When it comes to finding a way forward in establishing such best practice, does the minister recognise the work of Under One Roof in providing an interface and a one-stop shop for advice, as well as the work of organisations such as the Loco Home Retrofit co-operative in Glasgow, which was established in 2021? It has provided a great example of how to build confidence between owners and contractors, bring people together and build best practice, and we need to scale up that sort of work.

The minister says that she has been trying to protect mental health funding, but I am afraid that the Government does not have a good track record. The health budget for mental health has been frozen or cut in-year for the past two years, with almost £20 million in cuts announced just last week. In the programme for government, the Government said that it would commit to £120 million of funding for mental health. Will that be new money, or is it just a repackaging of existing funding?

I congratulate Mr Simpson on securing this timely debate. As he highlighted, this is not a matter of self-interest by building owners—it is a public health emergency. Having shelter and security in the home is one of the essential components of any hierarchy of needs, but the condition of Scotland’s housing stock leaves a lot to be desired. We certainly have some of the oldest housing stock in Europe, which has been a perennial challenge for the city of Glasgow for more than a century.

The Housing (Financial Provisions) Act 1924 was created to address sanitation issues that were affecting housing in Glasgow, but it focused largely on the construction of new municipal housing estates and did not tackle inner city tenement challenges and the collapse of factoring that took place after emergency legislation was introduced in 1915 to restrict rents. Laudable as that was at the time, it was not revised or amended and, as a result, there was no factoring of tenements in Glasgow for half a century.

We can fast forward to the post-war period, when emergency slum clearances in the city and the building of overspill estates and new towns were also intended to address the problem. The result was the designation of large parts of the city of Glasgow as comprehensive development areas, of which there were 29 in total. Within the space of 30 years, 40 per cent of Glasgow’s housing stock was demolished. That is an extraordinary figure: 40 per cent of the city’s houses were demolished in 30 years.

That is the scale of the challenge that we face if we do not deal with it. Glasgow City Council has highlighted the scale of the maintenance backlog; it recently conducted a survey that showed that 46,600 tenement properties in the city are in an urgent state of disrepair and that that maintenance backlog will cost £2.9 billion. That is an urgent crisis. Glasgow City Heritage Trust, of which I am a trustee, has an annual budget of £1 million to dispense in grants. That is an absurdly inadequate figure.

The structures for how we assist people to improve their tenements are also inadequate. Grant funding alone is not sufficient. We must be far more intelligent about providing patient loan finance to allow property owners to carry out larger-scale improvements and to address fundamental fabric challenges. In Glasgow alone, we have 76,000 residential buildings that predate the first world war, of which about 70,000 are tenements, so about one in four Glaswegians live in a tenement that was built before that war.

There are big challenges, but we must find hope in the solutions that Glasgow found a generation ago, in the 1970s. Many people of that generation will be familiar with the cludgie. My grandparents talked about the toilet in their shared stair, where the seat was always warm. That came about as a result of the Burgh Police (Scotland) Act 1892, which insisted on indoor sanitation but not necessarily on indoor toilets for individual private flats. Even in the 1970s, one in four Scots had no toilet in their own home and had to share one, but, by 1990, Scotland was the best-toileted nation in Europe.

That came about not by accident but by the innovations that were carried out in Govan, Partick and other districts in Glasgow by people such as Raymond Young, a young architect who was involved with Assist Architects, which was an experimental practice that spun out of the University of Strathclyde’s architecture department. He went to meet a lady called Annie Gibbons in Luath Street in Govan. She said, “I’ve heard all about your work on putting indoor toilets into flats. I want one,” so she became the experiment—the guinea pig—in putting an indoor toilet into a tenement. Eventually, the housing convener of the city, Pat Lally, came to cut the ribbon on her toilet.

The authorities realised that they had spent the past 30 years demolishing a hundred thousand tenements when they might have better deployed those resources in retrofit. As a result, the growth of the community housing association movement took place in Glasgow, with the passing of the Housing Act 1974. That formed the basis of what we are talking about now, such as owners associations, sinking funds and the management of properties. As a result, about a quarter of the city’s housing stock is managed by registered social landlords. In total, there are about 80 housing associations in Glasgow.

The infrastructure is there and we have done it before. We committed with positive action, coherence and the sort of consensual approach that the member for Edinburgh Northern and Leith talked about, and solved a major social problem in Scotland. We moved from one in four Scots sharing toilets in the 1970s to being the best-toileted nation in Europe.

We can do the same with other fabric repairs now, but we need to implement urgently the recommendations that the tenement maintenance working group identified in concert with the Scottish Law Commission. We cannot continue to dawdle. We have seen the pathway, we can pilot a lot of this stuff with our existing infrastructure, we can look at our housing associations and we can get ahead of the problem in Glasgow. We can start to effect the practical operation of this very early in a city such as Glasgow, and I urge members to look at how we move forward with that. The Law Commission is certainly keen to look at such pilots, so that it can write the legislation to reflect the reality. Let us move ahead with that, because there are big opportunities. If we do that, we can solve a lot of the housing problems that Scotland faces.

The cabinet secretary has outlined some of the issues that he is wrestling with, but the Commonwealth Games Federation has highlighted that it will have to come to a conclusion sooner rather than later. Will he highlight to the Parliament what the approaching deadline is and what timeframe we are looking at? Is it a matter of weeks or months?

There has been deep frustration in Glasgow in recent months due to the closure of the regeneration capital grant fund at Scottish Government level and the suspension of funds such as the community ownership fund at UK Government level. Will the Deputy First Minister look to engage rapidly with the Treasury and her colleagues in Government to ensure that, with the budget forthcoming in October, we can rapidly reopen those funds if capital funding is unlocked?

The risk to the Citizens Theatre is real, with the company under imminent threat of liquidation. On that basis, will the Scottish Government actively participate in the steering group that consists of representatives of Glasgow City Council, the Citizens Theatre and the contractor, Kier? There is a major discrepancy between the estimated cost of the project according to the theatre’s consultants and the estimated cost according to the prime contractor. As the Scottish Government—

Two weeks ago, when I asked about the Citizens Theatre redevelopment project, which has a capital funding gap of between £7 million and £15 million, the cabinet secretary told me that the Citizens Theatre project would need to meet strict criteria set out by the European Commission in order to be able to access vital funding to ensure that the project does not collapse. That is despite the fact that £11.7 million of Government and council capital grant funding has already been committed and sunk into the project.

It seems to me that the cabinet secretary is now suggesting that the remaining European structural funds are not available to the overrunning Citizens Theatre project, despite it being the sort of cultural heritage project that would typically be funded by European structural funds. Is this not now simply an example of Government mismanagement that has squandered available funding that could have been used to reinforce that critical project in Glasgow?

Is it not the case that this chairman, who has no shipbuilding experience, is repeatedly sacking those who do have it for telling him uncomfortable truths about the operational realities of delivering a highly complex programme that is on track—as it has been for months—for handover this summer? That has not changed. All that has changed is that the chairman seems to be carrying out a face-saving exercise on the operational workforce, which is leading the project as best it can.

Sarah Boyack has made excellent points in support of her amendment 98. Does she share my frustration at the Government’s lack of a joined-up strategy on those aspects—in particular, on green steel? We export enough steel to be self-sufficient in steel manufacturing, but there is no link to initiatives such as the development of electric arc furnaces to ensure proper circular use of steel in our country.

The First Minister has said that his biggest priority in government is to eradicate child poverty, yet, this morning, Scottish National Party and Green councillors in Glasgow voted to cut the celebrated MCR Pathways scheme by 50 per cent. Celebrated High Court judge Rita Rae has said that that will be a disaster and that it will bring people into the criminal justice system, while former director of education in Glasgow Maureen McKenna has said that it is inexplicable.

Members of my family take part in the MCR Pathways scheme. It is genuinely one of the best measures that we have ever developed to improve the lives of young people, get them out of harm’s way and give them life-changing opportunities. Surely the First Minister agrees that the proposed cut is a regressive, retrograde step. Will he do something to ensure that the MCR Pathways scheme is not cut but expanded, given that it is one of the most successful public policies that we have?