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The consultation on the charter revision has been extensive. The 12-week consultation was on the Scottish Government’s website and was widely publicised by the Government and other stakeholders. There were 12 virtual stakeholder consultation events for tenants, landlords and others with an interest in social housing. That process was facilitated by the Tenant Participation and Advisory Service and the Tenants Information Service. The range of issues that the convener mentioned—particularly in relation to the cost of living, including the affordability of energy and other costs—touch on some long-term challenges that the sector and the rest of our housing system will have to deal with. The current consultation and the new deal for tenants will also touch on those issues.

That is probably an area where some of the questions remain open, as we are currently consulting on the new deal for tenants rented sector strategy. We have clearly indicated some potential changes to the role of the regulator in relation to social housing. However, in the private rented sector, there is no charter equivalent nor is there a regulator at present, although we are proposing one.

The opportunities to close the gap in outcomes for housing across different sectors, the opportunities for social landlords to develop their wider role in the community in relation to energy systems, for example, and the opportunities to learn lessons from good practice—and from where practice has perhaps not been so good—in relation to tenant participation are all areas where there will be some interesting overlap and connection between the social and private rented sectors, although there might not necessarily be a direct read-across. The social rented sector has some innate advantages in relation to tenant participation in that, often, but not always, landlords tend to be bigger and have a geographically defined focus. Quite often, the social rented sector has a more stable and older tenant population. Some of those factors lend themselves to the ease with which good social landlords have improved their practice in relation to tenant participation. Often, those factors are absent in the private rented sector. Trying to achieve that level of participation and tenant voice will be a challenge. The current consultation is actively exploring that.

I am grateful for the opportunity to hear Living Rent’s perspective. If I remember rightly, I am meeting it later this week, so I will get a chance to explore that concern in more detail. I note that Living Rent is pleased with the charter itself and that it has agreed that the charter outlines worthwhile outcomes. If I understand Living Rent’s perspective properly, its view is that what needs to change is the way in which social landlords are regulated, rather than the charter itself.

I am sorry to come back to the point that there is an open consultation on some of these issues and it might be wrong to pre-empt that. The consultation proposes greater involvement for the Scottish Housing Regulator as well as the creation of the new regulator for the PRS, which will improve standards and enforce tenants’ rights. The vision for and principles of regulation are being consulted on and will be based on standards of quality, affordability and fairness to try to achieve the tenure-neutral outcome that I was talking about earlier.

I would like to think that some of the work that we are currently doing and which will flow from the current consultation on the new deal and the rented sector strategy will go a long way towards addressing some of Living Rent’s concerns, which, as I understand them, are not principally with the charter itself or the changes that we are proposing today.

In short, I do not think that that is okay, but it connects directly with the issue of the private rented sector having no regulator or equivalent to the charter. The new deal for tenants consultation does not go into specific questions about whether there should be a charter like this for the PRS, whether the charter should be expanded to cover it or precisely what the regulator should be. Instead, it opens up a range of options in that respect. At the moment, however, the private landlord in the situation that you have described is not regulated in the same way in relation to prevention of homelessness.

Ideally, if things are working well, social landlords hear the tenant voice directly. The regulator has the responsibility, which it is given by Parliament, to monitor the work of social landlords against the outcomes, including on tenant participation and tenant voice.

As I said earlier, since the creation of the charter, in 2012, and the review of it in 2017, there has been pretty good evidence to suggest that it has been an effective tool in raising standards. Nevertheless, if there was a major turn in the other direction, that would be picked up by the regulator in its reports to Parliament and there would be an opportunity for either Government or the regulator itself to take action.

Sure, I can say a wee bit about it, but I might not be able to say much more than that because, as I say, the consultation is live. It is an important question, though, about the extent to which a regulator for the private rented sector would either align with and share some functions with or diverge from the current Scottish Housing Regulator for the social sector.

There are significant differences at the moment. We are committed to reducing the gap in outcomes between the tenures, but there will probably always be some degree of difference in relation to the legislative framework, for example. Towards the end of the charter, in the section on rents and service charges, we have a very wide difference between the legislative arrangements relating to rent in the social rented sector and the broadly free-market approach in the private rented sector.

We are proposing major changes there; we have the experience of rent pressure zones, which have not been used at all in Scotland. We now have a commitment to introduce a single, national system of rent controls with some degree of local flexibility. We are not yet at the point of having a detailed proposition on that in legislation to put to Parliament, but that work will continue. Whatever we were to say about rents and charges within the private rented sector would need to take account of the legislation that is still to be developed, introduced and debated in Parliament.

Other elements of the charter would fairly reflect an expectation that somebody should have of their housing, regardless of which tenure they are living in. Something like the charter, if that is the way we go in relation to the PRS, would have some common points but probably also some divergence. The same thing will be true of the PRS regulator that we are proposing. There will be a very live debate about the extent to which it should align with or diverge from the approach of the existing social sector regulator.

Clearly, the social rented sector should be taking that role, and very many social landlords do take a wider role in relation to environmental factors and the community at an economic and social level. As I mentioned earlier in relation to energy issues, social landlords could have a critical role in investing in the heat networks that need to be developed and implemented extensively throughout this decade. Those heat networks will have an impact not just on social landlords’ own tenants; they can be catalysts for the wider community way beyond the social landlord itself. There are already examples of that, but not enough.

The question is: to what extent should the charter seek to capture that wider role? As I said earlier to Mr Briggs, in the consultation that we undertook, we wanted to ensure that the changes to the charter that we have proposed address the issues that tenants want to be addressed in the charter in a way that they feel is effective for them. That is not to say that other issues are not important, too—to social landlords and to the Scottish Government, for our net zero targets and for our homelessness and child poverty targets. Not every important issue is necessarily best captured in the charter itself.

The wider approach that Willie Coffey talks about is hugely important, but that is slightly outside the scope of what we should be putting in the charter. The revisions that are being put forward today are pretty much in line with the strong view that what is currently in the charter was working well and needed only modest changes.

I am turning to my colleagues. I am fairly sure that there is a requirement to make tenants aware of the charter.

The charter relates more to the responsibilities of social landlords than to those of the local authorities, unless we are talking about council housing. The separate function with regard to the provision of, for example, welfare rights advice or housing advice is separate and does not necessarily come within the charter’s ambit. That said, the approach that we are taking in trying to achieve tenure-neutral outcomes and to introduce regulation in the PRS that, although perhaps not identical to that for the social rented sector, integrates with it to get a more coherent approach to achieving the human right to adequate housing for everybody, regardless of tenure, will go a long way towards addressing situations such as you are describing.

Some of the responses from individuals might have been about the service that they were getting from their social landlord, rather than about the contents of the charter. That is probably the main reason for that statistical difference between organisations and individuals in their overall level of positivity .

In that context, it is always legitimate for people to raise whatever issues they have. If they have an issue with a social landlord, it is perfectly fine for that to be heard. That individual difficult case or circumstance needs to be dealt with by their social landlord or, in extremis, by the regulator, rather than necessarily being reflected in the charter itself.

However, the overall view from organisations and from individuals was pretty supportive on the contents of the charter. There were really not many major proposals for change. That is why the changes that we are proposing are relatively modest.