Fire Safety

Part of 1. Questions to the First Minister – in the Senedd at 2:23 pm on 8 February 2022.

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Photo of Mark Drakeford Mark Drakeford Labour 2:23, 8 February 2022

I'm not quite sure I follow the very final point the Member made, because the Welsh Government does intend to provide funding of that sort, but to do it in a way that does not create the moral hazard in which the public purse pays for the problems that developers themselves have created and lets those developers off the hook. I think exactly that point was made by the Secretary of State in England, Michael Gove, when he said that he expected the industry to provide the £4 billion that will be necessary to put right the wrongs that the industry itself has created. If the public purse simply steps in and picks up all those bills, what possible incentive will there be for the next developer to make sure that their buildings do not suffer from the same defects?

I congratulate the Member on the meeting that she held. I saw some accounts of it, and those are powerful testimonies that she's relayed from the people she met that day. It's because of that, Llywydd, that on 14 December the Minister responsible, Julie James, made an oral statement on the floor of the Senedd, where she committed the Welsh Government to a new leasehold support scheme to help that small number of leaseholders who find themselves in the very significant financial hardship that Jane Dodds has pointed to this afternoon. The Minister will make a further statement before the Easter recess that will provide further details of how that leasehold support scheme will operate—the costs it will cover, the way in which people will be able to access that help—so that the worst casualties of this scandal will receive the help that we can provide without allowing the developers themselves off the hook. They are responsible for these defects, they must put them right.