Chamber and committees

He was seven when he started his campaign.

Do you mean that we have had three First Ministers in two years? [Laughter.]

That is an interesting thought.

We thank the petitioner for raising the issue, but we are unable to take the petition further for the reasons that Mr Torrance stated.

That brings us to the final of the new petitions that we are considering this morning. PE2117, lodged by Bruce Whitehead, calls on the Scottish Parliament to urge the Scottish Government to ban the use of any chemical labelled “Very toxic to aquatic life with long lasting effects” or carrying the dead fish pictogram, on coastal jetties or slipways.

The key legal framework in Scotland for protecting the water environment is provided by the Water Environment (Controlled Activities) (Scotland) Regulations 2011, or CAR, regime. The framework covers both direct discharges into the water environment and situations where there is a risk of diffuse pollution from activities on land. Under that regime, the Scottish Environment Protection Agency’s role is to assess the risk of proposed activities before deciding whether to grant an authorisation. The Scottish Government considers this to be a regulatory matter and points to the Great Britain regulatory framework, which is in place to prevent or minimise harm to people and wildlife from the use of biocides used in amenity settings. Its response to the petition states that it does not believe that the Scottish Government has a role or that there is a reason for Scottish ministers to intervene.

The petitioner explains that he is concerned about the use of chemicals at Hawes pier and believes that the conditions of SEPA’s authorisation have been breached. He says that manual application of the authorised chemical has led to spillages over the pier edge into the river and in unpermitted weather conditions.

Are there any suggestions for action?

I am genuinely intrigued. The Scottish National Party made a commitment to pay the winter fuel allowance. It did not say that it would pay the winter fuel allowance on the condition of receiving support from Westminster. If the argument now is that that commitment was only ever contingent on support from Westminster, the commitment was hollow all along. The Government cannot make a commitment and then say, “Actually, the commitment was worthless unless we were given the money by somebody else.”

Colleagues might be slightly surprised to see me, after 17 and a half years, stand up to make a contribution for the first time in a housing debate. I have left the precocious policy interventions and half-pursued master plans to others throughout that period.

I say to the Scottish Greens that, frankly, fervour over pragmatism leads to a housing emergency. Is it not a tragedy that we are sitting here in a Parliament that is 25 years old, with housing policy wholly devolved to us, discussing today what is in fact an absolute shambles and a housing crisis across Scotland? Perhaps if I, and more parliamentary colleagues than have decided that they are interested in the subject this afternoon, had engaged on the issue in a more pragmatic and collective way, we would have made some progress.

Time and again, in health debates that I have participated in, I have heard the argument put that there is a demographic trend in Scotland that has led to an ageing population and a crisis in healthcare. That ageing demographic is also one of the uncontrollable factors that has led to housing stock not coming on to the market. That is for perfectly good and valid reasons—people have lived longer and they have lived in those houses longer.

There is also the fact that, in my lifetime, a fundamental change has occurred in the way in which people operate socially. There are far more single-occupancy homes than there were historically, and far more people are in further education than there ever were when I started out—it has gone from one in seven to nearly all in seven. That has led to a huge explosion in demand for student accommodation.

All those things are uncontrollables, which I understand we have to wrestle with. However, they have led, to my astonishment, to my small local authority of East Renfrewshire Council declaring a housing emergency, because it had, according to the Scottish Government’s figures, the highest percentage increase in households living in temporary accommodation anywhere in Scotland. I recognise directly what Willie Rennie described in his contribution, because, to my astonishment, people in my constituency are now coming to speak to me with casework issues who are in that bereft position. They have no idea where they are going to live, what they are going to do or how they will fulfil their determination to offer to their young children, to whom they are absolutely devoted, the best start in life, when they are all crammed into temporary accommodation—at times in one room—with no understanding or knowledge of where things will progress after that. We have to do far better.

It would be fair to say that in the earlier debate today we had a bit of a rammy to do with the Labour Party and its Government at Westminster, but in East Renfrewshire we try collectively, on many issues, to be as pragmatic as possible. The local authority there—a Labour-led, minority administration—has set out quite genuinely and pragmatically why we have an increase in homelessness applications in East Renfrewshire. One problem is the abolition of the local connection benchmark, which has meant that people just turn up, present and become part of an issue that that small local authority has to deal with when it does not have the major resources that some other authorities might.

The Labour leader has said that the council acknowledges that the Scottish Government has recognised that there is a national housing crisis and it has declared as much. However, that does not sit well with the removal of some £200 million in funding for the provision of affordable housing. There is not much point in recognising an emergency and then axing one of the tools that was there to deal with it.

The leader of the council has written to the First Minister, informing him of our situation in East Renfrewshire. Yesterday, East Lothian became the 13th council to declare that emergency. The Scottish Government’s own figures must surely be a wake-up call to the Government that it needs to take action. That means, as my colleague Meghan Gallacher has argued, that we have to pause the bill and redraft it as a bill that we can pragmatically work together on to achieve and which directly addresses Scotland’s homelessness emergency.

Will the cabinet secretary take an intervention?

It might be that these things get teased out as we go along, in any event.

What impact do you consider that our existing national parks have had on the economies and communities within their boundaries? Are the national parks achieving the statutory aim of promoting the sustainable and economic development of those communities? If there is a concern that the national parks are not meeting that statutory obligation, what lessons need to be learned or considered before anything further comes to us?

Would the gentleman online like to comment in response to any of the questions?