Tower blocked: Scottish homeowners wait for cladding remediation

In the early hours of the morning, Lewis was woken by a fire alarm in his flat at Breadalbane Street in the Bonnington area of Edinburgh. This was not an uncommon occurrence in his building. He describes the fire alarms as being “trippy” and says the fire brigade would arrive and quickly establish there was no fire. “You kind of got used to it,” he says. 

He began to get his shoes on to head out of the building. However, before he could leave the flat, the alarm stopped. As he went back to bed, it began sounding for a second time and, similar to the first time, it stopped as he was leaving. Shortly afterwards, the alarm came back on again and Lewis says he thought to himself, “I’m not going to get out of bed”. But he recalls the alarm this time sounding different, describing an additional layer of noise that sounded like it was coming from the communal hallway. This time, it was a fire.

“It was a lot more aggressive, and I knew something was up. I drew the curtains and saw a bunch of people below me looking up towards our flat block.  

“I quickly got my shoes on, woke up my flatmate, who I think after the first two alarms decided he wasn’t getting up. As we came out of the building we looked up and right at the top of our block, on our side, there was smoke coming from a flat above.”

Soon after, the residents were ushered away from the building towards the car park, out of harm’s way. Now 4am and feeling cold (it was late March), Lewis decided to go for a walk to kill some time and warm up while the firefighters tackled the blaze.  

“About a 10-minute walk away from the flat, I looked back and remembered seeing billows of smoke above the other buildings and thinking to myself that it had gotten worse,” he says. 

Arriving back at the building around 5am, Lewis found firefighters still tackling the blaze. The response was complicated by the building’s horseshoe design, with the affected section accessible only via stairs and a wheelchair ramp.

The fire spread to neighbouring flats, and at its height 70 firefighters were involved in tackling the blaze, with two suffering minor injuries. A total of 100 residents were evacuated, all without injury. They included MSP Graham Simpson who took some dramatic photos of the fire. 

“It looked to me that the difficulty of access was one of the main reasons why it spread,” Lewis says. “You could tell that the flat it started in was an absolute inferno.” 
The fire was described as a “complex incident” at the time, and a subsequent report by the Scottish Fire and Rescue Service linked its cause to a mattress lying over underfloor heating.

The fire happened almost two years after a City of Edinburgh Council report revealed that a building survey had raised serious safety concerns, including combustible cladding and insulation, combustible decking, and issues with internal fire-stopping. It also found seven internal lift systems to be “non-compliant” with regulations.

After the blaze, the building’s factors introduced interim safety measures including “waking watches” and fire supervisors. Then in July 2026, residents were advised to leave the building after new investigations found the block posed a high fire risk. Residents were offered temporary accommodation as they couldn’t stay in the building while remedial works were undertaken. 

Nearly a decade on from the Grenfell Tower fire, which claimed 72 lives and exposed major failures in building regulation, concerns remain about the safety of Scotland’s high-rise housing stock.  

Since then only 16 Single Building Assessments (SBAs) have been completed. An SBA is the Scottish Government’s official process for determining whether a residential building’s external wall system, including cladding, presents a fire risk and what remediation work, if any, is required.  

These figures raise concerns as the Scottish Government estimates there are over 13,400 residential buildings which are over 11 metres in Scotland, with around 1,100 estimated to be in the high-rise category.  

As of June, remediation work funded by the Scottish Government was completed on only one building with work underway on two further buildings, despite early government estimates suggesting more than 1,200 residential buildings could ultimately require work.

England has moved to remediate dangerous cladding more quickly. Its response includes legislation, government funding, and a legal agreement with building developers.  

Westminster’s Building Safety Act 2022 created a new building safety regime, strengthened enforcement powers, and introduced protections designed to stop many leaseholders bearing the cost of remediation. It also introduced the Building Safety Fund, the Cladding Safety Scheme, and developer remediation contracts that require major housebuilders to assess and fix affected buildings they were responsible for developing. 

As of March, over 4,300 residential buildings over 11 metres had been identified as having unsafe cladding, and 56 per cent had started or completed remediation works. For buildings with aluminium composite material cladding – the material used on Grenfell Tower – 97 per cent had started or completed remediation works.

Despite this, last year, the House of Commons’ Public Accounts Committee said progress on remediation was still “far too slow”, with thousands of buildings still not identified, which in the meantime left homeowners in those buildings to face high insurance costs and difficulty selling their homes. The committee estimated that between 9,000 and 12,000 buildings in England may require some form of remediation and put the cost between £12.6bn and £22.4bn. 

While it is clear the situation is far from ideal south of the border, it is hard to argue that the situation has been managed more efficiently in Scotland. The Scottish approach has been different, according to Ian Fergusson, who was part of the working group established by the Scottish Government after Grenfell, and is a senior partner at Shepherd, a leading surveyor firm. He says Scotland’s progress has been “desperately slow” and that most of the remediation he has seen has been in hotels funded by private developers.

Rather than moving towards large-scale programmes aimed at remediation, the Scottish Government spent several years developing the SBA, an assessment that does not solely look to identify unsafe cladding and inspects features inside the buildings too.  

“There was probably too wide a consultation, too wide a working group, and too many parties that turned out were more interested in the panacea to fix everything,” says Fergusson.

“As soon as you do a health and safety assessment inside the building – rather than just fix the cladding as happens in England – you end up with lots of things added...”

In the Scottish Government’s Cladding Remediation Plan, published in March 2025, it acknowledged that “the pace of action on assessment, mitigation and remediation has been too slow”, but argued that SBAs are “a necessary first step” towards identifying buildings that require work and ensuring resources are targeted where they are most needed.

The previous parliament’s Local Government, Housing and Planning Committee has been among the most vocal critics of the progress and heard evidence from homeowners ahead of the Housing (Cladding Remediation) (Scotland) Act, which passed in June 2024, and gave Scottish ministers powers to assess and remediate buildings, create a Cladding Assurance Register, and establish a responsible developers scheme. 

One individual who gave evidence, Perry Jenkins, who owns a flat in a large development at Western Harbour in Edinburgh, told MSPs that despite his building entering the Scottish Government’s remediation programme in 2021, there had been “absolutely zero progress” in physical remediation. 

Jenkins told the committee: “There is a distinct and absolute lack of clarity about anything and everything cladding-related, which is arguably an avoidable and unnecessary cause of frustration, anxiety and stress on the part of homeowners.

“The impact is not only felt psychologically in witnessing the devastating impact of flat fires across Edinburgh and the wider UK, eg Breadalbane [Street] development, [in] Leith – but also adversely impacting the development reputationally and financially with ever-increasing costs as a direct result of issues associated with the existence of cladding.”

The financial impact is clearly being felt by affected homeowners, and Fergusson says: “In the free market, ask any one of our 200 surveyors, they would say nothing is happening, no one is buying properties with cladding, and they are blighted until the problem is solved.”

Another crucial question that must be answered is who will foot the bill for the remediation. The Scottish Government’s position is that homeowners should not pay for defects they are not responsible for, and Fergusson says a big part of what is holding back remediation is money. Scottish ministers want developers to pay if responsibility can be established, and in some cases, building owners and government funding are playing a role.  

Fergusson says there needs to be a lot more funding from the Scottish Government, particularly when it comes to remediation and continued building of social housing. 
“At the moment there’s not enough [money] to go around,” he says. However, he argues the way to speed up progress is “with more money, dynamic management from Scottish Government, and more engagement with the private sector”.  

“That’s how we’ll see it move forward,” he adds. 

The fire in Breadalbane Street made Lewis’ and some of his neighbours’ flats unliveable, and many units were left unoccupied. Lewis is one of the luckier ones. As a tenant, he was able to move on with his life and has since bought a Victorian-era flat, but many are not so lucky and there have been reports of residents living in hotels in Edinburgh and Fife while the remedial work is completed.  

Looking back on the blaze, more than two years on, Lewis says it is “amazing” that nobody was seriously injured or killed. 

“It was pretty scary. In the grand scheme of things, everyone got out in time, but there was a lot of panic. 

“It made me really conscious of living in new-build high-rises. The flat I have purchased is a Victorian flat, and I genuinely feel a lot safer in this than in what I lived in before.”

Nearly a decade on from Grenfell, Scotland is still trying to address the questions the disaster raised. Which buildings are unsafe? Who should pay to fix them? And how quickly can that happen? 

For ministers, surveyors and developers, those are questions of policy and funding. For homeowners living in affected blocks, they are questions about whether their homes are safe, whether they can sell, and when they can finally get on with their lives.