Meeting of the Parliament 17 March 2026 [Draft]
I will begin with a wee reminder of why the bill is necessary. It is necessary to ensure that the house-building industry collectively puts right the failures for which it is collectively responsible, because it cannot be relied on to do so itself. It would be fundamentally unjust if clearing up the failures of the house-building industry fell solely to the public purse.
Are there options for doing that other than through a levy? It might be satisfying—I would certainly find it satisfying—if we could go after the specific developers who have caused the most problems, but we all know that that is not realistic, because the most irresponsible of them will be long gone. It is possible, in principle, that an insurance scheme might work, but to be effective it would need to have been in place for many years in the past, and it would not be workable to introduce one now.
A levy is the option that will work, even if it were not for the matter of trying to align with the other UK nations. A levy is clearly a more effective way to do it. It baffles me that some people are arguing that we need more rapid progress on the remediation programme but that we do not want the money from a levy in order to pay for it. Remediation is the responsibility of the industry, and it has a responsibility to pay for it; a levy is a mechanism to ensure that that happens.
We undoubtedly need to respond to the housing emergency.