Seòmar agus comataidhean

At the end of the day, what matters for me is outcomes. Where power lies and how it is exercised are about what the best outcomes are.

My colleague the Cabinet Secretary for Finance and the Economy, Kate Forbes, is in detailed discussions with COSLA about whether there are ways of making local government’s life easier when it comes to, for example, ring-fenced budgets and their asks in relation to revenue raising. All those things will be under consideration to ensure that local government can exercise its functions in the way that it wants to. Local autonomy is important.

However, it strikes me that sometimes in Parliament, it is demanded of me and others that we should have a national approach to things that 32 local authorities currently decide on. Other times, there is criticism that local government should be given the autonomy to make decisions. These are not always easy demands to balance, so I think that we should focus on what the best outcomes are for the communities and people who are served. Wherever the power lies to deliver those outcomes, that should be our guiding principle.

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.

You make a good point that the ability of agencies to respond to and tackle rough sleeping during the pandemic and ensure that people were kept safe is referred to quite a lot. That was very important, particularly at the height of the pandemic.

The action plan commits to placing greater emphasis on preventing homelessness, accelerating the shift to rapid rehousing and ending the use of night shelters and dormitory-style provision. We pledged to provide an extra £50 million to end homelessness and rough sleeping. As you referred to, we will also introduce legislation to strengthen people’s housing rights and to place a duty on public bodies to prevent homelessness.

It is worth mentioning the issue of temporary accommodation, because I know that Miles Briggs and the committee have an interest in that area. Temporary accommodation was used a lot during the pandemic to keep people safe, and there has been a bit of a lag in landlords being able to move people from temporary accommodation to settled accommodation because of the delay in turning houses around. We are working very closely with local authorities and are supporting them individually to ensure that temporary accommodation is always suitable when it is used. For some local authorities, that is quite a challenge, but we are working with them to ensure that the issue is tackled. I am happy to write to the committee with more detail on that, if that would be helpful.

First, I absolutely agree that the pandemic has impacted on everyone, but not on everyone equally. We know that those who were most impacted by poverty before the pandemic have been the hardest hit and, as you point out, a gendered analysis of the pandemic reveals a lot of evidence that there has been an impact in that regard. We need to take all that into account in the Covid recovery plan.

We see local government as a key part of the economic recovery. We provided it with an additional £1.5 billion in direct support through the local government finance settlement, over and above the regular resource accounting and budgeting payments, for Covid recovery. It is important that we deliver a bold and ambitious recovery plan, and in Government our priority is to work collectively to ensure that that is the case. The Deputy First Minister is leading the engagement to strengthen our partnership with local government in order to support that recovery and maximise the benefit for our citizens.

In discussions with local government and partners, we have stressed the importance of learning from, and encouraging on-going participation from, local communities and of listening to people. I have been struck most of all by the local community resilience that we have seen, with people really supporting one another. We want to harness that as we move forward.

Working with partners in COSLA and with local government more widely will be an important focus of our work with communities as part of the Covid recovery plan. I am sure that the Deputy First Minister will keep the committee furnished with the detail of that as we go forward.

You are absolutely right. Community wealth building has become a very strong concept. It has been tried in other countries and we are very committed to doing it in Scotland. The spending power of local government is huge and that is important for local communities and local jobs and services.

We have pushed ourselves in the agreement. As the committee will be well aware, we have gone a bit further on procurement than we previously did, which is quite right, and on conditionality in particular. We want to ensure that procurement brings as much local benefit as possible, for example by placing conditions around the fair work agenda in contracts that are let. All that will help to ensure that wealth is kept in communities, where possible. As cabinet secretary with responsibility for social justice, I am keen to work with my Government colleagues to make that happen.

That is an important question. There is a danger that we will all go back into silos, which would be really negative. We have to work hard to make sure that we do not do that, including in Government, where we must lead by example; we must work across Government as much as possible. I talked about the way in which we are working across Government to tackle child poverty. It is not just my job but everybody’s job to do that. Leading by example is important.

We want to build on the recommendations of the social renewal advisory board and ensure that the lessons of the pandemic are not lost and that they inform our approach. I met the board last week and we talked about how many of its recommendations have found their way into Government policy and ambition. That is good, because the recommendations are challenging—and rightly so.

In our work with local government, we want to focus on a community-based approach to Covid recovery and to sustain many of the good initiatives that arose during the pandemic, which support individuals in our communities. Such an approach is what we envisaged when we passed the Community Empowerment (Scotland) Act 2015. We wanted to enable much more community participation and engagement. The approach will be central to the Government’s response in supporting organisations to make a meaningful impact on their communities.

We have the opportunity to make that happen, but it will not happen on its own; we need to work at it. I know from my discussions with COSLA that COSLA feels the same. We must maintain that can-do mentality, whereby things that previously seemed to take a long time to achieve were achieved and barriers were swept away. That can-do attitude was very much to the fore and we want to maintain it so that we can make progress in the recovery phase.

I would like to look at that in a bit more detail. If you write to me with some of the detail, I would be happy to look specifically at whether we can do more in relation to supporting EDAS.

Local government has always had a key economic development role. That role will be even more important during the Covid recovery, so if we can do more to support capacity and those on the front line who have that expertise in local government, I am certainly happy to consider that, along with my Cabinet colleagues. Perhaps you could drop me an email about that and I can look at it in more detail.