Chamber and committees

Thank you. I now bring in Brian Whittle.

Thank you for that comprehensive response. Stephanie Callaghan has a brief supplementary question.

Yes—it is exactly your thing.

Does anybody have any thoughts on that? I am beginning to wonder whether this is the right group of people for these questions.

Good morning, and welcome to the sixth meeting in 2024 of the Local Government, Housing and Planning Committee. I remind all members and witnesses to ensure that their devices are on silent.

We have received apologies from Miles Briggs, and Brian Whittle joins us as a substitute member. Stephanie Callaghan is joining us online.

As this is Brian Whittle’s first time attending a meeting of the committee, under the first item on our agenda, I invite him to declare any relevant interests.

Thank you. We will now turn to questions. Please indicate to me if you would like to respond to a member’s question or to something that somebody else said. The intention is that, as far as we can manage, this should be a free-flowing conversation, although we have questions to lead the conversation. Sometimes you might not get to respond to a specific question, but you can tuck your response into a comment that you make at another time. Do not feel that you need to respond to every question—there might be things that are more pertinent to some of you than to others. That said, my initial question is an overarching one that is intended to allow a discussion of the big picture, so it would be good to hear from you all on this one.

It is great that we are all here to talk about the strategy in “Housing to 2040” and to do a bit of a review and a check-up on where we are, and it is great to have all of you in the room, because your organisations have been involved in setting the direction of the strategy. Obviously, there has been an intractable long-term problem with housing—it is not just a problem that we are facing now; it has been a problem for decades. Across the United Kingdom, since the first and second world wars, we have been trying to tackle the issue of getting affordable housing into the mix. It is a long-term problem, and it will be interesting to hear where you think we are now.

In that regard, what is your view of the high-level vision for housing set out in the “Housing to 2040” policy document? Is it still relevant, or does it need to be amended in any way in light of the changed economic context since 2021?

The committee has heard a lot about the issue of workforce in relation to the need to get housing built. Even if the money to build the houses were there, would we have the people to build them?

Brian Whittle has a supplementary question.

Thanks for that contribution, which brings the conversation to the question that I was going to ask, which is about retrofitting and the Scottish Government’s declared town centre first approach.

Some of you might be aware that Scotland’s Towns Partnership, the Scottish Futures Trust and others are doing a roadshow on town-centre living, looking at ways of getting more people to live in town centres and acknowledging that there is a lot of potential housing in the empty spaces above commercial properties. There are about 40,000 houses on the empty homes register, but those empty spaces are not officially viewed as being potential homes.

Those properties might represent low-hanging fruit, because retrofitting and renovating those properties would, I understand, cost about a third less than it would cost to do others. Obviously, we would have to think quite carefully about how we could make them relevant for modern living—for example, quite a few will have small rooms. We could bring in designers and architects to think about how to make those spaces work.

Through the roadshow, I have seen tremendous case studies of what people are doing to renovate buildings, transform churches and so on. I am interested to hear what you think about that opportunity. How does it fit into the “Housing to 2040” vision? I invite comments from ALACHO and COSLA initially, then perhaps Callum Chomczuk can respond, too.

Callum Chomczuk, do you want to speak on that? Does anyone else want to speak?