 Good morning, and welcome to the 23rd meeting in 2023 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, and we've received apologies from Pam Gosall and Mark Griffin will be joining us online. The first item on our agenda today is to decide whether to take items 4, 5, 6 and 7 in private. Are members agreed? Okay, we're all agreed. The next item on our agenda today is to take evidence on reinforced autoclaved aerated concrete, otherwise known as rack, from two panels, with our first panel taking place in a round table format. We're joined on our first panel in the room by David Baird, who's property service manager at West Lothian Council, Peter Drummond, who's the chair of practice committee at the Royal Incorporation of Architects in Scotland, Paul Jones, who's the strategic asset manager at the Edinburgh City Council, Ilsa MacFarlane, who's the director at Built Environment Forum Scotland, Ian Morris, who's the acting director of asset management at the Scottish Fire and Rescue Service, and Peter Watten, who's the service director at City of Edinburgh Council and Representing Solace. We're joined online by Stephen Booth, who's chief officer of corporate landlord at Edinburgh City Council, Professor Chris Goodyear from the senior leadership team at the School of Architecture at Loughborough University, Martin Little, who's the chair of the study group at the institution of structural engineers, Paul Livesey, who's the scheme manager of collaborative reporting for safer structures UK, otherwise known as Cross UK, and Sam Piplika, who's a senior specialist in building at the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors, otherwise known as RICS, and I welcome all of our witnesses to the meeting, and I'm going to begin our conversation this morning by inviting everyone to very briefly introduce yourselves, and I'll begin. I'm Ariane Burgess, MSP for the Highlands and Islands. Hi, I'm David Bairds, and I'm the property services manager for Westwood in Council. Good morning, I'm Paul Jones, I'm strategic asset improvement manager at Edinburgh Council. I'm service director for sustainable development at the City of Edinburgh Council, and I'm here on behalf of Solace. Good morning. I'm Miles Briggs, conserved MSP for Lothian region. Good morning, everybody. I'm Els MacFallan, director of best built environment for Scotland. Good morning. I'm Ian Morris, acting director of asset management for the Scottish Fire and Rescue Service. Good morning again, everybody. I'm Peter Drummond, a practicing architect, and I'm representing the Royal Incorporation of Architects. Ivan McKee, SNP, MSP for Glasgow Proven. Can we go online? I'll just call you up there. Stephen, if you can come in. Good morning. I'm Stephen Buthine, chief officer corporate landlord at Aberdeen City Council. Thanks very much. Professor Chris Goodyear. Good morning. I'm a professor of construction engineering with tales at Loughborough University, and I've been leading research into RAC for the last two years. Martin Little. Hi, I'm Martin Little. I'm a regional director at SWECO, and I'm here because I'm chair of the RAC study group of the Institution of Structural Engineers. Paul Livesey. Good morning. My name is Paul Livesey. I'm a charter structural engineer. I'm the manager of collaborative reporting for safer structures UK. Cross issued the industry-wide safety alert on RAC panels in 2019. And Sam Pipplaker. Hello. I'm Sam Pipplaker. I'm a chartered building surveyor by trade, and now I'm at RICS looking after the professional practice, so developing guidance and standards for our chartered building surveyers out there practicing. Great, thanks very much for that. So we're going to turn to questions from members, and what usually happens is a member will direct their question initially to somebody in the room or online, and if you want to come in to respond to that question as well, or to something someone else has said, if you can just indicate that to me in the room. If you are online, you can do that by typing an R in the chat function, and just to let you also know that there's no need for you to manually turn your microphones on and off both in and on in the room and online, we'll do that for you automatically. The intention of this panel, of this round table, is that it should be a free flowing conversation rather than a question and answer session. I do want to make sure that we wear appropriate, so you don't, I would say there's quite a lot of us, so don't feel that you have to respond to every single question, but come in and add to points as and when you feel it's important that something hasn't been brought to light. So with that, I'm going to begin, and I'm going to ask a fairly general question, and maybe I will direct it to Chris Goodyear to start the conversation. Given that the concerns about RAC's limited lifespan and potential for catastrophic failure have been known about since the mid-1980s, why do you think it's taken until now for significant action to be taken, or has remedial action been on-going away from the media spotlight? Thank you. Good morning, everyone. First of all, the limited lifespan is a bit of an urban myth. Out in the media it says 30 years lifespan. It's given the impression that year 31, these things fall down. This is unsubstantiating in any decent reference or evidence or testing or what have you, but it is out there and it is a belief. There are a lot of planks out there, 40 years old, 50 years old, and the ones we tested and investigated, most of them are performing very well. So just to get out that, the majority of RAC planks out there, even after 50 years, are performing extremely well and are very safe and will last another few decades. But coming back to the question, in the 80s some testing was done by BRE, which showed that these planks are probably a little less robust than traditional reinforced concrete, and they can deflect more or creep over time more than traditional reinforced concrete. So they weren't banned in the country, but BRE sent out this warning, as we do, take care with these things. They do perform differently to traditional reinforced concrete. So the kind of guidance was perhaps there might be better ways of building out there, so the industry stopped using them in the 80s, but other countries carried on, and so there's countries like Germany who have been using them since the 50s, 60s and haven't stopped. So we gave out this, I call it a gentle warning rather than a hard fast stop, so the industry stopped using it, but other countries didn't. Okay, thanks very much for that. Does anyone else want to come in on that question, or did we get that covered? I hesitate to clarify that answer, but whilst the 1986 BRE paper did indeed come back with relatively relaxed results, is it not the case that the 2002 BRE paper does highlight the potential for problems in a minority of slabs as a combination of both construction quality and, in some isolated cases, original component quality? Chris? Yes, I'd agree with that, but I'd also come back with every building that's 30, 40, 50 years, is showing signs of wear and tear and should be surveyed and looked after appropriately. Whatever material old buildings are made of, they need surveying and looking after, and they perform maybe slightly differently than when they were originally designed. So again, the industry looked to this and thought, yeah, it's 30 years old back then, we'll keep an eye on it, and that's what some asset owners have been doing, particularly the NHS that are probably the leaders in this field. They have a lot of rack, and so they looked at this and said, well, we've got 10,000 plants in some hospitals. We're going to monitor these and keep an eye on them, and that's what they've been successfully doing. Thanks, and I see Martin little you would like to come in. Yeah, thank you. So to pick up on the subject of what's been going on, so the SCOS report was issued in 2009 following a failure of a panel in a school. That sort of raised the general awareness. It was something which I got to hear about as well, and so we had been doing some work largely at a couple of hospitals with the BRE from about 2009. So for about 10 years, we'd been doing low level, slow research, but just generally doing a little bit more research into rack and not research, so I'm studying into the rack at these two particular hospitals. So when the SCOS report was issued in 2009, the institution of structural engineers put together a study panel, and that's the panel that I've been chairing from 2009. The NHS in England picked up the baton very strongly, largely because they've got quite a lot of hospitals entirely built of rack, and there was quite a lot of investigations and research that was done on the back of that, and that led to the instigation of the major research project by Loughborough University that's now been going on for two to three years. In the intervening period, the institution of structural engineers and the panel I lead issued two updates. One was issued at the beginning of last year, which was issued just to raise awareness to the engineering profession of some of the findings that were coming to light from the investigations into the hospitals, which were being looked at, and then we issued a second paper in April this year, and that paper was very much intended to spread the ability for engineers to assess the condition of rack to beyond just a fairly small pool of people who'd actually just had hands-on experience of rack, so the processes that have been set out to identify the hazards around rack and the risks have been tended that any competent engineer can pick up a situation with rack and can assess it, and can identify, come up with a rack-rated classification of rack that hopefully is going to have some form of uniformity across the whole of the country. Thanks very much for that. Paul Livesey, you wanted to come in as well. Thank you. Just to go back to the BRE report from 1996, or those that they suggested that the planks that they tested were safe, they did suggest that RAAC planks should be located and regularly inspected, so that was sort of the first shot across everybody's bow as going back to 1996. As Martin has mentioned, Cross or Scots as it was then issued the industry alert in 1999 following the collapse of the school roof in 2018 in Kent. The question talks about how has the industry known about it. I think I would imagine that there's been a lot of private buildings that have undertaken repairs, strengthening and replacement in the background that have not been widely reported. I certainly undertook replacement of a number of rack planks in 2010, so 13 years ago, of a shopping centre that had rack roofs over the storage areas and they had deflected to such an extent that the roof was leaking onto stock, so the owners of the shopping centre took the view to replace them then. I would imagine that there are other buildings where we just do not know, but they have been probably replaced or strengthened. Thanks very much for that. I'm going to now bring in Ivan McKee. Thanks very much, convener. I know just to follow up on the conversation so far. I'm interested to understand the extent to which the rack material is significantly different from other building materials. Our briefing says that if rack is not manufactured, installed and maintained correctly, then that can lead to problems. I respect that that is probably true of any building material. I would like to understand a bit from your technical perspective on what extent is rack fundamentally different from other materials alternatives that could be used in building. Is it therefore need a different approach rather than what you'd normally expect from buildings, as you said, good maintenance and good monitoring of the condition of the fabric? I don't know, I'm quite open to it. Maybe Chris wants to start with that. Yeah, can I start by the material then? I'll pass over to Martin, I think, who can maybe talk about how it impacts on structural design with a really different material. The rack is actually a good name, rather concrete. The concrete bit is a bit misleading because to be good concrete, you need aggregate in there, which is the big stones 10mm, 20mm big. So it doesn't have that. So it's not really concrete, it's really a mortar. So that's fine sand in there. It's aerated, which means it's got air in there, which is fine. It means it's a very good insulator and when you're a builder, it's lightweight and it's great to build with and it's cheaper and it's easy to transport. The autoclave bit is just how it's manufactured. It's a pressure cooker. So you literally cook this stuff at temperature and under pressure, which means it gains strength quicker and it can manufacture them quicker. And it's reinforced, which is back then mild steel bars, which I'll come back to. And then the kind of fancy ingredient, it's got cement in there just like normal concrete and water. It's got aluminium powder in there that under temperature, this aluminium powder creates hydrogen and expands into the gas. So I remember doing this at school. We drop some aluminium into some water thing and it fizzes and gives off a gas. So the kind of underlying chemistry is very basic and very similar to normal cement and concrete and there's nothing too fancy or magic ingredients in there. But from a material property point of view, the big difference is that the AAC, the concrete bit, is very low strength, about three or four megapascal and normal concrete is around 30, 40 megapascal. So you could say it's about 10 percent, 15 percent of normal strength concrete. However, before you get scared and think how this could this be possible, this is OK because the structural engineers type those numbers into the calculations. We know it's that strength and it's fine. For me, it's similar to saying wood, you know, it's really weak. You can snap a pencil or a ruler in your hand. That's fine because that's the numbers we use and put in for the design. And the reinforcement is basic mild steel that is in traditional reinforced concrete. It does have a coating on it though because one problem with the aerated nature is that water can get through it quite easily. So it can soak up water which adds to its own self weight, which is a problem, but this water can also get to the steel in the middle. And we all know I guess steel and water and oxygen isn't a good thing and it can create rust. So these bars are coated with a fine coating when they're manufactured a waterproofing coating, which in most cases we found is pretty intact still after 40 years or so. But in some cases this has deteriorated and cracked and come away a bit and it can rust a little bit. So I'll pause there, but maybe pass over to Martin and you can let me comment on how that affects the structural engineering model design. Martin. Can you hear me? Yes, thank you Chris. Yes, so this low strength nature of the material means it behaves very differently and it behaves in two ways very differently. The first one is the way that the reinforcement gets anchorage at the end bearing of the plank. Normal concrete does that by bond between the steel and the concrete, but the very weak nature of the material means it can't achieve that. So and this was known about in the 1560s. So there's a transverse bar needs to be welded onto the end of the reinforcing cages. And that's what anchors the reinforcement. Now that transverse bar needs to be positioned over the support for the panel. Now the issue associated with one of the biggest risks associated with rack was that at the time of construction, panels were allowed to have 45mm end bearings. So they only had a very short bearing length and this transverse bar had to be positioned over the top of it. And the biggest risk we're finding is that due to 1960s and 50s and even 70s manufacturing control, sometimes those panels, those transverse bars weren't correctly positioned. In rare cases they're not even there. But also with the same period of construction control, sometimes those panels weren't given the end bearings that they were aimed to achieve. And what that means is in some instances that transverse bar can be in front of the bearing and not over the bearing. And what that does and what the research has shown is that it doesn't affect the strength of the panel very much. But it leads to a situation where the failure of the panel can, instead of being a ductile failure where it just slowly sags and deflects until it fails, it can fail in a, what's called a brittle failure mechanism, but it can fail very suddenly. And that's what instigated the Scots report. Actually someone's corrected me, it was in 2019, I think I might have said earlier, but in 2019 it was when a failure had been reported at a school. And subsequent to that, there's been a handful of failures identified. Some of the failures where the panels have crashed to the floor, others where they just failed and being caught on something below that stopped them actually failing. So that's the biggest difference and the biggest risk that's associated with RAC. The other thing that affects RAC and it comes into the ageing of RAC is that, as Chris pointed out, the RAC doesn't protect the reinforcement from corrosion in the way that normal concrete does. Now that's taken care of in the manufacturer and it was known at the time of manufacturer with a coating of the reinforcement that was put onto it before it was carved into the panels. But that coating is breaking down with time and we're finding in some locations, quite a lot of locations, that that is allowing corrosion to begin to develop. Now the corrosion has two impacts on the panels. The first is that it can actually allow, it can push out the cover concrete from it and lead to spalling of the panels, which spalling is where parts of the cover concrete over the reinforcement will fall and fall away from concrete. And so if it falls then it presents a risk to people there. But also in that process of spalling and also just the general reinforcement, it can affect the bond between the reinforcement and the concrete. And in a situation where that bond strength is very weak to begin with anyway, that reduction in bond is something else that can lead to a concern about the reduction in strength of the panels. Sorry, that's quite a long answer, but does that help answer that question? It does, I don't know if anyone else wants to comment on that. Yeah, Ivan Paul lives, he wants to come in online and then we'll come to people in the room. Thanks. So, as Professor Goodyear said, some planks are absolutely fine, but what we have here is a perfect storm of contributory factors for a number of planks. So, as Martin's mentioned, we have some poor manufacture of some planks with critical transverse bars being in the wrong location. We've got poor construction with reduced end bearings. We have deterioration of the protective coating, which potentially can lead to corrosion of the reinforcement. We have long-term creep issues on some planks which can move the bearing position such that the stresses, the transverse bar is no longer in the correct location. We also have poor alterations that have been undertaken and poor maintenance. So, it's all these contributory factors working together that's led to a perfect storm for some planks. Unfortunately, the farm failure, as Martin mentioned, which can be a brittle shear failure, is one that happens without warning. So, you don't necessarily get many cracks and deflection, as you would in a bending failure. So, if I'm hearing that correctly, it's as much the nature of the catastrophic nature of the failure. That's the issue, at least as significant as the fact that a stuff can fail, because, as I said, most materials can fail. I suppose that it would be interesting to get confirmation on that, but I also understand that there's data there on how many failures there have been and how that would compare to alternative building materials. Who wants to pick that up? I think that Martin wants to come in. Yeah, thank you. I think that's absolutely spot-on. It's a brittle nature of the failure that concerns the engineering industry. As engineers, we design buildings so they fail in a ductile way by a multitude of methods, but that ductility gives one warning of problems coming. The brittle nature of the failure of rack is the one that is the most concerning, because it can fail with very little or no warning that's associated with it. The other thing that I will just, perhaps I should have added earlier, is because of the nature of rack being very soft, it's much easier for people to modify, particularly in buildings that are subject to a lot of variations, which is why the NHS particularly had a problem with rack or has a problem with rack. It's relatively easy to cut holes in it, to drill holes, to form openings in it, and concrete anyway doesn't particularly like having holes cut in it, but rack, because of this reduced bond strength and some other factors associated with it, means that it can be critically weakened in that process. That's perhaps less affecting, say, a school, which tends to be built to the school and remains to the school, but hospital is obviously a subject to constant change associated with it. Also, in the nature of those, where people were forming openings and were trimming those, because rack behaves differently, the typical trimming details that would be used if you were cutting out a bit of concrete were often used in rack, including by some instances by my own practice in the past, but without realising that it doesn't work and it's not as effective as it is in normal concrete. Modifications can either unintentionally or intentionally have created defects within panels. The issue effectively, and I think we'll come on and cover this later, it comes down to how effectively we're able to monitor the condition to give advance warning if there is any problems that need to be addressed. I think that that's another good question. I think the if, so the end bearing issues, it's very difficult and I'd go so far as to say that one can't effectively monitor for the end bearing. So, if one has to investigate it, assess it and appraise it, and then if necessary, do strengthening. Once that strengthens in place for the end bearings, the other factors of deterioration, that can be monitored. So, one can monitor that by looking at the deflections, looking at cracking, looking for water ingress that causes problems. So, there is a way to effectively monitor the situation or the condition of rat going forward. One of the things perhaps we might come on to is the Loughborough research, which has been phenomenally successful, but it's only barely scratched the surface. It's been going on for two years. Most other materials that we look at have been subject to research for decades and this has really just got two years of research. So, my plea would be to governments in this country generally is funding for further research is necessary. One aspect of that funding, and I think to me one of the most important aspects of the funding, is to start looking further at these deterioration mechanisms. So, the monitoring that will need to be put in place for buildings that aren't fully remediated, but that monitoring can be effective and economic. At the moment, I think we're having to hit things with almost an uneconomic level of monitoring associated with it and I think further research would help us target that into a more effective... It's a relatively small spend on research to say of a much, much larger number when it comes to monitoring and evaluation. Absolutely, yes. Most hospitals that are being monitored, the cost of monitoring that is hundreds of thousands of pounds a year, whereas the research might be... We're still going to win. So far, the research that has been spent has been funded to the tune of about £3.25 million, but that gives you a larger response. Thanks very much. My last question is... The committee report you mentioned, the Standing Committee on Structural Safety in 2019 advised that all pre-1980 rack panels should be considered for replacement. I suppose the question is how did Scottish local authorities react to that alert and what work was done that asked Peter that question initially? Probably been various responses at the minute local authorities are still inspecting their properties and I think it's probably important that we acknowledge the challenge there is with identifying rack. Some of that is referred to in your report. A lot of it is in inaccessible places and is typically covered in something, whether it be plasterboard wood or in some cases asbestos paint. The buildings that we're dealing with are typically the era where asbestos was used as well, so you have that additional challenge. So I think time is an issue. I think all local authorities are probably at different stages. I think West Lothian are here probably at most advanced because they identified an issue very early on and took initiative to accelerate inspection. I can say that in Edinburgh the learning estate has been inspected, but we're now moved on to other buildings to get that full picture. I think that local authorities are well placed to deal with it. I think that time and resource are always going to be an issue. I think that the advice that we have, particularly from a technical point of view, is very good. It's consistent. It's an informed approach. It's evidence-based and it's risk-based as well, so every local authority is equipped to deal with it, but the challenge is in identification and then remediation, in particular diagnosing what that remediation is. It's not something that can happen quickly, so every local authority has got buildings of errors who can identify it, but in some cases, as I said, scaffolding towers are needed to get at it. However, what the buildings of errors can't do is diagnose what the remediation is, and that's where the structure engineers come in who are more difficult to find for local authority, because typically we don't employ structure engineers, so they are in big demand. Once you identify it, there is the remediation. In some cases, some local authority is going to be dealing with it for five to ten years, given the nature of what they've got, where it is, and the fact that, in a lot of cases, it's in poor condition. Therefore, there is disruption, particularly to learn establishments during that period, and then there's ultimately the cost of it. I know of one situation where we're grappling with a scenario where the primary school has got rack in the roof, and to replace it, the roof needs to come off and be replaced. When you start to look at the cost of that, you're actually better looking at a best value assessment that says, well, you're replacing a roof on a 50, 60-year-old primary school that's not actually in good condition, and your best value assessment might say, actually, you're better to replace the old school. That might be an outcome, in some cases, as we move through this. Through shops, it's been monitored and through SFT progress, and, as I say, most local authorities have moved on to the rest of the state. Just as an example, Edinburgh has found it in one library, but over the last couple of weeks, whilst being teams out every day, we've not identified anything further. That's really an update, I think, from the local authorities point of view. Wes Lothian mentioned it by Peter. In our terms, when the 2019 advice came out, we were also looking at one of our schools, and we'd found planks had deflected. That led to us carrying out a full appraisal of all our public buildings at that stage to try to identify rack in them, and we identified it in nine of our buildings. At that stage, we got a structural engineering advice, and we went into our buildings to determine the condition of it and carried out regular inspections. In some of our buildings, we were able to put remediation measures in place and mitigation measures in place to keep the building safe and operating. We would go through a process thereafter in terms of our capital plan of trying to replace the roofs where the condition wanted that. We've taken the same risk-based approaches that have been suggested by colleagues of assessing the condition of the rack and falling it best into your practice right through that, which has changed this more and more as we've become known about the panels. That has led us to replace all but one of our roofs, or at least go through the processor of replacing all but one of our roofs, mainly due to the manufacturing issues and the condition of the planks and the deterioration of the planks. What we certainly have found is that, when we find planks in poor condition, as has been suggested by our colleagues, they can deteriorate quite quickly. That has led to some kind of de-cance, a very short notice in terms of our primary schools and one of our secondary schools. We'll be able to do that with the best engineering advice. We have an inspection regime in place with structural engineers. We also have weekly inspections of our premises where our buildings affairs, particularly in the one building where the racks are in good condition, just to make sure that we're keeping a very close eye on any kind of water ingress issues and other matters that come along. However, it has been quite a problem, and as Peter also alluded to, the age and condition and structure of these buildings means that it is as best as present. We have a huge amount of asbestos survey to do, even just to do, proper surveys of the condition of the planks. That has been really quite onerous and time-consuming to do that, but I'm quite a disruption to our education estate. Education colleagues have been very good at handling that and adapting to that, and we'll be able to support them through that. However, we are having to de-cant schools, de-cant villages for port of cabins in the likes, and just by going to other schools in such likes as well. However, it has deteriorated quite quickly in the west loathing cases, but we certainly do at least the one building there. The condition merits just a continuing to monitor the building rather than anything else. As I say, of our five schools, of our nine, we have three community centres on what we term a partnership centre as well with us in it. The partnership centre was a large games hall that has been replaced. Two of our community centres are on site in a minute, and we're working through one of our primary schools that we're going to replace with other two in the coming weeks and months as well. Our main problem remains our high school, where, again, taking Peter's point, we're looking at assessments, and rather than just replacing a roof, it very quickly became evident that, in best value terms, there's no point just simply replacing a roof in an old, inefficient building. We're now looking to demolish that area of the building and replace that area of the building. Other areas of the school will remain, but certainly we'll replace the rack area as a better means of coming up with a good solution for going forward with education attainment in the school and achieving best value. It is quite a challenge to do that. Obviously, we're quite content that, with the best engineer advice, we can put proper monitoring in place and adapt as circumstances change. Stephen Booth, you indicated that you wanted to come in. Good morning. I think that it's probably just fair to give the view across all local authorities, and I wouldn't disagree with anything that my local authority colleagues have said. As Peter mentioned, different local authorities are in a different position, and in speaking to David, you're probably speaking to a local authority that's maybe further ahead in that journey. In terms of Aberdeen, our response in 2019 was to conduct desktop reviews of all our estate that identified around 30 properties that we get further struck around engineer advice on, which at that point identified nine buildings across our estate, seven of which are schools that contained rack, and we had the mitigation and monitoring system in place around that and did carry some remediation work around roof loadings. Since then, I think that my colleagues have highlighted some of the issues in moving from that visual inspection from structural engineers to more intrusive testing and where there's maybe gaps in the market. Aberdeen City has been quite lucky to have some long-established relationships with engineers at lower properties, but I know some other local authority colleagues in rural areas that have the difficulty in getting that support. I think that the issue in terms of access to rack and asbestos has been a particular difficulty for us in Aberdeen, where there's a lack of supply, particularly within asbestos rather than the engineering market, both to get surveys done quickly, but also of testing turnaround quite quick. In Aberdeen, when the situation where we had seven schools, testing over the last weeks reduced that to three schools, which are all academies, which were working on mitigation plans and further surveying and investigation work at the moment. So it's maybe just to give that response that we're probably behind where David is, but I think that David is ahead of other local authorities. Thanks very much for that, Stephen. I'm going to bring in Paul Jones. I just wanted to, I guess, add some context for the council and where we are at this point in the identification of racks. So we have found it in some common cases where you would expect, so the mid-century buildings, however, we have identified rack in some areas where, I guess, we're probably less expected. So we found it in pitched roofs. We have identified it in actually an 1877 property that was subject to fire and then had a roof replacement in the early 70s. We've found it used inside depots for fire corridors, so just creating small structures. So I think where we are at this point in time is really we are looking everywhere across our state. We expect there's probably a low probability of finding it, given that we've seen it being used in lots of different ways. There's a possibility, so we're just trying to gain assurance around all areas. Great, thanks. David, do you want to come in and then we'll come to you, Ailsa? I'm going to back up what Stephen is saying. I mean, I don't think we're slowly on a necessary head for any dint of the fact that other buildings required us to carry out these surveys when we looked at them and it was a condition of the planks at that stage that required us to take, kind of, more in terms of measures rather than any kind of tardiness on our colleagues. I don't think that at all, so I think it really was just the very fact that we had roofs perhaps just unlucky in terms of maybe the manufacturing details and such, like we weren't quite right in our planks that made that necessary. So I think I'm confident that our colleagues have been just as diligent across the country as to speed up a particular set of circumstances in West Lothian. Thanks for clarifying that, Ailsa. Thank you, convener. I just wanted to make a parallel but I hope quite a pertinent point. We've been hearing from a lot of local authority colleagues around the difficulties in surveying, identification and discovery. This is not an issue that is specific to RAC in itself. We have a significant lack of knowledge about our building, our building material, our building condition and our building age. Without holistic centralised data on our buildings, we cannot continue to keep people safe, to meet future net zero goals and aims. We can't plan effectively for skills and material needs for the future and this is something that is well known in policy contexts and we are spending an awful lot of time and resource getting the basic data we need to find out what is where and how we can deal with it. Whilst there isn't a fix for this moment, there are significant fixes for the future that would pay dividends if we could find holistic building data that everybody could access effectively, making lists of specific registers that are time limited access, short term. Those are patches to much greater problems. They are necessary activity but I think that everybody would be able to get on with mitigation and with measures that would enable far greater, better solutions for those dealing with those buildings than the constant stream of surveying, identification and discovery, which should not be necessary now and should definitely not be necessary for the future. That was very helpful. I would like to bring in Martin. The point that I was going to raise was about the presence of rack. Most of the conversation here and also just generally about rack is about roofs because that is by far the most common situation that it was used. The earlier speaker who said that it can be everywhere is in fact the experience of most people. I would also add that it has been used in floors and it can and has been used in walls both as a load bearing situation but also as a non load bearing cladding panel situation. The appeal that I have put out to people is that when you are looking for rack, do not just look for it in roofs, you need to be looking for it in the whole of your building structure. If we were to have such a register, who do you think should be responsible for holding that register? Befs has made comments about that in the past. I think that there is a natural home within Scotland in 2015. The Scottish Government suggested that the Scottish Land Information Service should become the repository for information like that. It was a stated ambition from 2015 onwards and this has not come to pass. That is our solution. There is other excellent work being done by Professor Sean Smith at the University of Edinburgh around a national buildings database. There are solutions out there if people are willing to grasp the net along this. I will bring in Mark Griffin, who is joining us online. I had a question about staff and resources that local authorities would need to identify and remediate, but all of our local authority colleagues came in and reflected on that in the previous question. I will probe it a little bit further with Sam Pymlicka and Chris Goodyear to ask from your professional bodies whether we have the number of surveyors and structural engineers out there to do the identification and remediation that is required. I have heard previously that, because of the way that the UK Government has reacted, it has perhaps acted as a magnet for skills down to the rest of the UK. I will ask Sam and Chris about the availability of skills in Scotland to do the identification and remediation work. The availability of surveyors all depends on the appointing client and whether they have any barriers or limitations on what a surveyor requires from their skillset. As an example, the Department for Education in London produced an identification guide, which on the appointment of a Charred Bill and Surveyor, it limited who could be appointed to have one year's worth of experience in surveying of rack. Now, we have got many surveyors with significant experience that 30 plus years in the industry who may have never worked on a property with rack. However, with trying to update that guidance, surely there is a way that we can have, if we provide training, if we provide courses on this specific building material, this is how your survey removes that one-year time period that is required for an experience point of view if you can demonstrate competence by specific training. There are surveyors out there. There are competent surveyors out there. It just depends on what is the requirement of the appointing client, whether it is the local authority or other public sector organisations or private sector companies. As the rest of the people have already indicated, it is not all of rack. The knee-jerk reaction obviously promotes a bottleneck for surveyors, engineers to come in and carry out these surveys. That knee-jerk reaction obviously causes issues. However, as we learn more about the material and learn about where it is already located from in-house surveyors, they are already monitoring these buildings, our surveyors can then meet that demand. Does that answer the question? I would say that I use the word capacity. Apart from where we are in recession, the construction or building industry nearly always has a capacity issue of having enough qualified people in the right place to deliver for the industry. Projects such as HS2 or the Olympics suck up local talent in their regions. When we get national crises like this, where suddenly we need a lot of expertise in a particular subject, we have a capacity issue to deliver. There is also a regional issue. We do not know exactly where all the rack is in the country, but we do know that there is a lot in Essex and a lot of schools because it is really popular in the 60s in the Essex area. I imagine around there there is a bit of a capacity issue. It is having the right people in the right place at the right time. However, I would just like to mention about being qualified to inspect rack. The way I see it, I have had 20, 30 years of researching and building traditional concrete, and that is where all my experiences have come from. That is where the vast majority of the industry's expertise is. That is what we teach at universities, traditional concrete. Rack, as we said, is different. It performs differently, the materials are different. Even if an experienced engineer or surveyor opens the very good guidance that me and Martyn and others have written, you are fighting against maybe 20, 30 years of embedded experience. All of us around here occasionally think we know what we are doing, I hope. You go and say, I know this. I know what I am doing. I have been a surveyor or structure engineer for 30 years. I know what I am doing, but this is different. I think we have a capacity issue of the expertise of the right place, but also I am a little nervous, cautious of even the experience we bring to bear because it took me and Martyn a while to understand this material, and you cannot just understand it by opening a book and reading it and you are done. That is a little concern for me, I think. Thanks very much for that. Martin? I take what Chris says, and I think it is very true, but the study panel saw the situation of capacity becoming an issue over a year ago. That is why the latest paper that was published in April last year was intended to allow competent engineers to appraise the risks associated with different elements of the defects in RAG and to come up with a uniformity of approach. Taking on board Chris's point, the institution would say that, first of all, I think that one should be looking for chartered or incorporated members of structures of the institution, structural engineers as a sort of professional qualification threshold, but it is also looking at people who have experience of the appraisal of buildings. As Chris has pointed out, people who do not just look at a building and go, I know concrete, this is the same. It needs to have people who are aware of the difference associated with RAG. To respond to that, Chris is still producing some papers and output from the research. We will, as the study panel, update that. We have done a very high profile or has been popularised review as to whether our guidance needs to change after the actions of the DFE in the summer. We have decided not, because the instances that led the DFE to make their decisions would have all been identified as high risk or critical risk within the assessment criteria that was set out in the latest paper. The thing I would add to that is that the engineering community is now beginning to be able to identify the hazards that are associated with RAG. What needs to be done is to work out whether those hazards are acceptable and where those hazards are acceptable. The degree of risk for a building will depend on its use. If it is a storage building that is little occupied, one might decide that a particular set of panels is perfectly safe, whereas in perhaps a more emotional circumstance like a school, one might decide that it is not. The other thing that the institution of structural engineers is pushing hard for is for the health and safety community to get involved with the dialogue. Whether this is the health and safety executive or the new building safety regulator or a combination of the two, but what is missing from the national dialogue at the moment is what level of hazard and risk is acceptable over it. For instance, when the NHS first started to be aware of the issues associated with RAG, which were largely in hospitals, it is common sense that if you shut a hospital, people will die. If you keep it open, someone might die. That is a balance of risk that one can manage. That is a very extreme circumstance, but when you start getting into school buildings, into library buildings, into housing, into offices, there is a very different risk balance associated there. What would be very good is if Governments could be getting the health and safety industry, health and safety professions involved with the dialogue? Thanks very much, Martin, for that. With that, I will bring in Ian. Thanks very much, chair. I was sitting listening here, and obviously I do not have a structural engineering background. That is not where I come from. The lessons that we learned from the Scottish Fire and Rescue Service was that we were in the process of refurbishing McDonnell Road here in Glasgow, the fire station in Glasgow, when the 2019 Scottish report came out. We had identified the rack that looked dubious within the roof, and it was a sizable roof within McDonnell Road. There was spalling, there were cracks, there were various elements with it. In removing the roof covering, we absolutely, visibly seen the failure of planks. It was basically held on with the roof coverings. As such, we carried out the surveys across 357 sites and identified another 14 fire stations that have racked roofing within them. At 2019, we had competent surveys done with inspectors, and they were very, very good. We put in the mitigation, whether it was crash decks or props, or various other elements around there. What we also found out as part of this, and I agree with you, Martin, is a different substance from normal. What we found out as well is that these buildings when the 50s and 60s had been repaired at a roof leaks previously, so the roof could look perfectly good on top. We started doing drone surveys with thermographics on it, and that identified faults underneath the covering, which we were not aware of and were not visible. Again, to go back and look at the methodology of how we inspect these roofs and how we maintain the safety of our firefighters that are using these buildings, we put in the mitigation, and we are on weekly checks and quarterly checks going forward. Like we said earlier, there is a significant cost in the monitoring of these roofs. We have also done options appraisal on the removal of these roofs. As Peter alluded to earlier, the fire stations do not want the investment of a roof when we have problems with dignified facilities and various other elements in the 1950s. Let's face it, it is a very male-oriented workforce at that time, and obviously we are transitioning to be much more modern and inclusive. Looking at the construction methodology and what we need to do with these stations, I think that there are about 12 of them that we need to rebuild. We need to look at new options with our partner agencies going forward, and that is what we are doing at the moment. Obviously, capitals are challenged with regards to that, but I think that it was just to reiterate what Martin said. It is a very unusual material. It is not obvious to see where it has failed or what has been done through the organic growth of the buildings that we have had from the 1950s and 1960s. Our concern was, obviously, the firefighters that are operating these fire stations. I just wanted to add that. Thank you very much for sharing your experience. I am going to bring Peter Drummond, and then we will move on to more questions. We have rightly focused on capacity within the professional sector to identify those buildings and design solutions, but we have not touched on yet our industry capacity to deliver temporary solutions. When we sat in this room three weeks ago, we discussed CITB figures in respect of skilled shortages and, rather predictably, the figures in respect of skilled structures contractors are no better than the other sectors that we discussed. Even once we have a solution, be it a temporary or permanent one for a building, we do not have contractors hanging about at the bus stop waiting to make a start on this. There is a procurement lead-in period, and it will do us no good if we have a perfectly well-designed remediation solution if we are three or four months waiting for a contractor to do that. Now, we cannot just throw any old contractor at this kind of work, for exactly the same reason as we have discussed professionals. To put this in context, the RIS has been unable to find a single architect that has ever worked on a rack building, presumably because of the age of material. We have spoken to contractors, and we have found a few of them outside the hotspots that have been identified today that are familiar with the techniques that are required. That has an impact on pricing, on lead-in, and on our ability to deliver time-ass solutions to what is, I think that we will acknowledge, quite a high-risk situation in some cases. Thank you very much for highlighting that part of the issue. I will now bring in Marie McNair. Thank you, convener. I probably popped this question initially to Chris. Do we have any understanding of how, incidentally, rack was used in house building, particularly in social building? I would probably say from the late 50s into the 70s. Do you have any data on that, Chris? Can we get audio on Chris? He is waiting for his mic to go on. You can hear it. There you go. Thank you. I hope you didn't think I was being slow. My mic was not. So, good question, which we have had a number of times. I understand the concern. So, we have been aware of very few examples in housing, although there are a small number. There were a small number, again, I think, in Essex, by a manufacturer, I think, in Costain or Cypriots or someone, a small number. So, it is not as common as it is for hospital schools or maybe commercial buildings, but it can exist. Also, I have mentioned the change of use we have to be careful of. If a building was one type of building that has been changed into housing, it might exist there. We have not mentioned AAC blocks yet, which is good, because they are very different. So, millions of our homes are made from AAC blocks, which is the same material as RAC by all the reinforcement and its structural properties. But there are no concerns whatsoever over these AAC blocks here or anywhere in the world. So, I am glad we have not mentioned them, but I thought I would there. Thanks very much for clarifying that. Just open it up for Andy Oes. I want to come in. I would hesitate to mention any locations, but the RIS is aware of a small number. Of domestic premises, including some now in private ownership across Scotland. It does seem to be relatively rare. I hesitate in advance of a full survey to give any figures, but it does not seem to me to be of the same order as the Dorlin and Orlet problems of the 1970s and 80s, but they are there. Indeed, some of them have been well publicised in things like the Herald in the past. Just move on to my final question. Obviously, our understanding of the detail at the moment, we do not really have that, but do we have any rough figure of how much the action would cost to remediate? I just saw that Steven Booth wanted to come in on the previous question, so let us just bring him in for people to come in on the next one. I apologise, chair, for being a little slow there. Just in relation to housing, just to give some assurance, Aberdeen said to me that many other local authorities are conducting exactly the same review process around our social housing stock as we are around our public buildings. In Aberdeen, that is over 22,000 houses, and we are going through that process at the moment. We have identified RAC in a small number of properties, and we are just working through those issues at the moment just to make the committee aware that there is some housing issues right to buy. It is not going to help in that conversation going forward, but just so that there is awareness that there is RAC within some of our social housing stock that individual local authorities are working through. I will go back to Marie's previous question around the likely cost of mitigating or replacing defective RAC. David, do you have any expertise there? As I said, due to the circumstances of our portfolio, we were further ahead, and we are certainly progressing through our replacement programme and a number of buildings. We reckon that this current time, our benchmarks may be about £2,500 a square metre to replace the RAC roofs. That is just an early indication that we will vary in every project, depending on the circumstances and such likes as well. We are in for about £53 million so far. More to come, obviously, because we are still working through those things, but I say that we are slowly and really just seem to be a bit of an epicenter in terms of that, but that is certainly where we are located now. I can certainly inform the committee that at the moment it is around £100,000 a year on mitigation where we are paying to monitor those and to make sure that the safe systems are working and that the crash decks etc. are in place and monitored on a weekly and quarterly basis. Looking at the replacements, as I said earlier, it is not straightforward just replacing the roof, and it would depend on the station. We have small fire stations in rural areas, which would be a much smaller cost to replace, but the figure that we are looking at across the 14 sites is somewhere in the region of £70 million. It is a very difficult question to answer with any degree of certainty because the type of buildings that are affected are so disparate. If we compare, for example, the cost of repairing a large classroom or library roof where it may strangely be quite a straightforward exercise, it is one-space easy access with perhaps smaller buildings or private houses, you are really comparing apples and giraffes rather than apples and oranges. To put that in perspective, it does not surprise me in the slightest that it could be £2,500 a square metre for certain installations. You remember my evidence and boilers a few weeks ago, I pointed out that you could build a house for that kind of money, so we will very quickly reach a point where, in actual fact, it is more expedient and sensible and better for the public first to replace the structure and with it improve environmental standards within the building. Just to add, we are seeing significant costs with providing the decant accommodation, and we are at an early stage in getting costs and information about the replacement roofs for some of our properties. We have other buildings where, in particular, one high school is scheduled for replacement. However, the identification of that AC with the high roofs, the high ceiling height and the amount of scaffolding that we have to put in place and the monitoring costs and the structural engineering costs since the rain costs are significant for us. It is just to say that I raised a question with the 16 local authorities that have racked what they would like raised this morning, the answer was the same from 16 local authorities and that was funding. The cost is difficult to estimate at this time, but you have a benchmark in Westlothian of the magnitude that we are talking about. Local authorities have not budgeted for this, so what they are having to do is look at their capital programme and basically what are we going to sacrifice. I was back to my earlier point about best value assessments in making those decisions if there was a chance of funding that might make some of those decisions easier and we would achieve better outcomes. So I fully respect that it is difficult to send here some funding when you actually don't know what the actual issue is and that is going to be the challenge, but I do think, and it goes back to my earlier point, that it is going to be some time before we get to a point where everything is covered. The focus has been on the learning estate and rightly so, and that is the element of local authorities' estate, which typically would be about 60 to 70 per cent of their estate anyway, where decisions could come earlier to achieve better outcomes. I am going to move on to questions from Willie Coffey. Colleagues, I wonder if I could ask a question that constituents have been asking me to distinguish between rag and breeze bloc. Is it the same material or is it different? It is a very different material, although for the breeze blocs to use the shorthand, there are similarities, as Chris has helped to identify in the process how we use them. It is completely different. I will not get into the science, but your masonry bloc wall is all in compression. It does not tend to flex very much. It is tied together by the roof and the floors. In much the same way as a traditional masonry wall would work, where the problem arises with the concrete slabs that we are talking about is that they span from side to side. The role of the reinforcement and the cover of the reinforcement is very different indeed. Most of your constituents and my neighbours will have very little to worry about, I would imagine, in respect to their own houses. It is good to get all that on the record, because people do not know that they probably never had a rack and probably neither did we until recently. We have all heard the breeze bloc and have all seen it being used in construction, but it is a different material and there are no concerns about that. That is good to know. A question that came up in Ankmae Ailes I was touching on is that, why is not it the case that it is a requirement to record what a building is made of? We certainly have to find ourselves running around, inspecting and surveying to figure out what is in buildings. Why was it never a requirement in the industry or wherever to record what something is actually made of? I think that that is a very good question and one that I potentially put back to legislators. It seems entirely logical that that is what we do, particularly perhaps with public buildings, but you would think that all buildings would be incredibly useful. We are not putting ourselves nationally in a place to meet the challenges of the future. I would suggest that legislators could raise that at every opportunity, because it will only be of benefit to have that information. Thank you. I bring in Ian and then Peter Drummond. Just to pick up on that point there, speaking from operational colleagues here within the fire service, if there was a database such as that, that would be a immense value to the fire service, because at the moment we look at every risk when we are entering a building, whether it is sandwich panels or whether it is rack, roof, et cetera, et cetera, so to have that database that we could draw on and work with to inform our crews when entering a building what the construction methodology is with it would be added value. We do that at the moment with high profile buildings, we do our own internal service and we log on our data systems within the vehicles, within the appliances, but to have access to a central database would be invaluable to our operational colleagues as well. Members will be aware that the Scottish Government proposes to introduce a compliance plan system for future construction work. That will require the assembly of a very detailed portfolio of information and new buildings going forward and to a certain extent existing buildings that are being altered. I think that building on what Ailsa says not only offers us opportunities in terms of build quality and significantly improves on site standards but also creating a very robust archive. What we probably need to do is look at how we can join up that compliance plan system with other bits of the portfolio to see how we have complete files, as well as the requirements under the construction design and management regulations to more accurately record what we have. I think that we are very close to the point where we could, for very little additional effort, have a proper catalogue of what we have got on our sites. Thank you for that, Chris. Yes, I just want to mention a few things regarding this. First of all, any significant building or structure, you have the drawings and the design and back in the day they were on paper and they would be somewhere. We have dug out many rack original designs from these buildings, but, again, it's on paper and it's where does that sit. I know some structures are required to have a building register, and this relates to, say, Asbestos. We know where Asbestos is and we manage that risk. It's partly the sheer number. We have millions of buildings across the UK, so where does that information sit, like my house? Do I have it in my house which doesn't help the fire service? If it's in my house when it's on fire, do the fire service have it? That seems a good idea. Who has this? It's an issue that post-grunfo has become very important. Do we know what our buildings are made of and what the risks are? That inquiry has been looking at that and the term golden-threaded information is used for that. Then, more nowadays, the technology is available to store this data. It's not just on paper. Things like BIM, you might have heard, of building information modelling. We design things on a computer now, so that design sits on a computer. Digital twins is a more recent thing where every building can have a digital twin on a computer of exactly what it is. On the one hand, this is easier to store. It's on my laptop, but, at the same time, software and IT does go out of date in a few years, as you'll all know from data in your phones and laptops, software goes out of date. Something that seems simple, we'll just put it on the cloud, that goes out of date. Again, where does it sit, who owns it and how do you get access? There's a privacy and a GDP on the data issue. A security issue, if all this data is somewhere, then people can get this data that we don't want to have this data. It's a great idea that, say, the Grunfo and Cry has been looking at, but it does have its challenges as well. Thank you for that, Chris. You'd like to come back in. I agree that there are challenges with that, but we've got random for things like HMRC, DVLA and health records. That is important enough to put the effort into. I do appreciate that there are challenges, but there is an awful lot of information available about how we join it up, be that with unique property reference numbers. There are many mechanisms that are available. There are also fantastic examples. Denmark has done this very effectively. There are other countries that have already done this. This is not necessarily groundbreaking. It's something that I think is just necessary. Thank you very much for that. On the survey question that Ian Ewing gave some extensive information to the committee about what's happening within the fire estate, it's really glad and thankful to hear that it's a matter of routine. Does fire service, when they're looking at buildings for whatever reason, they may be there? Do they look and check for this material now or have you done it in the past routinely or will you be doing it from now on? The short answer is no. We would not look at that rack that has been at us. What we have done, we've put out awareness briefings to all our stations now to how to deal with if it's known as right. Again, it's about that knowledge base and knowing when they turn up at an incident if the roof is right. We've put out awareness briefings for our crews. We're also from the NFCC, which is the National Fire Chiefs Council across the UK. It's also putting out briefings and awareness of how that goes forward. We do surveys of high-risk buildings, hospitals, various others, so that crews know the flow of the building when they arrive. They can know what corridors are wearing, doors are wearing. They also know high risk areas, if there's oxygen on set, if there are tanks on set, etc. However, the construction methodology has not been—there's been a few, as I mentioned, of their sandwich panels. There's been a few commercial buildings where firefighters were injured because of the collapse of sandwich panels. That's something that's being built in now and looked at within our databases going forward, where it's known. We don't do any inspections for rack or anything like that going forward. That's not part of our fire prevention processes. I presume that it would be something that the fire service would support to have more knowledge about what's in a building before you go in it? Absolutely. As Peter Chris alluded to, a lot of that is community ground field at the moment. A lot of the learning of building construction and community ground has been adopted by the fire services as well. Is it permissible today, this very day, to build buildings where we lack? It's not been banned in any way. It's permissible, is it? Peter? Yes, it is. There would be no reason to worry if perhaps we did. In some cases, there have been significant changes, as I think Chris will confirm, to the standards for the manufacture of those products since, from the top of my head, 1990. The BRE reports both highlight, in particular, concerns about slabs predating 1980. Rack and its equivalence is used extensively abroad. I'm not suggesting for one moment that it is frequently used in the UK today, nor am I suggesting for one moment that either designers or other clients will be rushing to use it, but if one had a building that was comparatively recently built in this material or one of its derivatives, no, that would not necessarily be a cause for concern. If it met the certification requirements under the building regulations, then there wouldn't be a reason for concern for a new structure either. It would perhaps be for Mr Gavin later to talk to, but I would see no reason for us to be worrying about a pre-notification for it in the same way as we have certain types of cladding or sprinkler systems and conversions of late in respect of other cases. Chris, you want to come in on this as well? Yes, I'll just reflect on the international aspect. I was at a conference three weeks ago on AAC, mainly attended by manufacturers who make air creek blocks that are like blocks around the world, but also who make rack. First, I was mobbed. I've never been to a concrete conference and been mobbed before, so massive fascination from the industry around the world as to why the UK is worried about its rack when everyone else isn't. Major manufacturers still are Germany, in Europe, India, China, North America, Mexico, Indonesia, many in the Middle East, because of its thermal properties, keeps you cool as well as warm. They'll say, we haven't got any problems with our rack, which makes me think, and I can't see many issues reported online or in papers, but I see this in two ways. One is they haven't found problems because they haven't gone looking like we have, and I'm confident that if you go looking at 50-year-old buildings made of anything, you're going to find problems. It don't tell me they're all built perfectly. It was alluded to earlier. I think in this country we have a very good policy of reporting problems and failures in buildings and acting upon it, and if you're in warnings, I think it's probably one of the most matured, sophisticated in the world. A lot of other countries have an acceptance of failure, as in stuff falls down occasionally, and that's just how it is, and not much changes. Whereas here, anything falls down, we're on it. So, I think we are leading the world on this, but I think other countries will be looking at their rack and will find some, whether they report it publicly is a different matter. But probably Germany is the nearest European economy to ours, but even the European construction industry is slightly different to ours, particularly their contractors and the trades. Not anyone can be a builder in Germany. It's more regulated than ours, so I think they'll have, in general, better quality than ours, and they might not find as many problems as we have. But I'm sure if you go looking at Mexico and some other countries, you will find some poorly constructed rack. But, as I said, I'm using Mexico as an example. I think they're okay if the odd thing falls down, and it doesn't make the news as it would here. Okay, that kind of perfectly answers the next question that I had, Chris, on the international experience. But maybe just to ask then, do other jurisdictions, other countries, actually record what their buildings are actually made of? Does no one do it? Good question. I'm not that expertise on that point, I'm afraid. Okay. So we did hear from Elsa that Denmark does it. Is there anywhere else? I think there are a few others that I'm aware of, but I'd be happy to get back to committee with further details on that rather than to sort of try and pluck back into the reaches of my memory. Okay, many thanks a lot everyone. Thanks, convener. Thanks, William. Now I'm going to bring in Miles Briggs. Thank you, convener. I wanted to ask the question, we've touched upon some of this already with regards to widely used building materials and techniques, which might also pose a problem around this, which the committee should be aware of. Peter, you touched upon asbestos paint earlier, so wondered if, as you're looking at this, if there's other examples which are starting to come forward? What we find is that the situation with the identified rack, none of them are identical in the context of where they've been found, their physical condition, and I suppose the barrier is the main one that causes the issue to identification and ultimately remediation is typically the location of it, so if you can imagine a primary school in its in the gym hall, it's at a high level. The comment about asbestos was really making that link between the age of these buildings and when asbestos was also used, so it's very typical to come across asbestos, and when you're doing intrusive surveys to get to the heart of the matter, you typically need an asbestos survey first before you drill into anything, so that typically is the main challenge, and the second challenge again because of where it's located, and what we're finding is over time a lot of things have been added to the panels, so for example behind it you might have plant and machinery, which is either the ventilation or the heating system in schools, the schools themselves have attached overhead projectors to it, and these are all factors that have to be taken into account when you're assessing that risk, and as I say, we've not found two examples that are identical, and that's making remediation in a lot of cases bespoke, and somebody commented on earlier that puts the cost up as well, so that's really what the experience that we've had in that context. I'm very glad that you asked that question, Miles. In the 30 years that I have been in practice, there have been a succession of what I can only describe as wonder products marketed with all the regularity of Scotland sporting defeats. Some of them have proven quite successful, some of them have proven to be disasters, and for those like me that do expert work, we can see that some of them are disasters in the making. I'm not going to highlight particular products right now, you all know my views on cladding and insulation. The trouble is that for an extended period of time across Scotland and the wider UK, we have essentially experimented with novel forms of construction, and as a result, with alarming regularity, we find ourselves having to pick up the pieces. Now, it is easy to justify things like RAC or, dare I say it, the PRC houses of the post-war period as being forced on us by economic exigences, but it happens time and time again, and in stark contrast, dare I say it, to more traditional tried and tested forms of construction. 30 years ago in Scotland, timber kit housing was very experimental and it has proven to be a huge success. I don't think that any of us would disagree that that has been a good tactic. Certain kinds of insulation and contrast have proven to be disastrous in all meanings of term. Now, heather 2, we could rely on bodies such as the building research establishment previously publicly funded to providers with impartial test regimes. Those bodies have largely been privatised, they largely focus on commercial interests, and I would suggest that, with the notable exception of academia, no longer provide the same depth of assurance that we would require. If you look at who the BRE owns, and I have the greatest of respect for the BRE, use their work regularly, they own an awful lot of the other certification bodies. So I'm going to answer your question, I'm afraid, at tangent miles, which is, yes, there are other problems out there. There are other things that are merely potentially risky because we don't quite understand how they work yet, and in many cases, even if that individual product is a problem, it may not be mission critical to the building, it may be something that we pick up in the normal 20 or 30 year cycle of maintenance. What I think we perhaps want to learn from the early days of RAC and from other cases we've discussed is that we perhaps want to be a little more cautious with these wonder products so that we do not simply give our next generation yet another hospital pass, as we did with large concrete-built systems of the 1950s and 60s, now largely vacant from our city centres as a result of the defects that we've found. I think what I'm saying, just to finish that sort of Ben Elton-esque meander off, is that we need to gang a bit more canny with our procurement policy across Scotland, and we need to stop focusing on short-term magic fixes and look at long-term solutions, not just to avoid this happening again, but also because I would suggest it serves our environmental outputs well. Sam, you wanted to come on this. Thank you. Without answering the question directly, just repeating bits of or emphasising bits of bits, it's all about understanding buildings, how those materials perform before doing modifications to them, so if we're using new material, say insulation, making sure that we understand how the existing buildings, how those materials interact with any new materials and then we don't end up with a nightmare situation in the future, just because the understanding wasn't there, the application was then incorrect on the existing materials, because the thought process wasn't gone through at the start, so before working on any buildings attaching a projector to a rack ceiling, as an example, has the thought process gone through as to, yeah, is that appropriate? So just making sure that whoever's working on buildings is competent and understands how that building's put together from an individual material basis through to how all the materials that interact with each other. Thank you. Anybody else? Nope. One more question, and we've touched on this as well in terms of potential building register, and to have that knowledge about what we're building, not only across public services, but individual homes, and we've done work around poor quality of new build, flammable cladding systems, and now rack. Just wondering in terms of that model going forward, especially for the public sector in procurement and managing this in the future, what you think needs to change beyond that, we've seen some very high profile cases with new built hospitals, for example, and just wondering why we're getting that wrong. One of the suggestions I made when I was on health and sport committee was an establishment of an essential body to oversee some of these health projects, and the health secretary took that forward, and I think that's making a difference, because we've got to be honest, sometimes, as a small country, we don't have these expertise in all of our public services, and we've heard that today, so just wondered what that looks like in any suggestions we should also take forward, and also you've started a building register, so I'll maybe bring you back in if there's anything else. I don't think I'd add anything additional specific to that, but I think there are always areas about where responsibility sits and almost where things can fall between two stools, as well. There's something about having a more overarching sense of responsibility and understanding for our buildings from before procurement to past the maintenance schedule that I think also helps to give more continuity for that, but I think there may be others in the room who would like to add more. I hate to batter on miles about procurement, but over the last 30 years, what we've seen is a substantial de-skilling in large parts of the sector towards semi-skill tradesmen, instead of more traditional forms. At the same time, as we've seen a move to things like design and build, which I appreciate the design and build sector will write me the tuperous correspondence when I say this, but which does tend to remove much more independent scrutiny by consultants, clerk of works and others from the process. If we look at mainland European, particularly north-west European forms of procurement, there is much more emphasis on quality throughout the procurement process than I would suggest there is in Scotland or any of the other home nations. Now, lest I get another nasty letter from Scottish Futures about that, I know there is a workstream on that at the moment and I believe there's due to be some reports to your committee and others on that fairly soon. Now more than ever, budgets are hard. We've heard today about how the budget implications of addressing RAC will create problems, but what we can't do is allow ourselves to take our eye off the ball and go for less-than-robust solutions again. I think it'd be unfair if it was to call them bargain basement solutions. I think that less-than-robust is probably the fairest way of putting it, but we need, as we, with Scottish Futures and others, revise our procurement policies across the public sector and cascading down to the private sector, need to bring quality back to the front of the agenda. We cannot keep throwing up shoddy buildings in this country or else we're just going to face yet more cladding, yet more RAC, yet more Dorland debacles in future. Anybody else want to come in on that? So I think we've reached the end of our questions. I just wanted to see if there's anything else that hasn't come to light through what we've been asking you. We've got a few more minutes if anything else needs to be said. Peter. Apologies, apologies. In first lincidently, for the record, I keep saying Dorland houses when I mean Dorran houses. Apologies for that. The RIS would like to highlight the potential predicament of private owners of houses that now transpires having RAC in them who, through no fault of their own, have a building, which will be very expensive to remediate. The original design errors, if I can call them that, were made by the public sector. We believe that, in the vast majority of cases, people will have bought their properties in good faith. Those few of you, like me, who are old enough to remember the right to buy, of the 80s and 90s, know fine that there was not necessarily a requirement for a full survey. It will not have been picked up, but exactly like people in PRC houses, that is the Dorran and Dorran ones that I was talking about earlier, these people are now in a disaster that was not in the slightest of their own making. Government has faced this challenge on a number of previous occasions. Now, I don't think we're looking, as I mentioned earlier, at anything like the number of houses that we were for PRC, which was about £15,000 in Scotland, I suspect that it will be a small fraction of that, but you may wish to consider whether Government puts in place a scheme of assistance to help that small number of people and get them back on track. In doing so, I don't detract from the very significant challenges that the public sector faces, but the public sector has other avenues and other ways of funding these. Mrs McShugarty in her poor badly built house, wherever it might be in West Lothian, do not have these opportunities and may now find themselves stuck. There may not, in some cases, be easy remedial solutions for those houses, particularly the ones with wall panels, as opposed to just ceilings and roofs in it. Therefore, the scope of that would have to be considered carefully. It may, in some cases, involve buying them out. Now, that may seem disproportionate for what I'm hoping is a handful, and as I've said before, one of my handfuls at that of people, but I do not think that we should leave them high and dry. We haven't left people with flammable cladding high and dry, and there's no reason for a different approach here. Thanks very much. Chris Goodyear, you wanted to come in? Yes, thanks. Marty mentioned it earlier on about the research and knowledge on RAC. As you mentioned, we spend as a country about £3.5 million, which might sound a lot, but this RAC bill is going to run to hundreds of millions. If you compare it to other materials, there's been tens or hundreds of millions spent on understanding other materials. It's an urgent need to get some of this started now. I can list a number of topics regarding the durability, degradation, how it changed over time, climate change. I think one of the reasons we're finding more failures now is that our building is getting battered more and more, temperature and rain, so what's the effect of that? I'd say global. We've mentioned data a few times. There's real knowledge to be captured by collating and analysing the global national data on this RAC. We survey individual buildings, but aggregating is the better. There's a lot of learning to do there. Studying all the systems that were put in place to remediate and survey and look after these buildings, studying those, which are the good ones, which are the most cost effective. A little bit of money that's spent now will save millions over the next few years as we address this problem. Thank you very much to both of you for highlighting those two points. I think that brings our meeting to a close. I just want to thank you all for coming in or online for this discussion. I think that it's been very useful, enlightening and insightful. With that, I now briefly suspend the meeting to allow for a change over witnesses. On our second and final panel this morning, we're joined in the room by Shirley-Anne Somerville, who's the Cabinet Secretary for Social Justice. Ms Somerville is joined by Scottish Government official Sam Anson, who's the Deputy Director of Workverse Infrastructure and Digital, and Stephen Garvin, who's the head of building standards. I welcome our witnesses to the meetings. We were also due to be joined by COS this morning, but unfortunately due to illness, we were not able to field someone. I now invite Ms Somerville to make a short opening statement. Thank you very much and good morning, convener. Thanks to the committee for the opportunity to be able to give evidence today. I hope that this can build on the written evidence that I've already provided to the committee to give a context for the issues facing the public sector. Everyone with responsibility for building safety takes RAC very seriously. We have been working at pace with local authorities and other public sector organisations in Scotland, as they have conducted reviews of RAC in their properties. That allows us to understand the extent of the issue and where it is required that mitigations or replacement work is carried out. While the issue of RAC has been on-going for some time, the UK Government's Department of Education changed their approach for RAC specifically in schools on 31 August. They did not seek to engage with the Scottish Government before that change or, indeed, it would appear others in the UK Government departments. We have repeatedly requested that further information that supported the DFE's decision is available. The Cabinet Secretary for Education and Skills has written several times to the Secretary of State for Education on that point. As the committee has already heard this morning from panel 1, the Standing Committee on Structural Safety Scots set out their alert on RAC in 2019 and later the Institution of Structural Engineers published guidance on RAC in March 2022 and with a revision in April 2023. The guidance was written from an evidence base from research and engineering assessment of failure. Once that authority of guidance was published by IStructE, then appropriate advice could be given by engineers to building owners. Most action was taken over the period following 2019, in particular by SRFS, the clarity that the guidance gives means that proper assessment of risk can be undertaken. Local authorities, the NHS and Police all acted on RAC over 2022. Work has already been under way to deal with RAC in the school estate in Scotland prior to the UK Government's announcement. Local authorities have a clear responsibility as building owners to manage their estate and to ensure that they are safe for all building users. As a result, I am reassured that COSLA has confirmed that safety is the central consideration and that there is robust guidance, which is followed by every local authority to ensure that those settings are safe for the young people, staff and public to be in. Using that guidance, RAC has been identified in 37 schools. We have used the figure of 41 previously, but the committee heard this morning from Aberdeen about four of the schools there. RAC has been identified in 37 school buildings across 16 local authorities, including eight early learning and childcare settings within primary schools. Wherever RAC has been found, mitigations have been put in place. Those local authorities have also been communicating with parents and carers and have published information on their websites. We are now working with COSLA, SFT and local authorities to ensure that the full school estate is fully assessed as quickly as is practicable. Whilst the focus initially with local authorities has been on schools, councils are continuing to investigate the extent of RAC in their wider estate again, as you have heard this morning. A major study is also under way on NHS buildings in Scotland so that risk can be assessed and managed. NHS Scotland is sure, and partners are actively assessing 254 NHS Scotland properties, identifying this potentially containing RAC. Site surveys have started with 14 buildings confirmed as containing RAC in parts of them, where necessary mitigation actions have of course been taken. We are currently in the discovery phase for the housing sector. My officials remain engaged with COSLA, the Scottish Housing Regulator and Housing and Local Authority organisations to understand the extent of RAC in social housing. We anticipate that initial reporting on current activity and timescales will be received during October. The First Minister has been clear that we will of course spend what we need to spend to ensure that our buildings are safe for those that use them, but we need the UK Government to realise the seriousness of the situation and to provide devolved Governments with funding and their own departments. The Deputy First Minister wrote to the Chief Secretary to the Treasury about this in August, only receiving an unsatisfactory response some weeks later. The UK Government cannot simply put ahead in the sand that new capital money has to be made available rather than continuing cuts to capital budgets that we have seen and will continue to see in future years. The cross-government working group on RAC continues to meet and we will do so to ensure that any risk across the public sector is managed. I trust that the committee is reassured by the on-going actions that the Government is taking along with our public sector and industry partners on RAC and any risks that it might present. Thank you, convener. It's good to hear that we're going to be getting a more detailed picture beyond the learning estate and you said that's going to be coming forward in October. There's a number of things that came up already in the previous panel and you're aware of that. I'd be interested to hear your response to a few things. One of them was that we heard from Westlothian that it's going to be about 2,500 pounds per square meter to take the remedial actions. I hope that I'm getting this right—a total cost of £53 million. Something that came up in the conversation this morning was the fact that local authorities haven't set aside funds to cover those costs and the question of where the costs come from for that. Is that something that the Scottish Government can support with? I think that because of the sheer extent of the work that's going on across the public sector, it's not possible to have a genuine modelling of what the scale of financial commitment may be. I think that it's perhaps not helpful to speculate at this point until all that work has been done. As I think again that you've heard this morning, although those figures were mentioned, other panel members did say that it was difficult to put an overall figure in it, given where we are with the discovery work. Given the fact that it very much depends on the type of building that's involved and what the issue is with that, you heard some examples this morning about how that varies from example to example. At this point, it is not possible to put a final figure on that, but we do recognise that that is a concern across the public sector. That's why we're working very carefully with COSLA and other parts of the public sector to ensure that we have very close working so that we are alerted to the issues as they are found by the building owners who are responsible for monitoring and the upkeep of their buildings. Towards the end of the session, another issue came up, which was more focused on private home owners and the idea that the original errors were made by the public sector and therefore the suggestion of a Government scheme of assistance that I'm even potentially buying people out for those people. I think that it was identified as a small number of people that could be left having been involved in the right-to-buy scheme. We are at the discovery phase, as I mentioned in my introductory remarks, working with the regulator, working with councils to try and assist to find the scale of the issue that we have within social housing. That would also ensure that we had greater awareness of what might affect certain schemes that people have exercised their right to buy in previous years. That is something that we are already very conscious of. Officials have been asked by myself to look at the issue already to make sure that we are discussing that with the local authorities. We are very conscious that, as we sit here and talk about those things in the round, we are talking about people's individual homes and any concerns that they have. We are keen to ensure that we can reassure wherever possible. One of the most important ways for that to be done is by councils to carry out that work as they are doing so and to register social landlords to ensure that we have a greater awareness of the extent of the problem. Of course, as I have said, I have already tasked officials to work with COSLA and others to see what we can learn from previous examples where there has been right to buy in areas of non-traditional construction methods. Thank you very much for that. I would like to bring in Ivan McKee. I think that my point has been covered. You do not want to cover anything about risk? No, I have not covered that enough in the last session. Okay, great. Thanks very much. I am going to bring in Willie Coffey. Thanks very much. Good morning, cabinet secretary and colleagues. You might have heard a wee bit of the discussion in the first panel about whether other needs to emerge are registered and what buildings are made of in this country. We do not have that. It comes up from time to time at the committee about whether people are entitled to know what their buildings and their homes are made of. Is that something that the Government would take forward? I realise that that cannot be done overnight, but it is part of this process and part of a wider process. Is that something that the Government would support? We were listening very carefully to the session previous to this, so I will perhaps bring in Stephen McKee, who can go through some of the areas of work where this has already been looked at and where the discussions are at this point. At present, we have building standards registers. Each of those are held separately by the 32 local authorities who the building standards verifiers at the moment. Some of that information is available. It is not easily interrogated. If you are interested in a building, you can get access to to the information that is held, but it is in different formats. We are looking at, through our future building standards board work, at a national building standards register for higher-risk buildings, but that is work that is in progress at the moment. I think that, in terms of developing something for new buildings going forward, it makes sense. It feels using digital technology that that would be a possibility. There is the digital planning programme at the moment, which building standards is part of. We might see that that programme develops in a way that you can retain that information to be able to interrogate it for specific materials or construction techniques. Addressing the current housing stock in other buildings in Scotland is a much more enormous task. We have over 2 million homes and probably over 200,000 non-domestic buildings, so bringing information together in a sensible way on that is quite a challenge and would be a significant investment. We did not comment on working in Denmark earlier, so we can have a look at that. I am not sure whether that is a specific aspect that Denmark is looking at or whether it has the building models that it uses, but it is certainly something to look into. That is a really helpful response. People today, perhaps buying a house, buying a home should they be interested in understanding and knowing what their house is made of. Who would they ask? The builder, the selling agent? Who would have the information? Who would have it? Well, if they are building from a house builder, the house builder should have that information as a party who has an interesting building. They are entitled to get the relevant information from the building standards register as well, if they are so minded to do so. Primarily to understand the form of construction, the materials used and design information, it would be from the builder. Is that a requirement that they must record that so that when a house is sold on and on and on, that new owners can gain access to that? Is that possible? There is no requirement as such under the building standards system to do that. It is probably something that we would maybe choose to follow up on, but I will imagine. Just to clarify on that, does the home report not provide some or much of the information and could it be a basis for providing more information to address the point that Willie Coffey raised? I think that you raised a very important point. There is a new build that I think is where Mr Coffey was going with the questioning initially, but if you are looking from buyer to seller, there is the home report that is there. If there is a lesson to learn about how that home report process needs to be improved or adapted, none of that is set in stone and can be something that is looked at. There is information in the home report, but those aspects can always be built upon, should we feel the need to do so. Looking ahead, the cabinet secretary, if the process builds up to some degree that requires remediation across the public sector landscape, does the Government see itself having a role in trying to co-ordinate the procurement of structural engineering and construction services so that we do not see bidding wars because we heard about some of the skills shortage issues, particularly from Peter Drummond earlier in the panel. Do you see a role in trying to assist local authorities to do that in a methodical and consistent manner? I think that we have a degree of reassurance around some of those issues at the moment. Again, I will bring in Stephen as he is involved with the group where that has already been raised. Of course, as Government, we had questions around capacity and capability right at the start of the process, but that is exactly why Stephen can perhaps give some more detail into the reassurances that we have already attempted to receive. One of the aspects that is key is around the level of expertise and knowledge that is already in our 32 local authorities. That is a very important part. We compare that, for example, by the rather disparate nature that they have down in England, particularly in education, where we do not have the ability for schools to be able to access local authority knowledge in a different way that the system is set up. We are very close to the fact that we need to keep an eye on that, whether there is a role for Government in that or whether it is a role for someone else, but we are already asking the questions about that. Again, I can perhaps bring Stephen in as he has been sitting on the group that has discussed exactly that already. We set up the cross-sector working group that met for the first time back in August and it has met several times over September on rack issues. Capacity and capability to service the market has been raised. So far, stakeholders in the public sector are not reporting any significant issues there, with access and expertise of engineers, surveyors and so on. However, we are aware that the work ramps up. There could be issues. That would be an on-going discussion. The institution of structure engineers have talked about training and developing the existing cohort of experienced engineers on rack. That is something that would clearly benefit in terms of service in the whole market. You might have heard Peter Drummond's additional comment about architects. There are no architects in Scotland who get any experience of working with rack because of the age of it. Is that a worrier concern? Again, architects are the same as engineers, surveyors and so on. There is now clearly an awareness of rack, and we would expect the professional bodies, institutions and so on to work with their membership to develop appropriate training materials. I think that there is no evidence of anyone in the UK designing and using rack in new building, but I suppose that there could be relevance where your retrofit in the building, particularly perhaps energy efficient upgrading and architects awareness surveyors at that point, would be essential. I have a last question. You mentioned in your remarks that the UK Government has changed its approach for schools in the 31st of August. Can you outline the change and what the implications of what they are doing for Scotland? The Department for Education and I would stress that it is the Department for Education and not the whole of the UK Government, but the Department of Education did signal a change, as I mentioned in my original remarks. We have not received any evidence that would suggest that we should do anything different to what we are doing and have been doing for some time, which is looking at the I-Struct T guidance. We have not seen compelling evidence that justifies the Department for Education in England's departure from that I-Struct T guidance. We have clearly asked for all the information that is available to ensure that everyone is sharing that information and that we have full knowledge. I-Struct T engineers have confirmed that their guidance remains as good practice in this area, and that they use the risk-based approach to manage RAC. Again, I would point to the fact that there is a very different management model for schools in England and Scotland. In England, there are more than 3,000 bodies responsible for the school estate. In Scotland, we have 32 local authorities occupying that role, each one of them with a professional estate management team, and that is one of the many reasons why we do not feel that it is necessary or indeed wise to follow where the Department for Education has gone. It is that one department in the UK Government, not the UK Government, is wide open. In the last period on funding itself, has there been any indication, or otherwise, from the UK Government about potential funding to try to address that issue as it develops? No, there has been a disappointing response so far on that. We have clearly sent letters to the UK Government on that specific issue and asked that that is looked at and that additional funding is made available to devolved Governments, as indeed it should be made available to departments within the UK Government as they look to deal with that as well. It would be fair to say that the letters that we have had back on that have been disappointing and there is not any sign that the UK Government has recognised that there is a need for mitigation funding for RAC, for the Scottish or indeed Welsh Governments as so on either. We will clearly look at that because, as someone mentioned earlier, local authorities are not sitting with a pot unallocated to deal with the mitigation of RAC, nor is the Scottish Government. Our capital allocation and funding is allocated. It is a capital funding under pressure, given the great increases to construction costs that we have seen over the recent years. I won't go into the reasons for that, but that is a fact that the context of which we are in. At that point, it is clearly concerning if there is an expectation that the Scottish Government should assist all public sector bodies with this without UK Government support coming in to assist with that process. Thank you for those answers, convener. Thank you, convener. Good morning, cabinet secretary. I just wanted to ask what work has been done in Government to minimise some of the closures that we have seen in the rest of the UK of public building due to RAC-related concerns across the local authority state. I am thinking about schools, social work services, first-stop shops. What work is under going to keep those buildings open and, if you are aware of any work across the wider public estate as well in the NHS and GP divisions? The responsibility for decisions around decanting or a closure of building would be for the local authority or the responsible building owner to take, not for the Scottish Government. Clearly, for the example of local authority and a school, that would be something that is taken on a school-by-school basis. Again, panel earlier this morning went through some of the details of the discovery work and the more intrusive surveys that can go on within a building that would then lead to a building owner taking a decision either to put in mitigation measures in place or to decant or close part or all of a building. That really is something for the building owner quite rightly as they have the information about the survey. I am not giving examples again from the school estate but there are others elsewhere where it may be an exceptionally small part of a building and therefore the full closure is not required or indeed it can be dealt with through mitigation measures and no part of a building needs to be closed. That would be an issue for the building owner. We heard from the previous panel that the cost to some of those mitigation measures is pretty huge in comparison to potential research that might be undertaken rather than the continuous mitigation or monitoring of some of those buildings. Perhaps that alternative avenue would be to invest in the research to make sure that it is being managed at a more appropriate cost level. What work the Government has done on that, whether you would reflect on some of the opinion from the experts in the previous panel on that subject? Again, this is a significant part of the evidence that came over this morning is about how knowledge and expertise of the situation has developed over time. The issue of research is of course a very important aspect of that as we begin to learn more about that. This is already being discussed at UK-wide level, of which obviously Scottish Government officials are involved in those discussions because this is not an issue that the Scottish Government is looking at alone. However, we are, with the possible exception of the Department for Education down south, trying to work very hard collaboratively and jointly to discuss research, discuss capacity within professional organisations and so on. I recognise that that was discussed earlier on within your panel. I hope that I can reassure the committee that that is being discussed across Governments, including devolved Administrations, to see what more needs to be done in that area. I want to come in on that on another aspect that was raised with us around the cost of some of the repairs being so high that it becomes a best value assessment. The council will maybe decide that it is not worth placing the roof, but that you could build a new building for that cost. What are your thoughts on that? It is certainly a very important aspect that the building owner would need to be cognisant of. There were some examples given around schools, but not just the school estate in the first panel, and best value is clearly an area of that. Again, it was mentioned around the advantage if it was not a replacement roof, for example, but a replacement building that you could look to improve environmental standards and so on. The best value is a very important aspect of that. I stress that that would be a decision for the responsible building owner looking at how much the mitigation measures are costing and what the capital costs would be if we were to go through major building improvements compared to a complete new build. That would be on a case-by-case basis again for the responsible building owner to take that decision. In terms of getting an infusion of money in to make that decision, is that something that is in the scope of the discussions with the UK Government in terms of not just remediation but potentially replacing a building because it makes better sense for the value? Well, the Government should all be working on the concept of best value. Again, we have to work very closely with local government colleagues to give them as an example, because most of the discussions around that have been on schools to date and their analysis of best value around that, whether it would be building work or a complete rebuild and a new building. Quite frankly, I would, as a first step, settle for the UK Government, recognising that there is a need for all the Governments across the UK to be working on that. There is a requirement for additional capital funding for departments and for the devolved administrations so that we can then, once the discovery work is at a more substantive point, get into discussions about what that would actually look like. One of my questions has been covered in terms of not being able to put a figure on the funding. I wanted to ask a few more detailed questions on how we take a change forward. NHS Scotland now has NHS Scotland ashore looking at new buildings. I know that that is not a perfect science, given that it is a new organisation and that it is often looking at buildings towards completion, not on the drawing board. However, I wondered where the Scottish Government was looking at what that would mean for local authorities and a new model. We obviously heard in the first panel suggestions around a public register of what buildings are made of when they are constructed. Is there any work going on around that at the minute to look at what clearly needs to change? One of the aspects is hopefully already being answered by Stephen earlier when we were talking about register, but I myself or Stephen can perhaps help if Mr Briggs would like further information on that. There is another aspect that we are very keen to ensure that works closely together. Although building standards system is a devolved system, the construction products are a reserved matter. To have good building standards, we also need to have good construction products and a good system of reassurance around construction products. Of course, that is again one of the areas where we are very keen to work with others, including professional organisations, to see whether they have any concerns about how building standards and construction methods work together. Ensuring that the bits that are devolved and the sections that are reserved are also working as effectively as possible to ensure that, yes, if there is anything that we can do in a devolved setting or if there are any concerns around aspects that are reserved, we can again work with the UK Government to be able to hopefully design a solution that deals with any of the concerns from professional organisations and other on-construction products or non-traditional methods. Thank you for that. Has the Government looked at, and as a committee, we've been obviously considering famable cladding systems in Iraq? Are you satisfied that public building procurement is fit for purpose and is looking at not only just best value but long-term sustainability of these buildings and live information around the world when concerns are being expressed? I thought that that was quite interesting. I think that people in the earlier panel, by and large, seem to think that we are very good as a country in terms of this health and safety element, but looking specifically at where our public services all are doing this on their own, where we maybe need more specialist services around that. Well, I think that this is an area that clearly there has been concern raised about, and there clearly has to be a level of public trust around the processes that are in place, and whether it's procurement or, again, the building standards or construction methods, which I mentioned earlier. This is an area where we always have to ensure that the public trust is maintained and that people can have reassurance that whoever procures a building is doing so in the right manner and for the right reasons. We mentioned best value earlier on, and we mentioned energy standards again earlier on, and all of those aspects need to be looked at during that procurement method. At this point, I am reassured, but if there are any areas where lessons need to be learned, the Government stands ready to do that. I think that we have the processes in place within the Government for those concerns to be raised directly to ministers through officials through their work with professional bodies, for example, so that we can have those concerns raised to us and we can act accordingly. Thank you. In terms of workforce to do this, we know that, in terms of cladding, we don't have that workforce to do all the inspections at this moment in time. It was revealed, I think, last week that more than half of NHS buildings, which might contain rack, have not been inspected. I just wondered where our Government were with public agencies, councils and NHS especially, to provide that support because we are not going to magic these people up overnight. What expectations were ministers having that we would have these inspections completed at a certain point in time to know of the risk that is currently unknown? If I can take the NHS for an example, of course, other parts of the public bodies in the public sector are working to different timescales, but we take the NHS, for example, based on the progress to date. We expect that the surveys will be completed by the end of November. The work that is on-going is clearly looking at the highest-risk buildings, or those perceived to be at the highest risk first, to ensure that that work is being undertaken. When it comes to the school sector, we have had a reassurance that the small number that is outstanding that requires more invasive work can be done through the October holidays, when staff and students are not in situ, and that can be completed by the end of October. There is a variety of work teams in place, obviously, for different sectors. I hope that, given any example there of the NHS and schools about where we are with the speed of that work to date. That is helpful. I think that, in the interests of transparency, hopefully that can be shared with committee or published so that we are aware of the individual buildings that we are talking about and the numbers for councils. I think that this is a really important point for me, Mr Briggs, for interrupting that. This is a very important point about transparency. We have been keen to work with local authorities on the school estate to ensure that that information was published, but in a way that was done by local authorities, because they could also make sure that the information was given to parents about the extent of the issue within a building and the mitigations and measures in place. Clearly, what could give rise to concern is the example of a building being named, and then there is great concern that it is throughout the building when it is in a very, very small part, or indeed in some of the cases in the school that say it was in a part that had not been used for years. The local authorities have that information that will be published, and they will continue to update that. When we look at the NHS, health boards will publish that data for each of the health board areas, and then NHS Scotland will assure that it will publish an update for the whole of Scotland, and that will ensure that that is brought together at a strategic level for the whole of Scotland. I am keen to do that, but to do so in a way in which we are providing the responsible building owners the information to parents and, for example, important staff and to juniors around where that is a concern within a building, so that context and reassurance can be given, rather than just a list of names. In terms of homes, you touched upon council-owned property, housing associations, who might be in management of those as well. For work going on with those properties where people have bought their homes under right to buy, is that the model that you see for informing those individuals as well, and any inspection regime that councils might do but individual private home owners would have to be part of? We are working very carefully with COSLA both myself and Ms Gilruth who have met with COSLA a number of times, particularly around the school of state, but we are widening those discussions at ministerial level to the wider estate, and of course officials are doing that and have been doing that for the wider estate too. We are keen to learn the lessons about what worked well around the publication around the school of state, to ensure that we are working with local authorities to see what could be done, not just for housing, but of course there are other buildings as well, so the knowledge is out there with that context and they are working with the individuals that may be impacted on that. That will vary from council to council, from situation to situation. You have seen some examples, for example in Clackmannanshire, where there was a specific issue in a small number of flats and that was dealt with by the council working with the individuals involved. We are very keen to learn from good practice about what has worked and what we need to improve on, because that ability for people to be reassured is absolutely vital both to the Scottish Government and everybody involved in that, to ensure that we are being as transparent as possible about the information that we have. One last question. We obviously do not have COSLA here today, so we will put those questions separately. For a lot of councils, given where we are with the funding formula, there will be questions over how they reprioritise potential buildings, which they are going to have to bring forward quicker. We have heard about schools here in Edinburgh, for example, around replacements. Just wondered where ministers were having conversations with COSLA that, for some councils, this might present a far more bigger challenge to fund and what that will look like for COSLA to be in negotiations over potential changes to that capital funding in the future. Well, clearly all councils are going to be affected by RAC, given that this was used throughout Scotland. It will vary from council to council and it will vary in its severity, depending on the state of RAC at this point. I would again strongly encourage committee to pay particular cognisance to some of the very early evidence that was given about the fact that, because there is RAC in a building, it does not mean that it is unsafe or that there is immediate concern. I go back to that point about reassurance. We are very keen to work with local authorities to understand the extent of the issue, but it is not just local authorities—it is the wider public sector. The challenge around that will be for how responsible building owners fund that. I go back to the point, convener. That is why the liaison with the UK Government is so important on that, because that will not be a small issue. Just as local authorities are not sitting with a pot and may be looking at having to change priorities, if there is an ask of the Scottish Government without anything coming from the UK Government, we are also not sitting with a capital allocation that is simply sitting there for RAC. That would have to be looked at as well at a Scottish Government level 2. Thank you very much, convener. Just for completeness for me, cabinet secretary, you mentioned various mitigations that are under way. Could you explain that? Is that replacing the RAC or reinforcing it with other materials and if it has been replaced, what are we replacing it with? That is perhaps something that the panel 1 could have assisted with. I will give an overview, Mr Coffey, and Stephen King can perhaps assist. It can be a number of issues that you heard from Scottish Fire and Rescue colleagues earlier on about how some of the work can be done and the building can still be used. It can be a variety of different things, depending on what is happening. It can be ensuring that water ingress that might be impacting is dealt with. It can be a variety of aspects, but I will ask Stephen King to assist slightly and then perhaps refer you back to the professional bodies who were on panel 1. I think that there are a number of options to address the risk in existing buildings, such as troping and, as the SFRS referred to, crash decks, etc. It will depend on what is right for that actual situation. To a certain extent, do you need to keep the building operational or is there an alternative that you can move to? Sometimes either temporary or even permanent closing a building might be an option. There are a number of things that you can do to either manage it physically or by changing your service delivery in the short term. I think that, where rack has been found to be in poor condition or poorly installed, etc., then a longer-term solution to that is needed, but it is clearly temporary measures have been used to allow the operation of the building to continue in places. For us to be replaced, would you replace it with? That would depend on the building, so that would depend on a structural engineer and other professionals going in and assessing that on a case-by-case basis. I've got to take the nuanced approach, Willie. Ivan, you wanted to come in. Yeah, thanks, convener. I just follow up on a point that you touched on, convener. You heard on the first panel that we talked about risk and the very important point that not all rack is a problem. It depends very much on what has to be badly maintained or badly manufactured or badly installed, which of course is in common with many other building materials. You referred to that point. Do you think that there is more work to be done to provide reassurance on that basis? I think that the public dialogue perhaps is in a place where everyone assumes that all rack is bad and that there is a critical issue. The point was made by one of the participants this morning in this narrative that when it gets to 31 years, everything falls down. There is more work to be done there to provide reassurance that in probably the vast majority of cases there is not really an issue. I think that you touched on a very important point, Mr McKee, on that. I urge colleagues and their colleagues right across the chamber to just be very careful when we are talking about rack and the terms that are used. There have been terms used in the parliamentary chamber that would suggest that there is an imminent risk around or that there has been a collapse or that there has been a structural failure that would suggest that we should have closed buildings earlier. We need to be very cautious about our use of language around this area. We are taking this issue really seriously and have been for some time. I hope that the committee can be reassured about that and we are happy to provide further evidence about how that has been taken forward, not just by Government but by others. However, some of the public discourse around this has been unhelpful and may cause concern. I think that we all have a responsibility to make sure absolutely that Government is being held to account and we are doing what we need to do and local authorities are in so on, but to reassure people that, if they are in a building that is identified as having rack, it is not that they are in an unsafe building and they can be reassured that there is monitoring place by that building owner to continually check and make sure that that remains safe. If anything changed and the I-struct T guidance required mitigation to take place or a full building closure, that would happen. Indeed, that has already happened in areas. That has not come as a surprise. We have already seen some parts of the school estate where work had already been undertaken before the summer, where areas of schools, for example, had been closed. That aspect of reassurance on the situation is very important, as is the reassurance that we will continue to ensure that we are staying in close contact with I-struct T, with HSE and with other Governments to ensure that, if there is anything that needs to change in our report or anything that should change, we think, on the wider public sector approach, we would be saying that and we would be doing that publicly. That concludes our questions. I want to say thanks so much for coming in and providing us with the evidence and giving us clarity on the work that the Scottish Government has been undertaking on the topic. I now briefly suspend the meeting. The next item on our agenda is consideration of two negative instruments. Local Government pension scheme remedial service Scotland regulations 2023 and local government investment Scotland amendment regulations 2023. Do any members have any comments on the instrument? No. Does the committee agree that we do not wish to make any recommendations in relation to the instrument? We agree. Thank you. We agreed at the start of the meeting to take the next items in private, so as that was the last public item on our agenda for today, I now close the public part of the meeting.