Chamber and committees

Thank you very much for bringing in retrofit. That is certainly an aspect that I agree with you on.

Thank you. Other hands are going back up, but I will bring in Chris Birt first.

Is it possible to move away from annualising the SHIPs, given that the Scottish Government has to work on an annual budget? We have been having quite a bit of conversation about multiyear funding and that kind of thing. Would it be possible to do that? What would be the mechanisms?

That is what national planning framework 4 is asking us to do. Marie, did you want to ask your question?

We have some tenant participation in another piece of work that we are doing, which has been very helpful.

To continue the theme of including and involving local communities, tenants and residents in delivery plans, I invite Ronnie Macrae from the Communities Housing Trust to come in.

Is there some policy that should change, or do we need a different understanding? What would make that a happy marriage?

That is a good point. Priority is coming through as a theme today.

Emma Jackson, you wanted to come in a while ago, so pick up wherever you want to.

The committee has certainly taken an interest in damp and mould, and we have been taking evidence on that issue.

On the point about remaining in a home, I was at the Rural Housing Scotland conference last week, part of which was the Scottish Ecological Design Association—SEDA—land talks. A speaker pointed out that Scotland has around 40,000 empty homes—we have already touched on the need to tackle that—and there are 20,000 second homes in rural areas. They were basically pointing out where we can find potential for housing.

One striking figure was that there are 900,000 homes in Scotland—I need to find out where they got this statistic—with single people living in them. I have come upon quite a few situations in which single people want to move in order to downsize. I totally take the point that people need to be supported to remain in a home, but this situation is another bit of the puzzle. It touches on what Ronnie has been talking about—the holistic bit. We need to look at all the housing stock and the different situations and be able to say, “These people live in big houses, they are single, they are desperately needing to move out, and we can get families in there.” How do we start to move those things together?

For sure. Certainly. Thanks for that.

We are supposed to be here for a maximum of two hours this morning. It is such a good conversation, but we do have quite a few things to get in, so I will bring in colleagues a bit more rapidly.

Thanks very much for that. Willie Coffey has a couple of questions.