Chamber and committees

We move on to questions from Mark Griffin, who joins us on BlueJeans.

John Blackwood wanted to come in on that.

Thank you. In the interests of time, we have to get on, but I am glad that you made that point. Does Matt Downie or Alastair Houston want to come in?

Thank you for bringing us back to what the proposals are about. We move to questions from Graeme Dey.

Item 2 is evidence on the Coronavirus (Recovery and Reform) (Scotland) Bill at stage 1. The committee is leading on scrutiny of part 4 of the bill, which makes provision for strengthening protections from eviction for private rented tenants.

We will hear from two separate panels of witnesses today, with the first consisting of stakeholders and the second being the Minister for Zero Carbon Buildings, Active Travel and Tenants’ Rights.

We are joined remotely for our first session by Alastair Houston, who is a solicitor and head of housing and court department, Legal Services Agency; Matt Downie, who is the chief executive of Crisis; John Blackwood, who is the chief executive of the Scottish Association of Landlords; and Andrew Watson, who is a researcher at the University of Glasgow.

I will aim to bring all witnesses into the discussion, but if members wish to direct a question to a particular witness, please make that clear to assist our broadcasting team in operating cameras and microphones. If any of the witnesses wishes to come in on a particular point, they should let me know by typing R in the chat function and I will bring them in at an appropriate point.

I intend to allow up to around 75 minutes for the session. I now open up the session to questions from members and begin with a question that I will initially direct to Matt Downie.

Do you agree that the tenancy proposals in the bill will contribute to the Scottish Government’s objective of addressing the harms that have been caused by the pandemic and tackling systemic inequalities that have been made worse by the pandemic?

I bring in Elena Whitham.

Do these changes need to be made permanent now or should they be part of a wider package that might be introduced in a future housing bill? Perhaps Andrew Watson could respond to that.

Yes, that is fine.

I have one final question, which is for John Blackwood. Can you explain your concerns about the removal of eviction ground 8 from schedule 5 to the Housing (Scotland) Act 1988? That is a bit technical.

Thank you for that. I will follow up with another question.

Some respondents to the Parliament’s call for views on the bill thought that the proposals could negatively affect investor confidence and the supply of privately rented homes. You touched on that a little bit in your opening remarks. What estimate have you made of the impact of the changes on the supply of privately rented accommodation?