Chamber and committees

So the idea would be to put in rent controls in areas such as freeports.

I agree that you have to meet different party representatives, but we want to get the information so that people who are watching this meeting understand what you are trying to do with the bill.

Willie Coffey has a brief supplementary question.

We may take a bit longer: it will depend on how long your answers are.

We are aware that there is a new housing national outcome. I would be interested to hear how the bill fits in with that and how you plan to monitor the impact of the bill, so that we can judge its impact on the housing sector and on tenants’ and landlords’ lives.

Thank you. I will go back to the First Minister’s announcements on amendments that will seek to attract more investment. We are interested in understanding the Government’s plans for amendments to this part of the bill, and in knowing whether one of the potential proposals is inflation-linked increases. You are maybe exploring that area. I think that one of the issues is how attracting more investment can be brought about without allowing more profit to be extracted from tenants and thus continuing to make housing ever more unaffordable. I appreciate that you have a balancing act here, but it is quite an important issue.

Emma Roddick, would you like to come in?

Thank you for your opening statement. We have a number of questions to get through today, and we will follow our usual format. I will start with some general questions, and then we will go on to rent control, evictions, personalisation and other issues. I hope that we will do so in the time that we have allocated, but we might go a bit over time.

I will start with a question that came to light as a result of our evidence session last week. We heard concerns from witnesses, including a representative from the Chartered Institute of Housing Scotland, about the absence of a clear vision for the private rented sector in Scotland. Can you briefly set out your vision for the private rented sector and the role that the bill plays in its delivery?

We will stick with the questions on rents and come back to you.

Thanks. Getting that detail was worth our while. We go back to Willie Coffey for questions about evictions and so forth.

It will depend on how long our questions are, too. We may have some long questions.