Chamber and committees

I am sure that Mr Kerr and I could go back and forward about the local connection legislative changes that have been made. I will politely say that I continue to disagree with his assessment of our local connection rules. That is probably the most polite way that I can put that at this point.

When it comes to the other work that we are doing to address housing pressures, one aspect that is particularly important to continue investing in is our affordable housing supply programme. We are committed to investing £4.9 billion over the next four years, including a record £4.1 billion of public sector funding. That is an important area that we continue to work on. If memory serves me right, more than £900 million is to be invested in the affordable housing supply programme this year.

It is also important that we continue to look at the work that can be done on current stock. The support that we have given to our empty homes fund, and that we have provided to assist social landlords with their voids, has been exceptionally important. The ability to assist councils with acquisitions has also been an important part of our policy and one that I will continue to consider as I look at how best we can provide support in the future. We have done that, in particular, by encouraging local authorities to look at larger homes that will assist families, because the number of families in temporary accommodation and the length of time that they spend there are far too high. Part of the challenge is due to the lack of larger family homes, which is exactly why acquisition funding was exceptionally important.

I have touched on the planning work that we do directly with the chief planner and the Minister for Public Finance to look at particular sites across Scotland, to understand why they are not progressing and to identify what can be done to ensure that they do. Some of those sites are larger ones in our cities, but we absolutely recognise that reasonably small sites in smaller towns or rural Scotland will have as big an impact, if not a bigger one, as large-scale sites in our cities. It is not simply about the numbers.

My final point is on the work that we continue to do to support those who are looking to move into owner occupation, because it is important to have a fluid market. Encouraging or supporting people into owner occupation, should they wish to move into it, is another part of the work that we are doing to respond to current housing pressures.

The numbers are challenging, but we are making strong progress in our work on the affordable housing supply programme. We continue to update the committee on the numbers, and we are focused on delivering 110,000 affordable homes by 2032.

From 23 March 2022 to 31 March 2026, 35,368 homes have been delivered towards the target. Seventy-seven per cent of those homes are for social rent, and since 2007 we have supported the delivery of more than 146,000 affordable homes, of which 104,000 have been for social rent.

We continuously check that we are maximising the use of our affordable housing supply programme budget and progressing with the spend on that. I can confirm that the budget for 2026-27 is £925 million, so I was £25 million short when I tried to remember earlier.

Childcare is an important example of why a policy has to work across Scotland. The ministers who will be leading the work on the expansion of childcare will ensure that the proposals fit the needs and challenges of rural and island Scotland. We are very aware of the challenges with access to childcare in some communities, which is why, as we look at the expansion, it will be exceptionally important, as in all areas of policy, that island communities impact assessments are completed and that there is a recognition of the challenges and the opportunities as the policy develops. There will be an expansion of the workforce and the development of new skills, which will bring opportunities. I am sure that the minister who is taking the work forward will be able to provide more detail to the member. We would also welcome her thoughts on how childcare could best be expanded.

We are seeing further development in the work that we are undertaking on the housing emergency action plan. The vast majority of that work has been completed, and the Government is continuing to work with housing organisations to look at the outcomes that they want, and to deliver a statement of intent. However, the challenges vary from place to place, which is why we have a place-based approach to the issue, as opposed to a national yes or no approach, because local authorities would expect the Government to be working in a more sophisticated fashion than that.

As Mark Griffin will appreciate, the different policies that I have mentioned are at different stages of development. For example, how we expand childcare will make a difference as to how many children and families we can lift out of poverty. As those policies are developed, the usual impact assessments will be undertaken. We obviously have the work that we undertake within my portfolio to bring together the assessments as part of our review process, which usually happens at the end of March. That is when we will bring them together within my portfolio, but each portfolio, when it presents policies, will be delivering its own equality impact assessments as the policies go through and will also assess their impact on poverty.

The whole Cabinet heard that point clearly when it met DPOs. We discussed the impact that ADP can have and the support that it can provide to allow a person to go to work or stay in work. That was an important part of the meeting.

Clearly, there are other aspects to the matter, such as the access to work scheme, which is a reserved scheme run by the UK Government. We heard clear evidence from DPOs that that system is not working and is actually preventing disabled people from getting into work timeously. We heard examples of that from the DPOs.

You are right to highlight the fact that disabled people point to ADP as something that can support them into employment or volunteering or that can help to ensure that they are not socially isolated. All those aspects are exceptionally important.

Thank you, convener. It is a pleasure to be here with the committee.

The First Minister’s programme for government sets out the key priorities for the Government and makes clear that our number one priority is eradicating child poverty. It is clear that, across Scotland, families continue to face pressures. That is why our approach is guided by two clear objectives: helping people with the cost of living today, and taking the longer-term action needed to tackle the root causes of poverty and inequality.

We are building on strong foundations, with rates of relative child poverty in Scotland standing at 6 percentage points below the United Kingdom average as a result of the action we have taken. The programme for government sets out how we are going further by delivering on whole family support, driving delivery of more warm and affordable homes, investing in new employment and skills opportunities, and transforming our childcare offer. We will also expand the £2 bus fare cap across Scotland by the end of this parliamentary session and will begin consulting on legislation to establish legal price ceilings on some essential food items.

Social security is, and will remain, integral to our approach. Scotland’s system is founded on dignity, fairness and respect, principles enshrined in the Social Security (Scotland) Act 2018 that was passed unanimously by Parliament. Social Security Scotland now provides support to almost two million people and offers help that is not available elsewhere in the UK. That investment is helping to keep 50,000 children out of relative poverty through the Scottish child payment, supporting disabled people with the additional costs they face, and supporting carers and helping pensioners to heat their homes this winter.

The level of investment required to fund our social security system in Scotland, beyond UK Government funding, is forecast to remain stable at around 1.7 per cent of the Scottish Government resource budget through to 2029-30. Across Government, we are investing more than £3.5 billion in measures to tackle the cost of living for households, including free prescriptions, free bus travel for more than 2.4 million people and our package of family payments. We are also progressing the work needed to increase the Scottish Child Payment to £40 for families with a child under one. Alongside our financial investment, we are strengthening prevention, supporting families before they reach crisis and bringing services together to better meet people’s needs.

Everyone should have access to a safe, warm and affordable home, and we are committed to increasing housing supply while focusing on the needs of those experiencing housing insecurity and homelessness. During this parliamentary session, we will invest up to £4.9 billion, including a record £4.1 billion of public sector funding, to support the delivery of 36,000 affordable homes and our wider all-tenure housing ambitions. That forms part of our commitment to deliver 110,000 affordable homes by 2032. We are also taking forward the work to establish more homes Scotland. From April next year, that new national delivery vehicle will begin bringing together funding, expertise and tools to accelerate housing delivery across all tenures.

Alongside increasing the housing supply, we are strengthening our focus on homelessness prevention. Our vision is for a Scotland where homelessness is ended for good and our new homelessness prevention legislation, which comes into force late in 2028, will make that everyone’s business.

Public services will work together to prevent homelessness through early intervention, with local authorities and other relevant bodies identifying housing risk and acting when there is a risk that a household could lose their home. Our £50 million homelessness prevention fund will support the shift from crisis to prevention, with the first £5 million already providing help to families in the private rented sector to afford their rent and to strengthen tenancy sustainability through registered social landlords in Glasgow. We will support local authorities to deliver a further 1,500 housing first tenancies over this parliamentary session for people with a history of rough sleeping or other complex needs.

The actions that we are taking on whole family support and homelessness are clear examples of public service reform in action, focusing on prevention, efficiency and the designing of services around people’s needs.

Although we have already made progress and will go further, the policy choices of the United Kingdom Government, including the freeze to the local housing allowance rates and the retention of the cruel benefit cap, are holding us back. Next month’s UK Government budget offers the opportunity to right those wrongs, and I hope that the chancellor will use that opportunity.

Through action on social security, child poverty, housing and homelessness prevention, as well as public service reform, we are improving outcomes across Scotland. I look forward to taking the committee’s questions on my portfolio.

I am happy to provide to the committee, in writing, the Government’s direction of travel on the Harris review in its entirety. We will get that to the committee.

We have been asking stakeholders in a number of ways what they want the agency to do for them. It is important to recognise that it will have an all-tenure focus, so it will not look only at social rented housing.

We are also keen to ensure that it will look at all the different parts of Scotland. People have been concerned that it could be a kind of central belt agency, but it will have a specific workstream on rural and island housing and how we can work together to assist with some of the challenges around that.

We are looking at aggregation and procurement efficiencies around standardisation, modern building techniques and efficiencies through scale, and another factor that the agency could assist with is the skills that we need. We have had some discussions about the agency helping our small and medium-sized enterprise builders, which are facing particular challenges, and they are often the construction firms that undertake work in rural and island areas. What can we do to support our smaller building and construction firms?

We also want to ensure that we have the skills that are required to support local authorities and developers to find their way through the process. What can we do to make the process easier in the first place? Developments will still have to go through planning, and local authorities and developers will still have to do everything that they need to do on that, but what can we do to ensure that we support people through that process? When a barrier is found, either by a local authority or by a developer, what can we do to unblock it?

What skills and convening powers should the agency have to drive investment? I have heard directly from private investors that they see it as a real opportunity to increase investment, and not only in affordable homes, and show again that Scotland is serious about housing investment coming to Scotland.

It is a responsibility for us all, at every stage of the system, to ask why a development is not happening and whether, if it is not happening because of a policy, we are comfortable with that. If the answer to that is yes, at a local and a national level, that is the right thing for us to do, because there cannot be development at all costs and anywhere. However, we need to give ourselves those challenges in different parts of the system, to make sure that we are getting the most from the opportunities that we have. I hope that that will allow us to have a much better, more open and honest relationship with developers about the opportunities and that it will provide encouragement for investment to come to Scotland, in the private sector and to support the affordable housing sector.