I am a chartered civil engineer by background and training, so I come with the view of someone who has spent a long time in the construction industry, particularly in procurement. It is important to say that there have been a lot of changes in how we deliver buildings since the time that the Edinburgh PPP1 schools were built, as the committee has heard from other witnesses.
With schools delivery, we now work on individual schools rather than on large batches. That allows a focus on the individual development and on what is right for any one building. The committee has heard evidence from local authorities and headteachers on that. As you have also heard, we now have a much more detailed specification for our buildings, rather than the sort of very high-level output specification that was the case at the time of PPP1, which left a lot of the design development to the industry.
Construction methods have changed. We now use a lot more steel framing systems, rather than brick and block, and we work more closely with designers, clients and contractors during the development process. The SFT also has a different role in supporting authorities to get what they are contractually entitled to as they move to the handover of buildings and as they move to the really important stage of monitoring a building in operation.
As everyone has said, practices vary. The Cole report is helpful in highlighting those practices. As we have heard, different monitoring regimes are in place in different authorities, designers interact with construction in different ways and there are different payment approaches throughout the industry. In my view, it is important that we come up with ways of delivering quality buildings that work with any of those approaches to procurement and delivery, because they have grown up in the industry for good reasons. As the minister said, all those can be done in a high-quality way with the right systems, processes and people wrapped around them.
Construction monitoring is important, and there are important points about the way that designers pass their production information to the guys on the ground who have to do the building. There are important points about the as-built information—information on exactly what has been constructed—that comes to an authority to be retained. All those lessons are being learned in respect of how we now deliver buildings, but there is obviously more that we can do.