial impact on owners, who are not able to sell, to insure or to remortgage their properties. What is worse, if the combustible cladding is not removed from dangerous buildings, every night, families who live in those buildings go to sleep filled with dread and fear. Because of the Government’s inaction, families have been living in fear for far too long.
The bill has much to commend within it. For example, we welcome the inclusion of a single building assessment, but it is clear from the cross-party committee report that there is much more to do. We heard of the potential difficulties in implementing the bill because of a lack of clarity over what should be included in the assessment and how wider hazards that are not directly related to cladding should be dealt with if they are found as part of the assessment.
There is a worrying lack of detail from the Government about what the responsible developers scheme will look like. Much of that detail will be left to secondary legislation. Residents and developers want clarity on what their responsibilities will be, what owners and residents can expect developers to deliver and what burden developers will be expected to take on.
There is not enough information on the single building assessment, which is fundamental to the roll-out of the cladding remediation scheme. We need to know what a single building assessment is, what the specification is, what an assessment looks like and what standard it is assessing to. If we do not know, how can we possibly determine whether it will speed up the removal and remediation of dangerous cladding in Scotland? Those assessments are a key part of the scheme, and they are far too important to the process to remain undefined.
There is no argument that risks will be identified as a result of the assessment process, but it is unclear to me why the Government has provided such scarce detail on how it will categorise the risks that are identified and what should be done when a building assessment identifies a safety risk. How will the bill speed up the process of removing cladding if, in a matter of months or years, we end up back in Parliament yet again to talk more about those issues? The Government has had seven years. We have a bill, but surely the time to decide on those things is long past.
We will continue to push the Government to deliver a faster pace of remediation and the key information that is missing from the bill. The necessarily rushed nature of the bill, the lack of consultation and the lack of detail on relatively complex and technical proposals all lead to the committee’s real concern that the bill has potentially not been well enough drafted or scrutinised to achieve its stated aim of providing the certainty that will allow developers and householders to expedite cladding remediation in Scotland. This is how one property owner put it to the committee. He said:
“My sense is that the bill does not deliver a sigh of relief or a fist pump. It is legalese … but does the bill address the key concerns of owners? Not really, until there is proof.”—[Official Report, Local Government, Housing and Planning Committee, 23 January 2024; c 6.]
The bill’s aim is to put the building blocks in place to speed up cladding remediation in Scotland. We will follow that process closely and strive to ensure that we gain clarity from the Government on whether the bill will achieve that aim as it makes its way through Parliament.
For those reasons, we support the principles of the bill at stage 1. However, for the safety of people who live in unsafe homes, the bill must become an act that is laser focused on driving the Government to deliver its cladding remediation programme.
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