Monitoring of all construction projects should be compulsory
THE recent fiasco involving Edinburgh City Council and the Edinburgh Schools Partnership (“Schools closure crisis: Bill for childcare could top £1 million”, the Herald, April 13) epitomises what I believe to be a current problem with quality control throughout the industry.
Take, for examplem the Clyde Arc (the Squinty Bridge) at Finnieston in Glasgow and our Scottish Parliament building, where components failed shortly after construction was complete, resulting in the embarrassing closure of the facilities.
In the 1960s and 70s, any civil or building construction project necessitated the inspection of all components prior to a certificate being issued to verify said works ready for placement, for example, of wet concrete into a mould: shuttering, reinforcement and holding down bolts being the items for compliance.
I can recall one project where the civil engineering inspector was often at loggerheads with the reinforcement ganger demanding the correct amount of space between a shutter mould and the steel bars (cover). Needless to say, the inspector always prevailed.
Since the late 1970s the inspection regime has been eroded in the main by the squeezing of the design team fees. These would nearly always include a full on-site inspection team covering all aspects of construction. Now the norm is a weekly or fortnightly visit to see the product “as built” instead of a kinetic situation.
The Health and Safety at Work Act of 1974 adequately caters for the policing of projects in all aspects of construction; so the framework is there to prosecute for any failure. The problem is how does one ensure the construction work is up to standard in the first place? This is where we need to revisit the supervisory and inspection provisions of the 1960s and 70s and reintroduce compulsory monitoring.
Who pays? A couple of pence in the pound on to council tax and 30p a square foot on to speculative or bespoke office rental charges would go a long way to allow building control departments to increase on-site inspectors and architects to place full time clerks of works on projects.
I am sure the legislators will be able to take this forward and give us all a degree of comfort. Archie Burleigh, Meigle Cottage, Skelmorlie. ALISON Rowat’s lesson about the PFI/PPP schools (“Please Miss, why are our new schools falling down?”, The Herald, April 13) was top of the class, although I don’t agree that a public inquiry would “simply be a case of throwing good money after bad”. After all, the education of our children has been interrupted, but far, far worse than that, thousands of children and their teachers have been put at risk of their schools disintegrating on top of them, a truly terrifying nightmare scenario.
If we don’t ask the questions we won’t get the answers, and holding a public inquiry would be the best way to determine all the facts, and learn the lessons. Ruth Marr, 99 Grampian Road, Stirling.