Chamber and committees

The Homelessness Prevention and Strategy Group, attended by the Minister for Local Government and Housing, agrees an annual workplan.

Its current priorities include addressing the future role of temporary accommodation for homeless households and establishing joint working between health and housing services to improve outcomes for those with more complex needs.

In the past year, it has made policy recommendations on how best to address these priorities and other areas, such as the continued development of housing options approaches to prevent homelessness.

The proportion of everyday journeys made by bike has risen since 2011 but there is still a long way to go in achieving our vision. The vision is important as it focusses minds and that is why we have reaffirmed it in our 3rd Cycling Action Plan for Scotland, published in January.

That's also why our Programme for Government commits us to maintain recent, record levels of funding for active travel for the rest of this Parliamentary term. This funding commitment is unique; and we look forward to working with local authorities and third sector organisations both to secure continued match-funding and to make further progress towards our vision.

I refer the Member to the answers to questions S5W-05274 and S5W-05275 on 13 December 2016. In assessing the appointment of verifiers from May 2017 I intend to use the criteria set out in the Operational Framework and underpinned by the revised Performance Framework.

All answers to written Parliamentary Questions are available on the Parliament's website, the search facility for which can be found at http://www.parliament.scot/parliamentarybusiness/28877.aspx.

It is intended that the conclusions of the consultation on building warrant fees will be published in early Spring 2017.

The Scottish Government’s business rates policies reflect the full range of its strategic priorities, including the importance of support for town centres.

The Scottish Government is aware of one local authority applying the power stemming from the Community Empowerment (Scotland) Act 2015 to reduce non-domestic rates in its area.

The Scottish Government has treated local government very fairly despite the cuts to the Scottish Budget from the UK Government.

I will set out details of the 2017-18 local government finance settlement tomorrow as part of my announcement on the Scottish Government's 2017-18 Draft Budget.

Local authorities are committed to the verification performance framework that was introduced in 2012 and are subject to regular monitoring by Scottish Government.

Scottish Government commissioned Pye Tait Consulting to undertake an ‘Evaluation of the performance of local authorities in their role as verifiers’ and their report was published in March 2016. The independent research concluded that:

“In summary, whilst there has been substantial progress and investment in delivering a high quality and customer-focused building standards service since the last re-appointment of local authorities in 2011, there is still work to do to create the conditions for strong performance across all 32 Councils.”

I refer the member to the answer to question S5W-05277 on 13 December 2016. All answers to written parliamentary questions are available on the Parliament’s website, the search facility for which can be found at: http://www.parliament.scot/parliamentarybusiness/28877.aspx.

Building Standards went live in August 2016. All local authorities are our partners in the eDevelopment programme and have received online applications through the eBuildingStandards.scot.

Each local authority has their own business processes and their own level of digitisation of services. The introduction of electronic applications has involved substantial business transformation and modernisation of building standards services. For most authorities, this has required process change and some skills development to support the transition from largely paper-based processes to digital application handling.

We are monitoring uptake by service users, both nationally and by each local authority area, on an on-going basis. To date uptake had been far higher than anticipated with over 11,000 forms and applications being submitted through the service during the first three months.

We have noted that there has been a short-term dip in performance standards during the transition within some local authority areas, however performance is expected to improve with increasing familiarity with the new processes.