Student Accomodation Safety

Part of 4. Topical Questions – in the Senedd at 3:23 pm on 20 November 2019.

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Photo of Julie James Julie James Labour 3:23, 20 November 2019

Dealing with that last point first, I'm very keen to find a mechanism that doesn't penalise the actual people living in the flats, where it is clearly the fault of the construction company or some other obvious causation. Bethan Sayed will know that that's not always as simple as it sounds to establish, and we have an example in Swansea, which all of us from Swansea are aware of, where it's been immensely complex to figure out who exactly is responsible for which bit. We are working very hard to put a system in place that allows us to do that, but I'm very reluctant that people should have to pay for the mistakes of somebody who's made a great deal of money out of building a building that is inadequate. So, we are still working on trying to work out a way of getting loans and grants out to people in circumstances where we're not, effectively, rewarding bad behaviour. So I'm happy to keep the Senedd updated on our conversation around what we can do exactly, because people do want to be safe, but, on the other hand, they also want to have some equity in the property that they've bought, so I'm trying to keep that right. We're working very hard to try and walk the very complex path of trying to get that right.

We don't have a complete set of data as to the type of exterior façade of all high-rises—by which we mean 18 metres plus buildings in Wales—but we know that there are at least 10 high-rise buildings with HPL cladding. As David Melding alluded to, that doesn’t necessarily mean that they're flammable. Actually, a very complex system, including how the insulation has been put in, whether the fire bricks are there, what the rest of the construction of the building is, makes a big difference to whether it is or isn't considered to be a fire risk. So, we're working with partners to try and improve the information we've got, and we intend to legislate anyway for this. We've already been looking at this, as you know, through a review of our Bill and regulations and a number of things that we're looking at for that.

We have written out to all HEIs asking them to give us back information for all of their students, not just the ones that are in student accommodation supplied by the higher education institute, and we're also continuing to work with local authorities to keep our information up to date so that we can understand exactly where we are with that. We have been doing this for some time, not just in response to the Bolton fire; we've written out several times to local authorities and so on to keep this under review. Once again, we have an example of how important it is to make sure that we do get this right for the future.

I would just like to say, just to pay tribute to the fire service in Bolton, who clearly did the right thing on the night and put the right rescue arrangements in place—not only fighting a fire, but evacuating the students with all but minor injuries. But your heart does go out to people who've lost all of their personal possessions and who find themselves in that position.

But it is important to understand, and I do really very much want to emphasise this, that the system for evacuation should be provided to tenants and owners when they go into a high-rise block in multiple occupation, and we are about to write out to everyone, through Rent Smart Wales and all the other contacts that we have, making sure that people renew that. So, if you've lived somewhere for four years, you may well have forgotten what the information was that you got, if you got it in the first place. So, we're asking people to renew that—renew the information. And, Bethan, if you have examples of people being moved into half-built buildings, where they're not being given the right information about fire safety and evacuation, if you'd kindly give me that I can look into it further.