 warmed up to the fourth meeting in 2024 of the local government, housing, and planning committee. I remind all members and witnesses to ensure that their devices are on silent and that all other notifications are turned off during the meeting. The first item on our agenda today is to decide whether to take items 3-4 in private. Are members agreed? They are all agreed. The second item on our agenda today is to take evidence from two panels of witnesses ond hefyd, cladding remediation Scotland Bill with the first panel taking the form of around table. On the panel today, we are joined in the room by Phil Diamond, who is the managing director at Diamond & Co. Justin Fleming, who is the policy and public affairs officer at the Chartered Institute of Buildings. Gary Strong, who is the head of professional practice at the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors, Ricks. Kate Swinburne, who is the associate director at OFR Consultants. We are joined online by Alan Macaulay, building standards hub pilot director at local authority building standards Scotland, and Jim McGonagall, who is joining us from the institution of fire engineers. I welcome our witnesses to the meeting. I am going to briefly begin our conversation this morning by inviting everyone to introduce themselves. I am Arianne Burgess, MSP for the Highlands Islands region, and a convener of the committee. I am the folks I am, Willie Coffey. I am the member of the Parliament for Comanic in Irvine Valley. I am Kate Swinburne. I am an associate director at OFR Consultants. I am a chartered fire engineer working on a range of different fire safety issues, including those related to external walls. I am Maree McLean, MSP, I represent the Clydebank and MoGuy constituency in the west. I am Philip Diamond. I am a chartered building surveying, where I own a chartered building surveying practice. With my co-director, Steve Brookard, a chartered fire engineer, we are active in the external wall and cladding issues north and south of the border. I am Jocelyn Flemingham, the policy and public affairs officer for Scotland at the Chartered Institute of Building. My remit is to advocate on the public's interests on all matters related to the building environment. Good morning. I am Miles Briggs, MSP for Lothian region. I am Pam Gosall, member of the Scottish Parliament for the West region. Good morning. I am Gary Strong, I am a chartered building surveyor. I specialise in fire safety, so I am the head of fire safety for RSS globally. I am based in the RSS HQ in London. I am Steffi Calhoun, MSP for Odinston and the Bale South constituency in Lanarkshire. We are now going to turn to questions from members. Please indicate to me if you would like to come in to respond to a member's question or to respond to something else that somebody else has said. For those of you who are joining online, please indicate if you would like to respond to a question by putting an R in the chat function. Some of our questions are directed specifically to somebody, potentially, because you have got the expertise on that. The intention is that there should be a free-flowing conversation rather than a question-answer session, so let's see how we get on with that. I will begin with a couple of questions. I would be interested to get your perspective on the fact that the Scottish Government has not publicly consulted on the proposals in the bill and whether your organisations have had any opportunity to input into its development and if so how effective has the engagement been in improving the bill that we see before us. Maybe I will start with Jocelyn because you are right there before me. Ultimately, I think this is an important and welcome first step on the road to addressing Scotland's cladding issues. The CIOB is a member of the Scottish Government cladding stakeholder working group, so we have had some opportunity to feed into basically the wider cladding remediation programme of work to date. That being said, as I'm sure we'll get into much later, a lot of the detail is left to secondary legislation that's not on the face of this bill in its current form, so I think one of our biggest points is that consultation needs to be absolutely robust with industry moving forward as we start to flesh out really important details in implementation. I think we've had a conduit through the cladding remediation working group. That being said, I think there's certainly room for improvement in terms of the level of transparency and the level of consultation to date, and I think that's one thing that we would urge the committee to do and to ensure is full consultation moving forward with the industry. We highlighted in our response even possibly an indicative timeline with some caveats and reflexibility that would give us an indication of when we might be able to feed into consultations and dialogue moving forward. OK, that's very helpful. Thanks, Phil. Have you been able to be engaged? Yes, I took ten or so of the MSPs around development in North Edinburgh and spent an hour or so sharing a number of points on that. We work on a daily basis with the team and the directorate, and we've been working alongside the directorate in the wider ScotGov now for probably three, four years as part of that process. I think that our business is an awful lot to offer. We've got a very comprehensive database of what is out there, and we've been very active in Scotland particularly. We've been trying hard to educate as we go. Great, thanks. Your question was around consultation and engagement. We've been a bit involved in the initial stages of the single building assessment development a couple of years ago. In terms of the bill in particular, as a business we did respond, but it felt like the time that we had to review the detail and it was pretty limited. We're sort of made aware of it. Phil, a post that you put on LinkedIn was when we first became aware of the sort of request for comments on the bill. I would agree that there's still quite a lot of work to be done. We certainly had quite a few comments on it. OK, great. Thanks, Gary. How about your organisation? Thank you. We, again, like Justin said, we've been involved in the clouding stakeholder remediation group and other committees like ministerial working group, et cetera, so on valuation issues going back quite a few years, actually, working with officials here, which has been really important, particularly with our experience in England around EWS1 and the whole clouding, the possible clouding issues, obviously, off to the Grenfolds on fire. So we have been heavily engaged with the proposals coming forward, so that's good. I mean, it is really important that there is industry consultation about the proposals going forward around this, so we would welcome that continuing. Particularly, I think, our experience in England with the Building Safety Act and then the raft of secondary legislation that's come out, the regulations that followed that, is that sometimes we've experienced the Building Safety Act, for example, being very, very top-heavy in terms of its detail, and that's tripped up the department, the deluxe department a little bit, with then secondary legislation coming out to try and define things. So I think, my plea would be that the clouding remediation bill, if it's just going to talk about clouding, needs to be quite high-level, and then the secondary legislation, the regulations, then define the detail. Things like, for example, I see in the proposed questions, possibly around PAS-980, the SBA, et cetera, you don't want to define that too tightly in the primary legislation, because that would tie you up in knots that need to have to change the primary legislation. So our view has always been that make sure that goes into the secondary legislation, where you can change things in the regulations much easier and much quicker. Okay, thanks, that's very helpful. Now, I'm going to go online. Alan has building standards. Have you been able to be involved from the Building Standards Scotland perspective? Good morning. Good morning, convener. Yes, labs is represented on the clouding remediation working group, so we attend those regular meetings and our member on that updates their labs membership in due course. Our attendance at that particular meeting is very much to represent the role of the local authority verifier, and that very much comes into its own when we are talking about the application of building one submissions and the verifier assessment of that. So very much keeping a watching brief on the development of the bill, and happy to answer any questions on the specific role of the local authority verifier as and when you come up through discussions. Thank you. Brilliant, thanks very much. Jim McGonagall, how about the institution of fire engineers? Have you been involved? Good morning, and thank you for giving us the opportunity to attend today. The Institute of Fire Engineers in Scotland has been very much involved in the whole cladding issue since it's arisen and been involved in pilot studies and such of buildings. I've had external cladding on them that's had to be removed. Regarding the actual bill itself, we didn't provide a collective response. That was down to individuals to respond, but I think we have attended the various meetings from the cladding remediation unit and have got very much a watching brief as we go forward. Okay, great. I'm going to stay with you for my second question and then come back to anyone who wants to. I won't go round necessarily, but anyone who wants to come in on my second question. So it's about the focus of the bill, the scope of it. I'd be interested to hear what your thoughts are, Jim, on the bill. Should it be solely focusing on cladding remediation or should it extend to cover all fire safety issues or even all significant building safety matters? The bill itself is definitely to be welcomed and it will have challenges and I think this is one of them. It's very much the case of what is the scope of the bill and it's been driven by the tragic events that happened at Grenfell and the need to remove cladding that could put owners at risk and have rapid fire spreads across the building and that's what we want to mitigate as soon as possible and to reassure residents that may live in these buildings as well as other impacts that this could have on them. So that's very good, that's very clear. If we're going into buildings then to look at them and to determine are they safe by its very nature you will be picking up other things within that building, within the common areas of the buildings and such. I think the reality is that no matter what building you go to if you look at it you always will find faults, things that are maybe not quite right. So if you have a fire engineer going out to a building they are going to pick up other matters. The problem is at what point does these other matters become more of a problem than the cladding itself and that's something I hear what Gary Strong was saying is that the detail is probably better to follow on but I think the scope itself still needs to be clarified a bit in the bill so that we can identify what is the typical level of safety that we're looking for. For example you could end up assessing a building with cladding on it and determine that it's tolerable but because of the problems that you've uncovered elsewhere within the building you think that they are more of a risk so really the two parts of it I do think have to go together but the outcome of that will delay the process. Thanks very much, I'm going to go to Kate and then Jocelyn. I would reflect a lot of what Jim said there and I think it really depends on, yeah, like Jim said, the sort of scope of the bill so I can appreciate that for example insurers and lenders may be more focused on cladding, absolutely not my area of expertise but I know that's something that they're quite interested in but just like Jim said if I go to look at a building cladding is just one part of that and that's recognised in our building regulations for example we've got 15 mandatory standards and by pulling out just the cladding to look at it it's a bit of a concern that that prioritises just one issue as being more important than the others so for example if you look around a building that the cladding might have some issues what if you've got significant compartmentation features or you don't have adequate protection to your stairs, your firefighting facilities might not be acceptable if we then sort of spend our money remediating just the external walls sort of what happens to the other provisions and are you leaving residents with issues that they have to figure out how to deal with themselves so I think for me it really depends what we're trying to address with the bill, are we trying to address just cladding and that's fine and then that's clear but what about all the other stuff so for me as a fire engineer I wouldn't consider one issue as a whole these things are all really interlinked and I think the single building assessment approach speaks to that because you do a fire risk assessment you look at the whole building but you're sort of focusing your attention on remediating the external wall that doesn't quite sort of make sense to me you sort of need to consider the building as a whole Thank you, Jocelyn Yeah thank you, I'd ask for the points about you know we need to determine exactly what this scope is I think one of the reasons we're so you know strongly advocating for for their consultation with the industry is I think we need to proceed very carefully and think about some of what might be unintended negative consequences that come from expanding the scope of the single building assessment so obviously safety is paramount and we want to ensure the safety of various aspects of the buildings that we have in Scotland, the homes we have in Scotland and I'm conscious that I think that the cladding conversations that we're having right now in the single building assessment conversations have maybe highlighted a related adjacent issue which is we're not really adequately monitoring the safety of other aspects of buildings in Scotland in the absence of certain mechanisms and frameworks and regulations that exist in other jurisdictions I think we are also part of the Scottish Government's Tenement Maintenance Working Group and particularly with RICS, a subgroup that's looking at possibly developing a five-yearly building passport that would look very much like a sort of building MOT as you've suggested, computer, previously During those discussions very difficult conversations have arisen about what we might do if we hand a group of people in a tenement building for instance with mixed ownership a report that says that they have significant safety issues that need to be addressed right away In the absence of things like sinking funds or building management and factors we might be handing people a very real problem to address and I think we need to be thinking about the possible insurance and lending implications for those people and we already have a cohort of homeowners in Scotland who are facing challenges in ensuring and selling and financing their homes we need to be really careful about whether or not we might be looking at expanding that cohort, I'm not a lawyer, I'm not suggesting that we are I think there are very real questions that need answered here I think colleagues have also raised during the course of these discussions if we extend the single building assessment much further than what would be within the remit of developers to have a responsibility to pay for an address in terms of external wall cladding we also then need to think about what that does for the cladding assurance register so I think it's my colleagues at Homes for Scotland have suggested if 90% of a building has been remediated the developer has fulfilled their legal obligation and financial obligation to remediate cladding but the single building assessment has also identified other safety issues does that building then go on the cladding assurance register because that work has been done? is that held off until fire doors are addressed? so I think I'm not necessarily answering you or coming in on where the scope should be I'm saying there are very real questions that we don't have answers for right now and I think the way that we roll these things out in the order that we roll these things out in is really important and we maybe need to be looking at having a parallel discussion about wider building safety challenges we're facing in Scotland and maybe take this cladding piece as a standalone first step as part of a much larger discussion so just to raise additional questions and again the importance of consultation and thinking about how we roll this out thank you for that anyone else want to come in? Gary so I think the issue really post-cranfield tower immediately after the Cranfield tower fire everybody was obviously focused on the possible cladding issue and we said really from the get go that this is a holistic assessment of the building it's not just about the cladding and in some instances the cladding actually isn't necessarily the issue but there are other more important fire safety issues within some of these blocks which got uncovered as part of the investigation so to reinforce what Jocelyn was saying the cladding remediation bill is a good first step but my worry is the feedback we've had and we've been at this for six and a half years or so since the Cranfield tower is that we've uncovered a lot of problems when we started to investigate the cladding as part of fire risk assessments of external walls now on to PAS 980 not necessary to do with the cladding or even the installation behind it but lack of fire stopping and cavity barriers and that type of thing and then wider issues within the building such as Kate was saying that's the issue which I know London Fire Brigade and others have raised repeatedly with us is that how do we address those issues if you're just going to be dealing with the cladding on its own so I think our experience is that it's a good first step but my fear is that you're going to still possibly be leaving residents in homes that may be unsafe the fire risk assessment of the external walls informs the overall fire risk assessment of the whole building and there's go very much hand in hand and you can't really have one without the other so I think that's an important consideration obviously in England they've gone further with the whole building safety act is addressing structural safety as well as fire safety because they thought that was important and it's a question of how far you go with this in terms of what the single building assessment standard is going to be but I do worry if you're just going to focus on cladding remediation just very narrowly about the other issues that might exist in the block just before I bring Phil and Alan in so I'll bring this up with you but I know others have said it this is a good first step is there a sense from the work you've been doing on the cladding working group and being involved with the directorate that there's more to come and that we need to do this because there's an urgency to get this moving I understand that there is difficulty if you're going to go into the building and assess it in the first place let's do the whole package I'm just wondering if we're just seeing this piece of legislation as a committee and is there more in the pipeline being considered? Well personally I can't say that we've seen that come forward to us we've only been involved really in cladding like the cladding remediation stakeholder group has just been involved in cladding per se with input from lots of us into those meetings hasn't it so I don't see so far unless I've missed something any work going on further beyond that I mean the single building assessment is a great initiative because the difference in legislation from Scotland to what it is in England and Wales etc and a different ownership so that was a great step forward I think it was a great leap forward in terms of doing the single building assessment but I think in terms of excuse me the overall remediation how do you move forward and some of the challenges you might get around exactly what the specification is for the remediation because it starts going beyond just the cladding itself if you start going into fire breaks and things that are beyond the cladding, beyond the external wall where do you stop with this and I think that's where the difficulty you're going to run into with this so the devil's always in the detail isn't it every building's different there's no generic answer to a lot of this but I do as I say fear that as you start getting into this what do you specify the developer so your ask of the developer is he just going to replace the outside cladding or is he going to replace all the other issues with the building as well so I think that's the type of thing that I would worry about and we also heard last week from developers that there's an issue of doors may have been changed so that's beyond their scope of how they left the building so I'm going to bring in Phil and Alan and Justin you indicated you want to come back in if I could share our experience we took one property right through the process in Aberdeen, on behalf of Scott Governey co-prypriders started the SPA full fire risk assessment tendered, remediated externally and what that threw up was really what the guys are talking about we have a raft of things that need to happen internally solving the external part of it is actually quite it's quite straight forward in a lot of cases but even to this day we've still been unable to get consent from the co-prypriders to go into the common areas and address a small pile of stuff that was identified in the fire risk assessment so it's quite tricky in Scotland to go inside a lot of these common areas and common parts and take people's front doors out and upgrade the frames and fire stop and all that stuff so it's quite a difficult thing to scope and it shouldn't focus solely on the external cladden albeit the external cladden is probably the easier bit to fix it's when you come to the internals that's what the detail really is like compartmentation and fire stop and systems and services and life safety systems all of that the devil is in the detail like somebody said with that and it's very difficult my slight concern is that if that's all lumped into the one ask I don't think we'll get anything done in Scotland I think we have to stream this in some way break it up, parcel it acknowledge that it all needs done but I think if you try to do everything you'll end up doing nothing and it slows the whole programme down and that's a concern of mine and I think we need to look at a different way of tackling that you need to do the building holistically but it's quite often different contractors that would do the internal works anyway but I think we get we tie ourselves up in knots and nothing gets done because we're trying to do everything and there needs to be a way of splitting that process okay, so if there had been the ability in place to go into the building to remediate all those things that you've listed as part of this pilot you would have gone ahead and done that to see the whole, to demonstrate a whole experience of a building being completely remediated that's a combination of reasons why that's not happening it's legal it's consent, it's funding it's all sorts of things that was a relatively small building eight storeys high up in Aberdeen it took a wee while to get around it and resolve the cladding and we were constantly trying to address the internal issues as well but even to this day we've still not been able to consent to do it so consent and having the legal ability to go into the internal common parts in Scotland and fix, for example, fire those who are privately owned by a flat owner so we've got a different type of problem there that needs to be covered off somehow but I think if we're trying to do my concern with this whole process is if we tie those two things rigidly together we won't get anything done we have to start with the major risks alright, thanks for that Alan I'm just building a little bit on what Phil was saying there is I think it's important to separate out issues far from safety issues that are a result of issues with construction including cladding remediation in that regard and take that separately from a failure related through the age of a building and recognition that building regulations mature over time and continue to mature over time you know when you look at the range of the age of buildings that people live in in Scotland it's huge and it's insurmountable to an extent and when you consider the direction of travel and building regulations recently 2019 we introduced a requirement for two escape stairs in buildings over 18 metres in 2021 there's a requirement now for suppression systems in all new flats so I think you have to this is where the value of the single building assessment and methodology is a key role in making sure that we use the resources available to address the areas that are critical to life safety proportionately and recognise that all the buildings don't by their nature meet all current building regulations so I think you need to look at those two different areas separately Thanks Alan, that's actually really helpful it's kind of how do you parse this out and how do you look at something and it's important to find the right way as close as possible to actually be looking at this Jocelyn, you wanted to come back Just to echo what Phil is saying in terms of your initial question was about this being a first a good first step to us looking at the building safety act it's obviously a huge piece of legislation that we can't adopt wholesale in Scotland for a number of reasons, not the least of which is our 10 year system is incredibly difficult and I know through other parallel work streams access is a huge challenge so I think that's how the CIOB has looked at it it sort of tackles some of the challenges that arise from Scotland's 10 year system but I think in terms of looking at the wider challenges that have been raised during this committee's evidence sessions we're sort of saying it's probably a first step because there are also these other pieces we know we need to look at but also just to sort of echo the points Alan's made about the way that we maybe look at parsing this out in terms of challenges that arise from construction and then the sort of things that happen over time but just to say our first step was sort of 10 year based initially on what won't work that we know that we need to do both in cladding specifically and building safety more widely Okay, thanks for that I'm going to bring in Jim and then Kate and then I'm going to bring in another colleague with questions Okay Thank you I just wanted to clarify just before we moved forward when we were talking about all these different fire risks within buildings and whether if we don't address the fire risks that are encountered in parts of the building are problems with cavity barriers it's just to highlight that actually the fire statistics in Scotland do not highlight that we have a problem in Scotland and that there's less than 1% of fires spread beyond the flat of fire origin since Scotland has taken responsibility for the fire stats there's been no fatalities beyond the flat of fire in the last 10 years there's a 57% reduction for flats above 6 stories a number of fires and such and a lot of this is to do with different measures that are brought into the handbooks the great work that's been done with it now extending the coverage of fire alarms and detections to all domestic buildings and such so as Alan said there there are additional measures get added over the years to the regulations and you start off your single story building where you don't really have anything and as you go up in height in buildings additional fire safety measures are added to the buildings your fire rated doors, your alarm detection your sprinkler systems and such there's actually a lot of redundancy to an extent within the fire safety measures within the buildings areas that aren't installed as a manufacturer on such would expect it doesn't mean that overall the building is putting the residents at risk and the fire stats do seem to reflect that although obviously you wouldn't be complacent and I think Phil is spot on when he talks about when you're tying the two together it really does slow things up I don't know how to deal with that external wall system and such and to bring in people to deal with it but it's a whole different case for problems within the buildings however they got there was a developer problem as it works it's been carried out afterwards from residential impacts or whatever so that is a real problem and I think so the single building assessment by its very name indicates not just external cladding it's been looked at, it's the overall building and in Scotland we don't have a fire risk assessment process for the common areas of a building and so I can agree with Phil whereas we have the two bits looked at separately or in some way registered separately and that's where the past 9980 process comes in because it looks at the building holistically and then at the end we'll give you a result and mitigation measures for how that building should be addressed okay, thank you very much I'm going to bring in Kate making a slightly different point so taking on board the issues with access and who's responsible will develop or is it issue that's come about over time with changing legislation or expectations I guess it's worth making the point that for me you can quite separate out the external wall in all cases so for example it might be that you assess the external wall it poses some kind of risk but the only way to address that risk isn't necessarily just remediating the external wall it might be that there's something you could do internally that will be sufficient to address that risk posed by the external wall it might be that money is better spent reducing the risk in the whole building than spending money on your external wall having a very low risk external wall but would that money have been better placed addressing a different risk in the building or would doing something else have reduced the risk posed by the external wall to a tolerable level so I totally appreciate it makes sense in some context to separate them out because it will get work done on I just don't think that you can separate them out in terms of achieving an adequate level of safety for residents okay, I'm going to move on that's been a helpful opening discussion around the scope of the bill and what's in and out I think there's some interesting bits that have come emerged out of that conversation I'm going to bring in Willie Coffey thanks very much, good morning everybody I wanted to ask for your views and whether you think that some of the terminology used in the bill is acting as a barrier to faster, quicker progress Over the recent weeks we've heard from a variety of people giving evidence developers included and they cited things like you need to define a bit more clearly what we mean by a development what we mean by premises and what we mean by risk to human life and what that means from whether you think that those are genuine barriers to progress and speedier progress and I think that Gady you kind of mentioned it in your opening remarks as well about let's put not too much of the definition in the primary legislation but clarifying define more clearly in secondary legislation so I could maybe come to you first to ask what your views are on this it is a good point because people try to interpret words to their own advantage and so that's what we've seen happen right it is an issue and hence the reason just going back to England again with the building safety act hence the reason there's secondary legislation that try and define some of these things like what is a high risk building and then how do you measure the height even of a high risk building so there's even secondary legislation around how do you measure the height and I think the difficulty is that if you put too much in say into that primary legislation then people start to try and twist the meaning of it too much but you can nail that down I would suggest in the secondary legislation much tighter which is exactly what D-Luck have done in the building safety act but if you're clear that the cladding remediation bill applies to buildings over 11 metres residential buildings that's what your definition of premises is and you put that into the bill which is what the building safety act does for example then you're clear so that there's no kind of trying to get out of it by any parties if that's what they choose to try and do but if you do still have an issue with it then you can nail it down in the secondary legislation so that's where I was coming from is to try and define that tighter but if you try and define it too tightly in your primary legislation that's where I think you can get difficulties where again with the building safety act and difficulties with the drafting originally and they've had to bring out secondary legislation to correct what they meant so I think that's the kind of experience I was trying to portray around that but your secondary legislation is the key to it really because if you can bring that out quickly and to Phil's point about you don't want to slow this up there has to be an impetus to keep going with the cladding remediation because we're coming up to nearly 70 years soon since Grenfell Tower is being safe so you don't want to get bogged down too much and the building safety act is a really complex piece of legislation really overly complex almost really so we struggle with it those of us who deal with it on a day to day basis struggle with it so you get something which is 200 pages long and then after secondary legislation you don't really want to go there I would suggest you want to get something moving quickly to get on with it and then if you find an issue thanks for that Gary any other views on whether the terminology we're using in the bill to define these things is actively moving a barrier to quicker progress or does the people not hear that view would even be helpful for you my suggestion would be that people that are challenging the definitions and things like that at this point we don't really want to be over analysing we need to get things moving and in Scotland as Gary says I think there's time in the secondary legislation to create a glossary and let the wordsmith people define these things in a great deal of detail but I don't think now is the time for that and I can't imagine having read the bill that it's a barrier for people at the moment I think that's maybe not the case I'd echo the points that Gary's raised in terms of looking at this through secondary legislation and regulation that allows us to be a lot more responsive and flexible where we need to and develop these things over time I think inevitably we will come across challenges as these things roll out as we go through this process and being able to change those things and adapt to them I think is really important my understanding is that the law society has in their response raised some challenges with definitions and things and they are certainly better positioned than I am to comment on the sort of legal ramifications that we define things but to me all the more reason as Phil has said we need to get on with us we need to start making some progress for people who are living in buildings with problematic cladding right now so I think again welcome first step to allow us the time to really think carefully about how we define things how we roll these things out so basically I would echo the points that Gary's made and Phil as well and online we're going to bring in Alan just to use the building Scotland Act as an example we have the primary legislation which is the building Scotland Act 2003 but we have extensive secondary legislation including the building regulations document themselves which is secondary legislation again that allows for updating of that document on a regular basis so that's more efficient I think what jumped out for me in the bill is that it does appear to be fairly light in terms of the fine terms within its 67-20A and the one that Gary jumped out in that was the definition under the SPA of the height of the building and that's something that from Bill Stanner's point of view is clearly and well defined in the bill regulations so I think there is the opportunity to narrow down the definition and define these terms a lot more already existing within the Bill in Scotland Act which would be fit for purpose so we can learn lessons from the architecture of the Bill in Scotland Act and apply to the cladding invadiation bill that is required to Thank you for that In terms of the cladding assurance register we also heard some calls at previous committees that buildings should be added to that at a much earlier stage in the assessment remediation process instead of when the works were completed which seems a little bit odd to me but could I ask for any views on that particular point Phil? Pick that one up We've got a very healthy database of a portfolio in Scotland and a lot of it is absolutely fine The cladding assurance register to me could actually start with the stuff that is green and could just go straight into the system To me it's quite obvious we should be doing some kind of mass scale portfolio assurance type thing a fairly simple report get an army of surveyors, engineers, architects whatever go round and capture the basic data some high level criteria probably the first one is height because in England we've got four different definitions of height Gary so that's really the first thing to resolve what is in scope and what is out of scope but there is a lot of stock out there that is actually quite good and there's a lot of stock out there that is actually blighted just by things that aren't particularly risky there's an exercise I think to accelerate the programme to get all the good stuff clarified and put into a cladding assurance register in there that the more difficult stuff needs to be addressed and added as it goes but to me it's a gigantic triage exercise in the first instance Okay, thanks Phil Yeah, I think that's interesting actually Phil on something that Jim and I have discussed separately is that lots of buildings and we're only putting the ones on there that have been through that single building assessment process there will be a lot of our existing stock that will either not get on there or will take a long time to get there because nobody's looking at them in particular so I do think that's a good point I would say it sort of depends in terms of when should they go on like what we're trying to achieve with the cladding assurance register is it to support sort of lending and insurance and they're so kind of out with my expertise but maybe they do only want to know in that case about when a building is adequately safe but if it's also being used to communicate to people living in the buildings or others about how safe their building is or what the current status of their building is and that single building assessment process then perhaps it needs to be on earlier so for me when does it go on I think it kind of depends on exactly how that's going to be used and who's going to have access to any other views on that Gary yes I'm just going to come in on that because I think our experience south of the border is that you need certainty about all these buildings and so Phil's point actually is that there's an awful lot of safe buildings out there but people just don't know and so sometimes you can get a building which is blighted because they just don't know so transparency about the condition of a building is really important so all those buildings which are safe and those buildings which have been identified perhaps might be problematic but they're in the process of going through the SBA and eventually to remediation etc there needs to be complete transparency because the valuers, the insurers, the lenders etc will need to know that information that's been one of the real issues we've struggled with over the past six years or so is not knowing what the state of play is with a particular building and so I would urge transparency about all buildings and if you can put it up on to a public register and it's publicly accessible so you can see the information that helps enormously, the industry to keep moving it helps the insurers, it helps the lenders it helps the valuers in particular because they're not trying to search around for information which can completely stall any lending or any sales or purchases of properties OK, thank you, Roxie. Any other views on that or will I move on to that? I wanted to echo at those points exactly in terms of both transparency and if we're trying to provide assurance to people I think one of the challenges with things we need to consider with waiting until a building's been remediated is there's a lot of grey area in there for residents and other people that just simply don't have any information until it's finished so I think we need to look at that very carefully and I think to Kate's point it's about trying to establish what it is we're trying to achieve with an assurance register and I think that will maybe direct when things go on a little bit is who is this for and what are we trying to convey to people but I think Phil's made an excellent point about triaging and putting up the information that we do have already so yeah, I don't have anything to stand. I don't know where you guys are at with what you think the size of the problem is in Scotland but we've been running an exercise and we reckon that there's something like 7,000 buildings that are in scope in Scotland and we reckon out of that there's about 80% of them that if they were going through the pass process would probably be tolerable risk and would be okay so it leaves you with a 40% chunk of the portfolio that's going to range from having a minor problem to a major problem and I think we could collectively in the industry get to a position where we know whether buildings are red amber green fairly quickly we've created a bit of a problem for ourselves with the SBA because it's a binary thing and it's a red or a pass or a fail so by its nature everything's going to fail because there's always going to be something wrong on a building and if professionals are allowed to exercise their judgement we've all got a lot of experience I think that's what we should be doing we should be assessing these buildings on a different risk basis somebody's going to come to that the question you raise I just wanted to finally ask whether there should register it's a snapshot in time should it be regularly updated should there be a record of any changes to a building that would constitute another assessment some views on that please Gary I would say you'd need to keep it constantly updated almost weekly because this information is fast evolving it's live and you can't have that information regularly updated because people, the professionals in the market that are going to be using it need to see that it's live and updated I think that's really important if a building doesn't change structurally there's no record of any changes but in terms of refreshing the register just making sure that as the information becomes available it's put straight onto the register to me this comes back down to the point about what are we trying to achieve with this particular framework I think talking about currently is a cladding assurance register that looks to provide a list of buildings that have been remediated at least as it stands sort of broadly speaking what I think we're maybe having a conversation about is a safe buildings register and I think it's important that we maybe don't conflate the two unless we are actually moving towards something that looks like a safe buildings register so I think that to me it comes back down to what are we actually trying to achieve with this mechanism is it simply ring-fenced a list of buildings that have been have had remediation works completed or are we looking for a longer term register of buildings that are safe and monitoring their safety because to your point if it's the former then a point in time is okay that buildings were remediated to an acceptable degree done is on a list if we're looking at trying to monitor the safety of our built environment overall or our homes overall that's a very different tool and framework to me I could be wrong but I'm just wondering if we're conflating maybe two different things that we could discuss at this year and remediate it I would agree with that definitely it depends what the scope of that register is exactly I would agree though that it does need to be updated what that time period is even if it's just confirmation from someone EWS1 uses five years doesn't it like at some point in time I think he would want to go back and say all the information that's there is still relevant that could be a short exercise of things that have changed that didn't go through a building warrant process or whatever it is but if you looked at building and it's been on the list for 15 years and nobody's gone back to say this is still applicable I think you might start to ask questions about whether that information is still relevant okay thank you very much for that can you go on? Jim wanted to come in I just want to say it's a good point that Jocelyn raised there and what is the purpose of the register I agree I think it should be updated when any changes are made to the building that can have an impact from a fire safety point of view but you then get into who's going to determine if any impacts on fire safety have occurred and that then in Scotland as I'd said earlier under our fire risk assessment we don't have any requirement for the stairs and common areas in such a building to be carried out which to do down in England so to me the register is a way that we can address that and so I think that's something that would need to be bottomed out it almost looks as though it could become an MOT as it were for buildings where an annual check is carried out where the fire critical elements of the buildings are all still in place and all still functioning I just want to clarify I thought it was interesting what Jocelyn was saying so we've got this cladding assurance register what's that for but also are we moving in the direction of something else which is a safe buildings register which is that MOT idea that started to emerge throughout our conversations is it better to conflate those or is it better to keep them separate because of what we're trying to do here I'm going to bring in Pam Gosall with questions on single building assessment Thank you convener and good morning panel last week when it was indicated that there was a lack of clarity as to what a single building assessment is its specification what it looks like and what standards it is assessing to they also felt that until why the programme will not address at pace the life critical fire safety issues associated with external wall systems would you agree with that and do you believe the use of PAS 9-980 guidance would provide much more clarity on issues that are unclear in Scotland I'd like to ask Phil first we're certainly lacking on specification and guidance on the SBA we have developed our own in-house guidance for doing SBAs but that's basically borne out of just normal professional practice that any charter professional would be engaged in would desperately need something that benchmarks that so that everybody's working to the same standard and singing off the same hym sheet that is definitely lacking the SBAs at the moment are very cumbersome unnecessarily long-winded real problem with the binary output scenario in terms of PAS we've been working in England now for a number of years I think PAS definitely has merit up in Scotland we do actually use PAS assessments simultaneously when we do a Scottish property I'm actually a fan of the PAS process I like it because it gives the professional a bit more discresions when we know the right word a bit more ability to use their professional skills whereas the SBA doesn't do that at all because not every bit of cladding and every defect in a building is necessarily going to have a major impact on life safety under the SBA process that would automatically be a fail under the PAS you can use the professional tools your disposal can mitigate you can look at other factors so I think it's a much more useful tool it's more mass market I think there's more people out there available that understand PAS for a big competency issue in the PAS side of things but given that it's been tried and tested on south of the border I would have thought that that was certainly a kilted version of that that would be the way forward we can't just pick up on the English model right away because we've clearly got issues on the retainer and different legal aspects that don't quite fit the box with a bit of modification I think PAS could be it could be the way to go I would say this wouldn't I because I was on the committee that developed the PAS but we were at pains when we've developed the PAS to ensure that it was applicable north of the border so it wasn't just applicable in England but Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland for the very reason that a fire is a fire wherever it is geographically and a building is a building wherever it is geographically but there might be differences in tenure however we think that the FRAEW process which gives you the three binary is the SBA it's either a pass or a fail it's low, medium, tolerable or high risk does give you that professional judgement flexibility to be able to say it's not the one or the other it's not low nor high but it's somewhere in between and it's therefore tolerable but you might need to do some other mitigation measures with it so I would say that the FRAEW process in the PAS works we obviously have got an RICS training program for assessors which we train on PAS 980 because we think it is a good document it's the first version I would say as well and we're learning it came out January last year or so 2022 sorry and we're learning around the whole process around this but at the same time I think it is a process it's the first standard that exists there will be a second version of this at some point in time but it is something to be adopted the problem I have for the SBA is that there's no real standard around it it's quite a brief document and it is quite binary or high risk which I have an issue with I just don't think that really works in practice our position is generally to Phil's point we can't wholesale adopt the English legislation for a number of reasons in Scotland's unique context but I think where there is opportunity to harmonize standards there is certainly merit in doing so so I think that's something that we would support generally and then in terms of where we define when we define the SBA I think just to echo points that we made earlier about the merit in considering these things through secondary legislation and regulation later on so that we've got, as Gary sort of alluded to, the ability to evolve and change those things as we need to thanks going to bring in Kate and then I think we need to move on we're in this sticky situation where we're getting a lot of good information but we're only halfway through and we've only got about half an hour left so I've got to balance that Kate, have you come in? I'll be brief in that case I would reiterate the points that definitely need some more definition around what the single building assessment is as a business we haven't been massively involved in that and partly that is to do around the lack of clarity on the single building assessment in terms of the PAS to us the PAS is a framework so whilst it does reference some English guidance for example in it I don't think it limits you to considering a building in England I absolutely think it's applicable on Scotland because it's a framework it's not a set of prescriptive recommendations or requirements you have to follow and the other thing is that there is a limited resource of competent people an even more limited pool of competent people in Scotland as if we have our own sort of Scottish process up here or we adopt a different standard excluding a big pool of competent people elsewhere in the UK who could actually help us with that process so I think using a process we're familiar with and like Gary said it's the document we have at the moment it's the best approach we have at the moment I don't know why we would try and invent something else Pam, if you can ask your next question and then I know that Alan and Jim you wanted to come in on this but Pam can bring in her next question and maybe you can speak to that as well My question is going to be for Jim John Mackenzie Regional Secretary of the Fire Brigade Union said that failure to make meaningful progress in removing the cladding more than six years on is reprehensible and shows complacency to the point of contempt for those living working and being educated in such buildings and for firefighters who would be called to rescue occupiers and extinguishing cladding fires what is your view on the possible inclusion in the belt of timescales for the delivery of cladding remediation and how might this work in practice given various technical and industry factors that could delay such work over to you Jim Okay I fully understand the concerns for anyone that had a building with ACM on the building following what we've seen in other say tragic events at Grenfell and following Grenfell my understanding is that all buildings with ACM on a significant amount of ACM were identified and measures have been put in place to deal with the developer taking steps to remove it such as Taylor Wimpeck Glasgow Harper and such a process has been put in place to deal with 25 buildings were identified with significant amounts of ACM on it and so a process is in place dealing with those higher risk buildings and now we're at the stage of dealing with other buildings that have other cladding on it that doesn't meet the non-cabusful requirements that we look for now so I understand what the fire services are coming from and also the concerns that the residents would have if they're living in a building and that's why one of the good things when Phil was mentioning earlier about the register people will be living in buildings and they have a fear that it may be a greater risk from fire and that's why if you can bring it into the register earlier on as Phil Rick and a large amount of these buildings won't have a high fire risk then it's good to educate the people within that building but I would go back to what we were seeing earlier on about the fire stats our guidance and such is different from England and such and we brought in there was a high rise fire back in 99 down in Irvine where the fire spread to a number of stories and the guidance changed for that and we did it back in 2005 for that all to be non-combustible and brought in sprinklers for above 18 metres so we are in a bit of a different situation from down south but I do understand the concerns and that's why we fully welcome this process in this bill and to take things forward swiftly Thanks for that response Jim do you have any thoughts or anything to add to what was done Pam's previous question around the SPA or the PAS but really just anything that's different from what's already been discussed I think that they've covered it all it's a system as well we're recognised and all the pain has gone through in England in developing Thanks very much and Alan you had wanted to come in on the previous question but also maybe if you've got anything to add around timescales On the previous question the point I wanted to make is that while the past document totally agree with that and totally agree that we need great clarity on the scope of the SPA we just need to be aware that past document references the approved document be the fire safety regulations in England many many times and therefore we need to make sure that any past document is suitable for the Scottish system and more importantly the Scottish mandatory standards so we won't have to update it in that regard but as a methodology just on Pam's point around the timescales I think if the methodology is right and the risks that are required to be mitigated are right those timescales will be as efficient as they possibly can be I'm not sure given the complexity of the process whether definitive prescriptive timescales may only just raise expectations of the stakeholders involved if I consider the area we're involved in the Bill and One application process we will endeavour to assess that as quickly as possible but it takes as long as it takes depending on the complexity of the application and the speed of response to any questions that arise so I think if we get the methodology and the process is correct that's going to reduce the process from start to finish and get a resilience and efficiency in that as opposed to any definitive prescriptive timescales that we're now going to move to questions from Stephanie Thanks very much thanks everyone for joining us here today we've already heard a little bit about tolerable risk and I think you spoke about the fact that probably about 60% of 7,000 buildings can fall into that category there but I'd like to direct my question first of all Jim if that's okay because we have heard about the calls for the bill and the associated guidance to actually better reflect that idea of tolerable risks and rather than the low-high measures if you like and that this could include use of alternatives to cladden replacement where that's got similar fire safety benefits so I'm wondering if that's an approach that you would support Jim and how it might actually work in practice and then I'm happy for anybody else to come in thank you yes I would have to say I'm not a fan of the risk rating within the single building assessment of just low or high risk because even if the guidance in the document tells you that if you've got anything in the building that needs mitigated the building goes high risk and that means that the majority of buildings that will be looked at I would think would fall into that high risk category because that would impact on the residents of those buildings, one that could struggle to get insurance because they're now regarded as a high risk building and the fear it gives you that as far as you're concerned from a fire safety point of view your building is now high risk and that's pretty scary whereas that's why myself from what I can gather around the table with my colleagues as it were they're supportive of the pass process because it gives you your low, medium and high and this process has been working down in England as I say they've gone through this pain and such and what you find is that residents want additional information so many people adopt the health and safety measures and they've got a clear their low, tolerable, moderate, significant high risk and such and with information clearly against that so residents know exactly what the risk is within their building if it's tolerable, you know if there's minor things that need to be done and and going through that process at the end you'll be told what's wrong with the building and if there is any mitigation measures and it's very transparent and open and it also would allow whether it's housing associations and such to prioritise buildings that are at risk but it gets rid of that suddenly bliting a building by saying it's high risk whereas in the real world it might have things wrong with it but that risk may be tolerable or just a moderate risk and such and it's that kind of detail to reassure residents and the insurance industry and such is what we've been needed in Scotland Anybody else want to come in on that? I don't mean to stifle conversation now we're ahead of time because everyone has a burning different perspective or really wants to make sure we understand something clearly Kate Largely agree with what Jim says low and high risk is far too binary our building stock all has a level of risk every building has some level of risk we can't remove risk completely but making it either low risk or high risk I think what Jim was saying the risk is that lots of buildings will be lumped high risk category and it doesn't allow residents to feel safe but it doesn't allow us as professionals to focus our attentions on the buildings that really are high risk and maybe leave some that are tolerable or a lower level of risk It's certainly been something that's come through in the previous sessions as well the lack of nuance If I could just follow that up a little bit convener with Jim Davis-Bale Can you just wonder then if a part of this is about getting all that data together looking at prioritising the risks that really need to be addressed really urgently but actually having that information so that there can be a wider more holistic look at what issues are coming up and what issues we should be looking to tackle as we're moving forward is that the kind of thinking too? Yeah I think you've nailed it there yeah it's taking that holistic approach I think it's all important because as mentioned earlier there's lots of fire safety measures within a building and just because something's wrong with it it doesn't mean that the whole building is at risk You could have a situation for instance you've got the same building in Newcastle and Edinburgh and one is done by the SBA and the other is done under the pans under the SBA it would be high risk in that particular situation whereas it could be at just a moderate risk in Newcastle but the fire is just the same you know there's no difference and so an insurance and mortgage level and that is all really kind of done from a UK level so I think it's got the potential to confuse the market and confuse the people living within building and the past process allows that to take in all the information for a building and therefore you know come at a more realistic risk the actual past process is about 53 sort of really defined risks that you look at so everyone has become familiar with the process and so I do I think it is the way forward it may not be perfect but it certainly would be a lead for a far better outcome That's really helpful thanks Yeah thanks for that I think I'm getting confused because we talked earlier about the scope of the bill and now we're talking about PAS and that that's what we would want to do and so PAS is just looking at fire safety or does it so earlier on we were talking about we need to look at cladding to move that forward and now we're talking about PAS would that look at more than I mean that's looking at the whole of fire safety isn't it so do we want something where we're using PAS to look at the whole building but we're going to we're going to do the triage approach that Phil had suggested where we get on with the cladding part of it but we understand there's other pieces that we might need to come back and do is that am I getting it right here or maybe you can explain a bit more Yeah okay Gary So the PAS is about a methodology for assessing the external walls so what's called an FRAW fire risk assessment of the external walls that's the framework of the PAS however the FRAW informs the holistic fire risk of the whole building so in England we have a fire risk assessment you don't have that in Scotland as such but it does inform that risk of the whole building so just to clarify it's about the FRAW is about the external walls Okay that's really helpful I'm glad I asked that because I'm sure I'm not the only one that was getting a bit lost there I hear you Thanks very much Marie you'd like to come in Thank you, convener Jim I'm going to go to yourself first and then I'll open up Do you feel there's enough qualified fire engineers, surveyors and building industry professionals in Scotland to undertake the single building assessment and the remediation work required within the timescale any shortfall would be tackled It was interesting actually hearing Phil mentioned earlier that round about 11m it brings the number of buildings within the scope up to about 7000 which is a huge number and so I would certainly say that there's a limited number of fire engineers currently in Scotland with appropriate knowledge and experience in training on certain walls and that's also compounded with the fact that fire engineers and such don't want to take forward this work for a number of reasons including the on-going insurance costs the other thing that also going forward I think you're saying so how would we address that and can we get other people in and train to be fire engineers and such and at the moment that's going to be problematic because the Caledonia University which does a fire engineering degree that the fire service building standards, fire engineers and such we don't have gone through this is the last year but that course is closing so where other fire engineers are going to come from to help deal with this huge amount of buildings I'm not really sure so yes I would say there is a definite problem with sufficient numbers of fire engineers in Scotland at the moment thanks very much for that Jim Jocelyn sorry if I could just echo that point I think one of the challenges or one of the things that is yet to be established is exactly who it is that will be able to undertake single building assessments I'm conscious that Cabinet Secretary and Scottish Government officials have used different language sometimes it's surveyors and fire engineers sometimes it's just competent fire engineers the bill itself just says that ministers have the right to undertake SBAs and that might include a group of people with a particular qualification I think one of the challenges that we've had in terms of the consultation with the Cladding stakeholder working group to date is that their task and finish group has been somewhat closed doors in terms of that just being developers and officials or you know broadly speaking it's developers and officials and thus far professional bodies have not been part of those conversations so I think that this is the challenges we have skill shortages across the sector it stands to reason we will probably not have enough people especially given the scope of the buildings that like Phil has said we might be facing a huge number of buildings that need these SBAs so we don't really know who it's going to be in the first instance we've not been around the table to sort of develop out the scope and the spec and to see who that might be and then it's really difficult for professional bodies like the CIOB and you know not to speak for Gary but we would love to try to start communicating to our members and start making sure that we're moving in the direction we need to be to start training competent people but we're not around the table to start doing that yet so the earlier we can be part of these discussions the better ready the industry can be not only in terms of who's undertaking single building assessments but also educating and communicating to the wider industry what the impacts of this legislation are going to be so that they're ready to respond to it as well. Okay great Kate. Yes good question and we discussed this a lot of different people involved in that process whether there are enough competent people to do that so for me doing a pass assessment for example it's a fire safety assessment you want someone to be a competent fire safety professional if you take that to be a chartered fire engineer so not just chartered but a chartered fire engineer with sufficient experience so as a chartered fire engineer I would not undertake work that I don't have the experience to do so you've got to be chartered you've got to have the competence you've got to have the willing so not everybody wants to do external work and the fire safety industry is very busy and you've got to be available so sort of our look ahead we might be available in two weeks it might be 12 weeks depending on what our current workload is I'm sure that's sort of similar for others who work in my industry so I think it's quite limited it's an issue we see in England at the moment as well for undertaking the same kind of work in terms of how to address it I'm not really sure what they have got nothing more to add to what Jim said thanks for that I think from my point of view I might be seated slightly differently we know how many buildings there are not every one of those buildings needs a chartered fire engineer a chartered architect or whatever to me the piece that's missing here is some kind of initial assessment a fairly high level minor report clarence census type scenario find out what we're actually dealing with then it can be streamed into right that one's very complex that's chartered fire engineer territory that one's not so complex that can be two or three different disciplines and all the way down on was building a competent army there's no reason why this should be the preserve of chartered fire engineers and chartered building surveyors only there should be chartered fire engineers chartered building surveyors chartered architects, chartered engineers any who build stuff understands what's on these buildings and as long as we're giving those people the right type of building to look at and they're properly trained they have the competence and critically they have the professional indemnity insurance they couldn't expand the skill set away from by purely needing chartered fire engineer just if I can add to that I do definitely agree that there's a lot of people to be involved in that process and you don't necessarily need a chartered fire engineer in every circumstance I do think it's important though that sort of if you look at an initial triaging type of approach that you've got to make sure that the people making those decisions are competent enough to spot everything so it might be a simple building but you need somebody with sufficient experience to identify that initially I see that first part as a data capture exercise not a survey as such because that's the bit that's missing to my mind Can you say a little bit more in your mind about the difference between a data capture and a survey? Basically you're trying to where is the building what is it clearly above 11 metres are there a mix of materials on the building you don't have to send somebody to say there are four materials on this building and they are the following I think the fact that it's not a uniform construction would alert you I think you could design a survey programme that captured the data and it still has to be validated and checked and corrected and moves on to a more detailed survey process but we're doing this when we're standing in Scotland we don't have that data to hand that's the first bit of the past to me Sorry Phil, one last thing to add to that I was involved a couple of years ago in this sort of single building assessment pilot I actually went on maternity leave before it properly got started but we did try to help with that process a little bit as part of the IFE and we found it quite difficult to just the level of information you have but we found it quite difficult to to come up with an easy process to triage so absolutely there'll be some buildings you can look at and say that the extreme case you know is covered in CAT3ACM obviously that's bad or it's masonry masonry obviously that's fine there's a lot of different buildings and putting them in order we found quite a challenging process it did happen and there was lots of people involved but I think in principle it's a good idea something to be maybe taken offline and discussed a bit further but also it sounds that you have a bit of proof of putting you've gone through some of that difficult bit that maybe that's helpful Marie I'm going to go back to you with your next question just a few of the ones I was just going to sort of reiterate I think it's absolutely imperative that we build out exactly who it is that's competent and qualified to do these things not only so that we know that the data that we're getting on these single building assessments is ironclad and forgive the wording and we know we've captured things accurately but also we've got the public's trust to sort of regain here a little bit and I think it's really important that we make sure that the people that we're going in are doing these things we can demonstrate that they are competent and qualified and competent steering groups just published a report in the English context from the construction industry council that sets out a bunch of competency frameworks again, I'm not necessarily endorsing any of those but just to say there might be learnings from other jurisdictions that we can bring back to Scotland and that that report might be worth a review Thanks Gary I was just going to share the experience we had with the training programme for EWS external wall system assessors so DLUC grant funded us a training programme because we recognised there was a shortage of chartered fire engineers because of the scale of the problem in England the thousands of buildings that are in scope and so DLUC approached us to see whether chartered buildings could be trained to the level to do these external wall systems and it's about competence we want to make sure that we have the right base knowledge of experience to begin with and then the skills knowledge experience and behaviours and the definition of competence now is absolutely right so our training course is a level 6 off-qual so it's a degree level training course deliberately so that only people like filling myself are eligible to go on the course and they'll be trained up to do external wall system assessments up to 18 metres and then above 18 metres which becomes a more complex building we normally would refer to a chartered fire engineer such as Kate where we might be doing the survey work but the assessment is done by a chartered fire engineer because it's a more complex building and that was to aim deliberately to try and increase the number of professionals in the markets so so far we've had something like 1300 applicants to the course a lot of those are going through currently we've had just over 120 who have now passed the course and are now out in the market doing these but we launched the course in January 2021 so it's been a slow grind and what we found is actually not just RICS chartered members but IFE members as well and the RIBA the architects actually didn't really want to get involved they found it actually quite a very challenging complex process in terms of external wall system assessments and the high risk if you get it wrong obviously and then obviously the challenges around professional identity insurance so those challenges in the mix meant that we our pipeline of people coming through has actually been quite slow and was quite surprising in a way because we thought we'd actually have several hundred by now that are qualified and available in the marketplace and actually in Scotland we only have one course completed so that gives you the scale I think of the appetite for people to want to do this work in the first place and then actually complete the course and it's a tough course the failure rate is quite high but we make no apologies for that because we want people to go through and really understand what they're doing and pass the assessments etc and then graduate on the course and be able to do these and have restored the confidence in the public that they know what they're doing I think there's plenty of work for people and you don't necessarily have to go to the course it's not a mandatory course there's plenty of people like Phil for example that are out there doing this work and have got the confidence to do it but I would just say that we have to be really careful that we have the right people doing it and just let anybody go in thinking they're suddenly an expert in external work systems when we found our experiences that often they don't know what they're talking about so we have to be really, really careful about that Okay, thanks for that Very brief supplementary from Stephanie Calhann and then we're going to come back to Marie with our second question Yeah, just on that point that you were talking about there, Gary Isbell you're saying you know they have to be competent so how would you go about defining that on your application for example and are you talking about you've not had that many people applying if it was something we were looking at would it be better targeted at the type of people who have been most interested in it? Yeah, so to the course eligibility requirements are set by delug is that you have to be a member of a professional body and then it's defined as you have to be a chartered member of a professional body so if you're an RICS you have to be a chartered suburb same with IFE as well so you have to be at that kind of charter level to go on to the course to then undertake the training so that's the initial base knowledge we're expecting people to have before they're eligible so for example we wouldn't let somebody who is like an interior designer for example be eligible for the course because they've got no background in fire safety that we can determine no official training professional qualifications around any of that at all and frankly they'd be wasting their own time as well as ours by undertaking the course they'd failed the assessment with the absolutely so Okay, thanks It was just to say about have that qualification so it was a question around his bill, how'd you find then who would have those skills so maybe that could get ruled in as we go on, thanks Thank you Stephanie, Marie, back to you I can follow it up if you want more information about the training and thank you I'm going to go back to Gary for my next question Gary listened to your previous comments and given your experience, what is your understanding of how the single building assessment process will work with the EWS one process and is there any way to streamline the operation of the two systems The EWS one process came about in 2019 because of the complete snarling up of the lending market and lenders not wanting to lend on tower blocks that it may have or may not have some form of possible cladding so we had to find a process with the support of DLUC to find a way through that but we always envisaged it would be a temporary process because there was nothing else out there that existed at all so the EWS one process came about as a way to try and find a way through assessing blocks fairly quickly as to whether they were safe or not safe and so although the EWS one form has got a five-year time span we will be coming up to the fifth year anniversary at the end of this year we do see that fading away the EWS one process and that upon our FAQs on our website we make that point quite strongly that this is a temporary process so if the SBA process is robust enough and it gives you the information you require and it can be relied upon as a standard sufficiently robust standard then fine what we need is transparency so the value is lenders, insurers et cetera can all rely on that that process it does have to be robust because otherwise the default may be still that people would still go back to EWS one which we just don't see has been a long term thing I know that my colleague John Ma from UK Finance who was one of our partners along with the Guns Societies Association for developing the EWS one works to appear on the panel he might want to ask him that question but as far as we are concerned jointly we are happy to work with Scottish Government officials around that EWS one process and how the SBA would eventually replace it can I pick up another point? Sure EWS one form in the back of it has a pile of small print and part of that small print says that it has to be preceded by a PAS 990 assessment so I may be reading too much to the lines here but if there's a notion that the EWS one in Scotland there's something going to be tied to the SBA process in Scotland that would be a disaster for the Scottish property portfolio because all of a sudden there will be no buildings in Scotland that can physically pass EWS one I think it's an important point we made changes to the EWS one form to when PAS 990 was launched actually it's around version 3 of the form now and it heavily references PAS 990 so that would be a real concern for us Good point Phil Thanks very much Now I'm going to bring in Miles Briggs with our final question Good morning everyone thanks for your input so far I wanted to ask a couple of questions firstly in relation to local authorities and their building standard departments and whether or not you believe they're suitably resourced what will be an increased amount of work associated with clanding remedial works including new requirements imposed on developers and those specifically who are not part of the responsible developers scheme Maybe we'll go with Alan on line Thank you I think local authority verifiers we do recognise that the building on approval process is the last stage before warrantable cladding remedial work can commence on site and appreciate the need for an efficient assessment process I think overall labs we are comfortable that local authorities will be able to manage the building on application processes that come from cladding remedial sufficiently I think if we are looking at lowering the trigger height below 11 meters with the number of buildings that brings in that maybe needs another discussion but I think looking at the spending information from the cladding remedial team to date there are a relatively small number of authorities affected these being the larger city authorities and generally used to dealing with complex and sensitive applications as do many other authorities as well but I think just that reassurance of an effective building on assessment process does rely on a whole range of cooperation with other stakeholders we would want to be involved in the application discussion stage so that verifiers are set up and are aware of the building warrant applications that may be coming down the line in terms of the assessment we would also want to make sure that warrant applications are competent and complete to allow that full assessment to be undertaken and again we would want any design team to respond to any issues that we raise as part of our warrant assessment we have already engaged with colleagues in Glasgow City Council on the process that they went through on remediation projects to date and we will use that learning to work with verifiers on any applications that are on the horizon and I think just in general terms labs and my own role within the building standards will support verifiers and if we have to work collaboratively between them we will do to make sure that we progress these warrant applications as quickly as possible we are looking at different considerations in terms of the competence to undertake an SBA and indeed the past risk assessment and the competence to assess any building warrant application against the requirements of the technical handbooks that's what we do day in day out and we have extensive experience in that regard if there are areas of complexity within that that require oversight and cooperation from expertise within anyone authority we can call on that and work collaboratively to do that and again we need to work in partnership with this regard so I hope that labs and the hub will be able to work with the Scottish Government so that we are aware of the programme that's on the horizon and again the final point that I would want to make is that we need to allow time for the building we want and it is at the end of the process but if we allow for that a reasonable time for it then I don't see any issues with labs and the verifier community addressing those building wants when we're required to do so Thanks Kate Appreciate the time so I'll try and be quick just a reflection back on the competency point from earlier really South of the border is that when undertaking sort of works to apply for a building safety fund for example there hasn't necessarily always been checks and balances in place to check that what you're applying for is actually what's necessary to make the building safe so for example if you have a building with combustible cladding it's not necessarily that you need to take everything combustible off that wall and replace it with completely combustible components so just would like to make the point that it's important that this competency through the process it's that the single building assessment past 9 and 8 is going to be new for both professionals in Scotland working as consultants but for local authorities as well it's really key to make sure that we've got competent people on both sides of that assessing what work needs to be done we don't want to spend too much or too little and just finally I wanted to ask if there's anything specific you think should be in the bill which isn't we've had quite a wide conversation around the scope of the bill specific concerns have been raised with us with regards to electric batteries in cars and bikes in buildings with underground parking which currently isn't within the scope of this bill but the recommendations that we can put to ministers in our report I think should capture some of that so just wonder if there's anything specific you thought we should also include in that I think I made this point to you previously but legal title is a problem in a lot of these landmark developments where you have for example a small garden area it's actually assigned to a flat so we need to think ahead about that type of situation because you don't probably have the right legally to go in and erect a scaffolding on somebody's garden to do a cladden remediation scheme so I didn't see a mechanism for that but that'll be a blocker downstream Anybody with anything else that might have been overlooked Jocelyn say I think the way that we've sort of looked at this is sort of start small and develop it I know issues have been raised previously and my colleagues in the CIOB in the English context have raised concerns about non-residential buildings I think what we're looking at again is this as a first step and that there's going to be a natural evolution in progress to this bill so I think there are probably other things as we've raised elsewhere that will come up down the line and we see this as sort of a start small move on from there let's get on with what we need to get on with and also consider some of the things that we might need to start looking to address over time At UK level or in England anyway they have included hotels and care homes and currently include those Do you think they should be? The problem in Scotland in a Scottish context isn't only a developer problem there's issues with developers contractors housing associations even ScotGov themselves as far as I know we are very recently still applying combustible cladding to the outside of buildings via heap schemes and eco schemes so it worries me that it is quite narrowly focused on that individual part because we know fine that the problem is way beyond just the developers I think we've argued in the English context as well for inclusion of buildings like you've mentioned and I'm conscious that I think it's section 26 of the bill as it is sort of limits the extension of the SVA to buildings that don't have or are not intended to have dwellings so I think it's something that we've advocated for elsewhere and needs to be looked at I think it's defined as the sleeping risk so it has the highest risk as the sleeping risk so you've got people sleeping in a building for whatever reason and that's why including hospitals for example so there's a high risk there which is why that's defined in England so there's something certainly to look at the other thing I was going to raise was about mixed use buildings because mixed use buildings are the ones that cause there's quite a lot of concern where you may have a shopping centre and then that starts to cause issues around risk as well so when you coming back to the definitions of what's in the bill are you meaning mixed use because there's a residential sitting above something else so that's the type of thing I think where it would certainly would help to try and clarify that Thanks, thanks Camila Okay, thank you very much I think that was helpful to get that perspective as well so thank you so much a really productive constructive conversation there's quite a lot of insight from all of your expertise in various areas I'm now going to briefly suspend the meeting to allow for a change of witnesses our second panel today we are joined in the room by John Marr who's the principal of devolved government and social housing from UK Finance and John Sinclair who's the convener of the committee at the Law Society of Scotland and we are also joined online by Callum McQueen who's a technical surveying manager at E-Serve Chartered Surveys and we are hoping that we will be joined by Mervyn Skeet who is the director of general insurance policy at the Association of British Insurers and we're doing everything that we can to make sure that Mervyn will be able to join us and I welcome our witnesses to the meeting we're going to turn to questions from members and I'll ask that you indicate to me if you'd like to come in to respond to a member's question and Callum, if you can type an R in the chat function then we know that you want to come in on a question there's no need for you to manually turn on your microphones as we'll do that for you automatically one less thing to have to think about I'm going to start with a couple of broader questions before we get into some of the detail of aspects of the bill the first one is around consultation and engagement in terms of your organisation so the Scottish Government didn't publicly consult on the proposals for the bill but it'd be interesting here if your organisation had any opportunity to input into its development and if so how effective was the engagement in terms of improving the bill we see before us so maybe John Marr you could start thanks very much and good morning everyone and thanks for inviting me to your session this morning so in terms of consultation on the bill itself clearly it was introduced in quite sharp order with a limited opportunity to comment publicly in terms of providing views on its proposals and we recognise that there is a need to move at pace in progressing cladding remediation north of the border so in many respects it can be said to be right that the legislation is proceeding through the accelerated route notwithstanding that from our perspective at UK Finance I can say that we have had quite considerable involvement and engagement with officials over a number of years on cladding and building safety issues and UK Finance was around the table at the earlier Ministerial Working Group which provided its reports I think in 2020 and we've continued to be at the table since then as the programme has evolved through into the what's now the cladding stakeholder group so there has been involvement it's been welcomed involvement with officials is always welcome in terms of informing development of issues such as these but as far as the bill itself is concerned yes it has been rather a short period of consultation which would have been beneficial if it had been longer but we recognise the challenges that we would quickly just before we move on I'm going to welcome Mervyn just to let you know I've opened with a question which is around consultation on the bill was your organisation did your organisation have the opportunity to engage in it and if so has the engagement been effective in improving the bill we see before so a few questions around engagement but I won't put you on the spot and we'll come in thank you I would actually almost entirely reflect John Morris comments they'll keep it brief we welcome being part of the ministerial working group we've been involved in that our engagement on the on the bill, the cladding assurance register has been I understand primarily limited to the response to consultation okay great thanks very much Callum what about the technical what about the e-survey charge of surveyors we weren't consulted prior to the bill coming out but we have made comments on the bill through the consultation process okay thanks very much and Mervyn has the association of British insurers been engaged yes hopefully you can hear me now good stuff yes we have been engaged my colleague Alistair Ross has been representing the api cladding stakeholder group so yes and we've responded to the consultation okay great and do you feel that your engagement has helped to improve the bill in the process yes I mean it's been good engagement I think there's still some work to be done I'm sure we'll get to that as we move through the questions okay great thanks very much my next question is actually about the scope of the bill so it's the cladding remediation bill and do you think that it should remain solely a bill that focuses on cladding remediation or should it extend to cover all fire safety issues or even all significant building safety matters and maybe I will start with Callen McQueen what do you think of the scope I'm primarily involved with cladding issues so that is really important I don't really see my decision to decide what the scope of the bill should be that would perhaps complicate matters I mean it has been quite slow so far that the Scottish response to the cladding issue so perhaps a more focused response would be better rather than widening out okay thanks very much and Mervyn what do you think we think it should be wider than just cladding and we should be focused on all fire safety issues and that's the striving insurance premium so we think it should be beyond just pure cladding and look at all fire safety issues okay and that's because you said wider safety issues is affecting the premiums yes insurance is looking at the whole building and the potential loss of the whole building and if there are other fire safety issues in the building which aren't just cladding that will also impact how insurers will be building in terms of the loss of the building or loss of parts of the building if it was damaged okay and what are your thoughts about in the previous session and other panels there's a kind of concern around this the urgency that's I mean that's partly why the Government hasn't taken the time to consult because there's an urgency to move forward with it so how do you balance that urgency to move forward with remediating the cladding but then also broadening the scope of the insurance perspective I want to be interested to hear what your thoughts are on that so obviously cladding is an important part of the concerns and the issues here but we shouldn't prevent cladding being removed waiting for other stuff to be done but at the same time if we want to see insurance premiums be reduced then we need to focus on all fire safety issues to ensure the building is safe from that perspective thanks very much anybody in the room want to comment on that scope John Marr clearly cladding issues are perhaps the most visible manifestation in residential blocks of the wider sort of malaise around building safety so in that sort of single respect it can be argued that the focus is rightly on cladding however as Mervyn just mentioned and witnesses at your earlier session this morning mentioned there can be quite significant and costly building safety defects deeper into a building so specifically things about compartmentation and other issues defective doors to apartments and the likes and I think it can be very difficult to part fix a building and quite often as fire engineers and others will comment when you start to strip away the cladding it's then that you realise that there are significant and quite high risk issues elsewhere and it would be to an extent perhaps irresponsible not to address those issues and they have become visible so it is a challenge clearly resources are limited and the process has to start somewhere so in that respect I can understand why it's cladding remediation however that doesn't mean to say that all of the other issues which can affect life risk should be avoided later down the line We as a committee we have no specific view on this point but we had comments in relation to the act as a whole in relation to its integration with the wider legal framework and I think that if the scope of the bill is to be expanded to include non-cladding for our safety issues then I think it will exacerbate the consequences of this bill being dropped into a wider legal framework without also reflecting on the changes that maybe should be made in relation to prescription in relation to further allocation of liability between any parties who had an involvement in the construction of the building so we'll then operate differently in the context of subsequent alterations maintenance to the building so we have no specific view on that point but we would comment on some of the complexities that may flow from it Thanks very much so the complexities of a bill so the bill is narrowly focussed because it's trying to navigate and what you're saying is that if we widen it then there's going to be many other aspects that would need to be considered which then could maybe start to take more time in terms of the need to actually get on with the job Yes and so in another way putting it is that the cladding remediation is enforced as driven by the responsible developer scheme which is imposing a liability on the developer entities one of the concerns is that is that a voluntary assumption of risk in which case if there are other parties who should bear responsibility for or liability for the work that was carried out how does that risk then properly flow or liability properly flow through taking into consideration things like prescription and the fact that they may be deemed voluntarily assumed to risk these are these are ancillary issues a bill is to be expanded it would be good for them to be considered at the same time Okay great I think that's very helpful given that we're making some legislation here okay I'm now going to bring in Mark Griffin my colleague Mark Griffin who's joining us online today Thank you Cymru every morning we've heard previously from witnesses concerns that certain key terms within the bill aren't as clearly defined as there could be people have talked about the meaning of development premises and risk to the human life we had contrasted the evidence of the previous session just wonder if any witnesses have got any concerns about the terms that have been used in the bill whether they need further clarity or more on the face of the bill on those definitions maybe we'll start with John Sinclair you knew I was going to come to you first short answer is yes we do have concerns to pick maybe three or four or four or five the term development is used it is defined for the purposes of section 25 but section 24 which is to do with the responsible developer scheme no sorry to do with the SBA definition it refers to constructed or otherwise undergone development fully appreciate the need to have a wide net and a wording that has the flexibility to cope with a wide range of circumstances but it does leave open considerable questions so for example if you have a mixed use building for example built in 1980 you'd start off saying that falls out with the scope of a single building assessment being pre-1992 however if that shop had had a planning permission granted for alterations to a short front to constituted development in say 2000 would that bring another wise 1980 building into the scope of an SBA and if it did how if someone is looking at that particular building in 2026 how easy would it be for someone to assess whether or not that building in fact fell within the ambit of an SBA I can see the thorniness of all of that immediately and that's just with one word I apologise as lawyers we will come up with all the negatives despite the fact that this is an important and it's doing something that needs to be done I think no apology is needed it's really about we need to get this right and we need to have that clarity of understanding so everybody is moving in the right direction together I also thought that the meaning of risk to human life was another area that would benefit from being more fully defined section 25 also refers to the mediation standards to be set by the Scottish ministers that also is a sort of an open ended and uncertain concept and whether it's to be limited purely to purely to risk to human life or if there will be other considerations that the Scottish ministers may take into account I think that the previous session mentioned difficulties with premises and yes we can see particularly in situations where you have a block of flats within a wider scheme where there is a relatively complicated matrix of individual ownership of gardens ownership amongst the block of adjacent parking amongst the properties of the entire development for other areas and so I think some clarity about that would be welcomed possibly the final thing to mention but I suspect it may come up later on is that there is a reference to the single building assessment and then the single building assessment report and then works identified in the single building assessment report when we are looking at how this might actually operate and practice in particular in relation to the timing of appeals we are unclear as to just how much detail of the works would require to be contained within the single building assessment report to explain in terms of the our understanding would be that the single building assessment would identify that works are required that then be a set of decisions about what those works would be and between that point and carrying out any works you then have the generation of a very, very detail set of specifications and the reference to the building warned and there is we cannot see the clarity in the act in terms of what is a level of detail that is required to the works when there are references to the works being identified in okay that's clearly quite an important piece to tease out more is there anything else that is quite useful to you I will stop there and hand over to others okay thanks anybody else got any comments on the key terms in the bill John Marr it's excellent to have a legal view on all of these issues in fact what John was describing there really highlights perhaps the need for a lot of these definitions to be worked on in great detail and reflected perhaps not on the face of the bill but elsewhere in secondary legislation as might be required in the earlier session this morning some of the far professionals commented that there are I think four different definitions of height which just on one measure alone indicates how challenging it is to arrive at a particular definition for the purposes of this bill but other than that there are definitely priority areas where it would be useful to have an early clarity in terms of what we're actually talking about and certainly the SBA itself writes at the top of the agenda I think there is a critical need for clarity around what that is and around the remediation standards as well because these issues really factor in quite significantly into where we all go from here and certainly where developers go in terms of preparing themselves to fix buildings that they are responsible for so I think the other point that was an interesting one which was reflected earlier was around interpretation of terms and where perhaps they are loosely or broadly framed then there is increasing scope for legal and other arguments about what they actually mean so defining them closely will be a priority task but whether or not they need to be defined on the face of the bill is another issue Thanks very much, Calum, you wanted to come in Yep, thanks just a couple of comments I would agree with John on the definition of height I don't think you're ever going to come to a single definition of the height of a building as north and south of the border in building regulations on that so that's going to be a constant issue The other comment I'd like to make is where the bar is set for remediation my understanding is that the Scottish Government wants to remediate those buildings to the current building regulation standard whereas south of the border the decision is the building safe or not it's usually left up to the fire engineer or building surveyor to make that decision so that is an issue there has been some concern with lenders where they have felt that a building may be considered safe and then if a single building assessment is carried out additional work may be required because the standard is higher than was previously assessed Okay Okay, thanks That's interesting, and I think that the four height definition we learned in the previous panel was in England, I don't know what the situation is in Scotland but clearly there's different things as Callum has said, different north and south of the border I'm going to bring in Pam Gosall with a couple of questions Last week witnesses expressed the need to rapidly get to a place where everyone agrees banks and insurers included On the cladding assurance register we have heard concerns that because of all the work that needs to be completed before they can be included on the register then there is a risk that more substantial cladding remediation works may have been completed but the building is still not declared safe if other works remain outstanding Would completion of the substantial remediation works be enough for the insurers to be comfortable ensuring it? Could I ask the question to Mervin first? Sorry, can you repeat the last bit of the question I'm sorry, I heard most of it but not the last bit Would completion of the substantial remediation works be enough for insurers to be comfortable ensuring it? So insurers are ensuring buildings now but there is a difference between life safety and building resilience from an insurance perspective so obviously life safety is very very important and it's important that people can get out of the building and that's pretty much the standard that's in PAS9980 but in order for premiums to come down substantially then we're looking for an enhanced PAS9980 where the resilience of the building is considered as well so because we're looking at what the potential loss would be to the insurance company of ensuring that building should there be a fire or other peril and that maximum loss has gone up significantly if the whole building is at risk rather than individual units within the building so in terms of insurers are ensuring those buildings now but in terms of getting the prices down for the cost of insurance then we're focused on enhanced standards to a building resilience standard Thank you, does anybody else John? So just on that I mean taking it back to the cladding assurance register we've been very clear that we would like to see buildings entered on the register at an earlier point in the remediation process rather than at the conclusion because we feel that having that upfront transparency and visibility that a building has been assessed that works are being programmed that they will be carried out and paid for will help the market transact those properties sooner rather than later if we go through a three year two year however long it takes remediation process on a building and wait for all of that time before then saying to the market yes it's fine it's been fixed then the residents in that building will probably have been struggling to buy, sell, remorge their homes throughout that whole time so I think early entry in the register would be a benefit to the market it would provide transparency and visibility as I say and help to give that assurance that things will be done that the work won't be completed straight away but it's programmed we know how it's going to be paid for and that will help to free things up Thanks, Callum you wanted to come in Just to echo John's comments that yes a building should be put on the register when it has been identified as one that will be fixed lenders will consider that information and certainly consider lending on the building if you do wait until the building is fixed then that's going back to the situation in England prior to the building safety act when buildings that were identified as needing work would not be lent upon until the work was completed and signed off whereas now lenders do lend on buildings that require work once it's been identified who is going to pay for those works so that is an opportunity to open up the market for these properties in Scotland Thanks, John Marra you want to come back in and then I don't know John Sinclair if you want to come in too Just a further point on that I mean I think this is all about evidence and it's about evidence that costed and funded remediation plans are in place and that a building will be fixed and with that evidence in the form of an early entry on the register that will enable and we have RICS in the gallery and they were here in the earlier session RICS will then be able to update their cladding valuation framework because there's evidence that some value will be able to take into account to help inform their valuation decisions which in turn will inform a lender's decision to lend Thanks John Sinclair Thank you The last studies position is the same that if there is information available or if there is information generated it should be available on the register that buying a flat is going to be the single biggest financial commitment to making their lives and to be able to make that decision on a fully informed basis we think is very important and so if there is information that has been generated then it should be on the register we think we would also just for ease of operation of the market we would like to see if possible a register of buildings that have been assessed is falling out with the scope of an SBA otherwise every time you look at a building that's potentially within scope every single purchase will need to go through the same process if that's a the reference to uncertainty as to how you as do with the meaning of height for example it would be beneficial for the market if buildings could be declared non-SBA relevant Okay Can you say a bit more about that? Yes it's just basically if every time a flat is sold in a building someone comes along and applies the same criteria then theoretically they should get the same result each time but if there is a quality development about the measurement of height which there shouldn't be or about whether it's it would be better for that decision to be made once hand-recorded so that it's then not a process that needs to be gone through on every single sale of a flat within that building Okay, great, thanks very much Mervyn, you wanted to come in Yeah sure, just to complete the set would it support also everything being put on the register as soon as possible that would allow insurers to look at the remediation that's being carried out take into account the work that's being done up front and the transparency we can have around access to the work to the scope of the work and what's on the register would be better in terms of insurance premiums Okay, great, thanks very much for that One more question, thank you A previous witness in their written submission raised concerns about the appropriate balance of responsibility for funding remediation work and I note that in writing the Law Society of Scotland will place commercial pressure on developers to fund remedial works without building a coherent legal framework for distributing costs between all relevant parties Could you expand a little on that and what sort of implications it would have for developers and the remediation programme more broadly to proceed without coherent legal framework Can I ask John Sinclair that question Yes So if there was a failure in construction or a failure in design that resulted in the cladding being inadequate at the time at which it was installed then the chances are that the developer would have a remedy against either the contractor or the consultant who or contractor who constructed the building or the consultant who specified the materials or monitored, supervised it The concern is that the remedies and rights the developer would have had had this come to light earlier will probably have expired or be unenforceable due to for example prescription and so you are addressing one very particular focused route of liability and in some ways potentially creating a new liability or new obligations but without addressing the downstream liabilities that might otherwise have existed So that would be one example Happy to come back in a fuller written version of this because there are details that are somewhat beyond me but which I think would be good for us to express They sort of veers more into litigation territory than property law territory Okay, that would be very welcome Thank you I am now going to bring in Marie McNair Thank you convener and good morning panel Mervyn, we have understand that in England mortgage lenders have established a portal of properties with completed EWS1 forms and this tool has led to more efficient process Could you see a register operating in a similar manner here or do you think that a similar portal would be beneficial in Scotland Is that a question for an insurance sorry, I am just a double chicken So obviously talking about the England mortgage lenders have established a portal of properties so just kind of say it was your question Okay, I mean I certainly the EWS1 form is designed for property evaluation and that doesn't really have a major effect on insurance so I'm not sure the point of your question I'm sorry I'm not sure I'm understanding what insurance, how insurance would play a role in that Okay, maybe we'll go to John Marra on that one So thanks very much I think what you're referring to there is a portal which was set up by the FIA to host completed EWS1 forms and a number of the larger mortgage lenders provided some funding to help set that up but essentially you know this comes back to there being a publicly accessible place, repository, portal register whatever it's called which can provide information to the market, to buyers, sellers, valliers, lenders, estate agents anyone who's involved in the home buying and selling process conveyancers of course to be able to check that a building has been completed in terms of its remediation work or that works are programmed and will be paid for and completed in a reasonable timeframe so it's about having that online resource which anyone in the home buying and selling process can check Thank you Do you think we would benefit from that in Scotland? I think you know I can see that the proposed cladding assurance register could effectively provide that sort of resource and in that respect the proposal is a positive one subject to what I was saying earlier that it would be more beneficial to register a building sooner rather than later in the process Apologies Mervyn for being mixed up with the gaps to you There's no problem at all Okay thanks I'm just going to ask a bit more I'm going to come to John Marr and Mervyn on this a little bit more about the cladding assurance register and you may have touched on it but I just want to bottom it out a bit I'm interested to hear how confident you are that the mortgage lenders in your case John will accept the building's entry on the cladding register as proof that a property is free from significant fire safety defects and will borrowers and residents be able to access financial products at a general market rate So there are a number of issues within that question convener and I think one of them is really again it was touched on in the earlier session is what is the purpose of the register and when the information might be accessed so if a building has just gone through an SBA assessment and is entered on the register the work to remediate it will not have taken place and probably won't take place for some years into the future 2-3 years or however long it takes so looking at the register at that initial point it wouldn't be possible to conclude that the building is safe because the work hasn't been done however looking at the register again at the end of the remediation process it would be possible to make a conclusion reasonably that the building is safe in terms of mortgage lending and insurance decisions and Mervyn will come in on that this really comes back again to evidence which is a point that I mentioned earlier and this also feeds into the valuation piece because it's about providing reliable coherence information to valuers, lenders and insurers in a timely way which will enable them to make their own professional judgment in terms of the risk that they might be looking at so obviously an insurance risk from the perspective of Mervyn and his members and from a mortgage lender's perspective the risk would be about their prospective borrower being able to afford the mortgage or there might be risks associated with a negative impact on the valuation of the property so again just sort of coming back it's really about what the register is for what it's intended to do and I think it's about when people access the information on it because as I say if you look at the beginning of the process and at the end of the process you'll get a different answer in terms of whether or not a building is safe that's great so the register is not a point in time it has a kind of inherent process in it I think this is your convener touches on something else which the committee has been considering which is about you know is there something more to do of completion of remediation works it's about looking at a building throughout its life and cladding remediation might be one point or one period of time in that building's life but it will continue beyond remediation it will continue in terms of its use, maintenance and future adaptation so it might be useful and it's certainly something that the committee has considered to consider the register as a dynamic living thing rather than purely something which is static and defined only in terms of cladding remediation work okay great thanks for that Mervyn would you like to come in with the insurance perspective sure I would concur with much of what John said there that the register should be I mean a living document would be very good it keeps accurate and factual to the state of the building at any given point in time I do think it needs to be regularly updated and I do think there is going to be a different assessment depending on whether the building has been remediated or not the other thing I think it's worth mentioning is that we want to make sure that there's enough scrutiny and oversight by the regulator on the risk assessments that are done to make sure that they actually are done to the correct standard and therefore register reflects the right position of the building so I think that's really important too most of what John said makes sense to us as well that the register needs to be kept updated at all times and it will depend as to where you are in the remediation cycle as to how the buildings are looked down on the register okay great thanks very much I think there's more to that but I'm going to move on to make sure that we get to some of the other questions we wanted to ask and I'm going to bring in Willie Coffey thanks very much I'm probably going to combine two questions I had into one to ask you to help me understand the issues relating to the single building assessment and what role the quality standard the PES 9980 has to strengthen that now in the previous panel Gary is still sitting behind you who I think said if the single building assessment is robust enough then we won't need an EWS1 the SPA would replace that but then Phil reminded us that the EWS1 has loads of small print and it has to be preceded by a PES 9980 so if we lose the EWS1 we may lose the quality standard assurance framework given to us by PES I hope I've articulated that acutely on behalf of I'm just curious where do we stand in your view with the single building assessment we've heard John Sinclair saying that it needs to be clarified in certain places and we've heard John Marr saying perhaps that's for secondary legislation but how can the quality standard and the EWS1 assist us to get the single building assessment correct in the shape that we need it to be perhaps maybe I'm asking that John Marr, we're good to open with you It is all a bit of an alphabet soup with EWS and SPA and the Scottish advice note but as Gary Strong mentioned in his evidence in the earlier session EWS1 was developed in late 2019 we're now some years down the line from that it has been updated a couple of times in its life but it was always envisaged to be a temporary intervention essentially as a valuation tool to enable valueers to provide a reliable certain market value on properties which were affected by building safety issues as discussions have proceeded around the SPA I think we've always been clear in our discussions with officials that it would be appropriate for EWS1 to fall away in time when the SPA is fully up and running and scoped and defined now obviously in the interim we've had the development of PAS 9,980 which as the committee has heard in their session is highly regarded you know thoroughly adopted methodology for undertaking virus assessments of external wall systems and so on that basis there is no reason why PAS shouldn't be reflected in the SPA process it's already there it's recognised, it's understood it's embedding market and practitioners are becoming familiar and skilled in using it so for the SPA there's something there already on the shelf there isn't really a need to go back and reinvent the wheel I think if the SPA was developed in a way which aligned with the PAS then that would be a positive step forward and then just to go back to your point about EWS in one of its most recent iterations the EWS was updated so that it also aligns with the PAS so it can work with PAS the SPA at the moment I don't think is quite there yet but there could be work done to enable it to align and then we'd have that commonality of methodology and approach going forward so they're complementary rather than in conflict these are not conflicting standards they're all complementary in seeking the same outcome certainly in terms of PAS and EWS they have been aligned or EWS has been adapted and aligned to reflect the PAS there's still I think a journey to go in respect of the SPA any other views on that John Martin described there to add some clarity to our understanding at least as a committee John Okay, a lot of society we can't comment on the technical standards but what we would comment on is that there are currently purchasers buying flats on the strength of an EWS1 and there would be a I think a significant dent to the confidence in the market and the process of purchasing if having bought on the strength of an EWS1 they were then faced with selling against an SPA that required works and so there would be I suppose an expectation that the two would be aligned otherwise and if not then there would be consequences in terms of market confidence in the operation of the market any other questions I think both Callum and Mervin want to come in Thank you, a couple of points the EWS1 form it's really important to remember is a lending document we're all concerned about building safety we all want the buildings to be safe the EWS1 just confirms whether costs are required for remediation works or not and that's very important for lenders if we remove the EWS1 form then we would go back to a situation where lenders and surveyors were having to try and interpret single building assessments or fire risk assessments or PAS9980 assessments and decide whether a building required work or not which we don't want to go back to that the really great thing about the EWS1 form is its binary yes it requires work or no it doesn't so any replacement of that purely from a lenders point of view and from a evaluation point of view would need to replicate a situation where you know clearly yes costs are required to fix this building or no they're not and one other comment I'd like to make go back a little bit to the FIA register the issue with the FIA register of EWS1 forms is that it wasn't compulsory so it didn't it didn't hold all the forms that were created Thank you Just to say the PAS9980 is a highly regarded standard and it's something that is helping the risk of staying the same thing over and over it doesn't go it's important for life safety but it doesn't go as far as property resilience so whilst we think PAS9980 is made a big difference and it is moving forward in the right direction we're still thinking about how we would enhance that further in order to get insurance premiums down that's the only thing I wanted to add at this point That's very helpful Thank you Just on that enhancing the PAS9980 what are your thoughts on that what do we need to do As I mentioned briefly earlier we're focusing on property resilience in addition to life safety so the key concern for insurers is that obviously that everyone gets out safely that's very important for everybody but in terms of the potential cost to the insurer of the building being destroyed is much, much higher now than we previously thought so we're looking to get to standards that actually focus on that property resilience and that takes into account all of the fire safety issues that we've talked about so it's not just about removing the cladding that's very, very important but if you leave cladding or you leave combustible insulation in there and you haven't dealt with the fire breaks then that's still a problem for fire safety issues so there's a lot of issues around fire safety if we mediate one and the others are still there there's still a chance that that building will be totally destroyed in a catastrophic fire so that's the concern it's addressing all the issues Okay, that's very helpful coming back to the scope of the bill but I think in the previous panel we were hearing that we need to move forward but there needs to be an awareness that there needs to be more maybe more legislation brought forward to handle those other pieces or to look at the whole building I'd like to bring in Miles Briggs with a question I wanted to touch upon professionals insurance liability as well because witnesses have told our committee that the cost and availability of professional and emity insurance for building professionals industry professionals involved in this work continues to be a significant issue so I just wanted to ask why does this continue to be the case and how do you think that can be resolved so certainly PII insurance has been affected by the Grimfield strategy and the loss of confidence in previous building regulations but our understanding talking to our members is that PII cover does remain available and it does remain available for people to purchase and particularly we understand that qualified fire safety engineers are able to purchase that cover and carry out the planning inspection work so it's still available to purchase and we understand that people are buying that cover but it has been impacted of course by the loss of confidence in the regulation issues Thanks for that I don't know if anyone else wants to add is there specific products given the workforce which will emerge which have been developed in Scotland around this I'm not aware of any specific products at this point in time but what I'm seeing in England is that if there are fire risk assessors doing this work then there is cover so there is no reason why that cover shouldn't be available in Scotland as well Thank you Thanks Miles I'm now going to bring in Stephanie Callaghan Thank you very much Some of this has been touched on but clarity is always good and ABI in Finance UK said in their written evidence they were asking for the bill to focus not just on the preservation of life but also the protection of property Merrill, you've just spoken about property resilience to prevent total loss someone, are there other justifications for this change or is that about the potential cost for insurers only and also what the implications around the cost and timescales for remediation work might be From an insurance perspective it is about insurance costs so if the expected loss of an insurer is higher the premiums will be higher and the feeling is at the moment is that without building resilience standards then the potential loss the expected loss of the building if it is subject to a catastrophic loss is high and therefore premiums are higher so it is very much linked to the cost of insurance premiums from an insurance perspective it's about making sure that the building is protected in the various ways I've already mentioned in terms of insulation fire breaks, cladding etc in a way that stops the building from being completely destroyed or severely damaged there are other elements of that as well if a building is damaged obviously not only do you have the cost of the building itself but people will need to be rehoused etc obviously it takes longer to rebuild a whole building then it has to repair the damage for individual units within a building so that's the key issue there in terms of your second part of your question as to whether this would slow things down we've said already that we think PAS9080 has moved in the right direction and it is a good point as we move forward but I do think that over time we need to think about how we enhance PAS9080 so that we can get to this building resilience and be the piece that actually ultimately brings down the premiums now I should say at this point that we shouldn't be looking to see insurance premiums going down to where they were pre-grandfield a lot of things have happened since then not least inflation so I just want to make sure that people are aware that insurance premiums would have gone up in that period in any case due to inflation here on the impact on premiums because of the expected loss being higher I don't know if you would have anything to add to that John and if there are different views as well from any others I've been interested to to hear those Just picking up the points that Mervyn has made about rising insurance costs the issue in terms of how it plays out for mortgage lenders is really about being a requirement essentially of all mortgages that the building is insured for all the standard perils obviously including fire and destruction and if the cost of that insurance continues to be high then that will affect the affordability of a mortgage for a borrower to affect the loan to value the LTV that a lender might be prepared to offer a customer on that property so it's really from that perspective that the interest from mortgage lenders in insurance costs come but clearly we do recognise that if as a result of a significant fire event the building is destroyed then that essentially means that the lender's physical security for the loan is lost however that's why we have building's insurance in place so it kind of comes round again but essentially high insurance costs in terms of premium or excesses will impact borrower affordability or the LTV that they're able to get then around the costs and timescales for remediation work I think clearly everyone wants these problems to be fixed sooner rather than later there are going to be factors at play in the market, the labour industry access to materials and professional services that will impact the overall timescale for delivery of typical remediation programmes and we will have to live with that really if it can be accelerated and brought forward then costs might come down sooner but we just don't know how long it's going to take for each individual building to go through its remediation journey you've got a couple more questions just one more question actually thanks I know when the law society put in their written evidence they were keen to see that there is greater detail that was included in the bill around responsible developer scheme and the cladden assurance register and I'm just wondering if you want to say a bit more in that anything about risks and mention any specific recommendations that you would like to see the committee bring forward for example to the Government in relation to the responsible developer scheme it's just a point of principle which is that there's not a lot of detail how it's contained in the bill for example the nature of the connection is open ended and is left to I think secondary legislation and so the question has been do you think the RDS will work and the answer is it's hard to say how it will work without that detail specific recommendations for specific revisals to the bill it is more of a general comment that it is difficult to assess how it will work in the absence of this detail and in relation to the cladding register we have already commented on our review that the more information that is contained on that register as early a point in time as possible the better for making sure that everyone in the market has the same information but also we would be keen to see a register of cleared buildings that fell out with the scope of the SPA to avoid the inefficiency of the same question being asked, investigated and answered on multiple occasions where there should be the same answer as reached each time I'm just wondering do you have any reflections then on some of the comments that were made by the early panel today about having that flexibility rather than having to go back and actually change primary legislation using the secondary legislation just interested in what your thoughts on that might be I'm conscious that the number of points in our consultation response we were keen to see more detail and that's just a natural position of people who will be asked what does this bill mean to operate and it's not possible to really answer a large number of questions without that detail however we also recognise that there is a need for flexibility and I think the difficulty that I think all of us witnesses and what it would have is how would you balance the need for flexibility against certainty against consistency against speed of legislation and that's what I'm very, very glad that I'm on this seat rather than some of the other seats I think you sum it up very, very well there Joan thank you convener I just saw John Maher I want you to come in on that to agree with John on that that is essentially a question of balance but also just reflect on the experience which some witnesses in the earlier session this morning commented on with the building safety act in England which is a mammoth piece of legislation of immense complexity with a great deal of detail on that primary legislation and the experience has been that aspects of that have been problematic and have required subsequent reworking so it does underline the need to as John Maher says, get the balance right as far as possible because I think clearly there's the scope for things to be further delayed if any legislation which is passed by the Parliament here has to come back for reworking rather than being taken through the sort of secondary legislation route okay yeah thanks for that kind of perspective I've got one final question which is around do you think there's sufficient qualified fire engineers and other building industry professionals and contractors in Scotland to undertake a single building assessment and cladding remediation within a reasonable timescale and if not how might any shortfall be tackled so I'm interested to hear your perspective on that perhaps on that I could really just reflect the views of fire professionals and other witnesses in the earlier session indicating that given the numbers of buildings that may require work there could be a shortfall in professionals north of the border however beyond that I couldn't really comment it's not a space which we operate in as UK finance but obviously there should be enough people to do this and if there aren't then that really is a concern about the prospect for further delaying buildings being fixed and further delaying the people who live in them to be able to get on with their lives to buy and sell, to remortgage and to move on thanks anybody else John Sinclair ready to reiterate or agree with what John Marre said and to highlight that the value and quality of the register will be underpinned by the confidence the public have in the register and that will be very that will depend upon having a high degree of confidence in the people who are preparing the single building assessment but also the process for signing off on completion of works and so the availability and quality the right quality, the right competencies of people involved in the single building assessment is critical Madam Commander, I return indirectly to one previous point which is about flexibility and speed one of the issues in the bill that is of concern to us and I think it is driven by the need for speed and rapidly as rapidly as possible with works to buildings but in the provisions relating to an appeal against works there is a provision which provides that if an appeal to the sheriff is not determined within 21 days then that appeal is deemed to be dismissed and whilst we understand and appreciate the need for speed and certainty of process that provision seems to us to be awkward I'm glad that you brought that up because when I read that in the papers I thought that seems quite tight and what would be if it wasn't an urgent situation what would be, is there a more a usual time frame for that kind of appeal process our concern wasn't actually with the time frame albeit an appeal against a proposal for works could be a very very complicated the concern we have is more of the principle that an individual could be effectively deprived of their right to an appeal by a delay within the process and is there another way around that maybe you need to write to us I think there is another way it will come down to the court rules and the process of managing the appeal I think the position could perhaps be ameliorated in greater clarity as to what is the trigger for the appeal and when that appeal would then occur I think from the terms of the bill are that the notice that would be appealed would be the notice that is given by the Scottish Ministers once works have been arranged or they have arranged to carry out the works and I think it's understanding what is meant by that is that basically they have a building contract or they have a set of tenders that they're about to put forward or do they have a rough set of works that they know what they want to do but they haven't specified it in detail or cost it it sort of comes back to the earlier point about the process between a single building assessment to the report to the specification to the building warrant to the contract for the construction of the works and perhaps greater clarity as to the point at which that appeal would be triggered would be one route for reducing the potential for a very late stage delay and disruption in the process I think that's very helpful and I would actually just open that up in general in terms of is there anything that's missing in the bill from your perspective to anybody else ask that question to anybody else no okay Miles you wanted to come in with a brief supplementary it was just on a specific point with regard to at the heart of this our individual householders the stress and anxiety they've felt but it has been raised with us as we go through this process often buildings what's done with those and where the insurance industry maybe are treating those different so just wondered as we go through this process and the hundred and odd buildings here in Scotland which are currently going to be looked at in relation to these buildings and making sure that there's specific solutions found I might be bringing you in to start from that yeah I mean sorry when you say open buildings I'm assuming you're meeting individual buildings that are but are not linked to any other other developments is that right? or where developers cease to exist cease to exist yeah I mean so again I guess we insurers are providing cover for buildings they're not they haven't provided cover but of course the cost is higher when the remediation haven't happened and so our members are can help owners to understand what remediation might be required but obviously then there's a question of how they fund that right and that's a very difficult very difficult position to be in right so I'm not sure it's perhaps to be helping them with the remediation cost but it's certainly we're going to have discussions with them as to what might be required in order to get premiums down if we're not dealing with developers who are currently in existence and I think my specific concern would be we create a two-tier system where we say and potentially where they go on the register that we say well a developer is going to do this work it's agreed, public funds are also available but then we have a group of orphan ones and workforce-wise all the workforce goes to where developers are orchestrating that work and then insurance premiums increase for people and these properties are seen in a different category so we need to make sure we don't leave them left for someone to then look at doing that work going forward I should probably know in England that there has been funding some government funding for some of these buildings right and maybe that's a way to work forward is to focus government funding on those buildings where the developers don't have there are no developers they're no longer in existence in order to get to solve some of those issues as we move forward but importantly I suppose the insurance industry to understand this need as well yeah, obviously we should definitely understand the need but there's not a desire to have buildings being treated differently but at the same time we obviously have to make sure that there's mediation plans in place so that we can move forward with reducing premiums but the one thing maybe I should add which we haven't mentioned at all on this course yet is that we have been developing a reinsurance facility which is aiming to try and get premiums down we would expect there to be a plan for mediation for buildings placed in that facility but we're very hopeful that facility will be announced soon and that will apply to buildings in Scotland in the same way that will apply to buildings in England that's helpful, thanks yeah, thanks very much I think that's heartening news for people who own the buildings yeah, Dunmar so thank you just for picking up on that as well certainly as Mervyn mentions that there are public funds available to support the mediation of so-called orphaned buildings in England and also in Wales as well and if that's not something which has been considered here in Scotland then it might be something that MSPs might want to think about in terms of directing public funds to those buildings where a developer cannot be identified or held to account okay, great, thank you very much well that actually concludes our questions I think it's been yet another very helpful panel this morning certainly getting a much clearer picture of all the different permutations and how do we make this a good piece of legislation that's going to meet the needs it's quite challenging but I think it's really been good to hear from you we previously agreed to take the next three items in private so that was the last public item on our agenda today I now close the public part of the meeting