The Scotsman Bulletin Tuesday September 05 2023
The Scotsman Bulletin Tuesday September 05 2023
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00:00 Hello and welcome to the Scotsman's Daily Bulletin for Tuesday. I'm Alan Young, I'm
00:06 Deputy Editor of the Scotsman. I'm joined today by our education correspondent Callum Ross to take
00:10 a look at some of the main headlines. Hi Callum. Morning Alan. Let's have a look at the front page
00:16 first. And we splash today on Callum's story and it is around the saga of weak concrete which has
00:26 obviously been dominating the headlines for several days now. You see the headline there,
00:31 'Officials were told of the dangers posed by concrete a year ago'. We'll speak to Callum
00:36 about that in just a minute. But also to point out on the front page, Scotland Street is back
00:44 and continues in today's paper. And we also have a full look ahead to the programme for government
00:52 statement by Humza Yousaf this afternoon. That is a big day for the First Minister and we will
01:00 be covering it online at scotsman.com and in full in print tomorrow. However Callum, let's talk about
01:07 concrete and the latest revelations that you've uncovered today. Yeah that's right. I mean
01:15 I think if you think back to last week, last Thursday when this kind of erupted with the UK
01:21 government announcing the closure of more than 100 schools, there was a bit of a sense that it
01:27 kind of all came out of the blue wasn't there? That's very much the feeling I got from the
01:31 Scottish Government when I was speaking to some officials on Thursday that they were a bit
01:36 surprised that this action had been taken. But my story today shows that the officials from the
01:42 Scottish Government and some council representatives, you know they were discussing it more than a year
01:47 ago. These emails show that the Scottish Fire and Rescue Service had contacted the government
01:55 with a kind of briefing on it. This RAC material warning that there was a risk of kind of structural
02:02 collapse in hospitals and other public buildings and the Scottish Government official in these
02:08 emails actually kind of forwarded it to the council reps and asked do we know how many schools have
02:15 RAC in them? And that's over a year ago and I'm going to fast forward to the end of last week and
02:20 Friday morning, they still didn't know how many schools had RAC in Scotland, but later confirming
02:26 of course that there was about 35 schools. Now the other issue in the story today, and I've just had
02:32 a bit more information about that this morning, is that West Lothian Council two years ago, more
02:37 than two years ago, June 2021, they encountered RAC in several of its buildings and were dealing
02:44 with it and they were so concerned they passed a motion agreeing to warn councils, other councils
02:51 across Scotland, of the dangers posed by RAC and they did that. I've seen the letter, the council
02:57 chief executive contacted the chief exec of COSLA in June 2021 and asked that all councils be alerted
03:04 to this issue. So it's just, I mean it seems like different parts of the public sector and different
03:10 parts of the UK have been responding at very different kind of speeds to this because we know
03:14 even last week some councils were still trying to confirm the state of RAC in their schools and
03:22 other buildings. We're still having to have a complete list of the 35 schools impacted, I don't
03:31 think. Like you say, some council areas were getting quite a lot of information and others not so much.
03:36 Yeah, it's the same sort of issue. Some councils are being quite upfront and saying which schools,
03:42 and I'm not sure that all are. I mean I think we probably can piece together most of them now,
03:46 but the information in the public domain. But there's also loads of other public buildings,
03:51 I mean the Brunton Theatre in Musselburgh is closed at the moment because of RAC. And then
03:57 there's the issues with hospitals. I get the sense this is maybe an issue where the complexities of
04:03 the kind of devolution arrangement and health and safety laws which are reserved to Westminster may
04:09 have played a part as well. The Scottish Government may have been waiting for UK-wide regulation or
04:15 guidance to come in, but in the end as we saw it was the Department for Education
04:21 that made the big move by closing schools and that's left the government with questions really.
04:27 And is that part of the issue do you think? So we saw in England, we've known about this probably
04:33 for a long time, but it blew up with that order to close school buildings last week. And in England
04:40 the Department of Education issues that order. And Scotland has very much been left up to
04:48 individual local authorities and there is a feeling I think expressed by opposition politicians that
04:53 no one's really taken charge of this as an overall issue. That's right, I mean the Scottish Government's
04:58 position kind of before last week really was that obviously it's up to the owners of buildings,
05:04 so in the case of schools, councils, in the case of hospitals, health boards, you know to make sure
05:08 their buildings are safe. But they repeatedly pointed out that health and safety legislation is
05:13 not devolved and it seemed like they were waiting for an order from the health and safety executive.
05:20 But yeah, in England we've seen this action from the Department for Education, but even in England
05:25 that's left other departments like the Department for Health, why haven't they been acting?
05:30 There's all kinds of questions for different departments and different branches of
05:35 government in Scotland. The Fire Service was looking at its buildings for RAC in 2018-19.
05:41 West Lothian Council was looking in 2020-21, but some parts, some councils, some parts of the NHS
05:48 haven't been looking until now, certainly some councils anyway it seems.
05:52 This is going to run and run. Thanks very much for talking us through that. Callum,
05:57 please keep an eye on scotland.com throughout the day for all the very latest news including that
06:01 big statement in Hollywood this afternoon. And if you are out and about, please do pick up a
06:06 copy of the paper from me and from Callum. It's bye for now.