Meeting of the Parliament 14 May 2024
I thank Ben Macpherson for that intervention, but I say to him that it should not have taken seven years for us to get to this point. I think that he would agree with me on that. He and I have worked together very well on the issue of tenement maintenance. Members will have received an email from me earlier, asking them to back a members’ business debate on proposals around that, and a number of members from different parties have already backed that. We need to move forward together on this very serious issue, and we can do that.
The bill’s introduction was rushed and it was not good enough, so some of us attempted to improve it at stage 2. We failed but, as I said earlier, the minister committed to working with some of us ahead of stage 3. I said at the time, kind of jokingly, that I would just have to trust him on that, but my trust has been repaid. The minister and his team have helped to craft amendments from me, Pam Duncan-Glancy and Miles Briggs. I thank him and his team for that.
As you are giving me extra time, Presiding Officer, I will quickly mention a few other members. Miles Briggs spelled out the impact of all this on residents. Mark Griffin mentioned the fires in Milan and Valencia and the general dangers of cladding. I was struck by a comment from Ariane Burgess, who said that we should have no more excuses and that it is time for action. She is absolutely right.
The bill is not perfect, but it is better than it was. At its heart, it gives ministers the
“Power to arrange remediation work”
that has been identified in a single building assessment report as
“being needed to eliminate or mitigate risks to human life that are ... created or exacerbated by the building’s external wall cladding system”.
Whether that involves the original developers or whether they have gone bust or disappeared does not matter, because the work needs to be done. We have to get rid of all dangerous cladding.
At their worst, the effects of fire can be tragic—as we saw at Grenfell—but they can also be life changing. Time will tell whether the bill will help to get dangerous cladding removed, but I will back it in order to give it the chance to do so.