Chamber and committees

The cabinet secretary said that roughly half of approvals are at or below benchmark and roughly half are over it. When the programme started, were such proportions expected? Is that a sign that the benchmark system is working? Is it generating more work than was expected because the applications that are over benchmark need more detailed scrutiny?

You mentioned the Scottish social housing tender price index. Given everything else that is going on in the world and with UK interest rates and inflation, is that index robust enough? Does it provide a data set that is robust enough for RSLs and councils to be confident that they will be able to meet the costs of building the homes that we know that we need?

The differential in benchmarks between RSLs and councils has been a sore point for the Convention of Scottish Local Authorities for a long time. Last year, you told the committee that the differential was there because of differences in the availability of borrowing to RSLs and councils. Will that ever be resolved to councils’ satisfaction? Will there ever be parity in benchmarking?

The Accounts Commission and, to be fair, other organisations have highlighted issues relating to the lack of multiyear financial settlements, including issues that that has caused for long-term planning and financial management. Putting aside the impact of some of the drastic cuts in the resource spending review, does the five-year plan give local authorities the certainty that they need to plan services over the next five years? I will go to Bill Moyes first on that.

That is helpful. Thank you.

I am sorry, convener, but I think that that is someone else’s section.

That is very helpful. It gives us a basis to interrogate the spending review and to flag up to the Government the lack of detail that would give local councils more certainty about the individual figures that they will get.

Leaving aside the principle of the spending review giving local authorities longer-term or medium-term stability, I want to ask about the content of the spending review. The five-year review is a flat-cash one, which means, with inflation as it is, significant real-terms reductions to local authority budgets. That is on top of cuts that go back over the past 10 years, probably. What is the Accounts Commission’s view on the ability of local authorities to continue to provide the services that are needed, based on projections of real-terms reductions of upwards of £700 million over the next five years?

Would any of the online witnesses like come in at this point?

Yes. My questions are on waiting lists, demand and communication between authorities and those on waiting lists. We have had quite a bit of discussion about that, so I probably know the answer to this but, generally, what is demand like? How many people are on the waiting list in your area? How has that changed since the 2015 act? I come to Rosanne Woods first.

I want to touch on communication with people on waiting lists and what local authorities can do to identify duplications on waiting lists. Ian Welsh, you touched on data protection issues, but there are ways around everything. For example, if allotment associations asked people for permission to share the data, could local authorities play a bigger role by having a comprehensive, local authority-level waiting list? In that way, with applicants’ permission, councils could co-ordinate waiting lists and encourage incorporation, perhaps looking at particular sites where authorities own land. That does not seem to be beyond possibility, provided that people give their permission to share the data.