Edinburgh is carrying out a survey of its sandstone tenements to ascertain their condition. And the law is being changed to force flat owners to pay repair bills that could easily be tens of thousands of pounds.

The council in Edinburgh says it is leading the way in identifying and rectifying crumbling property partly as a result of the death of Christine Foster in June 2000. She was killed by falling masonry when she working as a waitress at Ryans Bar in Edinburgh.

The council said after the tragedy that it was considering allocating more money to the inspection of buildings.

And a new Bill introduced to the Scottish Parliament in February, the Tenements (Scotland) Bill, will force flat owners to pay up, although the council says it will consider term payments or a claim on the price when a flat is sold. It is not yet clear what affect the prospect of high on-going maintenance costs might have on the price of these flats.

Across Scotland, the problem could affect 20,000 flat owners and the cost of carrying out repair work has been estimated at £6.5billion.

Alan McKinney, chief executive of the Scottish Stone Liaison Group, and Dr Ewan Hyslop from the British Geological Survey in Edinburgh, have been talking to newspapers in Scotland that have devoted many column inches to the matter. The men have pointed out how important it is to choose the correct stones for the repair work.

They say there are fewer than 10 sandstone quarries left in Scotland, where there were once 600. A Sainsbury\'s supermarket stands on what used to be Craigleith Quarry, the stone from which could have been used to repair these tenements.

However, a Stirling firm, Tradstock, have applied for planning permission to extract sandstone from Cullaloe Quarry, which experts agree is a good match for the Craigleith stone.

The owners of flats in one property, Bruntsfield, have already been told they will be billed £47,000 each (£680,000 in total) after the council was called in to resolve a dispute between the residents, some of whom were refusing to agree to the work being carried out.

The new Bill before the Scottish Parliament will, if it becomes law, mean work can be carried out and the cost shared among the residents, even if some of them do not agree to it.