Part of 1. Questions to the Minister for Climate Change – in the Senedd at 12:48 pm on 16 June 2021.
Yes, of course, Janet, and welcome to your new brief as well. But of course, Janet, my heartfelt sympathies go to the victims of the Grenfell fire and, indeed, actually, to all of the people who are living in high-rise buildings who have these issues affecting them. It is absolutely a scandal that the buildings were ever put up with so many faults. However, as I said many times in the previous Senedd, this is incredibly complicated in terms of the way that land law works, the way that property law works, the way that leaseholder law works, the way that the buildings are managed, the way that they're constructed, and so on. And unfortunately, there isn't a one-size-fits-all solution to this. Each building has a set of problems that are unique to it, and it's very difficult, therefore, to put in place an overarching thing that works.
The UK Government has had some serious difficulty in this area as well. It has put in place a number of funds, but those funds have been less efficient than I think they would have liked, to be charitable. And also they only cover some of the cladding issues, whereas we know that very large numbers of these buildings also have compartmentation issues, escape issues, alarm issues and all sorts of other things wrong with them. So, we are currently looking at a holistic approach to the remediation of buildings, which includes the compartmentation—it's very hard to say—of the buildings, fire alert systems, evacuation systems and fire-suppression systems. So far, we've only had one set of consequentials off the UK Government, despite the very large amounts of money that have been announced. I have received, via MP colleagues, assurances from the Secretary of State that a consequential will be forthcoming, but so far it is not forthcoming and we have absolutely no indication at all as to when and how much that money will be. So, I would very much like your assistance to get the Secretary of State to tell us quite how much money he is thinking will come to us in a consequential, because it's very difficult to plan without that level of detail.
Nevertheless, with the money we already have, we are working hard on putting a scheme together that is likely to be able to assist building owners—I say 'building owners' as a global term, so just to be clear, that's not the technical term, because there are a large number of complexities, but the people involved in owning the building—to understand what's wrong with their building, because that's the first problem, because none of the people who live there are experts in that and actually even just asking people, 'What is wrong with this building?' is a really difficult thing to do. So, we are working really hard to put something together that allows people to get the right result in, 'What's wrong with this building?' and then to be able to assess the right kind of finance to put it right afterwards. But it is fiendishly complicated, and we are not going slowly because we don't want to do it, we're going slowly because we want to get it right.