Cladding Remediation Programme: report to the Scottish Parliament

Development of the Cladding Remediation Programme

3. Following the tragic events of Grenfell Tower fire disaster in London in 2017 which exposed systemic failures in building safety management across the UK, the Scottish Government immediately convened a Ministerial Working Group of Building and Fire Safety to provide advice on what action should be taken to identify and address life-safety risks in multi-residential buildings. Following a cladding related fire in Irvine in 1999, Scotland had already banned combustible cladding in high-rise buildings (or set out the need to pass an extensive fire safety test).

4. Stemming from the Ministerial Working Group, a review of building standards was carried out by Professor James Cole. This concluded that the system was “not broken but it needed improvement”, specifically around the process of certifying building compliance. There was also an immediate response by the Scottish Fire and Rescue Service (SFRS) and by November 2017 it had carried out 900 operational visits to high-rise domestic buildings. A fire safety leaflet was distributed to all occupiers of high-rise buildings.

5. In addition, SFRS led on a range of recommendations directed towards ‘blue light’ services and made several changes and improvements to their approach to managing fires in high-rise buildings. This included the update of their standing operating procedures when attending an incident at a high-rise domestic building.

6. The Scottish Government led an extensive information-gathering exercise on high-rise housing stock across all tenures, carried out in collaboration with Local Authorities. In April 2022, further legislation was introduced on combustible materials, going further than 2005, by removing the option of a fire test and extending the ban to domestic buildings and other buildings such as care homes over 11 metres.

7. Further to this work to strengthen and review the system of building and fire safety, a Cladding Remediation Programme was launched. This initially took the form of a pilot phase. This identified several substantial challenges, including the need for a robust, consistent and holistic form of risk assessment, along with issues arising from Scotland’s distinctive tenure system. (In Scotland there is typically no single ‘owner’ of a residential block who can take forward assessment and remediation – unlike in England.)

8. To address these challenges, it was necessary to develop and introduce the ‘Housing (Cladding Remediation) (Scotland) Bill’, coupled with a new specification and statutory Standards for a ‘Single Building Assessment’ (SBA). The Act and Standards both commenced on 6 January 2025 – enabling the Cladding Remediation Programme to move into an active delivery phase. (We are here defining an SBA as an assessment that meets the statutory specification and standards, even if the building concerned is not within the scope of the Act – meaning that it does not activate the relevant powers within the Act.)