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Thank you, convener. Having not made an opening statement, I will try to integrate some of those points into my remarks during the meeting. When I come to talking about the pilot phase of the programme I will probably turn to my colleague Stephen Lea-Ross, who, as you have said, is the director in charge of cladding.

I will take the last part of your question first and will talk about the lessons learned from the pilot phase. There were two particularly important things for the Government to overcome in making progress on cladding. First, there was a requirement to bring together a single bespoke assessment that would be sufficient for the consideration of dangerous cladding and of what remediation work had to be done. The pilot programme was important in bringing together what is now the statutory single building assessment. The other issue that we had to overcome was that the tenure situation in Scotland is a little different from that elsewhere in the United Kingdom, which meant that we would ultimately need to have primary legislative powers to step in where action was not being taken in a multi-owner building. The pilot allowed us to do that. It has now ended, although you could also describe it as simply having become part of the wider single open call, which is now progressing.

I will leave my remarks there for now, convener, to allow you to come back with anything that you want to say. Those two lessons learned are the most important things, and the pilot has now been integrated into the larger single open call. If you wish, I can say more about some of the buildings that were part of the pilot.

I am certainly concerned to make sure that developers who were responsible for the construction of a building with potentially dangerous cladding are contracted to deal with that.

We are talking about a significant programme of substantial costs, much of which the public purse will meet.

Developers signed the 2023 accord, and the developer remediation contract, which we are now negotiating for signature, is on largely similar terms. We have had agreement for a number of years that this was the direction of travel. It is now about turning that accord into the contract and having it signed.

I am of a similar mind to you, because during the summer update on cladding, I was keen to make sure that a deadline was set for the signature of the contract, and I have set 31 October. That is not really a reflection of any concern on my part that developers will not sign it. We are on very good terms and are exchanging drafts. Ultimately, it is just about bookending it and saying that there will be a point after which the contract will be signed and we will move on. I think that it will line up quite well with the rest of the single open call taking off.

That is the estimated expenditure, and the Building Safety Levy (Scotland) Bill, which my colleague Ivan McKee is taking through the Parliament, will make a contribution to that cost of around £30 million per annum from 2027. That is the expected provision.

Yes, and I would probably start with your final point, namely that, when you consider that the public purse might contribute between £1.7 billion and £3.1 billion to a very important matter, which we absolutely need to do and will do, £30 million per annum is a small contribution. Therefore, I am very supportive of the building safety levy in order that it can contribute to the overall costs. That is not to say that I do not understand that there are concerns, particularly from smaller operators, and I have already discussed this, in relation to small and medium-sized enterprises, with Homes for Scotland. Therefore, I am open-minded about ensuring proportionality in the way that the building safety levy operates, but it must operate, because we need that contribution to what is a significant task with a large price tag.

I will address those two questions separately: first on monitoring and then on the indicators. The plan having been completed, my attention is immediately focused on its delivery and on tracking that delivery. As the plan deals with issues ranging from protection from domestic abuse through to flipping and acquisition of existing houses and building and planning, it requires me to work across Government. I have set up a group of officials who will report to me fortnightly. I will have a written update on a weekly basis and a fortnightly meeting, at which representatives of the teams across Government will report to me on how each of the 20 actions is being taken forward. That is an internal, good-governance piece of work. I also have the Cabinet sub-committee on economy and investment, which the Deputy First Minister leads. Housing is a big part of that, so that is another way in which we manage internal delivery.

Externally, the housing to 2040 board will meet shortly, for the first time since the housing emergency action plan was published. I have taken a bit of time to consider how we might pivot to having that board oversee the delivery of the plan, as well as our wider 2040 ambitions—none of which, incidentally, has been replaced by the plan; they have been added to.

There is a really important piece of work with the folks whom I am relying on to deliver the plan, chief among them being local authorities and registered social landlords. Early in post I had a suite of meetings with the leaders of the five councils with the most strained homelessness situations, and I will now do another suite. I am very likely to put that on a quarterly basis, which will involve understanding the pressures that those councils face now and how they are implementing the plan to make it work.

On the point about indicators, I was pleased to work with Mark Griffin on his amendment to the Housing (Scotland) Bill that concerned the housing emergency—how we know when we are in it and when we are coming out of it. We will now work to implement that provision. It needs to be carefully done. As we all know, Argyll and Bute was the first council to declare a housing emergency, and coming out of that will look very different there from what it will look like in Glasgow. We need indicators that are specific but also broad enough to reflect different circumstances.

I will bring in Matthew Elsby on that, because it predates my time, and I expect that it is an official-led piece of work.

That is a good question, which I have asked myself over and over again. In the past three weeks, I have had to present to the First Minister homelessness statistics that are going in the wrong direction and, more recently, house building statistics that I was not happy with. As I noted earlier, Scotland’s laws on anti-homelessness are strong and they have been further strengthened through the Housing (Scotland) Bill. Equally, we have consistently spent hundreds of millions of pounds every year to build affordable homes—we have a great record in that regard—but we still have strain on the system.

Recently, there has been a bit of a perfect storm, whereby economic conditions have been either stagnant or poor. For example, between 2020 and 2025, the cost of materials has risen by 40 per cent. Any house builder facing that would immediately not be able to deliver as they would want to. Other general economic headwinds have been difficult for the industry as well as for the Government—our capital budgets have been under severe pressure. At the same time, the difficult economic conditions have affected households to the point that people in the private rented sector are experiencing precarity. They might have been able to manage their bills before, but the cost of energy has sky rocketed, with their rent payments potentially suffering as a result. For the house building sector, construction inflation in particular has been a massive issue in the past five years.

That is the idea of the plan. As I said, we have £808 million in the programme this year and have committed to investing up to £4.9 billion over the next four years, which is to give that certainty. Meghan Gallacher puts on the record that, in one year, the funding of the programme took a step backwards. However, that was in response to extremely difficult budgetary decisions in Government and is a very small interruption to what is otherwise 18 years of consistent investment in and delivery of affordable homes.

I will not review the target of 110,000 affordable homes by 2032. To date, the Scottish Government has delivered 140,000 affordable homes, so a lot is being done and will be done before we reset our target.

I absolutely welcome the research by the three groups that I mentioned. I have the greatest respect for them and the work that they do, as well as for the work that they are supporting us to do. In principle, I completely agree with them that the number of affordable homes that is delivered each year must now increase to meet the significant demand in the system. However, first, we do not have the capacity to deliver 15,000-odd homes a year just now. I am trying to pre-emptively do the work now so that we can build to that kind of annual delivery towards the end of the target, which we must meet by 2032.

Secondly, our capital budget over the spending review period is expected to fall by 1.1 per cent in real terms, and prices are ever increasing, as we have discussed. As a Government, we have difficult decisions to make about the prioritisation of capital funding. I have just argued in favour of and had agreed that we will spend £4.9 billion over the next four years on housing, which is a significant win in very difficult economic circumstances. I note that £8.2 billion is unrealistic at this stage, when we also have bridges, schools and prisons to build and roads to fix. It is a difficult decision to make, but housing has already been prioritised in the budget.

I will always argue for the greatest possible investment in housing. That is my job in Government. We have succeeded in that because, as I said, in difficult economic circumstances, when the Cabinet Secretary for Finance and Local Government has been looking at a very strained budget, we have argued for that significant uplift over the next four years and that was agreed. To put it into a bit of context, we will spend £3.5 billion over this five-year period, and this is £4.9 billion over the next four-year period—so less time, but more money. It is a significant uplift.

The private sector will have to play an important part. That is why I have confidently said that, alongside investment in affordable homes, there must be the right circumstances for private investment, not least in the work that we have done to create institutional exemptions from rent control. That is all about saying that the Government will do as much as we can to support affordable homes and make circumstances right for the rest of the sector, because we need more investment and we need all-tenure delivery. Only through the combination of all that will we get to where we need to be in the coming years.