 Ieithio bod y Gweithio Llancaf Aelodau Cymru yn 2017. Can I please remind everyone present to turn their mobile phones and other devices onto silent for the duration of the meeting? Before we move to the first agenda item I'd like to place my thanks on record to Ross Thompson, who was a member of this committee from the start of the session and has resigned as an MSP to take up his news seat at Westminster. The first item of business is a decision to take items in private. Mae gennymd Там 3 i 4 yn yr ysgolio am darlynt explainad yn hanfodol a'u d wine w относio mewn gwaith yn Ysgolio peith odd o gyda pupas ysgolio yw vereidiau. Mlad iciwyr wediried cyhoedd sut mae gennymd Tam 3 i 4 yn y prif honno. Yn coll microbiwr Cymru, mae gennymd Tam 5 i nosio sy'n gwneud i'r dweud ar gyfer y bydd o gr secondly wrthws, mae gennymdeg yn efallag y gwaith yn teimlo i gyfieithaidd ein disg slidellig a weithio pan yn ei dweud. The second item of business is the first evidence session as part of the committee's inquiry into school infrastructure. This inquiry will focus on the lessons to be learned from the incident at Oxgang's primary school in January 2016, the inspection and remedial work of the school of state since early 2016, and the quality assurance practices for new school buildings. Today we will hear from Professor John Cole, who was the chair of the independent inquiry into school closures in Edinburgh, Ian McKee, who is the immediate past chair of RICS in Scotland, Paul Mitchell from Scottish Building Federation and the Scottish Building Apprenticeship and Training Council, and Jim Thullis, general secretary of SLS Scotland. Before I start, it is important to note that there is an on-going fatal accident inquiry relating to the accident in Liberton High School in 2014, when very sadly a pupil died following the collapse of a wall within the school. We will therefore avoid discussions on the specifics of that accident to ensure that this committee does not impinge on the work of the FAI by exploring matters that may be subjudice. I am sure that members will join me in expressing their condolences to King Wallace, Benes' family and friends. I now move to questions. As usual, I will start and I have a general question for Professor Cole. What are the main recommendations or conclusions of your report? Would you like to highlight to the committee and specifically what are the key lessons we should draw from the Oxgang primary school incident? There is a long version and a short version of the answer to that question, I am afraid, and the long version is the 270 page report. The shorter version would be fine. The short version, I am sure, will be more suitable today. The fundamental issue was the fact that there was no one with the responsibility on behalf of the client to ensure that what the client was procuring was procured to the standard that was required in the contract. The quality assurance within the project was failed. It could only fail with the level and there is plenty of information within the report showing the tables of defects that were found across the schools. What amazed me in coming into the report was the fact that despite that there were six different contractors, main contractors, involved in the 17 schools in Edinburgh, and they used different brickline subcontractors and different personnel within those companies, that the same basic faults occurred were found to be evident across all schools to very much a similar degree. Yesterday, I was in London at a meeting and an architect looked at me and they had just found a wall in a full wall in a gymnasium in a school but last year. On the basis of this report, the contractor had come back to look at it and they found that there were no wall ties in a whole large two-story wall which, if it fell, would equally be liable to kill people in the gymnasium or outside the gymnasium. The fault is probably not one limited to Scotland but I can only speak about the evidence that I collected in relation to the inquiry which focused on the information that I received from Edinburgh Council, which was very helpful in relation to their openness and the other local authorities to whom I wrote to ask for information in relation to their projects. The similarity of occurrences across all those schemes was absolutely quite amazing. Lack of embedment of wall ties, lack of inclusion of header ties, lack of inclusion of bed joint reinforcement, fundamental and basic elements of the construction of walls that are essential to give them the stiffness that they require to resist wind loading in a range of specified conditions under the codes of the country. The fact that nobody was watching that and that all the quality assurance systems of the contractors involved and the role of the independent tester, for example, in the PPP projects, somebody who, in theory, assigned the buildings as being completed in accordance with the requirements, the fact that those roles, none of them, were of sufficiently detailed or intensive a process to actually allow the client to be assured that the building was built in accordance with the specifications. The only way that that can be done is either by having a clerk of works on site who would be there at such regularity of visits that he can actually see these elements before the walls are closed in particularly when they are building walls and on a day-to-day basis. That element of supervision, which was standard in previous procurement models, has now been, in a large degree, discarded by public procurement processes, particularly with PPP on the basis that there is a thought, as is put about by quite a few legal advisers, that the client does not want to take responsibility for any contributing negligence by having his people look at the wall and comment on it and ask contractors to do anything, so you stand back and you let the builder do it. The risk with that is that the builder may do it wrong because sometimes there are perverse incentives for contractors to not mark their own home work down and force them to rebuild walls, cause them extra money and delays, which can lead to liquidary damages, etc. The contractor will always give their own work the benefit of the doubt, whereas an independent scrutiny by others would allow that to be captured. When a contractor knows a clerk of works on site, I feel that the attitude is different because they know that if they build something inappropriate, it would be marked and told to be rebuilt again. The procurement models have created a gap of that detailed level of inspection. The independent tester role is very much interpreted by clients as they will give me the assurance by the certification that the billing has been completed satisfactorily, but the level of duties and, in fact, the fees that they are paid allows them maybe to visit a site maybe once a month or not even that. They see their primary role as commenting on progress and, ultimately, was the billing finished to look roughly like it did and were all the bits there, rather than a comment on the quality of construction and the detail behind it, which are fundamental to the safety of the users of the building in the future. We have a gap currently within the system whereby the client thinks that the contractor is working on his behalf, he thinks that the independent tester is giving him the credibility and, finally, as you will see in the report, he thinks that by having building control officers come out to the site that they are giving them that assurance, will the level of visits of building control officers has decreased very much over the years. What was in the report is that about 90 per cent of visits were relating to drainage issues and only one or two at the end were looking at the construction of the building. They did not see, and rightly so is described within the legislation, they did not see it as their role to be supervisors of the work of contractors. They are not, but the client ultimately, the City of Edinburgh Council in this case, cannot delegate a way or responsibility to ensure that what they are procuring is a safe building for children and other users to be in. Therefore, they have to put appropriate steps to ensure that there is independent scrutiny, that a contractor is actually delivering what he has promised to deliver, rather than relying on a contractor to do it automatically. The level of supervision should reflect the level of risk. If having looked at 100 per cent of these schools in Edinburgh and found that 100 per cent of them failed, then that would require supervision on all of those schools until you find that that is not the behaviour of the industry and that walls are being built safely. Therefore, you can look at whatever the next risk issue is. None of us would actually pay a contractor for doing work in our kitchen, whether going around and looking to make sure that it was all finished before you paid him. But, effectively, by stepping back from that as a client and saying, we do not want to take any risk in judging you, so you do it and it is over to you if it fails. The only risk is that if it fails in a way, which is to do with the structure or another element that I picked up in the document, the fire safety of a building, if somebody has killed as a result of that, it is fine that you have one person to sue, but at the same time, you have not carried out your own responsibilities in assuring of what you procured by taking appropriate measures. The current procurement systems have lost that role. There is now a gap of that detailed level of scrutiny in many cases, not in all cases, because some local authorities are still using Clarker Works. That has lots of issues to do with the change in the role of the professional, no longer representing the client but representing the builder. An assumption that that professional is still acting on behalf of the client when he can only act on the contractor and, in many cases, is forbidden to talk to the client directly without the contractor's approval. The fact that professionals cannot report and do not tend to report to clients directly when they see defects, but report to the contractor. It is up to the contractor to decide whether he fixes that or not. There are real gaps in the process. Good quality, best principles in terms of how you manage projects and how you manage quality assurance can make any of the procurement system work, can make PPP work, can make design and build work, can make traditional construction work. What we have done is we have changed the system, we have pulled back from the clients who do not want to take on that risk, and we have left a huge gap that can cause real real problems and I think will continue to cause real real problems until something is done about it. Thank you very much for that. That was a very full answer. Somebody who worked in the building trade many years ago, the Clarker Works was central to everything that was ever done, and I am shocked to hear that it has such a minimal role according to you. In your report, you concluded that the financing method itself was not the reason for the faults in construction, but you also said that, although it was not responsible for the defect of construction, aspects of the way in which PPP methodology was implemented in those projects did increase the risk of poor quality design and construction. How do you marry them? What exactly do you mean by that statement? The first statement is that it really does not matter where the money comes from for a project if it represents value for money. Most of us, I am sure of you, ran the table and had a mortgage by your house because you do not have the money up front. The City of Edinburgh Council in my report says that it found itself in the position that it could not repair its buildings, which were in a really bad state, so it went to PPP getting the money from the private sector. The source of the money is not necessarily relevant to how you manage the quality of delivery for the project. The funding is there. From that point on, you say, what is the best principle relation to the design quality and the construction quality and what mechanisms do we need to have? You can have clockerworks in a PPP scheme. You can have independent architects or independent design teams working for the client in a much more structured way. You can have proper quality assurance systems. Those are not there. The compatibility of good practice with PPP is possible if it is done that way, but the trend and the nature and the way that PPP is done is that there is less and less contact between client, professionals and design and the detail of the work. The way that it is implemented is a problem as opposed to the fact that the money comes from a bank as opposed to from Government. The money is just something that the resource appears for the goods. It is how they are procured and the detail of that procurement arrangements and the definition of roles, including appropriate quality assurance mechanisms. If those are built into all those systems, then all those systems would work okay. I have used PPP very effectively on different occasions as well, although I tend not to use it. Why, then, do you think that PPP—that is what you are highlighting here—was not working? There seems to be this trend towards cutting costs or cutting costs. Because there is nobody on the client's side checking that has been done to the level that they want and because there has become this belief in clients that they do not want to be involved, they want to transfer a risk to somebody else to provide it. The benefit of doing that is, as in the case of the Edinburgh schools, that if somebody goes wrong, they have to pay for putting it right. Whereas, under a more traditional role, if somebody went wrong, they would have to sue the architect, sue the design team, sue the contractors to find out who was to blame. Under PPP, the contractor does not get paid when the billing is not available. That is a benefit of PPP in that, if somebody goes wrong and you cannot use it, they do not get paid for it. There is an incentive for them to fix it and they have to pay for fixing it, which is happening in the Edinburgh case. However, that still does not mean that you are getting buildings built properly. The contractors come in, they build the buildings and they sell them off. In this case, the original stakeholders were Amy and Miller Construction. Amy sold all her shares before the second phase of the schools was complete and Miller was shortly thereafter. Contractors moved their money through because their builders buildings are rather than managers of buildings and they sell on to funds that buy into them. All the equity holders now are not the people who were originally involved in the scheme. The contractor is in for a short while and there was a belief with PPP that if it was a 30-year contract, when people built it, they would build it right. However, in the evidence given to my inquiry, when we asked the people involved in the FAM side of things, they said that it was only lip service that was paid to the operator of the building in terms of when they were introduced into the process and their ability to influence the quality of designer construction. That was the premise on which PPP was supported by many people that because there was a 30-year contract and if it does not work, they do not get paid, they will build it better. Clearly, that was not the case in this instance or in the case of the many other instances that we find. People did take shortcuts. Contractors make their money on what they pay out in terms of the cost of building and, if they can reduce that, the incentives for contractors to try and cover up work are unfortunately there. Many contractors would not allow for that. I have been encouraged by recent conversations that I have had with chief executives of some major contracting firms who have already said to me that, as a result of the report, they have strengthened the level of on-site supervision that they are applying to brick-line workers. One company said that they just appointed 20 brick-line supervisors to work in the UK across-game. There is a recognition in the industry, too, that things have gone wrong. I do not think that there is any intent by the industry to do it that way. Effectively, we have lost skills in the industry. We have people inspecting work that may come from more project management rather than construction background, and we do not know what to look for when they are looking at works. We do not have a clerk of works with the specialist eyes on site. We do not have the professionals eyes on site because they are not paid to go on site in a way that they were in the past. You are not getting the professional inspection. You are not getting the clerk of works inspection to the same degree. I am talking about the generality rather than the totality because there are still lots of very good contractors and lots of people using very good practices, but this has become the dominant model where the client advisers are now working. Who used to be the client advisers is now working for the contractor. Just one last question before I pass it on to my colleagues. Do you think that the client should be, in terms of procurement, should not be allowed to have that hands-off role that they should make sure that the clerk of works or whatever some sort of safety inspection model is in there? Ultimately, the client has to take all reasonable steps of public body client to ensure that what has been built is safe and complies with the billing regulations that they, in the case of a counsellor, are actually responsible for implementing and ensuring. What steps do you take to do that? You take whatever appropriate steps you need and the level of supervision should be proportioned to the risk of it not being done properly. The risk of bricklaying not being done properly has been shown to be a very significant risk. Therefore, you apply appropriate resources to ensure that that is happening. Contractors are telling you that it is complete. The independent testers signed the certificate of these buildings and they were complete. The building control gave completion certificates for those buildings that were signed. There are two or three of the schools that never received completion certificates from building control and yet we are open. All those certificates would tend to let a less informed client think that he has got a building that is completely safe, but none of those processes is working perfectly. Professor Cole, you have just said something that shocked me that someone did not even have the building certificate and we are open. Is that what you said? Yes. It is in the report. It is quite a big section of the report. Professor Cole, I find your evidence very interesting but also very depressing. I am interested in that you have given us a very articulate and very clear view of what you think ought to happen to improve matters. Could I ask you not just about the actual building process and the oversight of that, but about the maintenance of school buildings? Obviously, local authorities, in most cases, have a responsibility on an on-going basis to make sure that the buildings are fit for purpose. I am sure that every parent across Scotland wants an absolute guarantee that their school building is safe. Do you tell us what you would see as the fundamental qualities that would be required in the maintenance process of inspection on an on-going basis? What do we have to do across all local authorities across Scotland to ensure that we have a robust maintenance and inspection on a regular basis of all our school buildings? Again, that could be a long answer, but I will try to keep it brief. The strange enough, PPP does put the level of money into maintenance to allow the buildings to maintain properly. You will find a commentary based on the evidence given by people from Edinburgh Council themselves. Because of the contractual arrangements, they have to pay the money to get the schools maintained. So whether the walls need to be painted every three years or not, they will be painted because that is the contract that they get paid for doing that. In the schools that they manage themselves, maybe because of the amount of money that they are paying out on the PFI maintenance contract, they did not have the same resources. Their own schools, which are run by themselves and owned by themselves, were maintained to a much poorer standard. The evidence from the head teachers associated with the schools in question who had experience of both the council-owned schools and the PPP schools said that, from a maintenance perspective, the PPP schools were maintained better. Just to go back for a moment when you said that it is maintenance to ensure that buildings are built properly, the problem associated with this issue and the main problem, the masonry issue, is the building of the brick walls. It is not something that is going to be found by maintenance inspectors after the event. The inside of walls are no longer visible. Another issue is that you cannot tell if something is wrong with the wall by walking around from the outside once it is finished and seeing it. That was the case with the inspectors. The 17 schools here said that they were all okay from external examination. Only when they opened up did they find that many fundamental elements were missing. That can only happen when it has been built because if you close up something that is no longer accessible, those elements need fundamental inspection of the times being built. The issue of the fire stopping is interesting in that in the report you will see that the contractor AMFM told me that it did regular inspections of fire stopping. Fire stopping is generally visible, sometimes hard to get at and hard to see, certainly depending on the nature of it, but the number of defects that were reported in the schools were substantial across all the 17 schools. We were advised that they had been doing inspections on a regular basis. The inspectors, when they get paid for it by a client, also have to have somebody inspecting the inspectors. You do not rely on somebody's paint to tell you that everything is okay, so there needs to be an appropriate regime of council independent inspection. The words that I have used time and time again are independent scrutiny. Do not let the person who is getting paid for it tell you that everything is fine. You need to have somebody else in looking at that to give you the reassurance that you need. Again, the level of that independent scrutiny should be proportionate to the risk and your experience and the areas of work that are more liable to not being carried out safely. The key element in the maintenance of buildings is having an appropriate regime for long-term and cyclical maintenance and short-term maintenance and funding it properly. Unfortunately, I would say that most public buildings—as I said, this is somebody who worked in mainly health for many years building hospitals, etc. Most public buildings fail miserably in terms of the level of maintenance funding that is applied to them during their life cycle. That is all very interesting. What you are effectively saying is that there has been two components to the inspection process that are absolutely properly done with scrutiny at the time of the building and, secondly, on an on-going maintenance basis. Obviously, there was slightly different criteria there. Do you feel that, in the second case, as it comes across the maintenance over a longer period of time, do you feel that within a school inspection process it would be possible at the time of the school inspection to have the authority from the construction company or the architect or whoever it might be to give a guarantee to the school that, as well as their inspection in school terms being fit for purpose, the building maintenance has also been fit for purpose? Would that be a possibility? I think that every piece of work should have somebody signing off to say that it has been done properly, and that requires competence on the basis of the people who are doing it. That is another weakness in the industry, but many of the people signing things and certifying it do not necessarily have the competence in that area to speak knowledgeably about those issues. So what do we need to do to ensure that they do have that competence? It is about having a proper structured system that says, for example, if something at the moment is in relation to gas, you do have very particular requirements as to who inspects and who signs off alterations to a gas system or maintenance of a gas system. It has to be by a registered person. Whereas in relation to building, generally there is no requirement as to the level of competency that anybody can in and build. Anyone can call himself a builder. The current regulations put the responsibility on the owner or developer to appoint somebody with the competence to do that, but there is no definition as to what that competence is because there is no standardisation, there is no licensing. People coming on site to build walls, in times when there is a demand for bricklayers, you really do not know quite often who is coming on site and what kind of occasions they have. My last point would be that your recommendation would be that we have higher professional standards and accreditation. Yes, but this is the other issue. If you want higher professional standards, you have to pay for them. What has been cut more and more and more over recent decades in terms of trying to achieve efficiency is cutting out the processes that help to guarantee the quality. If you want a professional person to be there, you pay that professional person reasonable for the time. If you are leaving it to the contractor to decide how often an architect is going to come on and inspect their work and tell them that it is bad and have to do it again, when they are working for them, when that person is paying them, there is a conflict of interest. In many of those appointments, the architects or engineers are not appointed to carry out that supervision because the contractor does not want them to tell them what is incorrect. Mr Mitchell, do you have any comment that you would like to make? In the construction industry at the moment, the main way to check individuals' credentials is through CSCS cards, so CSCS cards can only be obtained if they have an relevant qualification. Quite often, you will find that they are in circulation on larger construction sites. However, we still have a problem whereby local smaller contractors will simply receive a call from somebody who says that they are a bricklayer. They will say start on Monday morning and they will know by first tea break whether they can hold a trial or not and whether they can perform. We still have issues of candidates entering the construction industry who do not have formal recognised robust qualifications. Professor Cole, just looking at the initial incident at Oxgang, I wonder if you could explain the process of what happened immediately after that a little bit more. The incident of part of the cladding of the wall collapsing. The school was closed for three days. There was a visual inspection of the 16 other pp1 schools, but the school was reopened. Two months later, that school, as well as the other 16, were closed for a prolonged period of time because of further survey work that had revealed further issues. To a layperson, that seems really concerning that the school was closed for three days and then reopened only to have further serious issues discovered and then closed for a prolonged period of time two months later. Would you be able to explain that process, how a school was closed due to a structural issue, then reopened and then closed again? I can tell you what happened rather than explain. What happened was that the wall collapsed. There was an immediate response and people were right very, very quickly. People saw a wall collapse. They knew that the storm gertrude had just happened, so they knew that the cause for it was the suction of the wind pulling that the other face off the wall. They hadn't done the full calculation at that stage to understand precisely whether the construction of the wall had been up to the codes required because a wind exceeding the requirement of design for the codes would still cause a wall to fail and you couldn't criticise people. The wall could have been built properly if there had been a huge extreme wall. There's a process to go through to identify what was the cause of the fault. The engineers who came along and did that analysis also had to try to get the school ready to be used again and make sure that it was safe to do so in their minds. So they did a visual inspection and you'll find what the report says about visual inspections of this school. They said prudently enough that if this school was built by, we'd just have a look at other walls to see whether this wind caused any bulging or cracking, which would be the normal signs of stress on a wall that might subsequently collapse. None of that was found in the other schools. The report done by the engineer said that this requires further consideration and we'd recommend that that was done. I think that the incident was started on 29 January. The report was completed on 29 February following inspections of the wall, the intrusion of inspections of the rest of the walls of that school, and it showed similar defects in terms of the missing wall ties. It was only the wall ties at that point that was the subject of debate. The reason that all the schools were closed was that in the process of starting to fix the missing wall ties, it was noticed by one of the contractors that the header ties were not there. I don't know whether you all understand the nuances, I'm sure—some of you do, I'm sure—some of you don't, but if that's a wall panel, and this is a steel column on either side of it, and you're just being across the top, if there's nothing fixing that panel to this, that and that, then it's virtually a freestanding panel. So when the wind comes to it, it can suck it and blow it down both sides. The wall also was a cavity wall, so you have an outer leaf and an inner leaf. The failure on the oxygang school that was initially put down was the failure for this to be bonded adequately to the back leaf, so the panel would act as a single panel. At that stage, it didn't realise that the inner panel as well had not been as required to be tied back to the steel frame. So the requirement for freestanding panels like that to stop flipping about as I'm showing it, is that this is tied with steel ties to the columns and to the steel beam above. What they subsequently found almost by accident when they started to repair the missing wall ties was that many of the ties supposedly holding this panel to the steel beam at the top and making it rigid were missing, and that therefore would create the risk that not only would the outside face fall off, but potentially the inside wall could fall out or in. So only when that was discovered was the decision then subsequently made to close all the skills. Up to that point, the risk was felt to be handled in the fact that the fall would only be upwards and they were fencing off all those areas to protect them. So I think they moved as fast as they could with the level of information that was coming along. The other thing to say, I was amazed as an architect who has been involved in £3.5 billion of work, I was amazed to find that the same incidents were happening with that level of frequency across 17 different buildings. No one could have thought that. They thought that this was a nicely added incident at the start and acted on that basis, but prudently they did look, and it's only by the fact that they did look and do this report in the 29th, and then in the opening that up they found this second defect that they realised that they had to do something much more significant, which led to the closure of the skills. I totally accept what you're saying about being an unprecedented scale of errors across multiple buildings, but is there an issue with the process there in that they agreed that the codified process was followed but that it was inadequate and that visual inspections were not adequate to identify what could have been wider problems, and the process itself needs reviewed and strengthened? What I've said in my report is that visual inspections should not be considered satisfactory. It's one of the recommendations in the report that nobody can assume because a wall looks straight from the outside that it is built structurally well. This comes back to the issue about maintenance. You can't tell this afterwards and you can't go up digging holes in walls or even out again to check because you can only see so much through a scope going into a wall. You really can only do this at the time you build it. This comes back to the issue about a clocker works as the ears and eyes of an architect and the ears and eyes of a client on a site, watching what the contractor does and confirming that it's been done properly. That was the only answer really to this. Just very briefly, on the point about the clocker works, you'd said something earlier that might have missed. I wasn't sure whether you were referring to the clocker works, but saying that often they're not allowed to go directly to the client, they have to go through the contracts. No, that wasn't the under-design and build which has become the predominant methodology used by public sector organisations, a method that I tend not to use because I prefer to have professionals on my side and I always did that. On to that, a system instead of the architect working for the client and getting paid by the client, he's working for the contractor and getting paid by the contractor. There is a confidentiality clause in most of those contracts which stops the architect or structural engineer talking to the client directly about issues affecting the quality of construction. You'll see in the report that the architect, if it's a long report, I'm sure you haven't read all of it, but I recommend it to you, but in one situation you can see what the architects said, pointed out that they were building the inner leaf first and that does need to increase phenomenally the risks of building the wall and not getting the joints coarsing properly or the ties fixed properly. The architect pointed to the site and he showed me emails where he pointed out to the contractor. The contractor decided to ignore that because he wanted to build the inner leaf first to get a dry interior so that it could finish the builds a bit quicker and then finish the outside walls later. That has led and contributed significantly to the faults that we find in the construction of building, but the architect didn't have any authority. Under the old system, the architect would have said, the specification that I wrote says that you can only build the walls together and bring them up together so that they're tied properly together, but he was overruled by the contractor because he wasn't working for the client, he's working for the contractor. For clients to think in that situation that they're getting the full benefit of professional technical input is a mistake and I think clients have been led to believe that. They've then stood back and they don't have people representing them or understanding fully the implications of per construction that can happen as a result. I'd very much like to pick up on a couple of the points that have been made by Professor Cole. It relates to the placing or the involvement of professional consultants and professional members of the design team and how they have become subservient in the project. As Professor Cole has said, they are acting effectively for the contractor with no contractual link or means of communicating with the ultimate client. This is something that we've been talking about. We've been voicing for quite some time that it is the outcome of the procurement strategies that are being followed, but linking that to the issue of maintenance, I am a charter building severe. There are many different types of charter severe, but as a charter building severe, my principal role is appraising existing buildings, so working on existing buildings to maintain them, repair them, refervish them and adapt them. That role is the principal role in maintenance, in assessing what a building needs by way of maintenance over a period of time. Generally, it's a five-year rolling programme. You inspect it, you put together a programme of maintenance work, create the budget, agree the budget and then execute the work and it rolls on. The problem that we see now in common with making professional consultants subservient and pushing them away from the front line is that we're dumbing down the professional skills. A lot of these condition-type surveys, large-scale surveys of portfolios, are reduced to a tick-box exercise, and to my mind that just can't go on. You need an experienced professional individual who knows the building to get in there and really investigate the building as part of the maintenance survey, the maintenance inspection. It's only by doing that that you get to the heart of how the buildings build, how it's deteriorating, because all buildings, new buildings, old buildings, they all deteriorate from day one. Maintenance starts from the day after practical completion, if you like. You really need that level of diligence and expertise in there. As Professor Cole says, that comes with the price, because it takes time. It takes quite a lot of time. Thank you very much. Do you have any idea of what headteachers think of all those? Very come at this from a different perspective from my colleagues in that I am at the sharper end of this. Having read Professor Cole's report, I have to say that I am rather quite scared by what was happening there. Headteachers take over school buildings on the basis of trust that they are fit for purpose. Professor Cole's report highlights entirely and consistently the kind of missing link between contractor and client. Can I substitute the word headteacher for client in that there is an expectation from parents, there is an expectation from society out there that young people, when they are sent to school, will be educated in a safe environment? All the way through Professor Cole's report, there is nothing there to give me confidence on a great many occasions across the country and reading the reports that have come in from the local authorities across the country, that that is consistently the case. Other point to be made within that context is that you were talking here about a wall that was blown down, an account of structural work that was not done. What else exists out there within schools in relation to the safety in which we are educating young people? There is a huge question to be asked around about that, whether the roof is secure enough to stay on. Are the fire break procedures within the school sufficient to stop a fire within school and you could go on down that line? The link between contractor and client has got an absolute and definite impact on the way in which young people are educated within schools. We are expected to educate them, we are expected to look at an environment that is comfortable, safe and on-going maintained in that sort of a way. That is the first part. The second part is very much in relation to on-going from here. Liz Smith has touched on the whole notion of maintenance and on-going within maintenance. One of the things that came out of it, and we were directly as an association involved in it at the time, was the lack of a contingency for when things went wrong. The notion of worst-case scenarios where during a summer holiday when staff are not in schools, we are bored greatly on the significance of what happened within Edinburgh. But bearing in mind what the local authorities have said out there in relation to what might be the case within 30 total local authorities within Scotland, I asked the question, what is the contingency view in relation to any other defects that come along? Another aspect to this, and I am sitting here at Education Skills Committee, but at previous Education Skills committees we talked about training of young people, developing the young workforce, training young people to contribute to the workforce meaningfully within Scotland. Some of the comments made throughout the report in relation to the level of training and the skill that young people, older people perhaps, were bringing into the workplace has had an impact on what has been going on here. It might well be worthy of a further explanation and discussion at some other time around the whole training regime and the way in which we look at a skilled workforce coming into all aspects of Scottish industry. One of the problems with the fact that a lot of public bodies have done away with their own hennais, Clarkerworks, over the years, they used to have bodies of them there to protect them in this way. Secondly, they are not using them within the contracts because of the issue of contributing negligence. As a result of that, there are less opportunities for Clarkerworks. Somebody advised me that I need to look at this in more depth about the lack of availability of courses to get qualified Clarkerworks. Because we are not using it, the skill is dying, and that is the skill that is fundamental to the problems that we have here. From a skills perspective, we need to look at how we build up cadre of people with the experience. Those people will generally come from trades within the construction industry, jointers and bricklayers in the past. That is not happening anymore because there are no opportunities for Clarkerworks or reduced opportunities for Clarkerworks. The problem is exacerbating itself by the way that public sector bodies procure. I want to ask you one question that came from the evidence, and you probably got it right on your porch while apologising in advance. The fact that the same fault was so widespread, what do you think was the cause of that? The nature and the way in which bricklayers are paid, the fact that they do not generally belong to organisations that used to belong to big contractors, we have really good apprenticeship systems. They generally now can be just picked up and moved through project to project. They are paid on the number of bricks they lay, and the number of bricks they lay does not measure the number of fittings that they put in behind the bricks, or they rather fitly-fixing it. Particularly, we find that where the beams were, in this case, a sloping beam, to fix the header ties, which were a complicated header tie, into both leaves of the wall and into the header beams as we drill. That takes time, so it means that when they are doing that, they are not laying bricks and they are getting paid on that day on how many bricks they lay. We find an instance where the fittings that should have been used to tie the building back to the steel beam were actually sitting on the flange where the bricklayer left them up there, and no fittings have been put, because he is getting paid on the number of bricks he lays on the day. There should be a way of compensating them for taking the time to do this? Yes, or paying them on time. There is a combination of methods, which I know that some contractors have already, not just on the basis of the support that some were doing it before, changing the way in which they are trying to pay bricklayers. One or two contractors have told me that they have actually changed the way that they are paying them to reflect the fact that they should have time to do the rest of these fittings. That is great. Gillian, you wanted to come in briefly. Yes, what has been in my mind the whole time that I have been listening to you is that there are other sectors where there are really stringent health and safety procedures. I am thinking of oil and gas. Obviously, they are a very profitable area of work, so that they can put those, as a result of the Cullum report, the completely overhaul way things were done. My first question is that this issue is of a gravity that we need to be looking at having an overhaul of how health and safety works within the construction industry, and almost having an accreditation regime. People cannot enter this until they have a certain amount of training in that respect. First of all, health and safety can be a confusing issue. Health and safety within the industry has vastly improved over recent years due to the card system that has been brought in the mandatory training for everyone, including anyone coming to the site. They have to go through health and safety training in terms of working on the building. The risks to workers on site have dramatically reduced, and the number of instances has dramatically reduced. That is to the workforce, the building workforce. The safety of people subsequently using the building, if that is what we are talking about, is back to the quality of the building built. The building regulations are there to protect that. The problem is that there is nobody ensuring at their sufficient level of detail that the building regulations that are followed completely would provide all the safety that they need in the design of buildings, fire protection, etc. There is no being in many cases applying sufficient scrutiny to ensure that they are being complied with. The building control now receives a certificate that is given by the contractor, and the building control now has only just to show itself that it is reasonable to sign that. In the past, it was the responsibility of building control to go out and to take the lead in that. Even in that situation, the number of visits by building control officers and the number of building control officers around and, secondly, just for our digression, the skills that I have had people saying that the problem is actually recruiting building control officers with skills is now a problem, and the courses for those in Scotland are actually reduced as well. There is a real issue there. Nobody is doing the checking. The regulations are there. This is a question about the application of appropriate scrutiny. Right. Effectively, we have got things in place already that are just not being followed, and there is no scrutiny of them. Am I okay? Thank you very much. First I can just begin by saying that this is an issue that has very much impacted my constituency. The catchment area for ox gangs is significantly within Edinburgh and Southern. St Peter's primary was one of the perfect primary schools, and Libiton High School had to host Gracemount High School for a significant period of time. I am really interested in the quality assurance process, and Professor Cole has outlined quite well that the fundamental problem is the collapsing of the responsibility for the designing and the building of the schools. Now, if that is the case, the design build model would be just as prone to these sorts of issues as schools built under PPP and PFI. Is that correct? Design and build is a subset of PPP. The owners of PPP schemes, the special companies, the funding companies, etc. They are not builders, they just go to a builder, but the general model is that that builder will then employ the design team. Design and build is a standard model for any PPP scheme, so it is a subset of it. It is not different to just a subset of it. There are a number of procurement routes that could have used public money and led to exactly the same issues. Many do. Many of these falls will be found in design and build schemes where there has been no PPP involved. Money, as I said before, really does not have too much to do with it. I am also very interested in the RICS submission. Relegating the regulated independent professional consultants to a subservient role on many occasions reduces the quality of construction. This is prevalent in PFI PPP and more recently hub projects. That suggests that this is a very significant on-going issue rather than a historic issue. How serious should we take this as an on-going issue in public buildings generally? Extremely seriously. Not having the professional design team at the forefront of building projects is foolhardy, in my view. The design team, whether it is made up of the architects, engineers or savers, really needs to have a contractual link to the ultimate client. Whatever the procurement method, some means of keeping those professional consultants who are the regulated, are the individuals who are insured, regulated, working to very high professional standards, keeping them with a contractual link to the ultimate client. To what extent is there a fear from the panel that there is a very large number of undiscovered faults in public buildings built under both hub and PFI PPP that we do not know about? It is impossible to answer, but given the frequency that we find it where we have looked, I think that if you open, you will find. It is unfortunate that that is based on the evidence that we have to date, just based on the law of averages on what has been opened up, the ability to find and say a colleague of mine in London yesterday had built two schools, and the contractor decided to open one of these as a report and find a wall with no... I hear that all the time. It is not schools, this is buildings. What we are talking about is walls. I think that needs to be forgotten. It is just walls. The wall in a leisure centre or a fire station or a hospital or if it is a panel wall built to the same structure, there is nothing to do with schools. We have called it the school's inquiry, but this is actually about construction. The other point I would just like to maybe add slightly to Andrew's view, is that even if you have the architect working for the client, unless the architect is going to the site or appropriately and regularly and inspections, and generally that will happen maybe weekly or on a site. If a resident architect in the site on bigger sites is out of view that many times, but in all cases they still need the eyes and ears of somebody walking around the site on a day-to-day basis. That is back to the clock of works. It is not necessarily the issue to have somebody independent of the contractor able to say that isn't good enough and then for him to be able to go and say to a professional architect engineer, you can now issue an instruction to the take down that wall and rebuild it. I think that that is a very key point. The clock of works is an important role that has been eroded and lost over time. I mean, 20, 30 years ago, certainly as I started in the profession, you came across the clock of works fairly regularly, but I would say now that I very infrequently come across the clock of works. It is important that that clock of works from wherever they are drawn, their skills match the building that they are working on, the project that they are working on. Clock of works nowadays can be drawn from the trades but it could also be drawn from colleagues of mine building savers. The key thing is that they need to be reporting to the professional design team. Traditionally, historically, they have reported to the architect but now you do not have the architect at that level. The architect has been removed. Having the clock of works report to the builder— It has to be an employer's agent, a professional employer's agent. It does. On the employer's side, you have to have that architect or senior professional for the clock of works to respond to. However, picking up on the point about building control and professional skill, what is happening here and what has happened over the years is an erosion of professional skill. We have a chronic skills crisis at the moment. We are not attracting young people into the built environment, we are not attracting them into the professions and we have a lot of people retiring out over the next 10 or 15 years, just by the way the demographics are and also the impact of the financial crisis. We have a very big hollowing out of experience within the profession, so we need to turn that around. We can turn it around if actually all the professions that are being asked to do is up to pre-contract work, do the design and not see the construction work through because they gain no experience. If you are not on site seeing the thing built, interacting with the contractor and the other professionals, you do not know what a properly built wall looks like. We have a number of problems converging here. The model to be using is de-skilling the professionals, the industry as a whole. One last question, and can we start to keep your questions and answers short? I think that most people will be pretty shocked that building control does not ensure that buildings are safe, whether they are schools, office blocks or whatever. Do you agree that that is shocking? Secondly, do you think that there should be a statutory requirement to have a clerk of works for public buildings? I am not sure if there should be a statutory requirement, but there should be a good practice requirement that they should. One looks at issues and the other thing is about the number of clerk of works and how much time is spent on site. The issue about building control, I do not think that, based on the time that they actually spend on the number of officers, any local authority could ask them to guarantee that a building is built properly. If they are going there once a week or once a month or whatever it is, that will never be enough unless you spend a lot, lot more, in which case you would have to increase significantly the building control charges to pay for that. Isn't that exactly what we should be doing? You should be getting clerk of works and architects certifying and going to building control. We have certified that because we have put the right time in. I do not think that it is really practical for local councils to take on that supervision job. They really should be there to be able to affirm, based on strong evidence from independent professionals that the work has been carried out properly. I feel that the bit that we are really dancing around here is the fact that subcontractors and, to some extent, presumably the main contractors have seen a weakness in the system and exploited it to cut corners. That is what it seems like to me. Would you agree? Unfortunately, in some cases, that is the case. I do not think that the intensity set out to cut corners or anybody's intensity sets out to build something badly. However, by cutting the cost of the quality assurance elements, by not having the proper staff, by not having the professionals on site or the clerk of works, we are not investing in the quality assurance. We have cut corners, and that pressure has come from clients, not just from contractors. The public sector has sought to reduce costs and come under pressure to reduce cost of fees. I am an architect and I do not feed bids, but I will tell you that some of the bids that are now submitted by professionals to win work are totally inadequate for them to properly carry out the required work that they do. That is a system that we are still allowed to happen. If you talk to any group of professionals, that is the feedback that you will get from them now, that quite often they are taking work and that they cannot afford to put the time on. That was the evidence given to the inquiry by people. If I might come in on that. When that happens, to square the circle, if you like, services get cut, there will be an agreement between the consultant and the contractor and the post-contract, so the construction-faced services are the things that are likely to get cut to make that fee work. We are saying that the fault is right across the system. If you find the report, it starts off with a client in my recommendations, that is where the faults lie. It goes all the way down to the manufacturer's wall ties, so it is right down the whole system. We really need to think hard about how we build buildings and the quality of infrastructure that we want to produce. I have an architect with a great passion for high-quality design. I have only talked in this report about construction standards. There is the issue of design standards and what it can do to improve lives and make schools better places for kids. That is another area that has also been cut back on through the process that has been used in procurement by putting the contractor in charge of selecting the architect and imposing, potentially in many cases, a design that would be less than optimal because it is better for him to build. If we look at building standards, I have always thought that building standards gave some sort of reassurance to the quality of the build and so on. Clearly, in your report, you are saying that it has no remit on any sort of quality control practice, and it is not intended to provide protection to a client and a contract with a builder. In that case, what is building standards for us? Is this a tick-box exercise? It is a legal requirement for the developer, for the architect and the contractor to comply. It is only good if it is a crime to walk across a road in traffic. Nobody pleases it. Everybody will walk across a road in traffic. There is nobody effectively policing this, and we need systems that put appropriate attention into policing it because the impact of it not being placed is the oxgang-type incident. There were four earlier collapses of walls in schools in Scotland in the last four years, and the connection was not made prior to the oxgang. Oxgang was the fifth collapse of a wall. We are looking at perhaps one narrow piece here—wall ties and walls around it. It is just an example of a whole quality issue. Do we have examples of other issues that have arisen? The other one that I raised in the report is far stopping in these schools. Again, areas that are hard to inspect after and that nobody can see and get closed up are the ones that are most likely to be skimped on because people cannot get away with it. It is not as obvious, and that is where people skimp. There are proposals, and I know one of those groups. I have been encouraged by the very positive way that the Scottish Government has approached this report and in the groups that have set up and have participated in some of that. There are groups looking at how they can identify the high-risk areas. It is one of the recommendations of the report that we look at the high-risk areas that could potentially have impact on the safety of users and the public in general and see if there are mechanisms that we can put into the processes. There are good standard quality mechanisms that will ensure that those areas are checked, whereas other areas such as if the tiles of a floor are not laid particularly flat, you can see that. It is not going to kill anybody unless you trip on the edge of a tile. However, the issues that could impact on the health and safety and life of those people who are using buildings should be seen with much more scrutiny than they are currently. Going back to previous comments, you were talking about the fact that contractors could not deliver at the price that they were bidding for contracts. I did not say that. I said that architects and professional services could not deliver the services in terms of inspection and other duties because the fees are being paid, the bid has been paid at a slow level. That is where the cuts came to make the contracts viable. What other areas—I mean, you were talking about ties and such like in other areas where the defects would be hidden and difficult to find, because that is where the contractors took them away. What other examples could you give? Well, you start off with foundations. You never see a foundation. You start with damprif courses within buildings, but the impact of them might be more disturbance and inconvenience than having to close down buildings as opposed to killing people in some instances. However, there are lots of pieces of work that go out of sight very, very quickly and potentially could not be properly inspected, which could impact on safety. All the mechanical electrical systems to a building, the structure of a building, the fundamental structural elements of the roofing, there are lots of areas in a building. One of my recommendations is that the industry get together from the very sector, sit down and agree what are those high-risk areas, and then apply a more advanced level of scrutiny than it is currently doing. I realise that it is a difficult question to answer, but when do you think the change came that water should be there? This has been growing over the last maybe 20 years. It has been a movement away from, to be critical of my own profession, I think that there was some loss of faith in the ability of architects to control price. I would say nothing about the building I am in at the moment, but there were questions about whether architects could actually manage projects on behalf of the client, and it was felt that contractors would be much more practical and better at doing this job and getting on with it. There is some element of truth in that. The fact is that we have had a pendulum that was out there, and we swung it on its way out here. It needs to get back to the middle where we have a balanced approach to these things. I think that it has been happening maybe over 20 years. The development of the project manager role, the non-specific professional, who now seems to be representing the client, and the real design professionals are somewhere down in the system with much less influence despite the fact that they are the people who have the knowledge about what is essential to the health and safety. They are the people who design the building, but they are not allowed in many cases now to even see what has been built in line with their specification. To go back to the building control issue for a moment, building control spends an awful lot of time on getting warrants approved, getting your warrants signed, and all the time looking at drawings. But what is the point in looking at drawings? If you look at them and then they go out on a site and the contractor does whatever he wants with them, because nobody looks at it any further. The focus needs to be on the site we are actually building. I have said to several building control officers, I interviewed you and they said, I don't think anybody has been killed by a set of drawings falling on them, but they certainly have been by a wall. That is where the real difficulty is happening now. Certainly we have to inspect that people are building and complying with building regulations in their designs, but we put so much energy into that and yet it is totally wasted if we do not then go and ensure that what has been built on site complies with all those stringent requirements that would take months to get approved. I think that it does seem to me that what we are getting told here is that it is a false economy to drive down costs within local authorities around inspection regimes and the way in which projects are managed, planning systems, architects or whatever, but that is more general. I wanted to focus in on what it says about the building industry, because we do know historically that the level of fatalities among construction workers has been high. I am not, in my view, taking a serious list that is shooting in terms of the scandal. It represents what it seems to me to suggest to hear that, if you do not police those people, they will just do whatever they like. Now, there is a level at which it is impossible to police and folk have to self-police. Do you not think, from the building federation, that this is really a bit of a damning review that says, unless you nail those people down, they will hide their work? I have used the phrase very intentionally. I said that you should apply appropriate scrutiny based on the level of risk of the event happening. If you find that having placed your faith, which the procurement models have, in contractors building it properly and doing the quality assurance bit on behalf of the client and finding that that is not there, then you would be stupid to continue doing that process. At that point, you have to apply the scrutiny and do the policing and increase of placing in the areas where you find that that is not working. That is what this has shown, that in the areas of the management of quality of bricklaying across Scotland, we have found major deficiencies. Builders have been charged and held the responsibility for building those walls. It is the contractor's responsibility to build them, but it is the client's responsibility in the public sector to ensure that a builder who he is paying is building it properly. It is not just the builder, it is the whole system that is at fault. I appreciate that and the complexities of that. It just feels to me that if you, as a builder, are building a wall and you just miss out the bit where it is all tied together, at what level are you aware as a professional of what you are doing? Is it because it is subcontracted down so far that gap between laying the brick and what you are building is even lost? I think that we have to be very careful not just to point the finger of blame at the bricklayer who is at the gynaecol face. Obviously, there are issues there if they are deliberately cutting corners, but we have to look at the wider context, the wider culture and the wider system that they are operating in. From my perspective, I have a particular focus on the people issues rather than the technical issues that my colleagues on either side might be better placed to advise on. From my perspective, there are four main people issues. First of all, the level of training that the tradesperson receives initially, which is generally the apprenticeship. Second of all, we have to look at the levels of continuous professional development. Many bricklayers will pass their apprenticeship and can go through a whole career almost without receiving any technical training on bricklaying. I am sure that they will receive plenty of health and safety-specific training, but there is no requirement for them post-completion of the apprenticeship to do any continuous professional development whatsoever. That is an issue. Thirdly, we have to look at the levels of independent supervision and scrutiny of their work. I think that Professor Cole explained that better than perhaps I could. Lastly, it is the way in which the tradespeople are engaged with, and perhaps the employment contract or the labour-only subcontract, or people operating on a self-employed basis. I add to that the way in which they are paid and enumerated. Again, Professor Cole described the circumstances whereby bricklayers are often paid by the amount of bricks that they lay rather than the quality of their work. To my mind, if we create a situation in which we give very little in the way of continuous professional development, we create a perverse incentive to pay bricklayers to lay bricks rather than quality, and then we have a very laxistasical level of supervision. I do not think that we should be surprised if that cocktail combines to create the difficulties that have been seen in that particular report. To be clear, I was not pointing the blame at individual bricklayers, because I think that I am interested in the culture and what kind of pressures there are on somebody just to get through that, and I think that there may be some more understanding of that. Specifically, in your evidence, you talked about the dilution of the skills agenda around apprenticeships and that actual current qualifications are not given the kind of guarantees, as opposed to the autonomy of the tradesperson you might have had in the past. I wonder if you want to say something about that, because I think that that is something that we might want to explore further. If, even while we are providing apprenticeships, they are not creating the skills that we could then have confidence in to resist some of the perhaps the broader pressures that are on an individual tradesperson when they are doing their job. Thank you for the opportunity to speak about the apprenticeship qualifications. I think that that will be the main focus of my contribution to the committee today. First of all, in terms of the technical aspects of the bricklaying apprenticeship, we have asked Professor Cole to come and meet with industry representatives and college lecturers to identify any technical shortcomings in the curriculum, if you like, of the bricklaying apprenticeship. Thankfully, Professor Cole is coming over to speak with us next week to kick off that process. The concerns that we raised in our evidence are in relation to the renewal of the SvQ level 3 qualification that a craft apprentice would receive, including bricklayers. Unfortunately, we have sustained a significant level of frustration over the past eight or nine months in terms of working with our partners, firstly, at the Scottish Qualifications Authority SQA, and secondly, with our sector skills council, CITB, who have been ineffective in representing the industry's views. If I could take the SQA initially, if you would allow, last year, the unilaterally made the decision that the skills test was to be removed from the SvQ qualification. As many people may know, the skills test is the end test, if you like, that a craft apprentice must pass in order to be certificated. The end made the decision to unilaterally introduce portfolios of evidence to the SvQ qualifications without any prior discussion or dialogue with the industry. They also terminated a successful joint awarding arrangement with the industry, so all SvQ crafts certificates carried an industry logo as well. That was terminated without any justification that has been given to the industry for those actions or any indication on how the relationships will move forward from here. Lastly, they are now looking at introducing SvQ level 2 qualifications. What is sometimes referred to as the biblical crafts, which again includes prickling. There has been no consultation with the industry in relation to the introduction of those level 2 qualifications. The body that I represent as a combination of employer representatives, trade unions and employers directly, and they very much see the introduction of level 2 qualifications as a dilution of the skill base and the biblical crafts. The SvQ level 3 qualifications are broad based. Candidates would learn every aspect of prickling, for example, or carpentry and joinery, or painting and decorating. Level 2 qualifications have a much more narrow focus and may concentrate on one or two aspects of each of those crafts. There is a concern in the industry that we lose what is normally referred to as labour market elasticity and the ability for candidates to move from one job to another. We will be writing to SvQA to respond to the comments that you have made us. I would really appreciate if you did. We really struggled with SvQA over the last eight or nine months. They seem to be reluctant to listen to the industry. Again, it is a collaborative voice that we are speaking with. It is trade unions and employers and trade federations. I think that, allied to that, we have sustained difficulties with our sector skills council, CITV, who have, in my view, not properly represented the views of industry. Without wanting to get too far into the technical aspects of the qualification, we managed to overturn SvQA's decision to reject the practice of skills testing, which has been successful in Scotland for 30 years. It took us six months to be able to do that, but the sector skills council then wrote an assessment strategy, which is the document that outlines the processes to undertake skills testing. The way that that document has been written would essentially allow colleges to appoint their own skills test assessor, perhaps to mark their own homework in a way, rather than having an independent level of oversight from industry, whereby skills test assessors are appointed from industry, independently, by SPTC and then allocated to colleges. You could write to us with sort of the detail of this, and then we could tear it up with both those bodies because it does sound like an issue. I would certainly like to do that, and I'm more than happy to do that. If I could finish just very briefly by saying that the arrangements for skills testing are now such that they would undercut the collectively bargain terms of construction apprentices in Scotland. They are all protected by collectively bargain arrangements. The details of the skills testing would undercut that. They would also undercut the time-served period of apprenticeship. They would also allow candidates to get the SvQA level 3 qualification out with apprenticeships. You could simply complete a portfolio and then be coached to pass the skills test, and you could be on a building site working on a school sometime soon. I think that we'd all seek to avoid that process. The latest update that we have is that the industry, again collectively, federations, trade unions and employers are written to SQA to say that we do not wish for the revised craft qualification SvQs to be accredited. We've written to the modern apprenticeship group to say that we do not believe that the revised modern apprenticeship framework and the biblical crafts should be accredited. We've written to CITB to express our concerns in the way that the sector skills council is behaving. That letter is signed by employers who recruit or currently train up to 1,000 apprentices per year. We really are in a concerning situation at the moment that from 1 September onwards there may not be an SvQ qualification or a modern apprenticeship framework for candidates in the biblical crafts to be trained in. Thank you very much for that. Just to say that it would be worthwhile to speak to construction unions around this issue as well, because there must be a question about how that then impacts parts of your members in terms of their confidence to take on these questions in the actual onsite. I suppose that I would be interested in, and maybe it's not for now, to reflect on. There are very specific issues that you are talking about right now about training, but presumably a lot of the people who are onsite have been trained over a longer period of time. Is there a general delusion of skills training over a longer period of time that may have led to this position? It's not something you can answer now, but it might be interesting to look at having moved from what would have been regarded as very high quality craft apprenticeships, but is there, for understandable reasons and decisions, changes to that? What are those changes and what the impacts of them have been? I can give a short answer to that question. The craft apprenticeships in Scotland are still—the candidates still achieve an SvQ level 3 apprenticeship in Scotland. In comparison, south of the border, typically it's an SvQ level 2 qualification. In Scotland, we have fixed four-year term apprenticeships. That's not customary south of the border. We have standard terms and conditions for all the apprenticeships. That's not customary south of the border. We have a final skills test in Scotland. Again, England may be introducing that with trailblazing apprenticeships south of the border at the moment. Construction apprenticeships are not perfect by any stretch of the imagination. That report has highlighted some areas in which we need to improve the technical content of the curriculum. However, when I speak to my counterparts south of the border, they are often envious of the apprenticeship arrangements that we have here in Scotland. They are internationally recognised. My concern is that the developments from SQA and CITB are going to undermine that objective. Thank you very much. One of the things that kept recurring in the presentations that we had as part of the inquiry was the recognition and statement by every main contractor who came to talk to us that there was great difficulty in getting highly qualified, highly experienced bricklayers in the industry. That was part of their problem now. That is to do with the boom and bust nature of our economy, partly due to the seasonal issues in Scotland, when time is very difficult to build bricks in, but that there has been a loss, particularly at the last time, as a huge dip in the economy. So many people left the industry and have not come back. With that, I think that we are in problems. I will not get into the more difficult area of Brexit, but at least 8 to 10 per cent of all the skills in the industry have been coming from Europe over the past while. With that issue, with the fall-off and the apprenticeships with the reduction in the workforce due to the boom and bust situation that we find ourselves in, I find that the industry is in a particularly bad position at the moment. To touch briefly on the point that Paul made about the course itself, I think that we did ask on part of the inquiry about the skills test. We find that it did not really extend much beyond the simple building of relatively plain walls and did not really get into the real fundamental relationship between structural brick accessories as a type that has failed and their importance in the totality of the scheme of things. Again, to criticise architects and engineers, we also find that the information that bricklayers are given when they go on site is not probably in the best format. They are really pointed at the wall and say, you start there and you end there. Quite often, the information is on four or five different documents, different specifications, engineers, drawings or architects drawings, so the industry does not make it easy for bricklayers coming on board. There are problems at all levels in the industry where this quality issue has just been squeezed. I just want to ask a couple of supplementary questions to John Lamont's first two questions, and I'm sure my fears are going to be groundless here. I'm very taken with Daniel who was asking earlier on about the scale of the problems that you've established. It's not just about schools, it's about every bit of wall that goes up around the country. In your experience, tie rods to hold walls together are in the specification. So what the heck happens? Nobody wants us to see that they go in. But there's not an institutional sense that they're deliberately being left out because somebody is trying to skimp on a contract price. No, a couple of instances I reported and we've just told you of instances that we find in Scotland also gable walls with no ties in them. One particular instance given by Clarkerworks working in another sector, not school sectors, said that they actually found a bricklayer building a wall with no ties because he was only there on materials, he was only there in labour only, and the contractor had not provided enough ties to build into the wall, and he was going to be paid in the number of bricks he laid. So he just went on laying the bricks. Now in that particular situation, there was a Clarkerworks on the job, and the Clarkerworks found this out, stopped that the wall was taken down again. If there had been no Clarkworks on that job, that job would be like many of the walls we find where there would be no ties in them. That was because the bricklayer said, I'm not responsible for buying the ties and I can't stand round here because I'm getting paid for at many bricks all day, so I'm going to lay the bricks anyway. But the bit I'm struggling with is the specification says there must be tie rods. Totally. The industry knows that's how you build a wall, and yet it doesn't happen. That's the bit I'm just doing on the sound. It does happen. Let's be fair. The number of occasions of which there's wall ties left out is relatively infrequent. You will get some missing, but the problem is it's the level of embedment. If that's your wall, and this is a brick tie, I was joining the outside wall to that, the requirement is it goes at least 50mm into the wall. What we were finding was, in many instances, it was just touching the wall or not built into the wall at all, or sitting in the cavity, or in some cases missing. The issue in the oxgang school was lack of embedment. You can see the figures are given precisely in the report. They weren't embedded, so if they're only sitting tightly on that and the wind pulls the wall, it'll come off. They need to be embedded at a minimum. Under the regulations, it's a statutory requirement, but it's not just a specification requirement of 50mm and recommended 65mm. In many cases, we find that wasn't the case. They were just sitting there, or they weren't there at all. And that's your clock of works point. That's where a clock of works is at what he would look at, but the quality inspector for the contractor should be doing that. Should we supervise by the contractor employing the subcontractor? And that wasn't happening yet. The procurement models are putting their faith in contractors doing that. To pick up, going back to the financial implications of this, obviously safety is the number one concern about what's happening here, but there's also given that these schools have been built a great deal of public money. I don't know if you can help me, but at the point at which decisions was made about creating new state for local authorities, school estates, was PFI the only game in town at that point? In the case of the 17 schools in Edinburgh, it was the only game in town because they were told they would not get capital funding from the government to build it, and the schools were falling down around them and were no longer fit for purpose. So what I say in my analysis is, well, that was a source of money. They were also told by the government they would get £6 million a year towards the revenue payments on our PFI, which made it affordable to the council, and it was the only way they tell me they could have got it. They're not allowed to borrow independently. They have to get the monetary government. So if government wasn't able to give that money, and the government has used PFI as a way of getting many things done and getting many things done very well, and this is road building, you know, other areas haven't done generally very well, whether you pay more for it than you would if you had the money yourself and did it, it's probably the case you will do, but if people pay interest on mortgages because they want the house, they don't want to wait until they've saved up the few hundred thousand pounds of my house. So that's the way government has been acting for many years now since PFI came in. It's no longer waiting until it has the money itself that's borrowing the money, and the PPP system has been derived from that. I don't see a problem with the concept of borrowing the money. It's the lack of good quality mechanisms within the procurement processes in the contracting and the design and the supervision of the work, and that's where money has been piled out of it, the squeezes on that to increase profits within the system. So is there a risk that some of these school buildings are not going to be fit for purpose and the local authorities are still going to be paying them off at a point at which they might have to be built? The thing about the nature of the work that we looked at, and if you're talking about the brick issues as the main issue, you can't tell after the event whether the wall is safe or not. Until it falls. So we've had five falls in the past four years in walls for these reasons in Scotland that we know of. Not everybody reports falls because people don't want the bad publicity and the companies will tie it up quickly. So schools, I'm sure, don't want that person to know that there's a risk in their schools. I'm not quite so sure on that part. There's a difference between social responsibility of a school in the head teacher and a relationship in the head teacher has with the school community. That's a totally different relationship. But there is a generality that the councils certainly, and we felt that there was some hesitancy in terms of giving information to the inquiry at the start from local councils. He didn't necessarily want their school to be talked about. They were hoping to manage it appropriately within their own situation. So if it's due to the collapse of walls, unless they've gone through the processes of checking that we're recommending in the report and then made good any defects, there's always a risk. And I'm sure that there's many buildings have been checked. I'm sure that that is the case. It can happen again, but I don't know the frequency with which it will happen. The other thing is there's a thing called safety factors in the design of all structures. So a wall will sit there generally of its own volition, unless something happens to it. So you need a winder and some other factor. Many walls which aren't built right because they haven't been subjected to the maximum wind loading are still there. But if you were to get increasing storms in areas which have been there, you could get walls coming down. So when a defect has been discovered in a particular school, what's done to look at the take me through the procedure, what we've done to look at the rest of the school estate that was built at the same time or by the same contractor? We asked all local authorities and the Scottish Features Trust asked all local authorities to examine their schools and to take a risk-based analysis process as to if they find, if they looked and found, then look further. If you do sufficient additional checks and find it safe enough, then it's probably reasonable to stop. Edinburgh is still doing that on their other buildings and I think it's in the press that another four buildings were found this week, which had the same defects. How independent are those inspectors? Totally, because it's been done by the clients though. It's not done by the people who built the schools. I want to pick up a little bit on what Gillian Martin is saying there. I asked the panel whether they considered that the inspection activity in relation to the specific problems identified in Edinburgh is adequate across the school estate and widen that out to other facilities in Scotland. Do you want me to take that energy? I haven't been involved in the inspections at all. I am aware and have seen responses from each of the local authorities. I wrote to all local authorities as part of the inquiry and asked them to report to me all incidents that they had found. At that time, at the time of the report, people were still doing some of these exercises and I said that Edinburgh is still doing testing. I can't possibly comment on how comprehensively the local authorities have done that. I know that they have been asked to test in a rigorous fashion. It's impossible to say, and I think that predominantly the focus has been on the schools estate, whereas this is an issue of construction of walls. Those walls could be in any public building or any private building. We just don't know. I think that what we are saying is that people need to take reasonable responsibilities as owners of buildings and the public sector particularly takes it. I think that there is an onerous duty on them to do this, to look properly at their facilities and ensure for themselves and to confirm back to their constituents that they have done this. The main issue in my mind is looking forward to saying that we should ensure that no further buildings are built with this level of defects and risk associated with them. The measures need to be adopted and enforced by the industry itself, which has taken a very responsible view. In terms of feedback, I have had nobody throw a brick at me yet, although I haven't been back to home yet today, but I'll see. The industry has taken a very responsible position in terms of reexamining itself. I don't have any option to do that, but I think that the Government and the public authorities and building control and clients have to say that they haven't been doing it properly. We need to take more interest in this and review the procurement models that we are using and see how we supplement them with best practice models that are totally available anywhere. However, what you mean is that you have to invest in quality, you have to invest in assurance. If the first thing you cut is assurance checks, the one thing you can be sure of is that you are not going to get quality, and that is what we have done. I ask that he is a parent of a child who attends a PPP school. I am sure that most the MSPs around this table have constituents who are attending PPP schools. We have looked at wall ties, we have looked at header ties, the bed joint reinforcement and the fire stop. Do we know that it is not another risk of another major defect in schools? Can we get that reassurance or can you give that reassurance? I think that this comes back to the issue that I raised earlier, but some sort of structured process of determining what were the risk elements in construction, particularly those that need to be checked and can't be checked, and I think that the industry is having that discussion at the moment as to whether it is practical to do so. Some of those things are very difficult after the event to go back in, and the money involved in taking something apart to prove that it wasn't built wrong in the first place isn't really practical either. It has to be some sort of risk-based assessment with professional guidance, and I think that that's the professional guidance that was missing in the first place maybe that might have prevented us having to do this now. How do we get that independent risk assessment of the potential difficulties of dangers that are in our schools or under other public buildings? By removing the potential of conflict of interest, by not having people who are getting paid for doing something, the people who check it, so any school teachers amongst you, particularly here, you don't generally let the kids mark their own homework. That's what we've been doing with the contractors. Sorry. There is, in Liz Smith, a share earlier on about the inspection regime and not just the inspecting educational process but the inspecting fitness purpose of educational establishments. There are models out there, and the chain that Professor Cole is saying, for example, every year every school will have a fire risk assessment that will be carried out independently. Local fire service will come in and do that, and they will potentially close down areas of your building if you're not going to conform with what they are saying. There is a model there that chimes with that independent view of fitness for purpose for a school—any other public building, I suppose. My organisation would very much encourage it or be involved in encouraging that sort of view of the way in which we examine the school. The key, mind you, is not to find it out afterwards, but to stop it happening in the first place, and that's what we've been making in the shortcuts. I would pick up on that. The fire risk assessment is just one thing that needs to be done on an annual basis. We're focusing here rightly on new construction and the failures that are apparent in that. Buildings, whether they are schools, tenement buildings, office buildings or other public buildings, deteriorate. As I said earlier, we need to elevate maintenance and the reality that we need to spend a lot of money maintaining our buildings and keeping them safe. We need to elevate that way up the priority list. I mean, I've done quite a lot of work with the RICS on a policy paper calling on cross-party support to encourage tenemental homeowners to engage with their buildings and to maintain them. It's their statutory responsibility. Our intention was to take it from tenement buildings, which is the obvious big problem at the moment, to other buildings, and schools are no different. We must elevate maintenance up the agenda, because we can talk about new block walls being a potential hazard and danger. A lot of our buildings are over 100 years old, and I haven't had any level of professional inspection. Again, an awful lot of people will turn to a builder to go up and inspect the roof and the chimney after high winds. Again, the builder has a commercial interest. He's not going to be impartial. Again, maintenance of buildings, whatever they are, whatever age they are, whatever their use is, whatever their ownership is, is an absolutely fundamental issue if we want to keep buildings economically sound and more importantly safe for their users, their owners and the people who pass by them. Thank you for that. I've got one last question for Jim, but I'm sure that most builders will do the work that's required as opposed to solely be looking to see how much money they can make from every call. Jim, can I ask you what's the role of head teachers in the design process of school buildings? Has evolved and has developed over the phase of PPP and into Scottish Futures Trust, from my own personal experience, involved almost integrally as head teacher of secondary school in Dundee when we started to look at the redesign of the building, and that was not the common practice in the earlier phases of this. It's something that, in relation to the direction of travel, engagement of the head teacher, engagement of the school community through the parent council is becoming much more prevalent just now. It's much more of a standard practice than it ever was before, where it was very much when PPP was the only game in 10. The contract was for 10 secondary schools. What you tended to get was 10 secondary schools to a model. It's much more specific now to individual schools and individual school needs. It's still a way to go, but it's much more interactive, much more engaging and much more flexible than it was. Would you say that that's uniform in terms of the head teacher of the school cohort that would be involved in the design? In the latest phase of secondary school building, I can't perhaps comment primary school building quite so much, but within secondary school building it has become the norm rather than the exception. Thank you very much for that. That was a really worthwhile session and I really appreciate all your time. We will be talking among ourselves and we'll be deciding what our father will actually take. Thank you very much. Oh yeah, but no going into a private session.