Chamber and committees

The minister will know that deer are a natural part of the rainforest ecosystem, but the increasing number of deer and their mobility mean that they are one of the main barriers to rainforest restoration.

Given that the Scottish Government has committed to restoring Scotland’s rainforests, I ask the minister to reconsider his current position and to ensure that the deer management incentive scheme will be extended to key rainforest locations.

Just before Parliament returned from the summer recess, Fiona Hyslop announced that peak fares will be returning to Scotland’s railways. There was no debate—that was it. Well, here is the debate today, and Parliament can give its view. I hope that the Government listens.

Transport Scotland declared the trial of having a simpler and lower fare structure to have been unsuccessful, even though it led to more people using the trains. With fares having been raised by 9 per cent in April, passengers are to be hit with a double whammy in just 16 days, which will result in someone commuting between Edinburgh and Glasgow facing fares that are nearly double what they were at the start of the year.

When Fiona Hyslop faced a barrage of questions on the topic last week, all she had in her locker was a bizarre claim that people will pay less if they take advantage of season tickets or something called a flexipass, which friends tell me is fiendishly complicated. All that begs the question of the transport secretary, if there is money for her new complicated rail discount schemes, why does she not use some of it to scrap peak fares, which passengers overwhelmingly prefer?

My fare from East Kilbride to Edinburgh will rocket by 83.8 per cent. That is not a saving.

In March, the Associated Society of Locomotive Engineers and Firemen, the National Union of Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers, Unite the union, the Transport Salaried Staffs Association, the Scottish Trades Union Congress, Stop Climate Chaos Scotland, Transform Scotland, Friends of the Earth Scotland and the Just Transition Partnership issued a letter to Fiona Hyslop. It read:

“If you were to restore peak fares it would be a retrograde step that would send exactly the wrong message at the wrong time. We urge you to do the right thing, scrap peak fares permanently to help Scotland meet its climate targets”.

Mike Robinson of Stop Climate Chaos Scotland will be delighted that I am quoting him. In March, he said:

“If we are serious about tackling the climate crisis, along with reducing inequality and improving health and wellbeing, it’s a no-brainer that using public transport should be cheaper than driving.”

I would not want to leave out my good friend Kevin Lindsay of ASLEF, who, in May, said:

“Surely just at the time the Scottish Government has backtracked on its net zero targets they should be doing all they can to make our trains more affordable and reduce CO2 emissions from road travel, which their own policy is committed to.”

Not for the first time, Mr Lindsay is bang on the money, as is Alex Rowley, whose amendment we will support because it calls on the Government to reverse that retrograde step. The Government amendment does not do that, so it should be rejected.

I should say that I would have been happy to support the Greens’ amendment, too, had it been selected for debate, and I give them credit for their work in getting peak fares scrapped in the first place, although, of course, others were also calling for the same thing.

If we want to get greater numbers of people to use public transport instead of driving, we have to make it simple and affordable. However, the service also has to be reliable, and it has not been. Almost 6,000 ScotRail trains have been cancelled since April, and more than a quarter of a million pounds has been paid out in compensation for delayed or cancelled trains. Two million pounds has been paid out since the nationalisation that was supposed to make things better. We have an unreliable service, and now it is to be more expensive. If the policy was to get more people on to the roads, that would be genius.

Fiona Hyslop has not been able to explain how increasing fares will help the Scottish Government achieve its ambition of cutting car miles by a fifth by 2030. Last week, the dire programme for government warned darkly of “demand management” measures. People might be tempted to hop in the car rather than taking the train from now on. However, I say to drivers of Scotland, “Beware: the SNP is coming for you”. The SNP Government is just not saying what it has in store yet. Maybe it is road pricing. It will certainly coin it in on that, at this rate.

It may surprise members to know that I do not always agree with the RMT, but, last week, it produced a critique of the Government’s backward decision that was spot on. It said—quite rightly—that the evaluation of the trial looked at the impact on overall demand and did not assess the impact on demand in peak time only.

I start by apologising: first, to my colleagues for their having had to listen to me twice today; I spotted the ones who filed out of the chamber just now. I also apologise for the length of the motion, which is—to be frank—ludicrous. I have poked fun at other members for producing similar epics in the past, so I deserve whatever ridicule comes my way.

However, as members may recall, I had originally—well before recess—lodged a motion on tenement maintenance and the Scottish Law Commission’s consultation on the issue. That motion got immediate cross-party support and could have been debated, but, sadly, my whip’s office preferred other topics, so here we are.

There is a benefit to that delay, as it has allowed me to encompass retrofitting in the motion for debate today, which is very much linked to the original topic. I thank all those members who have signed the new, longer motion. There has always been cross-party interest in this important topic, which affects so many lives.

In March 2018, some of us, as MSPs, established the tenement maintenance working group to see what we could suggest to improve the condition of Scotland’s tenements. Around a third of tenement flats were built prior to 1919; another third were built between 1919 and 1982; and the final third were built after 1982. Many tenement flats were in a state of critical disrepair when we started our work, and they are probably worse now.

Members will know from their casework of the difficulties that people can face in getting work done to shared buildings. People can sometimes wait for years to get agreement to have essential work, such as fixing the roof, done. The existing tenement law is not strong enough to get us to a place where our housing stock is brought up to scratch, maintained and made fit for the future. Housing impacts on people’s lives: it can affect their health, both physical and mental, as well as their work, relationships and wellbeing. Living in poor housing is depressing, and no one should have to put up with it.

I accept that the subject of the debate may appear to some to be a little dry, but there is nothing that is more important for people than the condition of where they live. In May 2019, the working group made a number of recommendations: there should be compulsory owners associations, sinking funds and five-yearly inspections. We sent our “Working Group on Maintenance of Tenement Scheme Property—Final Recommendations Report” to the Scottish Government, and it produced a work plan. In May 2022, the Government asked the Scottish Law Commission to make recommendations, but only on the proposal for owners associations. That consultation ran until 1 August.

I will talk about that in a moment. As members will see, that has all taken a long time, and it has been frustrating, so in 2022, we reconvened the working group. The group has been one of the best examples that I can think of that has involved parties working together in the Parliament, with outside experts, for the common good. We really should see more of that kind of thing.

I thank the Scottish Law Commission for the work that it is doing, too. In particular, I thank Professor Frankie McCarthy, who is leading on that work, and who has become something of an expert on tenement law, if she was not one already. The Scottish Law Commission’s discussion paper explores proposals to replace the existing tenement management scheme with an owners association scheme. That would make owners associations compulsory for every tenement building in Scotland and give those associations the power to enter contracts and appoint managers. It would also introduce duties on those associations, including an obligation to organise meetings, approve budgets and standardise titles to ensure that maintenance rules are consistent across tenements.

In its paper, the Scottish Law Commission posed 79 questions. Those included questions on which powers should be made available to owners associations, who should be eligible to act as the manager of those bodies, and in which circumstances an owner should be able to challenge a majority decision. The results of that consultation—I believe that there was a good response to it—will inform the final recommendations, as well as a draft bill, which should be introduced by the Scottish Law Commission in 2026. That will be after the next Scottish Parliament elections, so it will be for whoever is elected then to take the matter forward. That will be no easy task, but it is essential.

That brings me to retrofitting. In order for Scotland to tackle climate change, it is critical that we reduce carbon emissions from existing buildings. Across the United Kingdom, 80 per cent of buildings that will be in use in 2050 have already been built, and those could represent 95 per cent of future built environment emissions. Reducing emissions to net zero will require retrofit work on up to 27 million domestic buildings and 2 million non-domestic buildings across the UK. According to the UK Climate Change Committee, £45 billion of investment will be needed for energy efficiency improvements in homes to 2035. Those are massive numbers.

The motion mentions the publication of the report, “Meeting Scotland’s Retrofit Challenge: solutions from the industry”, which was jointly published by 14 leading built environment sector organisations. That followed a retrofit round-table meeting that was convened at the Parliament in May last year. The report calls on the Government to

“Establish a Ministerial Oversight Group on Retrofit”,

stating that

“Retrofit is a complicated, cross-portfolio issue”

on which “relevant ministers” must be brought together. The report also says that the Scottish Government should

“Develop ... a long-term Retrofit Delivery Plan with a joined-up approach to funding, regulating and incentivising retrofit work across Scotland.”

The report goes on to list some items that the plan should address, stating that it should

“Establish long-term targets and measurement tools”

and consider

“the human resources ... necessary ... to undertake”

retrofit “projects properly”. That really means skills.

In addition, the report calls for “a fabric first approach”, which means that heat conservation repairs and improvements should be prioritised before any changes are made to heat generation, such as installing a heat pump. People should do work to their property before they put a heat pump in.

None of that is headline grabbing; housing tends not to be, until things go wrong.

In my foreword to the tenement maintenance working group’s final report, I wrote about the tragic death of an Australian, Christine Foster, who was killed by falling masonry while she was working in an Edinburgh city centre pub in June 2000. She was just 26. Her dad called on the Government to lay down tougher regulations to ensure safer construction in Scotland, but not much has happened since then, which is why the action that I have set out is essential. I look forward to hearing today from other members, and from the minister.

Does the minister agree with Ben Macpherson’s very good point that the heat in buildings bill needs to work with tenement law, so the Government needs to ensure that there is flexibility in the bill when such law comes along?

While I am on my feet, I thank everyone who has taken part in the debate. It is good to see such interest in the subject. If anyone wishes to be part of the tenement maintenance working group, please let me know.

I have one more question, which is about the digital inclusion alliance. Perhaps you could explain what on earth that is. While you are answering that, could you tell us why its launch did not go ahead? Perhaps you could go on to discuss the digital citizen unit, tell us what that is and why there has been slow progress on it since it was formed.

That is for the Government to answer; it is certainly not for you to say why the Government set up those bodies and did not do anything about them.

Yes, very briefly, because there was a mention of Near Me. I do not know if that is an app or a service—I will call it a service. Did you do any research on how many people actually have access to that?

You are right, Mike. The moment that people go online, they potentially expose themselves to risk. Although everyone in this room probably has access to digital, there might be some out there who think, “That’s too risky for me.”

I will move on. Earlier, we discussed the human rights issue. I am drawn to exhibit 2 in your report, where you give examples of areas in which human rights could be affected. My general question on that is whether you think that such rights are being impacted or, indeed, breached because people do not have access to digital services.

I will go back to the question about R100. I am a bit puzzled as to why you did not go into that a little more deeply, because it is surely key. If people do not have access to the internet, they are automatically digitally excluded. What was the reason behind your decision not to go into that?