Chamber and committees

Good morning and welcome to the third meeting in 2026 of the Local Government, Housing and Planning Committee. I remind members and witnesses to ensure that their devices are on silent.

The first item on our agenda is to decide whether to take items 4 and 5 in private. Are we agreed?

Members indicated agreement.

The next item on our agenda is to take evidence on the draft climate change plan. We are joined by Shona Robison, who is the Cabinet Secretary for Finance and Local Government. She is accompanied by Scottish Government officials: Gareth Fenney, who is the interim director for heat in buildings delivery; Philip Raines, who is joint deputy director for domestic climate change; and Daniel Hinze, who is deputy director of the infrastructure and investment team. I welcome you all to the meeting. There is no need for you to turn on your microphones—we will do that for you. I invite the cabinet secretary to make a brief opening statement.

Thanks very much for your opening statement. You made some very good points, which I am sure that we will pick up on through our questions. I will open the conversation with general questions arising from our previous evidence.

Throughout our scrutiny, we have heard that councils want much more clarity on what they are expected to deliver under the climate change plan. Is it intended that the final plan will set out clearer and more concrete expectations for local authorities, including measurable actions? Given how limited the time is before the plan is finalised—we are also approaching the end of this session of Parliament—how will the views that we have heard from councils and other stakeholders be reflected in the final version?

That is also an issue for rural and island communities and councils, where it is a challenging space to deliver some of that. It is good that we have the carbon neutral islands project, which gives us an understanding of the challenges that they face. I would be interested to understand whether the Government has considered front loading support or giving more support to those harder-to-transform places where, for example, we will not necessarily get people on to buses, because there are no buses. How do we ensure that we bring those places along?

09:45

Okay—super.

I want to pick up a couple of points that Fulton raised on workforce capacity. Annex 3 of the plan does not include any modelling on that. Do we need to look at that aspect? It is about more than local authorities forming small teams of multidisciplined and knowledgeable people; it is also about whether we have the capacity. Do we have people coming through the pipeline who have those skills? That came up frequently in our evidence-taking.

I want to pick up on Willie Coffey’s point about councils being a volume provider for air-source heat pumps or whatever technology might be appropriate for a house. It is an issue that we have discussed in our evidence-taking sessions, but is it something that councils could do? Is there any space in procurement for that? Are there any blocks that would prevent them from doing that, or could they just decide, “Yeah, that’s a good idea—let’s be part of that roll-out and be a trusted provider”? I know that Home Energy Scotland offers a pathway for people to find suppliers or those who can fit the technology, but Willie Coffey was asking whether councils could be the place to go if you wanted to buy these things, because of economies of scale and therefore reduced prices? Would there be any block in the way of councils doing that, if they decided that they wanted to?

It would be good to have a look at that.

That would be great.

I have a couple more questions, under the heading of next steps. I touched on this at the beginning—given the very limited time between the end of scrutiny and the finalisation of the plan, I am interested to understand what processes are in place to ensure that parliamentary and stakeholder feedback genuinely shapes the final document. I will integrate my other question, seeking concrete examples: what feedback has already been integrated into the climate change system? If it is a living document, that would be great to hear about.

Thank you for that very positive opening statement. Thank you for your efforts on the housing portfolio in the budget. We have a number of questions about the affordable housing supply programme, after which we will move on to energy efficiency and decarbonisation and then cladding. Those are the areas that we want to cover this morning.

I will lead with a few initial questions. You have set out a four-year investment profile for the affordable housing programme. How confident are you that that profile puts you on track to meet the commitment of providing 110,000 affordable homes by 2032? From the work that you have done, can you tell us what the risks are of so much delivery being pushed towards the final year of the target period? What are you doing to reduce those risks?

That sounds very positive. However, something that causes alarm bells to ring, and which I have started to think about it quite a bit over this session, is the fact that it is one thing to invest, but Scotland suffers from a history of wealth extraction. One of the pieces of work that we have been doing over this session has been on the idea of community wealth building. We are encouraging all that external investment, but how do we ensure that wealth is not completely extracted through shareholders and so on, and that the communities are actually invested in? How do we build that wealth?

Earlier, we were talking about place-based work with the Cabinet Secretary for Finance and Local Government and the amazing work that is happening at Granton with out-of-silo funding. The main point is, how do we ensure that investment comes in but also that the wealth stays with the communities?