Chamber and committees

Thanks very much for those responses. You touched on some of the areas that I want to talk about and on the work that you are doing. Stephen Llewellyn, you say that you are maybe teetering on the edge of declaring an emergency, so perhaps this question is more for Blair Millar and Edward Thomas. Do you want to say any more about any work that you have been doing that has prevented the need to declare a housing emergency? Edward, how is it going in Moray?

Just to clarify, that is a forum that a tradesperson who goes into a house and sees something could—

Thank you. I am a bit curious about “appropriateness”. Stephen Llewellyn, can you unpack that a bit so that the committee can understand it?

Thank you for satisfying my curiosity.

I will bring in Meghan Gallacher.

I apologise—I now have two people on the committee with the initials MG and must be careful about that. I bring in Mark Griffin.

Finally, I have to ask about the Government’s new national outcome on housing, which is:

“We live in safe, high-quality and affordable homes that meet our needs”.

I think that you were all in the room when I asked the previous panel about that. What do you think of that outcome? Will it will help to guide the Scottish Government’s policies to address the housing emergency?

Unusually, I will start at the other end, and go to Edward first.

Yes. That would bring in the placemaking bit.

Christian, do you want to come in?

It sounds like there is a role for the Scottish National Investment Bank in that kind of situation. Before I bring in Fulton, I will say to colleagues that we are rapidly coming towards the end of our allocated time. We still have quite a few questions to cover, but, if you have been paying attention—as I hope that you all have—you will know that we have started to touch on some of the areas that we are interested in exploring a bit more.

Fulton, you glitched out a little bit, so if you could just paraphrase your question, that would be great.