Citizen Participation and Public Petitions Committee 04 June 2025
On bringing in specialist engineers, every local authority, regardless of size, has internal processes and procedures that we can go through. Smaller local authorities tend to employ the services of external structural engineers, who will come in. As Gordon Masterton said, a lot of them have a great deal of conservation experience around listed buildings—the issue is just that they have potentially never gone down the pathway of registration.
If we were to go down that path, and if there were only 10 such individuals available for all 32 local authorities in Scotland and we had to wait on someone being available, that could lead to significant delays in respect of a local authority’s legal obligation to protect the public. That is the ultimate consideration. Under the local authority building standards, demolition is our last resort. We will take every other step to try to work with owners, but we have to take into account that sometimes, unfortunately, owners do not take ownership of, and maintain, their buildings. That is why the buildings deteriorate so much that they get to the point at which we have to step in.
We have looked into cases in which we have taken specialist advice from engineers, as has been described, where the time allows that to happen, but that should not be the fall-back position. At the end of the day, however, it comes back to the issue of ensuring public safety. That is all that we, as a local authority, are legally obliged to do.
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