Mr. Hubert Loftus:

The Minister has covered a lot of the areas mentioned. I will pick up on some others. I am happy to provide a briefing to clarify how tender processes are done for the information of the committee. The motivation for the clerk of works essentially arose from the Grenfell fire and concerns about fire safety. To provide additional assurance, we made the decision in 2017 to put a clerk of works in place for all major projects.

As for actions taken in the past few weeks to be able to see this, bearing in mind snagging and things like that, I note that the building is closed up. We did opening-up works on the internal plasterboard and opened up areas within the buildings to look into the cavities, see what the issues were and satisfy ourselves on any concerns around structural safety. That took place in all of the schools. The outcome was the various categorisations we published on our website, either where nothing of concern was identified or where we thought it appropriate to put in place precautionary measures. Our approach was to err on the side of caution.