Chamber and committees

Absolutely. There is the fabric-first approach, but we should not deal just with fabric; we must address everything together, as you said.

I welcome back Elizabeth Leighton—the technology still needs to be finessed. I asked whether, given the high up-front costs of retrofitting measures, which have long payback periods, the financial support that is in place is adequate. What are your thoughts from the Existing Homes Alliance’s experience?

Thank you for those responses.

We will move on to our third theme, which is public engagement and local communities. I bring in Willie Coffey, who is joining us online.

I am thinking about how we can shorten supply chains and grow things here.

Did you encounter challenges with getting the project through planning or building control?

Given the speed at which we need to roll out retrofitting in Scotland, we might need to look into and address the area, to smooth things over somehow.

Elena Whitham has a follow-up question.

Meghan Gallacher will ask about the theme of local communities.

The third item on the agenda is consideration of the Ethical Standards in Public Life etc (Scotland) Act 2000 (Register of Interests) Amendment Regulations 2021, which is a negative instrument. As such, in the absence of a motion to annul, there is no requirement on the committee to make any recommendations on it.

As members have no comments to make on the regulations, the committee agrees that we do not want to make any recommendations in relation to them.

As we agreed earlier in the meeting, we will consider agenda items 4 and 5 in private.

I want to explore something that I have become aware of, to see whether the approach would be useful. It relates to the 44,000 empty homes across Scotland—I think that that is the number. I began to think about intervention points in the retrofitting initiative. Obviously, we want to have a whole-building approach, so looking at an empty home in a tenement would not work. I am beginning to wonder whether, in rural areas, we could bring empty homes back online and retrofit them before people are housed in them, so that people go into retrofitted houses. I would love to hear your thoughts on that.

We have come to the end of the discussion. Unfortunately, we never have enough time, but it has been very helpful to hear from this panel and the other panels this morning—I think that all committee members agree with me on that. As I said at the beginning of the meeting, this is not the only time that we will take evidence on the issue. In January, we will lead a debate in the Parliament on retrofitting, and we will see what comes out of that. Your contributions have been very helpful.

I suspend the meeting to allow the witnesses to leave.

We move to questions from Paul McLennan on skills and the supply chain.