By Professor John Robertson OBA
In the Guardian today, the above, and:
Far too many high and medium-rise buildings are still unsafe after the Grenfell disaster, with dangerous cladding remaining on at least 2,400 blocks, a housing minister has warned.
Wajid Khan, a Labour peer and housing minister, said on Friday that remediation work had not started at approximately 50% of properties being monitored for their unsafe cladding.
He told the House of Lords there is a need to “go further, faster” on 2,415 residential buildings over 11 metres in height in England. Figures show that of 4,834 buildings on the register 983 have started remediation, making 3,398 where the work to make the buildings safe is not yet done. About 30%, or 1,436, have completed remediation.
There’s no mention of Scotland in the above nor of the words ‘cavity barriers.’
Why do I care about the latter?
Apologies to regulars who’ve seen me batter away at this for years:
The Scottish media is full of accusations that the SNP Government is failing to spend the ‘almost £100m from the UK government‘ on fireproof cladding to avert a Grenfell ‘towering inferno‘ here.
From BBC Scotland on 4 September 2024:
Residents have been evacuated after a fire broke out at flats in Edinburgh in the early hours of the morning.
Around 45 firefighters have been tackling the blaze in Breadalbane Street, Leith, with Police Scotland also in attendance.
The Scottish Fire and Rescue Service (SFRS) said it sent nine fire engines and a height appliance to the scene after the alarm was raised at 04:10.
It said the building had been evacuated and there were no reports of any injuries.
Conservative MSP for Central Scotland Graham Simpson, who has a property in the block, was among the residents evacuated.
He said: “It started on the fifth floor and it’s spread up to the sixth floor and it seems it has gone into the stair well.https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/czvz0xg81z8o
On the spread to the sixth floor, you can see some spread via balcony materials but critically no surge behind the wall-cladding.
Regular readers here know why, but first, there have been two other fires in 2021 and in 2022, with similar non spread to other floors.
These Scottish blocks also had flammable cladding yet, in no case, did the fire spread up the floors to create a towering inferno effect and kill:
2021, one floor, no deaths.
In Glasgow again in 2022, one man taken to hospital,
Why?
This:
Reader Gordon Darge wrote for us in January 2020:
As a chartered architect in Scotland for 40 years I can confirm that the Building Regulations Technical Standards Scotland have for two decades required cavity fire barriers
2.4 Cavities
Mandatory Standard
Standard 2.4
Every building must be designed and constructed in such a way that in the event of an outbreak of fire within the building, the spread of fire and smoke within cavities in its structure and fabric is inhibited.
This includes for example, around the head, jambs and sill of an external door or window opening, at all floor levels and building corners etc. to prevent the spread of fire in building cavities. This would have prevented the spread of the fire at Grenfell Tower.
This is difficult and expensive to achieve and I can only guess that in England they did not follow the Scottish model because Westminster and the Tories were led by the vested interests of big business, property developers and large construction firms.
For anyone wanting more info see:
Finally, from statistics around the time of Grenfell
In Scotland 2015/16, 9 827 safety audits were carried out. England has 10 times the population and so, all things being equal, might have been expected to have seen 98 270 fire safety audits. However, in 2017/18, England saw only 49 423 fire safety audits, just over half the number. Fire safety audits in Scotland are thus almost twice as common, per head of population, in Scotland as in England.
Why? Cost-cutting Tory local authorities? Cost-cutting Tory central government?
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Talking-up Scotland 'Albatraz' 
Yet another story in which ”the country” is England and nobody knows or cares what happens elsewhere in the ”United Kingdom ”.
The caveat to this is , clearly , if Scotland had a WORSE record than England then THAT would be reported as if it was a Ferry Story !
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Can you imagine the headlines if the NHS were to use a travelling ferry to service the Scottish Islands’ medical needs?
BBC Scotchland would explode!
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I confess to being a little confused by Wajid Khan’s statement, in that I was not aware that initial surveys had definitively concluded “dangerous cladding remaining on at least 2,400 blocks” rather than identified them as potentially at risk meriting intrusive inspection and remediation where necessary.
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