Part of 1. Questions to the Minister for Climate Change – in the Senedd at 1:55 pm on 14 July 2021.
Absolutely, Andrew R.T. Davies, and I understand the written statement came out; sorry, these things are very complicated and I wish we could go faster. The speed is no indication of the priority; it's an indication of the complexity of being able to get these things right, as I've emphasised. I've been meeting, myself, as you know, with a number of residents associations and so on, trying to understand what each individual building is experiencing.
So, what we've done today is we've announced that we will fund the work necessary to find out what is wrong with each building, including the invasive procedures necessary to find exactly what's happening. We will fund that for the buildings so that they will have a building passport that tells them what the issues are, off the back of which we can design the system that allows us to fund the remediation works.
I can't answer the rest of your questions in detail, I'm afraid, because of the issue with these consequentials. I, frankly, just do not have any clue what the budget might look like. So, I will tell you that I am making budget bids inside the Welsh Government for the money that we may or may not have available, but the truth is that without the consequentials we will not have the money necessary to do all of the work in the way that we would like. So, I'm doing the best that I can in the circumstances, but why on earth it's taking this long to tell the Welsh Government what the consequential funding as a result of Robert Jenrick's announcements of several billion pounds earlier in the year will be, I do not know. If you can use your good offices to find out, I'd be very grateful.
It's my ambition that home owners—leaseholders, mostly—should not have to pay for things that are not their fault. But, until I understand the nature and the extent of the damage that there is, and how much money that is, it's impossible for me to promise that.