10.6.1 Building Standards within Edinburgh are administered by the City of Edinburgh Council. In so doing those Council staff responsible for undertaking this function are required to act in the same manner for building projects undertaken by the Council as for building projects undertaken by any other client. The evidence to the Inquiry would suggest that this was the case in relation to the PPP1 schools.
10.6.2 In a significant number of cases, witnesses to the Inquiry from both the Council and other bodies, commented that they had taken confidence in the build quality of the schools from the fact that they had all undergone independent scrutiny from the Independent Certifiers, jointly appointed by ESP and the City of Edinburgh Council, and had been subjected to the statutory Building Standards processes of design warrants, site inspections and completion certificates.
10.6.3 The Inquiry formed the view that there was a common misconception, even among some Council officers, as to the extent of the reliance that can be placed on the quality of construction of a building that has gone through the statutory Buildings Standards process.
10.6.4 Before describing specific issues associated with the processing of the building warrants and completion certificates for these projects, it would be useful to put into context the nature of the Building Standards process in terms of its underlying purpose and the level of inspection of design and construction generally undertaken to meet this requirement.
10.6.5 It should be noted that as the PPP1 schools were completed in 2005 they were processed under the previous Building Standards system as laid down in the Building (Scotland) Act 1959. This was repealed and replaced by the Building Scotland (Act) 2003, facilitating the introduction of a new Building Standards system, which became effective on 1st May 2005.
10.6.6 The following is an extract from a paper provided to the Inquiry by the Building Standards Division of the Scottish Government explaining the core objective of the regulations.
"The system is intended to ensure that building work on both new and existing buildings results in buildings that meet reasonable standards. The standards are set out in the building regulations, which in terms of the Act, include securing the health, safety, welfare and convenience of persons in or about buildings and of others who may be affected by buildings or matters connected with buildings.
The purpose of the building standards system is to protect the public interest. It is not intended to provide protection to a client in a contract with a builder. The system, therefore, does not so much control building but rather sets out the essential standards to be met when building work or a conversion takes place and only to the extent necessary to meet the building regulations.
The system is pre-emptive, designed to check that the proposed building work meets the standards. Inspections during construction and on completion are to protect the public interest in terms of compliance with the building regulations and to discourage avoidance of the legislation. The inspections do not provide a system to control work on site, that is a matter for the contracts and arrangements put in place between the client and builder."
10.6.7 Despite the changes to the system introduced in 2005, the essential responsibilities of Building Standards Departments remained similar to those under the previous system. Under both the previous and present systems Building Standards Departments are:
• "responsible for the independent checking of plans and specifications before a building warrant is approved, but only for the purposes of ensuring that the design complies with the building regulations; and
• are required to satisfy themselves that the construction meets the approved drawings and regulations."
10.6.8 Under the older system, which applied to the PPP1 schools, the Building Standards Department would inspect the building during construction to ensure that the work was carried out in accordance with the drawings and specifications included in the issued warrant. Visits to site were planned to allow monitoring of critical aspects of the construction but were at the discretion of the building control officer. There were only two notifications required to be made to building control; one at the start of the works and one on the completion of the works.
10.6.9 When the building work was complete, an application was required to be made for a completion certificate to the Building Standards Department, who were required to carry out a final inspection within 14 days. The final inspection was to ensure that the building complied with the approved drawings, including any subsequent amendments to them. Following a satisfactory final site inspection, a completion certificate would be issued. It should be noted that it was, and remains, an offence to occupy or use a new building for which a completion certificate had not been issued.
10.6.10 From the above it is evident that the Building Standards system is not designed or intended to give the level of assurance that a client may require in relation to the more detailed aspects of the construction of a building.
10.6.11 It was acknowledged by several of the professionally qualified witnesses who gave evidence to the Inquiry that the system tended to place a greater focus and allocate more of its resources on the approval of design drawings prior to the issue of a warrant than on the process of ensuring that buildings were actually constructed in accordance with the approved warrant.
10.6.12 This seems somewhat at odds with the focus of the Building (Scotland) Act of "securing the health, safety, welfare and convenience of persons in or about buildings", as while it is essential to have design subjected to appropriate scrutiny to ensure that it is properly considered, safe and compliant with regulations, there is little point in doing so if there is not an equivalent rigour applied to ensuring that contractors actually comply with what is on the approved drawings and seek approval for any amendments they may make to these on site.
10.6.13 Prior to 1992 in relation to the design of the structure of buildings, all structural calculations and drawings had been required to be submitted to local authorities for checking as part of the warrant application. Regulations introduced in 1992 allowed self-certification of the structural design by chartered Civil or Structural Engineers. The Inquiry was advised by a senior Edinburgh building standards officer that, when this system of self-certification was adopted by the design teams, as was the case with the PPP1 schools, building control officers would:
"check the certificates and do a brief review of the structural drawings. There were not usually any calculations submitted."
10.6.14 Drawings submitted for building warrant approval are inevitably not as comprehensive or detailed as drawings required for actual construction. In this regard, it was stated:
"We wouldn't see drawings and specifications of that kind. If there was a note regarding a particular specification that was fine, but ultimately, the applicant was self-certifying the quality of the structural design proposed. We wouldn't look beyond that."
10.6.15 The Inquiry sought information on the level of detail in relation to the structural design of cavity walls, including the provision of secondary steelwork and components such as head-restraints, that the Edinburgh Building Control Officers would have expected to see or consider. The Inquiry was advised that:
"The drawings produced would generally not be sufficient for a contractor to build from. Specification notes would be attached to the drawings but that would not give the detail they wanted."
10.6.16 It was recognised, with the introduction of the new Building Standards system in 2005 that, unfortunately, the system of simply requiring signed certificates from qualified civil or structural engineers had been subject to abuse and was no longer considered sufficiently robust to ensure that the necessary design checks had been undertaken by those signing the certificates.
10.6.17 In 2005 a guidance note entitled 'A NEW BUILDING STANDARDS SYSTEM FOR SCOTLAND' was produced by the Scottish Buildings Standards Agency in collaboration with Structural Engineers Registration Ltd. It included the following statement in relation to the self-certification system that had been used up to then:
"Those regulations, however, became widely regarded as inadequate to provide an acceptable level of public safety as the absence of a statutory checking requirement made the possibility of human error a serious risk. A further problem arose from a lack of common understanding as to how much of the development was "structure" and therefore covered by the certificate."
10.6.18 This last issue, in relation to practice within the construction industry, as to what constituted structural detail as opposed to building or architectural detail was raised in interviews by several of the witnesses. This was principally in relation to which of the design team's documentation should include the information on the design and construction of the cavity walls: whether on architectural drawings, structural engineering drawings or on both; and whether necessary supporting information on items such as wall ties and other secondary steelwork, that is normally included in specifications, should also be required to be fully incorporated on drawings.
10.6.19 A more standardised approach to this issue would assist the checking of information of this type by building control officers as part of the examination of documents submitted for warrant approval.
10.6.20 The Inquiry is of the view that all relevant structural information, details and specifications impacting on the structural integrity of the building should be included on the structural engineers' drawings in a form which is fully integrated with the architectural design.
10.6.21 It also emerged, in the evidence to the Inquiry, that the lack of accessibility by bricklayers on site to this information presented in a practical and manageable form was viewed by many as potentially contributing to quality issues of the type found in the PPP1 schools.