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What about gas boiler checks?

Thanks very much for pointing us in a particular direction at the end of that conversation.

This has been a really good conversation, and we could probably have spent a couple more hours unpacking some of the bits and pieces that have been raised around the room and throughout the conversation. I really appreciate your giving your time for the discussion.

I will briefly suspend the meeting to allow the witnesses to leave the room. Committee colleagues will then need to press on with some other bits and pieces.

The committee previously agreed to take the next three items in private, so as that was the final public item on our agenda, I close the public part of the meeting.

Good morning, and welcome to the seventh meeting in 2024 of the Local Government, Housing and Planning Committee. I remind all members and witnesses to ensure that their devices are on silent and that notifications are switched off. Stephanie Callaghan MSP will be joining the meeting online.

Agenda item 1 is to decide whether to take items 4 and 5 in private. Do members agree to do so?

Members indicated agreement.

It is good to have you here. I apologise, I have missed Stephanie Callaghan. I will have to work hard to remember that she is there.

I want to go into that a little bit more. In last week’s meeting, we heard that the vision is good but the issue is that there was not a plan for delivering it. I would be concerned about going back to the starting point and creating yet another vision and another plan. Can you say more about where you think we need to begin, and whether there is something useful in the vision that we could act on?

Will you say a little more about the opportunities that you mentioned? You said that there was an opportunity to do a lot more and do it quicker if we join the dots. Will you be more specific about the dots that need to be joined? You mentioned policy, but what about what happens on the ground?

There is the 26 per cent cut, which is a problem. Obviously, it is important that more money goes into the housing budget to be able to do some of this work. What would you say has to be done, given that housing takes time to build? We have heard from Chris Stewart about the struggle to attract people into the sector to build or retrofit houses. What do you think should be the priority? What do we need to change policy wise? Is it the type of housing that we build? We are still trying to have affordable accessible housing with all kinds of features, but if we are in a homelessness emergency and need to get people housed, what do we need to prioritise?

I call Pam Gosal to add her question to the conversation. I will then bring in Gordon MacRae, Rhiannon Sims and anyone else either to pick it up or to go back to other points, so that we have a bit of what I would call conversation weave.

Thanks for that. It is really important to go into that detail.

I want to pull the discussion back into more of a general space. Do you think that the Scottish Government is adequately balancing the need to address the short-term housing problems with longer-term policy aims? We have begun to touch on that question; indeed, we have already heard that that might not be the case. Somebody—Chris Birt, I think—talked about priorities, but where in the mix do the priorities need to change?