Chamber and committees

The Scottish Government has met 8 times with Homes for Scotland directly related to the development of the Scottish Safer Buildings Accord workshops.

We are making significant progress, to date focused around collaborative service design of the high level principles and scope. We are working at pace with our design cohort to refine specific technical criteria and build up granularity to the Accord.

Officials, in keeping with good collaborative working and Service Design, continue to meet regularly with Homes for Scotland out with design workshops and it is impracticable to attach a figure to these.

Discussions are sensitive and of a commercial, financial and legal nature. These will understandably not be published due to the confidential nature of discussions.

Scottish Government funding schemes, in the main, do not fund community-run retrofit organisations directly.

However, a number of our schemes do support retrofitting. For example, our flagship Community and Renewable Energy Scheme (CARES), delivered by Local Energy Scotland, has offered advice to over 900 organisations and supported over 600 community and locally owned renewable projects throughout Scotland, offering funding of over £58 million since its inception in 2010. CARES has supported 119 organisations to retrofit decarbonised heat and/or install renewable generation into their buildings.

The following schemes also provide support to households, businesses and other eligible organisations for retrofitting, though not exclusively:

• Warmer Homes Scotland – more than £176 million has been invested through the scheme since its launch in September 2015 helping over 27,000 households throughout Scotland.
• Area Based Schemes – up until the end of the 2020-2021 programme, £400 million has been invested delivering 110,000 measures to homes since 2013.
• Home Energy Scotland loans and cashback – since 2017, the scheme has issued 6808 loans, valued at over £37 million, and 4097 cashback offers, valued at over £11 million, to existing homes.
• SME loans and cashback – since 2008, the scheme has paid close to £40 million in loans and cashback, funding more than 1627 projects.
• Social Housing Net Zero Heat Fund – since August 2020, the fund has committed over £14 million to the retrofit of 1800 social homes across Scotland.
• Low Carbon Infrastructure Transition Programme – this programme has provided grant support for the retrofitting of over 1000 homes to decarbonise their energy consumption.

The Scottish Government budget and outturn for the First-tier Tribunal for Scotland (Housing and Property Chamber) in each year since 2016 is in the following table:

(a) there have been a total of 4 contract workers in the past 12 months.

(b) see the following table

For the year 2022 to date the average day rate is £505.03 (inclusive of VAT).

25 of the 29 buildings we have contacted are from the 80 block 2021 Expressions of Interest group. Once we ascertain consent and key details, we will move to the contracting process.

We have contacted 29 buildings so far to offer the direct provision of fire engineers. Once we ascertain consent and details, we will move to the contracting process.

We have begun the SBA delivery process for 15 buildings using our grant based approach, with an additional 29 contacted to offer directly commissioned assessments.

The number of Self Build Loan Fund loans and value of these loans issued by year of operation is shown in table 1.

Table 1: Number and Value of Self Build Loan Fund loans by year of operation

At the end of June 2022, the Self Build Loan Fund administrators, Communities Housing Trust (CHT) had approved 40 loans to successful applicants committing £6.02 million over 13 local authority areas. The average loan offered to borrowers was £150,000.

Of the 40 homes funded through the national Self-Build Loan Fund since 2018, 37 are located in a rural area according to 6-fold urban rural classification. In addition, over one third of all approved loans (14), with committed funding of almost £2.3 million has been made available to people living in the islands. Five of these borrowers have also benefitted from a Croft House Grant.