5. Will the Minister provide an update on building safety further to her written statement on 7 October? OQ58566

Certainly. On 7 October, I announced that 11 developers have signed up to the Welsh Government’s developers pact. Work is now under way to create the formal legal documentation that will underpin the pact, and I anticipate that a draft of the documentation will be shared with developers by the end of this month.

Many thanks for that, Minister. I'm glad to hear about the legal pact. I'm sure that you'll agree with me that it's not satisfactory that leaseholders are taking developers to court at the moment. That shouldn't happen, and one example is Celestia nearby. You mentioned in your statement timescales with developers; could you give us an update on those timescales?

It's very difficult to give you an update on each developer's timescale, for obvious reasons, Rhys, but we are working with them to understand what the schedule is for their buildings. Some buildings are in remediation now, I'm very pleased to say, and I'm hoping to visit a number of them over the next few weeks. We're delighted that buildings have gone into the remediation phase as the survey work is complete. I've recently written out to all the management companies and various building owners' structures, because trying to figure out who's responsible for what, as you know, under the system is complicated. But we've just written out to all of them making sure that they are aware that they need to give us permission to go in and do the intrusive survey work. We're in touch with a number of residents to try and facilitate that to go a bit faster.

We are looking to make sure that we have a proper pipeline of work for the remediation phase so that we are not competing with one another for skills, supplies and so on, so that we don't inadvertently drive the price up, obviously. And one of the reasons that the Welsh Government has intervened in the way that it has in the surveys is to make sure that that doesn't happen, as in England there's actually been a spiralling cost to the surveys as people complete. So, we always work with our construction firms. Lee Waters and I have a regular meeting with the construction forum and the house builders forum, so we like to work with them to ensure that we have a pipeline, and our SMEs get the work where that's appropriate, and that we have the right skill mix and so on. So, we're working with the developers very closely to make sure that they step up to the responsibility on pay. Here in Wales, leaseholders will not have to pay large legal costs, like they do under the building safety fund, to be able to take that, because we will step in for them. But there's no pretending that we can remediate the number of buildings that we have in a month or so; this is a long-term project. We're also looking to make sure that we do the worst first and we make sure that people are able to live in, and that's why we've got the rescue scheme, and so on, to go with it. As we are aware of the buildings that are into the remediation, I will be sharing as much as I can, for commercial confidentiality reasons for the contract process, with Members, where that is. Llywydd, I'll probably do that by written statement as that becomes available.