 am gynghoriwyr lastig, o'r llwg rai cael ei cyfnod i baut nad ymateb wedi bodon yn ei gŷnwys. That concludes what for our questions. We now move on to the next item of business, which is a debate on motion number 14167 in the name of Ken Macintosh, on housing and wellbeing in Scotland. meddylu allan compet y wrth iddynt gyda'u i ddim ym cael ei wneud rwyf chi ein ddiweddyn i s booton storwyd ag y byddee'r Yesterdayers yng ngynion bitmund today quell Westhow will for the language. Pryddiwch chi'n meddyl i mwy adnodyoulderu ma ledde— yn Robert McGesterling, wrth amfatt instructio, ond mae rhywbeth yn cyd-wyddain— yng Nghymru. Mae Llyfr interpretedd gyda'r Dad Posigys y Anti wirthygniad. Ar effek draw ar yr ap давайтеi, tydd ei hamm st 국민 iawn widd yn dblyw'r wrth gwerth maenginll�n ddysgu familieseladau yn ôl.�形šu hwnnaama diwrnodd trucksai lif hjäl achieve i ni widerwyr yn unrhy�faraes nhw'n mynd gael. F comment A! Mae'r thysedau nhw dim dda. Sut hi ddeingeni'r hwrs oes i ddeinolodd a fotboi dweud i'r iddo你有 drribion? Mae gyda hwnnw gifender hon i ddeum怖 gyda'r FF building A hefyd maen assure l circumstances i ddadau hynny wedi gwybr o d velocity i dde pinicious I ddeingerio'r hwrs oes na hwnnw. cydweithio, mae'n edrych bod hunai cael 14 pryddedigau maenigol iau yn y gweithio, ac rwy'n rhan o'r unrhyw y maen nhw'n arddangos i'r ein pwysig yn y fathliadau beth angen ni, a gwazdu angen rydyn yn y ll棒fyniad. Felly, mae'n edrych. Mae'n edrych. Mae'n edrych yn y bwrdd ymlaen, ac mae'n edrych ond, ondligtig mae'n arwinell yn yr wych. Mae'n edrych yn yr holl yn ohon, ac mae'n edrych yn y fathlach a chyllid a chyllid, os yr unrhyw, they know if their children would have a home, let alone one near their own community, relatives and friends. How familiar is that story to members across the chamber? There are more than 150,000 people waiting to find a social rented house in Scotland. The number of new homes being built has fallen by 40 per cent since 2007. The percentage of families oedden nhw'r own home is also declining, with affordability being a huge problem for young people in particular. The net effect has been to drive people into an ever-expanding private sector within many areas ever increasing rent levels to match. In some cases, private renting is exactly what is required to address local need, but for others it is unaffordable and insecure, with rents rising at double or treble any increases in levels of income and with no guarantees, as in this case, against being chucked out with little notice. We need to offer those in private lets some of the protection available to those in social rented accommodation. A quarter of those renting privately are families with children and they need to know that they are safe and secure, that they can stay at the same school with the same friends and community around them. The Scottish Government has yet to spell out what will be in their private tenancies bill, but I hope that it will take the five asks of shelters make renting right as their starting point. Stability, flexibility and security of tenure for both tenants and landlords are accompanied by predictable rents with a fair system for sorting out problems when they occur. That should not be seen as an anti-landlord measure. Landlords need to know that they can get rid of bad tenants or get their property back if they need to sell it. In fact, if the main problem that we are facing is a problem of housing supply, one of the potential solutions is to attract large institutional investors into the sector to build substantial numbers of properties for private rent, much as we have seen recently with the expansion of purpose-built student accommodation to rent. In a world where investment capital is highly mobile, I do not underestimate the difficulty in getting the legislative or regulatory balance right. I will return to the private rented sector or the PRS that is commonly referred to shortly. Before I do, I believe that it is important that we recognise that neither the difficulties my constituents face nor the sheer scale of the housing challenge across Scotland will be resolved through regulating private tenancies. We are quite simply facing a housing crisis in Scotland and one that will only be resolved by building more homes, tens of thousands more homes. These are not my observations, but the conclusions of the independent commission on housing and wellbeing. It is very easy for our debates on housing to get into a battle of numbers. I notice that the Government's amendment proudly highlights the commitment to 30,000 new affordable homes, which it clearly expects to deliver on by next year. The difficulty is that that figure does not reflect housing need in Scotland. A point that has been made yet again in the press today by the SFHA, Shelter and Homes for Scotland. Rather than degenerate into an overly partisan exchange comparing the record of different administrations, one of the purposes of the motion that we have put down today is to see if we can find agreement around the work and the findings of the independent commission on housing and wellbeing. First of all, can I say how much I welcome the report and the contribution that I hope it makes to developing housing policy in Scotland? Set up in 2013 by Shelter Scotland and chaired by the former Auditor General Robert Black, the principal goal of the commission has been to look at the ways in which housing can and does impact on the wider wellbeing of the people of Scotland. This nonpartisan, unbiased independent commission has examined the impact of poor housing on people's health, education, employability and life chances. It highlights the links between housing and the problems of poverty and inequality. It points to the wider gains in terms of educational attainment, care for older people and improved mental health, secured by a decent home. Following a lengthy consultation with the public, housing experts and drawingland expertise of organisations such as the Poverty Alliance, the commission has published a report that paints an accurate but worrying picture of housing need in Scotland and which provides a series of specific but practical recommendations for the Scottish Government to adopt. The chair of the commission, Robert Black, said that the report described the central focus as being about the importance of having a suitable home that allows each and every one of us to live fulfilling lives and achieve our potential. However, he added that we are a long way short of this. There are about 150,000 households on waiting lists for social housing, 940,000 in fuel poverty and over 60,000 are overcrowded. With an averagely priced house now costing about five times the average annual income, owning your own home is becoming an unachievable pipe dream for many families in Scotland, especially young adults and families. The key recommendation from the commission is the need for the Scottish Government to oversee a radical increase in house building. The report calls on ministers to set an interim target of at least 23,000 new homes a year, of which at least 9,000 should be affordable homes. Given that we are currently only building around 15,000 homes a year, the lowest levels of house building since 1947, that will require strong and decisive political leadership. Is it really asking so much in a prosperous country such as ours to expect every Scot to have a safe, warm and affordable place that they call home? That is Labour's vision, but I would hope that it is a vision that we could share with members from every political party. John Mason. I thank the member for giving way. He seems to be suggesting that we should have more housing, which I would welcome. Is he suggesting that the Government should spend more money on housing and, if so, should that come from where? The point of today's motion and the commission on housing and wellbeing is to see if we can reach common agreement across this chamber on the scale of the crisis facing us. I can assure you that the Labour Party would be willing to work with and support any Government initiatives that recognise the scale of that problem and recognise the scale of social rented housing that needs to be built, as well as private housing and housing across all tenures. We are genuinely willing to work with the Government if they will recognise that we are facing a housing crisis. I hope that Mr Mason would be one of those who would be genuinely willing to work with Labour and others on that issue. Many housing and anti-poverty organisations would go much further than the commission's interim target, both on overall housing and on housing for social rent. One area that does not get much attention in the report is how we improve housing for disabled people. It has been estimated, for example, that 70,000 households in Scotland need adaptations for wheelchair users, but do not have them. There is simply not enough suitable or accessible housing being built. It is up to the Scottish Government to increase that availability by insisting that at least 10 per cent of housing across all tenures is built to wheelchair accessible standards. The commission's report goes on to spell out a series of further actions that need to be taken. It does not shirk from identifying the major challenges that are facing us over the next decade, on freeing the supply of land for new housing, recognising and supporting the growing role of the private rented sector, on tapping fuel poverty and stepping up the pace in reducing residential greenhouse gas emissions. Those are all areas where I am confident that there is at least the possibility where we can find agreement if not content as across the chamber. What worries me and why we have posed this as a question in Labour's motion for debate today is that it is not that clear from the programme for government that it matches the ambitions and the call to action set out in the commission. Just for example, one of the housing announcements in last week's programme for government was the continuation of the help to buy scheme. We are all pleased that the Government has listened to criticisms that we have made of the scheme and announced a three-year budget as opposed to annual announcements. As Homes for Scotland has pointed out, the £195 million over the next three years outlined by the First Minister is significantly less than the £305 million allocated over the previous three years, a sum that was itself immediately oversubscribed and resulted in a stop-start situation for the industry, causing frustration and confusion for home buyers and builders alike. Homes for Scotland has also pointed out that earlier this year the UK Government committed £6 billion to extend help to buy to at least the year 2020. Based on rough calculations, the consequentials for the Scottish Government would be expected to amount to some £150 million per year, as opposed to the £65 million per year announced. Can I ask the cabinet secretary if he will explain to Homes for Scotland how he intends to use the remaining balance? Another of the housing announcements in the programme for government was on planning. The First Minister surprised many of us, when she unveiled plans for a route and branch review of the planning system. As the cabinet secretary will know, it is something that I wholeheartedly support, as I do not believe that the planning system is working as well as it should. It neither addresses our need to deliver new housing nor does it give local communities the accountability, the control or the protection that they wish. It is too slow and too unpredictable in outcome. I say that I was pleasantly surprised, but that is because I lobbied the cabinet secretary directly as recently as March this year, when I asked him what his position, the Scottish Government's position was on holding an independent review of the planning system from a community perspective. The reply that I received from Mr Neil did not encourage me. This is in March. I quote directly, Scotland's planning system has undergone the most significant modernisation in over 60 years. The overall aim was delivery of a planning system that is efficient, inclusive, fit for purpose and sustainable. The Scottish Government has no current plans to undertake a further review. I am intrigued. Perhaps the cabinet secretary will tell us what has changed in a mere six months to make this most significantly modern planning system the sufficient, inclusive, fit for purpose and sustainable system now apparently so antiquated. In the absence of a reply, I will return to the private rented sector. The commission on housing and wellbeing also flagged up the needs for reform. There is another reason why my Labour colleagues and I were pleased to finally see the Government outline proposals for a private tenancies bill. Since devolution and the formation of this Parliament, the proportion of Scots renting in the private sector has almost tripled, from 5 per cent to more than 13 per cent. As things stand, more than 312,000 Scots households are privately renting in Scotland, including some 80,000 families with children. By itself, that might not be a cause for worry, but research from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation has found that, in a quote, the number of households in poverty in the private rented sector has doubled in the last decade to 120,000. The Joseph Rowntree Foundation also reported that the gap between social and private rents in Scotland is higher than, for example, any other English region except for England. SNP members often say that, instead of criticising the Scottish Government, Labour should come forward with solutions. I do not think that it would be untoward of me to remind the chamber that taking action to improve security of tenure and to limit rent rises in the private sector is something that Scottish Labour has been calling on for quite some time. In fact, if I may point out to my SNP colleagues if they had voted with Scottish Labour instead of with the Scottish Conservatives to introduce rent controls in the housing bill last year, they could have saved Scots and private rents a considerable amount of money. Over the last few years, private tenants in Scotland have seen their rents rise on average by £200 per year above the rate of inflation, and by a lot more in the hotspots of Edinburgh, Glasgow, Fife and Aberdeen. That is why, while we await detail, we hope that the bill will be a positive step towards creating more stable and secure tenancies. I have tried to outline that there are some Government announcements on housing that we will support, but I am not convinced that they merit the label of bold, which the First Minister tried to describe them with last week. The commission has provided us with a call for action, and one of the strengths of its report is that it constantly makes a link between a satisfactory home in the one hand and our individual wellbeing and a fair society on the other. The cabinet secretary has made much of the impact of welfare reform and is currently working on a new social justice action plan. Here is an area that has a direct impact on our welfare, on our quality of life and on the prospects for our children's success. It is entirely devolved. We all know that families and individuals can prove remarkably resilient in the face of adversity if they have a safe, warm home to return to. On fuel poverty, just for example, the commission's report highlighted that a cold home is neither conducive to good health nor a satisfactory learning environment for children nor young people. Llangbanks, the director of WWF Scotland put it this way, it makes no sense that hard-pressed households spend scarce money on energy to simply heat the air outside of their cold, draughty and leaky homes. Yet the Scottish Government has yet to set a long-term goal for the national infrastructure project to bring homes up to an acceptable energy performance standard. We need to build many, many more homes, but this is more than a numbers game. Can I ask what the Scottish Government is doing to look at the specific neighbourhood recommendations of the report when it comes to recognising the greater role that wellbeing and community have to play when it comes to future housing policy? Scottish Labour deliberately decided to focus on the housing crisis that is facing this country in our first debate following the programme for government, ensuring that everyone has access to a decent home should be the starting block in our mission to build a more equitable and happier society. Labour's ambition for our country's future is matched by our absolute determination to ensure that everyone in Scotland has the comfort and assurance of a safe, secure and affordable warm home. It is not an impossible dream. It is not an unrealistic goal. What is required is political will, and I move the amendment in my name. I now call on Margaret Burgess to speak to and move amendment 14167.2. Minister, you have 10 minutes or thereby please. Okay, thank you, Presiding Officer. I am sure that we can all agree with a lot of what Ken Macintosh has said, and that everyone in Scotland should have access to a warm, safe, secure and affordable home. That is the aim of this Scottish Government, and we laid that out in our strategy homes fit for the 21st century. I also very much welcome the work that the commission on housing and wellbeing has done to explore and explain the links between housing and wellbeing, and to draw that to all our attention. The commission is a good example of the type of cross-sector working that I believe is important, and it shows a vibrant sector looking to work with each other and with Government to find positive policies for Scotland. Housing and particular social housing remains one of this Government's highest priorities and is why we have committed over £1.7 billion of investment in affordable housing over the lifetime of this Parliament. As the official statistics published yesterday show, we are now going to exceed our target of delivering 30,000 affordable homes across the country. Over 28,000 affordable homes have already been delivered, 93 per cent of the five-year target. That is a significant achievement at a time of UK Government imposed capital cuts of 26 per cent. Ken Macintosh referred to house building since 1947, but he did not take out of that the recession and the fact that he was talking about private house building. We are building more affordable homes and more homes in the social sector than any previous administration in Scotland. However, the Scottish Government wants to do more. The minister accepts that whatever number of houses the current Government is building or is being built in Scotland by the private sector, it does not meet the needs of Scotland's people and Scotland's communities. I was about to say that we want to do more. We want to increase and accelerate our ambitions for Scotland's housing as we go forward and to continue to do so in an integrated and collaborative way. Our current target of 6,000 affordable homes per year is absolutely not the limit of our ambition. We will continue to support local authorities to deliver their affordable housing priorities with quality homes and mixed communities that fit local needs. We have delivered 4,956 council homes, 99 per cent of our 5,000 council homes target. I am going back to the numbers game because that is 4,950 more than built under the previous Labour-Liberal coalition. We have built more social housing under the seven years of this administration than the previous Labour-Liberal administration. I will come to those figures shortly. We have built more social housing that includes RSL housing and council housing. We will continue to work with a wide range of partners across the public and private sectors to invest in and deliver a significant supply of housing that harms the increased level of private finance with value for money and public resources. Given the seriousness of the housing crisis that we have in Scotland, should we not start to try and move beyond who did what and blame each other and get on with the issue of building houses for rent council houses that people and families in Scotland desperately need? I would say to the member that that is precisely what this Government is doing. We are actually doing it and we set ourselves a target and we have met that target and we are exceeding that target and that is what we are doing. We are continuing to build houses for those that need it across all tenures and that is despite the challenges that we are facing in our budget and we are determined to do it. We have already worked closely with our partners to produce a joint delivery housing plan and the plan addresses the wide range of housing issues in Scotland and it captures a crucial set of delivery actions that we collectively agree are vital at this time. New housing supply is one aspect of what is important but we need to ensure, as Ken Macintosh said in his contribution, that people can afford to heat their homes and their homes provide a safe and positive environment and homes are flexible to households changing needs. In those last few years, high and rising energy prices on top of the UK Government's continued austerity have made things very difficult for many households across Scotland and that is why this Government has sought to help those households by investing over half a billion pounds since 2009 in our fuel poverty and energy efficiency programmes. Our efforts are paying off since 2008. Nearly one in three of all households have benefited from energy efficiency measures and now over a third of all Scottish dwellings has a good EPC rating of band B and C, an increase of 56 per cent since 2010. Housing and again the commission referred to this as did Ken Macintosh and I certainly agree that housing is much more about much more than a roof over people's heads. Good housing can assist in creating vibrant communities, allowing them to flourish and be empowered. It can create the right environment to allow children to grow, learn and reach their full potential. It can ensure the health and wellbeing of its occupants is maintained or improved. Good housing goes right to the heart of the fairer and stronger Scotland that this Government is working to deliver. The housing market has changed since the global recession and this Government has responded positively and creatively to provide a wider range of funding mechanisms than ever seen before and to squeeze the maximum value from our austerity-hit reduced budgets. That has seen us support the construction sector and home buyers through our help to buy schemes. Our considerable investment of over £500 million over the past three years and the three years ahead will help around 14,000 households to buy a new home. It will also provide the construction industry with a huge economic boost that can ensure employment in the sector and we will work with Homes for Scotland and the sector to develop how the new scheme proceeds. The Scottish Government continues to lead the way in innovation. The contribution to new housing supply from innovative financing approaches is substantial and growing, with nearly 3,000 new affordable homes being approved and unlocking around £400 million of housing investment. Those new approaches have seen us develop products for mid-market rent and shared equity and seen us support home owners creating difficulties through our home owners support fund. The availability of suitable, good-quality housing and housing services make a vital contribution to the success of integration of health and social care and we are working closely with the housing sector to deliver appropriate housing support and services. We also recognise the need to plan for the future and to ensure that we have the land and the infrastructure that is required to deliver the supply of new housing at the pace that we would like. The objective of the planning review announced in the programme for government is to ensure that planning does all that it can to enable the delivery of high-quality developments across the country. In particular, the review will seek to identify where further targeted improvements to the planning system can be made with particular emphasis on increasing the delivery of high-quality housing developments. We also recognise that the housing system works differently in rural Scotland. We have listened to rural stakeholders and in 2016, for a three-year period, we will put in place a rural housing fund to suit the particular needs of rural areas. All of that requires working closely with partners and we have done this effectively as can be seen in our delivery. We have delivered 20 per cent more affordable homes in the last seven financial years than the previous administration. We have outperformed England and Wales in new-build social sector completions and in private sector completions per 100,000 of population. We have worked with local authorities to deliver a substantial council house new-build programme, with 99 per cent of our five-year target being met to March 2015. We have provided affordable mid-market rent options for those who seek them. We have put on our occupation within the reach of many who, in the current climate, were struggling to raise large deposits or access full borrowing. We have helped people to insulate their homes and save money in energy bills. We have created additional funding options and routes to private finance. We have ensured that housing investment is targeted locally where it is needed most through local authority strategic housing investment plans. To conclude, this Scottish Government has achieved much, but let there be no doubt whatsoever that our appetite and our drive remains to build and improve on the good progress to date. We will do so within the powers vested in us while remaining constrained by Westminster. We are committed to building on our substantial progress in tackling housing issues and in doing so working in a constructive, collaborative way with partners across the public and private sectors to deliver a fairer, stronger Scotland. I move the amendment in my name. Many thanks. Before I call Mr Johnson, I will say that there is a modest amount of time in hand this afternoon. I will now call on Mr Johnson to speak to and move amendment 14167.16 minutes or thereby. Thank you very much, Deputy Presiding Officer. Lest I forget towards the end of this speech, may I begin by moving the amendment that stands in my name. It is always good to have Ken Macintosh proposing a motion in Parliament. Ken is an experienced politician and he manages to mix good traditional common sense with some good old-fashioned left-wing prejudices when it comes to applying policies such as housing. In fact, what Ken did today in my view was an attempt to redefine the crisis in order to fit existing Labour policy. For that reason, I would suggest that much of the motion is a bit of an attempt to hammer a square peg into a round hole. Nevertheless, it sets out a very clear problem and one that we are right to be debating at some length today. The issue of housing and wellbeing is something that has been dealt with extensively in the report that is mentioned in the initial motion. It is one that will serve to educate us, to inform us and to define many of the arguments that we have about housing and wellbeing going forward. In fact, wellbeing is a very interesting area of policy and one that I am sure we will return to. However, in the short time available to me today, housing will be my key priority. The problem that we face is that, of course, there is not enough money to go round. During the course of a recession, it can often be difficult, but money is not the only problem. In fact, when we look at housing and housing issues, it is surprising the amount of money that is or at least would be available for investment in affordable housing if the correct conditions were created. That is why we should prioritise confidence in the marketplace as much as anything else that we do. Turning briefly to the Government amendment today, it has to be said that it sets out the achievements of this Government so far. In fact, a brief look at some of the statistics would indicate that, in spite of the fact that many figures in terms of housing are well below where they were at pre-recession levels, positive progress is being made. The problem is that it is not big enough progress and that it is not being made fast enough. It has to be said, however, that, on perusing those statistics, one of the strangest ones that comes up—I did predict it myself—was at the sale of public authority dwellings, including local authorities with total stock transfer, rose by 20 per cent in 2014-15, from 1,527 to 1,835. That is a second consecutive annual increase after years of declining numbers of sales. The increases are likely, in my view, to be due to the announcement in 2013 that the right to buy was to be ended for all tenants. If we look at what is happening in our housing market, there is less construction in the private sector, there is less construction in the public sector or across the board, although this Government will insist on telling us that it is seeing more council houses built than any of its predecessors in recent times. It is nonetheless the case that the private sector, the private rented sector, has taken up a great deal of the necessary capacity that this Government has, for whatever reason, been unable to provide. The growth in the private rented sector has become the central pillar of our social housing policy. That is why it is of concern to me that, last week and to some extent today, we have heard talk of rent capping as being a primary tool taking us forward. However, I have to say that, looking at the description that appears in the amendment in the name of Margaret Burgess today, it seems to make clear that it is still the intention of this Government to take forward a modern private rented sector that is fit for the needs of today's tenants and landlords. I will ask her, or whoever replies to this debate, if that is meant to be an olive branch to the private rented sector, because it is necessary at this stage to deliver something. I can assure the Government that there is a deep-seated fear that action, the wrong action at this stage, will result in a move towards disinvestment in the sector under a time when we are not in a position to replace those homes with new build homes for rent one for one. We may lose a large section of the rented capacity that we have if we do not treat those people correctly. Excuse me, I am going to come to a conclusion very soon. It is the case, however, that we must search for ambitious solutions to Scotland's housing needs, that we must find ways to increase capacity and construction across the board, and that the way that we will achieve that is to build confidence. Confidence in the market is what gave us the growth in all sectors that we had prior to the recession. A return to that confidence is what will result in that investment returning. That is why it is the job of Government and all politicians, even the ones in opposition, to ensure that what we do is designed to make it easier, safer and more practical for people at every level to invest in housing. That return in confidence is key to success. It must be across all tenures and all sectors, but if we work together to build confidence, the capacity exists for our housing problems to be solved by investment that is not exclusively dependent on Government or the public sector, but can also find private sector solutions. If we treat the private investors and the private renters right, they can continue to solve our problems and deal with many of the issues in that crisis, which others are confused and I cannot find a solution to. Thanks. We now move to the open debate and six-minute speeches, or thereby. I call on John Mason to be followed by James Baxter. Thank you, Presiding Officer. I would like to spend a little bit of time looking at some of the words that are used in Labour's motion. It is probably good that we start with what we can agree on, and I have to say that I completely agree that securing a decent home is very much linked to individual and also social wellbeing. I hope that we are all agreed that investing in housing has huge benefits, which can take people out of fuel poverty, can help youngsters educationally to study better and can improve the health of whole families. Whether or not there is a, quote, home's crisis in Scotland I think is open to debate and that has been touched on already. I have to say that I think that crisis is a word that tends to be used very loosely in this place, and I think that we would do better if we thought about it a bit more carefully before we used it too frequently. One definition of crisis that I found included a crucial or decisive point or situation, a turning point. I really wonder if we are saying that, while we accept that housing is a key challenge, whether we are at some point a historical turning point. Housing frankly has been a challenge, it has been a problem for the whole of my life, both for Scotland and the UK, and realistically it is going to continue to be for some time whichever party is in power, but I think that to use the word crisis too loosely is a mistake, Mr McIntosh. I recognise the point that Mr Mason makes. Does he also recognise that the word is not being used by the leopart in this context, it is being used by Shelter Scotland, by the commission and by Sir Robert Black? Yes, I do accept that and I suppose my general point is not just in this place that we use crisis too loosely. I think that maybe we use it more widely. If we are talking about refugees and immigrants these days, then I accept that that would definitely be a crisis and a correct use of the word. Now, positively speaking, I have to say that in an area like Greater Easter House where I live, the state of the housing is generally much better than it was 25 years ago when I moved in. And in turn, even at that time, it was so much better than the tenements with the shared toilets and huge overcrowding that had happened after the war period. So let's be realistic that huge progress has been made historically before this Government came to power and since this Government came to power. At the same time, I have to accept that housing is still the main issue that constituents come to see me and my office about, so there is no question that we do have an on-going challenge. I think that we should give credit to the housing associations in the work that they have done and continue to do in doing their very best to find and create suitable homes for tenants as much as they possibly can. However, they are limited, the housing associations, and we are limited as a Parliament in what can be done by the resources, primarily meaning the money that is available to us. There are certain inescapable facts here, including that Westminster's mismanagement of the economy, which has led to a reduced Scottish budget, and that has been made worse by the Tories cutting harder than they needed to. So we do not have as much money for housing as we want or need. And if, as I challenged Mr Macintosh earlier, if the opposition are saying that they want more money for housing, they have to be honest and tell us where they want to take that money from. For example, is it less money for health and hospitals? Or is it less money for schools and colleges? Or is it less money for transport? Because surely it has to be one of those. Does Mr Mason accept that one of the reasons I have not put money in this motion was to try and get recognition that there is a crisis, a problem facing us, and to try and reach agreement, if we cannot agree on the scale of the problem, we will not agree on the solutions. Does the member agree that there is a crisis facing housing that needs us all to work commonly to address it? I think that it is already that I agree and I think that the housing minister agrees that there is a problem and there is a challenge. I do not accept that the word crisis is the right word to use at this time, but individual families accept that some of them are facing a crisis. Going on from if we are not going to cut expenditure somewhere else, can we raise it, for example, through taxation? Next April, we clearly start having power over income tax. Frankly, I would be delighted to tax higher earners more and use the proceeds for investment in housing. However, we have to remember that one P more tax for the richest would mean one P more tax for the lowest earners. We have to think long and hard before we go down that route. If I am speaking about housing, you will not be surprised that I mentioned my own constituency and particularly one of the huge housing issues at the moment, which is the Commonwealth Games village, with its 400 social rented houses and 300 owner-occupied, most of which are now occupied, although the care home has still to come on board. My first point on that would be to emphasise the tremendous enthusiasm with which this development has been greeted. We have disabled people now having a suitable home for the first time, larger families who are no longer overcrowded, and even folk moving into the area from areas like the west end, which I think some people used to believe was more desirable. I touched a point with Mr Johnson's point about building confidence, and that is exactly what the village has done and is doing, and we hope to see more private developers coming into the area shortly. Have I got a little bit of extra time here? Of course, new housing developments this size do have teething problems, and we have had some of those. Some residents are already not looking after their gardens. The council has refused to install litter bins because the roads are not yet adopted, but those are relatively minor in the scheme of things. Overall, it has been great to hear from new residents how pleased they are with their homes. The motion states that buying our own home is increasingly unaffordable, and sadly that seems to be the case. I see that this is very much linked to the wide gap between the richest and the poorest in our society. If we have a more even distribution of income and wealth, more people would be able to afford an ordinary home. However, if some people are so rich that they live in a huge mansion or even have several properties, the corollary is that other people are squeezed right out of owning at all, so helping people at the bottom end of the scale has to be linked to redistributing the income and wealth of those at the top. Other issues raised in the motion include quality standards and rent levels. I suggest that quality standards are a challenge—in fact, more of a challenge—in their own or occupier and private rented sector, where some of the worst conditions prevail. By all means, let's have rent controls if necessary and give more security to tenants, but improving the standard and safety of private rented properties has to be a higher priority as well. I think that we need to go further with factoring at some stage—perhaps having compulsory factoring—and a potentially compulsory maintenance funds. By historical standards, huge progress has been made. I very much welcome the progress that has been made by this Government and, in the words of the sum of the local housing associations, let us complete the good work that has been done so far. I should like to begin by declaring an interest. I am a private sector landlord in Fife, and I would like to put that on the record before I begin. In recent years, we have seen a vast increase in the number of people who rent privately in Scotland. Since the formation of the Scottish Parliament, the proportion of people who rent in the private sector in Scotland has almost trebled, from 5 per cent to 13 per cent. And yet 100,000 of households in the private rented sector live in poverty. Private renters in Scotland spend nearly a quarter of their income on housing, far more than is acceptable. A recent report from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation found that, I quote, the number of households in poverty in the PRS has doubled in the last decade to 120,000, while the number in social housing has almost halved to 190,000. At the start of the 2000s, poverty in Scotland was predominantly in the social rented sector, but that is no longer the case. Two-fifths of households in poverty live in social housing compared to three-fifths a decade ago. Meanwhile, a quarter live in the private rented sector, up from one in ten. Many people have little choice but to rent privately. They cannot afford to save for a deposit to buy a house and the options for social housing may be limited in their locality. Scotland is facing a social housing crisis. We need massive investment in the supply side of housing, which would see construction of social housing to boost our economy, access to safe, secure homes for thousands of families and all the improvements in health, wellbeing and increased community cohesion and safety in communities across Scotland that would come with those new houses. An affordable, safe home is a fundamental component of building a fairer Scotland. Since coming to power, the SNP has cut the capital housing budget. I am proud to say that Labour is committed to building at least 20,000 homes a year between now 2020. You are committed to building 20,000 homes. Can you give an indication of what that is going to cost and how much of the Scottish budget that will cost? I am not in a position to do that today. I would echo Ken Macintosh's comments that those are things that we need to work on together. An example of how those things can be funded, though, is what I was going to say, which is that in Fife Council, it has committed to building 2,700 houses by May 2017, and it is on track to do that. It did that by consulting with tenants and raising the rents and using the increased income from that to raise the funds to build those 2,700 houses. There are ways of financing increased housebuilding. In Fife, there has been collaboration between housing providers, housing associations, private developers and a number of Scottish government initiatives. That target is on track. Together, they are delivering modern, fit-for-purpose, energy-efficient homes. Where possible, the council's new-build properties are allocated to existing tenants whose current home is not suitable, and that existing home is freed up to allocate to someone else on the housing list. That chain of lets means that 2.4 households' housing needs are being met for every new council house let. That approach is making serious inroads into Fife's housing problems. On top of that, innovative and fast solutions are necessary if we are to deal with our housing crisis. Again, I refer to Fife. We have recently seen a very innovative project where we have been rebuilding on existing foundations. Sharp construction with support from Fife Council and Orr Valley Housing Association has speedily and safely built new homes on the foundations that are originally laid for houses that are no longer fit for purpose. They demolished those not-fit-for-purpose houses and built on the funds. The process was hugely collaborative with local people and has broad local support. It is just one of many new approaches that could be used to tackle Scotland's housing crisis now. However, for those who cannot or do not want to live in social housing, we need to reform the private rental sector to make it work for everyone. In the worst-case scenarios, the sector is at risk of just being a cash cow for landlords—not this landlord—but the priority for all of us must be to meet the needs of families who are either unable to get a foot in the property ladder or access to social housing. Shelters make renting right campaign has cross-party support. It makes bold calls for action on rent levels and security of tenure. It calls for stability for people wanting to make rented housing their home. Flexibility for people to stay in their home as long as they need. A modern tenancy that gives security and flexibility for both tenants and landlords. A fair system for sorting out renting problems when they occur and predictable rents for tenants and landlords. What is clear is that tenure options in Scotland are in desperate need of reform. It is a positive step that the Scottish Government has committed to making changes, but we must wait to see the detail of the proposals. The various tenures currently available must be rationalised and made to work for everyone in Scotland. Another area in which there is little doubt that Scotland's private rented sector does not work is in rent levels. Scotland has a larger gap between private and social rents than any region of England, bar London. The Scottish Government's own expert working group on welfare recommended mandatory rent caps written into all leases in June 2014. The Scottish Labour Party welcomes in principle the private tenancies bill that the Scottish Government has set out in its programme for government. One section of the bill will include references to some rent controls. Scottish Labour has been arguing for action to control rent rises for months. Indeed, we tried to amend the Scottish Government's last housing bill to that end, but we voted down several times. Since that bill was passed, rents have again risen. Had the SNP Government acted in 2013, when its last private rented sector review took place, the average Scottish rent in the private sector would have saved over £150 per year already. The SNP voted against proper rent controls three times and are now only proposing the far narrower, to quote the First Minister, provision of more predictable rents and protection for tenants against excessive rent increases, including the ability to introduce rent controls for rent pressure areas. The SNP rejected the Scottish Labour's proposal for real rent controls in the last housing bill and have now come forward with watered-down proposals. In the 2011 manifesto, the SNP provided a guarantee to retain secure tenancies at affordable rents, but private rents have increased by over 3 per cent year-on-year in Scotland. It remains to be seen to what extent the proposals put forward will achieve this goal because the housing crisis in Scotland is radical and innovative solutions. The Scottish Parliament will be given sweeping and wide-ranging new powers that could be put to use to tackle the housing crisis. Housing benefit reform, the building of tens of thousands of new houses and radical action on rents must be top of the agenda to ensure that people across Scotland are able to live in decent homes. Most gracious of Labour in the Labour Party to bring a debate to the Scottish Parliament today on housing and wellbeing using their own time. It comes as a bit of a surprise to many of us, particularly since Labour, whilst in government, had such a woeful record of having only built six council houses in the whole time that they were in power. That is six council houses in the staggering eight years. However, I am sure that the public will be exceedingly impressed if Labour were to say they intend to double their record, yes, to 100 per cent, and the public are bound to be wowed over this promise to build 12 council houses over eight years, although I do not think so. Of course, I must labour the point that six houses in eight years only added to the shortage in the quality council housing that was already a disaster created by the Tory failed plot to bribe voters to their cause by bringing right to buy. Something, again, Labour did absolutely nothing about no way it gets even worse. It continued the Tory master plan to rid Scotland of availability quality council housing. If you want to witness the effect of the dual impact of reduced numbers of quality council houses and the almost criminal lack of new-build council houses, I invite the Parliament to my constituency. Evidence lies there aplenty. Contrast Labour's record with that of the SNP. Now, we need to really remember that up until eight years ago Labour owned Scotland, or at least they thought they did. Just in eight short years of an SNP Government, a Government with no experience whatever in these matters, from a standing start since 2009-10, over 5,350 new council houses have been built by the SNP. Over and above that, 34,500 socially rentable houses have been completed. That is nearing a fifth more than Labour did over the same number of years. We do not need only to measure this Government's record on social housing against previous devolved Governments in Scotland. We can look further afield and a positive message on delivery for Scotland continues. The Institute of Fiscal Studies has highlighted that the Scottish Government spends a whopping 85 per cent more per head on social housing than in England and Wales. The result of this investment has seen a rate of social sector completions per 100,000 population being significantly higher in Scotland at 65.3 for the year to the end of September, 2014, but in Conservative-run England it was only 44.7. If that is not bad enough, the rate in Labour-run Wales is 24.6. However, there is always a catch when you do good work in Scotland. London has yet again put in the usual penalty clause like some rogue insurance company. We are being penalised by Westminster for investing more in social housing because the benefits of that spending accrue to the UK Government in the form of lower housing benefit payments. That aside, this has not deterred the Scottish Government for one second in doing the right thing and in doing all that they can to assist our people to get the housing that they deserve and need. With the announcement in the programme for government that £195 million will be provided over the next three years to help more people buy the new-built homes, this will see at least 6,500 families supported to buy a new-built home that meets their needs and, most crucially, at a price that they can afford. The help-to-buy scheme has already helped 7,500 households in Scotland to buy a new home over the past three years. I am sure that I do not need to say that we need to do more. It is quite clear that, of course, we need to do more—much, much more. However, it is equally clear that, with the actions that this Government has already taken and the record that it has, that this Government will not sit in its laurels, and I am confident that it will do all that it can with the powers and the budget that it has available to remedy the quality housing shortage that we have. Presiding Officer, I thank them for their efforts and the deliverance in their work. Both Ken Macintosh and James Baxter reminded us that the number of people living in private rented accommodation has almost tripled during the years of the Scottish Parliament. I want to speak mainly about that subject today and illustrate with an example that has been a major issue in my constituency over the summer. First, I would like to make three points about social rented housing in the city of Edinburgh council area. Firstly, there are on average about 200 people that apply for every social rented house that becomes available in the city of Edinburgh council area. I do not think that there is any local authority in Scotland that can match that shocking statistic. Secondly, I hope that the minister will take more account of that reality in the funding formula for distributing housing money and not be misled by the great success of Edinburgh in relation to mid-market housing. That is important, and it counts as affordable housing, but it is not suitable for the very many people who need social rented accommodation. The third point that I would make is about the long-standing issue of housing association grant when I went to the 40th anniversary event of the Port of Leith Housing Association last week. Once again, that was the issue that they highlighted to me. Housing association grant, the grant for each new social rented house that plummeted two or three years ago, was partially restored a year or so later, but is still significantly below what it was in 2007, shall we say? There has been a group reporting recently that has recommended that it should be further restored, and I hope that the Government will act on that as soon as possible. However, moving on to the private rented sector, I strongly agree with the and support that shelters make renting right campaign. Of course, the first problem is the short-term nature of private rented tenancies. I welcome, as far as they go, the proposals for the new private rented housing bill and will look in detail at those, but I do have concerns that they may not go far enough and that the six-month short-assured tenancy may still be the norm in Scotland. I did prefer and was disappointed not to see, for example, the proposal that UK Labour had before the general election for three-year private tenancy agreements being the norm, so I hope that the Scottish Government will consider that. A constituent sent an email to me recently and said, I quote, that the private rented sector is not geared up to provide long-term stable accommodation that folks and families can make their homes. The insecurity of the tenure makes stable life impossible and results in much disruption for tenants. Of course, rents comprown the problem because many need to constantly move because rents increase beyond what they can afford. Again, we have some proposals for the bill based around pressurised areas, but I would hope that the minimum should be that there should be no rent increases in any year beyond inflation. I would like that to see the minimum. The repairing standard was some progress for the private rented sector in the 2006 bill, but I now believe that we need to move to a common housing quality standard. I am glad to see that at least the Scottish Government is committed to consulting on a minimum energy efficiency standard for the private sector. I hope that the minister can tell us when that consultation will be launched. It also has a consultation currently on a letting agent code of practice, and I think that it is very important to make clear that the upfront letting freeze charged to tenants are unlawful. Regulations must be strong enough to see that agents who do not meet the required standards are struck off the register. We need a strong register for letting agents. We have one for landlords. Again, I urge the minister to look at that to make it stronger, because there are still many issues where private landlords are not meeting their responsibilities, for example towards common repairs or keeping their gardens housed tidier. It seems that there is not the power under the landlord legislation for action to be taken on that. Many of those problems are illustrated by a landlord in my constituency, which happens to be a charitable trust and which has decided to evict in due course over 200 tenants whose rents have paid for the trust's charitable purposes over many decades. The tenants have asked for a 12-month moratorium on sales so that they can pursue a co-op option or other suitable solution, but only four months have been granted, which is not enough time for such a complex situation. Crucially, the trust is determined to only sell in a way that realises the highest possible receipt disregarding their obligations to the tenants, many of whom have invested their own money in the homes over decades. There is surely a certain irony in a trust making people homeless in order to give more grants to homeless and other charities, and I cannot believe that that is what the 2005 charity legislation intended. It will break up a highly successful community in the Lorne area, a community with many families and older people and rich social networks. There are also major issues about the state of the properties and the failure over a long period of time to repair and upgrade them adequately. Moreover, there are big questions about the behaviour of the letting agency in question, which assured several tenants about the security of their accommodation, attempted to move some elderly and vulnerable tenants from assured to short assured tenancies and has recently stopped, stepped up its inspections in preparation for sales but with increased stress for tenants. Supporting those tenants in every way that I can has been one of my top priorities over the summer months and will continue to be so. There is an amazing tenants group at Lorne with some wonderful and determined campaigners and, more than anything, I hope that they will be able to continue living in their great Lorne community. Thank you, Mr Trism. I just point out to members that we have got a little time in hand, if you wish your remarks to run over a little bit, I will try to accommodate you. Of course, if you wish to take interventions, I will add time at the end. Thank you very much, Presiding Officer. This debate on housing does not take place in a vacuum. It takes place in the face of an austerity onslaught, which has devastated public funds for capital investment in the past few years. Less cash to build quite simply means it is challenging to say the least to build more homes in the face of a collapsing budget. Surely that is common sense. It is not defensive on behalf of the Scottish Government. It is just plain common sense. Mr Macintosh, on behalf of Labour, said that he did not want to descend into a partisan debate, exchanging statistics, and neither do I. It is reasonable to put in record that there have been significant achievements, Mr Macintosh, significant achievements of the Scottish Government, despite capital cuts. Housing waiting lists have fallen every year for the past six years, and they are down 10 per cent since 2007. That is an achievement. More homes have been built in the past seven years than were built in the seven years before that. Surely that is an achievement. Finding £1.7 billion in the face of the cuts that I mentioned to invest in affordable housing looks like we are going to meet our target of 30,000 affordable homes very shortly. That is an achievement. Let us recognise success where it has happened, but let us face up to the challenges that we have going forward. I want to look forward to future success and progress, but we cannot close our eyes to what happened in the past, the good things and the bad things, the successes and the failures. We have to learn about what worked and did not work to decide what our options are going forward. Sometimes when MSPs from this side of the chamber justise labour for what we feel as our failures and lack of success, we have to identify what went wrong, show what we are doing right and then we can build on that together. That is not partisan. We cannot close our eyes and pretend that the history did not actually happen. Yes. I thank Bob Doris for making that point. Does he therefore agree that when his colleagues referred to Labour only building six council houses, that is really stretching the argument beyond any recognition. The fact is that Labour built a substantial number of social rented housing at the same time, and the comparison between the number of social housing now and when Labour was in power is less significant than his colleagues would try to pretend it was. Somewhere within that intervention, there is a concession that there is far more social and affordable housing under the Scottish Government's record than under the last Labour Executive. That is in the face of significant capital cuts. Surely that is a success, and it is just a fact that there were six council houses built in four years by Labour, compared to over 5,000 in this administration. Clearly, we are doing something right to drive forward the expansion of council housing in Scotland. I suspect that the right to buy the ending of that is a significant driver towards that. We have to put that on the record and learn from our successes and the failures of other people that we have rectified those ill-considered ideas. Yes. The member accepts that one of the reasons why Labour controlled local authorities and other local authorities, too, not controlled by Labour, could not build houses was because of the right to buy. That was only revoked at the point at which Labour reformed the right to buy in an earlier session of the Parliament. What we did do was put the money into social housing in other ways, through housing associations. That is the fact of the matter. I thank the member for the intervention. She mentions that that is the fact of the matter. I would strongly disagree with that, but I do not wish to get into the partisan argument that I myself and Mr McIntosh seek not to do. The record is quite simply that more than 5,000 council houses are under Labour, and people can do the maths quite frankly. Let me give some consideration in relation to where there has been challenges, some successes and where we could go forward in the future. The Scottish Government took a decision—I think that it was Stuart Maxfield who was the housing minister at the time—to consistently cut the housing association grant budgets. Quite simply, if you could get more houses for a smaller subsidy in the face of cuts, that is what was done. That fell quite dramatically. It was successful, but I have to say, Presiding Officer, that we then amended the housing association grant and gave it a small uplift again to get the optimal efficiency in relation to delivering social rented homes. I hear some laughter over in the Labour benches, but it is this Scottish Government that will make the best use of taxpayers' money in the face of Tory cuts and challenge austerity to deliver for tenants in Scotland. I do not have time, Mr McIntosh. I am sorry. Can I go on to talk about housing churn and how we could perhaps not solve housing need, but better address housing need with the allocations policy and local authorities? Let me tell you about a couple of constituents of mine. Let me tell you about a constituent, the Balgrithill High Flats and Springburn, who was offered a house that would have met their housing needs. They were in a dire housing position, but they were very worried that, once they were moved to that house, they would be stuck there forever. The allocations policy, quite often in the social rented sector, does not lead to housing aspiration as part of it. That has to be addressed somewhere down the line. Let me tell you about another constituent Sarasyn Cross in Possell, where we were able to identify a possible house for that constituent, which would have improved their housing situation but would not have met all their housing needs. The housing association did not want to move them to a house that did not meet all their housing needs. There are just two examples of how housing allocation policies could be used more effectively. A churn in the movement to improve everyone's housing needs a bit, but do not close off the door or the route to housing aspiration in the social rented sector. I think that that is something that we have to look at. I want to talk not just about building houses, but about where we build houses and about building communities. In Somersen, where I stay, I have to declare an interest, because I will be affected by the Glasgow City Council plans in the Blackhill road area across Somersen, through to East Dunbartonshire and up to Lamb Hill, where Glasgow City Council decided that all the green belt will now be moved over for housing development to rezone it for housing. They actually decided not to do that until the landowners appealed that decision and it now forms part of their local authority plan. I have objected to that and I very much hope that that will be overturned at the reporter stage in terms of plans. It is not just about building houses, it is building communities and where local authorities have got a responsibility to play their part on that and they do not always get it right. I will not be alone among my colleagues here in Parliament in handling more casework about housing problems than about any other issue. I am sadly familiar with the litany of problems cropping up over and over again in adequate housing, overcrowding, high house prices, exorbitant private rents, long waiting lists for social housing, families stuck in temporary accommodation, damp homes, neighbourhood problems and fuel poverty. And yet, however familiar the problems, I am never in any doubt about how damaging and wearing it is for each individual constituent that I see and my own anger and frustration that our collective failure to tackle these problems grows. Housing problems wear people down, stress affects their health, debt grows and creates further problems and families are pushed to breaking point. Councils struggling with growing waiting lists force families to make invidious choices. A mother in temporary accommodation having fled abusive relationship who comes to me distraught because the council has told her to widen the search for social housing and she explains to me that if she does so she will need to move the children from a school that is settled in and away from family support in the village. A homeless family who has been offered a council house 30 miles away in a small town with no public transport links to where they work. A single parent and private rented accommodation who spent years fighting to get the educational and social support that her disabled son needed, finding herself facing eviction and the only homeless accommodation offered by the local council means uprooting her son from that support network. We can week out my surgeries underline that housing and wellbeing are inextricably linked. We all know that and yet still it seems that housing policy is dealt with in a silo. It is welcome that the Labour Party has chosen to use the debating time today to consider the commission on housing and wellbeing's report. The focus on wellbeing and the emphasis on considering in the round a range of interrelated issues such as housing, neighbourhood, economic activity, health and environmental sustainability is a profoundly different and indeed a very welcome approach. The commission has stressed the central importance of having a safe, secure and suitable home that allows people to fulfil their potential and for that home to be embedded in and linked to a strong, vibrant local community where people can live good lives. That chimes well with the Liberal Democrats' aim of enabling every citizen to achieve their full potential and contribute fully to their communities. The commission concludes starkly that there is, and a quote, very clearly a home crisis and goes on to make a series of worthwhile recommendations, and yet both the Government amendment and the Conservative amendment choose to delete all reference to a home's crisis. Deleting words in a parliamentary motion won't solve the problem, won't take away from the fact that this Government has failed to provide housing for the 10,000 households that are currently in temporary accommodation. In temporary housing, not just for weeks or months but for years, just last year local authorities gave us the grim numbers of people who waited for more than five and indeed more than 10 years after they applied for social housing. As of May last year, over 13,000 households had been on the waiting list for more than an entire decade. What clear indication is there of the Scottish Government's failure to adequately respond to the housing shortage crisis, leaving children to spend Christmas after Christmas in houses that they can't call home. While the Government claims that, in the course of this five-year Parliament, it will have built more than 30,000 units, housing completions remain at still 40 per cent less than before the economic downturn. 16,000 new-build houses were completed in the year ending. The member in talking completion will recognise that, in terms of affordable housing, there is more affordable housing being built under this administration than previous administrations, and she is referring to the private sector and the recession. One of the things that concerns me is the constant conflation of affordable housing and social housing. Affordable housing does not mean social housing, and social housing is where we really need to start making a difference. If you would like me to make some progress now. 16,000 new-build houses were completed in the year ending, March 2015, compared to 25,000 in the same period before the SNP took power. The Government can continue to blame the economic downturn, or it can figure out a way to help those in need of a place to live. I think that that is the spirit of Ken McIntosh's motion today. I would rather see us discussing how we collectively solve that problem than banding about figures back and forward. However, the fact is that the 30,000 completions over five years, only two thirds are intended for social housing, which falls short of both the commission's and Shelter Scotland's recommendations for at least 10,000 new homes for social rent to be built each year to start to meaningfully tackle Scotland's housing crisis. That means that we are at 30,000 social housing units that have not been built so far, that have been identified as needed. Turning to the announcement of a successor plan of the Help to Buy scheme, I welcome that, but I urge the Scottish Government to provide details as soon as possible. While we have seen the positive 9 per cent rise in the total number of new-build houses, we must recognise that it is largely because of the predecessor to the scheme and the private-build sector itself driving progress. As the right to buy scheme is being brought to an end in April of next year and its expiration date is nearing, it makes the release of information for the help to buy scheme even more urgent. In the north-east, housing shortage affects not only individuals but whole communities, with teacher and healthcare worker shortages exacerbated by the lack of affordable housing, putting strain on public services. We also need to consider innovative solutions to provide for the growing number of households headed by persons aged 65 and over, projected in the report to increase by 50 per cent between 2010 and 2035. In addressing the house's shortage in Scotland, we need to heed the findings of the commission on housing and wellbeing. A house, an education and a respectable healthcare are the issues that we need to tie together, but guaranteeing that each person has an appropriate, safe, warm house is the foundation stone for giving each individual a chance to experience the best standards of life. I am looking forward to this debate and I thank the Labour Party for bringing it forward. If one of the most important things that anyone can have is a decent house and a decent home, a warm, dry home, I remember many, many years ago speaking at a conference in Europe when I was, I think it was a deputy convener of housing in the SNP many years ago before I was even in this place and the way they dealt with rented accommodation in Europe was so entirely different the way they deal with it here, particularly even to do with funding as well and for many years I did push forward for that type of funding to go forward. I think that it is very apt that we are debating this today and I do want to thank the commission on housing and wellbeing for the report and the fact that the members of the commission come from a wide range of backgrounds. In fact, it is written in the report that there is only one member who comes from a housing background and that member is a very, very good spokesperson for the housing movement as well. I think that it is excellent that they have had a broad sweep in regards to the commission and the amendment by the minister which said that it is a very good example of cross-section working which I am sure all of us will welcome in that respect. I commend the work carried out by the Scottish Government in reaching 96 per cent of their target for building homes for social rent indeed since 2007. I think that it has been mentioned already, a total of 54,186 affordable homes have been completed. However, I think that we all recognise that yes, we do need more socially rented accommodation, we do need some changes in the law particularly in the private rented sector as well and we do need to work with various agencies such as housing associations, local councils and private landlords to achieve that. A number of members have mentioned the planning process, land release, to enable housing to be built and, of course, it must be looked at as is the risk of brownfield sites. I do remember that the Scottish Government has mentioned the fact of brownfield sites in my own area in Glasgow. The council has also mentioned the risk of brownfield sites in building on those sites but the problem, particularly in my constituency and perhaps around Glasgow, whilst it was mentioned to build on brownfield sites to bring people into the city, actually there are not that many brownfield sites within there to bring people into build houses on that and I will elaborate a bit on that further on. In fact, if it comes to fruition, which I hope it does and we do get more houses, it will not be within a city centre setting, it will be out with the city centre and I think that is something that we have got to take on board. I wanted to raise the issue in regard to my own constituency, Glasgow Kelvin, and we are mentioning the brownfield sites and bringing folk to live in that area but perhaps most people who live in Glasgow, Tyshaferguson and others, will realise that the only property that is being built are private student accommodation and I know Bob Doris is aware of that also so much so that there is absolutely no land available in my Kelvin constituency for social housing and that's a big question which I know that the ministers probably fed up with me writing to her as is Glasgow city council also and I note the commission's report in regards to communities, I think it's section of recommendation 19 in regards to neighbourhood and communities and that's a very very important aspect of sustaining communities and I think Bob Doris mentioned it in his contribution also and the problem that we have in my constituency in Glasgow Kelvin is that we have had thousands upon thousands of houses student accommodation built on this particular area where no social housing can be built and it means that when there is semester time then these become ghost areas and I'm not talking about places out with the Kelvin constituency, I'm talking about places within Numbarton Road, Bath Street, the city centre and these are not cheap student accommodation, they're not on campus, they're off campus and I can't understand why Glasgow city council continues against the wishes of the local residents which we're supposed to be consulting against their wishes continues to give permission for these to be built. Now an example of a couple of these is you can buy one, you can buy a pod for £160,000. That's not student accommodation, that's somebody trying to make money. As I said I've spoken to Glasgow city council, I can't understand why they keep getting permission for it, nothing whatsoever against students I've met with the Glasgow students and the universities there also and they're not using these accommodations so I've met with the developers and I asked why is it that you're not building social housing or any other type of housing? The answer that I got back was the banks will not lend on anything else. The interest rates people are getting from the banks is so low that they're buying into the student market because the returns are so great so that's part of the recession that we've been talking about and it's part of speculation people getting the money back but it doesn't do anything to enhance the areas where people actually live and I will thank Vivian Nicol of the evening times who did an article on the student amount of student accommodation particularly in the west end in my constituency and she did say maybe it's about time that Glasgow city council consulted with the residents there because believe you me has become so bad that when it comes to the summer time there will be no humanities left in these particular areas and that's something I think we need to desperately look at perhaps we don't have the powers here in that respect but we need to encourage developers to build socially rented housing. We have some cracking oh sorry a very Glasgow phrase we have some very good I'm sorry I'm on my last couple of seconds sorry we have some very good housing associations party housing association wanted to buy an area where they could move and move their offices and build rented accommodation the council sold it to a private developer and it became another thousand student flats so I just think to yourself I don't know how we get over that but I think we need to look at this in the aspects of the people who live in an area and to make sure the communities do grow and flourish. Thank you very much, Presiding Officer. Like most elected members my post bag is dominated by the issue of housing and in 16 years as an MSP this is a pattern that has not changed. What does change over time is the type of housing problem I hear about. I won't rehearse today all of the housing issues that have brought to me as I'm sure that they are the same or similar for members across the chamber. We will all be aware of them and as has been recognised in the report of the independent commission on housing access to a decent home is essential to an individual's social wellbeing and the lack of decent housing can have far-reaching consequences not just in terms of social wellbeing but in all aspects of an individual's life. For almost all of my life I've lived in the constituency I'm now privileged to represent and I've witnessed at first hand the changes good and bad that have occurred in housing over the years. The slum clearance of the 1960s when high-rise living and new towns replaced in sanitary Victorian tenements, the growth in the housing association movement that helped to give local people a greater say and the radical move to stop transfer relieving Glasgow of the historical debt that had stifled investment. In 2015 in my constituency we're embarking on another period of great change and the lessons of the past must inform our actions in order to improve the housing and the housing situation for all of our citizens. Housing provision must match aspiration and need if it is to work. We're now seeing local people being consulted about what they want and need in their constituencies through consultation events and planning surets and I know that the Scottish Government has been involved in much of that work too. Housing is no longer planned in isolation and that has to be a good thing. Happy to Mr Doris? I'm just wondering, I know you're the local member for Mary Helen Springburn. Do you feel that the people of Somerson were consulted adequately in relation to the city plan change when we see the entire green belt area be redesignated for housing use without anything to support the amenities or the environments? I will, Mr Doris, come to that point later on in my speech if you would just bear with me because I do plan to talk about that a little. It seems to me that Glasgow City Council's imaginative approach is outlined in its new residential development report. The council plans to build 25,000 new homes over 10 years and, with the Glasgow credit union, will introduce a mortgage guarantee scheme to help those who wish to own their own home. I'm working with the Wheatley group, it will deliver 1,700 new homes by 2022. The Wheatley group has already been involved in building new homes in Royston, Sighthill and Maryhill in my constituency as part of the reprovisioning programme. They now have plans for a further 125 new homes in the Milton area of my constituency, which will be a good first step in the regeneration of that area. One of the points that I have consistently made over the past 16 years is that Milton has a number of brownfield sites that really should be the focus of attention for developers. Unfortunately, developers are more attracted to greenfield sites. I think that we need to find a way to incentivise the use of brownfield sites over the use of greenbelt land. I have consistently, over the past 16 years, been against and opposed every single proposal that has come from Glasgow City Council to build on the greenbelt in my constituency. That is not always popular because people ultimately go and live on the houses that are built on that greenbelt land, but that is my position and I stuck with it over time. The Maryhill and Sighthill areas in my constituency have been designated as transformational regeneration areas. We are now seeing new housing in both areas being let to tenants, which is incredibly welcome. In addition, it is planned that a memorandum of understanding will be signed with Scottish Canals and will increase regeneration around the fourth and Clyde canal area in north Glasgow. That will include a third phase at the Buckney and Maryhill and working with the big partnership new private sector housing at the site of the former Diageal factory at Port Dundas—again, something that is very welcome. From the city deal, the sum of £898,000 will be released for the canal and north gateway, allowing sites to be prepared and made ready for development. I have spoken to two of our predecessors about the possibility of an area of land that is owned by a Government agency in the site of the old Ruchhill hospital and whether we cannot have a way forward there that allows Scottish Enterprise to take advantage of the new road that is built by the local authority for the new school in the area and to use that as part of the remediation and reuse of that area of land. I very much hope that the minister will agree with me on that. Finally, consultation has now begun on the future of the red road site once the iconic flats there are demolished in October. My own community consultation exercise in the area indicates that people want to see new housing, but they also want to see job opportunities and community facilities that will serve the people who will live there in the years to come. Now, at its height, the estate at red road housed around 4,000 people, and for those of us who lived there then, a school and some shops seemed to be an afterthought. We were provided with state-of-the-art housing, yes, but there were no community facilities until some years later. One of the reasons why, in my view, the estate did not succeed in the way that it might have done. It is clear to me that Glasgow is leading the way, making dynamic partnerships both with the Scottish Government, with the housing associations, with the credit unions in the city and with Scottish Canals. It is using its access to the city deal to make sure that the north of Glasgow is at the heart of its regeneration policy in the next five to ten years. That, of course, is very welcome, but it demonstrates that it is not just about good, decent accommodation. It has to be, if it is going to succeed, about all the other aspects that have to accompany that—good community facilities, good infrastructure and a mix of housing that means that people have the houses that they need and the houses that they ultimately aspire to. Too often, we find people who cannot be housed in the size of accommodation that they need, in the location that they need, and that is one of the areas that I think we have to focus on in the years ahead. I have listened with great interest to the debate this afternoon. I have recognised that that is not a new problem in housing, but I hope that I will be able to demonstrate that this Government has at its heart not just the availability of housing, but it has also done a considerable amount of work in improving the standards of housing. I hope that it is reaching its ambition set out in Scotland's sustainable housing strategy of 2013 about the types of houses that we should be building in Scotland. It was an eye bevin who said at the post-war house building time at that time, said that while we shall be judged for a year or two by the number of houses we build, we shall be judged in 10 years' time by the types of houses that we build. The quality and type of housing is equally important as the numbers in getting it right for Scotland's communities. As a central Scotland MSP, I have in my area the former Ravenscrag site, and on that site the British research establishment has its centre of excellence. It is an innovation part that is developed on the former steelworks, and that site is to showcase sustainable housing for the future with energy sustainability, affordability and community at its heart. It is very relevant as there are potentially 3,500 houses to be built on the Ravenscrag site. If I could highlight some of those buildings, the site was opened by Alec Neill in 2012, and there is a demonstration house by Apple Green Housing, which is designed to reduce the input of energy, water and other resources while minimising the generation of waste and other environmental disturbances. It used technologies from around the world to assist communities in achieving sustainable builds as well as on-going sustainable living. The houses are built outwith the site, usually sourcing local factories and local SMEs to provide the housing, and they are put there on the site, which puts money back into the local housing and the community through the jobs that are generated from Apple Green developments. There is also the Zero Waste Scotland site, plot number 5, which is a resource-efficient house. The Environment Secretary, Richard Lockhead, launched the resource house on the BRIC site in September 2013. It is one of the first projects to be levered by the Scottish Government's resource-efficient Scotland programme, managed by Zero Waste programme, and it is built in partnership with Peak Green Ltd. It is another example of a house that will lead to at least the goal performance levels in terms of efficiency and fuel efficiency. Every element of that is a net zero carbon house and it has been created with the need to lessen the impact on the environment from any house build. It is built to the 2016 Scottish building standards, goal performance requirements and working to the 2014 waste Scotland regulations. It is a modular house and it shows the principles of resource efficiency with the aim of bringing sustainable, affordable and repeated family housing models to the construction market. The site also contains a refurbished house. This is a retrofit demonstration with Edinburgh University and Historic Scotland. It has used retrofit techniques and it is currently replacing our housing market and redeveloping existing sites. It is imperative to improve the performance of existing housing stock in order to meet our CO2 reduction targets. That is something that will feed into the building industry and show best practice on how to retrofit and retrofit solutions that work in the long term. There is also a curriculum house designed and developed by the future builders and designers of our country in conjunction with new college lanexers, CAD architectural design and construction courses. There is also a timber house in partnership with the forestry commission, which showcases innovative use of homegrown timber products and the ability to use local products to ensure that we have low embodied energy, healthy and thermally efficient dwellings in Scotland. The reason that I highlight the BRE and the importance of the work that it is doing is that I know that the Scottish Government is absolutely committed to reducing fuel poverty. Since 2009, the Scottish Government has spent over £500 million on a range of fuel poverty and energy efficiency programmes helping over a third of all Scottish homes to meet performance criteria. The energy efficient programme seat will aim to improve in a multi-year funding to improve energy efficiency of all Scottish buildings, both domestic and non-domestic. The Scottish Government is also committed and unprecedented £119 million to the fuel poverty and energy efficiency budget, which will split between home advice and a variety of home and energy efficient programmes in Scotland. So, not only is the Government delivering on its capital build and delivering new build housing, it is also looking at how we can create sustainable, fuel efficient and effective homes for Scotland's going future in the future. If I could just touch on some of the issues raised in the debate, Alex Johnson talked about how he had concerns about how the social-arranted sector might react to rent controls. I hope that he will also pay attention to the effect of the DWP welfare reforms on that sector. We visited, as a committee, from the welfare reform committee in Venice to see the pilot of the universal credit being rolled out there. There were concerns that showed that the average rent arrears for non-universal credit tenants was around £200 in the area, but when we went into universal credit, that rose to £1,000, but in temporary accommodation, particularly service by the private rented sector, the average was £2,100. The reason for that was the inability to pay directly to the landlords anymore, and also some of the concerns regarding the time limits, where if somebody moves tenancy between their universal credit payments, one landlord could end up receiving the full amount, so I hope that he will pay attention to those concerns that are also being raised about DWP. Bob Doris was right to say that he cannot take that out of the context of austerity, because not only does the Government have to deal with slashes on its capital build budget and also deal with the austerity agenda, it is having to mitigate for council tax benefit and bedroom tax and the other problems that are coming their way. In terms of comparison, I am not going to compare with what was done in the past, if you look at the rate of social sector completions in Scotland per 100,000 of population, Scotland sets at 65.3 per 100,000 in Wales for labour and power, that is only to 24.6, and I would suggest that this Government is doing everything it can in the current climate to meet the housing needs of Scotland. Thank you, Mr Adamson. I now call Paul Martin, followed by Jamedie. I will be equally generous with time. Presiding Officer, can I first of all touch on the contribution from John Mason, where he refers to the fact that we should be concerned about using the term housing crisis? Well, can I just remind John Mason, if you are one of those 140,000 applicants waiting to be re-housed, and many of them, I am sure that John Mason has heard representations from at his surgery, then I think that they will see it as a crisis. If you find yourself homeless and not able to access the housing that you require, then that is a crisis. I am less concerned about the word crisis being used in the comfort zone of this debating chamber and the words that we used, and I am more concerned about the action that is taken to fall on from that. I also refer to comments from Bob Doris, who asks for a period of reflection on what Labour got wrong and what it got right. I did not hear from Bob what the SNP got wrong, but he advises me that that is the case, perhaps he wants to come in in an intervention to tell us what he got wrong. I will bring him in in a second, but just to clarify the point that I am going to make, I think that what Labour got right was writing off the housing debt in Glasgow and ensuring that people who lived in Glasgow were able to access good quality housing as a result of the debt housing right off. Also, what we got right was investing in communities via the community-based housing association model, a proven record and ensuring that we moved from a inimitable system that was impressed previously in Glasgow City Council and moving to the community-based housing association model. I make no apologies for that and am very proud of Labour's record in that respect. I will allow Bob Doris to come in and confirm what the SNP got wrong. Bob Doris? Two things, the SNP got one thing, Labour got wrong. We revised our housing association grant figures a bit too low and adjusted it higher again, as I said earlier on during my speech, and we did not take forward everything in firm foundations following further consultation, so there is reflection on the SNP. What Labour got wrong was insisting that housing stock transfer in Glasgow must go en masse and bypass local community housing associations, and Labour should be ashamed of that fact. Paul Marlam? I think that housing should be in the democratic control of local people, and that is the decision that local people took in respect to Glasgow when they did by a large majority. I have got to say that, despite the artificial divisions that have been created by Bob Doris, the housing association movement, led by the GHA and by Mark Lamestrol and led by the community-based housing associations across Glasgow, want to work with the GHA, and that is the way forward, and that partnership approach should be encouraged by the Government and not discouraged. I would like to pay tribute to those housing associations who have stepped up to the plate despite the challenges that they have faced. I would like to name a few of them, the Malmback Housing Association, NG Homes, all those that John Mason referred to in Easterhouse, Bartollock Housing Association, East Hall Park, Proven Hall, Well House, the GHA, the weekly group. Since the 1970s, those organisations have been ensuring that regeneration takes place in their local communities, and they have to be commended for the role that they have played in that respect. It would not have happened in many cases without them, and I defy anybody to visit Glasgow and visit many of those housing association properties and not be able to identify the very fact that those houses are housing association stock. That is something that many people have recognised on a number of occasions and the number of interventions that have taken place via housing associations and local regeneration and ensuring that social enterprises are in place. They have done that despite the challenges that they have faced, and I welcome the apology from Bob Doris in respect to the housing association grant level that has been reduced, because it should apologise for it. Since 2007, there has been a significant decrease in the number of new bills that have been carried out via the community housing association model. I am pleased that Bob Doris apologised for that today, because he should be apologising for that, because that community-based housing model actually works. I defy anybody to go back to the new bill properties that have taken place. I will take you to millennium close, close and Easter house that looks as if it was built yesterday, but it was called the millennium close because it was built in the year 2000. Those properties have been sustained and well managed because local people are in control and they have been discouraged by this Government's current approach to managing housing and ensuring that those organisations are provided with the appropriate resources. On a positive note, I welcome the help to buy scheme that has been a success. I recognise that there are a number of challenges in ensuring that that particular criteria in respect to the help to buy scheme should be addressed. There are many challenges, and we should be ensuring that those who are at the lower end of the earnings market should be able to access the help to buy scheme. However, reflecting on the correspondence that we have received from Homes for Scotland, we are still awaiting halfway through the new financial year information on what the help to buy criteria will be. Can the minister not advise us six months on from what should have been a new launch of the programme and the £185 million that has been confirmed? Can she not tell us what the qualifying criteria will be because it is not, it is having an impact in the local sales that are taking place across Scotland? If you meet with the developers and not many of them I make a case for in this chamber, I think that there are many challenges facing the developers that I do not have great sympathy with. However, I recognise that the help to buy scheme is one that has been a success and one that should continue to be encouraged. I ask the minister today, in closing remarks, to confirm what action will be taken in ensuring that the qualifying criteria is taken forward. Can I just say in conclusion, Presiding Officer? I always welcome a housing debate in here, but it needs to be one that will ensure that we will take forward many of the challenges that it faces and those 140,000 people who are waiting to be rehoused. It is not a laughing matter for those individuals, Bob Doris. It is a serious matter. If you are on that housing list, waiting on the Government intervening to ensure that you can get a decent home, it is no laughing matter that the chamber should ensure to take action. Thank you, Presiding Officer. I too welcome the opportunity to take part in this debate. Like other members who have taken part this afternoon, I commend the invaluable work of the commission on housing and wellbeing. The chair of the commission, Sir Robert Black, has said that the work of the commission is about the central importance of having a safe, secure and suitable home that allows people to fulfil their potential and a home that is embedded in and linked to a strong, vibrant local community such as those that were described in the speech by Paul Martin and others, where people can live good lives. That aspiration, that vision for the role of housing in our society is one that I share and which lies at the heart of the Scottish Government's own approach. Indeed, in fairness, it is one that lay at the heart of Ken Macintosh's speech this afternoon when he set a consensual tone. He has clearly learned the truth of the old ad age that you can catch more flies with honey than you can with vinegar, although I suspect that that is a lesson still to be learned by other members across the chamber. However, investment in housing is critical, as the report itself outlines to enabling individuals to achieve good health, access to educational opportunity, provide care for older people and to ensure economic wellbeing through employment and income. Investment in housing will also allow society to achieve its ambitions in the areas of environmental sustainability and in building strong and cohesive communities. The Infrastructure and Capital Investment Committee, which I have the privilege of convening, will host a session next month in which we will invite representatives of the commission and other stakeholders within the housing sector to engage in a round-table discussion on their findings. Of course, all members are welcome to attend that. The Scottish Government's own record is a good one. The evidence for that can be seen in the £1.7 billion that has been committed over the lifetime of this Parliament. It can be seen in the house building programme, which will build 30,000 affordable homes, 20,000 of those for social rent over the lifetime of this Parliament. It can be seen in the fact that council house building is at record levels. In fact, it is at a 25-year high. As someone who grew up in a council house and spent the first 21 years of their life in a council house, I believe that council housing should be at the heart of a mix of housing tenure, rather than simply being seen as a safety net for those who cannot afford to rent or buy. The commission has pointed to the fact that almost half a million homes in Scotland have been sold under the right to buy. Given the massive diminishing in the council housing stock that it represents, as well as the fact that councils were unable to spend the capital receipts on modernising existing housing stock or in building new council houses to replace those that were sold, I believe that that simply underlines why this policy was not sustainable and why the Scottish Government was right to end the right to buy. Another key finding of the commission is that 50 per cent of all households renting in Scotland in 2013-14 received financial support to help pay for their rent and that housing benefit spending in Scotland now is in the region of £1.8 billion in the year 2011-12, a 29 per cent increase from 1996-07. Housing benefit has become the main mechanism for helping low-income households to meet their housing costs. The commission has highlighted that housing policy has shifted over the last 30 years from predominantly subsidising social house building to providing income-related subsidies to poorer tenants in rented accommodation. The ratio has moved from four to one in favour of housing supply subsidies in the 1970s to the same ratio in favour of income-related subsidies today. How we bring about a shift back to subsidising bricks and mortar rather than means-tested personal housing subsidies is a challenge that we must address. That can only come about if we continue to expand subsidised housing supply and therefore help to make rents more affordable and reduce the need for personal subsidies. Sandra White, in what I thought was an excellent contribution, highlighted the fact that financial institutions are willing to lend to property speculators who are investing in student accommodation but are unwilling to lend to the social rented housing sector. That is an issue that needs further exploration. The commission has highlighted a number of areas that we would do well to reflect on, and one of those is the issue of temporary accommodation. I was pleased that, during the passage of the housing bill, the housing minister following representations from myself, Shelter Scotland and Alec Rowley, brought forward the homeless person's unsuitable accommodation Scotland Order 2014, which states that, in all circumstances, accommodation is unsuitable if it is A, not wind and water tight, and B, not suitable for occupation by children. That was to ensure that all temporary accommodation is fit for human habitation. I welcome the commission's reference to temporary accommodation when it says that there should be a significant reduction in the length of time any one household spends in temporary accommodation, and minimum standards for temporary housing should be implemented. I look forward to further work on that. The key area, of course, is that of maintaining existing levels of investment and to build on that in the years ahead. Clearly, if as a society we invest more, we will achieve more, and the commission has made a number of specific recommendations in this regard. It has recommended that the Scottish Government should increase the level of new building funded by the affordable housing investment programme to 9,000 houses each year over the period up to 2020, that the social rented new build programme should be increased to 7,000 houses each year, which would represent an increase of 3,000 over the current level, and that there should be a doubling of the mid-market rental new build programme, which together with the existing level of grants for new owner-occupied houses could provide 2,000 new houses each year. Clearly, it will be for the Scottish Government and for all the parties represented in this chamber to reflect on those recommendations. It is open to any party through the budget process to bring forward proposals to increase investment in the way that has been suggested, but there is also a clear responsibility to outline how that will be paid for and what other funding commitments will have to be cut in order for that to happen, which I think was made earlier and effectively by John Mason. Parties will, in due course, bring forward their manifestos for next year's election, and in a sense, the report of the commission could be looked upon as an opening bid for what should be in them. The commission has recognised that public finances are likely to be under severe pressure for some time with difficult choices required. We should not shirk those difficult choices. We should heed the call to action that is issued by the commission so that we can continue to deliver high-quality affordable homes for the people of Scotland. I move the closing speeches. I call on Cameron McKanan, a generous six minutes. Thank you, Presiding Officer. I, too, welcome this opportunity to discuss the importance of quality affordable housing, as well as to clarify the intentions behind the private tenancies bill and the consequences it could have. Whilst I support the principle of providing security for tenants and safeguards for landlords, I would not endorse some of the intrusive measures under consideration. A provision to remove the no-falt ground for repossession, I think, would severely deter investment in the private rental market, as it is too sweeping and would, in any provision, allow rent controls. Furthermore, the quality of housing in the private rented sector could be severely damaged, and that would plainly not be in the tenants' interests. That is what we must focus on, the genuine best interests of tenants and the long-term sustainability of this sector. I wonder if the member would accept that the quality of housing, not in every case but in more cases, is substandard in the private sector, and there needs to be more intrusive rather than less intrusive regulation. I do accept that, actually. I do think that that is right, and I think that there is an argument for that. We all wish tenants to receive a fair deal and should use robust evidence to determine the context and most effective way to ensure that the market is affordable and fair to all participants. On this note, I think that it is worth bearing in mind that evidence shows rents in only two of Scotland's broad rental market areas exceed the CPI inflation between September 2010 and September 2014, effectively meaning that rents have fallen in real terms over this period. In three of the areas, rents have even fallen in cash terms. I think that it is indeed important that access to affordable housing is available, but the approach should ensure that supply properties match rent demand. To do this, it is clear that Scotland needs more homes to be built, but that must be done through a clear planning process that strikes the correct balance between meeting housing needs and respecting local priorities. Let me start by saying that all parties want access to quality affordable housing to be available throughout Scotland, quality as well. This should be the target without predetermined intrusions, and I would welcome more clarity from the Scottish Government on their intentions. Where homes fall short of official quality standards, action should be taken. However, it is important that the consequences are analysed extensively before any damaging measures are enforced. So, whilst tenant security is important, it would be wrong and highly counterproductive to remove the no-fall ground for repossession. Not only would this be, I think, highly unfair and worrying and dismissive of landlords' rights, but I think it would encourage damage confidence, also damage confidence in the sector, and more importantly, make landlords increasingly reluctant to let out a property, which I think is vital. Take the example of a retired couple who depend on income from a property to fund their retirement. They may rent it out in the knowledge that they could sell should they wish to at the end of a contract. Without the no-fault grounds, this couple would no longer be in control of their own retirement income, which would be extremely unfair. For them, furthermore, it is likely that many landlords in a similar situation would choose not to rent out their property, but therefore fewer properties available to rent tenants would be noticeably worse off in their search for a home. A fairer and more workable alternative could be to introduce a more accommodating approach to tenancy agreements that would allow participants to decide for themselves the ideal balance between security and flexibility. Similarly, any provision to introduce the rent controls or caps would again be against tenants' best interests. They may be notionally sound like a good deal for tenants, but the reality would be very different, and I think disastrously so. With rents unable to adjust to market conditions, potential landlords may choose to divest from the rental sector, both in terms of making property available to rent and maintaining the quality of those available. It would hardly be in tenants' best interests for fewer properties to be available and worse to maintain ones at that. Indeed, a Shelters chief executive has stated that although many have called for rent caps as a solution, we have found that this could add fuel to the fire by pushing landlords out of the market and making it even harder for renters to find a home they can afford. The fact is that there is more demand for homes than there is supply. The long-term solution must therefore involve increasing the supply of housing. Disincentivising investment by landlords would obviously not help with this. What we do need, I think, is a properly thought-through development of all types of housing. However, this is often where contentious planning processes are crucial. Refusal of all contentious planning applications is neither viable nor a realistic option, but our communities and local representatives are not powerless, or at least they shouldn't be, yet as we can serve as revealed recently, the Scottish Government overrules local authorities more often than not when appeals are taken to ministers. That is not how we should go about striking a balance between the community's needs and securing the quality homes that our growing population requires. There is a certain scope to improve the planning process so that developments are more likely to be welcomed by local communities, and I await the proposals of the Scottish Government's review with considerable interest. What is already clear is that development driven by central government appeals is not the answer. I would like to underline our drive to secure a rental market that is fair, competitive and in all participants' best interests. It is in this vein that I would strongly oppose any provision within the private tenancy bill that restricts the ability of landlords to decide for themselves when to rent out their own property and dangerously distorts rent and investment dynamics with rent controls. The quality of rental homes should be ensured by encouraging rather than discouraging investment, and affordability must be secured by a long-term increase in the housing supply. To achieve that is apparent that restrictive measures measured on landlords should be avoided, and the planning process must be reformed so that it encourages sustainable development whilst respecting local needs. Thank you very much. I now call on Margaret Burgess up to 10 minutes, please, Ms Burgess. Okay, thank you, Presiding Officer. This has been a wide-ranging debate, and it is very clear to me that across the chamber we all agree on the importance of housing for Scotland's people and communities. Good housing has a positive impact on people's health and wellbeing and in neighbourhoods, as was mentioned by Sandra White, Paul Martin and a few others about the neighbourhood as well, about how important that is. Opposition has been very careful throughout this debate not to talk about how much it is going to cost, how much we should set aside for housing, but we cannot discuss housing and house building without talking about the finance as well. I have to say that we have already said that our commitment of £1.7 billion is providing 30,000 affordable homes in the lifetime of this Parliament. That is despite cuts to our capital budget, and we know that our budget is going to get further squeezed by Westminster. We are having to look at other ways of using the financial transaction money and other ways of attracting finance into house building in Scotland. I think that it is right for me to say that, even with those squeezed budgets, we are building more houses for social rent and affordable housing than was built by any previous administration, and that includes houses that are built by RSLs. In total, the social housing that is built by this Government in squeezed budgets is greater, 19 per cent higher than those built by the previous administration with rising budgets. In terms of affordable homes, we have also improved the number of affordable homes that have been built. We have built 15,327 as opposed to 9,000 by the previous administration. We have to look at that and how hard we are working to build more homes given the constraints in our budget. I do not think that it is fair to talk about it without talking about the budget. I would much better appreciate it if the opposition came and said that this is what we think should be spent on housing. As John Mason said, this is where we think that we should take the money from within the Scottish Government budget. I will take an intervention. Michael McMahon Ken Macintosh in his contribution earlier asked the question that has been asked by Homes for Scotland about the help to buy scheme. Based on the consequentials that were calculated as coming through that scheme, there was an expectation that the figure would be around £600 million. We appear to have an allocation of £195 million over three years. Where is the rest of that money? Has it been allocated to housing? The spending review is not completed. What we have said is that we will allocate £195 million to help people to buy a new-built house. That is in addition to what we are doing in terms of social houses and affordable houses. That is in addition to that. We have already assisted over 24,000 people to build a house. Ken Macintosh said that it is a pipe dream for people. We are assisting people to buy houses as well as providing the houses for social and affordable rent. A number of initiatives are making the best use of that money. 3,000 affordable homes have been approved through a range of innovative financing mechanisms. The National Housing Trust is the first to remain the only Government in the UK and public sector body in Scotland to use charitable bonds to build affordable and social housing. We have enabled pension funds to invest in affordable housing. We hope that that can roll out across the rest of Scotland. We are also in the private sector. We have supported homes for Scotland building the rented sector project, focusing and attracting institutional investment into Scotland's new-build private rented sector. We continue to do that. We are also in response to Alison McKinnis, the Aberdeen key workers scheme, where we are looking at working with local authorities to provide affordable housing for key workers who rent in pressured areas. Local authorities determine how many homes they need to look at. We have talked about the elderly and accessible housing. We are looking at that with local authorities. We have made it clear that they must look at that when they are producing their local housing strategy. A clear Adamson mentioned the green homes innovation scheme. We are also looking at that as how we can provide more homes that are greener energy efficiency and cost people less in fuel bills, which is something that we are all keen to see. Every member mentioned in their opening remark, such as the housing and wellbeing commission, that joint working across all sectors is the template that underprins the approach to improving Scotland's housing. Groups such as the joint delivery and policy group and the homelessness prevention and strategy group clearly illustrate our intent to work together. We very much appreciate the work of our partners on those local authorities and housing associations, which Paul Martin referred to, that we were in some way trying to disassociate from housing associations. We very much welcome the work of housing associations. They are a key partner to us. We recognise the work that they do in their local community. They are community anchor organisations. I will give way. Paul Martin referred to the record. I did not see that he disassociated herself from it. I said that he did not fund them. That is the challenge since ensuring that he gets the appropriate funding to do the work that he does. I will get mudges. Okay. You said that we are funding housing associations. We work with them closely. We increase the grant to housing associations when we increase the subsidy to housing associations and we have still built more RSL houses than under the previous administration. We also have the report from the subsidy group that we are currently looking at just now. We work very closely with the housing association sector. We recognise their role as a community anchor. They also receive funding for many of the subsidiaries and many of their projects from the People and Communities Fund. We recognise very much the wider role that they play. The minister just clarified that she said that the Government has increased the funding to housing associations on hag levels. Bob Doris apologised for cutting it, which is right. I think that Bob Doris did not apologise and he certainly did not apologise on behalf of the Government. What we did is that we, on very much reduced budgets and the pressures on the Scottish Government to build houses, the subsidy to housing associations was reduced. They still built houses with that reduced budget, and we absolutely appreciate the work that they did in that. However, I set up a subsidy group when the housing associations came and said that this is not going to be sustainable any longer. We then increased their grant to the recommendation from that subsidy group, which includes the housing associations and the community housing associations. There has been a lot of talk on the private sector and what we are doing in the private sector. We very much continue to take action to reform the private rented sector to ensure that it does meet Scotland's housing needs. We want to ensure that the private rented sector is properly regulated with the interests of landlords and tenants fairly balanced. There is no olive branch, but that was the intent of our intention in the private sector to ensure that we safeguard landlords as well because, as Ken Macintosh has said, as Alison McInnes has said and as others have said, we need the private sector. It is part of our housing system and we need to ensure that we can attract investment into it as well. It is absolutely essential that people give way. A number of speakers, particularly from the Labour benches during this debate, have suggested that rents in the private rented sector are rocketing, or they have given that impression. However, there seems to be evidence that suggests that, although surveys of advertised rents for property coming to the market may be rising, rents paid in the private sector across many areas of Scotland are stable or falling. Does the Government have figures that can inform that debate? Will it be possible for them to be made available to us if they have anything that we do not have already? If the Government has figures, the figures will be publicly available on that. As Alex Johnson has just said, there are some areas that the private sector is stable, but we are very much aware that there are hotspot areas in which rents are increasing considerably. We are looking at that, and that is why we looked at rents in the private tenants' bill and why we have put a provision in the bill for capping rents in those areas. We will shortly introduce the private tenants' bill to Parliament, and that bill will provide security, stability and predictability for tenants while giving landlords, lenders and investors the confidence to continue investing in the sector. I believe that that will achieve what Shelter is calling for in his making-renting right campaign. The new tenancy that we propose represents a significant transformative change and will enable tenants to better assert their rights and help them to feel part of their local community. I am sure that when Malcolm Chisholm sees what we are proposing, he will be happy with what we are doing given what he said. As I am about running out of time, I want to finish by saying that, last week, I was speaking on the Government's record on housing at a chartered introduced of housing finance conference. Many of the organisations there were worried about the changes that the Conservatives plan for England and their impact on social rent budgets. There was real concern that that would have knock-on effect in Scotland, and I could assure them that we have absolutely no plans to mirror the UK in this. Here in Scotland, we highly value and promote social housing and social landlords in our communities. It was clear that the value that we place on social housing was viewed very positively, especially by those outwith Scotland who are having to fight to maintain social housing. When we have people from outside Scotland wishing that their representatives followed our read, I think that we can take some satisfaction that the measures that we are putting in place are right, but what matters at the end of the day is that people in Scotland have a warm, safe and affordable place to live that meets their needs. That, Presiding Officer, is the ambition that the Scottish Government has for housing in Scotland. I recently discovered statistics that show that the number of vulnerable children in Scotland waiting for a home has increased by 400 in the last year and that the number of children in temporary accommodation now stands over 4,500. I reiterate that statistic this afternoon to do no more than highlight the shocking human cost of Scotland's current housing crisis. The point that I want to make is that there is an undeniable crisis, regardless of the SNP's strenuous efforts this afternoon to deny that fact. When we are seeing hundreds more children having to live in temporary accommodation because of a social housing shortage, there is nothing else that that situation can be called but a crisis. So, when debating the housing situation, fine, let's use statistics, let's make our arguments from differing perspectives and offer various solutions, but let us at least come together and agree the fact that Scotland is facing the biggest housing crisis since the Second World War. It really was regrettable although predictable to hear the minister and others on the back benches talk about the council house versus housing association straw man argument. There really is no place for that argument when we are talking about the number of people who are waiting on housing lists. Bandying figures around from 1999 and different circumstances, from the difficult circumstances that the current Government finds itself in because of financial pressures, does not help that debate to move forward. We have to focus on what is required now, not use statistics as Gil Paterson did. You are entitled to have your own opinion, but you cannot have your own facts. So, I sincerely thank Shelter Scotland for establishing its commission on housing and wellbeing. Let us listen to what they have to say about this crisis and let us commit ourselves to responding positively to the findings of the report that they recently published. As the commission stated, although many households in Scotland live in satisfactory housing, we quickly came to the conclusion that there is a homes crisis. Obviously, John Mason did not hear that message. He sounded more like Jim Callaghan crisis. What crisis? But when you see statistics that they produced of 150,000 on waiting lists, 940,000 in fuel poverty, 73,000 in overcrowded accommodation, 29,000 homeless people and 40 per cent of social housing falling short of the Scottish housing quality standard, those are statistics that demand action and not platitudes and not spin. I hear what the member is saying about historic statistics, but we recognise that the Institute of Fiscal Studies has highlighted that the Scottish Government spends 85 per cent more per head on social housing than in England or in Wales where Labour are in power. Again, it is a statistic that I accept, but when you are comparing apples and oranges, it is hardly a very good argument to bring to the debate about what is happening in Scotland. The reality is that, more than ever, we need real honesty when discussing this issue. That has been sadly lacking and it happened again this afternoon in this debate. The fact is that the Scottish Government has failed to tackle the slow rates of both social and private sector house building and we have to recognise that. However, in asking the Scottish Government to be honest, I am also going to be forced right myself and concede that no Government has ever really built the numbers of homes that have been needed. That is why Labour will now focus on how we can build both affordable homes and more social housing. Historic trends in new bills showed peaks in the early 1950s and late 60s, resulting primarily from programmes of post-war reconstruction and some clearances. Programmes for which Labour is immensely proud, but Labour also has to recognise that that progress was not sustained when we had the opportunity. More recently, while the figure for the year to December 2014 was up by 4 per cent, that only helped us reach 15,541, which is still 40 per cent below the post-evolution peak left by Labour in the Liberals in 2007. That is simply not good enough. We must have answers to the questions that house builders are asking so that we can promote house building to the levels that are required. We did hear some of those arguments this afternoon. Sandra White was absolutely right to talk about the difficulty of finding solutions in urban settings, especially city centre locations. However, we should not have a council of despair, because there are innovative ways out there that we could be taking as examples of how to address that problem. We heard some of them from Patricia Ferguson and from Paul Martin. We have to identify how many more homes can be built and explain how that will be funded. The minister was absolutely right to make that point, but that is where a requirement for even more honesty comes in. The additional sums of money that we require to maximise the potential house building that we need to address the problem that our country faces may have to increasingly come from private finance, for example via pension funds. As the commission on housing concluded, we will also have to consider tax changes and other measures to improve the supply of land for housing if we have to genuinely tackle that problem. I agree with Homes for Scotland, who have argued that our planning system also needs to be reviewed so that it helps rather than hinders house builders. He says about perhaps money coming from other sources, but essentially that is still alone, that even if it is from a pension fund, a bank or anywhere else, it is effectively alone, it needs to be repaid and it needs an interest rate return. How does that help to build more houses? We still need grant, do not we? It is an investment by a private institution into the building of houses. That is not a grant to anyone, it is an investment from the private sector. That is what we have to talk about. That is the kind of initiatives that we have to discuss. I know that the minister is going to come in and talk to us about Falkirk, but that is the type of thing that we need to be investigating. We have been at this for five years with the pension funds. The problem with the pension funds is that, if they were to fund the entirety of the houses being built by the housing associations, the rate of return from the current level of rents would not be enough. That is part of the reason why they are not investing to the level that I would agree that they should try to attract. In order to do it all by pension funds, we would need to increase the rates very substantially, well above their current levels. The cabinet secretary missed the point that I said that they did not all have to come from that. That is an example. The commission also reported that a cold home is neither conducive to good health nor a satisfactory learning environment for children and young people. There is a particular problem of potential hypothermia for older people who are unable or unwilling to pay to heat their homes to an adequate level. That highlights the need for improving the energy efficiency of homes to be a key part of the Scottish Government's approach to improving wellbeing through housing policy. I totally agree with Clare Adamson on that and commend the excellent work that is being introduced by the BRE at Ravenscraig. However, like the existing Homes Alliance Scotland, I welcome the Scottish Government's recent commitment to making energy efficiency a national infrastructure priority. A similar approach was a Scottish Labour Party policy in our manifesto for the 2015 UK general election, so we are glad that the Scottish Government is following our lead yet again. However, the Scottish Government has not yet set a long-term goal for the national infrastructure project. The commission on housing recommended that regulations requiring owners to insulate their homes should have a part to play in securing the necessary improvement in insulation standards. The existing Homes Alliance has also, for some time, supported the use of regulation in that regard, and I have to admit that I see a lot of merit in the argument that it makes. However well we construct our homes or improve existing stock, we must first and foremost build the number of homes that people need. To begin with, I will ask the minister again. Can she explain why, based on the consequential funding that we have expected to receive from the UK Government, the Scottish Government would have received £600 million overall for the help to build fund, yet they have only announced £195 million over three years. Can the minister explain how the balance of funds is intended to be used and is it still in the housing budget? Shelter has suggested that it would require £200 million to meet its target from the Scottish budget. Will the Government commit to that type of funding? That is a vitally important question and the minister cannot duck it any longer. The minister cannot intervene either. I am afraid that you are in your last 20 seconds. I will conclude by returning to the commission. I cannot find a better way of drawing this debate to a close than by endorsing the conclusion of Robert Black and his team on the commission on housing and wellbeing, where they state that they have delivered a call to action on one of the most serious and challenging issues facing Scotland now and throughout the next decade. They do not wish their report to sit on a shelf. Faced with the current crisis in housing, I can assure you that we on those benches will not allow that to happen. The next item of business is a debate on motion number 14189, in the name of Angela Constance, on the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act 1974, Exclusions and Exceptions, Scotland Amendment Order 215. Any member who wishes to speak in the debate should press the request speak button now, and I call Angela Constance to speak to and move the motion. Cabinet Secretary, eight minutes. Presiding Officer, I want to begin by thanking you, business managers, committee conveners and members and parliamentary officials for your support and cooperation in facilitating an accelerated timetable for scrutiny of this order, amending the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act 1974, Exclusions and Exceptions, Scotland Order 2013. It is in the public interest to help to minimise the disruption to the operation of higher-level disclosure checks and thereby minimise the risk to public safety. Members may be aware that higher-level disclosure describes the overall system that allows for additional scrutiny of a person's criminal convictions. It is used, among other purposes, where someone wants to work with vulnerable groups, for example in a nursery, as a medical professional, or in a school, or where someone wants to work in a sensitive area such as offering financial advice. There are two aspects to the higher-level disclosure system. Firstly, it operates through individuals being responsible for disclosing information. Secondly, disclosure Scotland issues certificates containing conviction information held on central police records. Under the system of additional scrutiny, the information that must be disclosed by the individual and disclosure Scotland includes convictions that have become spent under the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act 1974. That information would not ordinarily be disclosed to an employer, but it is under the higher-level disclosure systems as it currently stands. The operation of those two areas can be seen as mutually reinforced with information given by the individual and completing a job application form able to be checked by an employer against information contained in a higher-level disclosure, such as a standard or enhanced disclosure certificate or a protecting vulnerable groups PVG disclosure issued by disclosure Scotland. In June 2014, the UK Supreme Court found that the system of higher-level disclosures, as it operated in England and Wales, breached a person's article 8 rights under the European Convention on Human Rights. Although the court fully accepted the need for additional scrutiny of a person's background, if that person wanted to work with vulnerable groups or in other sensitive roles, the court considered that the automatic indiscriminate requirement for disclosure of all spent convictions was not proportionate, as no assessment of the relevance of the information to the need for the disclosure was undertaken. And while the decision related to the law of England and Wales, we have considered its relevance to the higher-level disclosure system in Scotland, informed by developing thinking and case law in England and Wales and Northern Ireland on how the balance of competing rights and interests should be struck, and we have concluded that the reforms should be made to Scotland's system. This order deals with one aspect of the reform system, namely the responsibilities of individuals to self-disclose spent convictions and adjust the existing law governing those responsibilities. Those changes will be reflected and complemented by changes to the disclosure of spent conviction information by disclosure Scotland. Those will be addressed by way of a remedial order using the urgent procedure provided for in the Convention of Rights Compliance Scotland Act 2001. That allows for a period of public consultation and parliamentary scrutiny after an order is made. Expediting the procedure in respect of that order ensures that the responsibilities of individuals and disclosure Scotland to disclose spent conviction information will be aligned from the outset of the operation of the amended system. We believe that the changes proposed will put beyond doubt that the disclosure system in Scotland is compliant with the European Convention on Human Rights while also ensuring that vulnerable people and the wider general public are protected. While not all spent convictions will be routinely disclosed under the system, spent convictions for offences that are sufficiently serious, recent or relevant, will continue to be required to be disclosed by the individual in the circumstances set out in the 2013 order. The amendments being proposed to the 2013 order set out two lists of offences. One list contains the most serious offences, including serious violent and sexual offences, which will continue to be disclosed indefinitely, even when spent in relation to the types of work specified in the 2013 order. The second list contains offences in respect of which a new set of rules set out in the order will determine whether or not they are to be disclosed. Those rules take account of the period of time that has elapsed since conviction, the age of the offender, on the date of conviction and the sentence imposed. The order also adjusts rehabilitation legislation to take account of the amended system to be operated by Disclosure Scotland, in particular by ensuring that an individual need not disclose offences for which they may apply to a sheriff for an order to have them removed from our certificate until that application to the sheriff is determined. I want to reassure Parliament that members will have a further opportunity to scrutinise the underlying policy. After the 60-day consultation on the remedial order after it is made, we will consider whether any changes are required. If there are changes needed, those changes may also require to be reflected in the 2013 order. Any such changes would require to be made by a further affirmative order. I hope that that reassures you and members that Parliament will have a full and open role in the scrutiny process, albeit in an unusual format, with the views that it listens to throughout. I also hope that members will agree that those amendments are necessary to ensure that our system of higher-level disclosures continues to operate to help protect vulnerable people and the public more generally, while also balancing the rights of individuals. I formally move the motion in my name. Thank you, cabinet secretary. Before I call Cara Hilton, can I say that we have a little time in hand to get us to 5.30 so I would appreciate your co-operation and help me to do so? Cara Hilton, a minimum of six minutes, please. Thank you, Presiding Officer. I will try to speak slow, but that could be difficult. Today's short debate on the rehabilitation of offenders' amendment order is important. It is important to ensure that our disclosure system is fit for purpose and that we strike the right balance between protecting the public and enabling people with past convictions to make a personal and economic contribution to our society. As I have outlined, the cabinet secretary is a debate that has been made necessary by a number of legal actions in England and Wales and, ultimately, by the European Supreme Court judgment, which concluded that our higher-level disclosure system was in breach of article 8 of the European Convention of Human Rights. Scottish Labour appreciates that we must act speedily to ensure that Scotland is not in breach of human rights legislation. It is pretty clear, too, that the system up till now has not been perforated and it has not always been proportionate. We want to ensure that we have a disclosure system that ensures full and thorough scrutiny of people working with vulnerable groups and that protects their children and young people, but it does not automatically require everyone to disclose convictions that maybe occurred a long time ago and does not take account of the age of the offender at the time. The order really is, but ensuring that the right balance is struck and that we do accept the Scottish Government's case for change. However, we are concerned about the speed in which the order has been implemented. Tonight, we are being asked to agree a draft order that was only laid on Monday 7 September. That is just two days ago, yet this is in response to a UK Supreme Court decision made back in June 2014. In theory, there have been 15 months for this to be properly considered. I know that this was an issue of debate at yesterday's delegated powers committee. In this morning's papers, the Herald described the Government's approach as scrambling to change the law within two days with no real time for proper scrutiny or debate. I do not think that that reflects well on our Parliament. I do not think that this is the best way to amend legislation that touches virtually everybody's lives. I thank the member for giving way on that point. I think that one of the reasons given at the committee yesterday was that, because there are 1,000 disclosures a day, holding that up for three days meant that there were 3,000 disclosures not happening or at least delayed. I think that the committee kind of accepted that that was probably acceptable. That is the fair point, which I think is going to come to in a couple of pages time. However, for the public out there, people think that the European decision was made last June, surely Parliament has had time to consider that by now. It deserves a lot better scrutiny than two days. Central to our focus in the disclosure system should be a responsibility, the primary responsibility should be ensuring that our system is robust and that it offers the best possible protection for children, for young people and for vulnerable groups and to the organisation requiring disclosures. It should not be a bit of a rush to avoid legal challenge. Indeed, I echo the report of the Delegated Powers and Law Reform Committee, who stated that the Government's approach was most unusual and not one that the committee would see becoming common practice. I know that the cabinet secretary has acknowledged this today and that in her letters this week to the Justice Committee, to the Delegated Powers Committee and to the Education Committee, she has recognised the widespread concern about this accelerated process and that is welcome. I know that the cabinet secretary has said that Parliament will undertake what she has described as retrospective scrutiny, with the opportunity for a revised order to be laid to take account of any issues arising out of this retrospective scrutiny. However, as the Delegated Powers Committee concluded in the report yesterday, should Parliament approve this order today, this will be the law. Further consideration by the committee will be undertaken in that context. That aside, we are prepared to accept that the Scottish Government has had little option but to ensure the passage of this order as quickly as possible. Given that Disclosure Scotland, as John Mason pointed out, has already ceased issuing the high-level disclosures so that we can ensure public confidence in the system, if today's decision was to be delayed, then almost 1,000 certificates a day would not be able to be processed or issued. Speed is of the essence. Obviously, that would cause major hold-ups for people such as police officers, childcare workers and teachers who are going through the process at the moment. That is why Scottish Labour will be supporting the order at decision time today. I think that our duty here has got to be to do all we can to keep our communities safe and the public protected. That must be first and foremost when it comes to changes that affect children, young people and the most vulnerable groups, but we also need to ensure that the system is proportionate and does not undermine the rights of people who have had less serious convictions in the past and are looking to play a positive role in our society and our economy. Up until now, many of the disclosures that people have made have been unnecessary. An example given in the Supreme Court ruling was that women refused their job at a care home eight years after receiving a caution for shoplifting. We have all had constituents come to us telling us about a job opportunity that has been denied because maybe we have a speed and conviction many years ago. Many or who have been involved in trouble as youngsters in decades on are still being made to pay the price for too long rules that have forced to blanket disclosure or are often irrelevant and sometimes unreliable information have blighted people's lives for too long. We all know that disclosure of even the most minor criminal convictions can have a huge impact on individual seeking employment. That especially impacts on men who are three times more likely to have a criminal conviction than women. Having to disclose previous criminal activity can have an on-going impact on people's ability to gain employment, to attend university or college, to volunteer even to open a bank account. All the evidence suggests that the key to ensuring that people don't re-offend is having those things, having a stable job, having access to education, positive family relationships and allowing people to move on and play a positive role, yet those are the opportunities that are being denied to some people by the way the system operates now. That said, I do think that there will be some public concern about the list of offences that are included in the order of the type of offences that will now be disclosed. I think that the list may be cast a wee bit too wide. For example, the list outlined in schedule B1, which now might not be disclosed, includes public indecency and peritury. I hope that in the 120-day period that Angela Constance has talked about, that there will be sufficient opportunity and time for retrospective scrutiny for any of those concerns to be fully taken on board. I am sure that the Scottish Government will fully engage with all the Parliament's committees, with all relevant stakeholders and with the public during this period. I would welcome assurances from the cabinet secretary that Disclosure Scotland and its staff will be sufficiently and fully resourced and trained to adapt to the changes that we are agreeing to today. Ultimately, those are changes that are about striking an important balance between public protection and people's right to have the privacy respected. I emphasise once more that we were a bit concerned about the way the order has been handled and about how that reflects on our Scottish Parliament. Scottish Labour will be supporting the Government's motion today. I am very pleased to participate in this debate on the amendment order to the rehabilitation of offenders act 1974, Exclusions and Exceptions, which was brought to our attention last week. I would like to thank the business managers, as Cara Hylton did, and also the cabinet secretary and our officials, including the Minister for Parliament. I do not mean that you are an official, but for your part in this. For keeping members informed of the circumstances surrounding the proposed changes to the system of higher-level disclosures, there are two issues that need to be addressed. The first being the proposed reforms themselves, and the second being the accelerated process that is required to achieve their implementation. Turning first to the reforms, let me be clear that robust scrutiny of individuals' backgrounds should be the prerequisite for anyone seeking employment in sensitive roles with vulnerable groups or positions of trust and responsibility. If the conviction is spent but is sufficiently serious and relevant to the remit of the role, our view is that it should always be disclosed. The gold standard must be to ensure the safety and security of those at risk and rigorous tests therefore need to be in place. We simply cannot condone a soft-touch approach on such an important issue. Equally, the current system that requires self-disclosures of all convictions regardless of how old and potentially minor they may be is undoubtedly anachronistic, and in some cases we accept could be unfairly prejudicial. As the cabinet secretary stated, in June 2014 the UK Supreme Court ruled to this effect, but it should be pointed out that the particular circumstances of the two cases that gave rise to this ruling could not have occurred in Scotland. Nevertheless, it is right that the system of disclosure is also under review north of the border. Based on the evidence, so far the proposed changes do seem to be proportionate and acceptable. However, looking at schedule B1, I quote offences that are to be disclosed subject to rules. Cara Hylton touched on that issue. We do have some concerns that individuals with previous convictions for offences such as fire-raising, fraud, housebreaking, theft and public indecency could potentially end up working in sensitive roles and with vulnerable groups. While I appreciate that the non-disclosure of these offences will be dependent on a number of variables, such as the disposal given and the passage of time, since conviction, I do very much hope that in practice it is exercised judiciously and sensibly. It is also important that the public fully understands the forthcoming changes to the higher-level disclosure system and the implications that those will have on future employment where applicable. Those reforms are fairly technical in nature and the effect of such changes will need to be communicated in a clear, transparent and accessible way. Turning briefly to the accelerated procedure that is necessitated by the affirmative order, I understand that disclosure Scotland has ceased issuing higher-level disclosures to ensure public confidence in the disclosure system. That is obviously a cause for concern given the sheer volume of disclosure certificates that will not be processed as the instruments are being scrutinised, we understand around 1,000 each day. We do, Presiding Officer, support the action taken today by the Government. We support the measures that have been outlined by the Cabinet Secretary in this debate, but we do ask the Government to continue to monitor the situation closely, to make sure that it has no adverse effects, and we would like to ensure that this Parliament or to ask that this Parliament is fully informed of any potential future changes and implementation. Can I now call Nigel Dawn to speak on behalf of the Delegated Person Law Reform Committee? I would be obliged, Mr Dawn, if you would continue until 5.25. Thank you, Presiding Officer. I should be happy to try to do so. I am grateful for the opportunity to be able to speak on behalf of the Delegated Person Law Reform Committee about this extremely important statutory instrument, which, of course, only was published on Monday afternoon and therefore came to my committee yesterday morning with relatively little opportunity to scrutinise it. It does, as others have commented, change the rules on the responsibilities that individuals have to self-disclose and adjust the rules on what information about an individual's previous criminal activity can actually be used against that individual in various proceedings. I would like to thank not only the Government for keeping us informed on the possibility that this might arrive, but also my clerks or my committee's clerks and our legal advisers who must have burned some candle wax in providing the advice to us. I would also like to thank members of the committee for their robust scrutiny of it in an hour and 40 minutes yesterday morning. Note also that the official report turned their work around very quickly so that not only was our report, but also the official report were published yesterday afternoon giving all members an opportunity to see what had happened. The exceptional circumstances and timing of this have already been noted. Clearly, we was not, as a committee, expect this to happen very frequently, but I'm sure it won't. Now, in the limited time available to my committee, I think it just simply has to be said that we have not been able to draw quite as many conclusions as we might have done on all the other instruments that come before us, but we have been able to draw the conclusion that there is no reason why we should report this. If I may quote from the committee's report, in the time available to consider the draft order, the committee has not formed the view that the instrument raises a devolution issue. Nor, however, can the committee be confident that no such issues arise. The committee considers that some of the policy choices which have been made in the draft order require further investigation with regard to the test laid down by the UK Supreme Court in T and another case. Further, in the evidence gathered to date, members recognise that, within the range of potentially convention-compatible solutions, distinct policy choices have been made, and the relevant lead committees will wish to explore those. I thank the member for giving way. I appreciate what he says. I very much agree with the conclusion that the committee came to, of which I am a vice-conviner. The one point that the court had raised was the question that no assessment was undertaken of the relevance of the information that was disclosed to the purpose for which the disclosure was required. Would he accept that there is a bit of uncertainty around that? Although there is a right of appeal in a sense, Disclosure Scotland is not looking at the purpose. I thank the member rightfully and helpfully for the one point that was a slight concern to us. Before I put that in context, can I be clear that what the cabinet secretary laid out before us was a set of rules? We recognise that it needs to be a set of rules. It cannot be a circumstance where anybody in Disclosure Scotland is required to provide their own discretionary view on the applicability of the rules, because otherwise that is no longer Disclosure Scotland, that is some kind of tribunal which Disclosure Scotland is not. The rules are laid down quite clearly, pick out the different categories of offence, and they quite clearly pick out the time that has elapsed since the offence took place, and the age of the offender at the time of conviction. However, as John Mason has pointed out, it is not clear that they do not specifically cover the relevance or otherwise of a particular offence conviction to the job for which the individual is applying. That is something that I think all parties will have to consider, but I do not think—and this needs to be clear, Presiding Officer—that is not a reason for reporting this. We are entirely comfortable as a committee that this does satisfy the primary test. We cannot see why it should be reported. We believe that, fundamentally, it is capable of satisfying article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights, and we have reported accordingly. I now call on Angela Constance to wind up the debate. Cabinet Secretary, please, to 5.29. Thank you, Presiding Officer. I start by welcoming the very constructive contributions from members, from Cara Hilton, from Mary Scanlon, Nigel Don and, of course, the two interventions that we have had this evening from John Mason. I once again want to thank Parliament for agreeing to this accelerated process. I pay tribute to members for their understanding of the position of where we start from, and it is that the UK Supreme Court's decision and the subsequent case law that has caused us to consider the operation of higher-level disclosures. I appreciate the acceptance that people have supported the Government's view in that our conclusions are that change is necessary and people appear to be accepting of that. We are of the view that changes should be made to ensure that the disclosure of spent convictions is more proportionate. The reforms seek the right balance between firstly and foremost public protection and, of course, the rights of individuals. Those reforms will continue to ensure that vulnerable groups are protected with a person's background assessed for any relevant conviction. It is important to stress, Presiding Officer, that, with the most serious of spent convictions that they will always be disclosed, and, of course, due to the rehabilitation of offenders act, there are some convictions that will never, ever be spent, and particularly for those convictions that warrant a custodial sentence of 30 months or more. Those offences will never be spent. Those reforms allow those with minor criminal convictions to put their past offending behaviour behind them, enabling them to become more productive members of society and not to be penalised for very old and minor convictions. I acknowledge to the chamber that we have taken the time to fully understand the direct relevance of each element of the UK Supreme Court judgment and the emerging case law, and how that applies in a Scottish context. Mary Scanlon is right that the original case that went to the UK Supreme Court was not a case in England that could not happen in Scotland. We had to look at matters very carefully and closely in relation to standard and enhanced disclosures and also the PVG scheme, and then to develop the complex policy and operational solutions needed to implement an amended disclosure regime for higher-level disclosures. I am happy to give the minister a right to me about the exclusion relating to proceedings before the mental health tribunal or the mental wealth commission for Scotland. I find that very difficult to understand why that was still disapplied. I give that undertaking to Mr Simpson. We began to focus yesterday at the committee on some of the other aspects of that in terms of firearms legislation, gambling legislation and the point that Mr Simpson raised that we need to address any concerns that he has in relation to mental health law and the mental health tribunal system for Scotland, and I will give a personal undertaking to doing that in the fullest possible terms. It is important to acknowledge that irrespective of the length of time prior to coming to Parliament that we would have always sought an expedited process. Essentially, the unusual parliamentary process was used to ensure as little disruption to the issue of higher-level disclosures as possible, and we have heard from members that, for every day that disclosure Scotland does not operate, that means that a thousand higher-level disclosure applications cannot be processed and we have sought to minimise that disruption to three days. We all understand that disruption is undesirable and that it has an impact on an applicant's ability to secure jobs and also an impact on an employer's ability to fill vacant posts. Nonetheless, I can reassure chamber that disclosure Scotland is fully resourced and ready to deal with that three-day backlog as quickly as possible and that it is confident that it will still meet its targets in relation to completing 90 per cent of applications within 14 days. My final point is that, in terms of continued scrutiny, this Government will welcome continued scrutiny on all of these matters. There are 120 days, 60 days for written views to be submitted and other 60 days in terms of committee reports. There will have to be a further parliamentary statement, but more fundamentally we do want to ensure that we have the right offences on the right list and we will work very closely with the Parliament to ensure that the detail of the affirmative order is absolutely right. Tomorrow, the remedial order will be placed and it will come into force on the same day as the affirmative order. That allows for the correction of any potential incompatibilities as well as any actual incompatibilities with ECHR. We believe that the changes that we are proposing to Parliament tonight will underpin a disclosure regime in Scotland that is compatible and compliant with ECHR and will continue to protect the public. I am grateful to Parliament and I seek Parliament's support for this order, Presiding Officer. Thank you Cabinet Secretary. That concludes the very short debate on the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act 1974, Exclusions and Exceptions Scotland amendment to order 2015. The next item of business is consideration of business motion number 14191. In the name of Joe Fitzpatrick, on behalf of the parliamentary bureau, setting it a revision to the business programme on Thursday 10 September, any member who wishes to speak against motion should press a request to speak but now. I call on Joe Fitzpatrick to move motion number 14191. The next item of business is consideration of business motion number 14175. In the name of Joe Fitzpatrick, on behalf of the parliamentary bureau, setting out a business programme, any member who wishes to speak against the motion should press a request to speak but now. I call on Joe Fitzpatrick to move motion number 14175. The next item of business is consideration of a parliamentary bureau motion. I would ask Joe Fitzpatrick to move motion number 14173 on approval of an SSI. The question on this motion will be put at decision time. Before we come to decision time, I would like to say a few words to Mark on a special occasion. As we commemorate the milestone of our longest-serving monarch, I had the pleasure and privilege to be with Her Majesty the Queen today. I was therefore in the very fortunate position to be able to pass on in person the best wishes and warmest congratulations on behalf of the Scottish Parliament. During the event today, the wonderful opening of the border railway, I saw yet again the commitment of a woman who has worked through decades of public service. That incredible commitment has not diminished with the passing of time. I am sure that all MSPs will wish to join me today in marking not just a landmark moment in terms of her history but in the remarkable and dedicated journey of one woman's life of public service. There are five questions to be put as a result of today's business. The first question is amendment number 14167.2, in the name of Margaret Burgess, which seeks to amend motion number 14167, in the name of Ken Macintosh in the housing and wellbeing in Scotland, be agreed to. Are we all agreed? The Parliament is not agreed. We move to vote. Members should cast their votes now. The result of the vote on amendment number 14167.2, in the name of Margaret Burgess, is as follows. Yes, 63. No, 54. There were no abstentions. The amendment is therefore agreed to. The next question is amendment number 14167.1, in the name of Alex Johnson, which seeks to amend motion number 14167, in the name of Ken Macintosh, and on housing and wellbeing in Scotland, be agreed to. Are we all agreed? The Parliament is not agreed. We move to vote. Members should cast their votes now. The result of the vote on amendment number 14167.1, in the name of Alex Johnson, is as follows. Yes, 14. No, 103. There were no abstentions. The amendment is therefore not agreed to. The next question is at motion number 14167, in the name of Ken Macintosh, is as amended. On housing and wellbeing in Scotland, be agreed to. Are we all agreed? The Parliament is not agreed. We move to vote. Members should cast their votes now. The result of the vote on motion number 14167, in the name of Ken Macintosh, is as amended. Is as follows. Yes, 95. No, 18. There were four abstentions. The motion as amended is therefore agreed to. The next question is at motion number 14189, in the name of Angela Constance, on the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act 1974, Exclusions and Exceptions, Scotland Amendment Order 2015, draft. Be agreed to. Are we all agreed? The motion is therefore agreed to. The next question is at motion number 14173, in the name of Joe Fitzpatrick on approval of an SSI. Be agreed to. Are we all agreed? The motion is therefore agreed to. That concludes decision time. We now move to members' business. Members should leave in the chamber, should do so quickly and quietly.