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As with other negotiations, I and my officials will be doing everything that we can to make sure that it is signed by 31 October. As you can imagine, we are dealing with a number of different developers, all of which have their own legal teams. One way that we have tried to overcome that is by regular communication, which I stress has been positive. Nothing right now would indicate to me that we are going to have trouble.

Equally, we work with Homes for Scotland as the representative body, and it agreed the terms in principle, subject to an exchange of legal views, some time ago. I would not say that I would be happy if it is not signed by 31 October—I would not be happy, and it needs to be done—but nothing right now indicates to me that that will be a problem. Ultimately, we are all moving in the same direction, and it is just about a bookend, which I think is much needed.

I understand that you are concerned about that. We have not had the opportunity to properly discuss it, so I undertake to do so with you. I know that you made an attempt to use the Housing (Scotland) Bill to extend the ban. I considered your amendment, which we were unable to accept for a number of reasons. I propose to discuss the issue with you offline, and I will speak to some of my Government colleagues who are dealing with other building types and come back to you.

In another part of my portfolio that relates to building standards, I am working with official colleagues to respond to the Cameron House inquiry’s recommendations, which refer to hotels and fire safety. A suite of work is on-going, which I want to update you on. I will also come back to you on the cladding question.

We have been discussing the cladding issue, which arose following a tragic event in relation to which dishonesty and so on have been uncovered. As we have just discussed with Meghan Gallacher, the programme for addressing that will be a significant programme with a significant price tag. Over the summer, the Government put tens of millions of pounds more into resolving the cladding issue across Scotland.

Reinforced autoclaved aerated concrete is a building standards issue. RAAC is a product that, when maintained properly, can remain usable and safe. It is still used in countries throughout the world. Therefore, it occupies a different realm from the cladding question. Given that the Government fulsomely backs spending on the remediation of cladding issues across Scotland, it is apparent, I hope, that the use of public money on the same scale simply cannot stretch to other potential issues.

The position on funding in respect of RAAC is that it is an issue for home owners. Essentially, it is a matter of building maintenance, which is always, in principle, the responsibility of the home owner. In some cases, the home owner will be an individual, and, in some cases, the home owner will be a local authority or a registered social landlord. I have made it clear that there will be no pot of money from the Scottish Government for dealing with RAAC. We simply do not have the flexibility to provide that.

There is only one Government across the United Kingdom that has the flexibility to respond to such unforeseen expenditure, and that is the UK Government. That is why I have pressed the UK Government to create a national RAAC fund. RAAC is present throughout the UK, and the homes in question were sold under the right to buy, which far predates the devolution era. I will continue to press the UK Government on that.

In the meantime, I have said that I will consider applications for the existing funding that we make available to councils to be used flexibly. Last week, as colleagues might have seen, we were able to come to an agreement with Aberdeen City Council in respect of the delivery of affordable homes.

There will be no Scottish Government RAAC fund, but I will work with home owners—whether individuals or councils and RSLs—to provide support, best practice and shared learning, and to consider the flexible use of existing funds.

I am sorry—that was a rather long answer.

They are the City of Edinburgh Council, Glasgow City Council, South Lanarkshire Council, West Lothian Council and Fife Council. If I am wrong, I will correct that, but the first three are right.

I will just add a general point. We have both top-down and bottom-up approaches to the programme. The single open call, which has gone live following the passage of the Housing (Cladding Remediation) (Scotland) Act 2024 and its coming into force at the start of this year, creates a programme into which any building owner can now bid for a statutory bespoke single building assessment of their property. We have made available funding for single building assessments, which funding was doubled over the summer. We made more money available for immediate mitigation measures where those are required. The call is broad and open; it says, “Come forward and have your building assessed to this bespoke standard.”

Alongside that, we are doing a massive sweep-up exercise, which is not only about asking people to come forward and take advantage of the offer but about proactively asking building owners about the status of their building, what work might already have been done, and whether it is planned for demolition or has been demolished. In that regard, we are working with the high-rise inventory and starting, in particular, with those buildings within the HRI that have high-pressure laminate or aluminium composite material cladding and are above 18 metres. That is about prioritising risk.

Of course. The most recent homelessness statistics from two or three weeks ago did not make for easy reading. However, within that, there were some green shoots, in that certain councils had managed to reduce substantially the number of children who were in temporary accommodation. Aberdeenshire and Aberdeen City had 45 or 50 per cent reductions—to be absolutely accurate, I will come back to you in writing on that. It is clear that the situation in Glasgow in particular is very strained. There are things that are adding to that, not least the UK Government’s asylum policy, which is causing difficulty and has to be handled exceptionally sensitively.

One of the main things that the housing emergency action plan does is to double the fund for voids and acquisitions, which the committee will be aware that we have been doing for a year. Councils have demonstrated great progress in using that money to bring social voids back into use. That work has gotten us to the point where there are very few social voids left to be turned over. I still want what is left to be turned over, but we now move to acquisitions—buying on the open market. In particular, I have asked local authorities to use that money to buy family-sized homes. They are harder to come by but are the homes that will get children out of temporary accommodation.

Another part of the plan that I am ambitious for is asking councils to implement the Association of Local Authority Chief Housing Officers guidance on flipping. It would mean councils asking households who are currently in suitable accommodation, except for the fact that it is temporary, whether they would like to change it to a permanent residence. That kind of thing could make a difference quite quickly, albeit that we would have to backfill the supply of temporary accommodation, which the acquisitions fund could do.

I was not able to follow your figures as you were speaking, so I am unable to say whether they are the ones that I am working with, but, no doubt, you have done the maths correctly. Everything that we are doing just now is about trying to go from where we are—despite significant headwinds, not the least of which is inflation—to where we need to be, which is to build 110,000 homes by 2032.

Achieving that involves everything that I have mentioned: increasing the affordable supply programme; giving four years of funding certainty, to allow RSLs, councils and others to plan; setting the all-tenure target; and making sure that planning is a facilitator, not an inhibitor. It is all those things, as well are trying to build up the capacity to where we need it to be, because the curve is steep.

We will come back to you on that. I do not have the figures for the all-tenure delivery this year; they were just released last week. Ultimately, we will be baselining it from that and moving forward from where we are now with 10 per cent each year for the next three years.

Such housing can absolutely make a huge difference. One question that has been put to me is whether there is a need for the process of identifying need to be more place based and specific. In your region, and even in places such as Clydesdale, an assessment for a whole area could be very different from an assessment of one small town or village in that area. I have my eye on that.

Yes, we have, because it is such a pivotal point. I think that it would be fair to say that officials have a very good cross-Government relationship with UK Government officials. Likewise, I had a good relationship with Miatta Fahnbulleh when she was the relevant minister, and I had good discussions with her about her warm homes plan, what the Scottish Government was trying to do and how the cost of electricity and gas was pivotal to us all. She has moved to a different department, but I have since met Martin McCluskey, the new UK Minister for Energy Consumers, and put the case to him. To be fair, he was two or three days into the job and having to look at everything that had been prepared in respect of the warm homes plan and ensure that he was comfortable with it for his part. There has been a delay as a result of the reshuffle following the former Deputy Prime Minister’s exit from the Government, but we continue to push for detail on the plan and on the UK’s intentions in respect of the costs of gas and electricity.