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I want to ask about an issue that bugged me for years when I was a local councillor. If a landlord in your authority is deregistered because they have been deemed to not meet the fit-and-proper test to be a landlord, can they immediately hop to another authority—I will say from Glasgow to Edinburgh just because you are here—and become a landlord there? Is there any impediment to their doing that?

Going between Glasgow and Edinburgh is not crossing the border, is it?

Robin Blacklock touched on the preference for having national data collection to inform the rent control debate. How do we make sure that local circumstances are built into that? If we do not have local data collection systems, how do we balance that so that local circumstances can be taken into account?

Thank you for your responses.

To return to the data issue, I think that you are saying that the data set that is gathered must be robust, wide, localised and all the rest of it. Are you seeking a broader discussion about what needs to be included in the data in order to allow you, as council officials, to make a recommendation to your council leadership that a rent control area be established? What would that data look like, in the widest sense?

Convener, it is worth reminding ourselves that the bill makes provision for rent control areas to be established, but only on the recommendation of the local council to the Scottish ministers. Anna, does that give you some comfort that, in rural communities, particularly in the Borders, the councils, in looking at the issues that you described earlier, would be more or less likely to be minded to declare rent control areas, for the reasons that you explained? Do you get any comfort from the flexibility that the bill proposes?

In order for a council to make a determination to declare or request a rent control area, it will rely on datasets and you have spoken at length about what those might look like and the sparsity of data in the area that you principally represent. Could I ask the whole panel, what kind of data do we need to be gathering? Robin Blacklock said that decisions must be informed by an evidence base. What datasets do we need to make sure that that is fair and that the council can make a reasonable assessment of whether to have a rent control area?

Are there any other views from colleagues round the table about whether data collection should be national, local or a mixture of both?

Yes—data collection is a hot topic.

Good morning, everybody. I want to ask our council colleagues about the power to set rent controls. Under the bill, it is entirely at a council’s discretion whether to recommend to the Scottish ministers that a rent control area be applied. If you have the discretion to not do that, because you decide that it is not appropriate, you will not do it, will you? Do you have concerns about that?

My point is that, ultimately, it is the council leadership that will decide whether to request a rent control zone, and that decision will be based on whether you have data and evidence to back that up. You will retain the control, the power and the discretion to introduce a rent control area. In that sense, the power to apply the rent control provisions is flexible. You will need to have the data to back up the decision but, ultimately, council leaders could decide not to make any such recommendations to ministers if they are not content that they have sufficient local data to justify the introduction of a rent control area. That is the case, is it not?