 Good morning and welcome to the 14th meeting in 2022 of the Local Government Housing and Planning Committee. I would ask all members and witnesses to ensure that their mobile phones 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 item 3 in private. Are we all agreed? Agreed. Thank you. The next item on our agenda for today is to take evidence on the building Scotland amendment regulations 2022, and this is a negative instrument. There is no requirement for the committee to report on it. However, given the committee's long-standing interest in issues relating to fire safety in buildings and following on from the work of our predecessor committee, the intention is that this session will also provide an opportunity to discuss the topic more broadly. We will then take evidence on the regulations from the minister for zero carbon buildings, active travel and tenants rights at our next meeting. We are joined for this session by David Aitken, building standards team leader at Dundee City Council and past LAB SS chair, as the local authority building standards Scotland. Chris Ashhurst, who is the group coordinator of High Rise Scotland Action Group, Peter Drummond, who is the chair of practice at the Royal Incorporation of Architects in Scotland and chair of the most recent fire safety review panel, and George Edward Edwards, technical steering group manager of the fire protection association, and also Laura Hughes, who is the manager of the general insurance association. We also have Craig Ross, who is from the building standards specialist royal institution of chartered surveyors and apologies from Dr Paul Stollard, chair of the review panel building standards fire safety in Scotland. I welcome our witnesses to the meeting. There's a lot of you, which is fantastic. Before I get started, I wanted to correct a factual error in the meeting papers for the record. The paper states that Dr Stollard chaired the most recent fire safety review panel. This panel in fact was chaired by Peter Drummond of the Royal Incorporation of Architects in Scotland and I apologize for any confusion. Dr Edwards and Laura Hughes are, as I said, joining us remotely today. Given the number of witnesses for this session, I don't expect everyone to respond to every question. It would be helpful if members could direct their questions to a specific witness where possible, although I would be happy to bring in others who wish to contribute. If other witnesses do wish to comment, please indicate your desire to do so to me or to the clerk and I'll bring you in at an appropriate point. I'd be grateful if George and Laura you could indicate if you wish to come in by typing an R in the chat function in blue jeans. I'll now open up the session to questions for members. I would like to begin with the first question. Having said that, I'll direct it to you. I'll start with Peter Drummond. Are you satisfied with the requirement to use only non-combustible material in external wall cladding systems on buildings with a story 11 metres or more above ground? Is sufficient to protect occupants from the possibility of significant fire spread up the outside of such buildings? The panel was tasked with an evidence-led approach on a fairly wide-ranging brief to identify all the key areas of risk for building occupants in high-risk structures. That evidence indicated that the principal risk was above 18 metres with a still very significant risk above 11 metres. There was no substantial evidence made available to the panel that properties below 11 metres carried with it the same level of risk. Now, there's a number of reasons for that. As you know, residential buildings in Scotland and some other use classes now require sprinklers within them. There are very clear requirements in the Scottish building regulations for fire tender access and for five fighting facilities. What I would say, however, is that the panel's view on that was predicated on all these different parts of the regulations working together in a unified approach rather than just one in isolation. For that reason, my view is that we should continue to monitor the fire risk and emerging patterns in buildings below 11 metres to ensure that our guidance and, indeed, in some cases, regulatory bans remains robust. Thank you for that response. I just wonder if anyone else wanted to come in on that question if not, we can move on. No, okay, so I'm going to now bring in Miles Briggs with a couple of questions. Thank you, convener. Good morning to the panel. Thank you for joining us today and online. I wanted to carry on the line of questioning with regards to the regulations specifically, which would prevent the use of highly combustible metal composite material in the use of external cladding and insulation. Do you think that the definition of that material specifically is robust enough to ensure that any dangers posed by such materials has now been reduced to the most reasonably practical way of taking this forward with the regulations? Or is there other things we need to look at specifically with regard to that metal composite? Peter, you touched upon that, so maybe start with you. Thank you very much. That occupied a very significant part of the deliberations of the panel. The concern was that we had to provide something sufficiently tight to pick up the most flammable forms, but which wasn't open to abuse. So, for example, we've recommended a ban on paneling up to 10 millimetres, comprising a calorific value of 35 megajoules a kilogram. Apologies for that. The risk, therefore, is that someone will produce a 10.1 millimetre board or a 34.9 megajoule calorific value. Again, for that reason, our advice to the ministers and to yourself is that that will be kept under review. Lightly, there will be new construction product materials coming through. Because of the provisions of the building safety bill and the new product regulator, one would like to think that they will be tested more robustly, but I would suggest to you that we should not be taking risks in respect of people's health and wellbeing and their lives. Therefore, there is a need for the on-going work of building standards and review panels, such as the ones that both myself and Dr Stollard shared, to keep coming through the system and also feed in real-life intelligence. I am also going to take a slight diversion and point to the wealth of very detailed technical assessment done for the Grenfell inquiry, not all of which has been fully analysed by us yet, which may also cast light on where we need to make future changes to the regime in order that we continue to have a set of building regulations that put public safety front and centre. Does anyone else want to come in and online, George? I know you're a technical steering group. I understand the focus on the metal elements in the external wall system, which of course is significant, but as an owner and experiencing it myself and across Scotland, we're finding that if we're wanting to get guaranteed safety, it really has got to extend beyond that, and I think that that's been touched on, but to focus simply, and I can say of a building that I'm intimately involved with, the cladding there is class as A1, wonderful, but 14% of the wall area is rendered, and behind that apparently is some EPS system, so merely, if I can put it that way, focusing on metal and is perhaps unhelpful, and certainly some of our owners are beside themselves with that whole definition and can't understand why their building can't be deemed to be safe when it actually hasn't got this cladding on it. Technical difficulties, and Laura and George apparently cannot hear us, so I'm going to temporarily suspend until we sort that out, because I really want them to be part of this conversation, so apologies for that. Apologies, Miles.