 Fodd wrth i ni. I welcome to the ninth meeting of the Social Justice and Social Security committee. Apologies for receiving from Natalie Don. I am pleased to say that Evelyn Tweed is attending as her substitute. The first item of business today is a decision to take items 5 and 6 in private. Are we all agreed? We are agreed. Thank you. The next item is to take evidence on the statement of reasons lodged to a company the draft proposal on the Scottish Employment Injuries Advisory Council Bill, and for the committee to decide whether it is satisfied with the reasons given by the member for not consulting on the draft proposal. The committee is not required at this stage to give our views on the contents of the proposed bill, but I welcome to the meeting the member-in-charge of the bill proposal, Mark Griffin MSP, and Mary Dinsdale, senior assistant clerk from the Scottish Parliament's non-government bills unit. I refer members to paper 1 and invite Mark Griffin to make a short opening statement, please. Thank you, committee members, for giving me the opportunity to attend committee this morning just to talk through the statement of reasons accompanying my draft proposal. This bill proposal was in response to reports that thousands of people were suffering from long Covid, contracted at work, most likely the workers in health, social care, retail and public transport. We all depended on them, we applauded them throughout the course of the pandemic. In the absence of any action from the UK advisory council, a Scottish council could commission the research and come up with recommendations on how to support people who caught Covid, nurses, care workers, supermarket staff, who now suffer with long Covid and are no longer fit for work. When I looked further into the industrial injury system, it also became clear that it was completely out of date. It only really recognises injuries and illnesses for male workers in occupations that were common in the previous century, does not recognise modern occupations and completely fails female workers. Just 6.5 per cent of applications under the prescription route come from women. The purpose of this session is for the committee to decide whether to accept the statement of reasons or not and the detail that I have provided about why I consider it unnecessary to carry out a further consultation, but I want to give committee a flavour of the motives behind the proposed bill. I also note that you have received a letter from the Scottish Government, and I hope to work with the minister to overcome any policy differences, any issues with a timetable, but again, as the committee will know, nothing in the minister's letter is relevant to the statement of reasons today. On the statement of reasons, it is less than a year since the draft proposal was lodged in the consultation began. It is just six months since the consultation summary was lodged ahead of Parliament, rising for the election. That process was undertaken with the support of the non-government bills unit, and I just wanted to put on record my thanks for their support throughout that process. The terms of the draft proposal are broadly similar to the proposal that I lodged last November to establish a Scottish Employment Injuries Advisory Council, but I have improved the word on to sharpen up the proposal and reflect more precisely the purpose and role of the council that was consulted on and the outcome of that consultation process. There is nothing new that was not previously consulted on and on which views were sought. The additional terms confirmed firstly that the council will be a statutory body that was explicit throughout the consultation document, and at question 1 in the consultation questions. Secondly, that it will have the ability to commission its own research, again made clear in the aims of the bill and specifically consulted on at question 2. And third, to the finance membership, which was the focus of question 5. That consultation on the previous proposal ran for 12 weeks and received responses from a range of individuals and organisations from relevant sectors. I wrote to a number of academics, civil society and third sector organisations, professional associations and business organisations, as well as occupational safety campaigns and of course trade unions. I think that there is a breadth of responses from across those sectors providing new positive engagement in the social security space. The consultation was also publicised in comment pieces and blogs in the Herald and the daily record and on Reform Scotland's melting pot blog and media coverage, where I highlighted the issue raised in the consultation document that Covid-19 should be prescribed as an industrial disease, which was also raised with the First Minister in December. Close the gap also blogged about both the gaps in provision for women and the existing benefit, but also women's health and safety more widely and again talking about Covid-19 in the workplace. There were two events conducted on Facebook and via Zoom, which were hosted by the GMB's health and safety group, where their members and separate focus groups were arranged with women members who shared their experiences of health and safety in the workplace. The consultation closed in February of this year, and I do not believe that respondents' view will have changed since then, nor have there been any material changes to the case for an advisory council. The UK advisory council since then has refused to prescribe Covid-19, which perhaps strengthens the case for evolution of the benefit here, and the Scottish Government has not yet made any legislative commitments to establish a new council. Repeating the consultation for a process that has been carried out so recently would seem to me to be an unnecessary duplication of work and effort, including for those organisations and individuals who took the time to respond to the previous consultation. I hope that members will agree that further consultation is not necessary, but I am more than happy to expand on any of those points and take questions. Thank you very much indeed, Mr Griffin. I should at this stage thank all of those correspondence that have been in touch ahead of today's meeting. Certainly my inbox has been rather full of emails regarding this subject, so I thank all those who have been in touch and invite colleagues to ask any questions if there are any. Pam Duncan-Glancy, please. Thank you, convener, and thank you for setting that out, Mark. We've received a number of emails, as the conveners have already said, from people calling for Covid-19 to be made an industrial disease in the new benefit, and others have said that women make up just a fraction of the applicants and that the benefit must start to recognise women's injury and disease in the workplace. Your bill isn't actually proposing to do that, so could you tell the committee how it will contribute to dealing with those issues? I'm glad to hear that your inboxes are so full, but perhaps for some of your staff who are dealing with that. However, it shows the strength of feeling out there in support of those proposals, but Ms Duncan-Glancy is right that that proposal in itself won't change any of that, but it is the first step on that road. Like I said, this entitlement is fit for the 20th century, not the 21st century. Having an employment advisory council with expertise, people with lived experience of actual 21st century workplaces, with expertise from epidemiologists and other experts in the field, having a gender balance on that council to make sure that workplaces that are predominantly female are the illnesses and injuries in those workplaces are reflected, because I said in the opening statement that only 6.5 per cent of applicants come from women now. If there was an equality impact assessment done of this benefit today, then it would immediately say that this is entirely inappropriate. For me, all those aims and objectives are the end point, but the starting point is establishing the council with the expertise and the ability to commission the research to start to address those challenges. I note, Mr Griffin, from the minister's correspondence that it is the Government's intention to bring forward legislation to bring about employment injuries assistance. He suggests that this legislation is therefore unnecessary. How would you respond to that? The minister has set out that he intends to bring forward legislation to establish employment injuries assistance, and that is obviously something that the Government has to do through as a result of the Scotland Act and Social Security Act. However, what the minister has not said and the Government has not committed to is establishing an advisory council to scrutinise the regulations that the minister would lay on the new entitlement, and, crucially for me, to carry out research in advance of that title being established, because what we can do is either lift and replicate what I feel is a failed UK system that is completely out of date, or we can get the expertise on board early, set up the council, give advice to Government, scrutinise those regulations. I think that all parties in this Parliament and Government have accepted that independent statutory body to scrutinise social security legislation is right. That is why we have got the commission on social security. I am asking that we go a step further, that we create another body with the expertise to look in depth at the range of injuries and illnesses that we see in Scottish workplaces and then update that benefit so that it best serves the people of Scotland. You do not feel that that could be served or delivered in terms of scrutiny or advice provided through SCOSS? What I am proposing is that the membership of a Scottish Industrial Council would have representation from trade union membership. It would take primary legislation to change the role of SCOSS to mandate that they had trade union membership, that they had workers' lived experience of illness and injury at work. For me, and the committee will know as well that SCOSS already has a lot of work on their plate. For me, it is important that we create a new body to specifically look at the very detailed nature of employment injuries and assistance, but also to give it that research function to look at illnesses and emergencies across the developed world, to make sure that the Scottish system is fit for the 21st century and not for the last century. That is very helpful. I do not know if any colleagues have any further questions. My only other question would be before we actually take a decision on whether to allow you to proceed without having to re-consult would be what your intentions would be in terms of liaison with the Scottish Government before you reintroduce your bill. I raised the issue with the First Minister in the chamber. I received a sympathetic response. I raised it with the minister. I flagged the consultation response in my intention to bring forward legislation, but I appreciate that he was only two or three days into the job, certainly not being top of his list. I really do want to work with the minister. The minister set out what he feels are concerns about policy and timetable. I think that I have a track record through the BSL bill of working with the Government to make sure that there are no concerns on either side. I would want to open up discussions between the minister and his officials. Essentially, I have a joint working approach to make sure that that is right and that it works for the people of Scotland. The committee will now make a decision on whether it is satisfied by the statement of reasons. I thank you both for your time this morning. I invite Mr Griffin and Mary Dinsdale to please step away from the table while the committee reaches an agreement. Thank you very much. I will briefly suspend. Thank you very much indeed. As I mentioned, the committee is now required to make a decision on whether it is satisfied with the statement of reasons and that a further consultation on the proposal is not necessary. We are not required at this stage to give our views on the contents of the bill. The question is, is the committee satisfied by the statement of reasons? Yes, we are agreed. Thank you very much. The committee is satisfied by the statement of reasons. We will reflect that decision at the minute. We can now move on. We turn now to our next item of business, which is an evidence session on homelessness and rough sleeping. We are planning to hold some standalone evidence sessions on topics covered within the committee's remit to establish priorities for future work this session. This is the first of those focused sessions. Given that homelessness is also of interest to the local government, housing and planning committee, we invited members of that committee to join today's session in addition to Mr Briggs, who is a member of both committees. I have a great pleasure to welcome Elena Whitham, deputy convener of the local government, housing and planning committee, to our meeting. I hope that we can continue to do such joint committee scrutiny with where issues cross over during the course of this session. I also welcome to the meeting our panel who are joining us remotely. We have Maggie Brunies, chief executive of the Homeless Network Scotland, Lorna Campbell, financial wellbeing and revenues manager from Dumfries and Galloway Council, Lorraine McGrath, chief executive Simon Community Scotland, Dr Beth Watts, senior research fellow Harriet Watt University, Gordon McCrae, assistant director of Shelter Scotland. A few housekeeping points for colleagues in the room and those joining us remotely. Please allow broadcasting colleagues a few seconds to turn your microphones on before you start to speak. Witnesses can indicate with an R in the dialogue box in Bluejeans or simply with a show of hands if you wish to come in on a question and I'll do my best to monitor that as best I can. Don't feel you have to answer every single question if you have nothing new to add to what's already being said by others. That's okay. I also invite members to please direct their questions to particular panellists. We're very fortunate that we have such a wide panel before us today, but in the interests of time we have about an hour and a half. I would hope that we can direct our questions to individuals. I would now like to invite colleagues to ask questions and my first question is coming from Jeremy Balfour. Good morning to the panel. I wonder if I could maybe start this question and aim it at either Lorraine or Gordon. It's really just looking at the lessons learned in the last 18 months during the pandemic. Clearly there was a lot of work done around homelessness and we almost saw the end of people on the streets at all for that period last year. I suppose for me, and it's a quite a broad question, is what are the lessons we learned there and have we regressed, even since then, where the local authorities, the third sector, the Scottish Government? Or have we learned those lessons and are we now implementing them as we go forward? Maybe one of those, too. Maybe, Gordon, you could start and then over to Lorraine, if that's okay. Thank you. I think that what I would start by saying is what the pandemic showed is that greater resources, more staff, better joint working with the third sector and public bodies does actually work. From our perspective, looking at where the levels of homelessness are—not just rough sleeping but homelessness more general—exposed some of the things that we can do well but also exposed some of the things that we had maybe lost sight of. More people ended up in the hotel accommodation than were approaching the hostels prior to the pandemic. For us, it tells us a story that there was still a problem with some people being prepared to approach the perception of what the homelessness system to the local authority would enable for them. We have also seen, particularly in Glasgow, where Lorraine can talk more to the practical steps that were taken. A shelter in Scotland took Glasgow City Council to judicial reviews a couple of years ago on its continued beaches around what we call gatekeeping, the inability of some people to access the temporary accommodation system. We have seen that pretty much go away during the pandemic. That is a testament to the resources. We have seen new staff, new case work teams, new property becoming available. From our perspective, that is not a surprise. That was what we were pushing for the whole time. It is regrettable to get health pandemic to bring in that shift. The challenge now is that it is difficult to disaggregate exactly where that money has come from, how much of that money and staffing can be retained. We certainly look to the Scottish housing regulators' data to keep abreast of just what the sustainable level of resources needed in the city. Lorraine is far more involved in that on-the-ground day-to-day than in the shelter teams. Thanks, Gordon. Good morning, everybody. I delighted to be joining you this morning. I completely agree with everything that Gordon has just said. The pandemic presented an incredible opportunity. I am happy to say that the work that has been done in interagency liaison, in relation to rough sleeping in particular, and people with complex needs, came into its own in a remarkable way. A lot of that was about people feeling empowered at the front line, which was a key pillar of the front line work from HRSAG and the organisations involved in that. However, how do we actually put decision-making power into the hands of the people who have the best connections and the best relationships with people who experience the most extreme forms of homelessness, such as rough sleeping and other forms of destitution? The fact that we were able to mobilise so quickly was great, and the fact that we very quickly removed the institutional barriers and the professional hierarchy that often gets in the way, and the need for protocols and pathways and processes, and we focused on people and what those individuals and groups of people needed in that moment, and how we could respond in that moment more effectively, and how, collectively, I think quite remarkably, big parts of the system and individual leadership, local, operational level leadership, seeing that opportunity to act and seeing that opportunity to do things that we always knew was possible, and we always knew what was important to the people we supported, but for one reason or another, for institutional reasons, system barriers, all of that, we'd never been able to make happen. However, the circumstances of the pandemic gave power to that decision making and that power to that action, and people seen opportunity rather than challenging risk and took those opportunities with people. We are, of course, talking about the most extreme forms of homelessness here in terms of rough sleeping, which tends to be the focus of discussions, but there was a lot of other activity around people who had lower level needs going on in the background with the councils as well in terms of being able to rapidly access accommodation and stay safe. A critical part of that was being able to support people who were perceived to have no recourse to public funds to respond to that with accommodation and get them into places of safety. As a result of that, we built a much greater understanding of their needs through an ability to take a much more intensive case management because they were in stable accommodation, where they were able to engage with staff and other services. What stayed in place is a lot of that front-line empowerment and a lot of those relationships that were formed during those highly pressured periods that have been sustained. There is a little bit of bureaucracy starting to creep back in. Of course, there is. People's on-day jobs are taking more priority again, rather than being able to invest in working with their colleagues across the sector. However, I would say that it has contributed heavily to our ability to keep the numbers of rough sleepers low. In both cities, there is a collective endeavour around a person, not a problem, not a number of people, not a system challenge, not a resource challenge, but what that person's circumstances are and what we can do collectively to make a difference to that person's circumstances and everybody else that comes along. That still remains one of the most powerful drivers, along with the additional resources that are obviously in reference within the cities. Thank you very much, convener, for inviting us to come from the local government committee today to give evidence. Before I start, I would like to say to former colleagues on the evidence panel this morning, whom I work closely with in terms of my causal housing spokesperson lead during the pandemic, thank you very much for all the hard work. In listening to both Gordon and Lorraine there, I am struck by the fact that it was a collective endeavour. My grave concern that we have at this moment is about whether that true multi-agency working that we saw and the step change, the removal of those institutional barriers, whether we start to slip back on that. It is of a concern to hear Lorraine say that some bureaucracy is starting to creep back in. My question is, are we likely to see increases in terms of homelessness presentations with changes that are coming down the line? If we think about the end of furlough, the end of the longer notice periods and the private rented sector, how can we make sure that we don't see the bureaucracy creep back in so that we start to see bad results for people again as they are presenting to councils? If I can maybe direct that at Maggie first and then perhaps Gordon, thank you. Good morning, everyone. Thanks, Elena. Good to see you. Thank you, committee, for taking evidence on homelessness and actually just considering this issue among your early priorities. It's obviously very important to each of us here. I'm just starting to answer that question. I can probably just remind everybody of what some of the key challenges were in homelessness before the pandemic, because it really matters in terms of understanding what's going to happen next. As concisely as I can, broadly in four parts are challenges where, first of all, making sure that we have the supply and access to housing and the places that people really want to live. Secondly, a system that's characterised by an over-reliance on temporary accommodation, and particularly the length of time that people see there. Of course, not all of that is suitable. Thirdly, about changing the conditions that create homelessness, poverty reduction especially as a primary driver of homelessness, as we all know. While laws to prevent homelessness are absolutely vital and they are, the fundamental shift in homelessness will happen much further upstream. I think that, finally, that key challenge is what is sometimes called the implementation gap, but we have great policy and legislation on housing and homelessness in Scotland. We really do, but making sure that that policy delivers on the ground for every person in the way that it was intended is the key challenge going forward. That, of course, needs more focus and implementation and just more value given, I think, to stay in the course. Particularly that all matters, because the pandemic has magnified all of that. In addition to the media and public health risks, the pandemic has created the same conditions that create homelessness, which gets to Eleanor's point. Thinking about what might be around the corner and what is ahead of us, we know that homelessness is always being for global events, life sessions and pandemics. What we expect, I think, is mostly for homelessness to be a bit of a lagging indicator of this pandemic, that we may not see it immediately. Indeed, the most recent statutory count of homelessness showed a slight reduction in what we would tend to see as an increase in homelessness a bit further down the road. I guess that we will start to experience those money worries, the pressures on housing, on employment, the end of furlough and all those other factors that will contribute to housing and security. Exactly what we need and what has been successful in both the last period is that big government leadership that we have seen that has truly worked. It is a national endeavour, thinking about housing, health and home all together, making sure that there is no rollback on that. It is a cute collaboration that happened over the period that Lorraine just described, because that too works. We need things like housing first at the helm to address just as serious the most multiple edges advantages and to do that first. I think that what we would say is that we should anticipate our rise in homeless presentations. We do not put too much stock on the homelessness stats for last year, because clearly we had an effective evictions back. One of the principal places from which people who make homeless applications were produced a house at the private rented sector. There is a little bit of a false perspective to put at the levels of homelessness that were at the point at which furlough ended, at which the courts reopened. We certainly see that, along with the cost of living crisis, continuing increasingly precarious nature of employment, the structural reasons for homelessness are important. When we talk about homelessness, we are talking about statutory homelessness, whether we need to understand the levels of housing homelessness, but Scotland's system is based on rights and duties based on the statutory framework. Struck by some of the evidence, especially from the crisis homeless monitor and elsewhere, we had failed to make a real dent in homelessness. Despite the very positive initiatives around ending homelessness together, housing first and many different individual initiatives, we were not seeing a significant reduction. In fact, homelessness was on the rise and was trending up two years in a row before the pandemic. Sometimes we just need to remind ourselves the scale of the challenge that we face. First, the thing is absolutely the acute end of the homelessness system, but it is in numerical terms the rails of the small proportion of the size of the problem. I would absolutely endorse Maggie's comment about the implementation gap. We now have a moment to reflect on how we get a whole systems approach to tackling the homelessness problem in Scotland. We absolutely endorse models like housing first and extending prevention duties to other public bodies, but we also have to take a step back and recognise that there has been a 75 per cent increase over the past six years of children in temporary accommodation, more than 7,000 children in temporary accommodation. We know the harm that causes to their life opportunities. We need to avoid deep diving into one narrow piece of the homelessness sector and take that broader role. Some of the elements of the ending homelessness together on your poll have not yet been progressed, such as the gender analysis of the system, the embedding of stronger ability to get recourse on your rights, whether they are acquired or denied. As difficult as it is, we need to approach the issues of homelessness with equal energy across the piece. We are concerned that, if we only focus in one area, we have an unintended consequence in another. The rise in children in temporary accommodation is a direct result of a focus solely on the rough sleeping and more acute end, as we see people who are not even counted when we talk about things like co-homes, which is a statistical model, not a legal model, explicitly excludes people who are in long-term temporary accommodation. Those are some of the consequences. We need, as I said, a whole-systems approach. We think that there are some really good pillars of what that will take, better rights, but ultimately more homes. The more homes, but we cannot achieve housing first if there are not the tenancies for people to move into. We can achieve rapid rehousing if there are not the homes for people to access. However, we do not want to go backwards into forms of priority needs, whereas some groups are deemed to be more important than others simply because of a set of circumstances. We support the needs-based analysis that looks at people who are making presentations at that time. The structural need for more resources for more homes is the lesson to learn from the pandemic. When we put the money in, when we put the energy in, when the Scottish Government took a leadership role, which was one thing that we did not touch on earlier, the Scottish ministers took a leadership role in the response to the pandemic, putting cash directly into flood sector bodies to do that immediate response. Those things make a difference, and we are very keen that through the working committee and through forums such as the Homes as Policy Strategy Group that we are able to continue that progress. Thank you, Gordon. Beth, please. I hope that you can hear me now. There is absolutely no doubt that there is a really acute concern among local authorities in particular that we will see that rise in homelessness, and we need to take that very seriously. From a range of sources, there is a reason to be somewhat optimistic. The lesson from international, UK-wide homelessness policy and trends is that the negative impacts of the economy on homelessness are inevitable. There is nothing necessary about them, and policy plays an extremely important role in breaking that link between those economic factors and homelessness rising. I wanted to draw attention to working in the monitors, projecting trends in homelessness over various time horizons, and to pull out a few core messages from that. The core message really is that some of the things that can make the most difference to stabilising and substantially reducing homelessness in Scotland are within the hands of Scottish Government and Scottish Parliament. There are some that would help that are out of our hands, but the key ones that can make a big dent are within the hands of Scottish Government and Scottish Parliament. Moreover, there are things that are already in the ending homelessness together action plan. I really want to underline that the core focus should be on seeing that plan through over a longer time horizon than the initial five years that was understandably the focus. Rapid rehousing into settled housing, whether that is social housing or whether that is appropriate private sector housing, is projected to make a huge difference on numbers in both the short and medium term. In addition to maximising prevention, there is a huge amount more that can be done in Scotland to maximise the gains from homelessness prevention, which I hope will go on to talk about. I will leave it there. Thank you very much indeed, Beth. Elin, have you got a supplementary there? Actually, it's just more of a winding up comment on that section from my question. I think that we need to put a marker down on the implementation gap of policy. I think that that's something that we have to recognise fully because we do have, as Gordon and others have said, world-leading legislation and rights and responsibilities that we have in Scotland. I think that we have to recognise that the cross-committee work is truly important because within my committee of local government housing and planning, if we think about the housing system as a whole, the housing system really has to come together to respond to that, to make sure that we have the supply of houses to be able to respond to any increase in homelessness or indeed the homelessness that we're seeing at the moment. That's going to be fundamental, but I also think that the national planning framework 4 is going to be vital for that, because we have to get that right, too. So, just to put the marker down with this commission on yourself, convener, that we do that cross-work going forward. Thank you. Thank you very much, Ms Whitham. Pam Duncan Glancy, you had indicated you wanted to come in here as well. Thank you, convener. Good morning to all of the panel and thank you for your testimony so far. I just wanted to ask a quick question on the temporary accommodation and also on evictions, because we touched on them. There's a large number, as we all know, of children in temporary accommodation. Could you say a bit about what we could do to try and move them rapidly, I think, as it's being described, so that we could get them into more settled accommodation by Christmas? Would that even be possible? I'd like to think so, but I'd be keen to hear how we could do that. The other point from the conversation that we've just had is around evictions and the changing of the eviction ban. It was rightly pointed out that that had a serious impact on the numbers. Can you talk about any concerns that you have about the lifting of that ban and the impact that that could have on homelessness going forward? I want to direct that, too. I promise that I'd remember to do that, as well. Can you comment on that, Dr Watts, and Maggie, please? I recognise the very important story that Gordon tells about the high numbers of children in temporary accommodation and that that absolutely should be a core concern for us. I want to reflect on the variability of temporary accommodation. Gordon mentioned our core homelessness lens on homelessness, which is one way of looking at homelessness, which is broader than rough sleeping and overlapping with statutory homelessness. The reason we do that is because we think that it's important to say that people in temporary accommodation can be in a range of better or worse circumstances. A few years ago, I did a study on temporary accommodation and focusing in on families with children, it was very clear that some of those families were in an okay situation. They were in self-contained furnished properties in a location that they were okay with near the children's school. Some of them were not. They were extremely overcrowded in accommodation that was really, really unsuitable and damaging their lives in a number of ways. I want to say that, in terms of prioritisation, there are people with very different experiences there. We should be focused on getting all of them out of temporary accommodation, but we should maintain that nuance in looking at the different situations that people are in. I absolutely believe that there are things that we could do in the very short term. You talk about pre-Christmas and that might be a conversation for local authorities and landlords more than me, but certainly the lesson from the pandemic is that we can make very big substantial differences in homelessness very quickly. You are right to highlight that rapid rehousing should be the focus there. Prioritising households in temporary accommodation and homeless households or rapid rehousing into social housing and private rented sector accommodation that is appropriate could achieve that very, very quickly. On the evictions ban, I think that the key thing here is that the phasing out of that evictions ban is slow and managed. People are not evicted overnight, but it is a long process. That gives an opportunity for extremely good and intensive advice to be given for landlords to really take responsibility for ensuring that evictions are only used when necessary and do not result in homelessness. Often, in those situations, we can see homelessness prevention activity working really well, either enabling that household to stay in that accommodation or in securing alternative appropriate accommodation for them before the eviction happens. There is a real need to emphasise the policy control that we continue to have over the impacts of the phasing out of that evictions ban. Thank you very much indeed, Dr Watts. Maggie, please. Can you hear us? Yes, I can see the moment when it's in the air. First of all, on the point of temporary accommodation and thanks, Pam, it is such an important point. As I said earlier, it is one of the chief concerns in the homelessness system overall. We have a system that is characterised by households, including families with children spending far too long in temporary accommodation and other individuals staying at unsuitable temporary accommodation. That is a huge priority for those of us who are working in this sector. At the start of the pandemic, we almost ended off sleeping and closed communal night shelters by opening up hotel rooms and by local authorities finding access to other types of temporary accommodation. In that moment, we are all on board. It is fair to say that any reflection on that period would probably all say the same result of those actions. We are talking about 13,000 households in temporary accommodation. That is up significantly on the year before. I think that there was a period early on in the pandemic that peaked right up at 14,000 households, which is the most ever. That is already in a country that has an overaligned temporary accommodation as a tool to respond to homelessness. It is a chief concern, but the fact is that, over the course of the pandemic and given that we are still in the pandemic months, local authorities are already starting to demonstrate a bit of reduction in the use of temporary accommodation from that peak to where we are now shows, first of all, that progress has been done, but progress can also be made on that. If they are in policy and practical decisions are made and we are seeing some evidence of that at a local level. I feel very supportive of that, which was set out clearly in the homelessness monitor. One of the key tools of reducing homelessness going forward and the reliance in temporary accommodation is simply increasing the proportion of lets that social housing providers and other providers make to homeless households. It is one of the most simple but effective mechanisms that we can put in place to just get the system moving faster and people spending less time in temporary accommodation and less of their lives in limbo, which of course is what is happening. The biggest challenges around temporary accommodation, which you would expect would be the cities, are also the areas that will be finding the unsuitable accommodation order and the terms contained within that in the challenging one. The principle of the unsuitable accommodation order is such an important one that I dare that if an accommodation is not good enough for some of us, then it is not good enough for any of us. It is absolutely important for us to hold on to. I think that, in fact, for many of us it was the final piece in that jigsaw of creating a universal set of rights to people who are experiencing homelessness. It is incredibly important and I know that everybody is on board with it. The reality, to the point before, is that there is a minority of local authorities that are just not going to be able to meet the terms of that. I think that fundamentally what we need to recognise is that those areas, with the greatest challenges around temporary accommodation overall and the related use of unsuitable temporary accommodation, do not really need the most support. That support will need to come from national government, as well as housing providers in the area and the range of housing health and repair support providers that can help with that move on. Finally, just a quick point on the point of addiction. Our organisation, alongside a wider collective of organisations around 35 organisations under a number ever called Everyone Home, which is third in academic sector organisations that mobilised at the start of the pandemic. One of our priorities is about seeing no evictions into homelessness at all, so understanding that there are circumstances where addiction can not be prevented, particularly in the cases of antisocial in behaviour or others. There can be no grounds where we can expend people to leave a household into no roof at all, and there is much more that can be done around preventing that and just committing to that as a principle in national policy terms, as well as what happens locally. One of the things that we hear in terms of housing associations and their position around about eviction is that, on the point of rent areas, eviction would never be started if somebody in a rent area had a payment plan with the housing association and were meeting the terms of it, and there would be some additional support around that as well. What a number of us want to do is support that. I think that we probably have some more evidence that that is always the case in all areas and across all housing associations, but absolutely to provide more tools and support to enable housing associations to stick to that as a principle because it is a rent one. Thank you very much indeed, Maggie. As we are talking about prevention, I would like to bring in Lorna Campbell to talk about the work that has been done in the local authority setting, particularly around financial resilience and touching the points that were made there by Maggie about rent arrears and ensuring that people have financial resilience in order to try to avoid falling into homelessness. Lorna, could you touch on those areas from a local authority perspective, please? Good morning, everybody. I will talk from a local perspective in Dumfries and Galloway about probably what I will say is what I will apply across most local authorities. We have been focused for, obviously, prior to the pandemic quite heavily on the prevention side and particularly around rent arrears. At the start of the pandemic, we did work very closely with our housing associations, because what I should say is that Dumfries and Galloway is a stocked transit authority, so we do not have our own housing stock, but we do work very closely with our main housing provider and all the other housing associations, particularly with tenants who have rent arrears and are struggling financially and put additional supports in there to work with those teams to look at areas such as benefit maximisation, underlying reasons, referrals into employability schemes, if that was appropriate. Obviously, recently we have had the addition of the Covid tenant support grant, which has been given to local authorities from the beginning of September. We have been working again with housing associations but also private sector landlords to highlight any tenants that do have arrears, particularly around Covid, and working with those landlords and tenants to get engagement and work with them to address their arrears. I think that picking up the comments from earlier about the potential evictions and the current economic climate with the ending of furlough and the changes to things like universal credit and the other economic situations that are putting a squeeze on people with low incomes. At the moment, we are not seeing a rise in evictions, and I think that it has already been explained that there is going to be a time lag before that actually started to see almost presentations because of that, but what we are seeing as local authorities is increased demands for things like discretionary housing payments, Scottish welfare funds, which are probably a precursor to that, people are beginning to struggle and that these eventually are going to lead to people struggling with their tenancies, but because we have those contacts already in place, there is very much a cross-sector approach with our housing associations, with our sector citizens advice, to actually get support in as early as possible to help tenants to work with these agencies to help address any issues that they may have, and that eventually obviously prevents homelessness occurring. Thank you very much indeed, Lona. Before I bring Miles Briggs in, I know that Gordon McRae would like to come in again at this stage, Gordon. Thank you, just very briefly. I wanted to sort of directly address the question that was raised about what could be done now. Maggie mentioned the unsuitable accommodation orders, which have been extended to all households. Some of them we really support was long overdue and much delayed, but it did not attract any additional, real additional funding for local authorities to implement it. One of the things that we do need to look at are more responsibilities being placed on local authorities from central government without additional capacity and resource coming in to meet that new goal. I would point out that there are probably seven local authorities that are going to be in breach from day one or are already in breach of those new duties. It is important that we recognise that those are legal rights, and the Shells of Scotland may certainly have cases every day where we are defending the rights of people who have been denied suitable temporary accommodation. It is a way in which we seem to tolerate breaches of legal duties in the homelessness system that we would not tolerate in other areas. It may be unfathomable to imagine a local authority denying a child the right to education at a place at school, but we routinely, before the pandemic and post-pandemic, have local authorities breaching their legal duties to provide suitable temporary accommodation. That is why we are trying to shift the discussion away from how we do the best with what we have within the housing and homelessness sector to how we create the structural changes that are required. We do not accept that local authorities have to focus on reducing harm with an ever-reducing budget. There have been small amounts of money, £8 million and £50 million over the next few years, but if there is one thing that can be done, it is to connect resources to new policy requirements and duties from here on out. Thank you, convener, and good morning to the panel. Thanks for joining us this morning. I wanted to ask about temporary accommodation for your input into trends around the individuals that we are talking about. Findings from the hard edges research at Harriet Watt University has showed the complex needs of individuals who often see them falling through the gaps of services. I know from my five years in MSP trying to assist people often—those are ex-military, people with learning disability issues, people who have drug and alcohol problems. I wondered whether, in terms of individuals who seem to be constantly in temporary accommodation by councils, if you had any evidence that you could provide to the committee on that. Whether or not different models, for example supported living models, is something that we should really be trying to look at, where individuals cannot necessarily hold down a tenancy. I wondered if we could have your views on that. Having referenced the research, I should maybe bring in Beth to start. Hi, thank you. Great question. I want to make a preliminary point, and then I'll come to the question of solutions. The preliminary point is that the group that you referred to is the focus of that hard edges research. They're experiencing a huge amount of challenges anyway, and I wanted to emphasise that some of the forms of temporary accommodation they have access to and it's understandable why, within the current system, local authorities are putting them in those forms of accommodation, hostels and bed and breakfast. Those can exacerbate the situation. Scotland should be very, very proud of its legal rights on homelessness. It should be very proud of having rights to temporary accommodation for people experiencing homelessness, but there are too many people in temporary accommodation and it isn't fit for purpose, and it especially isn't fit for purpose for exactly this group that you highlight miles. I wanted to emphasise that. The hard edges report, one of the key messages for that, was that local authority housing and homelessness departments really end up carrying the can for this group when this group's needs are so much broader than housing and homelessness, and it's absolutely essential in moving forward that we recognise that. That is an absolutely key principle of the prevention review group recommendations on bringing other public sector bodies to the table to really contribute to that, so I just wanted to emphasise that. In terms of the actual housing solutions, I want to make two points and I'd really recommend that you come to Maggie after me on this. Housing first, which I'm sure members of the committee are familiar with to some extent, is a key solution for the majority of this group. It's a hugely well-respected set of evidence demonstrating that even people with those very high levels of complex needs can function and indeed flourish in self-contained housing if the support is right, if the wraparound support that they need is right. There are, though, a very small subgroup of that group of people who need something else, and I'm really delighted to have been involved in some work headed up by Homeless Network Scotland to think about the role of supported accommodation for those whom housing first doesn't work for, and there's a few brilliant publications that have come out that have really set a policy direction for that, and it is about foreign cluster models, so maintaining the principles of self-contained accommodation, but making sure that that support is available on-site in an even more intensive way for the people who need it. I think that this has been a gap in the sort of amazing policymaking that's been happening in Scotland on homelessness over the last few years, so it would be really nice to square that circle. Any further? We can maybe bring Maggie in, and specifically on that point that you raised, Beth, one of the issues that I think is important to know, and we've already heard that nine local authorities are likely to be in breach, or at least seven will be in breach, of the unsuitable accommodation order, but what accommodation is necessarily out there for these individuals we're talking about? I know on a visit I undertook last Friday in my own region that there's over 50 people in Edinburgh with alcoholic brain damage who are currently on waiting lists to try to get into supported living, so that accommodation doesn't necessarily seem to be in existence currently, and also when we look at the support people need, wraparound care is expensive and the workforce isn't necessarily there, so I just wondered, and I'll maybe come on to Maggie now, what really does this committee need to suggest that a Government needs to be put in place for this individual group? My experience is that people often end up just pinging around services, sadly, so I wondered in terms of your expert opinion what you think could be a solution for that cohort of clients we're talking about, Maggie, and on that note, we've lost you. Okay, can people hear me? Yes. Yes, thank you, so it's something for those there. I've got a feeling it was me. Okay, so I'll answer the question I think I was being asked. I'm a very starting point again, similar to Beth, it's just a stage because it's important that most of us, with the right support, can manage our own home, and even that kind of hard edges in groups that we're talking about. When we're talking about, now that you've described, people that you see that aren't getting the type of response that they need, and if we can consider at least some of that, is about housing first being the right model, but not yet being a sufficient capacity to reach everybody that needs it. What we know, for example, through the Pathfinder today, is that we're now over 550 people have accessed their own tendency, and high numbers of people are sustaining that successfully. That is a drop in the ocean in terms of some of the model to forecasting that's been done around the level of demand for housing first going forward, and the type of numbers that we're talking about are about three and a half thousand people across the country a year. Over the next 10 years is the level of housing first that we need to meet to enable everybody to access that type of support and service. You can see that we are some distance away from reaching that. One of my key points about housing first is in recognising that, while we have a majority of local authorities now committed—I mean, a significant majority committed to housing first and, in fact, already delivering housing first, that the types of numbers and forecasts around housing first are far too modest, and we really need to be thinking much bigger. Now, with all that said, what we do know from housing first is that it was explained in the interim evaluation that was an independent evaluation undertaken by colleagues at Herriot-Watt University is that there are some circumstances where housing first doesn't work, and that that is generally where people just don't have the capacity to understand the terms of tenancy agreement. Secondly, where their level of health and support care is just beyond what can be provided with an independent needs due tenancy, and thirdly, people that just don't want that, and it's not that they would always not want their own place, but whatever their circumstances are, they don't want that right now. The piece of research that's just published last month is one that explored those circumstances. The three circumstances where housing first isn't going to work for the groups that we're talking about, and then what is it that's needed? This was a significant piece of research and also a policy position that was fine-tuned by a research advisory group that had a number of key partners on it, including national and local government, business port enabling unit providers of supported housing and other partners. What, in summary, the recommendations of that research and the policy position are setting out is a direction of travel towards supported housing, being a settled housing option for a small number of people that want or need 24-hour support that is on-site and available to them is currently used in a temporary reform, and what we want to do is push it toward a settled housing response, because for some people that small group of people that we're talking about, that's exactly what's needed, that that should be homely, that should fit all national policy objectives around about independent living, and that, as far as possible, that should be not labelled as a homeless accommodation because it should be somebody's home. So, if we can look at models that are already provided in health and social care and coding cluster at independent living places, that's exactly the type of model that we should be inspiring to as a response to homelessness as well. Some of the modelling that we've done around about scale suggests that the scale of need for that type of supported housing with on-site support is between two to five per cent of the number of people that make a housing a homeless application every year, so that's across the country, so that's somewhere between 400 and a 13 hundred people, so we really are talking about a small number of people, but it's incredibly important that people just need that better response miles that they've violated. Can I bring in Lorraine McGrath at this stage as well? I would absolutely endorse everything that has been said by Beth and Maggie there, and I think the start point is absolutely to see people and to see people in a way that they are able to achieve equity of access to health and social care services because one of the big challenges that we have even with the success of housing first is that it still sits very much within a housing and homelessness agenda rather than a health and wellbeing agenda. The issues, just as you outlined in the start of the discussion here, are much wider than their homelessness circumstance. There are people with significant complex needs, and that is a group that makes up the majority of the people that we support across the country on an on-going basis. We know those people by name, by circumstance that you are referring to, particularly in Glasgow and Edinburgh. We know them, we know their histories, we know their engagement and we have relationships with them, but one of the challenges that we've got is being able to achieve equity of access for them for the whole health and social care system to address that range of needs. You mentioned alcohol-related brain damage, for instance. There are a lot of people perceived to have that level of cognitive impairment but who have not easily been able to access proper neuropsych assessments to get to a place of understanding of what their actual needs are. Is the barriers to access from a homelessness perspective to the other parts of the health and social care system significant, particularly around trauma response services, mental health services, the links between mental health and addictions and recovery services? All of those issues become barriers to people being able to move out with that temporary accommodation bounce about from service to service because they either struggle to engage with what is available to them or what is available to them as providing enough safety and structuring security. That becomes a problem for the service provider. The fact that we don't have an integrated model in most areas where housing first services, planned services sit out with health and social care structures is not at that level of integration yet. Obviously, an opportunity abounds right in front of us right now with the development of the national care service to address that and to create equity of access and equity of status as well because there is no way that we would consider someone in a, let's say, a forensic learning disability supported accommodation service as homeless because it's not their tendency. We would not consider someone in older residential care as homeless but we do consider someone in a homeless supported accommodation project to still be homeless even if they are there for 12 months plus, two years plus, three years plus as they rebuild their lives and recover from all of the harms that they've experienced that's led up to their homelessness and then the further harms that they've experienced during their experience with homelessness. It's one of the things that we need to scale back and actually see the person and see them as someone with complex needs and complex issues, one of which happens to be homelessness. There is a housing need there and that housing needs to be focused very much on that individual person circumstance. We know from work that we've done in Glasgow and from a multi-agency partnership that was brought together in Glasgow called the CAN initiative that focused on this very group in Glasgow that when we do that and when we work collectively address and to place that person right at the centre of that and what will work best for them based on who knows them best, who has the greatest trusted relationship with them, who has the opportunity to connect with that person from a relationship first point of view, then we can absolutely support that person to transform their lives and some of the stories that are connected with that are just off the scale, you know, spine tingling incredible in terms of the impacts that people have been able to achieve for themselves with the right wraparound support. The last point that I'd like to make is that we've yet to get that full system wraparound around housing first in most areas. It does still lie with housing homelessness and largely the third sector as well and we're doing a great job, but we can do better in terms of scale, in terms of improvements in people's well-being within the housing first service development and if we can get that equity of access for people who are transitioning into settled living through the homelessness route. Thank you very much. Indeed, Llorraine, I'd now like to bring in Foisal Childry, please, followed by Jeremy Balfour. Thank you, convener. I think the question probably towards Beth, do you think the rapid rehousing transition plans are resourced well enough? I don't, but I want to preface that no by saying that rapid rehousing transition plans are the right tool and the right mechanism and that we have seen progress already with the implementation of rapid rehousing transition. We have seen more than half of local authorities change their social housing allocation policies in line with the principles of those plans. We have seen all local authorities produce such plans in ways that really reflect that they understand and are on board with the vision. We have seen increases in flipping the use of temporary accommodation where it is appropriate to do so. All of that is a really, really good start. The pandemic hit at a time when we may have been about to see an acceleration in the implementation and impact of those plans and it made it harder. As a side note, local authorities also found rapid rehousing transition plans useful in guiding their response to the pandemic, but there is no doubt that the pandemic slowed that progress. In addition to that, the vision of transformation outlined in the detail in the ending homelessness together action plan and thought to be implemented through rapid rehousing transition plans is a big one. It was always going to be the case that that transition would take more than five years, which it will do. This is a longer-term vision. It is the right vision. What is absolutely essential now is that we see it through and that requires more resource. There is absolutely no doubt about that. It is very clear from initial plans what local authorities asked for and what they were asking for funding to contribute to. Those were all in line with the principles and the funding that was allocated fell short. That was recognised and various boosts to that funding were given. We found in the Homelessness Monitor that they were extremely highly valued by local authorities who want to see that vision through and are grateful for any further resource. They are not adequately resourced. They are the right tool. We need that resourcing and that longer-term vision to extend beyond 2023. It would be a real tragedy if having done so much incredible work in outlining the plan and the vision progress slipped and we did not see through on that. I can make one final historical brief point. In the 2000s Scotland went through a massive transition in its response to homelessness that involved phasing out the priority need criterion, which blocked a lot of people from accessing the full right to rehousing that virtually all homeless households now have access to. That transition process took a decade. It was the right one and it was a good one, and that transition was achieved successfully. However, it was less multifaceted and it was less challenging. It was less wide in scope than the transformation that Scotland is currently trying to pursue on homelessness. We have to see that as both achievable but achievable in the longer-term. That is my answer. I have had a number of meetings with women's groups, particularly here in Lothian, Edinburgh, and I know that there is concern that women and children can also be put in temporary accommodation, which is just not suitable for either of the single men there. Either there is no proper facility for kitchens or there are unsafe spaces. I wonder what the panel will view, or maybe we have not got the time for the panel, so maybe just direct this one itself to a garden to view on how Scotland is providing for homeless families and how we can do it differently, particularly for children and women who are in this accommodation. Gordon MacRaeff, please. Technology will catch up. Gordon MacRaeff? I'm happy if anyone else wants to jump in. I'm conscious of time. I don't know if anyone else wants to jump in if Gordon can't answer. I think it's more... He can't hear us. Whoever's running the selection, he will go up there. I'm on. There you go. If I can, I can take the last two questions together very quickly. The direct response to your question is about the provision of accommodation for children, especially in the east of Scotland. Not just Edinburgh, but the Lothians and Fife in the Borders is totally inadequate. This is the area of the greatest need of housing needs in the country, and we're not seeing the allocation of central government funds match where the greatest demand is. The Scottish Government is building or are setting the funding for the new social housing for the long term. This is the only long-term answer that we have, but it's not yet directed in the places of greatest need. We saw that in the Audit Scotland report that came out at the very start of the pandemic, looking at the lack of additional impacts on the FFB programme. It's something that I don't think really has had the scrutiny yet, just because of the way it came out. It does lay out the need for the next phase of the FFB programme to be specific in terms of what it should achieve. For us, one of the things that it must achieve are larger properties for those families trapped in temporary accommodation. In terms of the short term, I'm worried I mentioned that there should have been some additional resource from central government to match the quite appropriate extension of the institutional accommodation order for single people. I'm seeing if that would in some respects alleviate the knock-on effect of allocations to people in temporary accommodation. The single homeless people who are now covered by the institutional accommodation order are also children and families who are always covered by it. It is placing additional pressure on the already limited stock. We do see examples of some people being placed in properties that are too big for them. At the same time, some people are placed in properties that are too small for them, and it's just that kind of harm reduction that people are needing to do today. If I could just pick up the bigger question about funding, I would totally endorse the lack of resource. If we look at the evaluation of housing first that has been the interim evaluation, if we take a cost of somewhere between £8,000 and £14,000 per person housed, that would require a resource of somewhere between £30 million and £50 million a year if we extrapolate that up to 3,500 people per year. We are some way from that, and some of that cost is sunk within local authorities already. It's not always about additional resources, it's about changing the way we work, but it does also reinforce that the comparison of the 2012 homelessness commitment shows us that it does take time, but the difference between 2012 and rapid rehousing is that 2012 had statutory underpinning. Rapid rehousing is, at this point, in time just the best practice guide. There is no legal basis for rapid rehousing transition plans. If an individual is failed by a local authority, there is nothing in the rapid rehousing transition plan, unlike a wholeness strategy, that could seek a judicial review on any other form of recourse. We would like to see rapid rehousing plans put in a statutory footing so that it does embed and uphold the rights-based approach that Scotland has. Thank you very much indeed, Gordon. I would like to bring Evelyn Tweed in now, please. Thank you very much, convener. Good morning, panel. My question is about rapid rehousing and housing first, and what actual benefits our service users get from those. Are those developments really making a difference to people's lives? I would like to ask Lorraine that question first, please. I think that the easy answer is yes. In particular, in terms of housing first, people have access to their own home, good quality housing with wraparound support that re-influents how it is managed, how it is delivered, how they receive that support, and they remain in control of that. They have access to furniture packages to make that house a home. They have access to a team of skilled staff who can advocate for them in terms of access to other services within the community that they go to live within, in terms of accessing community engagement, meaningful activity, their own aspirations and goals. There are stories and 500 nod people that are in the crosshousing first of Scotland at the moment. Some of the stories are just remarkable. We have stories of people who very recently were rough sleeping and in utter chaos. Who would have fitted that category? The Miles reference earlier, who are now settled in their own home and either engaged in educational activity or pursuing employability options, re-engaged with their families, engaged in treatment for addictions and recovery from their mental health problems. The transformation for some people has been remarkable. Rapid re-housing has been the underpinning factor particularly in Glasgow in the last year of the rapid change in moving people on from temporary accommodation because of the pressures on the system that it created. That has created that opportunity. It has also added the resource for all of the additional case-man and case-workers in the home of the system. It has facilitated that rapid move on as well. It is a big leverage in the housing system to increase allocations. There is no doubt that it has had a huge impact. There is a long way to go. I said earlier about the wider system wraparound for housing first. It is not there in all areas yet and it is not there in all circumstances for people. People are not being seen by the same lanes that someone coming from another route, say, mental health or mental health disability, would be treated and viewed in terms of equity of access to services. We have big challenges in areas such as Edinburgh where we simply do not have enough stock. What do we need to think differently about that? We need to think about the private rented sector. We need to think about, for instance, the role that social investment might play in helping us to develop more stock. We are excited to say that our first tenant is going to be moving into a flat this week—a really lovely flat in Edinburgh this week—through our social investment route. We will be secured £5 million to buy tenancies and provide access for people who cannot access mainstream housing as quickly as perhaps any of us would like. I think that Beth Watt is looking to come in off the back of that. In the strongest possible terms, the answer to the question is yes. What housing first and rapid rehousing mean in the very simplest terms is ensuring that people experiencing homelessness have access to what most of the rest of us are lucky enough and our families to take for granted, which is access to a normal home that they can be complacent about and take for granted. The evidence base is absolutely enormous on this. I am happy to share it, but the key message for it is that people who have been rapidly housed into mainstream housing and housing first that support their quality of life benefits just so hugely from those things. I want to emphasise that. Thank you very much indeed, Dr Watt. I would now like to bring in Marie McNair, please. Thank you, panel. Good morning and thanks again for your submissions. I found them really helpful. You emphasise in your evidence the importance of involving people who have lived experience of homelessness. It seems good in practice in achieving this. Did the pandemic hinder progress in any way and how do we maintain a momentum on this? Can I direct that to Lorraine and Gordon? Thank you. It is a really critical aspect of everything that we do in homelessness, and it has been really welcome that, over the course of the past few years, it has become a central pillar to the policy development area, with support from Maggie's organisation in developing the All-In for Change and Change team and the Prevention Commission. I think that it is easy to think that we are doing it all and we are doing it right now, but I think that continued investment in this area and continuing to reach further, to reach more people and bring more voices and to think about what voice looks like as well. I think that during the pandemic, in particular, that was a big challenge in terms of being able to engage with people in any other way, other than face-to-face. When we are talking about a group of people that are probably the most digitally excluded, for instance, of any groups in our society and in our communities, we will be able for people to be able to engage in influence and activity when they do not have the basics of being able to connect with the world and their communities. In the ways that we all have taken for granted in the last 18 months, we need to be clear about where the barriers are and the Covid pandemic to throw up a number of barriers for people's connection and engagement in all parts of the system, including their opportunity to influence that required to be resourced. I am sad that, whilst connecting Scotland has done incredible work across a very wide range of disadvantaged groups, one group that has not been prioritised within that are people experiencing homelessness. The work that has been done to connect people with digital devices to allow them to influence their own care and support and influence future design has been provided largely from within the third sector. Some of which has been rooted by them from connecting Scotland in individual cases, but not in any kind of strategic or organised fashion. Has the pandemic affected people's ability to do that? In terms of being able to reach further, and Maggie will obviously talk more in more detail to this than I can, and connect with people's experience during the pandemic, then, yes, it definitely did. I think that digital exclusion played its biggest part in that and the fact that people were able to engage in face-to-face services other than some organisations like us that continued to meet people to keep them safe and well. There was no alternative. There was no online version of that kind of support. In terms of where we are going with that, I think that we need to keep an eye on that and make sure that it remains an absolute critical and central pillar and that we find new ways for people who do not find it easy to engage in influence on activities to bring their voice to bear. Thank you. In the interest of time, I will move on to my next question. The Domestic Abuse Protection Scotland Act 2021 will come into force in December 2022. It will help to prevent women's homelessness by barring the perpetrator of domestic abuse from the home and give landlords the ability to transfer tendencies to the survivor. How impactful do you think that this will be in tackling homelessness among women and our other improvements needed to help better assist women who are at risk of being made homeless? I put that question to Maggie, please. Thank you so much for that question. Among the suite of proposals that have been developed by the Scottish Government in partnership with a range of organisations, including the women's specialist organisations, we have taken together the result and the type of improvements that we all need for this group. I think that there is something that we are becoming much more alive to in housing and homelessness. Housing is fundamentally a system that is not sensitive to different forms of inequality. It is fundamentally a bias system. When we look at the homelessness sector as a sector overall, it is one that has been developed over many years and has shared more towards the circumstances and experiences of men rather than women. Everything that we understand about the experience of homelessness has been very different. If I experience it as a man or as a woman, that does not mean that men who experience homelessness experience a system that works for them either. It does not seem that it is not a system that works for everybody in all time, but it is very inherent in design. It is not meeting the needs of women. I said to me earlier that there are women's children who experience homelessness as well. It is an area that we can definitely all do better on. I think that what it feels like is that a number of people come together and mentioned everyone who is a home collective who has connected in with the homelessness unit at Scottish Government to just start exploring what all this means, what common understanding of all is and what we can do first to really help move forward in the discussion of making sure that our responses to homelessness are gender informed. One of the things that we are really interested in doing is seeing whether we can facilitate some sort of project that enables women themselves to help us to focus our minds on what matters most. It just feels that such a fundamental gap in our understanding and speaking directly to women and working alongside women to improve through the system the services that they have and the access to the different conditions and policies that we described at the opening of the question. There is a lot to be done. There is a lot to learn from organisations that are already operating in this space. Specialist organisations would say that women's aid, of course, lireens organisation provides a number of specialist organisations for women affected by homelessness and there are just loads to learn from that. Fundamentally, we need to really centre this as a priority and overarching equality approach to homelessness in Scotland. There are planning structures to enable us to make the type of practical adjustments on the ground that we need to. Thank you very much indeed, Maggie. Sticking to gendered response to homelessness, I bring in Ellen Whitham, followed by Emma Roddick. Thanks very much, convener. Having worked closely with the Chartered Institute of Housing and Women's Aid on their improving housing outcomes for women and children experienced in domestic abuse report that came out, we are now waiting for implementation groups to be created, and also understanding, as Maria McNair has pointed out, the gold standard domestic abuse laws that we do have. Does the panel think—and I would like to direct this to Dr Beth Watts, if I can please—does Scottish Government policy at this point in time sufficiently take a gendered response and analysis to homelessness response and prevention, and do we need to actually revisit some of it? I think that this has been an area of progress since the publication of the first Ending Homelessness Together action plan, and I think that other members of the panel have been more closely involved with that than I have. In terms of progress today, I would probably want to defer to them. Your question specifically refers to homelessness prevention. The point that I would like to emphasise there is that homelessness prevention is a sort of concept that can seem quite vague and loose and large, but I think that there are an awful lot of tools that we can use to break that down into really practical things. There is a very useful typology of homelessness prevention that distinguishes between universal upstream prevention about lowering the risk among the population at large to targeted prevention to those about to experience homelessness to preventing people who have already experienced it from experiencing it again. I think that prevention of rough sleeping is very different to prevention of family homelessness among women with children in the household, for example. The key message that I want to say is that, in taking forward, I very much hope that prevention review group recommendations, which would be an enormous brilliant step forward in Scotland, there is a need to focus on those specific subgroups as well. Women, rough sleepers, specifically young people and those leaving institutions. We can do a lot of very specific things to improve prevention work for all of those groups, including through a gendered lens, which is absolutely essential, but one of a number of lenses that we need to take, I would say. Could I perhaps ask Gordon for his opinion on that, having had women come to shelter for advice in terms of homelessness through domestic abuse? I think that we have to hold our hands up and say that the ending homelessness together plan initially had some blind spots. Gender analysis was one. We have not touched on homelessness as experienced by marginalised groups, be it economic, people with disabilities, people of colour, which often goes under the radar in Scotland as well. I think that there has been some progress, limited progress, since the end. I think that Scottish Women's Aid in particular should be commended for quite constructively challenging some of the missing elements of the ending homelessness together plan, and I have made themselves essential to that work that you mentioned with CIH. We have to go further. We see that the voice of women and children in the homelessness system is very limited. When we talk about ensuring the voice of people with lived experience, we need to make sure that it is the living experience of the whole of the homelessness system. At Shelter Scotland, we run what we call the time for change programme, which is people who experience homelessness providing peer support to other people going through the system. We are not doing enough yet to provide that sort of gender lens, that female peers to support females going through that system. The pandemic has certainly made that harder. For me, that goes back to the point that I was making earlier on. If we only focus on a few areas at the expense of the system as a whole, we create perverse unintended consequences, and I keep going back to the fact that, in six years, since 2014, there has been a 75 per cent increase in children in temporary accommodation in Scotland. That is something that we have the power within Scotland to address. We need to give a voice to the women and children going through that system properly so that we can understand their needs. I am not convinced that organisations on my own can accurately reflect them at this point in time. The question is for Lorraine, but, given the focus on the shelter contribution on prevention, Gordon might want to come in as well. How much of the fact that certain groups are more at risk of homelessness stems from the accessibility of local authority housing policy, or the rigidity of application processes, and what changes could be made to address that difference? In terms of when you look at high-risk groups such as prison leavers, care leavers, women experience, there is a lot of variability in people's experience of how they access the housing system and what response they get. We are not doing well in a lot of these areas. We are still seeing a lot of challenges, particularly in the context that we operate. We see a lot of challenges for prison leavers, for people who have been involved in the criminal justice system, have lost their accommodation or lost their access to their home as a result. Better for long-term sentences but still not perfect, but certainly any short-term sentences is remanned, released from court. Those are all areas where we see struggling to access the housing system when released and struggling to get appropriate offers of accommodation because of some of the challenges that they experience and the availability within the system not being matched or designed around the needs of people with complex and challenging circumstances and complex and challenging histories. I would link in with the point that Gordon Gordon was making about the whole system and the need to read across all the different forms of homelessness and all the different impacts of homelessness. It is important when we think about what accommodation should look like and what access to the housing system can look like. In terms of what we can do better, it comes back to the equity of access that someone who comes to the system through the homelessness route should be experiencing the same responses as anyone else in the system, particularly around health and social care interventions, because it is often that that will make the difference to that person's ability to access the housing system and access sustainable living circumstances and a stable home. I am probably concerned about one of the things that I am picking up on. I agree with Gordon that there is a danger in the system just now that we start to think that bits of it are fixed, such as a response to rough sleeping. We are very good at responding to rough sleeping, but we are not yet very good at preventing people from being at risk of rough sleeping, so we are still requiring a lot of resources and a lot of investment to maintain that very positive position that we have, and that is across the multi-agency response. It is in that space that those high-risk groups quite often find themselves, because they are not being able to access the housing system. We do regularly see people with care experience accessing our emergency services and crisis response services because of a great down-and-relation or fleeing violence. We see people leaving prison on Friday afternoons and arriving when the system is not available to respond to them, even if there is a good response there. Arriving at our services on Friday afternoons is increasingly challenging to maintain that, and those are people who would end up sleeping if we were in any way to take our foot off the pedal in terms of the multi-agency response that we have in place at the moment. Emma suggested that Gordon McRae may want to come in on that. Gordon, do you have any further brief reflections? I think that this goes to the prevention model. How do we ensure that, where people are and where they become at risk of homelessness, the system is able to respond to them? We have considerable reservations about some of the proposals around prevention duty being placed or how we would adapt the existing responsibilities of local authorities. We wholeheartedly agree that wider public bodies such as health, justice and education should have a legal responsibility to consider homelessness and to ask about homelessness. When we look at groups that are not well represented within the policymaker framework or within the discussions, we have to consider whether we only focus on adapting homelessness or whether we look at adapting those services that they are approaching and accessing. That is where we can make the biggest gains. The prospect of a prevention duty on other bodies and the Scottish Government's commitment to embedding the human right to adequate housing in any future economic and social rights legislation provides us opportunities to take homelessness out of the housing sector alone and into the wider public and social responses that we have to the trauma that people experience. Going back to Lorraine, how much do you think that a negative initial response would turn those groups off from interacting with housing services in the future? It plays a huge part in the trauma impacts that people are living with in terms of their ability to make informed decision making. The survival experiences that they have on a day-by-day basis just in terms of getting through that day means that their ability to sit back, rationalise and think, okay, I'll come back tomorrow and maybe it will be a different story. It's just not there, and it often takes a huge amount of effort, time and energy of the support services and front-line support workers to often persuade people to re-engage with the service and for that to be a big enough priority for them in the face of chronic addictions and survival living and just getting through the day and feeling more in control of their circumstance and more in control of the voices that they have, they simply don't engage. We make it too hard for people. One of the things, certainly one of the learnings from the pandemic, is that where we do have good quality emergency accommodation that can be rapidly accessed and that the actual control of that access is in that front-line team. We can make things happen for people in exactly that circumstance, get them into a stable environment, a high-quality environment, wrap good engagement and quality compassionate response around them and then very quickly move from there to access to the fuller system, including the housing system, and we were able to do that for an awful lot of people who we had not been able to do that for before because we could make it happen there and then. We could make it happen there and then without any further process, and it was of sufficient quality and comfort and warmth and compassion and wraparound support 24 hours a day. The vast majority of people that move on within the housing system is better settled or temporary accommodation options from that hotel base, but, as points were made earlier, hotel accommodation is not ideal for any for the longer term, but the notion of rapid access accommodation of a sufficient quality with sufficient wraparound support for this, for these particular high-gras groups, is really important. Just before I bring in Pam Duncan-Glancy, I would like to turn to Lorna Campbell, please, on just to reflect from a local authority perspective on the priority groups that were raised in an earlier answer from Lorraine, particularly the policies that you have put in place in the authority to respond particularly for prison leavers, for Black Asian minority ethnic groups and for women and particularly children fleeing domestic violence, is there anything you can reflect on from a local authority perspective in terms of what you're doing there to try to help those people? Yes, thank you. Yes, from a local authority perspective, we have a number of policies and procedures in place, particularly around those groups. For prison leasers, we have worked very closely with local prison as well as justice services to look at housing direct from prison. We have had some private pandemic, we did have some limited success and, even during the pandemic, we did look at early intervention and planned releases. As has been mentioned, release from prison is going to happen, and it's about getting those networks in place with prison services that followed the shore standards that came out over two years ago. We actually get that in place, and it has worked quite well, for quite a number of, but it's still, and I think it's been reflected on, a work in progress, and it does take that cross-service close work in to actually make that happen. Unfortunately, we do still have situations where the Friday night Sunday is released and it comes up on the homeless service doorstep, and we will have to respond very quickly, and not in a planned way, but that is something that is a work in process. For most local authorities, there are plans in place, and there are various degrees of success for that across authorities, and it will depend on how and where their partnerships are working. Further areas, similar to domestic violence again, we have local arrangements and commissions with our women's aid services, who are excellent services and provide that, and we work closely with them in homeless about ensuring that, if we have any accommodations that are provided there and that we can fast access permanent housing, and touched on earlier, it can be challenging, particularly with women with families, to access housing where it is needed. As a large rural local authority, there are particular challenges around that, because obviously we don't want to move children away from our schooling areas or support areas, so families may spend longer in temporary accommodation than we would like, certainly because of that challenge, but it is again a work in progress to try to identify those accommodations as quickly as possible and to support families to move on where possible. I want to just continue the theme of equalities a bit and ask about disabled people who are presenting and the panel, probably particularly just in the interests of time, Lorraine Gordon. If you could briefly explain what is the experience just now of disabled people who are applying through the homelessness route and are there enough accessible homes being built to put people into? I don't think that it's very different for disabled people and I don't think that they always find themselves going into the most suitable forms of emergency temporary accommodation. I think that it just plays back into the lack of the range of options available to people and the challenges that local authorities have in terms of being able to respond in the moment for people in crisis. In terms of access to accessible housing, it's really challenging. It's particularly challenging if I take it as an example, even with people who would have what's known as gold priority under the common housing register application process index. They are within that group alongside so many other people with similar priority. Being able to support people to access appropriately designed accommodation to meet their needs is particularly challenging. I would like to say that people always get a really good response, but they don't. We've had situations where people have been in hospital having amputations who are within the homeless system. The plan discharges back to a tenement flat on the stairs. It's a game. It's that very personal circumstance. Again, back to that equity of access that I mentioned earlier, there were not responding to people who, unfortunately, have a homelessness label and are through that route that's out with generally the health and social care system that we view differently, and we respond differently. We would never contemplate that for a rolled-up person or for someone who has come through the system from a different route. Thanks very much indeed. I would now like to bring in Marie McNair for the final theme of questions, please. Thank you, convener. This is a question for Beth Watts. It's about future developments. Like you, we can make real progress with powers that we have, but UK policy is a hindrance in some respect. You say in the homelessness monitor that changes to welfare policy, including increasing the local housing allowance, would assist in reducing homelessness. Is that just due stating it obvious, or is there any optimism for the movement in that regard? That's a great question. I think undoubtedly these are really important parts of the picture in terms of responding to homelessness adequately across the UK and in Scotland. In many parts of Scotland, there is a positive story because the housing market context is somewhat more positive than certainly in the south of England and London, so some of these really pernicious welfare reforms we've seen drive up homelessness since 2010 did actually have less of an impact in Scotland, but they obviously have really challenging impacts across the country, nevertheless, and especially in places like Edinburgh. Obviously, the raising of the local housing allowance rate was a really important part. The Covid response really helped certainly in Edinburgh, I'm sure, elsewhere. It's very, very sad to see it refrozen. We're currently in the process of writing the homelessness England monitor where we try and get a sense of any likely policy movement on those issues. We have no special insight on that that I can offer, but I don't think that we'll be seeing radical changes in local housing allowance rates, the benefit cap, things like that, that we continue to see as a real problem. I do want to add that one of the members of the committee mentioned earlier discretionary housing payments in the Scottish welfare fund in our Scottish homelessness monitor work. Local authorities are very, very clear how enormously valuable these pots of money are in responding to and preventing homelessness, so I just wanted to underline that. They do offer local authorities a bit of a resource for dealing with a very not ideal welfare safety net, as decided by UK Government. As just a final comment, this is a challenging welfare policy context for Scotland to tackle homelessness within, but I would just want to redirect to the levers that are in the hands of the Scottish Government, the Scottish Parliament and how much can be done within that. I very much agree on the broad thrust of your comment, and we'll keep making those arguments directed at Westminster. Thank you very much. Indeed, Miles Briggs, please. Thank you, convener. I wanted to ask a few questions with regard to the theme of prevention and future opportunities for the Scottish Government, because we know within the programme for government that it contains plans to strengthen the law around homelessness prevention. I would put on record that I often feel that people have to declare themselves homeless before any support is made available, so I wanted to know from the panel what your ideal model would be going forward to try to change that, so support does start earlier. Some of the ideas put forward, for example, was public sector bodies having a conversation with vulnerable individuals six months out from that being a necessary crisis point. I'll maybe start with Gordon, because you touched on that earlier, and then go round to whoever else wants to come in. Thank you. As I mentioned, there are a couple of opportunities on the horizon. I think that you'll hear quite a lot of consensus from many of us today, but there are probably some differences in nuance and focus, and I think that this is one of them. Sadly Shelter Scotland, we fully endorse the proposal of the prevention review group around extending some of those provisions around our responsibilities to prevent homelessness to other public bodies. We also endorse the new moving from two to six months, the potential people who are at risk of homelessness being able to do that for the other body, the local authority, to start that preventative work. I wouldn't say what's wrong with this, but where we are sceptical right now is around downgrading the form of tenancy that people get at the end of that process, from what's called permanent to stable accommodation. We recognise that. That would allow some of the shared accommodation models that were discussed earlier, but we don't yet have those shared accommodation models. It would be a significant risk to level down our drive towards security of tenure as being the proposed outcome for people going through the homelessness system. The other area that we're concerned about is any duty on local authorities to relieve homelessness for people who already meet the definition of statutory homelessness. If you meet the definition of statutory homelessness, that should be a trigger for support needs assessment and for other forms of intervention from the local authority. Some of that will come out as we develop some of the proposals, and I'm sure that there's some space to find a way that brings that consensus. We sometimes get trapped in discussing principles rather than the details, and we're very supportive of the principle behind the prevention duty. There are some people on the detail of the way that it's currently framed. I can see that Dr Beth Watt is looking to come in, as is Lorna Campbell and Lorraine McGrath. Dr Watt's first place, followed by Lorna Campbell. I just want to respond directly to the concern from Gordon, which I'm familiar with. The PRG recommendations are a weakening of the rights of homeless households. It's just not something that resonates with me at all and my colleagues. I know the very wide range of people who were involved in developing the proposals. The proposals are designed to offer greater flexibility to both homeless applicants and local authorities, so the most appropriate form of accommodation can be found. Many homeless applicants are single young people, and permanent social housing and permanent council house might not be the most suitable option or what they want. Other aspects of housing, beyond security of tenure, are really important to location, for example. In any case, I'd like to emphasise that the proposal is that, where the offer isn't a permanent social or private let that the applicant has an absolute right of veto over that offer, they can refuse it without penalty. No one's forcing anyone to take any not-settled accommodation. The proposals also include increases in the safeguards that homeless applicants have going through the process, including strengthened appeal and review rights. I think that that adds up to a package that substantially enhances people's rights rather than restricts them. This will be an on-going conversation that I very much hope and expect, so I hope that we can iron that all out and I'll pass over to others now. Lorna Campbell, please, followed briefly by Lyrae McGrath. Thank you. In my view, what we've been fighting for quite time is better prevention in place, because if we're going to end homelessness and the dependence on temporary accommodation, we need to upstream prevention much earlier. That wider partnership, particularly with health and social care and identifying the rights of homelessness at an earlier opportunity, gives us a better chance to work with individuals and be at an economic response, or whether it is about sourcing better or more sustainable housing earlier, can help people. Often, we're seeing in homeless services, as is the crisis. People only come to homeless services when it's a crisis and they're homeless tonight, or at immediate thread, which limits the time that we have to help and support people. Moving that further back and identifying it earlier would be key. We're in a rather vicious circle at the moment, in the local authorities. At the moment, we've got an increased demand for temporary accommodation, which means that we've got to rent locally and take extra accommodation from housing associations and private landlords, which then reduces the amount of accommodation. We've got to discharge permanent accommodation, so there's that vicious circle. That earlier prevention stops the need for so much temporary accommodation, and it's something we're very keen to progress. However, time and resource means that we're constantly firefighting at the moment, and it's something that we need to start to upstream from where we're effectively going forward. I just wanted to make the point that policy legislation is really important, and I fully support all of the recommendations for the PRG and the widening of range of options for people in terms of their accommodation options. Regislating itself is not enough. The huge amount of that is about attituding behaviours and the silo effect that we have for people experiencing in the range of professionals. We know where the touch points largely are. We know where the opportunities are to intervene at a much earlier stage. We know that we are not making the issues of our range of data, whether that be from the benefit system or within the local authority system, or not making the issues of the soft intelligence people's points of connection as well within the system, whether that's someone who's looking at a social welfare fund application for somebody, or just somebody who encounters someone in a doctor's surgery. We know that engagement at health system evidence is very strong. It's almost always happened right before people's first episode of homelessness, so there are lots of opportunities that the legislation will support, but we often need to think about how we actually change attitudes, behaviours and that people see value in asking and acting value to their part of the system and their job with that person in front of them at that moment in time. Thank you very much indeed, Lorraine. A brief question from Miles Briggs followed by Emma Roddick. I wanted to go back to a point that Gordon MacRae had made earlier with regard to Edinburgh and the east of Scotland and specific pressures, which we're seeing within our cities really with regard to delivering services. Mr Balfour and Mr Chowder and myself represent Edinburgh. We see and know from our public bodies the pressures which Edinburgh does face delivering these services. I wondered in terms of potential solutions around that and whether or not you would support, for example, pressured areas like we've seen developed for London specifically given the cost of delivering services we've seen or other suggestions around the specific city issue that you've highlighted. I'll maybe bring in Gordon as I reference you back to that question. We, in partnership with the Charsenship Housing and the Scottish Federation of Housing Associations, commissioned a affordable housing needs analysis ahead of the last Scottish election. It's certainly identified that the east cluster of local authorities was the area where it was the greatest demand and was not having the delivery of new social housing, and I want to be very clear what you're talking about. Social housing is not all the forms of a affordable housing in this context at the scale at which it required. That was compounded by the evidence that came from the Scotland's review of the delivery of the affordable housing programme, which, as I said earlier, identified that it lacked any measure of success beyond just the number of units. Of course, it's self-evident that we could build them if we build all the disproportionate number of the units in places where there isn't the same demand that we're not alleviating pressure within the system. That's why we're calling on the Scottish Government to produce an annual social justice social housing report so that we can monitor the social impact of that programme so that there are outcomes beyond just the single number of units. I'm not familiar enough with the London example that you raised, but I'm happy to look at that and come back to the committee afterwards with a view. Thank you very much indeed, Gordon. Finally, Emma Roddick, please. Thank you, convener. Dr Watts, I note that in the written contribution that you've favoured raising housing allowance, I wondered when housing allowance is raised, how much do you think that the benefit to people struggling to afford housing is offset by private landlords raising the rents in response? That's definitely a concern and my understanding of the evidence from academics at Sheffield-Hallam is that that is part of the effect but not all of the effect. I probably want to defer to an expert on private sector market dynamics, but I certainly don't think that's a reason not to keep local housing allowance rates in line with a decent proportion of the private rented sector. Certainly, the modelling that Glen Brownlee, my colleague, does here shows that it will make a real difference to that. That would want to be my point of emphasis. In terms of landlords' behavioural responses, that's a hugely important question that should be in the policy debate as well, but I want to defer to someone with expertise on that more than my own. Thank you. Following on from that, Gordon, how much do you think that no DSS listings are affecting the ability of homeless people to find accommodation and what can be done to address that? This is something that's really being addressed. My colleagues in the shelter in England have led some work on taking as-and-test cases and taking litigation to demonstrate that it is a form of discrimination for a landlord to list accommodation with no DSS. It still remains. You can go on to any listings website and still see it today. We have chosen to address it through approaching letting agents and landlord bodies, but that only takes us so far, because we know that 94 per cent of landlords in Scotland have one property. We have a vast—I don't mean this in a pejorative way—amateur landlord sector. The people who join Scottish Landlords Association on their professionals are the ones who know their rights and responsibilities. The problem is that the largest proportion of accommodation is not yet being managed by people with the right level. That creates a problem, because that is disproportionately at the lower end of the market. That is where people who are homeless or are at risk of homelessness are more likely to be seeking accommodation. We know that universal credit is an in-work benefit. That is not something that is about people who are homeless or people who are otherwise at risk. We are talking about people who are simply reliant on the welfare system, because the homelessness housing system is broken and does not provide housing at a cost that can answer it with wages in a current economy. It is a major barrier. It is one that the courts have already addressed. The issue now is practice within a broadly amateur private landlord sector. Thank you to all the panel for your time this morning. We have provided some considerable latitude and extended the time for this session. It was really interesting to hear from all of you and all of your insights into this area. There has certainly been of benefit to all of us on the committee and our extended committee today. I should say thank you very much to Elin Wittam for joining us and for her contributions to, I really appreciate, your time and your patience with some of the technical difficulties that we have. Broadcasting has suggested the very technical term that the blue jeans was sticking at some points. I thank you for your perseverance and broadcasting for ensuring that things went as smoothly as possible. Thank you very much indeed and we will move on to agenda item 4 while we just wait for people to change position. Colleagues, we move to agenda item 4. The committee is invited to consider a negative SSI, the council tax reduction Scotland amendment 4, regulations 2021, background to these regulations outlined in paper 7. Members will note that the regulations were drawn to the attention of the Parliament by the DPLR committee under the reporting ground J. This is because the instrument was laid less than 28 days before coming to enforce. However, it was also noted by that committee that these regulations were introduced on an emergency basis to provide access to the council tax reduction scheme to people arriving from Afghanistan. The DPLR committee was therefore satisfied with the reasons given for the breach of the 28-day rule. Do members have any comments to make on this particular regulation? Nope. Are members content to note the instrument? Thank you very much indeed. That concludes the public part of this morning's meeting. I suspend the meeting and move to private session. Thank you very much. Members who are joining online should move to the link provided.