Chamber and committees

I am in my final 10 seconds.

Ministers have 18 months left to try to turn the situation around. They should take responsibility and address this national emergency. There are ideas across the chamber. It is time for ministers to understand that they have failed and to help to turn the emergency around.

I move amendment S6M-14719.2, to insert at end:

“, following repeated calls from charities and local authorities to take urgent action to alleviate rising cases of homelessness and to tackle Scotland’s affordable housing shortage; notes that homelessness in Scotland has climbed to its worst level in more than a decade, with over 40,000 applications, and that, out of the 33,619 households assessed as homeless, there were over 15,000 children recorded; recognises that housing is a wholly devolved issue that the Scottish National Party (SNP) administration has mismanaged and exacerbated through rent controls and financial mismanagement, such as cutting £200 million from the housing budget; believes that by working together with developers, local authorities and landlords, more houses could be made available to buy and rent across Scotland; acknowledges that the SNP administration’s cladding remediation scheme has yet to complete work on any affected properties in Scotland and has only spent £9 million of the £97 million given by the UK Government to fix unsafe cladding; understands that the Scottish Government has failed to provide financial support for residents living in properties built with reinforced autoclaved aerated concrete (RAAC) that are at risk; notes that the SNP administration has presided over a collapse in the housebuilding sector, with a 17% decrease in all sector starts and completions in 2023-24; echoes the concerns expressed around land supply and the planning system, and that the Scottish Government has failed to produce a clear plan setting out how it will properly fund and implement the policies contained within the fourth National Planning Framework (NPF4), and calls on the Scottish Government to take responsibility by addressing this national emergency.”

I agree with Emma Roddick that the Housing (Scotland) Bill contains some good policies, but those policies already exist. People should not be in temporary accommodation for more than two weeks but, in many cases in Edinburgh, they are in such accommodation for two years. The Government is failing, and the Housing (Scotland) bill is sweeping all that failure into a new bill.

I know that the sharing of resources, co-location and so on are happening in many council areas, and Police Scotland has been looking at some of that, too. It is all about bringing your infrastructure together and looking at the associated costs. I just wonder whether the councils that Keith Yates and Bill Howat were associated with ever did that. If so, was it more about improving services, or was it just a way of making savings?

I was about to ask about your views on the integration of health and social care, but perhaps that is going too far. [Laughter.]

Finally—this is my million-dollar question—how would you like to see the Verity house agreement taken forward? We have touched on the council tax freeze, which was thrown into the conversation when the ink was not even dry on the agreement. Do witnesses have any views on why it is taking so long to implement or on what could be useful to take forward the fiscal framework between the Government and local authorities on the principles that are set out in the agreement?

We have heard a lot about consensus on allowing councils to do their own thing. On the flipside, most people do not accept a postcode lottery—most politicians in this room will have used that phrase in discussions about all portfolios that we have worked on. Do you all think that, because local decision making is more important, it is absolutely fine that we should have a postcode lottery?

What if I used the phrase “variation in services” instead?[Laughter.]

Does anyone else want to add anything?

I will start with Alison Payne. Bill Howat has been thrown in at the deep end a few times this morning already.

Does anyone else want to add anything?

Yes, we come to the easy topic of public service reform. The Accounts Commission has stated that

“councils ... urgently need to transform how they deliver services to become financially sustainable.”

How, in your opinion, should councils be looking to change how they deliver services? What opportunities does local government have to reduce costs and improve efficiency that it has not already looked at over the past number of years? Moreover, how can the Scottish Government actively support that transformation? As I have said, it is an easy topic.

I have a question in relation to the Christie commission report. As a committee, we have discussed its recommendations—and the changes in how local authorities operate that have come out of them—in many areas of our work, especially in relation to how local authorities are able to move towards a preventative model. Do you have any examples of that? Were the principles of Christie taken on board or not? That perhaps comes down to the difficulty of making the shift to prevention, because you do not have a separate budget to do that work.