 I welcome everyone to the 27th meeting of the Local Government and Communities Committee in 2018. Can remind everyone present to turn off their mobile phones as meeting papers are provided in digital format, tablets may be used by members during the meeting. The agenda item 1, the committee is invited to consider whether to take its consideration of evidence on pre-budget scrutiny at agenda item 3 in private. Are we all agreed? The second agenda item is pre-budget scrutiny on housing adaptations. The committee is today holding a round table evidence session with a number of stakeholders in preparation for the publication of the Scottish Government budget towards the end of the year. We also intend to write to the Scottish Government before the budget is published, setting out some pre-budget recommendations. We cannot do this without expert input, which is why your presence today is so important. The focus today is on housing adaptations. It is also on a wider context of considering the suitability of our housing for the disabled and veterans and for an aging population and about how that should be reflected in the Scottish budget. I welcome you all here today. Perhaps we could start off by going round the table and introducing ourselves. I will start with me and then go round to Mary. I am James Dorn and I am the convener of the committee. I am Monica Lennon and I am the deputy convener of the committee. I am Jenny Leing and I am representing Aberdeen's health and social care partnership today. My name is Tony Cain and I am the policy manager for the Association of Local Authority Chief Housing Officers. Andy Wightman, MSP for Lothian. Nari Yureg, from the Quality and Human Rights Commission. I am Ewing, MSP for Cotinbeath constituency. Mark Farrie of Hanover Housing Association, we are a specialist provider of elderly persons housing. Lisa Innes, I am a housing advisor at Glasgow Centre for Inclusive Living. Moira Beane, from Housing Options Scotland. Oh, sorry! That's all right. I usually don't matter. Graham Simpson, MSP for Central Scotland. Apologies, yes, yes. I've said who I am twice now. Alexander Stewart, MSP for Mid Scotland 5. Fiona King, from Shelter Scotland. Kenneth Gibson, MSP for Cymru North. Obviously, we have the class to our left here. Can I start off the questions just by kicking off the whole thing by just asking a general question about your views and the outcomes for people needing housing adaptations across all tenures? Is there evidence of the benefits of preventive spend in this field? Would anybody like to kick that off? Mark? Off just by giving a comment that we see many cases where, prior to one of the most common adaptations that we do, which is the replacement of bathrooms with level floor access showers, previously residents may have needed the help of a carer or two to come in and help them bathe, which obviously is a resource from elsewhere in the public sector. Once those bathrooms get replaced with level access for showers, in many cases residents are able to go after their own bathing needs and don't need that extra assistance that comes in. In most cases, our residents tend to be single people. They don't have the benefit of a partner or a spouse with them, so prior to that adaptation, it does need assistance from outside to come in after it doesn't. Thank you. Do you have any other views? Can I add to that as well about the impact actually on unpaid carers of the adaptation as well? We really need to consider that in terms of the wider aspect of the carers act, which obviously came in a couple of years ago. The fact that people do not have that adaptation can have huge implications on the health and safety of the carer, on the stress level of the carer and can lead to breakdowns in the care being provided, which ultimately then causes resource to have to be spent in other areas as well. That is an important consideration for the individual themselves and how they are also supported in the community. We had our housing inquiry where we looked at accessible housing for disabled people. One of the things that we found is that disabled people who are in accessible housing or adequate housing meet their needs four times more likely to be in employment. It comes back to what we were saying earlier about how, when you spend money on adaptations or on accessible housing, you save money or gain money in other ways. That is an interesting statistic for the teams. We have evidence, particularly when there are disabled children in the family, that having the right adaptation and the right house keeps the family together. It enables the parents to continue working if that is what they want to do. It has much wider societal benefits. For a relatively small cost of an adaptation, you can see that spend being cascaded throughout the local community and beyond. That is all very true. When the appropriate adaptation is delivered and delivered at the right time, it can make an enormous difference to the experience and the life of the household that benefit from it. The evidence is that there are too many folk who are not getting the right adaptation as quickly as they need it. The experience of that process, and it was demonstrated by the ECHR's report that the experience of the adaptation process is often not a good one. That is really the reason why we are here, is to try and thrash that out and see if there is some way that we can improve it. Andy, you wanted to ask a couple of questions. It is interesting to look at the budgets for spend in this area, to the extent that we have got them over the past three years, have been pretty flat. In fact, numbers of adaptations in RSLs, for example, just above 3,000 for the past three years. Obviously, there is a big question about how much money we need to spend and how we should spend it, and we will explore some of them. I wondered whether there were any ways in which we could lever in other sources of funding through existing housing investment in the private sector—73 per cent of older people live in private housing—or through the tax system. Any thoughts? Sorry, Andy, sorry. Just before we go on to answering that, can I just say that, if anybody wishes to comment, if they could just catch my eye, we would like to get a free-flowing discussion going on here, but if you could just let me know so that we are not all talking over each other. Would anybody like to come in on the point that Andy Reeson has? If I can perhaps say that we mentioned it in our evidence, we have a scheme called access ownership, which is a partnership between ourselves and the link group. It is a very, very flexible shared ownership scheme. It can enable people either to stay in their existing property or to move to a more suitable property. It can own a share of the property and rent a share of the property from the link group. That has been a way of using its assets for wider community benefit. There is no reason why that could not be extended to other RSAs who have the financial capacity to do that. That would be one way of using the money that is in the existing system that is not being utilised at present. How widely—what scale is that operating on? We have done, I think, between 2020 and 2025 over the past five years. It is a small—it is a niche scheme that the link group uses. It uses £1.5 million of its own reserves, and there are other finance groups into the scheme. They would be able to take on more applicants. We feel that other RSAs might be in a similar position. Some of the bigger RSAs who have a substantial asset base could perhaps look at entering into some kind of shared ownership arrangement. I think that the difficulty with the numbers that you have in front of you is that there are less than half of the total expenditure on adaptations going on. We have a 10-year base to our funding streams here. That is the stage 3 for housing associations provided directly by the Better Homes division of the Scottish Government, and the money provided to Glasgow and Edinburgh Council through the transfer of the management development fund and the TMDF councils. On top of that, some housing associations are committing their own resources to fund those adaptations because the 10 million no longer covers the whole of the cost of adaptations in housing associations. It has been frozen for a number of years. I do not think that we know how much money some housing associations are putting in, but it is putting in consistent across the RSA sector whether or not they simply wait for grant to be available, or whether they carry out works up front and then reclaim the grant, or whether they carry the cost of the work themselves. We have not seen those figures. On top of that, there are owners who will be making contribution, in some instances, to adaptations to their own homes. A substantial sum from local government is at least £60 million a year in local government funding adaptations in the local authority stock. The key point there is that tenants of council houses are the only group who pay for the whole of the cost of their own adaptations from their own rent. Everybody else gets some degree of subsidy, but, on top of that, you also have, I think, GHA, who are not accessing TMDF or Stage 3 adaptations and paying for their adaptations and so on. It is a very complicated, tenure-based, sometimes landlord-specific system, and it is not clear how much it is being spent and the extent to which it is actually meeting the demand that is arising. Therefore, it would be very difficult to say if we knew if the Stage 3 budget was being spent as efficiently, being used as efficiently as it was, or if RSLs should increase their own spending adaptations because we do not know how much they are spending. That is absolutely true, but the key difference is that the Stage 3 budget is the only one that is being managed out with the IJBs. Where the Scottish Government required local authorities to transfer the statutory responsibility and the funding streams to the local IJB as part of that setup, the grants for owners coming from local government are theoretically administered by the IJB and the HRA adaptations are theoretically administered, although, for the most part, they are not. They are simply delegated back to the local authorities, so there has been no real change in what is going on there. The Stage 3 adaptations money, the £10 million, is administered wholly out with the rest of the process. It is completely separate. I got in touch with some of our local RSLs in Aberdeen just to give some idea of an indication of figures that we are really speaking about. If I can use my colleagues in Castle Hill housing association, they made an estimated budget that they would require for the year at £120,000 to serve the properties that they have in the city, Aberdeenshire and in their money areas. What they actually received was £66,000, and that money has now been committed at this point in the year, so they are having to look at alternative sources of funding and things. If you break that down into terms of the local authority area, that is only £22,000. I will have a laxie shower at the cost of maybe £5,000 or £6,000. It is not having the impact that we expect it to have given the money. It does take you back to the point that Andy was talking about at the very beginning. Are there some ways that you can leave it in? Yes, alternatives possibly, but it was just to give a real-life example of the type of funds that we are speaking about. Thanks, convener. I notice in the housing option Scotland submission that you said that with regard to veteran clients, we feel that a veteran's charitable set is a potential area of untapped funding. I wonder if you could talk a wee bit more about that. I mean, people all know that the veteran's charities are relatively well off. They tend to have substantial asset bases, and our experience is that they tend to be not that active in housing in Scotland, so there are big veteran's charities who do very little in Scotland, not because they do not want to, but because they really do not know how to, and they have concentrated on England. An example would be the Haig Housing Trust, which helps the XRF personnel. It has several million pounds worth of assets. It has very little stock in Scotland, and it has only one part-time member of staff. We think that there are opportunities there for Haig Housing Trust to perhaps offer individual housing solutions to our clients, either by purchasing and renting to them or by lending them the deposit to do something through the lift scheme or by paying the rent in advance or whatever. We think that that is an area for potential growth. So far, we have been very heartened by the response that we have had from the veteran's set, because they want to help people, and they are just struggling at the minute to know how best to do that. I wonder what you are going to comment on. If the supply and demand situation that you have just given us an example of is universal, and it probably is reasonable to accept that that is the case across most local authorities in most locations across Scotland, how do you see that being improved? If you cannot get support and funding initially, you are delaying and you are putting off and you are progressing at individuals for whatever reason. How do the council and the health board, etc., even manage that crisis? That can be a crisis if there is not the supply and support mechanisms taking place. That is going to create a massive backlog for us nationally. We have had examples where we have had individuals who are in RSL properties who have then applied for local authority housing and had to move because of their adaptation being held up. They are undoubtedly delays that are caused. Locally in Aberdeen, we have looked at different interim housing options for people as a stock gap, but undoubtedly there are people out there who are waiting for adaptations, which, picking up on March's point, ends up causing pressure on the services elsewhere. I do not know, Tony, if you want to come in on that. Timescales for the measure in the arc, the statutory return from local authorities and housing associations is a time from completion of a recommendation to the completion of the adaptation, so when you receive the OTA recommendation, that varies quite dramatically across the piece. I am sure that I said in evidence last year that it is the one indicator in the arc in which local authorities outperform housing associations reasonably consistency. I am not suggesting that local authorities do as well as we should do, but it is the one area where we do better. You are looking at periods of between four and five weeks in well-performing authorities to 50-60 weeks in poorly performing instances, and that variation is evident across Scotland. Can I ask just on that then? The reason for that would be what the local authorities have got a system in place and the RSLs do not want to spend the money? It is in part linked to the funding arrangement. I should say that we have from 2012 a clear set of recommendations from the adapting for change working group, which the Government accepted at that time, which set out how to address these issues. Typically, in a local authority, a budget will be fixed at the beginning of the year, but it will effectively be seen as a demand-led budget, and the local authority will continue to spend on adaptations till all the adaptations are done. What you will not get is a point in the year when the budget is spent and the work stops. I did some work in preparation for last year's committee, and I went round all the local authorities and asked about their processes and about their spend, and that was typically the response that was coming back. What you see in some housing associations is slightly different, because their expectation is that the adaptation will be largely funded from the statutory grant. If the grant is not available, then in many cases the adaptation will not be done until it is available. In some cases they will carry out the work and then claim the money at the start of next year, so you begin each year in many areas where there is a big chunk of the grant that is not spent. It does result in sometimes quite substantial delays for even quite minor adaptations. Just a major on Tony's point about the wait list, given what we do, we are almost a bit more tenure-neutral than some people around the table, because we necessarily only see it when systems and processes have broken down to the extent that third-party advocacy is required, but those wait times, the national figures, can hide a huge local variation, housing association, local council, but depending on the need it can be years and years and years depending on the extent to the adaptations or if conditions are progressive, so the need is changing or if there are children or it's a large family with a disabled child and potentially one of the adults has a need as well, so people only come to us when their situation basically becomes unbearable, and I think lots of people in their evidence have submitted quite poignant case studies that show how much people will put up with because they've got no choice, but that's when the systems are breaking down and the processes are breaking down, and I think ourselves and other people around the room, but other disability charities that we work with or who come to us for advice or legal advocacy, because of the pressure on the system and the lack of funding and the lack of availability of accessible or adaptable housing, we're almost in a sort of, it's the squeaky nail that's getting the oil, so if you have an advocate who can push your case for you that is what is in some cases getting you the adaptation that you need, but there's needs all over the country that aren't being met because of a mixture of the funding, the processes and the complexity of the issue, because it's not necessarily about time quotas, it's about making sure that a house meets the household's needs not just in the very, very short term, I think that's the difficulty with some of the disabilities and the ageing population, and it's quite a complex thing to meet the needs currently, but then also future needs, you don't want to meet a do an expensive adaptation that is not going to last the year or two years or three years. Okay, Mark and then Annabelle, because I know you won't. Thank you. Just two, working for a housing association myself, Hanover, I can talk about the stage three claiming experience and bidding experience to flesh out what Tony and other people were saying earlier. I think if you were able to look at the exact figures I think you find that generally speaking over the last three years that in aggregate housing association bids for adaptations in anticipation of the demands from the weightiness they already have and the extra applications or referrals that expect during the ensuing year have probably been had to be cut back by about 40% to square off with that £10 million budget. My understanding is that the 10 million comes from the greater housing investment budget that also funds new build housing. Other things to just brief you on in terms of figures. Yes, we do fund some ourselves, the more minor ones like grab rails up to £200 or £300, we go ahead with ourselves once we get the referrals from the OTs, we don't wait to make a call on stage three funds for that. Yes, we do in many cases fund ahead ourselves in anticipation of getting an allocation the next year so we cash flow to quite a large extent these installations. We don't generally get an announcement of our allocation compared to what we bid for until about June. Now I don't know whether it's possible to bring that forward a few months to the start of the year but that would certainly help us knowing what we can programme for the year. Just looking at the last full financial year, 1718, that we've got figures for, the average waiting time between us receiving the referral from the occupational therapist to be able to complete the work was 217 days. And the previous year it was less, it was 193 days and the year before that in 1516 it was 134 days. So in our particular case, and I'm not claiming this is exactly the same in all housing associations, over the last three years there has been about a 50% increase in the waiting time between the occupational therapist referral and us being able to complete the work. And what would you put that down to? Thank you, pardon. What would you put that down to? There's probably no one reason. We certainly have to wait initially if we haven't always got funds to call on from the allocation and we feel that we've committed enough of our own funds first to load the funding before claiming it back. There will be, if you like, an extra group of referrals that we've received that we can't make progress on. So that would be the main influence on the figure, I would say. Are the numbers going up, the referrals that you're getting? I'd say it's fairly consistent in our case anywhere between 100 and 150 a year. I'll work on that a bit on that first. Okay, thank you, convener. Just picking up on some of the issues that were raised just in the last wee while on the issue of the OT part of the process, obviously looking at it from the perspective of the individual seeking an adaptation, an issue will be raised but there may be a period of time within which the OT is not instructed. So somebody mentioned that Alako mentioned that looking at certain timeframes from the trigger of the completion by the OT of their report, but of course there can be a period of time during which the OT is not instructed for whatever reason, which may be a management process on the part of the instructing organisation, be it RSLs or local authorities, be it the IGB, but for the individual there's just a period of time that nothing is happening because the OT hasn't actually been instructed to go and do anything. So I don't think it's just looking at how long it takes the OT from their on-site investigation to completing a report. It's not really that, it's how the authority and the organisation manage that process. It would be interesting to hear if people felt that there would be a better way to manage that process because I don't think that individuals feel that the process itself is actually serving their needs and that brings in bigger questions about looking at, obviously, as far as local authority and private sector adaptations are concerned, the situation has only relatively recently changed to have IGBs at the head of this, and I just would be interested to hear how people feel that that is going. On the previous point around the budget, if you'll forgive me, although I have a comment to make on that, but I'm happy to wait. The colleague of mine did a calculation around where the current statutory adaptations is relative to bids from housing associations and how that has changed, and she's suggesting that around the current situation is bids amount to about just shy of £17 million on a £10 million budget, and that's gone up from about £13.5 million in 2015-16. So the mismatch between the current demand for adaptations from housing associations and the existing budget, and I'm happy to provide a copy of this to the committee if that would be useful. The issues have been getting worse over time, and it is the case that demand in housing associations is substantially outstripping the £10 million that's currently being made available. Thank you very much. Very interesting points, and I would agree with all those. There are a couple of things that are going on at the moment that address those type of issues. I was also part of the adapting for change pilot sites, the demonstration sites, and one of the key areas that came from that was training, which is being offered out to wider health and social care staff, as well as colleagues in housing. It was around identification of early housing needs, whether it be adaptation or rehousing needs, and doing quite a lot of work there to make sure that housing is everyone's business. The other thing that goes alongside that is the Royal College of Occupational Therapists have a document that is currently being updated and should be released in February about minor adaptations without delay. Again, that is about facilitating non-OT staff to do those assessments for more basic bits of equipment, for example your grab rails, external handrails that don't require specialist assessment, so therefore cuts out the delay in that. One of the things that we did look under adapting for change as well was a 10-year neutral pathway and looked at pathways into the service and how do people know how to navigate the system and so forth. In Aberdeen, we have a 10-year neutral pathway in terms of who communicates with who when, the bit that falls down is how quickly someone would get their adaptation depending on their tenure and depending on the time of year. I wonder how we can find out in terms of the practical development that has taken place such that OTs do not have to make the assessment for some adaptations, which helps to unblock the system. How can we find out how that is happening across Scotland? That seems to be a bit of a theme in terms of the IGB approach. We don't seem to have hard information about what the spend of each IGB is on adaptations across Scotland. We don't seem to have information about how each IGB is going to respond to the site test pilot evaluation. I think that the ball is now in the court of the IGBs to come back and say how they specifically are going to respond to the various points raised. How do we get a picture across Scotland because that really is what our constituents want us to find out? I think that you need to ask all 32 IGBs. By the way, I would add to that and say that IGBs have no additional resources allocated to them in relation to adaptations other than money from council tenants, which is delegated usually back straight to the council, and money for it. I would like to know what they spend as if they were started for 10 before we can make any further assessments. That's the information that's missing. I'm not sure that most IGBs will be able to readily answer that question. That raises issues a bit of the process, doesn't it? We can find out, Liam. Just on that very point, the committee had a letter from Kevin Stewart dated 3 April, where he had written to 31 IGBs about this. Mr Stewart said that, in April, 23 replies had been received as methods used to record expenditure differ across partnerships and some were unable to provide figures for 2015-16. It's not possible to provide the committee with a detailed breakdown of spend, so I think that you can see there that there's a rather confused picture with IGBs. We've certainly found it as a committee when we're not just on adaptations, but in looking at the local authority budgets, it's a little bit of a confused picture, so I certainly think that that needs to be sorted out. In the Equalities and Human Rights Commission report, they call for changes to funding arrangements for adaptations, say that it's urgently required. I wonder if people can comment on A, the confused picture with IGBs, and the need to change funding arrangements. Do you have any comments that you'd like to comment on? I've already said that I think that the position with the variety of funding streams and the way in which the money is managed and the position of the IGBs, the IGBs are in a very difficult position because they're not in control of all the resources and they're not necessarily responsible for reporting how those resources are spent, so local authorities are still reporting their spend on the HRA independently of the IGB, although the IGB is technically responsible for that bit of it, which is in relation to adaptations. To be fair, it's a very confused picture about where money is spent and who's responsible for it, so I wouldn't give the IGBs too much of a hard time on that one, my apologies. There was a second part to your question and it slipped my mind. It was the report from the Equalities and Human Rights Commission, you mentioned it in your evidence. We've certainly covered this previously, but the points still stand. There's been little progress in the adaptations process. They call for changes to funding arrangements. Together, the implementation of common parts regulations is urgently required to ensure that disabled people are able to get the adaptations they need. That's what they say. They're effectively asking for the implementation of recommendations that were made in 2012, and those have been extant since the Adaptive for Change report was published. So presumably nothing's happened since 2012? We don't have a single 10-year neutral funding stream to support the allocations for the adaptations process, and I think the other thing that's interesting about the EICR's report is if you look at how it describes the experience of clients going through the adaptations process, it precisely mirrors the way that experience was described by the adapting for change working group in 2012. So there appears to have been very little change on how people feel about the adaptations process at the experience, but also the way in which the key elements of it are organised and particularly financed. It's not moved on. Laura, you want to talk? Just to reiterate what Tony was already saying, a lot of it comes back to things that we previously mentioned. The funding available for ourselves, the £10 million that doesn't cover the actual need, then that you have different streams for different 10-years. So it's a wide variety of things, but yes. And then with the common parts, I should say that every six months somebody in the legal team at the EHRC writes a letter to the government to ask about the common parts regulations, and in a recent meeting we've been assured that they're working on it, but it's taking a long time. So I think we'll see something at some point, but it's something that we've been saying for a long time and not just us, a lot of other people as well. Are you able to share that correspondence with the committee? I don't know, I'll have to ask. It may be helpful if you can. Does anybody in the site have any comment to make, Lisa? It's just a general comment. Obviously I do advice work, and it's a bewildering process I think for clients. We've got so much going on in their lives to try and sort of, I don't know, go through the adaptations process themselves. They're kind of a bit lost with it all. So I think Blaine Island Trump hits a bit and other advice organisations. I think we're in a port and port of doing sort of hand-holding and helping people through it. They maybe get so far and you know, an obstacle where there's no money or what have you or an adaptation can't be done at all because they need to move. And what we find as well, even if adaptations are being done, sometimes there can be a delay while they're getting done because there can be poor workmanship. So we'll go and see someone, well we've had a wet room put in, actually the water's not draining, we're having to wait six weeks to get fixed. There's no overall person in charge of it, so they're sent here, they're in everywhere. And I think, you know, we work with a vulnerable client group and I think that has to be taken on board. And I think it's all very well if someone accesses us for advice, but I think there are an awful lot of people out there that kind of give up. Can I just clarify there when you say there's not one person overseeing it? Are you saying then, for example, the RSL of the council would say the work's getting done, somebody would come and do the work, but then if that doesn't work somebody else has got to do the response. I think that there can be a lot of contractors involved in it and all they need to come will actually need to come. And I think, you know, people say to us, I've made phone call and phone call and it's sitting there, it's really frustrating because I've got a wet room that I can't actually use at the moment because I'm having to make phone calls, people don't turn up, et cetera. It's a source of incredible frustration to my constituency and I'm sure those across Scotland. It raises the question, looking at this issue from the other side, what is the supply arrangement in place on the part of RSLs? I mean, is this a lot of money? And we want to ensure that it's being spent properly for the benefit of the people who should expect this service. So what are the arrangements in place on the part of each IGB, each RSL, in terms of getting this work done? How do they approach that? How seriously do they take it? Is there a cleric of works? What happens when something doesn't happen, that should have happened? How quickly is that rectified? These are really important practical questions, convener. I think that we should be trying to get to the bottom of it. I can ask you that you draw my attention. Oh, I'm sorry, I thought I had trouble. I thought I had trouble. I'm sorry, I'm terribly sorry. I thought I had trouble. Thank you, convener. Just to go back to a comment, Lisa, that you made it a few seconds ago, you said that people get to a point where they might give up. What happens when someone gives up? What are the consequences for people? Well, I think that they just kind of might do. I mean, we do have clients that, you know, especially with a disabled child in the household, they lifted them carrying into a bath, et cetera, because some of them kind of fall through, you know, fall through the loop in terms of how connected they are with social work as well. You know, we'll get people found out what do I do. I don't even know where to start. How do I get someone out to give me an assessment? There's kind of an impasse. You know, we're the best swill in the world. There's such a pressure on all statutory agencies. Obviously, we only see the clients that come to us. I mean, there's such an unmet need. Okay. I just wondered, convener, if there are people who give up hard, they don't continue to fight for the case of then the waiting times that we see don't fully reflect the level of need. Again, just if I can come in, I was struck by Shelter Scotland's written submission, because Fiona, you mentioned the case study of Linda, and some of us heard from Linda in Parliament a few weeks ago at Shelter's reception in the garden lobby. You know, we're hearing people who are trapped in their own homes, albeit it's time for accommodation or otherwise. I think the EHRC commission report or your inquiry talks about some of these extreme cases of people waiting more than a decade, I think, in the most extreme case, up to 18 years. We've got the current needs that we know about, and there's that mismatch in resource. But sitting here, we need to think about the longer term as well, because we know that this need is only going to increase. Are there ideas beyond just funding, which we've talked about already today, but looking at building standards and planning to make sure that we are building homes for the future that are going to meet all of our needs, because any one of us could become disabled and need accessible housing? What are the ideas around that? Fiona, do you want to come in on this one? Thanks, Monica, for raising those case studies. We included a couple of the many that we have, and I'm sure other agencies could speak to similar levels of case examples. It's important to point out that they do represent the people who have come to us and who have got advocacy, and it can still take a number of years to resolve that adaptation requirement. That's with all of our resources as well. For the people who don't have the ability at that time to seek external advocacy, who knows how long those adaptations can take if at all? I think the case of disabled children comes up quite frequently for us, because the parents are willing to put up with quite a lot more than they ever should have to, to carry children up and down flights of stairs and do all sorts of things that are just not appropriate. They're not got the best insight for the child. It's not appropriate for anyone involved. In terms of the work that Nora, the EHRC, that report speaks to is that we all want everyone to have good quality adequate housing that meets their needs, and the picture emerging is that that is just not the case for a lot of people, and it is the people with vulnerabilities and additional needs. That's on top of mainstream waiting lists, homelessness waiting lists. We put just a few statistics in our submission, but in terms of the overall picture, the housing crisis that we're in, we're not meeting need in many different ways, and this is just an additional pressure on the system, and that's what we're seeing. What everyone's speaking to around the room is that there is so much pressure on house building and statutory services and support and adaptations that the system is struggling to respond to those in a way that we would all want them to, which is quickly and promptly, and meeting those needs. I think the report that Shelter Scotland had commissioned with the EHRC looking at all 32 local authorities strategic housing plans showed that essentially the 50,000 target for new houses will most probably be met according to the plans and what have you, which is really, really positive, and that does represent that step change in affordable housing supply. However, chiming with what other people have said about data, there are gaps in the data, and I think the headline was very positive from that report, but the kind of subheading was, the picture's quite murky in it, and that was quite a sophisticated bit of external research, and that was all they were able to pull together. There are gaps in the data about what housing is being built, where, for whom, what the profile is, and I think without really improving the data on the need, but also on how we're meeting it, there is going to be this mismatch. We know that roughly 12% of the housing that's going to be built by 2021 will be specialist, but we don't know much more than that, and that covers quite a broad spectrum of need-based housing, but it doesn't all mean it's accessible or wheelchair access, so without more detailed breakdown of those figures, it's quite hard to match need with the right housing stock, and I think that's probably all everyone's got cases that show that, showing the symptoms of the housing crisis. To sort of follow up on what Fiona was saying, because of one of the things that, the report that Fiona already mentioned, the one that we commissioned together with Shelter, one of the smaller things that the report mentioned was actually the impact of Brexit and the fall of the pound, or the value of the pound, and that that's already had an impact, so, for example, when we look back at the funding that's available for ourselves, the 10 million in the coming years, obviously depends on what happens with Brexit and how that goes, but it's likely that that will have a huge impact, not just because of the fall of the pound, and because that means that materials get more expensive for the construction industry, but also the impact on the amount of workers we have in the construction industry, so, I mean, looking sort of towards the future, there's a large degree of, there's a large degree of uncertainty, and it's not looking very good, and when you already are in a system where you're experiencing increasing problems, you know, increasing waiting lists from year to year, like what Mark was saying earlier with his example, it's, that's all going to get a lot worse, or at least that's what it's looking like at the moment, and you really need to have that funding available to meet those needs, and on top of that, you obviously have the increase in demand that we're likely to see, so in our inquiry report, we highlighted that over the next five years, there's likely to be an 80% increase in demand for wheelchair accessible housing, which is obviously a huge increase, and that's part of the reason why we've called for a 10% national target. Okay, thank you, Mark. Thank you. One thing I would add is we have a small new build programme each year of maybe 60 to 100 houses each year, which is funded by the Scottish Government in part, partly by ourselves. For many years, probably 15 to 20 years, one of the conditions of Scottish Government funding has been meeting a document called housing for varying needs, which means that all housing associations that are funded by the Government for new build housing have to meet standards in there, and to give you some examples, it talks about when you're designing new houses that there's a turning circle for wheelchairs, it just needs a bit more on the space standards, the doorways are wide enough, so there's an element of a future proofing, even if the first resident that goes in there isn't using a wheelchair. The other thing that we're able to do, and again, it's very much a success story and working hand in hand with the Government funding, is that if we do receive notification or say we're building bungalows of clients that have a particular adaptation need before the dies cast on the design process, we can, for instance, if someone needs a ceiling strengthened because of a tracker hoist to take them from a bedroom through to a shower room, we can get that built in. We've done that on a scheme in the last year up in Elgin, and we've been able to access a bit more funding from the local Scottish Government office in Inverness to put in that adaptation at the build stage, which is obviously an awful lot more economic and efficient than doing it retrospectively later on. So that's about having advanced notice of perhaps quite unusual needs that someone might have to have, say, a tracking hoist, but that's quite a rare retrospective adaptation we do, but it's particularly helpful if we have that referral made very early on in the process. We seem to be moving on to the new build process, but just to go back to where we were with adaptations, I'm not sure I would characterise the whole system as failing. I think it's important to remember that many people are getting adaptations done well, done quickly, that meet their need. I think, in general, the experience of that process is a disempowering one, and how disempowering you feel it is will depend on what tenure you're in. Owners, I think, very often feel that the whole process is taken over by the council, but they will nevertheless effectively be the people responsible for instructing the work and for the liabilities associated with the work. I think very often those roles become unclear, and it becomes very difficult for owners to control work that is going on to their own home in the way that they would like to. So there are lots of different issues around, and it's quite inconsistent with the move towards self-directed support, which we see in other social care services, and I think we still tend to operate in a disempowering way for owners and for tenants in the way in which we deliver adaptations, and I think that's part of the problem and the dissatisfaction that arises around it. But the only thing to bear in mind is that, particularly in relation to older people, most older people are owner occupiers. 70 odd percent of people over 65 in this country own their home. The issue of housing of older people, the issue of adaptations to meet the needs of older people, is predominantly an issue in owner occupation, not in the social rented sector. Bear in mind that, particularly in the local authority sector, funding is effectively there, and it's drawn down on the rent, but it's quite substantial. Every council tenant in Scotland is currently playing between £1.50 every week towards the cost of adaptations that are being delivered to council tenants. It's a lot of money that's being committed, and the system is working for many people. I'm happy to turn to the issue of new supply if that's where we're now going, because I think that there are some more fundamental issues there. However, the fact that 80 per cent of all the houses that will be standing in 2050 are currently standing is an important one in that respect. Kenny, you wanted to talk about that. Yes, I follow on from what Mark Fairie and Tony Cain have just said. I mean, I understand that 91 per cent of all houses being provided by local authorities and house associations to meet housing for varying needs standard. However, what can we do to try and get those figures up when they were not occupied and indeed private rented sectors? First of all, on housing for varying needs, it's a 20-year-old document and there is unquestionably that it needs reviewed and reviewed comprehensively. The Scottish Government has a working group that's looking at, but the work hasn't started. We've not commissioned the work to rewrite that document. It doesn't deal with issues around bariatric care, for example, particularly well. It doesn't deal with issues around dementia either, because it was written in 1999 before the issues that we face around dementia became before. There is a real issue about rewriting housing for varying needs. My personal view is that the way to deal with future supply in the new-build sector is that we should develop a single adaptability standard, which applies to every house. To give an example, I think that every house should be capable of taking a track and hoist at the appropriate location, but that means that you have to change the way you engineer floor and roof trusses. At the moment, a private developer will put in a roof truss that is designed to do nothing other than hold up the roof and deal with the wind and the snow loads that it may expect over its life. Don't be putting a trunk full of books up there, because it isn't designed to take that, and you will damage the fabric of the property if you do that. There's something about future-proofing all-new-builds on an adaptability basis. Thank you for that. I'm just a bit floored my loft to put in my book collection. Can you engineer it? Look at your trusses if you're in a new house, because it won't take them. Mark, you wanted to come in on that. Many areas of Scotland are covered by care and repair schemes. I was involved with one for about 25 years between the early 90s and a few years ago. Those are generally funded by, in the one that I'm thinking of, was funded by the local authority in Perth and Kynros, as it happens. Over those years, all the work of that project gravitated towards private sector adaptations, and it was a free service guiding clients through the adaptation process. Again, like our experience as a housing association, most of the work was level access, wet floor showers. Maybe other people here today can fill in some of the gaps for me, but I believe that most of the country is covered by care and repair schemes. It is a free professional service that is intended to guide elderly clients in the private sector, predominantly home owners, but some long-term private sector tenants as well, through the process of getting an adaptation fitted. I think that my experience with the project in Perth and Kynros would generally be replicated at other care and repair projects in the country. I was a great fan of care and repair in the 1990s, when I was a Glasgow councillor and I did a lot of work for my own work pass. In some areas of Scotland, the grants available are so minuscule that people just don't see the need to apply for them. They can be under £100, for example, and a lot of people think that the rigmarole on going through care and repair is too much for the likely grant available. Perhaps it should be looked at again, and there should be a consistent standard for care and repair across Scotland in terms of grant availability and the things that people can apply for. It was a great scheme, but it has just been diluted by the reduction in the value of the grants in some areas. I think that that is correct. In my experience, the majority of the cost of the adaptation was met by the client themselves, but where the care and repair project did come in and was an advantage was just the professional consultancy service they gave to guide people through so that they avoided the cowboys and there weren't the post-completion defects that held everything up. There was a mix of different funding ratios that clients had. As a previous council, I am well aware of that scheme that you mentioned, Mark, and it was very successful. You have identified some of the areas that were seen for the clients to be improved, and they felt secure and safe in the process of going through some of that, because they were identifying individuals' organisations that could support them. However, as my colleague has said, if the grant system is an issue that falls into that too, that becomes a difficulty going forward. However, I think that the precedent that was set and the standard that was met is a good standard to have, and that could be replicated and should be replicated across other parts of the country to see what can be achieved. However, the biggest issue, as we have said at the very beginning, is the financial resources and the implications of that process and ensuring that the supply and demand is there. We know that individuals need that support and that they can get that support, and that project gave us a real opportunity to see what the real demand was out there from other clients in the base. There was a huge opportunity that it can develop, but it is sustaining that going forward. Your views would be quite useful to see how you think that could be managed. Part of the funding mix, in my experience, was applications to charities, which were sometimes successful. However, if the truth be told, it did rely more on someone's personal resources to meet the cost than anything else. That would be my answer. It would be a barrier to the whole process if it is the requirement of having something and not having the financial resources or having the financial resources that you have to then fund it yourself to make that happen. That was experience. There is a national organisation representing care and repair projects across Scotland, Care and Repair Scotland. You may do worse than to speak to them about their experience and how they feel about how it is working. However, for the most part, all local authority areas have some form of care and repair scheme. It will be delivered in a variety of different ways, but Care and Repair Scotland will have an overview of that. The other thing to say to be fair to the Scottish Government is that there has been quite a lot of work around alternative sources of funding, particularly for owners where they need to move, so there is access to the help to ice scheme for older owners who need to move and in equity release schemes as well. There has been quite a bit of work around that, but it has been very difficult, not least because a lot of older owners don't particularly want to burden the equity in their property to carry out repairs. Earlier on, there was quite a lot of talk about funding RSL adaptations. Does anybody have any suggestions about how the Scottish Government could change the process to make it easier or to make it more efficient? There was quite a bit of complaining about it, but there was no suggested solutions. What do you want to do? We don't get very many clients from RSLs or from local authorities because, by and large, their adaptations are sorted. When there are issues, a couple of things that we have been able to suggest to RSLs have been to carry out the adaptation and put a charge on the person's rent. It is not an ideal solution, but it means that the work gets done and the person pays a limited rent charge for the time that it takes to pay off that adaptation. The other thing that we have done sometimes is trying to bring in charitable funding. If an RSL or a local authority, although it has not happened to the local authority setter, cannot afford an adaptation, we can help the client to either apply to charitable sources for funding or do a self-funding campaign. Something else that we have done recently is to do a partnership with the RSL where, if we can find some funding, it can provide the materials. There are ways of being creative around that. That is not the big process, but there are tens of individual clients that are looking at individual solutions for people. I was struck by a comment that Maureen made earlier about picking up on the current conversation and the position of veterans and the role of SAFA, for example, as one charity in that area. I have had experience of a constituent and the help was indeed obtained, but I am picking up on the point that it applies to RSLs as much as it would apply to local authorities. Picking up on the point that you made earlier, Maureen, it seems that, if this situation presents itself—I have had to experience at least one case—to the local authority, it is kind of a new thing. It is sort of new and they are not quite sure how they wish to proceed and all the rest of it. Why is a not greater communication as between local authorities, RSLs and SAFA people who can be extremely helpful for the individual concerned? Why can't they get their act together and get on with it and have conversations with those people to help the people who need the adaptation? That is the age-old question, is it not? Even people like ourselves who know a lot about what we know about find new things happening every day, so it is very difficult to keep on top of absolutely everything that is happening. Our experience is generally that it is not any ill-will. Once people know that there is an issue, once they know that they can help to solve that, they are very willing to do so. We see a lot of goodwill across Scotland. One of the things that we have suggested in our evidence would be that if each local authority had the equivalent of the veterans champion—not a disability champion necessarily, because that tends to suggest wheelchair users. We have lots of clients who have children on the autistic spectrum who have real housing issues, but a one-stop person in a local authority with a wee bit of clout who could say, well, I am the accessibility or inclusivity champion and I can put you in touch with SAFA or Housing Options Scotland or whoever helped by scheme. I think that for a relatively small investment, if you had one person per local authority, that would certainly make a difference in that kind of bringing people together, the bigger picture. Interesting suggestion. The funding issue is not a straightforward one. The idea of a 10-year-neutral approach, so the Government pays for everything, would mean a shift of £15 million or £20 million on to the Scottish Government. The idea of, well, landlords should pay for everything would mean a similar shift on to tenants. That is £1 or £1.50 on the week for housing association tenants. It is not easy to advocate that any more than it is easy to advocate the other way. I think that it would just be helpful if we were clear how we expect these to be paid for, what is an appropriate burden to be placed upon the individual receiving the adaptation in terms of cost and then how the balance of that is to be funded. The recommendations from 2012 were very clear around that, that a 10-year-neutral approach to the funding so that it is clear from the applicant's point of view, from the client's point of view, how the process will work is central to easing the complications in the process, making it more transparent and putting them more in control of the process. Can I just go back to something that you were talking about earlier on, Lisa? The sort of breakdown where there is an adaptation put in, there is a problem with it, that can delay up to three months or whatever the case may be. Do you think it would be worthwhile if the local authorities and RSLs, et cetera, had somebody whose responsibility was to make sure that the whole thing was done, not just passed on to the subcontractors or the contractors and then left it in their hands? However, when they have asked for an adaptation, they have to see it through to the end, and that does not mean to be on-site, but to make sure that it is done to the completion of the client's requirements. It is a kind of project manager, if you like, because it is putting pressures elsewhere, is it not? You have maybe got other agencies involved pushing, well, do you know what, we cannot actually use this adaptation that has been put in. OTs are on the case, social work is also pushing, so it uses up our time and other agency staff time, whereas I do not see it would be too difficult to have someone overseeing the work getting done, but I do not quite know how that would be correct. If somebody has to be responsible for agreeing the adaptation in the first place and the funding available for it, you would think there must be some mechanism that they could make sure that somebody carries, make sure that the job is carried out from start to adequate completion. I would not have thought that that would be that difficult to achieve. Is this not information that we can seek from local authorities as to how they actually go by it? I think that from this discussion there will be quite a lot of information that we will be seeking from local authorities. It will be really helpful to know how they actually from start to finish what the process is. I think you will find that, in many cases, a single point of contact is the approach that is taken, how well that works is another matter, but the point about asking the local authorities, just to make the point again, it is the IJB that has a strategy responsibility for delivering these services. You should ask the IJB. The IJB will ask the local council, though, because they will not have the information. We have a confusion about where the responsibility for these things is set. We do not, because the IJB, as you have said, is technically in charge. Let us now have a debate round about that, and then we will take action. A quick question for Tony Kane. Tony mentioned a few minutes ago a figure of 15 to 20 million for taking a 10-year neutral approach. Where do you get that figure from? The Scottish Government is, at the moment, committing something in the order of £13 million through TMDF and stage 3 adaptations. There is a sum on top of that being spent by housing associations, probably £3 million to £5 million, and on top of that, the expenditure by local authorities in the public, which is the rent money, which is about £15 million to £16 million. So there is £13 million being spent. There is another £18 million being spent elsewhere if you wanted to replace that whole with a single pot from the Scottish Government. It is about £30 million, £34 million, and about £15 million, which is additional to what the Scottish Government is currently spending. However, this is back of the fad packet stuff. Is there anybody else who has got any comment at the stage that they would like to raise Andy? I just wanted to follow up the quality and human rights commission's report. Because back in May, we had the minister coming in, I think, in the week, indeed, that the report was published, suggesting that the 10 per cent target wasn't something that he was very comfortable with. He said, I do not necessarily want an arbitrary figure for what is required to be plucked from the air. The Government have a statutory duty to respond to your commission's report. Have they done so and what discussions have taken place around that target? So they haven't responded yet. We don't have a formal response, but we're going to get one, and we've been in touch with the civil servants working on the response. So there are various reasons for why we haven't gotten one yet, partly sort of the shift in ministers and they want to get several ministers involved in the response. So we know that the minister is not going to agree to our call for a target, which doesn't mean that we're not going to keep on asking for it. But what we've tried to do now is to look at some of the other recommendations that we've had following the report. So at the end of the report, there's a list of recommendations and the national target is just one of them, and we will keep pushing for it, but there are also other recommendations that we want the Government to look at and that we would like them to respond to. Why do you think that 10 per cent is not going to be agreed to given that we've heard the work that housing associations do to future-proof their homes that seems reasonable that all new homes should be future-proofed with regard to the changing needs of people using their own home? Yeah, I completely agree, and that's why we're going to keep on pushing for the target. And I mean, it's important to note that that's supposed to be a minimum. It doesn't prevent local authorities from setting much higher targets and we would love to see that. My comment about the minister not agreeing to the target was more sort of based on what the minister has said and what civil servants have said, but yeah. And coming back to point 20k made about essentially pooling funding, I mean, if you look at things like energy efficiency, I think the public have got a reasonable idea now about where to go for that. I think it's still a little bit uncertain, but broadly speaking, they know where to go. Government does a reasonably good job of promoting energy efficiency and signposting where people should go and what funds are available, et cetera. I mean, is that the kind of approach we need in the medium term, sort of pooling funds, clear signposting, so that we do get both a tenure-neutral approach and a system that's based on the individual needs of individual occupiers? I think it could be. I think the difficulty though is that it would be inappropriate to take rent from tenants and spend it on somebody else's home, so the ring fence that sits around at the HRA and should sit around housing association tenants' rents means that that money needs to just be redirected to those properties, so it's the balance around that. So yes, a single pot would be useful, but how you manage that pot behind the scenes needs to be properly fair to owners and tenants. I think that there are some parallels. Are they not with energy efficiency measures because some tenants' money in council housing is used for? I think that the parallel is that tenants pay more for energy efficiency measures than owners do. They get less support. Most of what's been done on energy efficiency in the last 10 years has come directly from rents and very little of it has come from elsewhere, whereas owners have received more substantial subsidy when work has been done to their homes. But yes, there are parallels. I think the point in the end, and it's really well articulated in the 2012 report and quite well supported by the report from the EHCR, is that it needs to be a transparent process that people can negotiate and control their own way through so they know what they have to pay, they know where the balance is coming from and they're in control of how the work is planned, programme specified and the quality of the work at the end of the day. I think that's often the bit that's missing. Okay, there's more to go back to the HRC point, but I think the 10% probably wandering into my personal views, I'd always defer to Tony and others on Housing Association and Council finances, but given the needs profile and the ageing population projections and the wheelchair projections and things, there does seem to be a huge disparity between current and future need and what is being provided. I don't know whether it's 10% or 20% or whether a target is the thing, but there does need to be a drive towards trying to build houses that are accessible or adaptable in the medium to long term. I think that maybe it's a bit of work around the ROI of doing that, because I appreciate for house builders who are already under a lot of pressure with the upscaling of the house building programme that it's very expensive and there's a lot of issues with delivery of the 50,000 in quite a short time scale anyway, but there's got to be some work done to show that the longer term there are savings across not just housing, but other parts of the public sector picture, health and social care most notably in terms of keeping people in their homes for longer and reducing, as Mark was saying, the kind of care and support packages in people's homes, so I think it needs to be looked at how we future proof the houses more fully than individual pockets of good practice, because I think what all the reports show is that it's very, very inconsistent, so there's a lot of good developments that are going far beyond the 10% and others where there's barely any accessible housing being built. Okay, thank you very much. Once again, just to back up Nora's point, as an organisation we're very much in favour of at least 10% of new builds to be wheelchair accessible or adaptable. I think kind of what we're a bit concerned about setting local level targets, because on a general general point a lot of local authorities don't really know the demand within their own areas for accessible housing and that's kind of why we're saying 10%, and it does vary a lot. Glasgow has committed to the 10% level for I think its units more than 130 units, but as we say some local authorities it's really low, and I think it's just the information they themselves have. Just generally reading reports can be quite sparse, and if they don't realise the demand in their areas it's quite difficult for them to set local targets. How, why, don't they realise the demand? I think a lot of it is based on who they have on waiting lists etc, but I think there's hidden needs, you know, it's about them knowing households that maybe do need to be moved, a lot of it is based on waiting lists that they have, housing waiting lists. Okay, thank you. Tony, you're right. I will if I may. Local authorities work very hard to understand demands in their area and to use what information is available to them so that they can plan to meet the needs of people who have particular needs in housing. It is just not very easy, and bear in mind that building something for an individual might be the solution and that does happen fairly frequently, but you have to be able to build it in the right place. So the offer that you have, you have sites where you have sites, they may not be where particular individuals with disabilities or with need for a wheelchair house want to live, so it's not as straightforward as, well you've got to build them there, build 10% in that development, you'll meet the needs for wheelchair units. Well if that development's in Stirling and you happen to live in Aberfoil it's no use to you at all. So the geography of it makes it much more complicated. Not everybody comes forward and identifies themselves. There is a lot of work around that. Typically in the end what you tend to do with highly adapted houses is they're done on a bespoke basis, so very often either as a stage two somebody's identified during the design process or you knew before you started, and very often those types of highly adapted houses will be built on a bespoke basis. When I was head of housing in Stirling for eight years, I think we built five in those eight years specifically for identified individuals, so that does go on, but it is very difficult, which is why in the end, there is a debate about whether a wheelchair accessible target is helpful. I think the minister has been clear about where he sits on that, and I understand his position. My preference would be if everything was built to an appropriate adaptable standard in every tenure, then going forward you would have a solution. Okay, thank you. Monique? Thank you, convener. Just to go back to what Nora was saying, it sounds quite positive, the correspondence between yourselves and Government, particularly if there is a cross portfolio approach, because housing's not just a matter for the housing minister. If we've got bad housing, the Government won't meet its objectives on improving health and clothing attainment gap in education and so on. I notice that one of your recommendations, one of the HRC's recommendations, is for local authorities to meet their duty to publish their equality impact assessments alongside their ships or their strategic housing investment plans. I was looking in your report and it is quite disappointing to read, and this was back in May this year, so there may have been progress. In the HRC survey, local authorities were asked how they discharged their equality duties, and only 41 per cent had carried out equality impact assessments on their local development plan. The committee is looking at the planning bill at the moment, and we've raised similar issues. I wonder if Nora can speak to that, if there's an update on that ask in your report, and maybe from Tony, because we've just talked about the importance of mainstreaming equality, but it sounds like there are some real barriers on the ground to doing that work early on in the process. We're working on the follow-up of the inquiry at the moment, so we're looking at things that we can do in the future to take that forward. As far as the quality impact assessments, it's not just which local authorities have done them, it's also the quality of those impact assessments and what they've looked at, so that's another issue. It comes back to other areas as well, so with the city deals and the regional deals, we're doing some work around engaging with those local authorities to look at what they're doing. Obviously, housing is a huge part of that. We're making some progress, but of course it takes time. Unfortunately, we do see cases where they could do a lot better, and then we see some cases where there's some good practice. Do you have particular examples to hand me out of the 40 per cent that are doing quality impact assessments? Are there some that are doing it to a really high standard? I'm not sure. I can get back to you on that, but I would expect that some are good and others aren't. I'm just wondering why it is such a mixed picture. These are legal duties on local authorities, so I wonder if Tony can elaborate. On that basis, all I can say is that the expectation is that local authorities, all public agencies, are not the only public bodies who can sometimes be a bit tardy in producing or publishing quality impact assessments, but the EQIA should be prepared during the policy development process. It should be published at the point at which the policy is accepted. I would go a little further. I actually think the quality impact assessing is one thing, but a fully quality proofing exercise really ought to be what goes around some of our more substantial programmes and policies, local development plans and ships might be an example of them. My colleagues get a bit tired of me reminding them of the statutory obligations and the importance of producing these things. Can I ask why that is? I don't want to keep pressing this point because we've discussed it in the planning bill scrutiny, but that quality proofing work shouldn't be an add-on. That has to surely be integral. Why does it feel like a burden to people? It doesn't feel like a burden to me, but it's not an area that everybody is entirely comfortable with. Much of the data around equality's impacts is difficult to source and isn't always clear, and not everybody's always comfortable with some of the conversations that they need to have as part of that process. Measuring, for example, housing impacts and housing issues in relation to the LBGT community isn't easy to do, and these are difficult conversations sometimes to have, even just asking basic questions because you need to ask quite telling questions in order to discover that that community is suffering housing disadvantage. It is something that we need to get better at, but it's not just local authorities that struggle with equality's impact assessments, I would say. I can point to other public agencies who've been tardy in completion of these things. Although we are the local government committee, so... No, and I wouldn't defend it. They need to be done properly, they need to be done to a standard, and people need to understand those the policy implications and the choices they're making. I absolutely agree with you. Okay, thank you. Liam, you wanted to come on. Yeah, just going back to the previous point, I remember when Kevin Stewart was here before and I asked him following up on the shelter report, are we building the right homes in the right places? And I'm not misquoting him, he didn't know, he asked me to write to him, but the more detailed question, which I did, he responded to me and he still doesn't know. I'm not on the wiser, nor was he, so it seems to me that this is information we should have if we have a target. We should know what is being built, where it's being built, are the right homes being built in the right places, and I accept the difficulties that Tony Cain has outlined, but it's not an excuse to say it's difficult. I think we need to make it, we need to make more of an effort, and if the minister wants to say that it's down to councils, or maybe it is down to councils, but we should be telling or advising councils how they should be getting that information. I accept your saying, but I'm not really sure how straightforward it would be to decide that those are the right places for those types of houses to be built. It's a fairly wide-ranging question. My view is that the Affordable Housing Investment programme is not directing investment to the right places, and I think that the evidence that was produced through the homelessness and rough sleeping action group in relation to pressure around homelessness demonstrates that very clearly. The recommendation has been made to three of the Edinburgh and two of the Lothian authorities that they need to allocate over 100 per cent of all social lets in their area to meet the needs of homeless people. If that isn't a absurd recommendation, it's certainly an unachievable one, but the equivalent figure for Glasgow is below 50 per cent. It's pretty clear that delivering half the programme in the west of Scotland, which is where we are, isn't focusing new supply and affordable housing in the areas where it is most in shortage, but I think to be fair, part of the problem is we haven't really come to a clear view about what we're trying to achieve through the Affordable Housing Investment programme, and as a simple example, in East Renfisher about 12 per cent of the homes are in social renting, and in West Dunbarton about 37 per cent of the homes are in social renting, and in this city about 19 per cent of the homes are in social renting, which of those three figures is appropriate in terms of a well-functioning housing market? We don't have an answer to that question, so it's difficult to measure what impact we have. Obviously, we're now on to the very important issue of availability of homes, of a number of homes versus a number of people needing homes, be they homes that can be adapted or otherwise. I was struck by a statistic to the effect that there are some 1,000 empty service family homes in Scotland, as we speak. Would it not therefore be a resource for veterans that the MOD could release this housing for veterans? Is that something that anybody has taken up? With the MOD, Shelter, for example, or Alaco, taking up with the MOD, there's all this housing sitting there, and there's veterans who are homeless. Why are the two things not meeting such that the MOD releases this housing for veterans, and has that issue been explored? Perhaps Fiona would… I'll come in, but I'll have to defer the specifics of MOD housing to Moira. In terms of the issue of empty homes, there are a lot of empty homes across Scotland. We think in the region of 35,000 is the work we do. Shelter Scotland is funded by the Scottish Government to deliver the empty homes partnership, so that is a programme of specifically bringing privately owned empty homes across Scotland back into use by working with local authorities to find owners, incentivise, bring in the back into use, selling them, whatever it is. It's kind of painstaking work, but we've brought back thousands of homes back into use. It's never going to be the silver bullet to the housing crisis, but it is bringing a valuable resource back into some form of housing stock that's usable. It's really, really valuable, and it's a really great programme. Many local authorities now have a permanent empty home officer in place, which is really, really positive, and that work has just been refunded for the next five years. That's not MOD specific, though. That is just privately owned. Is the MOD issue something that Shelter has taken up at some point? It's not something that we've taken up at all, and I'll let Moira speak to that. I suppose, just to come back quickly on the ships and the local housing needs demand assessments and what have you, it is quite a complicated picture, but it does have to be locally led. I don't think we can have national anything. It has to be local authority and partners informed, otherwise you're going to get a blanket solution that doesn't work in rural, urban, high density, whatever it is. That does have to be locally led, but what the ships report that we produced earlier in the year with the EHRC told the story of very clearly is that there is no consistent methodology, no consistent reporting, there is no consistent data set. I appreciate Graham that it's not sufficient to say it's tricky, but it is tricky. It's quite hard to identify and correlate and work out what the national picture is. I think we all need to be alive to the idea that the 50,000 might be numerically met, but the need may not be. That is next-level analysis that we need to think about taking forward to work out where is the identified need and our new house is meeting that need in the most cost-effective way. I think that the reason that the minister and others haven't been able to give a clear answer is because that is not yet proven. There is not a piece of work or a data set that shows that the investment in the 50,000 affordable homes programme is therefore reducing housing needs where it is most acute. We need to improve the data sets and the analysis before we can project what the next house building programme should look like. Before I let Moira in, can I remind people that we are talking about adaptations here? We have veered off the subject a bit years. I think that the MOD plays its cards pretty close to its chest. Their houses are not part of the civilian housing landscape, so we don't get the same information that we have about other housing stock. I think that they are now moving to a new model where accommodation isn't provided by the MOD and people are going to be given an uplift on their salary to source their own accommodation locally, which is going to be another huge problem, particularly if you are based at Lookers and trying to find affordable housing there. It is maybe something that I could take up out with this meeting and perhaps report back to you, because it is a good idea. If this new system is going to be in place, would that not make it easier for the MOD to get rid of those existing premises? My understanding is that the stock is in pretty bad condition. Maybe you wouldn't want it or you'd have to pay an awful lot of money to bring it up to what we would consider to be a good standard. Again, I think that that is part of a much bigger and broader discussion. Potentially, we are to add to the housing stock within Scotland in a substantial way, if it is done properly. Does anybody else have any other issues that you would like to raise? Did you want back in there, Annabelle? No, I didn't think so. I think that something that we see a lot of is the fact that Scotland has lots of different housing markets. In Glasgow, there are 60 RSLs, so if you are looking for a house in Glasgow, potentially 60 applications. In Edinburgh, housing is in really short supply. There are other bits of Scotland where, if you wanted a house this afternoon, you could have one. One of our frustrations is that people do not know that whole Scottish picture. We have a client who moved recently from a third-floor flat in Inverness to a wheelchair-adapted property in Greenock. He was very happy to move to Greenock. Nobody in Greenock or the local area wanted this house for whatever reason. Although adaptations are something that we need to look at, there is potential that we are spending money on adaptations that we could actually look at another solution and either leave that house for somebody else who needs it or does not need it adapted or adapted for somebody else. If there was a way of encouraging people to look beyond the existing local authority area or into an adjacent local authority, you might find that adaptation spending becomes more effective because we are spending it where we really need to run other than just because there is a current crisis that we need to spend. That is just something that we have found very powerfully from our clients. Thank you very much for that. I think that has finished with the questions. Is there anybody who would like to make any final comment before we bring this session to a close? We work with a lot of hospital occupational therapists. I just think cost-wise. There is bed blocking in effect. Do you know that you have maybe had someone who has a life change and injury and just cannot go back to their property? We have clients that have put an interim care home. I mean with a lad of 23 that has been in a care home for a year because he has just not been able to find accessible housing. Obviously, he cannot go back to the family home. Obviously, that causes pressures on the health surface. I guess it swings around about a little bit. It is having more accessible housing to get people maybe discharged from hospital quicker. I will not have to go into care homes, which can be pretty grim. Can I thank everyone for attending? Just to say that the committee will discuss the evidence in private later in the meeting and that the evidence will help to inform the committee budgetary recommendations later this autumn. The witnesses today will be notified of these recommendations when they are published. Thank you very much again. That was a very useful session. I will suspend the meeting for a couple of minutes to clear the gallery.