Chamber and committees

In the capital city, where we are sitting now, 3,000 council homes are, as my colleague Miles Briggs said, lying vacant that should be repurposed and brought up to scratch. People should be living in them—[Interruption.]—so why are our elected members in Edinburgh not fixing those homes? That is not scaremongering.

Statistics that have been published by the Scottish Association of Landlords have revealed that the SNP rent controls have damaged the country’s private rented sector. I am certain that members across the chamber can concur; my inbox is full of messages from people whose tenancies are being ended and whose private landlords are choosing to take their properties off the market. They are contacting me in desperation because they are about to become homeless.

Despite clear evidence that rent controls do not work and instead merely aggravate the problem, last month the City of Edinburgh Council backed a motion that was introduced by the Scottish Greens to support rent controls—the first council to do so since the introduction of the Scottish Government’s Housing (Scotland) Bill. [Interruption.]

I thought they would, too.

Common sense did not prevail, and the council did not support the councillors from the Conservative group in Edinburgh who submitted an alternative motion that really drilled down into the issues that rent controls will bring.

Furthermore, the SNP housing bill is going to add a £5.5 million burden to already overstretched councils, which have warned that the research that will be required to assess the sector for rent controls will equate to that amount. That is just throwing good money after bad. We need to start prioritising where we invest. Just think how many homes could be bought with £5.5 million—not that many in East Dunbartonshire.

We would reverse the rent freeze and the eviction moratorium. We will continue to oppose rent caps while ensuring that renters get a fair deal.

Rent controls are not the only issue that is contributing to the housing emergency, but they are driving investors away. Due to a lack of houses being built, there were 4,969 households in temporary accommodation in Edinburgh on 31 March 2024, which is a 4 per cent rise from 2023.

Twelve of the 32 councils have declared a housing emergency, and the SNP Government has presided over a Scotland-wide housing crisis, coupled with an increase in homelessness with thousands of people, including 10,000 children, now stuck in temporary accommodation. Willie Rennie made a plea to support investors, private builders and private landlords—

—but no response has been received. Minister, do you agree that the reclassification is crucial for funding, and will you seek to determine what is preventing the life-saving service from being assessed as a rehabilitation unit?

What everyone in the chamber forgets is that there are still people living in those homes: the homes that were bought have not disappeared. Families have been brought up and are having fantastic lives in those homes. They are still being lived in, which is a fact that we cannot escape from. Let me cast members’ minds back a little bit.

I have just started. If you do not mind, Ms Roddick, I will move on a bit.

Rent controls were first mentioned in the chamber by Scottish Labour and were quickly embraced by the SNP. Rent controls have been an unmitigated disaster, when it comes to their unintended consequences. We have seen rents rising in Scotland faster than they have anywhere else in the UK, including London. Industry leaders in Scotland have raised concerns about rent controls and about the Scottish Government’s proposed housing bill. More Homes More Quickly has expressed concern about the unintended consequences of rent controls, including a reduction in supply and in access to the private rented sector, which could subsequently impact on lower-income groups who are in need of housing.

That is not scaremongering. Around 21,000 flats and houses have disappeared from Scotland’s private rented sector in a single year. Statistics—[Interruption.]

I am happy to take an intervention if someone wants to intervene.

I thank my colleague Tess White for bringing such an important debate to Parliament, and I whole-heartedly associate myself with the statements that Michelle Thomson and Tess White made in their speeches.

I cannot remember a point when I was growing up when sport was not a major factor. In primary school, I played in badminton competitions for Juniper Green, represented Edinburgh in school competitions and travelled to Wales to play for the Lothians.

At university, I had to choose between playing hockey and playing badminton. I chose hockey, and I threw myself into playing in the 1990s—I have given my age away there. At that time at the University of Edinburgh, there were only three women’s teams. It was great fun—you could always find me and my pals at Peffermill, playing or umpiring, and I made friends and memories for life.

After I graduated from university, sport—especially hockey—continued to play a pivotal role in my life. I balanced a busy corporate career with all my sport, including Watsonians hockey, where I was the Watsonian Hockey Club president and manager of the under-16s and under-18s teams. I became the east district youth team manager and then east district president.

I also umpired all through that time, which included umpiring men’s and women’s hockey at the top of the Scottish game; there were not that many women umpiring men’s hockey. Now, as injury and age catch up with me, and when time permits, I assess budding new umpires.

All that gave me life experiences and friendships that span decades and continents. I would not change a thing about my experience, and I hope that other girls and woman can have the same positive experiences that I did. That is why I wanted to speak in the debate: to highlight the unfairness that many now face in female sports.

We will all have either seen or heard about some of the controversies surrounding that issue during the Olympics, and then again in the Paralympics. Nowhere was that more apparent than in the women’s boxing in Paris, with the controversy over the gender eligibility of two competitors. Algeria’s Imane Khelif and Taiwan’s Lin Yu-ting were cleared to compete at the Paris Olympics, despite being disqualified from last year’s world championships after they were said to have failed gender eligibility tests. Both fighters won Olympic gold medals. I think that we can all agree that that has shone a damning light on an issue that clearly needs addressing. As Tess White explained in far more detail, males of equal weight and size punch 160 per cent harder on to a less dense bone structure. Therefore, biological sex is a crucial factor in ensuring that female athletes are not disadvantaged or put at risk.

In 2023, British Cycling banned transgender women from competing in the female category of competitive events, tightening its rules around participation in order to safeguard the fairness of the sport. The new rules, which came into effect at the end of 2023, divided cyclists into female and open categories. The female category remains for those with sex assigned female at birth and transgender men who are yet to begin hormone therapy. The open category is for male athletes, transgender women and men, non-binary individuals and those whose sex was assigned male at birth.

Sebastian Coe, the president of World Athletics, has voiced his views about the transgender debate. Last March, in accordance with his long-stated belief that biology trumps gender, he banned athletes who had gone through male puberty from the female category in world championships and Olympic games, in order to preserve fairness in athletics.

However, the problem exists not only at the elite levels of sport. On the journey to elite sport, women will be at a constant disadvantage as they strive to win against males who are biologically stronger and taller and have increased muscle mass. Those men will take podium places from those women and their spaces in teams, excluding many women and girls from taking part at all.

We cannot escape the biological reality. It is vital that we stand up for single-sex categories in sport across all levels, from grass-roots to elite level. That should be protected. You cannot settle for protecting the 0.01 per cent at the top if you then ask every other woman and girl to accept being placed at a disadvantage. That is why I am backing Tess White’s motion, and why I will always champion single-sex categories in sport.

To ask the Scottish Government what financial impact its proposed heat in buildings bill will have on home owners. (S6O-03771)

The reality is that for thousands of Victorian tenements in densely populated parts of our cities, such as Leith and Partick, and in cottages and homes across the country, the costs of meeting the standards that are outlined in the bill are not deliverable or affordable; they are of a scale that neither the individual nor the Scottish Government can ever dream of affording. Owners could, in effect, be blocked from selling their homes, which would have a catastrophic impact on the property market and on the lives of those who would be trapped in homes that they cannot sell.

Does the minister accept that the proposal would aggravate Scotland’s housing crisis? Will he commit to introducing an appropriate exemption to the proposed scheme?

Earlier this week, MSPs were told in a briefing that eye pavilion services would be accommodated in facilities across NHS Lothian. The eye pavilion sees around 1,500 patients a week, with an average of 152 out-patient clinics a week, using 40 consultation rooms every day. Patients and clinicians will now be scattered across the city and I can only imagine the chaos and confusion that that will cause, all of which comes before we take into account the devastating impact on clinical care.

For months, I have been asking NHS Lothian for a back-up plan. Will the cabinet secretary finally give patients and staff the assurance that alternative and purposeful options are being arranged outside the existing NHS Lothian estate, whether that be in central office space, additional capacity in private opticians, or in hospitals and clinics?

Anne, would you like to go next?

Those are some helpful examples.