Seòmar agus comataidhean

The committee will be delighted to know that amendment 73 is the final amendment that I will speak to. I will leave that hanging, and I will try not to take too long. The amendment raises a serious issue, which is the requirement for foreign students in particular to have a UK-based guarantor. It is a fact that that is not always possible. Sometimes, they cannot come up with a UK-based guarantor.

Amendment 73 would remove the requirement for landlords to require tenants to have a UK-based guarantor who either owns property or earns more than a certain amount of money. The amendment proposes to insert new section 120A(1) into the Housing (Scotland) Act 2006 so that Scottish ministers must by regulations provide that, when a guarantor is required, their residential status or annual salary must not be a pre-requisite.

I have mentioned in this committee and the other committee that is dealing with the bill the cross-party group on housing report on student housing and homelessness that came out last September. It found that international students face additional challenges, with guarantor requirements being just one of them. A suggestion in that report was a revised and enhanced guarantor programme to be run by universities. I had correspondence from a student from the University of Aberdeen, who said:

“I do not have a local guarantor, and my parents are old pensioners back in my home country, so I was limited to my choices of housing. I paid some fees to a company that promised to act as my guarantor, but then I got cheated. I barely had less than a month to begin classes, and I was desperate to get a roof over my head. Sometimes I skip my dinner to afford housing rent.”

This is an issue that needs to be dealt with. Amendment 73 might not be the way to do it, or it might be—I shall wait and see.

Ross Greer has an amendment in the group—amendment 189—that suggests that we set up a public body to act as a guarantor for a tenant who is under 26 and is estranged from their family. That is probably the route that we ought to go down. There ought to be a body that people who need it can turn to, and if that is where we get to in this process, that will be a positive outcome. I will decide whether to press amendment 73 on the basis of the debate and what the cabinet secretary says.

Just before I came into the meeting, I had a very quick chat with Universities Scotland—it would have been longer but for the fact that the meeting was due to start. Universities Scotland is alive to all the issues that I have raised. I will be having more and much longer conversations with it, and I am sure that other members will do the same.

As I have said previously, we can probably come to some kind of solution by working together with the sector and the cabinet secretary. We do not want to make matters worse, of course. We need to have enough student housing, but let us accept that some of Scotland’s universities are in a perilous financial state and they are relying on foreign students to bolster their finances. We need to look after those foreign students. We also need to look after UK-based students. Some of them might struggle to get the guarantors that are asked for, so we are not just talking about foreign students.

The cabinet secretary has asked members not to move their amendments in most groups and has done the same here, but we have also seen that she is prepared to work ahead of stage 3 with people who have raised sensible issues. We are all going to be very busy, but that is what we are here to do.

I am pleased that she has offered to work with Maggie Chapman, who raises the serious issue of the sometimes unaffordable size of the deposits that people have to pay. She has also agreed to work with Meghan Gallacher, whose amendment 130 suggests that tenancy deposits should be paid directly to the scheme administrator. That would get round what is, in my view, a bit of a racket, where people can withhold deposits for spurious reasons.

There are some interesting amendments in this group, but I will focus on amendment 141, in the name of Emma Roddick, which raises the issue of when a landlord says, “I intend to sell; therefore, you need to go.” Does the cabinet secretary accept that, when that happens—and it happens quite regularly—there is no monitoring of whether the landlord does put the property up for sale or sells it. That is just not happening. I think that that is what Emma Roddick is trying to address—she is nodding—and it does need to be addressed.

Convener, it has been a superb session. The questions have been great; we have covered a lot of ground, and I have been fascinated to hear the views of the academics. I have just been reflecting on all of this, so if you do not mind, convener, I will give a small anecdote.

Unfortunately he was not—I could not get him to contribute. I think that there were issues at that time with the recall process in California, so Arnie was keeping schtum.

Convener, if I may, I just want to ask Nick McKerrell and Alistair Clark a question about non-attendance, given their strong views on the matter. Are you also suggesting that we scrap the law—because it is a matter of law—for councillors who do not attend for six months? Under the law, if they do not attend for six months, the matter can go to a vote of the council, which has happened several times in Scotland. Are you suggesting that we scrap that law, too?

On that point, do you think that, if this is the committee that deals with such issues, it should have lay members, as is the case at Westminster and, I think, in Wales?

I have been working on this for a long time now. At the start of the process, I attempted to reach out to Arnold Schwarzenegger through his office.

I have a reflection. If members have not done so already, I encourage them to read the bill’s policy memorandum, which covers quite a lot of the ground and shows that I have given deep thought to some of the questions that have been raised.

I know that I will be questioned in a few weeks’ time, but, if individual members feel that it would be appropriate and want to speak to me in advance of that, my door is open and I would be happy to discuss matters in detail. I will leave it at that.

Where are the various locations that they work?

That is not a small number.