Meeting of the Parliament 08 January 2026
Not just now.
The minister knows the answer to that. He knows that a pitifully small amount of money has been spent on dealing with the issue. He knows that the Government has bungled the cladding remediation process from the very beginning by trying to do something better than the rest of the UK but ending up doing something much more complex and much slower. As a result of that, people are suffering every day. Given that the Government cannot even spend the money that it already has, why on earth are we asking the sector to pay more when it does not have any confidence in the process that the Government has established?
The single building assessment is supposed to be superior, but it is far inferior to what we had before. The Government introduced legislation on the leasehold-freehold arrangement in Scotland extremely late in the day. It knew that it had to address that at the beginning, and it could have done something about it years ago, but it has been sluggish to act. All of that gives us no confidence that the Government is capable of remediating the cladding on people’s homes.
The second issue—which, again, is of the Government’s own making—is that it has shattered the confidence of the housing sector over a number of years through utterly reckless policies. As a result, the capacity in the system is much reduced, along with the confidence of the sector. Adding another tax on top of all the other measures that the Government is bringing in will have practical consequences. There are so many people in my constituency who are desperate for a home but cannot get one. The danger is that the bill will make the situation worse, with the result that more people who desperately need a home will not get one.