Seòmar agus comataidhean

I understand. I am interested to hear what Hazel Johnson and Laura Shanks have to say in answer to that question, but I will put my last question now and they can perhaps answer both at the same time.

I guess that the question should also apply where there is no risk to safety. In those situations, should there be a gradation of standard?

I agree with Mr Torrance and you, convener, that this has taken far too long. I am reminded that the petition was lodged in 2022 and that it has been considered several times since. The delay in itself is not acceptable, so Mr Torrance is quite right to say that we should not close it but should press the minister further. I also want to remark on the submission that the committee has just received from a body whose existence I must admit that I was hitherto unaware of—every day is a school day. The organisation is called the Association of Local Authority Chief Housing Officers, or ALACHO. Its submission, from April this year, points out quite extraordinary things. For example, its most recent survey showed that charges vary from £69 to £358 a week. How on earth is that the case?

ALACHO also points out that, as you have said, convener, in many cases, housing benefit is applicable. However, in some cases, it is not applicable, where claims are late or where somebody’s circumstances change. Hidden behind these statements are probably lots of human tragedies—for example, someone might not submit a document because they did not know that they had to or there was some bureaucratic foul-up. As MSPs, we deal with that kind of thing day and daily. I would be grateful if the Minister for Housing could specifically address each of the points that were raised by ALACHO in its submission of April this year, because it raises an alarming complexity and illogicality, under which I suspect lie a lot of human tragedies.

I think that, for the reasons that Mr Torrance suggested, and the effluxion of time in this parliamentary session, we are not going to get much more, if any, progress at all on the petition. However, I note that the petitioner, Mr Ronald, has pointed out that some district nurses and community health staff who have to repeatedly drive from place to place during the day may face multiple parking charges, which they do not necessarily get back. There seems to be a grey area with regard to who is and who is not reimbursed. As Mr Golden said, for those who are not reimbursed, the charges are massive.

As a final point, I note that, although the powers that be are anti-car—it is the zeitgeist—the car is, for many people, the only way in which they can travel. For example, you cannot get to the Queen Elizabeth hospital except by car. I know from someone who works intermittently at the QE—although it is not in my constituency—that some nurses have to drive there and get a car parking space at 6 am in order to be able to start their shift two hours later.

I make those points simply because there are a lot of underlying issues hidden away, and I am quite sure that the petitioner and others will come back in the next parliamentary session. I do not think that we have really bottomed out the issue, which is that many people are having to pay an awful lot of money in their daily lives because of the politically correct attitude of our times.

We did, but not at the same time. I think that you are considerably younger than me.

I must have missed them. [Laughter.]

On a serious point, I think that the petitioner has raised an interesting point. He uses the phrase “fresh eyes” and talks about his own family circumstances and the fact that children who are perhaps slighter in build and who end up in a class where some children are older by perhaps more than a year can feel disadvantaged and left out in sport. That was quite an interesting point—indeed, I think that the petitioner has struck on something. However, the responses of both Jenny Gilruth and Natalie Don-Innes were sympathetic in many ways.

There should be an element of parental choice as well as to whether the child is ready to go to school or would benefit from an additional pre-school period for various reasons, so I would certainly not recommend removing that parental realm of discretion and decision making. The responses might enable the petitioner to decide whether the matter could be pursued further during the next parliamentary session. The point has some merit and I do not think that it has been particularly studied, as far as the petitioner says—from the responses, I cannot really see that any analysis of the matter has taken place.

As often is the case, the petition raises novel points that we do not normally come across, so I am grateful to the petitioner for that.

It would also be to help younger kids if needs be. However, to be fair to Jenny Gilruth, she was keen to stress that this is something that teachers would ordinarily deal with in looking after every child in their class. Therefore, if there were to be research done, primary school teachers for primary years 1, 2 and 3 would probably be best placed to talk about whether the issue needs to be looked at more thoroughly.

Good morning, panel, and thank you for your most illuminating evidence.

Yesterday, I read an excellent article in The Herald by Stephen Jardine, the president of the Cockburn Association. He quoted from Lord Cockburn, who in 1849 wrote to the then Lord Provost of Edinburgh, stating:

“Edinburgh is not exempt from the doom that makes everything spoilable.”

That sums it up, really. Mr Jardine also alluded to the Cockburn Association’s work over the years to protect the Meadows from a motorway, for example, and George Street from a horrible high-rise hotel and to deal with other things that almost everyone would agree would have been disastrous mistakes.

On the one hand, we have a clear consensus that the best buildings must be preserved, but what I have not seen—and maybe this is my lack of scholarship or industry in examining all the papers, but certainly having noted the petitioner’s own submissions—is a distinction between those buildings that are A-listed, or of national importance; B-listed, or of regional importance; and C-listed, or of local importance. I raise that because, although Professor Masterton’s argument is strong in theory, the fact is that, as Laura Shanks has pointed out, councils have to deal with real risks to human safety. I understand that—it is a matter of absolute practicality. Nobody can gainsay it, and it is a difficult duty to discharge.

However, to follow the lead of my convener and play devil’s advocate, I am concerned that decisions have been made over the years to list buildings that seemed to many to be, at best, dubious candidates, shall we say; I am thinking of two gasworks, for example. A different example was the old distiller-manager’s house in the distillery of Balmenach in my constituency. Just a nondescript square building, it was going to hold up the redevelopment of the distillery, where many people lived in tied housing and where, because the roads were so narrow and not built for pantechnicons, lorries had to reverse 200 yards in icy conditions in winter, threatening the safety of children. That redevelopment was held up because Cairngorm planners saw fit to try to thwart the whole thing, until the then chief planner, Jim Mackinnon, happily had a word in somebody’s ear, and it was all sorted out very quickly.

I make the point just to set the scene. Many people feel that the listing of mediocre or nondescript buildings creates a barrier to progress. Nobody wants anything to happen to the Wallace monument or any of our fine castles. For the past 12 to 14 years, I have been overseeing a committee for the transformation of Inverness castle from a court to an international visitor attraction—and perhaps I can prolong the advertorial by saying that it will be open later this year, and you will be able to get your tickets online quite soon. It is grade-A listed inside and out, so we have had to work with HES every step of the way in what has been a very fruitful relationship.

Do you think that the whole system has been brought into question by ordinary folk in Scotland thinking, “What on earth are you listing a gasworks for?”

I entirely agree. You are absolutely right but, at the same time, and as must be said openly, we cannot let ministers off the hook simply because they can run the clock down. If that were the case, they could get away with doing nothing for every petition in every parliamentary session.

I suggest that, in light of the responses from the Scottish Government and from SEPA, we close the petition under rule 15.7 of standing orders, given that SEPA has moved to restrict its compliance and enforcement activity to specific targeted campaigns. SEPA stated in its service statement that the time spent handling queries and investigations is disproportionate to the very low risk of harm that the issue presents to the water environment, which negatively impacts on SEPA’s ability to focus on the most significant environmental harms that face it. The Scottish Government has supported SEPA’s position on the matter and is content that SEPA has sufficient resources to apply its approach to regulation and principles.