Chamber and committees

We welcome the debate and support the bill’s general principles, as we would any serious attempt to speed up cladding remediation in Scotland. For seven years, we have been urging the Scottish Government to take ownership and to urgently start removing the dangerously combustible materials from Scotland’s homes. Indeed, the minister has spent the vast majority of his time in Parliament as a member of the Local Government, Housing and Planning Committee, urging the Government to take such action, alongside the convener, Mr Briggs and others who have come and gone from the committee. The minister is now charged with delivering the action that he was urging the Government to take.

I thank the clerks of the committee and all the organisations that gave evidence on the issue.

The bill raises a variety of complex and technical issues relating to fire safety and building standards, but it is important to recognise what brought us to this point and why we are here today: the Grenfell disaster, which was a preventable tragedy that caused the death of 72 people. It is imperative that, in Scotland, we do everything that we can to avoid a repeat of the events of that night in June 2017.

Can the Government say that everything that can be done to remove dangerous cladding from homes is being done? It has been claimed that the bill is being pushed through Parliament with no public consultation in order to expedite work starting on cladding removal. That is all well and good, but it has taken seven years to develop a bill and to get to this point, when England and Wales have been powering ahead—not developing legislation, but fixing buildings and making them safe.

The figures speak for themselves. In England, remediation work has started on 1,608 buildings, with 797 of those now having had cladding removed or remediated completely. In Wales, work on 37 buildings that were in need of remediation has now been completed, with work on a further 86 due to start in the coming year. In Scotland, the total number of buildings that have been made safe comes to just two. The only thing that the Scottish Government has committed to doing is putting buildings on a pathway to a single building assessment by the summer of 2024, which is a million miles away from remediation. Where is the drive and leadership that we need to fix Scotland’s unsafe housing? I am not entirely sure that the bill demonstrates that.

Cladding remediation is not a theoretical exercise. The issue of cladding has absolutely consumed people’s lives, causing them long-term worry and stress about the safety of their homes. It has a financial impact on owners, who are not able to sell, to insure or to remortgage their properties. What is worse, if the combustible cladding is not removed from dangerous buildings, every night, families who live in those buildings go to sleep filled with dread and fear. Because of the Government’s inaction, families have been living in fear for far too long.

The bill has much to commend within it. For example, we welcome the inclusion of a single building assessment, but it is clear from the cross-party committee report that there is much more to do. We heard of the potential difficulties in implementing the bill because of a lack of clarity over what should be included in the assessment and how wider hazards that are not directly related to cladding should be dealt with if they are found as part of the assessment.

There is a worrying lack of detail from the Government about what the responsible developers scheme will look like. Much of that detail will be left to secondary legislation. Residents and developers want clarity on what their responsibilities will be, what owners and residents can expect developers to deliver and what burden developers will be expected to take on.

There is not enough information on the single building assessment, which is fundamental to the roll-out of the cladding remediation scheme. We need to know what a single building assessment is, what the specification is, what an assessment looks like and what standard it is assessing to. If we do not know, how can we possibly determine whether it will speed up the removal and remediation of dangerous cladding in Scotland? Those assessments are a key part of the scheme, and they are far too important to the process to remain undefined.

There is no argument that risks will be identified as a result of the assessment process, but it is unclear to me why the Government has provided such scarce detail on how it will categorise the risks that are identified and what should be done when a building assessment identifies a safety risk. How will the bill speed up the process of removing cladding if, in a matter of months or years, we end up back in Parliament yet again to talk more about those issues? The Government has had seven years. We have a bill, but surely the time to decide on those things is long past.

We will continue to push the Government to deliver a faster pace of remediation and the key information that is missing from the bill. The necessarily rushed nature of the bill, the lack of consultation and the lack of detail on relatively complex and technical proposals all lead to the committee’s real concern that the bill has potentially not been well enough drafted or scrutinised to achieve its stated aim of providing the certainty that will allow developers and householders to expedite cladding remediation in Scotland. This is how one property owner put it to the committee. He said:

“My sense is that the bill does not deliver a sigh of relief or a fist pump. It is legalese … but does the bill address the key concerns of owners? Not really, until there is proof.”—[Official Report, Local Government, Housing and Planning Committee, 23 January 2024; c 6.]

The bill’s aim is to put the building blocks in place to speed up cladding remediation in Scotland. We will follow that process closely and strive to ensure that we gain clarity from the Government on whether the bill will achieve that aim as it makes its way through Parliament.

For those reasons, we support the principles of the bill at stage 1. However, for the safety of people who live in unsafe homes, the bill must become an act that is laser focused on driving the Government to deliver its cladding remediation programme.

My second question is whether the Government has considered changing a particular element of the existing procedure. When a landlord gives notice of a rent increase and the tenant decides to challenge that, arrears can potentially build up in the gap while either rent service Scotland or the First-tier Tribunal decides which rent should apply. My understanding is that, if the rent increase was found to be appropriate, the tenant would need to pay from the date of first issue rather than from the date of the First-tier Tribunal or rent service Scotland agreeing that the increase was appropriate. As I have said, there is the potential for arrears to build up, so has the Government considered amending the process to ensure that the date from which the rent increase would apply would be the date of the tribunal’s decision?

In advance of that work being completed, does the Government have any concerns about the risk of financial failure of any particular Scottish local authority?

I draw members’ attention to my entry in the register of interests as the owner of a private rented property up to July last year.

Good morning, minister. The new process relies on tenants taking the initiative to challenge a potentially unfair rent increase, but we in the committee have heard long-standing concerns about tenants’ ability to challenge landlords, for fear of putting their tenancy in jeopardy. What steps is the Government putting in place to protect tenants through the process and assure them that any such challenge will not put their tenancy in jeopardy?

You set out some of the financial challenges that have resulted in this flexibility being used in England, which are well documented. What assessment has the Government carried out of the financial health of local authorities in Scotland that have used this flexibility and of whether that has put any of them at risk of going down the same road as the English local authorities that you mentioned?

To ask the Scottish Government to where within the education budget it reallocated any unused funds for teaching bursaries in 2023-24. (S6O-03135)

I think that we can agree that the current pressure-cooker environment in our classrooms, and in particular the rise in violence and aggression, is driving teachers out of the profession and making those who would have considered entering it think again. What action is the Government taking to challenge such classroom environments? Will the Government commit to redistributing any of the unused bursaries from this year to promote teaching as an attractive profession, particularly for people with skills in computing, modern languages, and science, technology and engineering and mathematics subjects, for which recruitment targets have been missed?

We will not oppose the order today, because we know that it is necessary to get the funding allocated to councils. However, although we will not attempt to block it, we cannot support it.

As we indicated during various stages of the budget process, we do not support the 2024-25 budget because people are paying more and getting less. Councils—and the democratic mandate that they receive from communities—have been treated with complete contempt, and decisions seem to have been made in a haphazard and chaotic way. The chaotic and disrespectful way in which councils have been treated also seems to have put the final nail in the coffin of the Verity house agreement.

From the very outset, the decision to impose a freeze on council tax has had a whiff of “The Thick of It” about it. The First Minister, panicked by a by-election drubbing, announced a freeze at the party conference, in front of astounded SNP councillors, without letting his Cabinet, civil servants or even his coalition partners know about it, never mind have any input—in direct conflict with the Verity house agreement that had just been signed with local authorities. The Cabinet Secretary for Finance was then sent out to assure councils and Parliament that the freeze would be fully funded.

Mr McCabe is a democratically elected leader of his own council and acts in that capacity without any instruction from me or anyone else. He has his own democratic mandate, and it is about time that the Scottish Government started recognising and respecting the democratic mandate of councils, because not doing so is how we got this problem in the first place.

As I said, the Cabinet Secretary for Finance was sent out to assure councils and Parliament that the freeze would be fully funded, but she completely failed to give any details, repeating over and over that it would be down to negotiations with the valued partners in local government who were snubbed by that very announcement.

The minister appeared at committee and could not give any explanation of what a fully funded council tax freeze meant. We then got the details of the result of those in-depth negotiations with councils, which seemed to be a case of the Government just plucking a figure of its own out of the air because COSLA rejected it completely. Then, after weeks of the Government insisting that the council tax freeze was fully funded, all of a sudden it was not fully funded, because another £63 million was found. However, the kick in the teeth to local councils was that that funding came mostly from UK Barnett consequentials, which should have been going to councils anyway. It would be funny if it were not absolutely tragic.

It is the councillors from every political party, including the SNP, in all 32 local authorities who are having to make the heartbreaking decisions—decisions that are of this Government’s making. It is this Government that has cut billions of pounds cumulatively from council budgets and from council services—services that the most vulnerable rely on—since 2013. Roads are crumbling, teacher numbers are being cut, libraries are closing and bins are overflowing. Now, it is being left to those councillors to make those tough decisions to balance the books. They are taking the tough decisions on whether to accept the freeze to protect households or whether to try to protect services.

We should all be concerned about the context of the discussions that councillors are having on whether to accept it. I have been told that, as a result of the damage to the relationship between national and local government and the lack of any trust whatsoever between those two spheres of government, those who are making decisions in councils, at political and officer level, are making recommendations on budgets and on freezing council tax on the basis that they cannot trust the Government to baseline the freeze funding. There are councils that are, right now, working on the basis that the Government will give with one hand and take away with the other and that, next year, they will have to impose huge increases in council tax just to stay afloat.

The fact that hard-working, non-political council officers in council chambers of all political make-ups have that level of distrust in the Government should shock and appal everyone in this chamber, and it shows just how damaged and toxic the relationship between local and national Government has become.

I hope that the minister will reflect on that, and I hope that we are not in the same position as we are now when we consider the equivalent order next year.

I am an MSP for Central Scotland.