Seòmar agus comataidhean

Before you move on to your next question, Stephanie, Mark Griffin has a brief supplementary.

I will now bring in Marie McNair, who joins us online.

Thank you for those questions. I will follow up on both of them.

On the funding commitment, you say there will be £41.3 million. I understand that it is demand led and I presume that the fund will increase as the demand increases. However, we heard that there is an estimated cost of £40 million to remediate just one building that we went to see. I am concerned about that number.

Great. I just wanted to make sure that we had a reality check on the scale of the finance that is needed.

On the previous question around the lack of qualified professionals, we heard in an evidence session that Glasgow Caledonian University has a course, which is the only course in Scotland, but it is due to come to an end. I would be quite concerned about that if we need to bring on more professionals.

We also heard that people are going to England because work is moving ahead more quickly there. How do we ensure that we have a sufficient pipeline of people who can take on this work? We have this emergency bill and we are taking evidence quickly so that it can move forward but, if we do not have the professionals, we will run into a problem.

The next agenda item is to consider four negative instruments. There is no requirement for the committee to make any recommendations on negative instruments.??Do any members have any comments on them?

As there are no comments, does the committee agree that we do not wish to make any recommendations in relation to the instruments?

Members indicated agreement.

Under agenda item 2, we will take evidence on the Housing (Cladding Remediation) (Scotland) Bill from the Minister for Housing, Paul McLennan, who is joined in the room by Scottish Government officials Kate Hall, director, and Rachel Sunderland, deputy director, from the cladding remediation directorate; and Micheila West, from the legal directorate.

I welcome our witnesses to the meeting and invite the minister to make a short opening statement, after which I will turn to questions from members.

We know from what we have heard from owners and residents that one of the key challenges for them is the difficulty that they face in obtaining insurance and in selling or remortgaging their property. It is not clear from the evidence that we have heard that an approach that involves responding to the challenges of cladding alone, and not responding to the wider fire safety issues, will precipitate a change in the situation. What are your thoughts on that?

Okay. Thank you very much. We might take that further, because we maybe heard something a little different in our evidence sessions. Maybe we will highlight that in our report.

I hear the importance of the 5 per cent of 25 per cent—[Inaudible.]

In our papers, we read that the James Hutton Institute questions whether

“support for agriculture is the most effective or efficient way to address issues facing rural areas. As such, the Bill provides a foundation for agriculture and environmental policy not rural policy more widely.”

We see that there are lots of opportunities now in community ownership, community woodlands, community renewables, nature restoration projects, and soft infrastructure that we desperately need for training and facilitation. I wonder whether the agriculture budget is the most important or appropriate source of funding for rural communities if we are going to be clear that there is an agricultural, farming community but also a wider community? There is an interconnection, but do we need to look at the support payments that are coming for agriculture and growing food and then at other things? Another opportunity that is coming is with the community wealth building bill. How can we make that work for communities? Of course, I hear from the local action groups about how important that money is and how transformative the 5 per cent is, but I wonder whether we could look at how we do that differently.

I will go to Sarah Skerratt and maybe Rob Clarke from Highlands and Islands Enterprise.

As the convener said, we are moving on to the theme of powers to provide support. Part 2 of the bill gives Scottish ministers the power to establish a new funding and support system for Scottish agriculture. I have a number of questions in that area, some of which we started to touch on under theme 1, so I might not rehearse that.

As the convener keeps saying, we are now at the business end of this process, so I am interested in hearing whether you believe that the powers in the bill will enable ministers to ensure that there is a just transition not just for farmers but for the wider rural community. That comes in the context of the Cabinet Secretary for Transport, Net Zero and Just Transition’s recent announcement on the climate adaptation plan. Do you think that the powers will be enough to get us to where we need to be for both farmers and rural communities?