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Again, as that is a highly technical matter, I will rely on officials.

Yes, although some of those issues were dealt with by the cabinet secretary in her statement to Parliament last week.

The single building assessment is intended to overcome a difference between the UK and Scottish tenure systems, in that in Scotland there is not a single building owner.

The committee will be aware that the single building assessment is about the safety of buildings and the people in them, and it includes a generic fire risk assessment as well as an external wall appraisal. It needs to be carried out in a professional and rigorous manner, and only by undertaking that work can we identify where changes to existing systems might need to be made. There is a fairly high degree of confidence that the majority of buildings will be found to be safe, so the mere conducting of an assessment should not give people cause for severe anxiety. However, the work needs to be undertaken to identify where those changes have to happen.

Training of surveyors to undertake the external wall appraisals is under way. We expect that to improve the capacity of the sector to deliver the assessments that are necessary. Reducing the level of competence of those who are undertaking the work is really not an option, so we have to work with the sector to increase the supply of competent professionals who can undertake that work. I think that the committee will understand the need to work with the sector to increase capacity but also to make sure that those assessments are conducted to the required standard.

It is also an important principle that the assessments come at zero cost to home owners, and the Government has ensured that they will.

I am not aware of any suggestion that we need an entire bill on the matter, but committee members will be aware that the changes that we are making are just the latest in a series that we have made, since Grenfell, relating to fire safety issues. We are planning more changes on the energy side of things. Our approach is to have more continuous development to address existing concerns and future challenges that our building stock will face, rather than to take a single big-bang approach.

Stephen—do you want to add anything to that?

Again, I will turn to officials for an answer to that question.

As I mentioned in my opening remarks, we are working with the industry to ensure that capacity grows to meet demand for assessments, as they come through. I am not sure whether we have any more recent updates on the work that has been done to our ensure that skills and capacity are growing to meet demand.

The presence of potentially unsafe cladding—and I stress the phrase “potentially unsafe”, because, as I have said, we are confident that the assessments will find the majority of buildings to be safe—has had a significant impact on people. Indeed, I have met people in my region who are in that situation—I am sure that other members will have had the same experience—and we in the Government get regular correspondence from people who are unable to move.

However, I come back to the point that this is the fundamental reason for carrying out the single building assessments, and the progress on that was reported in the cabinet secretary’s statement. We are taking action to roll the approach out faster and to more buildings. We fully expect that most buildings will be found to be safe; however, where any risk is found, it should be remediated, and the Government has always made it clear that developers have to play their part and step up to remedy buildings with unsafe cladding. Even some of the people to whom I have spoken who are in this extremely difficult situation are not making the case—or, at least, have not made the case to me—that the taxpayer should effectively bail out developers in meeting a cost that it is believed they ought to bear. There is a general acceptance that the developer community needs to play its part in ensuring that that work takes place.

Some of the relevant powers here are reserved to the UK Government, particularly around insurance. The regulation of insurance is not something that we are able to intervene in through devolved powers. Insurance premiums are obviously a matter for individual insurers. We are working with the Association of British Insurers through the cladding stakeholder group and, through that forum, we are seeking fair treatment for home owners by the insurance industry.

The answers to all the issues lie in working together to reach solutions that will work for people, and that will include insurers and lenders. As for what we believe would help people most, where developers or others step up to carry out remediation work, the insurers should trust the single building assessment process to deliver a safe building and return the market to acceptable premium levels.

I was pleased to hear from the committee’s meeting last week that the ABI and many of its member companies welcome the single building assessment approach and what it can deliver.

The compliance plan manager would have responsibility for all aspects of compliance—not only for the fire safety issues that we have talked about, but for wider compliance with building regulations

It might be worth our while to write to the committee with an update on the pilot that Stephen Garvin mentioned, and to let members know how it is developing and when we expect to be able to evaluate it more fully.

It is pretty clear that building standards are continuously under review and evolving. Since I have been a member of the Scottish Parliament, there have been regular updates and continuous incremental improvements to building standards.

As Stephen Garvin indicated, there are differences in context between Scotland and England. We need to ensure that we hear from the widest range of stakeholders about the Scottish situation, and we need to continue to develop and improve based on the challenges and requirements here, rather than to echo actions that are taken in England, for the English context.

Throughout all this—and I am afraid to say that this happens quite often—it has been difficult to get clarity from the UK Government in a timely way either on the consequentials that are available or, indeed, on other ways in which we might have worked together more closely and more collaboratively to address this entire issue. Miles Briggs will recall the frustration that the cabinet secretary expressed in the statement about the inability of not just the Scottish Government but the Welsh Government to successfully make the case for the UK to work constructively and around the same table with us on a shared and coherent response to this situation. I also point out that some of the approaches that the UK Government is taking for England alone make use of the availability of UK-level reserve powers. There is a great deal in this entire situation about which one could have made a very strong case for collaborative working between the Governments in the UK, and it is not for want of trying that that has not happened.

As for the work that needs to happen now, we clearly have to continue with the single building assessment to identify where specific changes need to be made and to work not only with home and building owners but with the developer community to ensure that this activity can be funded.