Glasgow City Council leader Susan Aitken calls for 'national effort' to rebuild after fire on Union Street

She said: “The First Minister reached out to me first thing this morning, and I’m really pleased that he has proactively said that the Scottish Government will help, that they’re not going to leave it up to Glasgow to deal with this on their own. I think that’s incredibly helpful. I completely agree this has to be a national effort. Glasgow City Centre is a national asset. And I’m grateful to him for doing that.”

First Minister John Swinney visited the site on Monday afternoon.

Ms Aitken called the situation incredibly complex and said that it would not become clear until the council’s building control team were able to access the building that a figure could be put on the cost of the damage.

Ms Aitken said that she would wait on the fire investigators report before being drawn on the cause of the fire which originated in a vape shop on the ground floor of a Victorian building beside Glasgow Central Station.

She said: “I think we need to be clear that it is speculation and that right now nobody knows the cause of the fire. The fire investigators, when they’ve done their job, will tell us what the cause of the fire was. But secondly, I think we need to have that conversation anyway, regardless of whether it’s contributed to this fire or not.”

Ms Aitken said that the issue of safe disposal of batteries was currently part of a public information campaign after battery fires in the back of the council’s cleansing team trucks.

Asked what message she would send to Glaswegians who are concerned that the Union Street site might be another fire ravaged site in the city to face a drawn out rebuild, Ms Aitken said that Glasgow City Council was “bending over backwards” to bring the sites back into use.

She continued: “They are challenging. They’re very complex. The council doesn’t own them. They’re in often fragmented ownership. There are multiple owners. We believe that that’s the same for that site.

“What we will be doing though is pressing that case for this being a national recovery effort and for there to be a combined civic approach to, I guess, making some lemonade out of lemons and trying to have something really good rise and rise as quickly as possible from this devastation. However, I do think we need to emphasise that this is extremely complex. There’s a lot of work to do and a lot of stuff to be determined before we can start to put timescales on it.”