 Gweld fel ddechrau i fy rhai gwrs, wrth yn 2016 o'r Infra-Struxia Unedig i Gweld Fel Dwiol Fawr Clif wedi mynd i gael y cwrnodau baig, sy'n f hospitality sy'n gwaith yn y dyfodol gwagol gyd龫, ac mae'n ddweud yn cyflawni ffaith yng Nghymru gũtau digitalais bod argymellu cyfhyddiadol wedi gyrfao'i. Rwy'r cyfrifoedd nid o gydig i gydig i fynd, maes i dd jon adnol yng nghydrych yng Nghymru yng Nghymru. The committee will take oral evidence on OFCOM's draft annual report, draft annual plan, and I welcome Sharon White, chief executive of OFCOM. Can I invite Ms White to make a short opening statement? It's an absolute pleasure to be here. It's my first time at a parliamentary session here, and it's a great delight for us to get some feedback and some commentary. As you know, the Scottish Bill will mean that there's a more formal and structured role for Parliament on our annual plan, and I have to say very keen as a chief executive who's very focused on ensuring that communications work for consumers, and there are all sorts of issues and priorities for us around access and availability, speed of service, and big issues of rurality, which come to life, particularly in Scotland, that we're very keen to get your feedback today so that we can ensure that the needs of the populists in Scotland are properly reflected. Thank you very much. Okay, thank you. I'm very pleased to have you in front of the committee this morning. Perhaps I could kick off and just ask you. You mentioned the Scotland Bill, which is currently going through Westminster. That will bring about a number of changes to the way in which OFCOM operates in relation to Scotland. I just wonder if you could provide a short update on what progress has been made towards the agreement of what I understand will be a memorandum of understanding between the two Governments on OFCOM's relations with the Scottish Parliament? As you say, the Scotland Bill will further strengthen the relationship between OFCOM and Scotland. We are working very hard with colleagues in the Scottish Government and with the UK Department for Culture, Media and Sports. I hope that we are weeks away from agreement, but what we will do is set out some very clear formal structures for consultation, not least as I think you know, with a Scottish member of the OFCOM board, which we see as a very positive step. A little bit more about what difference you think that appointment will make to the way in which OFCOM operates and what the benefits will be for consumers in Scotland. I personally think that it will be a big difference. As I said to you, my main priority Cabinet as Chief Executive is to really think about the UK connectivity looking 10 years ahead. Although the market has been competitive generally, has worked well generally, there are still some very significant, I mean more than pockets, but significant parts of the UK, not least in Scotland, businesses as well as residential consumers. I hope that if you take a very practical example of the universal service obligation, the issues around the Highlands and Islands will be very different from the issues of the Welsh Valleys or of the city not spots that we have in London. There will be different technological demands and different technological requisites. I think that having an OFCOM board member from Scotland that is able to speak to all of our agenda but represent and understand the needs in a more granular way is really important. It is one of the reasons why I am also increasing the size of OFCOM's presence in Scotland. We are setting up a new Edinburgh office and I am hoping to have more of our engineers, technologists and some of our other consumer experts place it on the ground here in Edinburgh. The OFCOM board member, can I ask you, do you see that role being very much OFCOM's person in Scotland or the consumer's person on the board of OFCOM representing Scottish consumers? I mean it is a bit of a fudge to say both. I think the best, the most— We are used to fudging. I know, it is my civil service background. When I think about the representative of Scotland, I think the ideal candidate is able to speak both to the broader OFCOM agenda and as you know, our remit is very, very broad. Broadcasting, determining which parties are rightly due, party election, broadcast all the way through to some of the telecoms issues, can speak to the broader agenda but has got a real understanding and appreciation of the priorities in Scotland that can feed into the decision-taking on our wider priorities. I do not quite see them as the consumer champion of Scotland but I do see them as somebody who has got the credibility of this committee, who has got the credibility of the broader populace in Scotland. I think that is really critical. In terms of the memorandum of understanding, will that provide any detail on the positive engagement that OFCOM will have with the Scottish Parliament, with this committee, and what kind of issues will be covered off in that? As I say, it is still up for debate and I suspect that some of the discussions are about how much more or less specificity there is there. For me what is really important about the MOU is that it does set out a very positive agenda and a positive story for the engagement. So that is both at working level but I hope that we can get into a routine where Parliament feels able to call us more routinely for evidence, where there is an early engagement on our annual planning and where it is an ongoing dialogue rather than a once-a-year discussion. For me having Parliament much more tightly knit into our engagement and to our priority setting is really critical. What about the information that OFCOM provides in relation to Scotland? Do you anticipate that there will be more detailed information at a local level, more granularity in terms of the data information that you provide? Some of you may have seen a report that we did last autumn called Connected Nations, which is building up of our desire to have much more granular information. At the moment we are now able to publish by postcode data for mobile availability, which in the past we haven't been able to. Some of you have seen our mobile checker maps, you can now go in and tap your postcode in any part of the UK, any postcode in Scotland, and see whether actually you are able to make a mobile phone call and to compare different providers in your area. As I come back to the consumer, understanding what the connectivity situation is like for the individual consumer is an area that we are keen to do, I'm hoping over the course of the next year to household level and not just to postcode level, because obviously for many people you're combining mobile, wireless connectivity as well as fixed lines, so that's a very strong yes. Can I ask you about the strategic review of digital communications that I understand is expected to report this month? I'm not asking you to breach the embargo, but can you give us a flavour of what the initial conclusions of that review are likely to be, which will obviously be charged with implementing and what will be the key benefits for businesses and consumers in Scotland arising from that? What I can do is give the committee a sense of the headline issues that we are covering. Clearly a lot of the media attention over the last few months has been particularly on the question of open region, its relationship with a broader BT group, but actually the review is much broader than that. Our starting point is we're trying to step back as a regulator, we haven't done a strategic review for 10 years, the markets changed a lot in that period and we're trying to look ahead over the next 10 years to set out as a regulator how we can best support markets, communications working for all consumers over 10 years, and so we will be looking at issues we've just touched on around availability, so what can we do working with government, working with industry to ensure there's universal access to a decent service? We will be looking at, and this is probably a question for urban areas and rural, but how can we maximise competition so that consumers again aren't just reliant necessarily on an incumbent or a single provider but have got a choice of maybe two or three providers ideally? We will be looking at quality of service as communications has become, I guess what some people are determining, the fourth utility, we all rely on it. Issues about customer service are really important and so we will be looking at what is a regulator, what our role is there. We'll be looking at deregulation, so we'd like to think of ourselves as being a proportionate regulator and clearly given technologies change, you think about again, this is not an issue for much of Scotland but in some parts of the country mobile has become more of a substitute for landline use, is there some scope for less regulation without leaving many particularly the most vulnerable people disadvantaged? Then of course we'll be looking at the question of open reach again in the context of the consumer, so would the consumer benefit from a different form of separation between open reach and the broader BT group? We said when we launched our discussion paper last summer that we would be looking at four options, the status quo, the possibility of deregulation if there's more network competition for open reach, the current model of functional separation and then the sort of fuller more structural solution whereby you would have a change of ownership. Okay, that's very helpful. I'm going to hand over to my colleague David Stewart to ask some specific questions about the universal service obligation. Thank you. David. Thank you, convener, and I should say outset thy represent along with Mike McKenzie, the Highlands and Islands, so you can imagine that broadband is a huge issue there. I suppose in general terms I would say that this is one of the great stares of contention among constituents is speed of broadband, the intermittent issue about broadband. I suppose that the wider point that I would make is that some constituents have argued that having a minimum broadband speed should be a basic human right, perhaps that's slightly to overstate it, but I must say that I'm very sympathetic with that. What's your general view of constituents' views about broadband speed being a basic right? I'm very sympathetic. I mean whether you talk about broadband speed being a basic human right or a fourth utility, I think it's the same idea, which is if we were sitting in this committee room five years ago, maybe even three years ago, what felt like a nice to have has now become absolutely fundamental to people's ability to have community engagement, social engagement and economic engagement, and I think about some of the very interesting reforms taking place in Scotland on public services and move to digitalisation. Without a decent level of broadband being available for both residential and business consumers, it's not just an inconvenience, it has got potentially very serious deleterious impacts both in terms of wellbeing but also in terms of economic activity. The sort of examples that I've been picking up is if you take Western Elts for example, a couple of move-to-the-area want to run a small guest house and are using broadband for a booking system and find that they just can't utilise that, that is a real constraint on economic development. Would you accept that general point? I completely agree. My MP's mailbag on a weekly basis, probably 90 per cent of the concerns that are raised, are absolutely around broadband speed and quality of service and I think that's why I mean OFCOM, we have been encouraging the USO and I'm delighted that the USO has now been announced and delighted that even in the course of the last year, because obviously there was a budget 2015 announcement of a five megabits per second universal service obligation, that was doubled in the Prime Minister's speech last November and I certainly will want to work very, very closely with the Government to ensure that that gets implemented in a way that everybody has got a right to request a decent service and have it made available. In fairness, I think that the broadband development UK funding to Hans Lian's Enterprise, which BT are now developing, certainly that's been a huge boost and obviously we've had regular briefs about the work that's being carried out and obviously I welcome that. I think that if you look at the Connect and Nations report in 2015, it talked about Scotland as the highest proportion of rural premises, that's 57 per cent, that are unable to receive more than 10 megabits. I think that there's the issue about rural areas being neglected and I'm sure that this is an issue in England, Wales and Northern Ireland as well, but since we're in Scotland I'll flag the Scottish issue up. I mean, would you accept that, that there is a real worry that rural areas are still losing out in terms of decent broadband speeds? I mean, I think that we're in violent agreement with each other. I think that one of the reasons why we were keen to give more visibility to the availability issues that comes back to the convener's point about granularity is to make clear that although the broadband expansion has been hugely positive for many people, there are still big chunks of the country, big chunks of Scotland, small SMEs, I think is another big issue which for other historic reasons, you've got many SMEs who are sort of caught between not quite having a service for residential consumer and not able to afford very high-end services, where there is still a big gap and certainly as chief executive for Ofcom, one of my big priorities over the next coming period is to close that gap, and for me the proper implementation of the USO alongside the work that's already happening in BDUK, obviously digital Scotland, superfast and some of the community initiatives, this patchwork needs to deliver universality at a decent speed. Could it leave what may seem as a left-field issue but has been raised by some academics with me is about the sort of corporate planning across all services and government. Let me give you an example. Currently, there are quite serious increases in road building north in day 9, if not the longest drunk road. The argument that's been put to me is, when we're doing massive road building, why don't we lay fibre optic cable as a minimum across the country rather than then it's dug up at a later stage? It just seems a lack of corporate planning across departments and perhaps across government. Is this something that's within your remit and responsibility or is this something that's been raised with you as well? It's very easy with us as well. My past life when I was at the Treasury, this is very much as a feature of how the planning rules are implemented, but I think we're very aware, particularly when you are laying, if 66% of Scotland is served by BT, 34% isn't. You're talking about laying new networks in a very large geography of the country and that gets you very much into practical issues of how many times do I want my road to be dug up, how many times do I want my streets to be dug up. Although it's not our responsibility, we will certainly be recommending that the planning rules are implemented in a way that makes it more likely that you're going to get the networks laid. In some other countries, for example, where you've got some utilities that open up their ducks, for example, they say, dear providers coming, you've got six months to lay your fibre and then there's a moratorium for two years and it then incentivises all the competitors to come in at the same time and also demonstrates to residents they're not going to be going through perpetual building works. I represent an urban area, so I've got oxot problems for my colleagues from the islands. When you look at the figures, the coverage is very, very good, but the problem is that it always seems to be the low-lying fruit that's taken the easy-to-get areas. I have a situation where it's actually new estates that don't have—we have an option in an area—for cable and fibre optic broadband. The fibre optics is only available and most of the complaints come from new areas. Is there anything you can do to encourage the planning system, local authorities, to ensure that when new estates are going up, there are those coverages? Although it's not hell in our direct gift, we certainly are involved in conversations. For example, the question about new build that you have is actually a broader issue. Similarly, we've had issues of business parks, paradoxically, business parks, which in the past have been bypassed for fibre optic cables. Certainly in the discussions that I have with operators, but also in the discussions which are now being convened by the Westminster politicians, there's a digital infrastructure taskforce, which is looking very actively at these issues, and I sit on it. We are working behind the scenes, but also in the strategic review, we will talk about how universality—you can't just write it down on a piece of paper—there are a whole series of very practical steps that need to be taken, and that's why, for us, the first step of making visible where the gaps are, we feel is really vital, so we've at least all got the same data to work from. That's a bit of chicken and egg. In rural areas particularly, and you'll know that the Highlands and Islands is an area larger than Belgium, where the population of Brussels is the little shorthand that we occasionally use, is about E, from the market point of view, there's probably a lack of demand, but secondly, there's also a lack of operators to actually run that, and that probably leads me nicely on to the calls for BT to sell off open reach. You touched on that in your opening statement, and you did explain, I think, that there were four different options. How likely is this to happen? Would this help the market? Would this help us to provide more competition, to provide more operators, to provide better standards of broadband? You'll appreciate that, given that we haven't quite concluded, I'm slightly limited this morning, but what I would say is that, in looking at the open reach question, we will be looking at it, not from different models of governance, as a sort of academic question, we will be looking at it from the point of view is, will a different structure encourage more investment? Will it encourage better quality of service? Those will be the metrics and the criteria that we will be approaching. As you say, there are going to be some areas of the country where, with the best will in the world, one's top priority is just to get access, and so the likelihood of having a competitive number of rivals in Orkney and the Shetland Islands, the commercials aren't necessarily there, but I think there was an interesting question about whether we can get some competition in terms of their technology, so at least you're not necessarily reliant on a fixed line connection, but you've got wireless operators who might be able to come in too. Although I'm afraid that I'm unable to say more definitively where we're coming out on open reach, I hope to give some assurance to the committee that we will be judging that question from the perspective of, are we going to get more investment? Is the roll-out going to be faster? Are we going to get better quality of service from a different model? My contention is that broad-brand development is probably one of the most vital ways of increasing economic activity in the highlands and across the UK, particularly in rural areas. You'll know that some of the technical solutions aren't just a bit fibre-optic because it'll go in very hard-to-reach communities. It will require satellite development to have broadband, Wi-Fi and indeed 4G, but of course there's problems with 4G as well. Can you give any comfort to committee about the developments in some of these technical solutions? Is that a rule that GM has as well over the technical provision of broadband? We're in a very similar place to you. We would love there to be, particularly when we think about the implementation of the USO, that we do that through a variety of technologies. We do it through a variety of technologies partly, as you say, because fixed lines are not necessarily going to be the best solution for very remote communities, but also from our perspective we want there to be choice and we want there to be more competition in the way in which further access is rolled out. I did say final, but I think I'm in a senior moment. I forgot the other question. One of the things that I'm quite interested in as well is where government has a role, for example in the word of contracts, that Wi-Fi broadband is seen as a function. For example, in some of our ferry services, consumers, I'll give you a practical example, the Camlack ferries to Clyde Brydrian. I was involved in a previous soul chairing the Petitions Committee when school children in Harass were very, very keen that there was Wi-Fi provision and in fairness the company picked this up and this is now going to be developed. In future tenders, this will be a condition that you have to provide. You'll be aware, of course, that this is a condition in tenders for these coast London services and increasingly for ScotRail, which is clearly within Scotland. I think that this is another way that government can lead by making this a minimum service condition for what you view on that. I agree. Given the priority to ensure that broadband, whether you are travelling by car or by rail, whether you are going about your daily life and you need mobility of connectivity, we are very, very strongly supportive of finding—I know that the government is looking at south of the border rail and franchising, for example—whether there are ways in which one can apply conditions on greater connectivity there following very similar lines of the example that you gave. I think that all of this needs to be on the table and we are very strongly supportive. We will come in advising on some of the technical details and some of the technological solutions, but we have got exactly the same objective, which is that over the next period we have got good connections everywhere. Perhaps I could ask you about the two voluntary codes that applies to business broadband speeds and residential broadband speeds. Can you tell us how that is proceeding? Is it proceeding well? Are you getting the buy-in from the internet service providers? Yes, thank you. The data and information that will be available as a result of that will provide consumers and businesses with information that allows them to see how the company is performing and what particular service individual businesses and consumers are receiving from them. It is early days. I think that the committee will know that last summer we published a voluntary code whereby all the big internet service providers—BTs, Virgins and a number of other companies—are in there. If a residential consumer feels that the service that they sign on to is not the service that they have got, the companies have committed to making it easier for consumers to walk away without a fixed penalty. We have done something similar in the last couple of weeks for small businesses. It is quite early, but it ties to the point that even the point in the urban area is that consumers often think that they are signing on to an up to 10 Mbps or 20 Mbps, and the service that they have coming through may be appreciably low for a variety of reasons. What the code does is that the providers have committed to be much more transparent and much clearer at the point of sale. If things go wrong, the customer is not then in an argument about having to pay some early termination fee. It is too early for us to have data, but it will give us good evidence over the coming months as to whether the code has had to be invoked or whether the fact that we now have a voluntary agreement means that the point of sale is becoming a more robust process. Are there any other outcomes that you would expect as a result of the introduction of the codes? I have a hope that it also means that consumers shop around a bit more. I know that that is obviously practically hindered where you do not have a choice of providers, but even between cable and MBT, you are just having that point of sale where you have got a couple of providers clear about what they are providing. You are not just looking through a 20-page contract of small print and ticking the terms of condition and jumping out of the shop as quickly as you can. I hope that it means that consumers are able to exert where there is competition and more pressure at the point of sale. You mentioned earlier the issue of BT and open reach. The option of separating out open reach from the broader BT group is something that was being looked at. Can you tell us a little bit more about that process, what the timescales for it are, and how will you go about evaluating the advantages and disadvantages of each of the four options, including the status quo that you referred to earlier? We launched the review of the communications market last March and we published in July what we called a discussion paper, which essentially set out the half a dozen or so areas that we were keen to look at, which I run through deregulation, quality of service and so on, included on the open reach question. We set out at that stage a preliminary view of what the issues were, what we felt had worked well over the last 10 years, and perhaps what had worked less well. Then we used the discussion document as a call for evidence. Subsequent to July, between July and October, we've had a number of encyclopedias of evidence that have been received, mostly from the companies, but from borders, stakeholders, too. We've had, as an organisation, lots and lots of meetings, too, to follow those up. We've taken in evidence between July and October, and then subsequent to October, we have been evaluating the evidence, checking against the issues that we flagged in July to see where we haven't got things right, where we need to modify, where we haven't attached the right priority in some areas. Then we are hoping, with a fair wind, to set out initial conclusions at the end of this month. A final outcome to this process will be when? A final announcement when? The initial conclusions at the end of this month will set out the results of our deliberations. You may know that, in applying those directions or recommendations to our practical regulatory tools, there is a process that we follow through Europe. We will be reviewing, as Europe requests us to, every three years, each individual market. For example, we recommend that we do regulation in a particular area. When the market review for that area comes up, we will take those initial conclusions from the end of February and then start to apply that in detail to our regulatory tools. The implementation process will be a period of several years from now. Can I just ask you, irrespective of which of the four options you finally go with, what are you actually looking for in terms of how open reach can better serve Scotland's broadband infrastructure needs? As I was saying, the starting point is how consumers up and down the country get the service that they deserve with consumer expectations rising by the day. We will certainly be looking at the issues of quality of service, irrespective of any discussions about the structure of open reach. The committee may be aware that, a couple of years ago, we had got BT's credit. I think they were equally concerned, but we were very, very concerned particularly about the quality of service issues on the business side. This is particularly if you're actually a big business and you are having a bespoke superfast cables installed, which means construction in the streets and cables up your building. It was taking, it was just long delays of several months and it's the first time that we dipped our toe in the water as a regulator to set minimum quality standards for BT, which one feels quite conflicted about, to be honest, as a regulator, because we're an outside body. For an outside body, to be setting the standards for a company that operates across the UK, for me, is a slightly second best situation, but we will be looking at the experience of the impact of those quality of service standards, which, to BT's credit, they have hit subsequently. Whether that goes forward, whether we strengthen it, whether we set different, tougher targets, that's all for consideration. We're on the competition issue and one of the concerns that has been expressed is that BT is squeezing the margin between wholesale and retail prices in order to effectively squeeze out competition in areas where they've got a near monopoly. Does Ofcom still have concerns about the wholesale price of Superpass Broadband? You probably know that that's a regulated price, so we have something called, in the technical jar, it's a Vula margin, so we require BT to ensure that there is a big enough gap between its wholesale and retail price to allow other companies to come in and still to make a profit, and we do that because, of course, if you're BT, you've got a lot of cost, you've already got an existing network, you come in with a historic cost advantage, and so we have set a margin to allow companies like Talk Talk or Sky to come in, so that is a regulated price. Has to be said, we're currently in litigation, so it's been contested as we speak by BT, but at the moment we do set that in a regulated way to ensure that competitors aren't squeezed out because of BT's historic cost advantage. As you said, BT is contesting that without speculating about what the outcome of that might be, do you have any alternative plans or alternative approaches to ensuring that that remains an area where competition is viable? I can say very strongly that we are absolutely committed to ensuring that consumers where there is a market get a choice of provider, and so I can't speculate on whether the Vula margin is going to be struck down or not. If it is, or if it's modified, we will clearly have to look at alternatives, but with the objective in mind of ensuring that that remains competition. In the broader sense, from the consumer point of view, what's Offcom doing to help consumers and businesses to make informed decisions about the best telecommunications deals available? The issue of pricing is really interesting in an area that we are wanting to do more on, and it's an area that we want to do more on because the market itself is becoming more complex. As you know, people are increasingly moving to what are called triple play bundles, so we're buying our tele and our phone line and our ball band together, and it's possible that with the BTE merger, we may move like the rest of the continent to quad play. It just becomes much more complicated for people to compare deals when you've got headline prices and discounts and so on. A couple of things. We've been firstly very supportive of the advertising standards authority who are trying now to get better transparency in pricing, so I think one of the issues you may have picked up as a committee is that you sometimes get these very, very big font headline deals of superfast broadband free and then in rather smaller font, and by the way you're still paying your £16 monthly landline charge, so we've been very keen to get more transparency at the point of sale. We are also now starting to collect much more pricing data because one of the things we have started to find, and again the committee is probably aware of this, is that although the market is still in aggregate very competitive, some prices have started to rise, particularly landline prices, and particularly for customers who tend to be the over 75s, tend to be more vulnerable groups who don't switch providers, so we are again actually as part of the communications review. We'll be looking at options for greater transparency of pricing information, and there's a careful balance to tread because in making prices more transparent, you don't want to standardise the tariffs because that takes competition out, but we do want to find better ways by which people can compare what is an increasingly bundled and increasingly complicated market. Of course, where competition exists, the ease of switching provider is often a big challenge and a barrier in some cases. What's Ofcom doing to make it easier for people to switch provider? At the moment, we are particularly looking at trying to make the process of switching easier. Last summer, after a lot of work by the teams, it's now much easier if you're with a provider that's on the open reach network, so if you're with, you know, if you're with BT or with Sky or Talk Talk, etc., all you now need to do is to ring up the company that you're trying to move to, and they will in one, what we call as a one touch, but in one move, basically make the switch for you. We are now looking to do something similar for mobile, where we've done some research which suggests, you know, you've got the PAC code that you need to ring up one company and get it to switch to another company. We're trying to make that process a little bit easier, and then we've said that we will then look at triple play. I think there is a, to my mind, there's actually a broader question which comes back actually to your point about pricing complexity. You know, we're all pretty inert, and you know, not many of us have got, you know, time to spend on a call centre call to switch, and so although we are looking at making the process easier, I am quite interested over the longer term at looking whether there are other ways that one can encourage consumers to switch, because even if you've got a faster process, unless your service is really, really poor, most of us kind of stick with the people that we know, and in a situation where companies are starting to consolidate, I do think personally that I would like, I think at Zofcon, we need to look at the whole process of switching and how consumers actually switch, how you can encourage consumers to be less in that, and some of the other regulators, I think, have probably taken, you know, some quite innovative ways on this. I think this is a really, really critical area, because as soon as you move to bundle products, people stop switching. I think the rate of switching, if you've got triple plays, about 7%, because it's just, you know, you'll lose everything, why would you switch? So it's a critical issue, we're making some progress, but I think it's a part of a broader piece we now need to look at. For my information, where deals are being offered that cover broadband, landlines, mobiles, perhaps television supply, does that play a major part in excluding companies that cannot compete at that highest level? I think this is a really interesting question, and I think it plays to the sorts of changes in market structure we're seeing at the moment. So if we were sitting in Europe, actually quadplay, mobile, landline, broadband, TV, is a much more typical way of selling. And so I think, you know, we've now seen BT becoming a television company, we've seen BT now going back to mobile that it had with Cellnet, you've got the proposed merger between O2 and 3 on the mobile company, you've got, you know, you've got Sky, has said that it's going to do a tie-up deal with O2 later this year. And I think you can see companies starting to converge, the telco's looking more like TV companies, the TV companies needing to get into the broadband, and particularly because mobile has become such a device of viewing and seeing programmes. I think it's absolutely true that we will see growing convergence and possibly us catching up with the continent that we buy more of our services in a four-package bundle. I was very interested in what you were saying about consumer information and choice at the point in which they're looking at it, and particularly the post-coded uses that you were talking about. But Ofcom had a map that showed the fixed broadband information by administrative authority, but it hasn't been updated since 2013. Is that what you're about to do at my stake? So we, I think in the, you know, so data has been sort of shifted between exactly. I think it's now, Mark, what we're trying to do is now pull together the mobile data that we have updated. Can you make a phone call on a smartphone and bring that together with updated fixed data? And then we're trying to splice those two things together ultimately by household. That's the plan over the course of this year, but we will get the fixed line data out very shortly. I was pleased to hear you mentioning the Highlands and Islands in your opening statement because Dave and I both represent the Highlands and Islands. I'm not sure that Dave fully articulated the scale of the problem. When you go to the Highlands and Islands, if you were to draw a map, despite the theoretical coverage, I think it's the equivalent of the medieval map that said, here there'd be dragons. When you disappear over the digital divide, well, my PA says that, you know, I know you're about to go dark. I think she watches too many spy thrillers, but that is the reality. Talking to colleagues of yours over many years now, I've been constantly reassured that things are just about to get better, but the reality is that things aren't getting better. They're getting worse. That digital divide is like the Grand Canyon, but it's getting deeper and it's getting wider, and part of the reason for that seems to be that there's more demand, more people are using the services, digital services, and part of it seems to be the content, the services that are available, so what used to be a simple newspaper website now has got all kinds of theatrical stuff going on, it's got embedded films and so on. No doubt shortly we'll be having avatars popping out your phone and dancing across the table, and that's driven by good availability of service provision elsewhere in the country, and the contrast therefore is getting wider and wider between the services that my constituents get. Given that part of the reason you're here, I think part of the game changer here, if I understand it, is this new Scottish board member, is that really going to be a game changer? Can I go back and look my constituents in the eye and say to them with integrity that things are going to get better, not worse in real terms over the coming years? What you can say is that the picture that you've just painted, not only do I completely recognise, but it's at the top of the entry for us, and I think those points about consumer expectations are in a completely different place, as I say, even two, three, four, five years, and it's not just your dancing avatars, it's the fact that will we be able to get through to the NHS on our medical records, or figure out where our kids are going to school, or set up a business without having to leave the Highlands and Islands and head off to Glasgow? It's fundamental, and that's why I think the conversation about utilities or human rights is absolutely at the core. I think that the Scottish board member is important. I do, just in terms of my character, if there's a problem, I need to figure out how we're going to fix it. The key thing for me is how the universal service obligation gets implemented for the Highlands and Islands. That, for me, is the test case, because for all the reasons you say about geography, costs of getting backhaul out, and the question about choice of technologies and how wireless technology is going to work for this, and to do it in a way that, by the time the Highlands and Islands has got coverage, we're not finding, actually, that 40 megabits per second has become the new 10. So there is that trick of, for me, of putting in the foundation stone, but in a way that allows the gearing up as consumer expectations are designed to do stuff without necessarily having to take a car or take a train. It's really, really important, and that's why, for me, it's partly the Scottish board members also, to be frank, about how my colleagues, how I as chief executive, my understanding as we take forward the USO, which we expect to be implementing once the Government has set out the policy parameters. When I ask my teams the question, what does this mean for connectivity, not in Aberdeen, what does this mean for connectivity in the Highlands and Islands, over what timescale, what's the rollout, clearly there will be a cost premium, how is that going to be actually as a matter of practicality then shared, provided for, is it the user, individual user, or is that shared across a broader community, given in a sense that we all benefit. That is the test for me, so governance matters, but the test for me is universality for a regulator that has the consumer first is a top priority. Can you give us a view on what coverage then of 3G and 4G will look like in Scotland over the maybe a time frame of the next year? The next year is really critical, partly at the moment, as you know, there's a lot of market structure change or proposed change amongst the mobile network operators, but there is the commitment there to coverage by 2017. One of the things we will be doing, partly through making more visible who is providing what services and where in Scotland, we will be working with, I hope, I'm sure it will be a constructive engagement with the mobile network operators to see where they are in terms of meeting their 95% and 90% coverage obligations on geography and on premises over the next year. I can't quite believe that it's 2016 already, but it's coming very close. Dave Stewart touched on the idea that, in some areas, to be fair, Inverness, which is the city within the Highlands and Islands, gets reasonable 4G coverage and so on, but an awful lot of my constituents—I think that this is where we'll have to be careful, we'll talk about 10 megabytes being unacceptable, but a very high proportion of my constituents would die for 10 megabytes. It's maybe closer to 2, sometimes 500 kilobytes. It's really very, very poor to the point where it's almost not worth having. It's the same when we talk about 90% coverage, but it's always the same 10% who are continually left out. I think that we all understand why that is. You might describe it as market failure, but surely it's a definition of regulatory failure, the missing 10%. Are there any plans within that to address that missing 10%? You'll know that the Government's initiative here to try to fill the rest of the gap that the commercial providers hadn't set out in their coverage obligations. The mobile infrastructure project has had a difficult history in Scotland. In this case, one looks to the regulator, but one also looks to the regulator working with the companies and working with the Government. For example, there are plans on the emergency services front, which is going to be as a mobile infrastructure will be UK wide. Personally, I think there's a really interesting opportunity to use that rollout to get broader coverage, so not just your ability to make a nine line line phone call on your mobile, but to get broader coverage. Again, that's part of this digital infrastructure task force. This is a conversation that we are keen to have. To give you assurance, this stuff is hard to deliver, but I start at the 100%, not the 90%. If you look at 10 megabits per second, 40% of the UK doesn't get 10 megabits today. We are talking about a very differentiated story, mostly because of the reality. Both Mike Mackenzie and Dave Stewart have articulated the challenges in digital divide in rural and remote parts of Scotland. Could you address specifically the issues in terms of digital exclusion that face people on low incomes and people in receipt of benefits and how you, as a regulator, seek to address those? This is partly why we have been very focused about issues of pricing. For us, as a regulator, not as a Government, our focus is to try where we can to maximise as much competition. As I say, I know that that has got limits in Scotland because where that's commercial is relatively limited, but for us, the key way in which we have observed that we will get prices down and prices most affordable is through having rival players who are competing for business. The question about what happens with pricing, where you're in a rural area, that's in a sense where it comes to where we regulate pricing. Where you've got BT as a dominant player, we do, as a regulator, have tools to apply what we call charge controls to make sure both the prices that BT then charges to other wholesale operators or potentially directly to consumers that the advantage isn't taken of their dominant power in the market, and 90 per cent of BT's open reaches prices are regulated by us directly. You said earlier that this is the fourth utility. Of course, in other utilities, particularly in the area of energy, companies will seek to provide a different tariff for people who are in receipt of benefits. What's the equivalent within this sector? There are some equivalents. We talked a bit about landline, which is everything we know is the area that has got the greatest reliance by the most vulnerable people, by the most vulnerable consumers. BT and others have basic tariffs which try to ensure that vulnerable people aren't, essentially, able to get a decent service, even if they're on a fixed or unstable income. This is an area that, more generally, I want to look at over the next period because of the concern, not yet realised, but the concern as to whether consolidation in the sector may have an impact on pricing and what that does not just for people who are able to pay, but what that does particularly for people on low and fixed incomes. Whether that's then for the regulated coming in or whether that's a public policy intervention, I think that's a different question. Are you, as the regulator, doing enough? What more can you do? You can always argue whether you're doing enough. I do think that we are at a potential turning point in the market is what I would say. If you look over the past 10 years, and this is an aggregate, I do take the point about the people at the end, but an aggregate, we have been paying about the same for a much broader set of services, and that's because the technology install has meant that, particularly on the mobile side, we've basically been getting more for less. We are in a situation where companies are converging, we are in a situation where companies are wanting to consolidate, and certainly the evidence that we see from other countries is that that can have a material impact on pricing, particularly when we get what we call the horizontal mergers, a mobile company and buying another mobile company. That's why we are now starting to do much more detailed analysis of pricing. If pricing does appear to be a regulatory problem there, then we will act. Thank you for that. I'm going to pass to Adam, who has a final question. Okay, and thanks, convener. I'd like to change the subject a little bit. You'd mentioned earlier on in your remarks that you see a switch from landlines to mobiles, and I certainly have also noticed a change in how landlines are used. A lot of calls are going straight to voicemail, and to my mind a lot of that is created by what we can call nuisance calling. More like harassment in many cases, the constant calls that we get from PPI or seeking boiler replacements, or computer-generated calls, or calls from foreign call centres coming in. People are stopping using their landline as they used to do. A. Do you think that this is a problem, particularly for people who are perhaps vulnerable? And, secondly, what are you going to do about it? The issue of nuisance calls is incredibly important. I talked about my mailbag. When I'm not getting complaints about quality of service, the rest is almost entirely nuisance calls. As you say, it's not just frustrating, but particularly for vulnerable people. That can be incredibly distressing. I would say, as an aside, that part of the shift from landline to mobiles is the smartphone. We can do more stuff with the mobile. We are working very closely with the Information Commissioner on nuisance calls. We have a very particular division of labour in that we have statutory responsibilities for silent and abandoned calls. The Information Commissioner has responsibilities for classic PPI miscellings, but we are working in a very coordinated way. We and the ICO now come under the Department for Culture and Media Sports, which I think has also helped. As a matter of practicality, we have been looking, particularly my technical experts, working with the communication providers and the ICO to try to get more technical fixes on this. Fingers crossed, we think that we are making quite a lot of progress. As you know, lots of these calls originate overseas. Lots of these calls aren't necessarily wrong numbers, but they mask the number with a real number, and they bounce around various points of contact before they come to the user. We think we may have a technical fit that could have quite a significant impact on the number of calls that are coming through, and I hope shortly we'll be able to say some more publicly, but it is absolutely a critical issue. I take your point about technical solutions, but technical solutions tend to, eventually, people tend to get around them. Is there not a case for some stronger legislation in this area? Is it interesting that you'll probably know that in the last session there was more, the government took stronger powers in the area of nuisance calls, and partly on the back of that, the information commissioner is now taking much tougher enforcement and certainly issuing higher fines. So when I say technical fixes, I don't want to give the sense that I'm being naïve that somehow you squeeze one bit of the balloon and guess what, it bursts somewhere else. But at the same time, what's been interesting, I have lots of very difficult conversations with a number of the companies we regulate, nuisance calls is the area where there is probably the strongest, clearest consensus that something needs to be done. So I think the technical side is important, I don't think by any means it's part of the picture, it's the whole part of the picture. I'm not sure whether the government, having already taken new powers for the information commissioner, will want to step forward with new statutory obligations. I personally would be very interested if the committee has got ideas for what more could be done, we can certainly take that away. It's an idea, I hope. It's just obviously one of the ways to limit, not stop, the nuisance calls is for consumers to be able to not accept anonymous numbers. But a lot of the service providers have a charge for that service, is there anything you can do to encourage them to provide that as a free service to customers? We'll definitely take that away. You'll know that we have been doing some work with some of the premium numbers and we introduced some changes last summer, which we're reviewing to see whether transparency is leading to prices falling or not, but I would certainly take that away, thank you. Can I ask a technical question in the back of that? A number of constituents have written to me about nuisance calls. They are part of the preference service, so my understanding about that is that you would opt into that and you shouldn't get those calls. What the response has been from some companies is that we'd exempt because we're a marketing company. I don't know if you've come across that solution. Is that an exemption to the preference service? One of the things that does happen with the TPS is that you might be buying something on the internet and you accidentally tick the box, so you think you're ticking the box which says, oh my goodness, I don't want any marketing and actually they've ticked the box which says, I do want marketing or you're, if you essentially sign in inadvertently or not to marketing, then you are still going to get calls and that's one of the issues that again, I think we need to make clearer to consumers. So I think when they say that marketing companies are exempt, what I think they mean is that consumers, they will have a form, or a piece of paper or an email which says, yes, I've bought some theatre tickets and I'm very happy to hear about a whole bunch of other things which I didn't think I'd signed up to. So constituents should be clearer when they're shining up to things to watch that. So is the solution then to go back and re-sign up to the preference service? Or does that not make any difference? So as I say, I mean, because I dug around at this as well because I was surprised when I came into this job that the TPS wouldn't say has a hole in it, but it was new to me that the very fact that you have said, I am happy, and it can be, it's often quite small font, but I am happy to receive marketing material means that the company has taken that you're happy to receive marketing material. So I do think it's a bit of a message to consumers, but I think it's also greater clarity about what the TPS can and can't do. So if your company that breaches the preference service, apart from the issue that you've just raised, I mean, what are the sanctions and do you have a role and do you presumably have a role in regulating that? So if you've got constituents who have signed up to the TPS and are still being bombarded with calls, they should get in touch either with Ofcom or the Information Commission's office. We are all for your new Scottish representative. Yeah, they can take some of my letters. Okay, do members have any further questions? Are there any final comments that you would like to place on the record, Ms White? I need to say thank you. This has been a huge pleasure. Thank you very much indeed. Well, I think the feeling is mutual. I think we've found it a very useful session and we very much welcome your attendance at today's session and your positive and constructive engagement with the committee. We will certainly, as a committee, be keeping a close eye on developments, the strategic review of digital communications being foremost among them, but also what difference the new Ofcom board member for Scotland will make and the voluntary codes of practice for business and residential broadband speeds is another development that we will be keeping a close eye on and also the review of open reaches provision of superfast broadband. So clearly there's a huge agenda of relevance to this committee and to the people of Scotland and we very much welcome your engagement with the committee. We hope that this will not be your last session in front of the committee. That would be back. Thank you, convener. Thank you all. You can be assured of that. Thank you very much. We now suspend this meeting briefly for a witness handover. Good morning. We now resume this meeting of the infrastructure and capital investment committee. Agenda item 2 is for the committee to continue its inquiry into the circumstances surrounding the closure of the fourth road bridge. This morning, we will hear from independent bridge experts. I welcome John Evans, consultant at Flint and Neill, Richard Fish, independent engineering consultant, and Peter Hill, general manager and bridge master at the Humber bridge board. Good morning, gentlemen. I intend to move straight on to questions for this session. I'm going to ask Alec Johnston to kick off our questions this morning. Thank you very much, convener. Please correct me if I'm wrong, but I understand that we have expertise on the panel that includes the Humber, the Tamar and the Severn bridge, would that be right? We have heard from experts to give evidence from previously that, rather than following the department of transport recommendations, on the fourth bridge there was an approach to inspections that was risk-based and often resulted in the frequency of inspections being higher than would have been recommended. Can you explain to us what the frequency of inspections at the Humber, Tamar and the Severn bridges were and whether you also adopt that risk-based approach? I believe that it's correct to say that the first very formal attempt at this risk-based approach was done on the Severn bridge. In my opinion, the reason for it was largely commercial, rather than purely engineering, because the Severn bridge was going to become part of the concession agreement for the construction of the second crossing and the operation and maintenance of both bridges throughout the concession period. You can imagine that the concessionaires were very interested in knowing, among other things, what kind of moneys and resource they would have to expend on inspecting and maintaining both their new bridge, which was really under their control, but also the 40-year-old bridge by that time that they were taking over to run as well. Now, as to timing, this came at the end of a series of contracts for strengthening and operating the Severn anyway, and that was undertaken by our firm on behalf of the Department of Transport Originally Highways Agency. For this reason, we were deemed to know as much about the structure as probably anybody, and it was part of my individual personal duty to develop this maintenance manual for the Severn bridge, which became volume 12, I think it was, of the concession agreement, so it was very much a contractual document. To go back to your question, the concept of vulnerability and criticality was built into that inspection regime, and there were a number of different periods of inspection allocated to different elements of the structure. They were based largely on the engineering, in other words, what the structure was going to suffer from the point of view of stressing and straining and movement and so on, but they were also based on the experience of operating the bridge up to that point. Have I answered your question sufficiently? Yes, I think that we have got to that answer. Can I extend with regard to the matters at the Humber? Certainly, commercial aspects play a part, but there are also the practicalities of such huge structures, and the risk-based approach makes it practical to ensure that we have a sustainable system for inspection that does not overload the organisation with either providing unnecessary resources or unnecessary data in some respects. The standard format for inspection, as the committee may be aware, is for two-yearly general inspections and six-yearly principal inspections, which were set by the Department for Transport. Of course, these are generally for owners of a large stock of bridges. We are owners of a large bridge at the Humber, not a large stock of bridges, and therefore we also found a risk-based approach that was most appropriate, both looking at the risk of failure of any element and the consequences of failure of that element. Certain areas such as the abutments, which take the load from the cables ultimately at either end, are big blocks of concrete, and in ten years time there will still be big blocks of concrete, so an intensive inspection of those is perhaps not practical or sensible, whereas other more flexible elements on the bridge require greater monitoring and more frequent inspection. So we have also adopted a risk-based approach. Thank you. For the record, I no longer have direct responsibility for TAMR Bridge. Sadly, it ended in about 2008 when I left the public sector and moved into the private sector, but since that time I have developed my own business in a sense around bridge management and bridge maintenance, so I can link perhaps the answers to the question, both from TAMR experience and more recent. I think that, in the old days of the TAMR bridge, it was exactly as Peter has described about the frequency of two-year general six-year principle. It was at the time of the changes around the UK bridges board developing a code of practice for highway structures, which first introduced this concept of risk-based inspections, and certainly TAMR has in the interim moved towards risk-based, because it is important that inspections should not just be prescriptive. The risk is that you just end up ticking a load of boxes. What bits have I got to look at today? Yes, I have looked at that. I have looked at this tick-tick. You have got to be a bit more reactive to what the bridge's behaviour is, how it is performing, and if there are areas of concern, little hotspots, in which you think, well, actually we need to look at a lot more detail at this, then you would, by instinct, want to increase that inspection frequency, but at the same time it has got to be recorded and regulated. That is the shift to risk-based. You are developing an idea that, as Peter has described, some areas of the structures are not going to change over decades, others may change over months and years, so that is where you target your inspections. That is a more efficient and, dare I say, safe way of approaching it. Mr Bishop, can you explain for the lay people both in this room and outside who are watching or proceedings what the difference is between the general and principal inspections? Certainly, yes. A general, as you might suggest, is—I hesitate to use the word superficial, but you only have to look at elements of the structure from a distance. If you can get up close or very good, the big issue around principal inspections are two issues. One is that they should be carried out by a chartered civil or structural engineer. Secondly, every part of the bridge should be accessed within touching distance. Big bridges, even if they are of similar design, are unique structures. We are focusing in on the truss end links, which have been exposed as the weak link in this case. I presume that each of the bridges that we have talked about and your general experience covers components that are similar to the truss end link. I think that Tamar is the closest in that the similarity between Tamar and Forth are that they both have stiffening trusses, whereas Severn and Humber are airfoil box sections, so it is a slightly different arrangement. Tamar is very similar to Forth in that end of the trusses where they arrive at the tower. There are the vertical connections, the pin-tools with the pins, which do the same job as Forth. Taking the risk-based approach, how often would you expect critical components of the bridge to be inspected, and how often would you inspect components such as a truss end link? I will go first rather than hog it. However, as a general statement, those connections and the pin-tools are perhaps the most overlooked part of a traditional truss type suspension bridge. Everyone focuses on cables and hangars and towers and the steelwork of the trusses. They tend to get overlooked. That is not to say that they are not inspected. At Tamar, I have firstly gone down and accessed them and checked for movement, but it is a very difficult thing to inspect, especially because it is relying on the movement for the articulation of the bridge. However, I am sure that Tamar—I spoke to the bridge manager the other day and he said that as soon as the news of Forth came out, that was the first thing he went to look at was the pin-tools on the Tamar. Can you say at the Humber that we do have elements that move in the same way? They are not truss end links, but structural elements that rotate on a bearing point. It is something that we have recently replaced, because those were inspected and found to have failed. The mechanism of failure was by excessive wear, which becomes quite apparent over time. Even a general inspection or a superficial inspection, which is even more of a walk past, could identify, in the case of the Humber, that type of failure. It would not identify if an element was seized. With our pins, the bearings had formed an oval rather than a circle for the pin to move in due to wear. It became visually apparent. That is perhaps the difference. I am talking about the Humber, but it is coincidental that I was talking to the manager of the Tamar yesterday. We had one of our annual meetings of bridge managers. They have a similar issue with similar elements at the Tamar, but, again, it is being observed through wear. Seven is slightly different again. During the assessment for the new loadings, it was discovered that the original n-props were much shorter with a shallower box, but the original ones from the 1960s design were overloaded for the new system. Part of the strengthening was to replace those completely, and they were replaced by bigger ones, more outboard. As part of the replacement process, we refurbished the inner ones and provided them with a jacking facility so that, in a planned operation, we could come back and jack again and inspect the outer ones more carefully, more we could check the loads as well as looking visually. For this reason, by 1990, the equivalent system on seven had been completely renovated, but the original problem was twofold. It was overloaded and there was wear. It was wear rather than seizing. Is there any or are you aware of any examples of a similar mechanism seizing at any other bridge? We didn't have a little talk just before we came here, and I think that the closest that I can identify was some bridges in America that had a suspended middle span, and those hung on links. I believe that there were problems with those. There was one actual catastrophic collapse, but these were family bridges on the interstate, and they were all refurbished. It's possible that the one on the M50 was not dissimilar, but I've never worked on that one, so I don't know. Do you know of any bridges that adopt special inspection or monitoring techniques to check whether the pins are moving correctly, and if so, what would those methods be? I think that I don't know of any system that checks whether the pins are moving. There are systems that check the movement of the bridge, so it's the whole link, and the forces involved, as I think Richard Hornby told you, are enormous, so you're more likely to damage something if there's a jam pin, but I don't know of anything that actually checks whether the pins are turning. As I think that the committee has already discovered, you can't see the pins where they turn. Is it an easy thing to check, because just from my own imagining of how the situation would be, while flexibility is essential in this element, the actual level of movement must be extremely small? The movement will be small in terms of the rotation on the pin, but if that movement isn't taking place, the structure will still move, so there will be some, and as the structure moves, strains development, hence the material, becomes stressed and potentially over-stressed against its original design loads. I would just echo John's point really in that I'm not aware of anything that would specifically be able to detect movement. In normal weather conditions, if you stood beside that pin and looked at it, there would not normally be very much movement. To visually discern that movement would be very difficult. What may well come out of all this is something that is devised by people who look at the structural health monitoring, etc., to come up with a concept that will help to detect movement or lack of it. However, it's not something that you want to sit in front of that pin for hours on the time, trying to just see if it's moving. Some sort of remote sensing, I'm sure, can be developed. However, at the moment, structural health monitoring, or as I like to think of it, structural performance monitoring, is more geared to the performance of the whole structure, how is it working, how is it articulating, what's the deflections compared to the loads, etc. You'll get a picture of everything that's going on, but actually diagnosing a particular small issue can't be done with a more global structural performance system. I could just add a little bit to that, because, as I think has been discussed around, the movements of elements of the structure away from the actual pin bearing that may be in the order of tens of millimetres once they are transferred back to the actual pin mechanism are remarkably small, extremely small movements, but in absence of that movement, the forces transmitted can be very large. The one thing we did do at the Humber with our replacement system was to install a system monitoring the stresses in adjacent materials, not the pin bearing itself, but in adjacent materials, just to make sure that we weren't overloading that structure. However, in terms of the pin bearing itself, we haven't monitored that. As a committee, we focused a lot of attention inevitably on the issue concerning the trust end link member and the seizure of the pin. Given the limitations that each of you has outlined this morning in terms of structural health monitoring, can I ask you the question that I asked Barry Colford, the former bridgemaster at the Forth Road bridge last week, which was, do you believe that the issue could have been foreseen? Perhaps Mr Hill would like to kick off. Referring right back to the start of the questions with regards to a risk-based inspection, if we monitored every single element and every single joint, it's possible that a very detailed analysis of the information from every point of the bridge could give some indication of some trouble in some part of the bridge, but it would be a huge exercise, particularly with suspension bridges. It's a web of elements, particularly with the Forth Road Trust. It is a whole web of elements, and the action of one part of that web being restrained or moving slightly differently to that that it was designed to do so would be an enormous task to monitor and to determine what the results might be. I'm not sure if that was a yes, a no, or a maybe. Come back to that if you like. It is. Obviously I'm having difficulty answering it with a definitive yes or no. The amount of data mining, which would be necessary that could perhaps give the information that would point you to a specific element causing distress, would suggest a very large team of people looking at the results 24 hours a day. It may be possible that it probably isn't practical or economically viable. Mr Fish, the same question. It's very difficult to divorce hindsight from all this, because we know what's happened, but winding the clock back a couple of months and saying could that have been anticipated and avoided. Part of the structural performance monitoring that I know is on-forth, mostly geared at the cables, but also gives an indication of deflections in the main trust. That could have been used to say what is going on with the articulation at the bridge. Coming to the conclusion that the pintles and the linkages were, as I've described earlier, a potential hotspot in terms of a problem, an inspection regime would only say that there's potentially an issue with this whole element. What it would not necessarily do would conclude that the failure that happened with the fracture in the metal above the pin would have been the outcome. With hindsight, you can say that that should have been examined and looked at. Some analysis should have been done to see what the loads were going to be in the end posts on the trust. I said to the other fellow witnesses beforehand that the irony to me of all this is that Forth is one of the most well-managed bridges in the whole of the UK, and I've got a huge regard for Barry Colford. He had such a thorough understanding of that bridge. It would seem unlikely that something would be overlooked and I would have thought, at the very least, that those issues would have been addressed. I'm sorry, that's not a yes or no answer either, and I apologise for that. Okay, Mr Evans. Again, my experience of this sort of thing is that when those joints begin to jam up, there's usually evidence from things like noise. That's always what we go and look for. As far as I can tell from all that's been said here, there was no evidence of creaking or groaning. For those who don't know, if that kind of thing happens on that structure, it resonates through the whole structure. It's very loud noises, and as far as I know, there's been no report of that. I would add that if the pin jammed up and there are internal stresses on the connection between the fabricated bit and the pin itself, again, you get no evidence of that. What happens is that an imperfection, I won't call it a defect, but an imperfection becomes overstressed and you can get a very sudden failure and it transfers across the weld line and into the material very quickly. It's my experience that you wouldn't have found this until it was there. That's a fairly definitive no then. I've heard my question on structural health monitoring, but can I perhaps look at the different angle? Is it fair to say that structural health monitoring is not a sort of silver bullet that's going to solve every problem that you have on the bridge? I think that some of the witnesses have already identified that A, it's very expensive to do this. Secondly, it's very expensive on staff time, and you could well have staff monitoring screens 24 hours a day, which is a huge cost to the organisation. Is that after your point, Mr Evans? I think that it is, and you've got to add one other thing that the people looking at the data have got to be experienced enough to understand what they're saying. I agree. The big difference between what you want to get out of structural performance monitoring and structural health monitoring is the translation from data to information. You can get bombarded with millions and millions of bits of data, that's got to be interpreted. The more recent developments in structural performance monitoring have led to a lot of what's called a post-processing element. The structure is modelled in a finite element or a structural analysis point of view, and the performance is compared to what's going on on the bridge is compared to what the computer model says. As soon as there's a difference between what's going on on the bridge and on the computer model, then the light slash and the bells ring, and that's providing you the information, so you're not necessarily having to go through vast amounts of data. That is in an embryonic stage. I'm not aware of any—a lot of bridges are putting structural health, structural performance monitoring on from new, but that post-processing is what's actually needed to turn data into information. That seems to make a lot of sense, so that would be some form of exceptions warning. Exactly. Obviously, as you know, the new bridge is going to have some of that, but a new bridge has got up-to-date design in the sense that it probably doesn't need it as much as a bridge that was built in 1964. Are you aware, in terms of best practice across the world, of much retrofitting that's going on on bridges to put in structural health monitoring because of any particular problem? A lot of retrofitting has gone on. Like you intimated, it's a lot easier to put a system into a new bridge, design it in from the outset, and a lot of new structures being built at the moment have inbuilt health monitoring systems and a lot of data collection. It's not quite so easy to retrofit, especially with older bridges, because you don't really know what's gone on in its history in terms of what's already had some effect on it. Some elements have moved due to creep or shrinkage, and then you're applying a system after such movements have taken place, so you're not getting necessarily the full picture. The retrofitting is going on a lot, but you still fall into the same trap of having a vast amount of data and not necessarily the information. I can only reiterate the comments that have come across. I think that absolutely with new bridges, it's very sensible and worthwhile to install the equipment capable of monitoring the structure. Even if at the moment we don't have 100% credible methods for analysing that data, there is still the risk that we are referred to earlier as data mining, just the collection of data that no-one knows what to do with. Undoubtedly, it is always an improving picture, so it's certainly something valid for new bridges. I think that Mr Evans' point is useful for one about the fact that abnormal noise was a factor to raise. The non-engineering view that I would have is that you can evolve all the structure health warning monitoring that you want, but you shouldn't forget about the day-to-day common sense thing of looking at noise and the visual inspection as well. That is certainly why we have a range of inspection protocols. Even though generally, for the big bridges, we don't subscribe to the fixed general inspection and principal inspection, we still would expect our inspectors to report unusual noises. Having a team that is dedicated to the structure that knows the structure inside and out, as I know Barry Colford's team did, is still an essential thing to have. I can stick with you from the next question, Mr Hill. The committee has been told that the Truss End links at the Humberbridge have been replaced recently. Can you describe when the problem was identified, what the problem was, and when the work was completed? Those were not Truss End links. They were called A-frames, which were torsional and rotational members for the Humber bridge. For the layman and woman who are watching this and for the committee as well, can you perhaps explain the difference? Just briefly, of course, with a suspension bridge, they do not have conventional bearings. The loads are not transferred from the deck down to supports under the bridge. They are transferred up to the cables. Nevertheless, if you leave the ends of the bridge free to rotate, they could twist in midair horizontally, vertically and laterally. There needs to be a restraint there to stop those movements. Theoretically, they do not take vertical load. In reality, of course, they do, because they are structural elements and they are there. Therefore, they take load. Those are the elements that we replaced at the Humber bridge, whereas the Truss End links for the fourth bridge were expected to take load and also restrained the bridge in the different directions. Our replacement was for these A-frames, as they were called. It was first identified that these were wearing in around 2005, or a little bit before that even. But it was identified because they had been moving and they had worn without getting too technical. The pins themselves travelled through bushes, which were especially machined to allow the rotation. With those pins, the pins themselves were actually grooved to allow grease to be forced into them to facilitate that rotation. Just so that we are clear as well, in the case of the Humber bridge, are the pins visible so that you could detect this with a visual perspective? The ends of the pins could be made visible. There were cover plates on, but we had cover plates that we could remove to see them. You still won't detect any rotation by sitting there looking at them because it's again microscopic. However, the pins it was subsequently found had locked into the bush, so a similar form of failure to the fourth perhaps. But the bushes themselves had then rotated within the A-frames causing the wear and became visible, which was the indication of the failure. Was this picked up at one of the standard inspections or was it because of some exceptional issue in the bridge that you picked up? This failure didn't cause a significant issue in terms of serviceability or operation of the bridge. It was picked up through inspection, the visible wearing of the hole and dropping of the A-frame structure. That's helpful. Perhaps if I can turn to Mr Fish and Mr Evans, do you know why the similar work has been carried out at the TAMAR or the Severn bridge? At the TAMAR, we went through an elaborate strengthening and widening project in the late 90s and early 2000s. That involved a lot of works with supplementary cables and replacing a concrete deck with a steel orthotropic plate. In the process of doing that, the analysis looked at the existing linkages, the pentals and it was deemed that no work was required. That was a major milestone in the history of the TAMAR, because it was doing all that work. If the work had been needed, it would have been done at that point, so nothing has been done subsequent to that. I think that I've already briefly touched on what was done at Severn. To follow the train of thought, the structural analysis indicated that the inner links were overstressed or would be overstressed under the new loadings. That meant that we designed the outer links to a new standard. Therefore, we didn't suffer problems, but when we took them apart, we found where in the bushes they were bushed. I'm not absolutely sure about that, but I think that they were a kind of bush that is self-lubricating. I think that it's sintered bronze or something. I think that that's what it was called, but they were definitely wearing. I found a question to all the witnesses. Based on your engineering experience, do you have any comments that you would like to make on the specific failure on the Forth Road Bridge? I think that I said earlier that I suspect that this happened between the two inspections, the May inspection and when it occurred, when it was picked up in early December. Because of the nature of steel, any imperfection that starts to grow grows very quickly. I certainly support what John has just said. I think that the other point to remember is that the time that the steel for Forth was being fabricated, steel quality wasn't the quality that it is now. Certainly, when the TAMAR was finished in 1961, when we were doing the work on the TAMAR bridge and looking at the existing steel, it was very mixed. There were some areas where there were a lot of impurities, thin blowpipes in the steel itself, and the quality of the steel cannot be guaranteed. I'm not saying that that was a factor here, but it's something that should be recognised that steel quality perhaps wasn't quite the same as it was in the 60s as it is now. In very simple terms, could you explain why there's been such a change in steel quality from the 60s to present day? I think that a lot of it was building up the industry post-war and increasing the levels of quality control through the 70s and 80s. There was a demand for steel after the war and perhaps it was more important to produce quantity rather than quality. That wouldn't necessarily just be a UK thing, because I know from the current bridge a lot of the steel is from China, wasn't it? Yes, yes. Well, don't get me started on Chinese steel. We could certainly have done with more domestic steel, as the basis of that. Inquiry, although it would be an interesting diversion, another day. I would similarly agree that this sort of failure, if it happened in the way that some believe it did, would occur very quickly, particularly in a material of perhaps unknown quality. Would you echo Mr Fish's comments about variable steel quality? Certainly in the past in the UK. We believe that even the Chinese steel now is manufactured to a much better standard than perhaps it has been referred to in the past. I am very curious to get told off by the convener to go into steel inquiry, so I will leave it in that. Briefly, I want to talk about the response to the failure, as Mr Evans pointed out. The trust end link was seen to have failed on 1 December, and the bridge was closed, and it reopened to all traffic, except for the HGVs on the 22nd. Do you think that this is a reasonable time to carry out the emergency work? From what you know about the repair work, was this an appropriate solution? I am absolutely confident that it was a remarkable achievement. I have only come into this since the event, and I have been following what has been going on. To deal with all 16 end links in that time, in those conditions in the middle of the winter and in the middle of the fourth, dealing with the old steels that we discussed, all those things, it has been a remarkable achievement. Do you think that it was an appropriate solution that was engineered? Yes. I have to say that one of my disciplines is welding, and I would have been very nervous about welding on those steels. We have discussed the age of them and the quality of them. I might have gone for a bolted solution, but they appear to have achieved what they set out to do. I would echo John's comments entirely. We have sent some outline drawings of the solution, which I thought was very innovative, practical and easy to build. The time that it has been done is exemplary. There is absolutely no criticism at all of the outcome or the time taken to deliver it. It needs to be tempered, obviously, with the expectation that it may not prove to be a permanent solution. I do not know myself, but it does seem that the team working on that came up with an excellent solution and installed it very, very promptly. I was certainly impressed. I thank you for those observations. Can I ask, from your own experience, have you ever closed a bridge that you are responsible for, the humble, the tame, the seven, to all traffic? About 12 hours ago, actually. Due to the high winds on Tuesday night, I was actually on the humble bridge at Monday night, sorry, at half past 10, with a foreclosure in place, but this was not for a structural issue. It was a fact that we had unfortunately a vehicle overturned. Again, yes, for operational reasons, I have had to close the bridge. Again, not for structural reasons, either for suicide incidents or, again, vehicles turning over, vehicles breaking down, but nothing from a structural point of view. My experience is that we managed to strengthen the whole of the seven crossing, that is not just the seven, but the Y bridge, with only two, four-hour closures in the middle of one night, complete closures, but we've had the same wind incidents. But the other ones that the committee, the other one that the committee will be aware of was when the Erskine bridge was hit by an oil rig, and I spent the next six weeks on-site with emergency repairs. Of course, the first week, I think it was, we had to close the bridge until we were satisfied that we weren't going to get a complete failure, catastrophic collapse of the structure, but then it led into all the difficulties of controlling the traffic. You might remember that, it went on for quite a few months. Yes, I remember that. In summary, a closure like this would be a very rare event, and it begs the question that, in your opinion, could have been foreseen and prevented. I don't think that you would have foreseen, I think that we discussed it, foreseen what the particular failure was, but the idea of having contingency measures in place for when something catastrophic happens might be looked at in the future. The obvious thing straight away was to stop the heavies because it's very difficult to control heavy goods. They tend to go in gaggles, which is the very thing that we don't want on the loading of bridges, but diversion routes and that kind of thing are not in common these days, pre-planned diversion routes. Lesson the impact, but you wouldn't stop the problem. Yes, there's a cause and effect thing here, isn't there? The cause, as we've discussed, would have been very difficult to predict the effect as in the closure of the bridge. Obviously, that was taken not as a light decision and safety is a travelling public absolute paramount. I wouldn't question the decision that was made by the engineers who are at the sharp end and face for that sort of issue. I don't have the evidence to say, well, could the bridge have been kept open with just two lanes running instead of four? I don't know, but the decision had to be taken around public safety. I could only say that, knowing the competencies of the team with Barrick Allford, I can't see that this incident could have been otherwise determined or pre-warned in any other practical way. As to the subsequent actions of the team that are now looking after the bridge and reacted to this emergency, it seems to have been entirely appropriate. Thank you very much, gentlemen, for that. Can I perhaps switch to consideration of future maintenance repair and strengthening works? Are there lessons to be learned elsewhere from the experience on the forth? I think it's certainly, as a bridge community around the world, and we do have quite a strong international community sharing information. Most of our maintenance programmes are based on information shared around the world. I believe that the fourth bridge had a similar type of full maintenance plan to myself. I have a 60-year major maintenance programme, which is informed by similar structures throughout the world. Of course, 60 years is an impossible time to look ahead for maintenance. The intention behind that is just to make sure that we identify the areas of risk, the elements that we know that have had to be maintained on similar structures around the world and make sure that they are in the programme to be addressed at an appropriate time. The key point is linking the inspections to the maintenance so that you are determining when to intervene in a maintenance sense. It may not be a strict comparison, but if you compare the fourth bridge to a Formula One car, the ideal thing for a Formula One car is that, as soon as it crosses the finishing line, all the components fail. That's its design life, that's what it's intended to do. Every component of that car is given a design life. Structures and bridges are not exactly the same, but you obviously want to have some sort of contingency and reassurance. You are able to look at the results of inspections, the results of structural performance monitoring and come up with a regime of maintenance intervention, which would say that, at this point, it will be a very sensible thing to do to replace cableband bolts, for example, because I know that that has been done on fourth, because you don't want it to fail, obviously. However, there is an intervention point somewhere ahead of failure. As for lessons to be learned, there is an international suspension bridge conference this June, and I very much hope that the lessons of fourth will be able to be, and I assume that they will be down to Transport Scotland if they are willing to release that information. However, if there are four big suspension bridges in the UK, there may be about 400 in the States and around the world. It is vital for those owners to learn the lessons from fourth, as well as those of us in the UK. One lesson that I would take from this is that these end links are an element that it appears to me that one could provide an alternative load path as we did on seven. The reason we did it on seven was a different reason, and we were lucky to be able to do it. However, I would think that it would be an idea to have in mind a way of dealing with any failure of any one link. Good morning. I would like to ask a little bit about the capital planning for the bridge and how you would capital planning your own areas. I have had some terminology in the committee. I think that the engineers mentioned a wish list that they always had. Feta had provided an indicative capital plan, and there are committed projects at any one time. Can you shed some light on what your understanding of those terms are? How long do you have a capital plan in place for your bridges yourselves? I have to say first that I know that Barry Colford would not refer to it as a wish list. Just as we all do, we recognise that there are financial constraints on maintenance. We don't have an infinite pot. However, we do need to look to the future and identify projects that may or may not subject to inspection require undertaking. My own maintenance plan I've just referred to is actually over 60 years. For the Humber bridge, that's such a long extent because we're still working to repay the capital debt for construction of the bridge, which has around 30 years to run. I was looking at a programme of maintenance to at least double that timescale. That's why I'm working on 60 years. Probably a more reasonable return period for maintenance for someone without that type of constraint is probably around 20 years. Again, it's still impossible to really look into the future for 20 years as to what will be necessary. However, it's important to make sure that both for operational and serviceability reasons to keep the bridge fit and safe for purpose, that we're aware of the projects that are likely to become necessary to at least consider based on experience from around the global community and make appropriate planning for those, both in terms of making sure we don't end up with a huge amount of work all to do in one year so that it can be spaced out, but also in terms of the financial outlay that's necessary for that work. Tamar, we used to work to horizons of 5 and 10 and 15 years, but that was very fluid because if something came along in terms of an issue discovered during an inspection, then obviously that programme would have to change. Broadly, you could separate things into essential and desirable and interventions themselves, some things can be put off and the obvious one is painting. If you can put a painting scheme off for a year or two years or five years, the bridge won't collapse, but the intervention that you're going to have to make at that future point is likely to be more expensive. There's a fine balancing act between getting the priorities and determining the most efficient way of managing and maintaining the bridge, but every structure of any size, and if you get into smaller structures, it's treated as a bridge stock rather than an individual bridge, but you would have to have a capital plan, long-term plan, as I said, fairly fluid, linked around the optimum time for maintenance interventions, and that's how you would plan your budget. The big question, and it's clearly as much a political question as it is an engineering question, does the budget drive the maintenance or does the maintenance drive the budget? I know which way around I would want it to be, but I'm in the real world as well. My experience is slightly different. I can't tell what happened with the seven bridge between the end of the construction in 1966 and when the strengthening started in the 80s. It was in the hands of a local authority during that period, and I don't know how they budgeted. Then, of course, once we moved into the strengthening works, all that was costed, it was competitive tendering, so the funds were provided by government. Once it moved into the concession period, there's another set of considerations there. The key consideration that you're talking about is that at the end of the concession period, whatever that is, it's either temporal or financial, the bridges to be handed back to the owner, the government, in the condition that it was intended to be, so it starts its life again. Whoever takes over after that, we don't know at the moment, but they will obviously have to have some financial plan, budget and then there will be the usual financial constraints on that, but hopefully they will know more clearly what they've got to allow for in the way of inspection and maintenance. In terms of your annual budget for running the bridges, do you have any capital reserves or contingency funds there in case the unforeseen happens and can you give me an idea of what level those reserves would be in an annual budget? Certainly with the time on maintenance budgets, there always were reserves for contingencies. I can't recall what the level was in proportion, but effectively there would be a revenue budget for operation and management of the structure, there would be a capital budget for planned maintenance and that also you'd need to have a budget as well for reactive maintenance and that may have been taken from the reserves or it may have been at the expense of other planned maintenance, but I'm sorry, I don't know the detail of the level of the reserves in proportion to the overall budget. At the Humber, we do hold a small reserve, but generally that's incorporated within our major maintenance fund because many of the projects on a bridge the size of the Humber are big projects just because of the size of the bridge. They cost significantly more than we can actually collect in any one year, so we have a maintenance fund from which we build up looking at the major maintenance programme so that it can be expended at the appropriate time. If there are any contingent works need undertaking, we'll often take it from that fund and then increase payments over subsequent years to bring it back up to the level we need for future projects. Can you just tell me what you would understand the difference to be work essential to maintain the long-term integrity of the bridge and safety critical work and what would have happened if this had been identified as safety critical? Safety critical is quite an unusual term. Safety I would recognise as being one of the paramount elements which we consider in terms of prioritising works. We obviously look at the risk of failure and the consequences of failure in any risk-based assessment. That's both in terms of the financial consequences, the operational consequences or the consequences for safety of any failure. That would help prioritise work at the bridge. I am not party to the shareholders, the concessionaire shareholding, but I suspect that they are big enough not to specifically identify reserves, but they are big enough to provide anything that is necessary to meet their commercial obligations. In terms of capital planning and long-term capital planning, was it reasonable to review the non-committed projects in light of the decision to rebuild the new fourth crossing? I'll say yes. Knowing the little bit of the history around both the new and the old fourth road bridges, I would say that you had to look at the two in the round. The similarities with seven are fairly strong. You had an existing bridge and then building a new alongside. The process through which it is delivered is very different. You have to take a couple of steps back and so we'll look at the future transport links across the fourth. I don't think that you can separate the two. I think that I ought to clarify for you there that Richard may not know, but the strengthening of seven was decided before the second crossing was on the cards. It was the only link. From a public governance of funding perspective, I'm sure that it would be appropriate to consider the maintenance on one structure with an adjacent new structure. I wouldn't like to say that that was actually done because, obviously, I don't know. Finally, as a result of the review that FET undertook, they identified a trial repair to the bit of the trust end link that they were worried about, which is not the bit that broke and closed the bridge. Have you been able to look at that repair and identify that as a reasonable repair strategy for the future of the trust end links at that point? I personally have very limited knowledge. I'm aware of what was undertaken, but the actual mechanism of loads there, I'm afraid that I don't know enough about to comment on. I've seen the copies of the original drawings, so I understand how it worked. I don't know anything about what was proposed in terms of repair. Again, I've only got a superficial knowledge, but I can say that it's not unusual to do a trial when you're going to adopt something if you can do a trial. I would have thought that it was reasonable to do the trial and find out all the bugs before you lash into it. I thank some of the questions that I was intending to ask of me. I've already been covered, but I'm just taking you back a wee bit. I'm quite interested in the inspection regime and how you go about that. In the absence of some of the high-tech solutions that may now be available, it seems to me that, from what I understand, primarily you're talking about a visual inspection, and Mr Evans talked about sound. That makes sense to me. I know a mechanic that can diagnose faults from an engine, often just by listening to it. I'm correct in saying that, as you undertake the inspections in the absence of any sound, it's a visual inspection and you're looking for stress cracks or that kind of defect. It would tend to be almost a binary thing. The element that I'm inspecting looks okay or it doesn't look okay, and that's the best that that kind of inspection can deliver as it's currently practised. Am I connecting that? I would say that you are, correct. A lot of it is down to the experience of the engineer or the bridge inspector. The most useful tool that I take when I do bridge inspections is a hammer. It's back to the sound issue again. You tap whether it's a bit of masonry or a bit of metal. There's a sound to it which gives you confidence that that's intact. Once you find an issue, then you would be a bit more intrusive and look for trying to find the problem a bit more. First sight, it is visual inspection with the experience of the inspector and a bit of brute force occasionally. Thank you. That's very useful, I think. Just touching on going back on this tension, I suppose, between the budget, nobody's got an absolutely open-ended budget, and between on-going maintenance and repairs and so on, how would you prioritise projects that maybe couldn't all be carried out within a budget? How would you allocate that priority? I think that we've touched on this concept of safety critical. Again, I'm a bit nervous about using that term. To me, safety critical means that if it fails, the whole structure fails. It's not just an operational failure where you might have to close the bridge. If you come across one of truly safety critical, there's no option. You've got to go in and do it and somebody's got to find the money for sorting it out. With other things, it's as Richard says, that there's painting you can put off, surfacing to an extent you can put off, up to a point, because there are standards even in surfacing the road condition. Elements like a jamming up of an expansion joint, you've just got to do something with it straight away, and somebody has got to find the money either from the commercial organisation or from central funds. It just puts the structure out of operation. That leads me very nicely into my final couple of questions. The committee received some written evidence from a Mr Bob Hopemall, who is a retired engineer who looked after some bridges in North Ayrshire, not on the scale of those bridges, but nevertheless with some similarities. He said in his written submission that no public bridge authority would refuse to fund essential maintenance that was considered to present an unacceptable risk to the travelling public. Would you regard that as a generally correct statement? Absolutely. The Humboldt Bridge Act causes us to provide a safe method of crossing the Humboldt Bridge Act for the customers. In my opinion, the integrity of a bridge manager would mean that it would be a resigning matter if funds were refused and the bridge were allowed to remain open against his or her recommendation. I did read Mr Hopemall's statement, and I must admit that bit did make me smile a little bit. I think what he is saying is that it is back to this shift from the engineering decision to a political decision. I am also an ex-local authority bridge engineer. I do recall situations where, not because I wanted to put any pressure, but to say to elected members that you have got to realise the implications of a decision around either doing a slightly reduced maintenance regime or not doing one. I would never have gone so far as to say that that is a resigning matter. I think that might be a bit of a tantrum issue, but I sympathise with his sentiment. I would probably not say that the resignations would be taking place all over the country otherwise in today's financial climate. Some of these have been stated emotively, but I would expect anyone in that position that identifies—we will use the term safety critical event—to make sure that no one was going to be put at risk of that. I would not consider a resigning event. I would close the bridge. Thank you. That is very useful. I tend to agree with what has been said. The difficulty about closing the bridge is that Peter has total responsibility. The concessionaire at seven at the moment has as good as got total responsibility, but unless it was a structural failure, it would talk to the department to transport the Welsh Government before it said, we have to close the bridge. Thank you very much. That has been very useful. Mr Hill, if I heard you correctly, you talked earlier about the risks of failure and the consequences of failure. It was yourself who said that, wasn't it? We heard in evidence last week from Mr Colford on the subject of risk management what appeared to sound like a hierarchy of risk with the most phrase that people are hesitating to use—the most safety critical being the safety of the users of the bridge, that is to say, the travelling public and the people who operate the bridge, the long-term structural integrity of the bridge and then the operational safety of the bridge. Is that a fair characterisation? It is. I feel that if there was any situation that presented itself with a significant danger to life and limb, the consequences of that risk would obviously be up the most in consideration of action—the long-term integrity of the bridge, obviously. You might come across an incident where the long-term viability of the structure is critical, but there are often more than one way to skin a cat in that sort of scenario, so it may be appropriate to pause. Certainly, if it is just a matter that inconveniences the public or the operator, that would be a lesser consequence. Certainly, I would agree that there is the hierarchy in terms of risk management, risk defined by the likelihood of the risk occurring and the consequence of the occurring. That presents quite an objective way of rationalising and prioritising those risks and the sort of hierarchy that you said, convener, that Mr Colford stated, I would agree with. That is quite appropriate. Mr Levins? I think that I would just add one thing, which is that we have also got to take cognisance of the emergency services, because they come into this equation, but they are dealing with the operation on the carriageway, as it were. It might not be particularly structurally important, but they certainly can intervene and close the bridge to traffic. Thank you for that. We heard earlier from Claire Adamson about the indicative capital plan, and we had a bit of a discussion about how you prioritise maintenance works within the budgetary constraints in which you have to operate. Clearly, part of our discussion as a committee and inquiry has been about the postponement of a particular piece of work, which was the replacement of the entire truss end link assembly, which had been costed at an estimated £10 million to £15 million. I just wondered if you had a perspective based on your own engineering experience and what you have learned about what has happened historically at the fourth road bridge, about whether the decisions that were taken would be consistent with the hierarchy of risk that we have just been discussing. In other words, where are the correct decisions made to postpone capital maintenance works? I think that, as Barry Colford once said, it is a fairly hypothetical question now. We know what has failed, but I do not think that anybody at the time thought that those particular links were going to fail. That is the bottom. As far as the overloaded upper brackets were concerned and the consequences of those, with my limited knowledge from reading and seeing what has happened in the last few days, I do not think that that was an unreasonable decision to go for the trial and then see what came out of that compared to that £10 million to £15 million budget for the whole thing. There was a risk, but it was an operational risk. I can say that I have certainly, in the past, reprioritised work looking at it, not only in terms of the cost to smooth out the cost profile, but also in terms of the practicality of undertaking work with other works going on on the bridge at the same time. You cannot start cutting all several structural elements at once, so sometimes there is a need to reprioritise on that basis. Certainly, if the consequences of the risk appear to be only the serviceability of the bridge rather than a critical risk to the bridge, it is perfectly reasonable to do so. Mr Fish, do you have a perspective on this? I would again endorse what the others have said. I would also add that in any maintenance budget there are going to be pressures from the amount of money in the budget for one, pressures from other maintenance needs and other interventions that need to be carried out, and that is that balancing act. With hindsight, you could say that that should not have been removed from the programme, but at the time, with reducing budget and increasing demands elsewhere, that was quite an understandable decision to take. Thank you. Just on the conversation that you have just been having, how involved would the board be in accessing that money to prioritise in your experience of your bridge? How involved would the board have been in that? In a sense that this is the political dimension that I assume that you are referring to, so that the board would be the one who would make the final decision at the recommendation of the engineer or the bridgemaster who is making that point of view. I do not really know what that relationship is. There needs to be that element of trust. You cannot have the board on the one hand saying that they have priorities to maintain the bridge if they are not going to allocate funds. They also have to have an implicit trust in the engineering side from the bridge manager. Is that your experience of your bridge? Yes, this is very much so. In other words, what I am coming round to is that it has almost become a joint decision. Both have to recognise the territory in which the other one operates, but at the same time there is a real world. Either the board has to sign up to what the engineer says or we are in the position that Mr Hopewell was describing earlier on. Seven crossings again are slightly different, but I am trying to draw the closest parallel. The concessionaire is ultimately responsible during the concession period, but there is a Government representative who oversees or somebody talked about light touch. I hate the idea, but I was a Government representative for some years. During that period, if the concessionaire wanted to do something that was outwith the envisaged work from the maintenance and inspection manual and all the other volumes of the concession agreement, we were in a position to say, no, you cannot do it, but we would only do that if we really felt that it was totally unwise for the bridge. There was somebody just behind the board overseeing it. I suppose that that example, and to go back to the conversation again previous, was about if there was critical work, and Mr Hopewell said that if that had not been guaranteed and the safety was compromised, then it is a resigning matter. In that instance, with the people behind and the board, if the money was not allocated because you had spent your allocation for that year, three years, five years, whatever it may be, and yet this safety critical work came up, who would ultimately be responsible for sanction funds, how do you generate those funds, given that safety is the impact but the money is not there, how would that work in those scenarios? Again, my experience is slightly unusual and I think that the shareholders have got a very high conscience to the safety of the travelling public, and they would find the funds. In the case of a Government? Either that Government would have to intervene, or the Government gives permission to borrow, and the funds are found through borrowing. Would local authorities be involved in that at any point? Tema was a unusual case, and it was managed by a joint committee. It was similar to FETA in a way, but it was a joint committee of two local authorities. However, in order to do the strengthening widening works that were carried out, we did need additional funds, and so those two local authorities subsidised that through their own reserves. That is the equivalent of going to a central Scottish Government or Westminster Government. How was that budgeted for at the beginning? Who were the partners in that? It is a trying to keep a long story short, but the bridge is also a joint undertaking with a ferry operation using chain ferries across the Tema, and they had a reserve to replace those ferries ultimately. That was a classic decision taken jointly about two crossings again, where you could defer the ferry replacement. That money was shifted to the bridge, so that gave us a capital allowance. The Tema bridge was told during the works and before the works, so we were able to source a fairly static toll income. We started doing the strengthening work without enough money in the bank to finish it, so we had to keep the bridge open to traffic doing all the work and collected the tolls. We just went into the red for a period of about six months to the tune of about £2 million, and that was, as I said, funded by the two parent authorities under a fairly loose borrowing arrangement. If we hadn't had a facility to charge tolls, and this was the issue going to central government, because we went to central government for funding initially, and their response was, no, you charge tolls, there's your income, you use that to pay. All of these structures are very similar, but all very different, certainly in terms of governance and in funding situations. That's certainly complicated. That's very helpful. Thank you. Do members have any further questions, Mr Alex? Yes, I was going to explore something dangerous territory into last week, but I'm going to try it again just briefly. The work was deferred on the trust end links, and that work was associated with the opposite end of the link and a part that has not failed. Had that work been carried out when it was originally mooted, would it have led to either the discovery of a problem in the area that failed or maintenance to that area that would have prevented the problem? I'm afraid that it would be impossible to say without a far more detailed understanding of the mechanism. The question that I intended to ask after that is how often in the maintenance of a major structure do you find yourself in a position where planned maintenance work leads to additional maintenance work, which may immeasurably defer cost or danger in the longer term? How integrated is the process? Can it be separated into its individual parts? In theory, yes. In practice, hardly ever. I think that almost certainly when you decide, right, I'm going to do some work and you're actually undertaking that work on an assumption as to what the problem is. Once you start, then you get the reality of what the problem is. Then fourth cable investigation is a classic point. That had to be done in order to determine the problem, which then led into other maintenance interventions such as the dehumidification to help resolve that. I think the same would have applied had the investigation started at the tower connection rather than the trust connection. You don't know where that might have led. That might have led to an analysis which actually said, well actually the problem's not up here, it's down the bottom. But who's to say? The one word answer is possibly. I have to say, I suggest it's fairly unusual for that to happen for planned works to then uncover unknowns because we do tend to plan these works over a significant period of time. We investigate what the impact may be on other structural elements and plan for those. So it's actually quite rare that we start with one problem and find half dozen others. We might not find what we were expecting in certain elements, which leads on to a different solution, but not other things that we weren't aware of. I might be able again to give a sort of parallel here. At the beginning of the concession period there was a joint inspection by the potential concessionaires and the government's representative staff. That joint inspection was intended to flag up anything that might need to be done during the concession period. After that, the only thing that could get the concession extra money was something that couldn't have been found during that inspection. You might say that that's a kind of government back to reserve. Equally, as far as the strengthening works were concerned, which was a competitive tender, as I've said, there was a large, well, I say large, there was a sort of 10 to 12 per cent contingency sum, not all of which was spent, but we knew once we got into the work in deep detail we would find things that we hadn't seen before. Is it in the nature of maintenance that the unforeseen will be found if you maintain and that as a consequence, if you defer maintenance, there is an element of risk? I think that there's a larger element of risk if you defer maintenance. I think that the risk of head in the sand and not knowing what's going on is far greater than having a maintenance regime that can at least give you an indication, but just another point as an aside, the whole issue around some of these maintenance works when you don't really know the extent of the problem is actually arriving at an estimate for budgetary purposes right from the outset. That's why I understand, I think that the convener said that the estimate was between 10 and 15 million. Someone might say, that's a big range, but you just don't know until you start work. Hence, building in a contingency is a very sensible thing to do when you're actually developing budgets for maintenance. Thank you for indulging me. Not at all, I think that was a very helpful line of questioning. Are there any further questions that members have? Are there any final points that any of our witnesses would like to place on the record? I would like to reiterate what I said at the beginning, that I'm amazed at how much has been accomplished in such a short time. I know a huge amount of resource was put in, but it still was a major effort and all involved are to be congratulated. Thank you for that. I certainly endorse that. I think that it's a very healthy thing for this committee to be conducting its inquiry because I'm sure that the impact was felt very hard in the travelling public here in Scotland, but it was national and international news as far as the British community was concerned. Actually, as John has described, the potential problem was turned into a success in very quick time, so well done to those concerned and also to your committee for conducting this inquiry. Thank you for the invitation to come along and talk to you. It appears that you have the last spot, Mr Hill. Yes, I can only really build on what the other two have said and assure them that this discussion is going to go on internationally for quite some time. As Richard referred to, we do have the meeting of the ICSPOC, the conference, which I expect Barry will be attending as well, and I'm sure we'll discuss it there. Okay. Thank you very much. I thank on behalf of the committee our witnesses for making their considerable experience and expertise available to the committee this morning. It has been invaluable in informing our work as we take this inquiry forward. I thank the witnesses for their attendance and I now suspend this meeting briefly to allow the witnesses to leave the room. Thank you. This meeting of the Infrastructure and Capital Investment Committee, agenda item 3, subordinate legislation. The third item for today is the consideration of a negative instrument, Public Contract Scotland Regulations 2015, SSI 2015-446. Paper 5 summarises the purpose and prior consideration of this instrument. Members may wish to note that the committee will receive an update from the Cabinet Secretary for Infrastructure, Investment and Cities on the whole suite of secondary legislation in relation to public procurement reform when it considers the draft affirmative instrument the procurement Scotland regulations 2016 at the future meeting of the committee. The committee will now consider any issues that it wishes to raise in reporting to the Parliament on this specific instrument. Members should note that no motions to annul have been received in relation to the instrument. Can I invite comments from members? David Cymru. Thank you, convener. As you rightly pointed out, this is a negative instrument that we need to deal with today, and there have been no motions to annul. My point is that I would like to put some comments on the record, perhaps for passing on to the Cabinet Secretary. I think that the instrument is fine as far as it goes, but the big gap to me is any reference and any substantial action on tax dodging. I support the moves by Christian Aid, STUC, Unison and others to restrict companies who tax avoid from government procurement. I draw attention to members to my registrar of interest showing that I am a member of Unison. The estimates of unpaid tax is difficult to ascertain for the UK, but estimates from the group that I just mentioned are around £25 billion in unpaid tax due to aggressive tax avoidance. I think that we all probably want to make sure that we can secure tax justice, and I believe that the regulations have put forward to us a big gap. Europe has had quite a lot of positive things to say about that, and I particularly would support European-wide tax reporting to try to ensure that large companies such as Amazon do not get round domestic tax laws. I believe that our Scottish Firms Convener are losing out because of tax dodging. Unlike multinational firms, they are less able to use aggressive tax avoidance. We do not want to see them using aggressive tax avoidance. I believe that there is clear economic, social and community benefit. Companies who wish to benefit from the public pound must pay their fair share of tax. It is helpful to have your comments on the record. I am not entirely clear that the issue that you raised would fall within the remit of either the regulations or the primary legislation, but I think that I might have a solution that would be for us to write to the cabinet secretary asking him to provide further clarification on the issues that you raised should the committee be minded to do that. Alex, you wanted to come in. I will simply go into comment on the difference between tax avoidance and tax evasion. One being a criminal offence, the other one being a practical management issue, and note that the UK Government is currently doing quite a lot to tighten up the regime and to try and close some of the doors that have been left open. That was a matter that was discussed extensively along with one or two other significant points at the time the bill went through Parliament. I think that we had these arguments during the passage of the bill. With the one reservation that it is something of a telephone directory of secondary legislation, we are getting here, and it can be difficult sometimes to assess, but it appears to me that the regulation gives effect to the legislation as we passed it in the chamber when the bill went through. Therefore, I am content with the instrument as it exists. Are there any further comments from members on this instrument, Siobhan? I think that all members have received something from Unison or a briefing on it. I certainly received it just as an MSP that did not draw my attention very specifically. The question that is in our document today was what issues we should put forward to the Parliament. I think that we should be saying that we have been approached by those out with concerns, and it is not simply MSPs, but others. I think that that should be put on record as well. That is helpful. Are members content that we write to the cabinet secretary in advance of his appearance before this committee and ask for some further clarification on the issues that have been highlighted? Are we agreed? Agreed. I will make the point that all the issues that have been raised by members are issues that can be put directly to the cabinet secretary when he appears before the committee, so we will have an opportunity to do that. Finally, is the committee agreed that it does not wish to make any recommendation in relation to this instrument? We are agreed. In that case, I now move the meeting into private session.