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I have tried to consider the papers carefully. I have concluded that we should seek to close this petition under rule 15.7 of the standing orders, primarily on the basis that surveyors are already subject to various requirements, including the need to have a complaint handling procedure in place and to offer independent third-party recourse for complaints. Also, the home report guidance is being updated to make the limitations of the single survey clearer to buyers and to provide information about other steps that buyers can take to assess the condition of the home they are considering buying.

In saying that, it is important to state something that is true but is perhaps not mentioned very much, which is that when someone buys a heritable property—typically a house or flat, a dwelling house—the system is caveat emptor. The buyer takes on the risks, and it is up to the buyer to decide whether or not the home report is sufficient. Very often, in practice—this happened in my day—one would look at the home report and decide that there were further investigations that required to be carried out, for example, into whether internal alterations to a property had been made with or without consent, or whether there was an extensive problem of infestation of dry or other forms of rot.

All those things have to be discussed by the buyer’s solicitor with the buyer, and the buyer’s solicitor owes legal duties. The RICS rules about what surveyors are bound to do are very clear: the surveyor must be chartered and that chartered surveyor must have professional indemnity. The chartered surveyor, in providing the home report, does not have a duty to provide a thorough, detailed, intrusive, incursive report, but only a report designed primarily for mortgage valuation. Having seen those reports myself, and worked with them, and having seen a home report recently, I would say it is a very limited document. Frankly, it spends more time setting out the exclusions of liability than it does describing the actual property. That may be a bit cynical, but that was true of the home report that I saw very recently.

I think that there is a much wider issue here. Possibly the petitioner’s complaint is an individual legal complaint that she may have to pursue against the RICS or the individual surveyor’s indemnifying insurers, and that would be a legal private case for her to pursue. In saying that, I am not passing any judgment. It is a possibility. However, given that the Scottish Government is carrying out a review in this area, there are not any magic solutions here.

The home report was brought in to replace the situation where there were five parties going for the same property and five different surveyors surveying the same property each time. That was regarded as an unnecessary expense and an unnecessary procedure, and that is the reason why the home reports were brought in. There is no perfect system, however, and caveat emptor is where it starts and, frankly, where it very often finishes. It is up to the individual to listen carefully to advice from solicitors.

I did not mean to give a conveyancing lecture here, convener, but because we are proposing to close a new petition, I thought it only courteous and respectful to the petitioner to set out the reasons why I do not think that this committee, at this stage in the parliamentary session, can do anything more, while recognising that the petitioner certainly has raised valid points, which I am quite sure will be reflected by many other people who were less than satisfied with the experience that they had. That is by no means new, convener, and if there were easy answers that everybody could be happy with, I am sure that they would have been discovered long ago.

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.

Perish the thought that I would stoop so low as to abuse the Parliament’s time.

My other point is a more practical one. This might be more for a local authority spokesperson to answer, but in the practical application of the process, is a distinction made so that a higher standard of care, rigour and diligence is required for grade A buildings than for grade B ones, and do grade Cs not require quite the same rigorous standard of diligence when it comes to the quality of expert advice that has to be given before a demolition order can be made? Putting it bluntly, is it easier to get on with quickly demolishing a grade C building than it is with a grade B building, or are they all treated the same way? I do not know the answer to that, because it did not really sing out from the petitioner’s submission.

I agree, and following what Mr Torrance said at the end of his remarks, I make the point that, if the petition had been brought at the beginning of this parliamentary session, I very much doubt that we would be closing it today. It is only because there is relatively little time left, and because the Scottish Government has given specific undertakings to carry out work that perhaps could not reasonably be expected to be done between now and the end of this parliamentary session, that it would seem that the petitioner is not losing anything by the petition being closed today. I just wanted to emphasise to the petitioner that the approach is dictated by the parliamentary schedule, rather than the merits of the issue, which is, of course, extremely serious.