 Good morning and welcome to the 29th meeting in 2023 of the local government housing and planning committee. I remind all members and witnesses to ensure that their devices are on silent and all other notifications are turned off during the meeting. We have received apologies from Mark Griffin this morning and Marie McNair will be joining us online. The first item on our agenda today is to decide whether to take items 7, 8 and 9 in private. Are members agreed? We are all agreed. We now turn to agenda item 2, which is to take evidence on the annual report of the Scottish Public Services Ombudsman 2022-23 from Rosemary Agnew, who is our ombudsman, Andrew Sheridan, who is the head of improvement standards and engagement, and Nikki McLean, who is the director at the Scottish Public Service Ombudsman. I would like to invite Rosemary to make a short opening statement. I thank you also for rearranging the timing of this to be for Christens rather than after. I can still just about remember last year at this point now. I don't propose to go through everything that you've already seen in updates on the annual report. Other than that, I think for us, our main themes are around our broad statutory functions, obviously public service complaints, which have their challenges, but at the moment I'd say that one of the biggest challenges for us is volumes. We're seeing dramatic increases even in the last two months of demand and complaints. The Scottish Welfare Fund, which is another area of a very distinct type of function, is relatively stable in the sense of the numbers coming in. The challenges there are more about policy and guidance and the unpredictability of the future. The independent national whistleblowing officer function, I would say that we are now, certainly the first year going into the second, seeing it bed down a lot more. We're learning a lot more about the approach to investigation, which is quite different to public service complaints. Finally, the other area of our work, which is around engagement, communication and complaint standards, is an area that we've also been working on in respect of child-friendly complaints. We've done a lot of development work of our function in terms of training, developing a new approach to outreach since lockdown finished. What we're seeing is four very distinct areas, but the common themes between them are resourcing capacity and trying to foresee numbers, but at the same time building efficiencies because we recognise that resourcing is going to be an issue for everyone. You will also have had an update from our six-month point, which we found really helpful to do because it will give a sense of progression. We've even an update on some of those figures that you saw there because I know you've had a particular interest in the backlog of unallocated complaints that we started last year with. At that point, I'm going to leave it open for questions and hope that we cover all of those four areas. If we don't ask the right questions for the things you want to get on record, please make sure that you do that anyway. I want to touch in on your opening statement about the volumes of complaints that you received. I would be interested to learn a bit more from you. You wrote to us about the unprecedented increase in public service complaint numbers so far in 2023. I'd be interested to hear if you have a sense of why that is and what trends you're observing. What we're seeing by the time we started the current year was numbers creeping up. By the time we did the six-month update, we were fairly close to where we were pre-Covid. However, what we have seen in the last two months is the number of public service complaints received has increased by 40 per cent. It's very easy to say that old Covid was the factor in all of that. In 2022-23, we were probably seeing the legacy of Covid in that it disrupted our service and our ability to get information from public bodies, because their service was certainly disrupted. However, I don't think that that was necessarily the underlying issue. I think that it was the exacerbating one. Services were already under pressure prior to Covid. There were already complaints about waiting times for elective surgery. There were already concerns about the scope or the value or the quality of public services. I think that what Covid did was exacerbate some of those existing issues. However, the two things that have been significantly different have been the double whammy of cost of living and inflation and public expectation. Certainly, the cost of living and inflation taken together did not just increase the day-to-day living costs for people, but increased the costs for public bodies in delivering their service. With inflation not reducing as quickly as everybody had expected, even when the cost of living started going down slightly and it's unlikely that it will go back to where it was, the spending power of what is left is reducing. When you combine all of that with coming out of Covid, the impact on public services, I think that people are partly worried, partly frustrated and we see it in pockets of things. We don't so much get the, I can't see my GP, that maybe we were seeing more of during Covid, but I don't know how you describe it. It's not losing patience. I think that it's just frustration of not being able to get the service and that manifests itself into complaints. It's also one of those things, my colleagues who've worked in complaints, when money gets tight complaints tend to go up and I think it's all of those things, not one of them, and I don't see it getting noticeably better in terms of demand on our service for the next short while. I don't know if you want to add anything to that, neither of you. I was just going to agree with that Rosemary. At times what you can see is that you'll get large volumes of complaints about a specific issue and in those circumstances what we would do is we would take one lead complaint, but that's not what we're seeing at the moment. It is just a general rise across the board in complaints. Obviously if that happens then we would manage it in that way, but that's not what we're seeing and we're not able to batch cases in that way. Coming through the networks and my team are picking up that public bodies are definitely feeling more stretched and they are seeing more complaints coming in, so we're trying to support them that way through engagement activities and sharing practice and giving a focus on resolution-based approaches to complaints, but the volume is still increasing and you're getting that feeling from them that they are feeling stressed and stretched as well and it's just a perfect storm at the minute. Good point. You mentioned Rosemary that Covid disrupted the ability to get information from the public sector and it says on your website that there's still a four-month delay. Was there anything else, aside from the inability to get information that Covid created the delay? For us, we were like every other public body, it affected our capacity because our own colleagues had homeschooling, there was also Covid, we caught Covid as well. So, certainly for the first three months of the first lockdown, there was that adjustment to working in a different way. I would say in the reporting year here what you've seen is we've had a much more stable environment, we've been much more geared up to working at home but that still took time, or in a hybrid way, but that still took time from just the disruption on our own staff and our own ability to work. Thank you very much for that. I'm now going to bring in Willie Coffey. Thank you very much, convener, and good morning to you all. Nice to see you. Rosemary, I wanted to ask you a question about the number of complaints prior to you being in post. I think it was about 800 or so that went through the investigation stage prior to you taking up the post. After you came in, that seemed to drop to 192. Was it just to invite you to give some kind of reflection on why that is, what's happened there, why so few cases are going beyond and being investigated and so on and so forth, please? I think it's probably worth at the outset saying what the word investigation means because it has a very specific meaning within our act. It's a formal step where you serve notice on the public body and you do a more formal investigation. But the everyday sense of the word, investigate, we don't investigate fewer. What we are doing, we have over a period of the last couple of years in particular, we are doing constant review of our own service and what we are finding and what we have adjusted to doing is the result of model complaints handling and the engagement work means that we're seeing a much better investigation at local level than we've seen over the years. For all sorts of reasons, I was reading the Crerror report yesterday. One of the things that it said was more complaints handling should be at local level and actually that's what we've achieved and what we're seeing is the benefit of that. Now, there are some complaints that won't go anywhere because they're out of jurisdiction but once we've established whether we can investigate something we then look to see whether we should investigate and it's not that we don't do any work on them. Some of them we do quite a bit of work but what we are doing at that stage is really exploring what's gone before us so we'll often get the complaint file from the public body, we'll certainly follow up to see whether they've done what they said they do but if we see evidence of a good investigation and we can achieve no more for the complainer than has already been achieved because there's learning taken place, there's a remedy put in place. It doesn't seem fair to put either a complainer or a public body through a more in-depth investigation that's pretty much going to repeat what's already been done and get to the same place. There is a fail safe in that in that we also consider the public interest because if there is something that needs to go through that as you say the 192 because there needs to be a public report then that's what we will do but what it enables us to do is be much more proportionate in how we use our resources for benefit across the board. The important things are that learning must be captured, the remedies that are promised must be put in place and if we come across something where that doesn't happen then we will progress it. The other thing and I think this is something if I were a complainer I'd be saying but are you just doing what the public body says they've done? Are you just not looking at that? Well actually we do some we call it inquiry but it is a mini investigation essentially very often. Those type of decisions are made under my delegated authority so I don't see those cases day to day but there is a right of review so if somebody is unhappy with that either the complainer or the public body they can ask for that case to be looked up by me and it's not a huge number but occasionally we will do a bit more investigation and we're open to reopening a case to look at it further and I think that combined with our quality assurance and the other measures we have in place what I think we have is a much more cost effective and effective system because if a public body has said they will do something and it addresses the issues found if we then do an investigation it could be quite a long time before somebody gets the remedy their due so in its entirety in the round no we don't do 800 in-depth investigations but I think we get better outcomes now because we focus our resources where they're really most needed. Okay just could I just stick with that for a wee second Rosemary so let's say 800 complaints were valid in the past and now it's 192 where is the difference going is that they've been pushed back to the public body the local authority for example and to the public making the complaints to the ombudsman who often think about you as their last protocol we have to do with the ombudsman and then are you writing to those complainers saying we're not dealing with that we think it's better dealt with locally by the public body or the councillor but what message does that give to the public who want to use the ombudsman as a kind of independent kind of arbiter about some of these issues I'm sorry forgive me I made an assumption the the process is that the model complaints handling requires the public body to look at something first so if somebody comes to us with what we call a premature complaint we sign post them back and you know we can give help and support if they don't get responses but it comes to us generally when it's been through that stage too so the public body will have a complaint file they will have done an investigation and often the ones that we send back at that you know preliminary just made an inquiry where do I go stage don't necessarily come back to us so I think it's part of the the actual complaints process that we are effectively the third stage and people will know that and there is a duty on public bodies under model complaints handling to sign post people to us but the best remedies and the quickest remedies are often at local level because instant action can be taken I think it's local authority in particular they resolve a lot of their complaints at that very early stage so they basically just put things right I can't remember the numbers I don't know if you can I was actually if I can just add a little bit to that I think two of the things that have helped reduce those numbers one that rosemary said we've really had a focus with public bodies about sign posting so making sure that that is there but going through their process first so we I think I said the last time we're here we had relaunched our training offer for public bodies so we now offer two different courses so there's a good complaints handling and an investigation skills course and through those courses we've really focused on what makes good complaints handling so there's been a real focus for all public bodies on putting their you know everyday complaints handlers through the the good complaints handling so we've had 425 sign-ups in the past year but the investigation skills we've had almost 500 officers from local authorities bodies under jurisdiction and we take them through that whole process so for us that's part of what we've taken from learning improvement and we've taken it back to the public body so saying this is what makes a good complaint to stop it escalating to here but obviously sign posting if somebody's unhappy with it this is what you should do this is how you get to a good resolution here is how you agree it so we take them through that step by step and one of the things we're going to do now is start to really refine that in terms of sector specific training so at the minute it's good complaints handling and it's investigation skills but the feedback we're getting is that more specific examples would be helpful so we're seeing that impacting on the complaints that are coming through as well people are handling them better at that stage. Are the public happy with that change in emphasis if you like or are we tracking what the years of the satisfaction process or complaints process is? We currently don't do what I should say we have revised our approach to customer feedback because traditionally we were only getting asking for feedback after we'd done that investigation now clearly we have a lot more closure points where we don't proceed any further so next year we're relaunching that we do get some I think the two indicators are complaints about our service but probably more so complaints not complaints requests for review of those initial decisions and in the entirety of the number of cases we do it's very small I think it's like everything else there will be some people who are very unhappy some who are very happy and then those in between but the key to this I think is actually explaining and explaining well I do think there is a communication challenge in this because we're not saying a complaint is unimportant in fact we're saying the exact opposite the complaint is really important but actually if we can't do any more for you and I think this time is in not frequently but sometimes with the expectation of what even an investigation could achieve so for example we can't look at a complaint about education and say a teacher must be sacked so there are occasions where I think it's the outcome was not what somebody wanted but I wouldn't say it's lots and lots of people it's often most specific for us which is absolutely right because if we don't challenge aren't challenged we don't review ourselves and look at ourselves and look at could we've communicated that better but the other thing I just wanted to add on these cases that are resolved or addressed or don't go into this large investigation we're increasingly looking at resolving trying to find resolution where both parties as long as learning happens are happy to with our intervention to actually put something right so a good example might be if there's an issue with the housing repair rather than go through investigate it should they have done it we might just phone up the housing association and say we've got this complaint you've already acknowledged that this should have been done will you just put it right and and it's about changing it sounds counterintuitive but it's actually changed to being people focused rather than process focused which I think can only be a good thing but um did you want to add anything niki the only other thing that I wanted to state is so in terms of premature complaints if we receive premature complaints we would tend to sign posts back to the public body but if it's quite clear that the process is very frustrated long running somebody is having real difficulties and real challenges we would certainly take into account any vulnerabilities the person was experiencing and we would consider and we do have the power to take that case even if it's premature so it's not something that we do often for the reasons that Andrew's explained but we do have the authority to do that the second point that I wanted to make was in terms of cases that as Rosemary says we use that term investigation advisedly but for those cases that are not fully published investigations on cases where we receive advice 63% of the cases where we seek advice on are at that initial advice stage so as Rosemary says I think that just illustrates that it is not that there is no investigatory work going on in these cases we are seeking professional advice we're looking at these cases carefully some of our decisions communicating these findings are 16, 17, 18 pages long arguably too long they're incredibly detailed so I think it's as Rosemary says that maybe the numbers and the terms don't actually describe the work that is the extent of the work that is going on at that phase okay I certainly think the public view and in terms of their satisfaction with processes is an important aspect of this to keep some kind of track on going forward for us Rosemary if that's possible so my other question might actually use the same answer but I'm going to ask it anyway it was in relation to specific local authority complaints the information we have here suggests that local authority complaints being closed after the investigation stage was only 25 out of a possible 1151 last year so the question arises again why are so few local authority complaints investigated that's quite a substantial difference isn't it so and I invite you to explain that one if you can please it's the assessment of whether to proceed is is a whole range of things but I might take on this is actually the local authority local authorities were the first to have model complaints handling procedures and they're also the network that we've had the most contact with over the time so I think some of it we are seeing good complaint handling at the first instance there's also something about because of the breadth of different types of service they cover that we see a lot of complaints where as Nicky described about professional advice if it was planning for example we're limited in what we can investigate and our initial advice might be actually everything that's happened to this point is exactly what they've said should have happened we won't proceed further on those I couldn't tell you chapter and verse why but I think it's a combination of the types of cases being so diverse and the the length of time and the very active network group that is there because Andrew and his team go to that and they they're very good at sharing good practice they're quite proactive in you know comparing monitoring stats and stuff like that so I think it's something to do with the sector themselves as well as the complaint handling but I don't if you want to add anything from the network group so if that's enough yeah I would just add that they are a very active network and the when they meet they split into family groups and they share trend analysis of the data that they capture on complaint handling so they are actively now sharing good practice with each other that we've kind of established that conversation so we go along and we support that and we share more relevant or up-to-date examples of support and learning that have been put in place but they are now as a network doing that themselves in small family groups and we're there to support that they're also the network that probably engage most on any tweaks or changes that we make to guidance documents or information that's shared so they're quite embedded in terms of the language they understand the process really well so they are out of all the networks the one who probably are further down that route as rosemary said in terms of good complaint handling and good outcomes and they're really focused more on people centered now having said that take nothing on face value so we are monitoring and we constantly monitor so the four areas that we get the most complaints about housing education social care and planning the ones that are most likely to go to more of an investigation would tend to be those education and social care more complex complaints but i'd say we take nothing on face value so we do monitor so by the end of quarter two in this year we were up 29 per cent on local authority cases and significantly for me what we have seen is that the premature rate that is people coming to us before they have been through the process is 28 per cent which is slightly up but before model complaints handling it was it was 50 per cent so i think for the reporting year in place okay but we're not complacent and we will monitor it but we can only monitor what people bring to us so i think the other side of that is if you're not happy with it please progress it to us just just if you don't mind just just let me just pick that finally those numbers that i gave you the year 25 out of 1151 were closed can you just give them assurance give the committee and the public an assurance that the the difference the 1126 are being dealt with by someone they're not being dismissed they're being dealt with in a different part of the complaints process yeah i don't have the numbers to break this down specifically to local authority but we could do if you if it would help afterwards but just to give you an indication of those that we don't do that formal investigation on so i'm just trying to find the numbers i turned over the page yeah it's that one so in the the reporting year there were actually 1915 cases that were closed after these initial stages so of those 1288 were good complaint handling so you can see a significant number had already been through a good complaint process and some of the 376 of them were where the investigation looked reasonable and although it hadn't been upheld when we looked at it we couldn't see anything more that could be achieved for the person now what that means then is if you look at some of the other things so we resolved 44 of them and our resolution rate is rising and what it means is the number that actually we didn't look at in great detail is very very low it's it's probably under 150 now of those 110 we accepted them but we sent them back or said they're a valid complaint but we formally returned them to the organisation to tell them to investigate and obviously we talked to complainers when we're doing this so the vast majority have some form of investigation it just doesn't come under that formal we investigated if i could change my legislation the language is some of the things i would change in it okay thank you very much for those responses thank you thanks very much for that i'm not going to bring in Pam Gosall thank you chair and good morning panel in the last seven years complaints have doubled regarding the scottish public service ombudsman's own services and the spso largely puts this down to the backlog that is in the process of being cleared so my question is around what steps does the ombudsman plan to take forward moving forward to lower the volume of complaints they're getting so my question to you rose marie um it's a good question because i'm not sure i'd necessarily always try and lower the volume of complaints because it's a really valuable source of feedback we would like fewer complaints which would demonstrate that our service is is there we have over the last well it's the last few years now since i've been in post we have adopted the equivalent of the model complaints handling procedure so we have a two stage process ourselves which is identical to the model complaints handling obviously we can't have a third stage which is the ombudsman so we contract an independent person to do that third stage investigation for us so that is the process itself so whatever that person's findings are we will treat them as if an ombudsman had made them we'd look for improvement and obviously feedback the delay has been a big issue with certainly in the reporting year but again we we have reduced the number of complaints about that partly by reducing the delay but also about managing it better and communicating better now over and above that um that i think what we're seeing is a reflection of what all of public service is seeing i think there are other factors it's not just about us and very often what what we see is that when a decision has been made that was a delegated decision and there's a right of review what we will often see is somebody will engage with the review process and if their complaint is not upheld still they'll switch to customer service complaint process and i completely and utterly understand that you'll try everything you can to get to the answer that you want to hear and i think it's part for me of listening to what people have to say so we'd like fewer of them because it's obviously drain on our words not drain but it's more resource for us but i think the two important things are we monitor the trends and we monitor if there are specific subject areas and delay was the only one that was the really the the theme that went through so we've we've tried to learn to tackle the delay and it's not just in unallocated cases it's in other areas of of case work too because the knock-on effect one of the reasons we had unallocated cases is because of the knock-on effect of the investigations taking as longer so having more old cases so we couldn't allocate the new one so we've we did both together so we're seeing a reduction in that in terms of any other reductions there is a combination of things that it's not just what's complained about but it's the type of complaint and it's very often the same person making the same complaint about the about everybody they come in contact with and i just really want to help them understand that we're giving them you know a good service but we can't always tailor it 100 percent to every single person we we try and engage in terms of making reasonable adjustments as far as we can in and we do actively ask at the beginning of an you know when we get a complaint is there anything you need us to do or communicate differently and ultimately sometimes it just comes down to we can't please all of the people all of the time in every single way um but we do we do try very hard can i just ask in that rosemary you just mentioned that sometimes it's the same complainer it could be in the four areas you've took challenges you spoke about how often does that happen that um that rather than getting i wouldn't say the word new complainers but different complainers does it is it often the fact that you do get those repeat um complainers quite a lot in numbers terms it's not a huge number of complainers so we could probably you know recall who they are over a two-year period it's more the volume and similarity of what they complain about so it's it's often the same complaint or a very similar complaint and it's it's something that i find personally quite challenging because i want to help people move on there comes a point where we can do no more the public body can do no more um and those complaints we're actually not quite a non-sector we've we say when we talk about reducing times and constant review of our processes we do a lot more agile testing of new ways of working and one of the things we're currently testing and working on is actually instead of taking all 10 of those complaints over a period of a few months is make sure that we've addressed the basic and central issue but not take every single complaint and it's not that we don't want to it's it doesn't help the complainer fundamentally it doesn't help us and it doesn't help the public body sometimes because it keeps it can keep the same issue going round and round sometimes for five six years without anybody getting any further on so there's no single answer we try and do everything we can but stick to our value of of people focused thank you thank you thanks pam i'm gonna bring in miles i wanted to return to the question willy kofi had asked with regards to trends which you outlined and just wondered if there is any analysis available at a national level now to look at those trends since spso took over the role of standardising complaint procedures i think it was around 2010 it's to analyse trends you have to have data so we have engagement we through the networks and that enables us to analyse trends in particular sectors we obviously do the same as many sensible organisations do we do horizon scanning and we look for wider societal trends as well because there's often a correlation between those and our own complaint numbers we have in the last two years shifted our approach to how we use our own information so in andrew's team we have what we call an insights officer who's able to pull together all the bits of information we have so not just numbers but what recommendations have we made are their themes within recommendations so communication is an eternal theme amongst all public bodies i would say but the other things then that enables us to do is identify from our data whether there are we get more from proportionally from one public body or one sector than another and we try we we couple that with our support and intervention policy the focus being on support is there something we can do offer that organisation or that sector to address some of the trends so during the sort of reporting period we did not identify a trend with health complaints and delay and sometimes not even being looked at so we proactively a couple of times actually wrote out to NHS boards and highlighted and offered support about perhaps how to address it during the Covid the lockdown the times of high demand we also within that policy if there is an organisation that we think needs to improve and they're not doing anything we have different powers under complaint standards now what we can't yet do which i it's partly a resource issue and it's partly how organisations themselves are set up we do it for the whistleblowing function because there are fewer public bodies there's a requirement to actually publish annual statistics and in the whistleblowing standards what we we incorporated there was an annual reporting requirement and we see all of the annual reports for whistleblowing what we don't see in the same way because we're simply not resourced for every single public body to say send us your annual reports so we can analyse them now there is undoubtedly a technical solution to all of this somewhere down the line i think as information commissioner we managed something but it ultimately comes down to the benefit of doing it and i think right now we get enough data to be able to do the intervention the training development and all that from from our own data thank you for that that relationship which you've developed being closer to bodies who you know people are complaining about to try to speed up that i think has attracted some comment for example in 2014 professor chris guild now at glasgow university but formally at SPSO wrote about these new responsibilities and engagement with public service bodies but also the need for demonstrating sufficient independence during that period so just wondered what safeguards you're making sure are embedded in that process yeah i would use the word closer advisedly because that applies implies a there is a different sort of relationship so fundamentally if you look at our investigatory work and our welfare fund work they are independent decisions that we take independently our findings are our findings they're not negotiable unless there's some form of material error but we have so that is very clear we don't talk to public bodies about specific cases unless we're actually investigating something obviously now andria's team what they have are the the the officers who give advice and guidance about complaint handling generally so it's almost like two tram lines one is about much as we want to get on professionally i'm i'm the ombudsman you're a public body i am my staff act independently and objectively on the other tram line what we want to do is improve the process for everybody so we will give general advice guidance training now i think and it actually comes back to something mr coffee that you touched on i think our challenge at the moment is how we communicate those cases that don't go all the way through to this big investigation because we have to be able to convince and demonstrate that they are taken independently we're not just going on what the public body said because they said it and i still think we have a challenge with that but it's not chinese walls it's about being professional and recognising the limits we will always make decisions independently i think if you take any of my investigation staff and cup in half they'll say independent in the middle and it's it's you know something that we are all really conscious of and i'm well aware of professor gill i think his his advice was very very timely because it would have been very easy i think with the complaint standard stuff to get too too close but even the network groups that we've mentioned we don't run those we're invited to go and speak at them so aren't necessarily always there for everything they're talking about and then at a different level at a senior level so like myself and nikki we have had to go and speak to public bodies about complaints handling or trends we've noticed and that's a bit of a combination of the two this isn't good enough but we'd like to be able to help you to help yourself so i don't know if that helps at all no that's helpful i didn't want to pick over professor gill's all his comments but i thought there were some interesting pointers like you've said and and around new responsibilities actually since 2014 which ssp sort of have been given and he did express specific concerns with regards to and i quote we should be asking whether such additional roles will help or hinder the ombudsman institution in fulfilling its constitutional role i just wondered in terms of those comments if if you'd considered that given new responsibilities as well obviously since 2014 and i became ombudsman in 2017 and took on the whistleblowing stuff since then and we are also likely to be developing child friendly complaints i would say we learn ourselves so much from the stakeholder engagement and the actual doing of the work i think it's it's very good advice about consider that relationship because it does alter slightly each time but i would say it's definitely a help not a hindrance the hindrance would be is if you didn't do it well and didn't do it professionally but i think if you come at it from the approach that we take in relation to our values and our strategic aims about learning and improvement it's also about building capacity not just our capacity the capacity of the complaint system which actually takes us all the way back to crera actually about should be better complaint handling locally they all fit together in a different way so help not hindrance that's helpful thank you thanks camina thanks miles i've just got a couple of questions around the public petition relating to the sps pso it's being considered by the parliaments citizens participation and public petitions committee and among other things the petition calls for an independent review to establish whether the current legislation governing the spso is fit for purpose and given that uh you are also pushing for legislative change i'm interested to hear if you agree that 20 years after the legislation setting up the spso review may be required and if so who do you think should conduct that review how long have we gone okay i absolutely fundamentally think there should be a review i've been trying since almost since i came into office to get that review there are a number of reasons for this from a complainer point of view our act was written at a time when everybody did everything in writing and kept making files and i don't think that it's adaptable enough as it or as adaptable as it should be for different ways of delivering services and making complaints the each time we've had a new function it's added something in and it's an incredibly messy piece of legislation to read now and i think there is something about making it clearer it's not just lawyers who read legislation within that though there are some areas where as an ombudsman service and organisation we are not keeping up with our colleagues certainly in other areas of the UK and across Europe and this relates to own initiative investigations which i won't go back to because we've we've talked about before but then there are other i think more maybe not as obvious but other things that would help and that is this it's almost this relationship thing again about being able to share information differently with other scrutiny and oversight bodies because as public services become more complex the scrutiny and oversight of public services is quite complex and i think there needs to be a a review of how those bodies are enabled to work together because it's often the legislative things which get in the way and as to who does it i would leave that to the greatest and betters but i can't see that a parliamentary scrutiny of our legislation would go miss it would certainly kick things up in the air or get things started wouldn't it so you mentioned that you weren't going to go go over the own initiative investigative powers and i know we did discuss that i think last year when you were here or earlier this year but i would be we just so we get it all on the record here be interesting to hear from you what you think these ombasmen in for example wales and northern ireland and other international schemes are able to do that you're not able to do and if you have a sense that the lack of own initiative powers hinder your ability to fulfil your responsibilities so i can only investigate at whatever stage a complaint if it is brought to me if somebody doesn't complain i can't investigate under own initiative powers you're able to investigate something in the public interest of your own volition now arguably you can say well can't you research it now yes you can but when you have the own initiative powers you have the other things within the act that come with it like being able to compel evidence and information and what it enables you to do is focus on an issue or a demographic or a theme without having to focus on a particular public body it also means that you can phrase it and word it to get to the issue you're trying to look at because i think with complaints sometimes you have to go with what the complainer is complaining about now the benefit of that is you can do one investigation that is cross cutting in one way or another that doesn't necessarily right you've got to do this do that but it really highlights an issue and it really enables the underlying themes that might prevent or help other complaints and complainers now the other benefits to this is it's a far more effective use of resources you might achieve with one investigation what you couldn't achieve with 10 20 complaints but for me i think fundamentally the way that you choose and decide what to investigate it ties in with what nikki mentioned about people and vulnerable situations i'm as interested in knowing why some people don't don't complain and whether the complaint system as a whole serves everybody as it should so you can look at those very different issues and and it is actually the way that if you sort of go back to sort of textbook things voice for the voiceless i think that would give far more of a voice for the voiceless than us being able to only look at the complaints that come to us yeah i think that's certainly a good point that not everybody complains but there's people who are sitting on something that they would really could do with some help and support okay so well so thanks for unpacking that a bit and that's very helpful i'm now going to bring in Marie McNair who's joining us online thank you convener and good morning panel um with me you touched in your opening remarks um about what you're doing to develop the child friendly complaints and obviously you might want to expand on that a bit but also um we heard from you last year obviously you're talking about um there's vulnerable groups who are not making complaints you just kind of reference that a wee second ago there um and obviously kind of we don't obviously know you know what the barriers are in terms of the making complaints but i just wanted to ask what you're doing to reach out to those groups and individuals okay so we it won't be in the last reporting one it's it's work that we're doing this year we we're partly we're refocusing our engagement strategy our stakeholder engagement to try and identify how we can make get better contact we have a number of individual initiatives and i might ask andrew to talk about one that's related to data we have also been working with jointly with the northern island ombudsman and a couple of academics one of whom you know um they're looking specifically at how you identify vulnerable people in vulnerable situations and we've had a couple of workshops with them and they're going to be developing some resources that we will have on our website host on our website for advice for public bodies because whilst we would like to have greater contact actually it's it's how at front line there is more support in terms of complaints so it's a work in progress but i'm just going to ask andrew to talk about the data bit of it if you don't mind yeah so the insight officer in my team started to look at all the stats from last year so we pulled all the complaints that came in and we broke them down across all the local authorities and then we used the deprivation index to target where the complaints were coming from people in deciles one to four just looking at the most vulnerable deciles to begin with and then we further drilled into that to look at what sector the complaints within those deciles were more likely to come from so we now are at a stage where we have a vast amount of data that will help us director engagement over the next year so for example we can look at a local authority we can see that people that are experiencing the most vulnerabilities within those deciles are more likely to complain about housing issues so then that allows my team to engage with those public bodies and support them so what are the issues how can we help you to have better complaints handling but the key thing that rosemary touched on is is the hidden data and that's the bit that we're trying to pull out now so we can see across the 32 local authorities well why does that local authority not have anybody in deciles one and two complaining about this service it might be that that local authority is doing a fantastic job and there's nothing to complain about but actually or public body sorry but it might be that actually the process isn't right for them so on part of this project which we're you know we could we could go 100 miles an hour and go every avenue down this but we're trying to pull it back is we're now looking at well how are our materials supporting public bodies and supporting members of the public to access our service is it the language isn't right do we need to look at easy read do we need to look at how we are communicating to bodies under our jurisdiction and that they should be relaying that back to members of the public so there's a whole myriad of projects that can come out of this draft of data that we've pulled and we've only been doing that this year but the the keys for next year moving forward will be the engagement that comes out that will be driven from that data so my team will actively look at where can we have the biggest impact where are we going to get the most in terms of improving complaints handling from this data the other the other things i talked about we we do a lot of you know very quick small projects so a specific example will be it's quite challenging communicating and making complaints for prisoners and we completely reviewed the literature for prisoners and and actually followed the advice because there are quite high rates of or low rates of literacy and well i'll assume Marie is there even though it's only her name showing in prison so we we reframed it using guidance from the dyslexia association on how to communicate so there isn't a big bang for everything we're just trying to do it within our resource as much as we can individually i was just going to add in terms of the the welfare fund applications we we take all of our applications over the phone whereas that that isn't the case at first here review stage for local authorities some somehow free phone numbers for example but not all local authorities so i think it's as rosemary says it's it obviously is about accessing easy access to our service and we've worked really hard with our teams to make sure that across all three areas of casework that happens through regular training feedback etc but it is also about how people access service the the public services themselves and i think there's there's more work to do in particular i would say around the welfare fund rosemary one of my constituents raised an issue about a complaint not being accepted because it was made in the name of a local community council i just wanted to ask what avenue does a community council have to make a complaint if it's about a local authority i would find it difficult to answer the question without it being obvious what i was talking about would it be possible for me to write to you afterwards about community councils because it's quite a complex area and i would rather make sure that i give you the right answer than try to edge around it if that's okay welcome that rosemary that would be really helpful thanks i'll move on to to my last question obviously kind of earlier on in the year you're saying that you'd started to kind of log complaints about housing repairs is this really about damless moan it's something that committee is very interested in and obviously you were saying that the numbers were very low but can you advise the committee of you know what you're doing to obviously to find out what complaints are there and it has been a kind of a big jump in numbers well the first thing we did was we started actually putting a log on them in our case handling system so when we spoke to him in may we had 10 cases logged that figure is now 39 so we've already looked at so obviously they're going up we have 39 statistically what is interesting is 17 of those were premature cases which meant the issue had not been even addressed or looked at at local level and i think that is probably a combination of not knowing where to complain or not knowing how to push that so we have got cases in the pipeline obviously some of them are still under investigation um there've been a few where actually when the complaint about the damper mold was made six of those they were properly investigated at the local level and addressed um what we are do finding though is that and it's a generalisation and it's only only a small number but organisations are responding to concerns and we've not had to do a really big in-depth investigation yet i will always say yet um i think some of this will be driven by the publicity about it but because of the way this particular issue has emerged publicly i think it's going to be less likely that we see a public body not looking into it because of the implications um but at this moment we're tracking it let's watch this space and yes they've almost quadrupled in numbers thanks for that was me back to yourself condina thanks very much mary um and that comes to the end of our questions but you said at the beginning you wanted to cover certain areas i just we do have a little bit of time so if there's anything that you want to highlight or make sure we really hear that you're welcome to do that i mean certainly what i've been hearing from you is that you're taking a very in general a very proactive approach kind of preemptive work and all of this kind of like being effective and and really kind of looking for that people-centred approach that you're going for and and you know love the idea that rather than being stuck with the process following that to the end it's actually looking for the solution for people and meeting that need so i think that's tremendous that that's beginning to work out yeah i think the the couple of things that i did want to highlight are the work on the independent national whistle blowing officer and i'm sort of running out of voice so if you feel like you'd like to do that and also touch on the current state with unallocated cases because there's good news there yeah i'm happy to do the brief update on the in-woe because obviously it's it's the second year of in-woe now for SPSO it a lot of work went into the preparation with working with boards to get ready we talked about the annual reporting process earlier so unlike with public service complaints we are we have been able to analyse the first set of annual reports on in-woe and really that's been able to then direct the activity that we've undertaken with boards producing guidance for them about where they need to consider i think one of the challenges for boards at the moment is very much about how they report the learning from these cases whilst very clearly protecting the confidentiality of the parties involved so i think that is still something that that we're learning from we had a very successful second speak up week in october of this year where the focus was very much on how you ensure that you are you are driving learning and improvement from these cases not just in the specific instance but sharing that more widely across the organisation so i think that these these investigations are proving to be very complex in nature some of them and we're using a wider range of investigative techniques and we would normally use on public service complaints but we're working it's a it's a relatively small team our in-woe team it's around five people within that team so there is learning on our part as well but i think as we're going through we're working well with public bodies we're carrying out reflective reviews on the cases that we're undertaking and you'll see from our website we're publishing findings so it was really just to highlight in this second year there is still work to do but we are very much finding our feet in terms of investigative processes that we're using thanks for that that sounds like a very positive direction and i i do think i remember seeing promotion for the speak up week in october so it cut through even somebody who's very busy just the final one because i know the committee have had an interest in our unallocated cases as of yesterday we had 288 cases waiting allocation obviously these aren't the same 288 there were right back at the beginning of the year but that is in the context of a 40% increase in the numbers coming in so the systems that we've put in place are really working effectively it's it's marginally just under four months still for some cases and i have to stress the sum because we do prioritise cases that will get allocated in in that sort of half that time it's not ideal but we're still seeing the direction of travel and actually it's been a really helpful learning experience for us in how we manage that and keep the throughput of work going and we still at the same time are working on making sure we don't have lots of older complaints by the end of the year so the direction of travel is still in the right direction i had hoped it would be a little quicker but i wasn't anticipating quite such a big rise as 40% that's great thanks for that update and i just want to check do you do you want to come in yeah come on in thanks can we just follow up briefly on the Marie McNair's question there on the dampness and mould issue are you aware at all of authorities still regarding complaints from tenants about dampness and mould being categorised as condensation and therefore not dampness and mould we've had this problem for many years and some of us who have served in local authorities have experienced this and it appears to be the case that dampness and mould wasn't a recognized danger to prevent a housing a local council from allocating a personal house that's in that condition so i wouldn't like to think that that's still the case that people's complaints about dampness and mould are being disregarded and regarded as condensation could you say anything about that at all and whether we are actually gathering these complaints in fully and properly now i don't have the data to say absolutely it does or it doesn't and it's it's unfortunate in a way dampness, mould and condensation are three different things they may cause each other but they're not necessarily the underlying issue i think what i would come at it from a slightly different perspective is we are seeing better handling of complaints about those issues generally and the fact that none of them have got to us this in this current year it's obviously tracking it this year that have raised that as a major issue it doesn't mean they won't reach us but it's not a theme that's come through in the way that i have recognized it in the past i'm sorry i was looking at fellow policy of say and we'll know the cases in more detail than me it's not something that's been raised through a case but what we will do is alert our teams to make sure that that we're looking out for that and to be able to capture that as an issue okay thanks for that thank you great thanks very much so that concludes our our questions i think it's been very helpful to to hear from you again and i'm glad that we were able to move it to this side of the year rather than six months on as you say when it's fresh in in your minds so thank you very much for your evidence today and i'll now briefly suspend the meeting to allow for a change of our witnesses thank you i'll now turn to agenda item two which is to take evidence on the annual report of the Scottish Housing Regulator 2022-23 from George Walker who's the chair and Michael Cameron who's the chief executive at the Scottish Housing Regulator and i'd also like to welcome Paul Sweeney MSP to the meeting who has joined us for this item and i'd like to begin by inviting George to make an opening statement thank you very much i might take just a minute or so more i'm opening statement this time they're done before just because so much has gone on since the time of publishing an annual report so i hope that's acceptable to the committee i promise i won't drawn on for too long but thank you so much convener and committee for inviting us to present the annual report today for 2022-23 we published in October in October as you'll know but since march the the end period of the report so much has happened and we really did want to draw your attention to some of these important developments since then so i'll start with homelessness if i may i'll share some analysis with you on new build and what's happening there and i'll also update you on rack which is pretty hot off the press if i might so to start with homelessness we've previously spoken about this and back in February we said in our thematic review of homelessness services that for some councils there was an emerging risk of systemic failure that was a significant statement since then the Scottish Government published statistics showing an increase in the number of homelessness applications today as we sit here the number of people and children in temporary accommodation is now the highest on record and they're spending longer in temporary accommodation than in the past our on-going engagement with councils about the delivery of services for people who are homeless have found that breaches of statutory duties are now a regular occurrence in some councils in the recently submitted annual assurance statements to us as the regulator 14 local authorities stated they do not always fully comply with our duties and some acknowledge that they are not able to meet their duties to people who are homeless are not always able to meet their duties to people who are homeless our analysis of the recently submitted social landlords annual returns on the charter have identified that fewer existing homes are becoming available and when they do they are empty for longer so that the net effect is that fewer homes are available to let in addition to those already in temporary accommodation some councils are concerned that there is going to be an additional demand for homelessness services resulting from the home offices initiative on streamlining the asylum process we see that the demand in some areas now certainly exceeds the capacity to respond we are now of the view that there is a systemic failure in the services provided by some councils and that there is a heightened risk for other councils too well we'll of course contain to monitor assess and report on homelessness we recognize that systemic failure requires an intervention beyond the regulatory powers given to us by parliament yesterday we published a statement updating earth thematic review to reflect this current position about systemic failure in some homelessness services provided by some councils we of course stand ready to work with the Scottish government and stakeholders to address these acute issues that we see in homelessness now we're very aware of your own parliament's recent debate on housing our views at the context for tenants and social landlords has never been more challenging but social landlords have worked hard and kept to rent increases in the last couple of years to levels below the prevailing rate of inflation that's undoubtedly been of immediate help to those tenants struggling to manage household finances however rent arrears are at the highest level since the introduction of the charter and landlords are facing real pressures in funding future investment in their tenants homes and in services related to this i do want to highlight our recently published analysis of rsl five-year financial projections so this takes us up to the 27 28 year and what we see in that is a reduction in the new homes that rsls will build and in the number of rsls who plan to build that's also in decline this is due to cost increases in construction and on and impacts of the cost of borrowing for rsls they're also planning to cut back our delay investment in existing homes too so troubling these same organisations are also having the expenditure having on non-core activities what's that well that's things such as welfare and energy advice that they provide not part of what of core as i said and having expenditure on that significant the impact on current tenants and people experiencing homelessness could be really very significant so this is further evidence of the significant pressures that tenants and landlords are having to cope with let me turn to rack as you know indeed convener we discussed it when we last met we've been working with stakeholders to establish the extent of rack in social housing in scotland from our on-going data collection which we started in october we know that nine social landlords have a total of 953 homes with rack we'll continue to update these figures as landlords conclude their on-going investigations of possible rack and of course we're engaging with those landlords that have confirmed rack in homes to get assurance about the plans to deal with with managing this finally i want to report that we're progressing well with the review of our regulatory framework we started that in june with a discussion paper and we've used the feedback from that to develop specific proposals which we are now consulting on this consultation closes on 15 december we'll cogitate and consider the feedback from that and produce a final framework in febru for implementation in april alongside that we're also revising our corporate strategy that again we'll start from april i'm happy to say that feedback's been broadly very supportive there's a clear sense that the sector wants stability and that the existing framework has been working well we agree with that the existing framework has been working well at present while we're engaging with a number of landlords i'm very pleased to report that we have no statutory interventions currently underway the main proposals that we've made are around allowing for us to ask for further detailed information on emerging topics topics such as damp and mould in the annual landlord assurance statements we're also looking in the framework to clarify or clarification rather on the regulatory status based on feedback from tenants and importantly lenders to the sector we'll also be doing a comprehensive review of the annual charter return part of that is safety related and we want to collaborate with the sector to develop key measures around safety issues such as damp and mould and that's complex so you can see a collaborative approach matters we will wrap this up with work on the indicators we will use to monitor landlords achievement of the newly proposed social housing net zero standard and we'll do a further consultation on that combined towards the end of the year of course throughout all this we'll be very happy to keep the committee updated on our work via the clerks or by coming to visit should that be needed convener i'm sure you'll have questions for us so i'll hand back to you and we're happy to answer any questions or discuss anything you'd like thanks very much thanks very much george and thanks for that very thorough introduction and kind of getting into some of the detail about homelessness and but also highlighting the your awareness around maybe more data to be gathered around damp and mould which has become an issue that the committee's taken on i'd like to open and you did touch this touch on this a little bit in your opening statement around the challenging operating environment for social landlords and the financial pressures on tenants but i'd be interested to hear how it's impacted on your regulatory approach and what it means for tenants and other service users and landlords okay happy to take that so i'd start on that michael and i'll see if you'd like to add something um there's a very sensible question there is there's no doubt in our minds that this is probably the most challenging volatile uncertainty i suppose environment that social landlords tenants and service users have experienced i think that that's clear the economic uncertainty and volatility over the last three years has been unprecedented and frankly to me at times has felt pretty relentless and that's what we hear from tenants and landlords i could give you the kind of rhyme and reason on inflation in bank of england i think you know that so i'll probably not get overly bogged down in that detail but we know the effect it's having a couple of points to make is i think we all know that food and drink inflation remains high regardless of headline inflation rates having fallen the annual rate hit just over 19 in march and it fell a little bit to 17.3 in june and the last monthly data shows that this has slowed to around 10 so it's a good thing but it just means that the prices are rising slower and still at 10 why did i comment on that because poorer households it's just the reality spend much more of their budget on essentials such as foods and we know that they are the most exposed to high food inflation so we mustn't be drawn into thinking that because headline inflation has fallen that has taken the pressure off some of these poorer households it really hasn't in many cases we're very aware to for landlords to to your point about the whole sector convener we're very aware for landlords that cost inflation especially in maintenance and in new construction is running at 10 to 20 so significant and in our regular meetings with landlords that operate in rural and island areas it's it's even more dramatic we recently heard of cost increases in maintenance costs of 30 to 40 percent over the last two years and so there's just one area where social landlords the inflation their experience is running way ahead of of cpi i'll touch on the fact that what's happened with bank of england rates of the rapid increase to five and a quarter percent has has really had now beginning to hit home about 25 percent of the borrowing from social landlords is on variable rates and so that has fed through to increase interest charges of about 66 million a year so quite a significant chunk of revenue that's that's gonna hit now there's no doubt in our minds at all that social landlords have made considerable efforts to to minimise the impact of these challenges on on their tenants we really see evidence of that they've certainly tried to limit rent increases to levels below what they would have had in their their original business plans which are usually linked to inflation and of course but that does mean that landlords have have less income than originally planned in the current and future years so less resources to invest in tenants homes and services as as we've said another example would relate to their wider activities i touched in an opening statement about the cutback in these wider non-core activities such as welfare advice energy advice social landlords support tenants in a host of ways and and again as i referred to we're seeing plans to cut the the investment they put into that in half which is which is quite significant so we really recognise that in the current context means that social landlords are having to make tough decisions to prioritise where they pay attention and focus their resources so that that's on the most critical issues for them and we just to reassure the committee we absolutely are taking these challenges into account in our risk assessment this year which we went public on fairly recently and we'll continue to respond to that changing landscape and the challenges that landlords and tenants face so i suppose that i'm saying to the committee please rest assured we will focus on the big current challenges that face tenants and landlords in the cost of living crisis we won't do regulation by tick box we will focus on what's in front of us at the time and that will be on issues around the cost of living crisis affordability of course and the acute issues around the number of people in temporary accommodation the emerging requirements on on landlords on net zero dampen mold and resident safety so to the final part of your question that's the approach that we will be taking as a regulator to this is to focus on these live issues now as they emerge i hope that helps that certainly is very helpful to hear to hear that but that is your approach and i'd just like to actually pick up on you spoke extensively at the beginning about the thematic review of homelessness and i just wanted to and you actually kind of covered some of the question i was going to ask you but i just wondered you mentioned that there's a number of local authorities who are not able to comply or meet the needs and i just wondered how you are monitoring the how the councils are going to make progress and actually move towards compliance yes i'm happy to pick that up so yes yes convener as you said in febru we published our thematic report on homelessness services in scotland and flagged at that time this very real risk of systemic failure yesterday we updated that statement as george has advised you on to to highlight that we are now of the view that there is systemic failure in some councils in relation to some of the services that they deliver for people who are homeless we will engage we are engaging with all of those councils which we have identified and we will be updating the engagement plans for each of those councils to reflect that current assessment so that will happen in the coming weeks we will look to all of those councils to continue their best efforts to meet their statutory duties towards homeless people and to engage in the dialogue that is going on at the moment at a national level to look at alternative approaches to dealing with the the most immediate challenges particularly those acute problems for people who are in temporary accommodation or looking to access temporary accommodation and as george has said we will we will continue to work with the Scottish Government and other stakeholders in the area of homelessness to look for opportunities and different ways that we can address these very real and acute issues okay thanks very much for that just in terms of the 14 councils is it is it the same issue or is it nuanced across all of them different issues is it really just a lack of housing stock or we looked across six different aspects of performance and statistics for each of the councils so looking at for example around breaches of the unsuitable accommodation order or failures to provide temporary accommodation when it's required but also looking at issues such as the the number of people in temporary accommodation including number of children and also the the direction of travel in terms of demand for that type of accommodation so there are a number of dimensions that we looked across some of the councils that we are focusing on have you know if you like the red status in some of those dimensions a smaller number have them across all of those dimensions so it's variable across councils and across the country I'm bringing in Pam Gaussill the supplementary thank you chair and good morning panel I've got kind of two supplementary questions you've mentioned obviously 14 councils but so far obviously there's three councils that have declared a housing emergency and many are breaking statutory duties you know every day and you have like I said mentioned 14 do you think it's time that the Scottish government should be declaring a housing emergency what we've set out very clearly is a statement that we consider that there is in relation to the provision of services to homeless people there is systemic failure I think language such as housing emergency is not something that sits in our regulatory framework so I think that that would be for others to consider whether that's an appropriate form of language we'll look at the individual councils and the position there we will set out in the coming weeks our assessment in the published engagement plans for each of those councils and we will then engage with those councils around what they are in a position to do but importantly we'll also engage with Scottish government and other stakeholders to consider what wider options there may be to tackle those to tackle those very acute issues that we're seeing particularly in relation to the provision of temporary accommodation not thank you for that response but obviously councils are going through really challenging times and I've had the opportunity to speak to many councils in the last couple of weeks and they have been speaking about obviously budget cuts and pressures so just on that obviously there's currently more than 200,000 people on the social housing waiting list including 100,000 children so what should the Scottish government do different to ensure that these lists are drastically reduced so I know you mentioned obviously you're looking at councils but the councils are looking at the Scottish government for support and help as well so is there anything you feel that they could do differently the Scottish government but as I say our role is to to regulate individual landlords including local authorities having said that obviously we do engage with the Scottish government around the wider systemic situation and a systemic failure does require a systemic intervention and that's well beyond the powers that the parliament has provided to us we don't have those systemic intervention powers at the heart of this is the supply of homes to allocate to people who are experiencing homelessness and the Scottish government has a programme to deliver new social homes and that is absolutely critical however the new new build programmes new developments take time to deliver and we are seeing real challenges around the cost of new build and as George has touched on our analysis of the financial projections of RSLs has given us a clear sense that the RSLs are showing significant reductions in plans to build new homes and in the number of homes that they will be building so I think it remains critical that supply side know that the Scottish government is also looking at a national acquisition plan to see whether there are alternative approaches to deliver that increase in supply that will be needed but our sense is that that now needs to happen at pace to deal with the very immediate challenges that are in front of all of us I think there's also a need to look at the direct provision of support to local authorities and to register social landlords to enable them to maintain the services that people who are experiencing homelessness need now and will need to help them to sustain tenancies. Good morning to you both. Just to follow up on that point that Pam Gosell was making there there's a paper coming up following this item with you guys that tells us that in Scotland there's 70,000 long term empty houses. How does that square with your comments about systemic failure for some councils to deal with homelessness? How have we got such a huge number of long term empty houses and such a high number of homelessness people in Scotland? Many of those empty houses are obviously not in the social rented sector so there's an imperative to understand where those homes are and how quickly and effectively they might be able to be brought back into use, obviously to let as a social home it has to meet Scottish housing quality standard and that in itself can be a challenge for some of those homes that are empty. The national acquisition plan, which I mentioned and touched on there is one vehicle through which perhaps that can be done. I know that there are a number of other initiatives that are in place to bring empty homes back into play and it may very well be that in the current financial context where we're seeing the costs of construction being prohibitive in some regards that maximising the use of the stock that is already there is increasingly important. In terms of empty homes within the social housing sector, we are engaging with some landlords around ensuring that they are maximising their approach to bringing those homes back into use and part of the conversation that I know is happening with the Scottish Government and other stakeholders is whether there are further initiatives that might be able to accelerate. We know that it is taking longer for homes that become empty to get back into use. A lot of that is to do with some of the challenges around cost and availability of contractors. We've seen some challenges around utility companies and ensuring that appropriate supply is available in homes when they are ready for re-letting. That is a growing concern among social landlords. There are a number of areas where initiatives that can be undertaken, but I think that sometimes the statement that there are a lot of empty homes out there might understate some of the challenges that they can be in bringing some of those homes back into use. As I said, there are a number of initiatives in play that may very well help to ease the supply side through that, targeting homes that are available either for purchase or are empty and can be brought back into use. Do you track the various figures that are important here, Michael, that the number of social rented long-term empties being allocated to people who are temporary or long-term homeless? Are we tracking that? We monitor landlords' performance around lettings and management of empty homes and we produce statistics on an annual basis for that. One of the things that we are in conversation with the Scottish Government and other stakeholders about is whether it would be helpful for us to put in place a more regular data collection from landlords around some of those key things, such as lettings of homes, management of empty homes and a number of homeless people who are being allocated such homes on a short-term basis to help to understand the effectiveness of any measures that are brought forward. We will have a meeting later this week where that very topic will be discussed further. While we do it on an annual basis, it may well be that we do it on a more frequent basis before too very long. That would reflect the similar approach that we took during the pandemic when we had monthly data collections from landlords on some of the key areas of performance to ensure that everyone understood the impact that the pandemic was having on landlords' ability to deliver those services. A similar approach may very well be put in place within the next couple of months. That is really helpful, Michael. Thank you very much for that. George, in your remarks and in response to some of the questions, you made some really positive comments about attempts by landlords to control their expected rent rises. You mentioned that several times. Is it just to ask you to flesh this out a wee bit if you can conversely, the impact of that initiative and the work that they are doing to invest in their stocks? You mentioned that a couple of times if you could add any more to that in terms of numbers. How many are doing that? Is it widespread? Is it a small number? Can you give the committee a sense of how many landlords are embracing your recommendations? I do have some things that I can give you on that. I probably do not have specific numbers to hand on that today, but I can certainly provide you with some more data on it. So what I am about to say is maybe more high level, if I can put it that way, Mr Coffey, in terms of that. In terms of coming back from the pandemic, I suppose the place to start is actually the good news that we see from landlords is that, in many cases, they are back to providing pretty much the full range of services that they were pre-pandemic. That is a good thing. It might even be a surprising thing given the cost challenges that have been hit. Now, are those things perfect? No, there will be gaps here and there, but it would be fair to say that they have stepped up to that challenge. They have been hit, of course, not only by the pandemic, but by the dual challenges of global impacts and inflation, etc., as we have touched on. In terms of probably things that I would highlight is that there is a struggle with—I will come on to the right thing in a second—a lower turnover of homes than pre-pandemic. That is something that we think is quite significant and something that has not come back to pre-pandemic levels in this place through. What I mean by that is that around 1,700 fewer homes became empty during the last 12 months—that is quite a big number. That is nearly 5,000 fewer than if we go back as far as 2019-2020, so that is a significant slowing of turnover, if you like, of social housing. Landlords are certainly impacting—that is impacting—landlords and tenants. Michael touched on into your questions around empty homes and so on. Michael touched on the fact that the landlords were struggling to re-let rapidly enough to give you some specifics on that. In 2019, it took about 30-32 days by my numbers to re-let an empty property. Today, it is taking 56. That is a gap. Michael touched on some of the reasons for that around availability and cost of the services to deliver that. The one thing that I will draw your attention to is that that means that they lose rent from those empty homes, even in that re-lenting. By our estimate, it is about £38.7 million to be exact, £38 million to £39 million of lost rents due to that. You can see where some of the challenges are, but in terms of what landlords are trying to do to alleviate that, it would be fair to say that we do believe that they are making significant efforts. The evidence says that over the last couple of years, as I said, rents have increased below the rate of inflation. To give you some numbers on that, CPI inflation was averaging 8.7 per cent. The average rent increased by social landlords was 5.1 per cent. The median was 5 per cent. That is reasonably behind what CPI inflation was showing. Now, to be clear, averages and medians can mislead. There was a range in that, to be honest with you, and that range for RSLs ranged from zero. Some had no rent increases up to as high as 8 per cent, but that 8 per cent was still behind the 8.7 average that there was at the time. That just gives you a sense of the scale of the rent increases that they have been tackling and what they have been trying to do against that backdrop. The final thing that I want to draw your attention to, because it is quite important, is that during the pandemic, in particular, we did have some safety concerns. Those safety concerns were around gas safety and access to homes. You can imagine during a pandemic that access to homes is difficult, both for landlords and worrying for tenants themselves. There was a gap in some landlords in getting those done, but I am quite pleased to see that, post-pandemic, social landlords are now back to meeting. In the last year, they have done 99.8 per cent of the gas safety inspections. That is a very significant recovery from where they were when they struggled with access during the pandemic. I hope that that gives you some flavour and those rent increase numbers give you some flavour that will go to your question. We will have a look at what other data we have and can give you on more specifics to that on numbers of landlords and so on, because we have all of the data on the suite of what landlords have been doing with rents and can, I am sure, provide you with that. It is really, really helpful again, George. The only thing that occurs to me to ask you about is that it has had any impact on the landlords' ability to retrofit. Their median rent rises lower than inflation. Has it had any impact on their ability to get their properties retrofitted for net zero and so on? Michael Russell may have something specifically on retrofit. To front of my mind, I do not, but I touched on the idea of reinvesting an existing stock. I touched on the five-year financial projections that we are looking at, and there is no doubt that we are seeing evidence emerge of landlords finding it challenging to reinvest in their existing stock, but that can be a whole host of things from replacing roofs to new kitchens to bathrooms on a regular cycle. Retrofit itself, Michael, do you have anything to add on that? I do not want to comment on something that I do not have the information to front of mind. Generically, there is a reinvestment challenge, if I can put it that way. In relation to retrofit specifically to tackle energy efficiency and net zero, George is right that the financial projections show a reduction in the planned investment that landlords would have around existing homes, but the vast majority of those plans did not necessarily include the future cost of meeting energy efficiency requirements in net zero. That is largely because of the on-going review of the energy efficiency in social housing. That proposal was published last week for the social housing net zero standard. When that consultation is concluded, landlords will have greater levels of certainty about what the expectations are and the standards that they will have to meet. We would expect to see them to start to plan out the costs of delivering on those standards, and we will start to see that come through in the financial projections. We anticipate that that will be substantial, the cost of that retrofit. The other uncertainty is at the moment, which I am sure that you will hear from landlords if you speak to them, is what level of public subsidy there may be made available to help them with that exercise in investing in their homes to meet those new standards. At the moment, there is a degree of uncertainty around that. We anticipate a substantial investment requirement. Exactly how that will then impact on rent levels for tenants will be, in a large part, determined by the answer to the question about public subsidy. Thank you for that. My last question, George. Again, you have anticipated that you have answered almost. Obviously, you have got second sight. I think that you know what we are going to ask. It was really about the time that landlords are taken to re-let their properties, and you mentioned that it was taken longer. Did you pin it on the impact of Covid, the residual impact of Covid? We hear, if you like, a mixed economy of answers on that. There is a kind of flow-through, if you like, from two things. One, there is the availability of the services and the providers to do that. Not all landlords have that in-house. It is often outsourced. Again, there can be a mix. They can use a mix of in-sourced and outsourced, with the same landlord. There are issues that we hear about availability and access to the services to do that. Some of that is about people, frankly, as I understand it, and recruiting the skills and the qualified trades to do that, either themselves or for the outsourced partners. That is one aspect of that. That has been a kind of follow-through from the pandemic and the recruitment challenges that we are all hearing about in so many sectors since then. The second thing is inflation and the costs of those things. We rehearsed earlier that some of the numbers involved. I gave you the flavour of the sort of construction and repair inflation that they are saying. We hear numbers of 10 to 20 per cent from landlords of inflation and those things. There is that impact, too. I think that it is the combination of those two things that we are tending to hear from landlords that are impacting that. There is one other thing that I should draw attention to. The final thing that we hear is a challenge of getting gas and electricity supplies reconnected in those homes as it goes through that turnover. We are aware—we have discussed it with them—that the Scottish Government has flagged that at the UK level of some concerns around that. That is certainly something that is coming up as an additional challenge. That is one that landlords might say that they might get control over what they spend and control over the access to services to a degree. They have no control over that aspect. That has been a recently emerging one. The loss of income due to the long line was at £38 million. It was. I think that it was at £38.7 million. I think that it was just to be clear. Yes. That is the loss rent while they sit empty for that period of 56 days on average, as I said. Any sense from them about whether they intend to try to recoup that loss? With that resource that has gone, there is nowhere to recoup it from. If you like, the house is empty, there is not a tenant in the home that would be due to pay rent. The longer a home stays empty, the greater that loss rent figure becomes. That is why we are very aware that landlords work hard to minimise the length of time that property is empty, principally so that they can provide a home to somebody as quickly as possible, but also recognising that there is a very significant financial impact on them of having homes that are empty. Is there going to be an impact on their retrofitting intentions as well? Absolutely, because that is money that has gone from their available resources. It is another reason why they work very hard to try to minimise the length of times that homes are empty, but there are unquestionably contextual factors that are making that increasingly difficult for landlords. The availability of material and supply, the cost of labour and materials, and some of the other challenges around utility companies and connection of supply are making it increasingly difficult for landlords to bear down on the length of time that homes are empty. Thank you very much for the answers to both of you. Thank you. Thank you very much, Willie. I'm going to bring in Marie McNair now who's joining us online. Thank you, panel. Obviously, I just started listening in there the last bit there. I mean, I know that local authorities have got robust, void strategies, but there's huge pressure just now on the HRA accounts. Moving on, obviously, the annual report into the social housing charter shows that tenant satisfaction with quality of their homes has remained around the sort of frame, 84 per cent compared to 85 per cent, obviously. I wanted to ask what you're doing to ensure you meet your priority around quality of homes and tenant and resident safety. You have touched on that a bit, but I mean, can you expand? I'm happy to pick up on that one. Landlords' compliance with the Scottish housing quality standard is the principle measure of the quality of the homes that are provided to tenants by social landlords. Landlords' compliance with the Scottish housing quality standard improved between 2021-22 and 2022-23 from 73 per cent of all homes meeting the standard to 79 per cent. That is still below the compliance rate that there was prior to 2021 when it sat at 87 per cent. It's worth saying that most of the homes that fail the Scottish housing quality standard do so on one criteria only. Broad range of criteria within the Scottish housing quality standard that homes have to meet. The vast majority fail on just one. Less than 4 per cent of homes that fail on more than one criteria. It's also important to flag that the Scottish housing quality standard was amended in the last couple of years to include the requirement for electrical installation condition reports to be carried out every five years and for interlinked smoke and heat detectors to be installed in every home with compliance targets of March 22 and February 21 respectively. The decline in the overall compliance levels with the Scottish housing quality standard has principally been because of the challenges that landlords have experienced in meeting those target dates. We know that landlords are continuing to work through the backlog. That backlog is clear sense that that was impacted by some of the issues that we've already touched on in terms of availability of materials and labour as a consequence of all the economic challenges that we've touched on. We are engaging with a number of landlords around our compliance levels and we expect to see full compliance with those particular elements around electrical safety and fire safety when landlords report their performance in the annual return on the charter that they will give us next year. On satisfaction levels, there was a very small reduction in the overall satisfaction level but generally the picture shows that almost nine out of 10 tenants remain satisfied with the homes that their landlord provides with them and with the services that the landlords provide. It is down ever so slightly to 87 per cent. We look for landlords to carry out a satisfaction survey at least every three years. In January 23, we updated our advisory guidance to landlords on surveying their tenants and service users. That was to include a wider range of approaches that were available to ensure that they have the capacity to reach as many tenants as possible through those satisfaction surveys. Just under half of all landlords did surveys in 2022-23, which means that the figures that we are presenting have changed on the basis of that volume of surveys that have been carried out during that year. There have been some slight decreases in the satisfaction levels in some regards. Tenants satisfied with the quality of their home decreased slightly from 84 per cent to 84 per cent from 85 per cent. Tenants satisfied that their rent is good value for money decreased slightly to 81 per cent from 82 per cent. Tenants satisfied with the repair service remained at 88 per cent. It is fairly marginal changes in those overall satisfaction levels. In the context that we have just been describing, you might very well consider that to be a positive outcome. Thank you for that. In the interest of time, we'll hand back to you, convener. Thank you, chair. For 2021-22, there were 12,000 instances of damp and mould recorded in social homes across Scotland. We heard from earlier on in our previous session that Ombusman mentioned that complaints around this issue have quadrupled. My question is around, do you need to do more work in this area to ensure that good practice is widespread and that tenants live in safer homes? What support should the Scottish Government be offering to ensure that social homes are warm enough to prevent the re-emergence of damp and mould? I'm happy to kick off on that one. Clearly, ensuring that tenants live in safe and warm homes is a critical priority for all social landlords. In December last year, we wrote to all social landlords with advice on the importance of timely and effective action to respond to any incidents of damp and mould. That's very much in the frame of the requirements around tenant and resident safety. In that letter, we asked all governing bodies of RSOs and all committees of councils to consider the systems that they had in place to ensure that their tenants' homes are not affected by damp and mould and that they have appropriate and proactive systems to identify and deal with any reported cases of damp and mould. Following on from that, we worked jointly with the Chartered Institute of Housing, Scottish Federation of Housing Association and the Association of Local Authority Chief Housing Officers to produce a briefing note to landlords that we published in February on how to ensure that they deal effectively with damp and mould problems. The briefing recognises that the issues are complex and can be multi-layered. Solutions can include tackling issues with the property itself, but also supporting tenants with advice in that regard. Those partner organisations that we worked with to produce that briefing went on to run a series of workshops for landlords to disseminate best practice in responding to incidents of damp and mould. We know that those were incredibly well attended by landlords, indicating how serious landlords take that issue. In July this year, we wrote to social landlords to ask them to include a specific assurance and a specific statement on their compliance with all tenant and resident safety issues, including damp and mould, and that they include that in their annual assurance statement that they provide to us. They provide that statement to us at the end of October every year. We received all those statements from landlords at the end of October, and we will use that information, including the specific statements on damp and mould, as part of our risk assessment, which we are now delivering. We have also published all those annual assurance statements on our website, so that anyone, including tenants, will go and see what their landlord is saying, and specifically about their approaches to damp and mould. We will also fully analyse that information to ensure that we have as good an understanding as possible as the landlord's response to damp and mould. We recognise that this is a critical issue, and we need to go further in terms of data collection. That is why, as George indicated earlier, we are developing a suite of indicators to include in the annual return on the charter, alongside a wider suite of indicators that will focus on other aspects of tenant and resident safety. We will be consulting in that in the coming year to ensure that we have that as comprehensive as possible suite of indicators that help us to understand landlords' response to any reports of damp and mould. We have also asked our tenant advisers—those are tenants who work with us on a voluntary basis to help us to scrutinise landlord performance and to look at the information that landlords are putting out on damp and mould for their tenants. Again, when we have that analysis fully done, we will use that as part of our risk assessment process and reflect any outcomes in that in the published engagement plans that we produce for social landlords. It is great to hear that you are doing so much stuff, but just earlier this year the UK Government brought forward Awab's law in the memory of the two-year-old Awab Ishaq who died in 2020 due to poor housing conditions to force social landlords to fix damp and mould within the strict limits. Should similar legislation be brought forward in Scotland? That would be a matter for the Scottish Government to consider. What I can say is that the guidance that has been put out, we believe, was effective in setting out a good approach that landlords should be taking. When we develop our suite of indicators, we will look to ensure that those are capable of assessing appropriately whether those responses are being delivered. You have touched upon my question already with regard to the review of the regulatory framework, but I wondered what the results were from the review of communications with stakeholders and what changes you are looking to bring forward around that. I will pick that one up. The review is going well. As I touched on my opening statement, we kicked it off in June with a discussion paper in order to get feedback from the sector. Probably the best way I can summarise the broad feedback was that it was very supportive of our thinking, in particular based on two things. First, landlords were saying to us that they would really quite like a period of stability post-pandemic. Thank you very much, regulator. We would quite like it if you did not change too much, which seemed not an unfair response to us. The other thing that came through from landlords, and indeed a whole range of stakeholders, not just landlords, tenants lent us to the sector as well, was that the framework was working pretty well. In fact, we agree with that that the framework has been working pretty well. That was the broad feedback to the discussion paper that came back. Of the specifics, which is now out to consultation now and closes later this month, I will give you a little flavour of some of those specifics if you would like them and what is there. It is not a huge amount, for reasons that I have explained. That is annual assurance statements. Michael referred to them a number of times. Those were something that we introduced in the last framework review, and they have been enormously effective, I need to say, in getting a finger on the pulse of landlords. We have even had landlords, and I have sat with chairs and chief executives in various meetings who have said to me how helpful they have found them and that they have helped them to look into dark corners that maybe in the past they had not always looked in. It has just given them more focus. Some adjustment to the annual assurance statements prompted partly by the discussion that we have on damp and mould to bring aspects such as emerging issues like that into the annual assurance statement each year. Clearly, we have signalled on that that we would give landlords time to prepare for that. We are not about to announce in September that we would like something in damp and mould in October. They were very clear that they would like notice. Some adjustments to annual assurance statements to allow that. Some specific changes to the language around our regulatory status. Our regulatory status—I mean the language that we have at the moment—is working towards compliant. Compliant. There is an in-review category, and there is an within-stacturity intervention category. We have made some adjustments to that language primarily around the language of working towards compliance. It was very important to lenders and to tenants that they felt that there was some vagueness there and the language was not helpful. We have made that there. We have touched on the fact that we wanted to develop a suite of metrics around damp and mould that Michael has touched on. We did not want to take a slight amateur crack in that on that. Hence, the collaborative approach that we are taking with the sector, both on the advice that was developed but on the suite. We have expanded that out into the arc, the annual return. We are kicking that off with a series of working groups involving landlords and others to do that. Normally, we would have made that part of the framework review itself, but partly because of the timing of the new consultation around the replacement of each published recently. We wanted to combine those two things together, so that is the final part of that. That will be on-going rather than implementable from the 1st of April. That is probably the overview summary that I can give you. We are really quite pleased because we made significant changes to the framework last time around. That has been working well and that is what we hear from landlords, too. It is fairly unusual that those who you regulate come to you and say, actually, that it is working quite well. You made lots of changes, and we do not really believe that you need to change lots more. We agree with that. Maybe the evidence for that is how well the annual assurance statement element is working and the fact that although we are in discussions and engagement with a number of landlords at the moment, as you would expect, there are no statutory interventions taking place. I was hesitating on the year because I could not quite remember. Michael Sys just pointed out in 21. I think that that may be evidence of why we are hearing what we are hearing from landlords, lenders and tenants across the board. That is helpful. You will be aware that the housing bill that the Government signalled will include new homelessness duties placed on it. Has that also been part of the communication with stakeholders to pre-empt that coming in, which would be a statutory piece of legislation? We will cross public services and accept that, but I wondered where work was starting already on that. We have been working closely with the Scottish Government around its plans to bring forward the proposed new duties on prevention of homelessness in particular, and we will ensure that the approach that we take to setting out a regulatory framework is such that it can accommodate changes in legislation as they come through. We are very excited about what is being proposed and where there are duties that are brought in and placed on social landlords by the proposals around prevention. We will ensure that we monitor the delivery of any of those new duties that are brought in. I have a question that connects to the regulatory review. I would be interested to hear how you deal with complaints about how you have dealt with regulatory matters. Do you think that some social landlord staff may be unwilling to raise complaints with you? That is hard for me to say as to whether people are unwilling to raise complaints. We certainly get complaints from time to time and we have a very clear process that is laid out on our website as to how we handle that. I point to a number of things. We have extensive engagement across the sector, including a number of landlord groups that we are engaging with at any one time, what about a third of landlords, with three live groups that engage with us. One was an existing group pre-pandemic, the systemically important landlord group that we were called. We then have two new ones that we introduced. We called out to the sector to ask whether we were willing to get involved in that. If you would like to upper engagement even further post-pandemic, we plan to introduce a second group but the response is so significant. We have 70 landlords and I think that it was wanting to join us. We ended up establishing two further groups in addition to refreshing the systemically important. One was focusing on those landlords operating in urban areas and the other was for more remote rural and island areas, because sometimes the challenges that they tackle can be different. They certainly engage with us on a regular basis. Do they raise issues and concerns in those discussions? They do. Does that result in specific complaints rarely, but certainly things can come up with those. I think that we have a very open relationship there within that. In terms of what we try to do, we certainly work very hard to be effective in an open and transparent regulator. In terms of any specific concerns about how we regulate, and I suppose, convener, on how that applies in particular in statutory interventions, we have a very clear complaints process that can be taken up at any time as laid out on our website. There is a route, of course, to the ombudsman. I think that you were just hearing from before as that happened, but I route through to the ombudsman. That has happened at least once recently that I can think of, but not commonly. That is certainly there. In terms of the use of statutory powers, we have used statutory powers 12 times since 2012, so that is not a very significant number over 10 or 11 years. We go out of our way to publish a final report and be very transparent on why that intervention was required and so on and so forth. The bit that I would want to ensure the committee on in terms of that is that we do not take statutory interventions lightly or enter them lightly. That typically only happens after quite a significant period, usually multi-month of engagement. In fact, it is only really where a landlord either can't or, I will be honest, in some cases won't engage to tackle the issues that we are raising that statutory powers are used. I think that that, in summary, would be how I would answer that, that we try to be as open as we can be. We certainly encourage people to come and talk to us, and they do. That might be individual issues that feed up through tenants, through the tenant liaison committee of the RTOs that we meet regularly, and Michael and I are at each of their meetings for a period of time through to the various landlord groups that we have, and sometimes with the membership and professional bodies that are around. That is the approach that we take, but we are certainly very open to concerns, complaints or anything else that comes to us, and we are very transparent on what the routes can be taken both internally to us and externally to the ombudsman to take things like that forward. Okay, thanks very much, that was very helpful. I'm now going to bring in Paul Sweeney. Thank you, thank you, gentlemen. How does the Scottish Housing Regulator oversight of the loss of several community-controlled housing associations to take over by large national housing groups square with the Scottish Government's community wealth building and empowerment missions? Well, we regulate individual landlords. We don't have any kind of sectoral role, or we have no remit from Parliament to effect sectoral change or restructuring or consolidation. So the role given to us by Parliament is to monitor, assess and report on landlord's performance and to intervene as appropriate. We are an effective regulator doing the job that Parliament has given us to do and will continue to do that job in a proportionate and risk-based manner. So that job that Parliament has given us to do is to ensure that we protect the interests of tenants and others who use the services of social landlords and in particular to monitor their performance against the Scottish social housing charter and against the regulatory standards of governance and financial management. That's the extent of our role, so we do that role. We monitor, we report and we intervene where there are failures against any of those three elements. As I said, that's the job that Parliament has given us to do. We believe that we are an effective regulator in doing that. Do you not think that community control of asset wealth is in tenants' interests? All I can say is that we deliver our role against assessing landlord's performance in relation to those things that are set out in the Scottish social housing charter and in the regulatory standards of financial management and governance. Those are the things that we are tasked with monitoring landlord's performance on. Now, if those had different things in them, different requirements, different specifications, then we would monitor, assess and report and intervene in accordance with those requirements that were set out. So we're doing the job that's been set by Parliament for us to do. We believe that we're doing that effectively. Just to be clear with your point here, do you agree that the current remit of the Scottish housing regulator isn't adequate to safeguard community control of assets? The remit of the Scottish housing regulator set by Parliament? Standard 7.3 in the SHR's regularly framework standards of governance and financial management states that it registers social landlord must ensure an adequate consultation before engaging in an options appraisal. So why was this not done at Reedvale housing association in Glasgow and when this was reported to the Scottish housing regulator no action was taken and the housing association were allowed to carry out a consultation post appraisal but which had already predetermined that there should be a transfer of engagements currently owned by the community to another housing association assets that are valued conservatively over £100 million and with no debt secured against those assets? The first thing I would say is that we're quite happy to meet with the member to discuss his specific concerns about a specific organisation. Always happy to do that with any MSP. Obviously I'm conscious there's a lot in the specifics of what you raised there. What I can say is that we engaged early with Reedvale in its considerations of a possible transfer and we highlighted the importance to Reedvale of it engaging with tenants on proposals and we expected them to carry out effective consultation with their tenants. Reedvale then developed a detailed tenant consultation plan and commissioned the tenant information service as an independent tenant adviser and that's a requirement which we placed on them. We engaged closely with Reedvale to get appropriate assurances about how it was consulting its tenants and that tenants have been given meaningful opportunities to feed into the transfer proposals and to give their views and of course at the end of the day tenants will have a vote on this, that vote is on going at the moment and we will expect Reedvale to abide by the outcome of that tenant vote. Of course at that stage the precondition for transfer had already been set and obviously the regulator has a role in overseeing these processes. In the case of Reedvale we know that places for people group, a London-based organisation have been present at Reedvale's AGM, have posted proportional material on Reedvale's own website, have sent targeted literature to tenants, put up signage in the area and struck a deal to take over a community centre owned by Reedvale housing association after the housing association with drew funding for it. Do you think that this sort of aggressive and sedgeous lobbying is appropriate? We will ensure that tenants have that opportunity to vote on any proposal that is sent in front of them and we will expect Reedvale to abide by that tenant vote. I have observed 18 separate regulatory breaches, conflicts of interests and procedural abuses by the interim director and management committee co-opties at Reedvale housing association, which I have written to you about today along with other members of Parliament. If a potential transfer partner has breached data protection law by obtaining the personal contact information of the target housing association's tenants to canvas them without their explicit consent and unsolicited text messages and calls, what action would the Scottish housing regulatory take in this instance? I thank you for writing to us. We will take any of that information under consideration to identify whether there have been any failures in the part of Reedvale or any other party to the transfer. I will say again that I am very happy to meet you to discuss those concerns. I very much thank you for answering my questions and look forward to further discussion. I just want to reassure Mr Sweeney how the board looks at this. You asked to add direct questions around your support for community control. The board is completely agnostic. I can tell you two very strong tenants on our board who would not let us be otherwise, by the way, if we wanted to be. The board is completely agnostic about structures or ownership. What we are interested in is fulfilling a statutory duty that is to protect the interests of tenants. Therefore, what the board has looked at and the board has been very well cited on what has gone on at Reedvale are the issues that may affect tenant interest. Just to give you a flavour of what those are at Reedvale, there were and there remain serious governance and financial management weaknesses at Reedvale. There is no business plan. There is no up-to-date stock conditions survey. There is no long-term investment programme. We have now established that many of its homes require significant investment, and in its most recent annual assurance statement it said that it cannot meet its investment requirements. It told us that we would need to significantly raise rents and to borrow in order to fund the necessary investments to maintain its homes. To give you a sense of what that means, what it is telling us is that it needs to raise rents by 5 per cent in year 1 and 10 per cent a year thereafter in order to fund those things. There are very high overheads well beyond the overheads that we see at other landlords. Salaries that are higher than are being paid at other landlords. The organisation has not managed its resources to ensure its financial wellbeing or its financial position. There were serious weaknesses in the governing body and it is having to rely heavily on the support of voluntary co-options. It told us of weaknesses in its organisational structure, its pensions approach, its commercial assets and investment requirements. There are examples where it has not received remuneration for commercial properties, which is rented or given to organisations to use at no cost. The rent increased last year for some of those reasons that I have explained, as you might expect, as amongst the highest across social landlords at 6 per cent. A recent internal audit has reported very weak assurance in the delivery of the factoring role. On what the board of SHR worries about in an organisation like this, it is those things and how those things will, in the long run, affect and impact tenants rather than structures, local control and so on. I just want to reassure you, A, that the board of regulators is very sighted on this and is very closely briefed as I am personally, but also what it is that is on our agenda when we discuss an organisation such as Readveil. I know that you want to understand what role a board would play and what would be on our agenda for that, and that is the role that the board plays. We can get a list of concerns that are around Readveil. That is not to say that community ownership is not a good thing and an important thing, but what matters most is that Readveil can deliver for its tenants. If I may come back briefly, convener, I appreciate the challenges in governance that you have outlined and which I have been sighted on as well, but what I would note is that the fundamental is that this is 900 tenants and a highly desirable part of Glasgow with no debt secured against them, which is quite unusual for housing associations to have that level of fiscal headroom to raise capital through secured debt against the properties. Furthermore, there has not seemed to be any proactive efforts to support the community to improve the governance of the housing association by having to surrender control of the assets and also that several professionals who are engaged in community controlled housing associations across the Glasgow area offered to commit to the housing associations to support the restructuring without having to surrender control of the assets to a large national housing group, but were denied and blocked by the Scottish Housing Regulator. Those are matters of concern that I understand in terms of co-options on to that board. In light of that and what you have said today, it is certainly a matter for us to consider how we strengthen protections for community controlled housing in Scotland, so thank you very much. Thank you very much. Certainly, as you say, if we have a community empowerment agenda, maybe that is something that we do need to be looking at, but it was also very helpful to hear that the board of the Scottish Housing Regulator has a very specific clear remit to look after the interests of tenants, so how do we do tenants and community is something that we should take away. Thank you so much for coming in and giving your evidence today. I think that it has been very helpful to hear about your work over the last year and obviously the challenging landscape that social landlords and tenants are living and working in. I now briefly suspend the meeting for a change of witnesses. We turn to agenda item 4, which is to take evidence on the council tax variation for unoccupied dwelling Scotland amendment regulations 2023 from Tom Arthur, who is the Minister for Community Wealth and Public Finance of the Scottish Government, and Mr Arthur is joined for this item by Scottish Government officials Heather Galbraith, who is a solicitor. James Mises, who is the council tax policy lead, and Jessica Niven, who is the unit head at the More Homes division. I welcome the minister and his officials to the meeting and invite him to make a short opening statement. Thank you very much, convener, and good morning to the committee. The draft instrument under consideration has a purpose, which is twofold. Firstly, it is intended to provide councils with discretion over the council tax treatment of second homes. If introduced, it will enable councils to charge second homes up to a 100 per cent premium. The instrument also seeks to allow councils to grant a six-month grace period from the 100 per cent empty homes council tax premium, which is aimed at incentivising the reoccupation of empty homes. Those regulations seek to deliver both changes with effect from 1 April 2024. In the spirit of the Verity House agreement, both of the policies contained in the instrument have been developed in partnership with local government. Last year, I convened the joint working group on sources of local government funding and council tax reform, which is co-chaired by Scottish ministers and COSLA. That group has considered and endorsed the final policies within the instrument. In April this year, we published a consultation in partnership with COSLA on the council tax treatment of second and long-term empty homes. That consultation sought views on giving discretionary powers to local authorities to increase the rate of council tax on second and empty homes. A 100 per cent council tax premium on second homes received majority support from respondents to the consultation. With discretion to apply to second homes, a discount up to 50 per cent or a premium up to 100 per cent ensures parity with the treatment of long-term empty properties. If implemented, the discretionary power would put councils front and centre in deciding how to achieve the right balance in the use of housing to meet local needs, enabling them where necessary to encourage more residential accommodation to be in occupation and used as homes for living in. That is consistent with our intention set out in the Verity House agreement to provide greater flexibilities to local government. It also dovetails with the Scottish Government's Housing to 2040 strategy, which commits to providing local authorities with greater discretion to encourage greater occupancy of second homes. I should also note that the UK Government has very recently legislated to provide councils in England with the same 100 per cent council tax premium on empty homes. Turning to the empty homes grace period contained within the instrument, that issue was considered by the joint working group following the publication of an independent audit report on the effectiveness of Scotland's long-term empty homes policy, produced by Indigo House. That report recommended that the council tax premium for empty homes could better incentivise empty homes back into use. Reflecting on that recommendation in partnership with COSLA, we agreed that the council tax premium on empty homes could be a disincentive to the delivery of bringing empty homes back into use where a long-term empty property changes hands after a sale. Those regulations provide for a six-month exclusion from the 100 per cent council tax premium when a long-term empty property is purchased by a new owner and renovations or repairs are being undertaken. Local authorities will have discretion to extend that six-month grace period. That measure would prevent the empty home council tax premium from becoming a deterrent to new ownership. To conclude, the draft regulations that were laid before the Parliament deliver on our commitment to a fairer housing and taxation system. The Empower local authorities to make decisions about the council tax treatment of second homes to determine the balance in the use of housing to meet local needs. They recognise that local areas differ across the country and what may cause pressure on some communities that could equally provide a benefit to others. On that, convener, I will conclude and I hope that members will agree to support the instrument today. I would be interested to hear your thoughts on why a council tax premium of 100 per cent may encourage second home owners to use accommodation differently for the benefit of local communities, for example, by making their property available for long-term rent. Do you understand the typology of second home owners enough to determine whether that would be effective? I think that the questions that you raise get to the heart of why this is a discretionary power for local government who are best placed to determine whether or not tax measures can be utilised in a way to support their policy objectives. As I pointed out in my introductory remarks, I recognise that second homes in some areas may be making a positive contribution equally in other areas. It may be the view of local authorities that they are causing pressures and a way of helping to address that in tandem with other policy levers at the disposal of local authority would be to use those discretionary powers. We very much recognise that this is a decision for local authorities to be informed by their expertise with regard to what their local priorities are and what the best way to address them is. Thanks for that and certainly underscoring the intentions and the Verity House agreement. In Wales, councils have been able to, as we know, charge a council tax premium on second homes of up to 100 per cent since 2017 and, since April 2023, they can charge a premium of up to 300 per cent. I would be interested to hear if you have considered the implementation of that policy in Wales. I understand that there is a consultation on second and empty homes around raising it to 200 per cent, but 300 per cent and what lessons can be learned for Scotland? As I am sure that the committee appreciates, those are relatively recent changes in Wales, but we continue to have dialogue at official level, as you would expect with the Welsh Government and indeed with our colleagues in the UK Government. We will, of course, monitor with interest developments in Wales as more evidence becomes available. As you highlighted, as part of our consultation, we also posed the question as to whether we should be the option to go beyond a 100 per cent premium, and that is something that we are reflecting on further as part of the on-going work of the joint working group. Good morning to your officials as well. Thanks for joining us. I wondered what consideration had been taken by the Government with regard to the argument that has been put to committee that people with second homes are not using public services to the same extent as permanent residents and may have already as well paid additional dwelling supplement on land and building transaction tax. Those will be matters to be determined by a local authority. What that power provides is for something that is discretionary and, of course, there are existing powers that local authorities have to apply at discount. It would really be a question for an individual local authority in recognising that the decisions ultimately taken by elected members who are democratically accountable to the people who live within that local authority. We recognise that there may well be a range of views within a particular area, but I would note the broad support that was received for the proposals within the consultation. Indeed, the evidence that the committee has taken from some local authorities has already recognised, at least at this stage, an intention to explore the utilisation of those powers. Have the Government also considered other mechanisms that would be available that could be used to incentivise second homes to use their homes differently? For example, conditional grant schemes or leasing schemes? Was that part of the consultation as well? The consultation focused very much specifically on the provisions that we are considering today and the other matters that I made reference to. There are also some potentialcillary issues around non-domestic rates, as you will be aware of as well. That was part of the overall package of proposals that were considered in the consultation. There clearly is a range of work under way across local government and national government with regard to increasing the supply of housing that is available. I would say that and recognise that there is no one single policy that will act as a solution to all of the challenges that we currently face. However, that is one tool that will become available should Parliament agree to it as a discretionary power to local authorities. I say that it will be for local authorities to consider the utilisation of that discretionary power in that broader context of policy tools that they have at their disposal. In terms of the policy's impact, it has been quite clear that the Government has said that it is to bring more homes into full-time long-term let. I do not see anything from Wales to suggest any numbers of that policy being delivered, so that is perhaps more in terms of tax-raising revenue for councils. I think that the Government is estimating £35 million potentially. Is that your reading of that? There are no statistics of how many additional new homes at long-term let homes will provide, so that is just another stream of revenue for councils. I think that it is, again, back to that point about seeing it being utilised within a broader context of policy interventions. Tax can play a role. We set out within our framework for tax that we published some two years ago. The various functions of the tax system can include, for example, revenue-raising, promoting behavioural change, economic stimulus and redistribution. Now, clearly, revenue-raising will always be a consideration in any tax policy that it has taken, but behavioural change is also an aspect of tax policy consideration. In terms of the actual particular circumstances, that will be for local authorities to determine. As I say, that is a completely discretionary power and it will be for local authorities to decide based upon their local understanding of the priorities in the area, whether or not to use it. I am now going to bring in Willie Coffey. Tom, are you concerned at all about any possible behavioural response to the measure in that second home owners might shift their properties into the short-term letting domain, making them liable for non-domestic rates and thereby potentially not paying anything at all? That will be, in a broader sense, something that, of course, we will continue to monitor and keep under review. That will again be, coming back to this point, a consideration for local authorities in terms of monitoring any behavioural response that takes place and in doing so reassessing whether or not any policy decision they take in utilising this power is having the desired effect, as more broadly with regard to the existing threshold for non-domestic rates. That was obviously something that we considered as part of a consultation, but we do recognise that the existing thresholds are relatively new and, as such, we would not be proposing to make any changes at this stage and rather are looking for that to further bed in. I mean, it was certainly raised by Councillor Lloban, I think, at previous meetings about the potential for that to happen. You have just touched on the second part of my question there really about the consultation, the potential to increase it beyond 100 per cent. Did we give consideration to that and rule that out? That is something that the joint working group is giving consideration to as part of its broader programme of work. What I would note is to move beyond what is within these regulations would require primary legislation, but, as I say at this particular point, the joint working group is carefully reflecting and considering what emerged through the consultation and consultation analysis. On the legislative change, how would you be monitoring the impact of it? Do you think that there is sufficient data being captured that would indicate in the future if it is having the intended impact on improving the availability of housing? Clearly, we would continue to engage with local authorities. Local authorities will have, should Parliament agree to this instrument being passed, the option to introduce the measure from 1 April next year. I recognise that some local authorities are actively considering that. Clearly, there would need to be a period of time before we could be in a position to assess what impact such policy intervention was having in a particular local authority and also to consider the impact within the various geographies of a local authority and the impact in different local authorities. We would consider that over time. Local authorities would be monitoring it in terms of the efficacy of the policy. Clearly, through our continued engagement and dialogue as per the Verity House agreement and the joint working group for that matter, that would provide a forum. However, we would recognise that any local authority introducing this in April next year would need to allow some time before making any initial assessments. Of course, there will be on-going engagement and dialogue throughout that process. Thank you for that. My question is round. I have been speaking to councils in relation to this coming forward, and some of the councils have said that they will raise a substantial amount additional in revenue from additional taxes, but some have said that they will raise nothing from that, and some will be much less. Has the minister considered that that may create a huge disparity between different council areas? Does the minister have any expectations of how the revenue generated should be spent and should it be ring fenced or not? On the latter point, we are through the joint working group engaging with COSLA around joint guidance in that particular space. More broadly, in terms of the disparity that will exist between councils, that will be a factor of the relative number of second homes in different local authorities, but it will also come down to whether a local authority chooses to utilise those powers. Clearly, there can be a number of different factors that will bear on that decision for a local authority to make. We will continue to engage, as I touched on with my previous question, with local authorities to monitor and understand any impacts that are observed with regard to the policy itself and how that relates to revenue that individual local authorities are raising. On the ring fence, is there anything on that? I know that the house agreement will relax a lot of ring fencing for local authorities. Are you proposing to ring fence this money to be spent in certain ways, or is it completely up to the local authority if one, they take it on and do how they spend it? We would want to have that discretion and flexibility consistent with the existing premium on empty homes to apply to that, but, as I said, we are committed to engaging with COSLA and Biola around joint guidance. However, we recognise that that is a discretionary power for local authorities, and we want to approach that in terms of how revenues are used to be consistent with that discretion. I will bring in Marie McNair, who is joining us online. Regulations pose a grace period from the application of premiums for new owners at empty homes, where repairs and renovations are being undertaken. How does this proposal fit with your wider audit of empty homes? Remote progress has been made on it? That is a demonstrative of our commitment to addressing issues. To utilise all the powers at our disposal in progression of our wider ambitions around housing in 2040, that was something that was identified via the housing audit that I referred to in my opening statement that a 100 per cent premium on empty homes could act as a disincentive for those purchasing empty homes. That helps to address that through a six-month grace period. There is also the discretion that is available for local authorities as well to extend that period, but that would be a matter for individual local authorities. On that point, with regard to a grace period, I think that it is important, but I just wondered why there is not a formal process beyond that. You have suggested that councils will have to have individual discussions with developers or individuals who are trying to bring back empty homes. That will create a postcode lottery if each council has a different process, different rolling potentially. For those who are trying to encourage to bring empty properties back and 47,000 have been pointed towards, that leaves it very open to councils then deciding whether or not six months are taken as a cut-off or genuine case by case who would be doing that work. I can understand the premise of the question. I think that there is always inherent within empowering local authorities, and to have that discretion variation will be part of that, but it will be a matter for local authorities to determine. I know that it is a shared ambition with local authorities to ensure that we are bringing as many empty homes back into use as possible, and I am sure that that will inform part of the decision-making process that local authorities will take. However, with regard to the discretionary elements across the board that we have been discussing today, those are matters for local authorities to take into account, and they ultimately reflect the fact that local authorities are democratically accountable to their electorates. James, do you want to come in with any further points? Within the policy note, there is a commitment to establish joint guidance with local governments so that there is a more standardised approach to what we mean by repairs and renovations, citing examples. However, as the ministers said, there are individual circumstances that require a single perspective, a case-by-case assessment, for example someone who is undertaking repairs and renovations that go beyond six months might indeed get in touch with their local authority to request the great period to be extended to accommodate that. That is helpful for any of us who watch TV programmes, as we can understand sometimes, where the expected timescale slips. The flexibility within the guidelines is really important. Edinburgh City Council told us recently that, as Edinburgh MSPs, it takes up to eight months to bring a council-owned property back—that is the period of work that they expect. I think that it is important that guidance provides that flexibility going forward. Thanks, Miles, for seeking that bit of detail. That concludes our question, so I would like to thank the minister and his officials for the evidence that you have given today. We now turn to agenda item 5, which is consideration of the motion on the instrument. I invite the minister to move motion S6M-1186 that the local government housing and planning committee recommends that the council tax variation for unoccupied dwelling Scotland amendment regulations 2023 be approved. Do members have any points that they wish to make? The question is that motion S6M-1186, in the name of Tom Arthur, be approved. Are we all agreed? We are not agreed, so there will be a division. Those in favour of the motion, please raise their hands. Those against, and those abstaining. The result of the division is for the motion 3, against the motion 0, and abstentions 2. The motion is therefore agreed. So thank you. The committee will publish a report setting out its recommendation on the instrument in the coming days and will now briefly suspend to allow the minister and his officials to leave before we move on to the next item. Thank you.