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Willie Coffey has a number of questions.

Great. Thank you very much. I will now bring in Willie Coffey.

It is good to hear that you are already involved with that.

Finally, your submission states that the SPSO looks at a range of areas that are much broader than just local government and suggests that

“it may be time to consider whether scrutiny of the breadth of our work may go beyond the capacity of a subject specific Committee.”

What parliamentary oversight arrangements would be more appropriate, in your view?

That is very welcome. That concludes our questions. It has been helpful to get a fuller picture of your perspective and how you are working with the Renters’ Rights Bill—I really appreciate that. I will now briefly suspend the meeting to allow for a changeover of witnesses.

Agenda item 4 is an evidence-taking session on the Scottish Government’s cladding remediation programme. It arises out of concerns expressed by the committee about the progress that is being made on cladding remediation in the committee’s tracker report. In particular, the committee noted that its consideration of the Housing (Cladding Remediation) (Scotland) Bill was subject to an expedited timescale in order to accelerate remediation; however, that acceleration has not materialised and the committee wants to understand why.

We are joined for this item by Paul McLennan, the Minister for Housing, and by Stephen Lea-Ross, director of cladding remediation in the Scottish Government. Before we begin, I invite the minister to make a brief opening statement.

That is another area that we are keeping track of, so we will be in touch on it.

I thank the minister and Mr Lea-Ross for their evidence, which we very much appreciate. I will suspend the meeting briefly to allow them to leave the room.

Did you pick up anything that we could do to improve that situation?

Having more regular contact and actually being in touch with the people you are working with creates a more connected interrelationship.

Emma Roddick is joining us online for the next area of questioning on appeals and oversight.

Yes, thanks for bringing that in, Emma.

I will give the final word to Shona Gorman.