COUNCIL chiefs say they have found Grenfell Tower-like cladding on 57 Glasgow high-rise blocks.
The local authority had been sitting on the information, and had not told the fire brigade, the building owners or the people who live in the affected properties.
Details only emerged during a session of the Scottish Parliament’s Local Government and Communities Committee, when Glasgow’s assistant head of planning, Raymond Barlow, told MSPs initial checks had focused on housing association flats.
After those had all been checked, and found free of the dangerously flammable material, Barlow said his department’s “research from then on was very much on private flatted developments”.
“That information we only managed to complete in the last couple of weeks, and I have passed it over to the ministers,” he added.
The committee’s convener Bob Doris then asked him: “So, combustible cladding has been found in some private properties?”
The council official replied: “Yes, it’s just not public information yet.”
Doris replied: “It’s now public information because you are telling us.”
In the wake of the Grenfell Tower blaze, when around 80 people were killed when fire swept through a high-rise block in Kensington in London, the Scottish Government established a ministerial working group to look at building and fire safety.
Barlow said the council had only passed the information on to this working group.
“We’re simply saying we’re supplying the information to Scottish ministers and then we wish to see what they wish to do with the information before we take it further,” he told the committee.
After the meeting, ministers hit back, saying the information received from Glasgow “did not detail how many private high-rise domestic properties may have aluminium composite material (ACM) or whether the material was combustible cladding of the same type as used on Grenfell”.
Housing minister Kevin Stewart said: “The overall detail of information was insufficient for the chief building standards officer. Therefore, Glasgow City Council was asked to provide further information and we are waiting for them to provide clarification.”
A spokesman for Glasgow City Council said: “We reported back to the Government at the start of this month and they asked us a number of follow-up questions which we are in the process of answering.
“We identified 57 privately owned buildings which had some element of ACM in their construction, and a much smaller number of which have it as a substantial part of their make-up.
“However there is no suggestion that these buildings are a particular fire risk. All of them have fire systems in place and all of these buildings comply with the building regulations”
People should not panic, the council spokesman added.
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