Seòmar agus comataidhean

I welcome the opportunity to engage with the committee this morning and I am sure that it will be the first of a number of engagements around the important issues that we will touch on today.

As members are aware, my new portfolio is wide-ranging and, although it is challenging, it offers great opportunities to address the issues that lie at the heart of achieving a fairer Scotland.

Housing must be a key part of the recovery and “Housing to 2040”—Scotland’s first long-term housing strategy—sets out our vision for Scotland’s homes and communities and our approach to improving Scotland’s housing over the next two decades. The strategy shows how integral housing is to our objectives of tackling poverty and inequality, creating and supporting jobs, meeting energy efficiency and decarbonisation aims as well as fuel poverty and child poverty targets, and creating connected, cohesive communities. We have an increased ambition to deliver 110,000 affordable homes by 2032, with at least 70 per cent for social rent and 10 per cent in our remote, rural and island communities.

We have also been concentrating on the first 100 days commitments. One such commitment was to begin cladding assessments; we have agreed to fund assessment and remediation where the need is identified, and we will use all available consequential funding to do so.

A further important 100 days commitment has been to develop a new rented sector strategy. The forthcoming strategy will deliver a new deal for tenants, by giving them more secure, stable and affordable tenancies with improved standards of accommodation, new controls on rent and more flexibility to personalise homes. We will also introduce a new housing regulator for the private rented sector.

We will consult on a draft strategy in early 2022 and help to inform a housing bill in the second year of the Parliament, which will bring in some of the legislative elements that are required to meet those challenges.

We are working at pace to develop the delivery process for the £10 million tenant grant fund, which will provide support for renters who have been financially impacted by the pandemic. That work will include consideration of how the fund will interact with the existing tenant hardship loan fund, which has provided more than £500,000 of loans so far.

What has also to be established is the short-term lets licensing legislation, which we consider to be vital for balancing the needs and concerns of residents and communities with wider economic and tourism interests. We intend to introduce that legislation in November.

Our on-going work to meet our climate change targets is also critical. By 2030, at least 1 million Scottish homes and around 50,000 non-domestic buildings will need to change their heating systems for a zero-carbon system; that is not an easy challenge. Our draft heat in buildings strategy sets out actions to transform Scotland’s building stock over the next 24 years; that will play a key role in meeting emissions targets and removing poor energy efficiency as a driver of fuel poverty. We are stepping up our investment over the next five years and have allocated £1.8 billion to support the accelerated deployment of heat and energy efficiency measures in homes and buildings across Scotland. Working alongside the Cabinet Secretary for Net Zero, Energy and Transport, we will do all that we can to support a just transition as we decarbonise housing across Scotland.

I will conclude my opening remarks with a brief focus on child poverty. We are aware that meeting the statutory targets set by the Child Poverty (Scotland) Act 2017 will be challenging, particularly without the full powers to tackle the drivers of poverty. However, we see ending child poverty as a national mission and are concentrating our efforts in this area to deliver real change. Last year, we invested around £2.5 billion to support low-income households, including nearly £1 billion to directly support children. We will outline further measures to tackle child poverty in our next delivery plan, which will be published in March next year and will set out the further action at the pace and scale required to deliver more progress.

Convener, I hope that that brief overview of some of our key priority areas is helpful. I am, of course, happy to answer any questions that the committee might have.

On the first question, when I came into post, “Housing to 2040” was one of the first documents that I looked at. I knew about the high-level elements but, from reading it in detail, I found that it is a very good long-term housing strategy that gives us the route map to some significant changes over a longer period.

It does not follow the five-year parliamentary session but instead takes a longer-term approach, which will be critical if we are to deliver to meet the housing needs of Scotland. It is not just about bricks and mortar; our aim is to create places that people want to live in and where they can work, bring up families and spend their leisure time. We know from our work with communities that good design really matters. We are committed to the community-led design work and the design version of the place standard, which is a new tool that we are launching later this year to help that happen.

This year, we are establishing the place-based investment programme, which is a £325 million investment over five years that will contribute to our ambitions in respect of community-led regeneration, community wealth building, town centre revitalisation and the concept of the 20-minute neighbourhood, where people will be able to get to leisure and shopping facilities and, where possible, places of work in 20 minutes, rather than having to travel long distances.

The second question was on short-term lets. We have been consulting for quite some time on short-term lets and it is important that we continue to do that. We have been trying to listen to stakeholders’ views as much as possible. The working group lost some of its members, which was unfortunate, but since then I have had a series of productive discussions with those stakeholders and they have said that they will continue to work with us on the detail and the implementation issues. They will not necessarily agree with us on everything. In fact, those who left the working group are mainly proponents of a registration scheme rather than a licensing scheme. Nevertheless, they have signalled that they want to continue to work with us, even if they do not agree with some of the key elements of the proposals, because they want to ensure that we get the implementation right. I welcome that.

At the end of the day, it is important to ensure that there is an even and consistent approach to safety standards across short-term lets. That is an important issue that was initially raised through the concerns of residents in communities across Scotland and by members of the Scottish Parliament. At the heart of our licensing scheme is a set of mandatory standards that will help to protect the safety of guests and neighbours in all types of short-term lets across Scotland.

I wrote to the committee to say that we would bring the legislation to Parliament in November because we have had over 1,000 responses to the latest consultation and it is important that we give them due consideration. As I said at the beginning of what is now rather a long answer, I want to listen to stakeholders, but we will stick by our principle of a licensing system. However, if there are changes that we can make on implementation, we will listen to stakeholders. We have already done that in relation to the energy efficiency requirements, which we removed because we thought that they might be onerous. We want to forge ahead, but we also want to ensure that it is not onerous or difficult for the people who will have to implement the changes.

There is on-going discussion on that. It is important to recognise that the affordable housing investment benchmark assumptions are used only to determine the appraisal route that an application for grant funding follows; they are not grant rates or ceilings, so they should not have any impact on council or RSL rent-setting processes.

When determining the level of grant funding, councils and RSLs need to apply for an order to deliver projects. Councils and RSLs need to be comfortable with the level of borrowing that they plan to take on and should be satisfied that tenants’ rents remain affordable.

I acknowledge the issues that have been raised during the review. The most recent proposal has resulted in a significant closing of the gap between council and RSL baseline benchmark assumptions, with the same additional benchmarks being proposed for the elements of higher quality that are being phased into the programme—for example, on zero emissions heating systems. However, I intend to hold firm and maintain a baseline differential between council and RSL benchmarks, primarily because of the different borrowing opportunities that are open to councils and RSLs when delivering affordable housing through the programme. It is important to recognise that.

Finally, I will consider COSLA’s overall feedback on the group’s work when deciding the outcome of the review, which will be considered in due course. I hope that that answers Elena Whitham’s question.

Early intervention and prevention are always better than trying to deal with the consequences of poverty or homelessness further down the line. You will see early intervention and prevention built into all our policies, but we need to get better at that. We have been saying for a long time that investing upstream is the best way to invest in order to prevent problems from emerging, but it is quite hard to do that and transform services while trying to keep those services running.

One of the key recommendations of the Christie commission was to invest upstream in prevention and early intervention. We need to work out ways of making that easier. We are currently in discussions with COSLA and local government on how we can help services to make that transition. That is easy to say but harder to do.

We are looking to continue funding the Hunter Foundation and its exciting work on transformation. The foundation brings funding to the table, too, which is always welcome. We have been partnering with and providing funding to the foundation. The work is to oil the wheels of change—to help to get from A to B and make that service change. You cannot do that overnight; you have to invest in that bridging to transform a service.

I am keen to see more of that. To tackle child poverty, we absolutely need to tackle its causes. Some of that is systemic. There is not a single solution; we need to tackle it all. Early intervention and prevention are key. Where possible, we need to push the spend in that direction. However, as I said, that is easy to say but a lot harder to do when we are also trying to keep services going day to day while we make the transition.

Mark Griffin is right that we need a starting point of better data on the private rented sector to be able to deliver an effective system of rent controls. We will set out our intentions about how we will do that by the end of this year. That work will be taken forward in tandem with the new rented sector strategy, with both elements being consulted on in early 2022.

There are various options to consider for how that data is gathered. It is a big piece of work and it is not easy. I am not sure that we can necessarily rely on the current sources of data that are available. Data is a key priority in order to have an effective system of rent controls, and officials are working very hard on that. Again, I am happy to provide the committee with a more detailed answer as a follow-up to this evidence session.

Mark Griffin is absolutely right. It is probably more complex than simply a ratio of income and cost. Work is being done to try and get an agreed definition of affordability across the system in order to give it more sophistication than it currently has. Again, I am happy to furnish the committee with more details as that work progresses. We want to get an agreed position across all the registered social landlords and local authorities—it is work in progress.

I am happy to consider that reporting in addition to all the reports and statistics that come out. There is no lack of information but, if the committee would find it helpful for us to pull that together in a way that puts the key points in a single place, I am happy to do that.

Caroline Dicks might be the most appropriate person to come in at this point to talk about the benchmarks.

I thank the committee for the opportunity to give evidence and look forward to meeting it again.

That will be a judgment for Kevin Stewart, the minister who is leading on the issue, and not for me.

We absolutely want to hear the voices of not just COSLA but stakeholders and those who receive social care. We are not starting from scratch. We have had lots of discussion on the issue, and there have been many parliamentary debates about it over the years. There was a lot of consensus among the manifestos leading up to the election that business as usual and the current models of social care just will not cut the mustard, so we need to do something different. I think that there is that level of consensus.

The detail is important, though, and how the service is taken forward and implemented matters. It is a big change, and it has to be got right. However, if we get it right, it could be one of the most important reforms that Parliament has ever supported and implemented.

I agree that opportunities are provided by joining up all those areas. The committee has a great opportunity to pull together the various strands and look at how we work as a Government, not just in my portfolio, I hasten to add, but across the whole Government. That is why, in relation to child poverty, I have tasked my Cabinet colleagues to tell me what more they can do in their portfolios to leave no stone unturned in looking at game-changing policies that they can deliver in their portfolio areas to make sure that there is a cross-Government effort. However, it is not only a cross-Government effort, because it has to involve local government and the third sector, too. We all have to work together if we are going to get anywhere near those interim child poverty targets, which are very challenging, as I said in my opening remarks.

I agree with the Accounts Commission that significant progress still has to be made in reducing inequalities and protecting human rights. As I said earlier, we have agreed a national mission to tackle child poverty, and we remain firmly committed to that. It will take all of us working together to do that. We are working in particular with COSLA, Public Health Scotland and the third sector to identify how we can support and embed positive changes that have been made as a result of the crisis. There are some changes that we want to make permanent, and we do not want to go back to some of the old ways of working. We need to deliver further progress on our fairer Scotland ambition. I meet COSLA regularly, and we are working with the Deputy First Minister on the Covid recovery plan, which local government is at the heart of.

I hope that that gives the committee a flavour of the key elements that we are working on and taking forward.