Meeting of the Parliament 17 March 2026 [Draft]
On 4 September 2024, John Swinney said:
“Keeping residents and home owners safe is our priority, and we are taking action to protect lives by ensuring that the assessment and remediation of buildings with potentially unsafe cladding is carried out.”—[Official Report, 4 September; c 26.]
At that point, seven years on from the Grenfell disaster in which 72 of our fellow citizens perished, remediation had been completed on precisely zero buildings in Scotland. Based on the latest available statistics, from November 2025—and the minister refused to demur from those statistics today—that figure still stands. Eight years and nine months on from that fire, not a single building remediation in Scotland has been completed. In contrast, in England, 1,938 remediations had been completed by November 2025. That shows the Scottish Government’s utterly shameful record of incompetence.
The reason that work has not been completed on a single building in Scotland is not that we do not have a building safety levy. The Scottish Government has failed to spend even a fraction of the almost £100 million provided by the United Kingdom Government for the purpose of cladding remediation. The Scottish Government has now admitted that those funds, which were intended for such remediation, were used to fill budget gaps across Government. It is up to the Scottish National Party Government to explain why it has taken so long to act, leaving people in Scotland at risk of fire and death in their own homes. If we wound back the clock to the day after the Grenfell disaster—15 June 2017—I do not think that we would imagine that our country could possibly be in this position.
There are specific structural differences in the housing and building sector in Scotland that make remediation challenging—that is without dispute. If the SNP wants to do something to speed up the process, those are the areas on which legislation could be brought in, and the Parliament should be looking at them. An additional tax on house building will not change any of those differences—none of them.
The critical point is that this levy comes at the worst possible time. Scotland is still in the grip of the SNP-made housing emergency, which the Government acknowledged nearly two years ago but has done precious little about since then. More than 10,000 children are still stuck in temporary accommodation, and house-building rates are at record lows.
It is estimated that the levy will add an additional £3,500 to the cost of building a new home. In evidence to the Finance and Public Administration Committee, house builders were clear that the levy will render house building unviable anywhere outside Edinburgh and the Lothians. Those are the repercussions that nobody on the Government benches or, in particular, the Green benches seems to be willing to tackle. On that basis, and in an unprecedented step, as Liz Smith described, the committee made no recommendation on the general principles of the bill. That gives a clear indication of the committee’s serious misgivings about the viability of the levy in its current form.
I am sorry to say that the bill has not been greatly improved by the amendments lodged either at stage 2 or at stage 3, and the minister has refused to support many sensible amendments that sought to analyse the levy’s impact on the house-building market and to introduce exemptions in specific cases.
The minister has also repeatedly failed to commit to the independent sensitivity analysis of local areas that the committee recommended and on which several members lodged amendments. That does not give confidence to the Parliament, the sector or the thousands of Scots who are without a home to call their own that the SNP Government takes seriously the mess that it has made of Scotland’s housing system and the further damage that the levy could do if it is not introduced carefully.