Ms Orla Hegarty:

If the owner of that site chose to put them off the site for the day, he or she is within his or her rights to do that. If they did not give him or her the documentation for the steel, he or she is within his or her rights to do that. If the owner chose to replace them the next day with somebody else who was more manageable, he or she can do that as well. Those are weaknesses in the system.

My second point is in regard to the impact of cost. This is very difficult to quantify. The issue is that it is designed to be expensive but the reality is that people either cannot or will not pay or cannot resource it to that level. In a part of Australia where they went this way, there was a race to the bottom on fees and it became very cheap and ineffective. From my research on the building register last year I know there is one assigned certifier who was inspecting more than 500 houses. That is from my own count on the building register. They were not on one site; they were on sites throughout the country. I cannot imagine that high fees were being paid. The fees were probably quite low. The problem is that the diligent people who want to do this carefully and forensically in accordance with the law are being underpriced and cannot compete in that market. The system favours the people who are not diligent rather than favouring the diligent. Any system of control should favour the diligent and support them in trying to do a good job and remove the people undercutting them or those who are not doing a good service. It should not favour the people who are cutting corners.

With regard to the impact on cost, people talk a lot about assigned certifier fees. That is just one piece of it. A design certifier who has to do all the design verification has to be paid also. That is not talked about very much at all. Under that, a great deal of sub-certification is being required from everybody, and many of those people are being asked to put additional insurances in place as well. It is very difficult to quantify that because it gets buried in contracts, tenders and sub-contracts. It is very difficult to sort out what that is because the requirement is in with everything else.

There is also an issue of specification because if professionals are being asked to be liable over time for everything, they will always look to raise the specification. Rather than going with what is the national accepted standard on something they will always look to go higher. That is inflationary as well in terms of what owners are actually getting.

The third question was about the fact that there are many bodies involved and the system being fragmented in terms of professionals. It is, and there is not a consistent approach in the way any of that is managed and policed. It is also an issue for cost because if we consider a level of an additional 80,000 people in the construction industry, are we looking at registering an additional 80,000 people on top of the potential 100,000 we have at the moment?

To go back to the numbers, at the height of the boom we had 170,000 or 180,000 people in the construction industry. The number is approximately 120,000 now so in broad terms there are still 150,000 fewer in the industry than we had ten years ago. Are we talking about registering all of those, assessing them all at point of entry and charging a fee on all of them every year, and the backlog of migrant workers coming here who have to be assessed before they can work? There are major issues in that regard. If we are talking about registering 100,000 people at €600 each, that is a €60 million cost to the construction industry so the benefit has to be weighed up in terms of what is important. There are key professionals and trades that very much needed to be regulated, and that would include fire stoppers, alarm installers, engineers and others.

The next question was about an independent inspection regime and the capacity in local authorities. There is a precedent in that regard. The Building Control Act 1990 already makes provision for authorised persons to be appointed by the local authority. They do not have to be employees of the local authority. They can be on a panel of the local authority. There is a precedent in the 2009 regulations where people were brought in to do fire safety certificate applications. There is a precedent and a mechanism, and that is all possible. It would be a lot to ask of the local authorities to upskill and employ staff very quickly. It would also be very inflexible because if they take on staff one local authority might not have the volume of work but another local authority might need them. It is a much more flexible process to use a panel. It also means they can bring in expertise in strategic ways so if a specific fire engineering issue arises, they could bring in a technical expert through this sort of mechanism rather than expecting people in local authorities to be skilled in everything. As I said, the mechanism is in place.

To go back to the point made about existing buildings and inspection, that panel could be a mechanism through which to do that to a national standard and with an inspection list of things that need to be done. There would be consistency and a mechanism to gather that information and to apply standards across the board. There could be huge benefits in that.

A question was asked about who pays for bonds. My thoughts on that are similar to an issue that can arise with the travel industry. When an issue arose with people being stranded in Spain because travel companies collapsed a bonding mechanism was brought in whereby these companies were bonded and if someone was on holidays they were protected in that they were brought home or allowed to continue the holiday because there was a fund to cover that. I wonder if a model like that, particularly for speculative housing developers, could be considered, the point being that the owner buys from the seller. If the seller is no longer around or has ceased trading voluntarily or involuntarily, there is no redress. A bonding mechanism would put different controls on people who are selling housing and would mean that people who buy from those entities have some immediate redress in those circumstances.

That was the first set of questions. The second set was to do with third party inspection, and mention was made of the United Kingdom. Deputy Casey said that 93% had problems but 70% of those were aesthetic. That comes back to the issue of compliance which the technical experts can measure and should be accountable for versus the shoddy construction part.

At the end of the day, developers are the ones who control the process. They buy the materials, pay the workers when things are done correctly or incorrectly and deliver the product into the market. The shoddy construction element is an issue for the person providing the product not for the person checking technical compliance. Perhaps the issue with BCAR is that technical inspectors are being asked to stand over shoddy workmanship as well. Where does it stop? Division of the two is important. There is a problem with house building standards in the UK. There are many reasons for that on which we could expand. Some of it is to do with the inspection regime and some is to do with the procurement model, as I said earlier, where there are conflicts of interest. Some of it is to do with the warranty scheme or even competition in the market. Many big players control much of the market and there is no competition for buyers to go to the better product.

Skills shortage is the single biggest issue for the construction industry at the moment. There are two sides to this and a skills shortage will have two impacts. One is that prices will go up because people are not available to do the work so other people can charge more. The other side is that quality generally goes down because the people who are doing the work have another job to move onto. They need to get paid and they need to move on. It is very fractured. Since 99% of the construction industry is in micro-enterprises, we are dealing with very small entities. We do not have traditional house building companies like we had 30 years ago. We have management companies that will employ people to do specific tasks who will then move on. That is why this outside intervention is important. If people are coming in for a week or two weeks to do some work in a house and they have to bring in a crew to do something, they are being asked for an ancillary certificate before they get paid. If they are not going to be on the site the next week, they will produce the certificate but what value does that certificate have to anybody in the process?

The next question was on the local authorities and the level of oversight in the BCMS. I do not know how much oversight there is and my instinct is that resources are very constrained in the local authorities. Planning departments were generally resourced and people understand what planning is, but building control departments are very under resourced. In some local authorities, it is one person and not even a full-time person. I made the point in the report that there are fewer building control officers in the country than dog wardens. There are statistics published for dog control but not for building control. It is very hard to get an insight into what is going on. It is no criticism of the people in the local authorities who are trying to manage with what they have. It is not reasonable to expect them to have full technical oversight of every drawing when thousands of drawings are being uploaded in a system that does not really balance which drawings have priority or which things are more important. How do they manage that level of information?

In terms of the level of inspection by the local authorities, statistics are published on target rates. They are not obliged to inspect but there are target rates for each local authority. I will speak from my own experience. In my role, I monitor the work of graduate architects who are working out in the market on live building projects. I have probably seen 400 or 500 in the past 20-plus years of live building projects in Ireland. If I looked back on how many cases had issues with building control in a construction product, I could count the number on one hand. That is my take on what actually happens on the ground in terms of local authority involvement. Some of that is not just resources; it is because the law is very unworkable around enforcement. It is very expensive for the local authorities to get into this and that is a barrier to them acting.

The Deputy asked if BCAR is working on the ground. In my experience, I have seen many different things and that is why it is very hard to quantify what it is costing. I have seen the very high standard that some corporate clients have put in place. Similarly, at the other end there is a lot of box ticking and people not really engaging with it. It is not always that people have bad intent; sometimes they just do not have the skill or the necessary information to do the job properly. Some buildings are being occupied without completion certificates because the tiniest detail can hold up a completion certificate. It is not feasible for people not to move in if there is a tiny snag in a building. That is a barrier so people are occupying buildings that do not have completion certificates. The other problem is there is a three-week standstill period when a job is complete for the local authority to validate the completion certificate. The code of practice says they should not start a technical assessment of the drawing at that stage. What that means is the local building control officer should not start opening all the drawings at completion to check them. He should check them if there is an ongoing concern during the course of the job but if there has not been an ongoing issue, they should just be filed. The regulations allow three weeks for that process to happen.

What I have noticed is that in the first year people were planning to do that more quickly. Over the past year, people are starting to put into their contracts that there is a standstill period of three weeks for this to happen at the end of a job. That is a huge cost if the builder is keeping the heat and light on in the building and security on the site and the owner is delayed in occupying the building. It could be an office building or a hotel. There are costs associated with all of that. That mechanism is certainly not working. There is also an issue for assigned certifiers who find themselves in a situation they do not want to be in. There is no mechanism for an assigned certifier to resign. They have to be released by the owner. That is another oversight in the regulations. If an assigned certifier is in the very difficult situation of seeing bad practices on the site that they cannot stand over, they cannot take themselves out of the process.

I mentioned some of the issues of skills and numbers. It also concerns what we will regulate and whether we will regulate people, that is individual plumbers, electricians, architects and engineers, or whether we will regulate companies and entities. At the moment there is a mismatch because builders are regulated by limited liability companies and professionals are regulated as individuals and are individually personally liable. If a company ceases trading, there is protection for anybody involved but the professionals are very exposed because it is a lifelong commitment.

Whether the money is spent on larger or smaller developments, there should be consistency. If somebody is a self-builder building a house in a rural location there are risks for that person in terms of the building being energy compliant and properly connected to the drainage system which could impact locally if there is contamination. There are key things that are actually measurable in terms of compliance that a professional can look at. The same thing goes for larger, multi-unit developments. We need to move away from the concept of a product guarantee and the signing off on shoddy workmanship and be very clear about what compliance is and what the role of the State and the market is in terms of product to establish the consumer protections that are necessary in the market.