Ministers have come under fire for spending just 9% of a special fund set up to deal with 'dangerous' cladding across Scotland seven years after the Grenfell tragedy.

A total of 72 people lost their lives in the Grenfell Tower fire in London in 2017. Its cladding is believed to have contributed to the rapid spread of the blaze.

The Scottish government set up a cladding remediation programme following the disaster, but has been strongly criticised for failing to act quickly enough to save lives.

A May update on spending reveals that just £8,570,790 out of the £97.1m received from Westminster via Barnett consequentials has been spent to deal with potentially flammable cladding.

In 2021/22 just £241,280 had been spent.

To date £7.448m was spent in the Glasgow local authority area, £592,539 in Aberdeen, £405,726 in Edinburgh and £87,653 in Dundee.

There are just 105 buildings currently in the cladding remediation programme - and they are only part of an assessment pilot.

The Scottish Government’s Cladding Remediation Programme was set up in the wake of Grenfell to safeguard residents and homeowners by addressing the fire safety risk to human life that is directly or indirectly created or exacerbated by a building’s external wall cladding system.

The aftermath of the Grenfell Tower blaze

It was also established to help deal with the consequential negative impacts which can exist in relation to the buying, selling and re-mortgaging of flats in Scotland.

At least 95 high rise blocks and nearly 300 other buildings, including 244 schools, nine independent schools, five hospitals, one prison, five hotels and seven care homes were found to contain high pressure laminate (HPL) panels which safety experts have raised serious concerns in the latest official Scottish Government detailed snapshot survey carried out in 2021.

Further analysis of local authority high rises carried out also showed that a further 23 of Scotland's 774 high rise buildings reported polyethylene type ACM panels (ACM-PE), another combustible material, similar to that found at Grenfell. An identical number were found the previous year.

A further 15 buildings with ACM panels reported "limited combustibility".

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Thousands more flat-owners in Scotland are also estimated to have had their privately owned homes rendered worthless because they are wrapped in flammable materials.

Scottish Conservative shadow social security, housing and equalities secretary Miles Briggs said: “The SNP are shamefully continuing to progress at a snail’s pace in spending this money.

“It is completely unacceptable that they have still spent such a small sum in removing dangerous cladding from buildings across Scotland, which is continuing to put homeowners at risk.

“SNP ministers received this funding from the previous UK Government over two years but have failed to act with the urgency required. Too many people have been left in limbo as they wait to discover if their home will finally be free of dangerous cladding.

“This lack of action is typical of the SNP’s response to housing issues across the country and it is time they come clean on why tens of millions of funding has still to be spent making these homes safe.”

A Housing Cladding Remediation Bill passed unanimously at Holyrood in May with 116 votes for and none against.

It was expected to give ministers further powers to assess and carry out remediation on buildings with unsafe cladding - with any work then recorded in a special register.

At the time of Grenfell, cladding regulations were already stricter in Scotland than the rest of the UK, due to legislation that had been introduced in 2005.

This followed a fatal fire at the Garnock Court tower block in Irvine in 1999.

The fire at Garnock Court spread to nine floors (Image: PA)

A 55-year-old man died in the fire and five other people, including a 15-month-old child, were injured in the Irvine blaze.

Witnesses reported that a vertical ribbon of cladding on one corner of the block was quickly ablaze and the fire reached the 12th floor within 10 minutes of it starting.

The flats were owned by North Ayrshire Council, who ordered the removal of plastic cladding and PVC window frames as a precaution "at whatever cost" so they could be replaced with safer materials.

The then local MP, Brian Donohoe, said at the time he believed there was something "quite wrong" in the use of the cladding.

A February assessment found that only two of the 105 being assessed in Scotland for cladding remediation have had any work carried out.

But in England, in a scheme monitored by the UK Government's Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities, as of November 2023, there were 3,824 residential buildings 11 metres and over in height identified with unsafe cladding and some 1,603 (42%) have either started or completed remediation works with some 777 (20%) having had projects completed.

Sean Clerkin, campaign co-ordinator of the Scottish Tenants' Organisation, who was invited to give evidence at a Scottish parliamentary examination of the cladding issues said: "The Scottish Government’s actions to date have been woefully inadequate in tackling flammable cladding in Scotland when comparing that to the actions taken in England.

"The Scottish Government are not interested in tackling the highly flammable cladding which is in tower blocks in Scotland which affects mainly social rented tenants and therefore they are endangering the lives of those social tenants through inaction and indifference even though the money is available to transform these tower block."

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Ministers have been under pressure to either pay for the issues or replicate the scheme launched in England by UK ministers to secure an industry wide agreement that will make sure developers pay to fix the problems created.

The scheme involves an extension to a Building Safety Levy chargeable on all new residential buildings in England which was to raise a further estimated £3 billion forcing industry to pay. A further £2 billion has committed by over 35 developers to make buildings safe.

In the Programme for Government published in September, last year ministers set out an intention to seek the devolution of powers to introduce a similar levy.

But according to a financial memo in relation to the programme, the Scottish Parliament does not currently have the power to introduce a levy and was not included in the Housing (Cladding Remediation) (Scotland) Bill.

Police are understood to need till the end of 2025 to finalise their investigation into the Grenfell fire, with final decisions on potential criminal charges by the end of 2026.

Metropolitan Police deputy assistant commissioner Stuart Cundy has said that investigators will need another year to 18 months after the publication of the report from the second part of the public inquiry into the blaze, due to be released later this year.

Rosemary Ainslie, from the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS), said prosecutors would then need until the end of 2026 to make final decisions about any criminal charges.

The mammoth police investigation into the fire, which killed 72 people in 2017, has already generated 27,000 lines of inquiry and more than 12,000 witness statements.

A total of 19 companies and organisations are under investigation for potential criminal offences, and 58 individuals, and more than 300 hours of interviews have taken place.

Potential offences under consideration include corporate manslaughter, gross negligence manslaughter, perverting the course of justice, misconduct in public office, health and safety offences, fraud, and offences under the fire safety and building regulations.

So far eight out of 20 files have been sent to the CPS for early investigative advice that would be passed back to police, with a typical case file more than 500 pages long with 17,000 pages of evidence.

The current timeline would mean it would be nearly 10 years before anyone could appear in court over the Grenfell Tower blaze.

Up to the end of March this year, the Met has spent £107.3 million on the inquiry, and there are 180 investigators currently working on the case.

Forensic teams spent 415 days examining the tower itself after the deadly blaze and painstakingly gathering evidence.

Exhibits have been stored in an enormous warehouse that is big enough to store 25 double decker buses.

It includes the charred remnants of cladding panels that would have had molten plastic dripping down them while the building was on fire.

A Scottish Government spokesman said: “The Cladding Remediation Programme is a demand-led programme. Where issues have been identified within a building, we have ensured financial provision has been given and action taken. 

“Assessment, mitigation, and where needed, remediation is complex, but we are focused on addressing barriers to delivery, increasing capacity and setting standards for both Scottish Government and developer-led remediation in Scotland. 

“The recent passage of the Housing (Cladding Remediation) (Scotland) Act 2024 is a landmark moment in our efforts to make buildings safer and to safeguard homeowners and residents.  We have also recently published the Single Building Assessment technical specification, a critical milestone as it forms the core of the standards to be set by Ministers for the assessment of buildings in the scope of the new legislation.”