Part of 1. Questions to the First Minister – in the Senedd at 1:45 pm on 31 January 2023.
Leader of the house, it has been some years now, obviously, since the Grenfell tragedy. The inquiry into the Grenfell tragedy has concluded its work, and we await its report. As I said, in the UK Parliament, the legislation has been passed to give comfort to residents who live in these orphan buildings—there is one literally just up the road from here—who find themselves in the horrendous situation of not knowing whether they will get the remediation works undertaken, and they are living in properties that are unsaleable now and in fear of their lives basically, because of the fire activities that could potentially go on in those buildings. I would hope that I could have achieved a more substantial answer from you, given the time lapse since the tragedy of the Grenfell fire, but I implore you and the Government to take those measures on board to give confidence to those residents that they will get restitution in place to fix the damages.
But another thing that was spoken about by the UK Minister, Michael Gove, was that, where companies refuse to honour their commitments to remedy these buildings, they would put into law the ability to stop those companies being able to work, build future buildings, in those localities. Will the Welsh Government give urgent consideration to adopting such measures here, to strengthen your arm when you are negotiating with these companies, so that—if they couldn't build in the past to a good standard, what confidence can we have that they will build in the future to a good standard? And we need that legislative change here to give the Minister the ability to go into those negotiations and stop these companies doing what they did previously.