Launch of Scottish Building Standards Hub – May 2024

Alan McAulay and James Whiteford have been appointed as the new Directors of the Scottish Building Standards Hub (SBSH). Alan and James moved into their new roles on the 24 May 2024.

The Hub will continue to work closely with Local Authority Building Standards Scotland (LABSS) and Building Standards Division (BSD) to strengthen the Building Standards system. The SBSH will play a key role in supporting transformation, quality, and delivery of compliant buildings through the building warrant process. Services provided to local authority building standards and wider industry will be delivered across three main areas:

• By delivering a range of building standards system services
• By supporting Hubs of expertise and operational partnerships
• By supporting learning and development

The SBSH will have a number of internal Units and recruitment for the relevant posts is underway.

The Hub Directors said:

“Being successful in obtaining the Directors posts, we are both delighted to be able to take the pilot developed Hub structure and range of building standards system services and activities forward into reality through the Scottish Building Standards Hub, hosted within Fife Council. It is exciting to be at the forefront of this new and innovative development supporting and serving local authority building standards service delivery, which will improve stakeholder and customer engagement with the system."

The key priorities for the SBSH over the coming months are to:

• Circulate the Memorandum of Understanding between the SBSH and all local authorities to chief executives and building standards managers outlining the services the Hub will deliver to their building standards teams.
• To continue and fully embed the links between the SBSH and the local authority network through LABSS Consortia Technical Working Group (CTWG) and Digital Delivery Group (DDG), providing the necessary support to these groups.
• Progress the recruitment process to enable full functionality of SBSH supported building standards system services. Particularly in house assessment of Scottish Type Approval Scheme (STAS) applications and the creation of Information Papers.

Most staff role profiles have now been established and with post now being advertised (see related news article).

For further information on the SBSH please contact:

Alan McAulay for matters relating to STAS, Information Papers, the Dispute Resolution Process, peer review, Hubs of expertise and technical support: Alan.McAulay@fife.gov.uk

James Whiteford for matters relating to SBSH business/strategy, workload sharing, learning and development and transformation: James.Whiteford@fife.gov.uk