Chamber and committees

We have an active consultation on building standards. I encourage Alexander Stewart to contribute to it if he wishes. If he wishes to write to us on the specific issues relating to the Grenfell inquiry, colleagues will reply to the letter.

The housing to 2040 strategy, fuel poverty strategy and heat in buildings strategy together set out our approach to decarbonising heat and eradicating fuel poverty. We have run a number of advice and funding schemes. We have increased investment to £268 million this year and have committed to invest at least £1.8 billion during this parliamentary session to kick start market growth and support the people who are least able to pay.

As I mentioned in answer to Beatrice Wishart’s question, we are establishing a green heat finance task force to recommend ways that the public sector, communities and private investors can collaborate to scale up investment and help households to overcome up-front investment costs.

I am aware that members from Dundee and the wider region, from many political parties, have expressed serious concern about the situation. It arises, as Michael Marra knows, not from building standards but from a change to the British safety standard—a different regulatory regime—and a failure on the part of the local authority to pick up the change, for which the local authority has apologised.

Agreement has been reached, on a cross-party basis, to hold an independent inquiry into the situation. I think that we should all have confidence in the local authority’s ability to conduct that inquiry and, I hope, to take its recommendations extremely seriously—as we would expect all local authorities to do.

Yes, I am delighted to congratulate West of Scotland Housing Association, CCG and hub West Scotland on the delivery of the new development at Springfield Cross in Glasgow, and I welcome many other positive developments.

The development will deliver 36 new homes with the support of grant funding through the affordable housing supply programme. The homes are being built to achieve high energy efficiency standards, which will result in low fuel bills for tenants when they move into the completed homes next year.

We continue to take action to increase the energy efficiency of new homes and to modernise construction to put Scotland’s homes on the pathway to net zero by 2045.

We are currently consulting on improvements to the high energy standards in Scottish building regulations for introduction next year. Those improvements will be strongly focused on reducing overall energy demand in new homes, and we are also developing a strategy to build more high quality and energy-efficient affordable homes in communities across the country, through greater use of off-site construction.

Yes—I can hear you fine. Can you hear me?

The Scottish Government has committed to delivering a new deal for tenants and to consulting on the options, delivering legislation and implementing an effective national system of rent controls, with appropriate mechanisms to allow local authorities to introduce local measures, by the end of 2025. We will set out proposals for taking forward that work in our forthcoming rented sector strategy, which we aim to publish for a full public consultation by the end of this calendar year.

We have a full programme of work to be enacted well before the end of 2025. I commend Pauline McNeill for her work on the issue in the previous parliamentary session and I hope that she will work constructively with the Government to take forward our new deal for tenants under the rented sector strategy.

Some work under the strategy will be implemented earlier. Aspects including the models of rent control need proper work to examine the range of options that exist, including those that were included in Pauline McNeill’s member’s bill. However, there are other options and models that we need to examine to get the system right.

In Scotland, we have already gone through a process of designing and adopting a system of rent controls that did not work. Rent pressure zones have never been used and have not changed anyone’s rent. Let us not get it wrong; let us spend the time to consult openly and get the model right. I hope that we will be able to work constructively with colleagues across the—

No one who had already been offered an LPG system or an equivalent system has had the offer withdrawn. In fact, all those that were in the pipeline had commitments made, and those commitments were honoured.

Now, particularly as the 26th United Nations climate change conference of the parties—COP26—is taking place in Glasgow, we should all be conscious that simply continuing with some of the most polluting heating systems that are available to us is really not an option if we want to support householders in all parts of the country to reduce their emissions.

We continue to provide a wide range of interventions for those who might previously have been offered LPG systems, and we are committed to continuing to review and improve the offer that is available.

I hope that the member will acknowledge that some of our work to develop models and consult on proposals is intended to do exactly what he asks for—it will look at the full range of potential benefits and how to avoid unintended consequences.

There are those in the private rented sector who do not have the instinctive recoil against the principle of rent controls that some might think. I hope that the member will acknowledge that continuing with the situation in which people in parts of the private rented sector are—to be frank—being price gouged is not acceptable. We need to deal with the unacceptable rent increases that some people have been living with.