Hansard

I thank members of the committee for considering the petition, which concerns an issue that has been a bone of contention for me for many years. When I was growing up in Glasgow, a city that has experienced significant demolition and destruction of its built heritage over the years, I was motivated to become engaged and get involved in many ways by my desire to try to preserve the built heritage of the city and my community. I guess the matter begs the question: why do all these buildings seem to be getting demolished a lot of the time and what is the process that is underlying that? I have spent a great deal of time interrogating the issues and getting to the nub of what is going on. I could go back to 2004 and the demolition of the Elgin Place memorial church in Pitt Street, which was done unnecessarily two days after Christmas, based on no evidence from a suitably qualified structural engineer. Coming back to the present day, as we speak, in Sauchiehall Street, which is just around the corner, the listed ABC building—the former Regal cinema—is currently being demolished, despite there being advice and an assessment from a conservation-accredited structural engineer that the façade could be preserved. That advice was disregarded by the owner of the building and by Glasgow City Council’s building control officers. The building was summarily served with a dangerous building notice and is currently being demolished without any due process whatsoever. No evidence has been presented that the building could not be saved, at least in part. That is why this petition is so important. Save Britain’s Heritage’s engagement, as my colleague Ms Mochan mentioned, came about as a result of the Ayr station hotel incident in Ayrshire, where the building suffered a fire. The building was deemed to be dangerous and the council’s building control team came in and started a process of almost wholesale demolition of the building. It made no communication with stakeholders and no evidence was presented transparently about why that demolition was necessary in its entirety, even though the local Ayr Development Trust had commissioned its own structural specialist engineers—the top experts in their field, Ed Morton and Ben Adam, who were registered conservation-accredited engineers—who had produced reports saying that the building could be substantially saved, at least as a shell, which were completely disregarded. There was not even the courtesy of a response from the council on the matter. That took place was over a period of months, so the notion that the demolition had to happen urgently—in a matter of hours or days—to safeguard the public is a fallacy. In reality, such exercises are long drawn out and take place over a series of months. Indeed, the ABC building has been standing empty in Sauchiehall Street since 2018 and has potentially been a danger to the public since that time, yet only in the last three months or so, after a proposal from a developer to demolish the building and build a new building has been received, has building control suddenly leapt into action and expedited an emergency demolition order. I would contend that the process is subject to routine abuse and manipulation. One of the problems, not even just with the dangerous buildings process under sections 29 and 30 of the Building (Scotland) Act 2003 but with the process under the Planning (Listed Buildings and Conservation Areas) Act 1997, is that there is no independent arbitration and no independent scrutiny of the evidence presented by developers or those applying to demolish listed buildings to test whether the evidence presented is sufficiently robust. I would suggest that the petition makes a reasonable ask: that the conservation accreditation register of engineers, which is maintained by the Institution of Civil Engineers and the Institution of Structural Engineers, is used as the basis for the qualifications that are necessary for an expert to judge the condition of a listed building when it is in a dangerous condition and when applicants are applying for a listed building consent to demolish a listed building or a building in a conservation area. That would be a necessary enhancement. I can tell you, with all sincerity, that the process is subject to routine abuse whereby soft engineers are commissioned by clients to present reports that basically advocate for their desired outcome. Those engineers are not independent—they are commissioned by the applicant. Of course, the engineers will do what the client wants, so that is why the process is inherently tainted by bias under its current guise. I would suggest that, certainly in the case of listed buildings, there should be a much higher threshold of evidence necessary to justify demolition. There are 2,214 buildings in Scotland on the current buildings at risk register, and over the past three decades or so that the register has been active, 658 listed buildings in Scotland have been demolished. There are probably many more out there that did not make it to the register in the first place. I would say that most of those, if not all of them, could have been saved in whole or in part had a more proactive approach been taken by the planning authorities, and the right expertise was in the room assessing those buildings. No planning authority in Scotland has a conservation-accredited engineer employed. Theirs is not an in-house set of skills. In the same way that I would not go to a GP to seek treatment for a brain tumour, but would go to a neurosurgeon, there needs to be the necessary expertise commissioned to ensure that we do not unnecessarily lose the nation’s built heritage. The petition has the perfectly reasonable contention that guidance should be enhanced so that in cases of listed buildings at risk when a section 29 or section 30 order is served, a conservation-accredited engineer must be commissioned to investigate the building and determine what could be saved, if anything. That independent approach would be much better at achieving outcomes such as saving the façade of the ABC building on Sauchiehall Street, which is currently being unnecessarily demolished. That will be a permanent loss to our national heritage, which is a crying shame. I could cite numerous other examples. The Springburn public halls in 2012 could have had its façade preserved, but it was entirely demolished. The Elgin Place church, maybe known to some as the Shack nightclub, on Pitt Street was unnecessarily demolished. There are numerous other examples: Ayr station hotel is the latest in a litany of buildings lost to the nation. I would encourage the committee to consider further actions by asking stakeholders to present further evidence. I would suggest asking the Institution of Civil Engineers and the Institution of Structural Engineers to talk about why the CARE register is so important and why its use would result in a good professional benchmark for enhancing the guidance in Scotland. I would suggest having Lydia Franklin and Henrietta Billings from Save Britain’s Heritage along to discuss, in particular, the case of the Ayr station hotel. I would suggest speaking to registered conservation-accredited engineers who are currently practising in Scotland, such as Ben Adam at Narro Associates, Will Rudd Associates, and Ed Morton, who is a CARE engineer who was involved with the Ayr station hotel. I would suggest engaging with the Scottish Historic Buildings Trust, the Architectural Heritage Society of Scotland, Glasgow City Heritage Trust, whose director is Niall Murphy, the Scottish Churches Trust, and National Trust for Scotland. It might be good to have Liz Davidson along, who has been heavily involved in the Glasgow Building Preservation Trust and efforts to save Glasgow School of Art’s Mackintosh building—the Mac. The Ayr Development Trust, of course, was heavily engaged in the saga at Ayr station hotel, and it could recite to the committee the flaws in that process in detail. Esther Clark might be a good starting point, as might Robin Webster, who is an eminent conservation architect—top of his field in Scotland—who could also relate some of the issues. That is just a set of suggestions of people to bring along to the committee. I have many more in my reservoir of suggestions. I would encourage the committee in the strongest terms to inquire deeply into the issue. I am fully clear that there are flaws in the current process and that the current regulations are open to regular, routine and pretty sophisticated abuse by consultants, planning officials, applicants and property developers.