 Ysgolwch a fyddai cymaintol, cyreuniau gwirioneddau cwyddoedd yn meddwl am gyllideb yn Ffion-y-slog MSP. Ysgolwch, mae'r cymaintol yn ymddangos yma ar y gallu cymaintol aethau cymaintol yn ymdillawr. Aeth yma ydych yn sicrhau cymaintol mewn cyllideb yn ymdill those, ond dy rydych chi gan cynlun i'r ffordd gyda hyn. Mae ffordd i'w cymaintol yn eich bod i'ch ei deulu o hyn o bod yn ffordd gyrhawn. Yma'r cymaintol yn ei chael gyrhau the committee will take to the future inquiry into ferry services. Do we agree to take these items in private? That is agreed. Thank you very much. Items three and four will be taken in private. Our next agenda item is an evidence session in relation to our on-going inquiry into the role of local government and its cross-sectoral partners in financing and delivering in net zero Scotland. I refer members to the clerks and the spice papers for this item. Oedon ni'n gynch chi'n meddwl'r wneud o'r panel deillogau deillogau yn fynd i gydân replywn i net zero. I welcome three panellists who are joining us in the committee room. Ffiona Kell, director of policy, homes for Scotland, Tom Norris, managing director of places for People Scotland and Niall Robertson, director building consultancy, Jones Lang LaSalle. Good morning everyone, thank you very much for joining the committee. It's a pleasure to have you here. Felly, we have allocated up to about 75 minutes for this session, and we will begin with questions. The first question I have relates to the heat in buildings targets set out in the Scottish Government's policy. Fiona, in the written submission provided by Homes for Scotland, you said the following. There is a very real chance that the legislation around much of the net zero targets has been set well before the skills are developed and that that could lead to a period of economic stagnation. Those concerns have been raised in many other sessions that the committee has had in this area. We have heard about local authorities, the lack of resourcing, the challenges faced in the planning departments, as well as the limited availability of teams available to retrofit and decarbonise heat in buildings. I would like to ask each of you, perhaps I could go with Fiona, then Tom, then Niall. What do you see as the major resource and skills constraints in this area in terms of delivering the targets for heat in buildings? Given those challenges, do you think that those 2030 targets are realistic and can be achieved? Fiona, if I can start with you, please. Good morning. Thanks for inviting us to attend this morning. To start, it is worth saying that the home building industry as a whole understands, respects and supports the aim. We are committed to achieving what is practicable at the earliest opportunity. It is important that we emphasise that. We are not starting from a standing start and the industry has already made great strides, but you are right in saying that there are significant concerns that we feel. The way that I would describe it is that building the house at the end of it is almost the last and easiest part of the jigsaw. It is ensuring that the rest of the components of the system are in place to allow the physical house to be built at the end of it. For more point of view, we think that there are significant issues around grid capacity, supply chain, skills and labour, as you have touched on. There is also something around the wider societal impacts and customer affordability and readiness to be able to address all of this. In addition to the skills that we have touched on, there are technical skills required upskilling in terms of moving from gas boiler installation to heat pump installation, for example. It is also really important that we emphasise the skills in local authorities. We are really concerned that the requirements in terms of enhanced understanding of the issues that we require of planning and building control departments. We know that they are already under significant pressure. For us, there is a concern that that may form a significant blockage in the system if we have not got those skills addressed. That, in general, is our starting point. We are committed to it and understand why we are trying everything to get there, but we recognise that it is part of a very complex and interconnected system. Tom, you have touched on a number of issues that we will come back to. Tom, I wonder if I could address the same question to you, please. Thank you very much for the invite to come and talk to you today. Place for people in Scotland is an affordable social rent housing association. We are part of a much larger UK group, but in Scotland we are very much focused on social rent. I draw out what Fiona has said about this whole thing around people and customers. For us, the absolute key, as we go forward with all of these changes moving to net zero, and all of the other legislative things that we are required to do, is that we must not forget that end customer. I have around 10,000 customers in Scotland and it is hard out there, as we all know, but my teams are seeing it on the coal face every single day. As we move forward, we have to be so careful that we do not inadvertently put customers' bills up even more than they already are and push people into fuel poverty. Our balance as a non-for-profit entity is to make sure that we move forward gently when appropriate, that we are innovative when appropriate and that we do not end up using any of our customers effectively as guinea pigs to test things out. We have to make sure that we do two things, that we allow them to affordably heat their homes and that we decarbonise at the same time. It sounds easy when I say it like that, but as we all know, that is not the case. Parking that point about all of our customers, that is at our heart. The challenges that we have around skills are everywhere across the sector at the moment. It is not just in this area that employing people, particularly in trades, is challenging and that flows through into more newer technologies, if you like. It is a bit chick in an egg as we see more technology come online, we see more heat pumps, and we will then see more people qualified and able to repair those. However, it is a challenge, as we are retrofitting in particular, to make sure that we have the skills in our organisation or that we have the contractors available who can support everything that we need to do to make sure that we do not just retrofit something, but that it will work in the long-term and is sustainable again for our customers and affordable. I think that challenge there about how we ensure that the particularly on retrofit, I have come to new build in a moment, but particularly on retrofit, that we recognise that the disruption to people's lives is pretty significant, particularly on the older properties. If you drew a circle around where we are right now, we have 2,000 properties in a miles radius of here. Now, you will all know this area, so you will know we have got some really old stock. It is really challenging to deal with. We have also got some newer stuff that is somewhat easier, but either way, when we do start retrofitting things, there is disruption and, depending on the stock type, it can be relatively significant for our customers. We have to keep that in mind at the same time. Ever the optimist, with the right cross-sector, with the right joined-up approach, I think that it is achievable for us to decarbonise in the way that we are looking for us to do. There needs to be more joining up, I think. We find that there are often different bits of legislation that push against each other that make it hard for us to do what is effectively the right thing that we all agree with, if you just take each two and our decarbonisation things. There is a rub there that we are finding right at the moment. I think that a more joined-up approach, more industry collaboration, and us really working together to deliver those targets is the way to do it. I would like to come back to you. You mentioned joint working. I would like to come back to you on the question of finance, how this is all financed. We have heard about non-financial challenges, so there are certainly a number of them, but obviously one of the major challenges is also going to be the question on how this is going to be financed. Nal, if I could bring you in in the first question and then maybe later on ask you about financing as well. Sorry, just to say a pronouncement named Neil. Neil, sorry, Scottish pronunciation. Yeah, so thanks very much for inviting me along today. Very much appreciated. Just to introduce myself, I'm a charter building surveyor and I work in commercial property, so the domestic sector isn't really my area of expertise, per se, but I think the points that are raised apply across the board. There are, you know, since the pandemic almost came to an end, we're starting to get back to normal. There's been a huge demand for professional services, such as RICS members and engineers, all these specialities, so in commercial property there's a real demand for retrofit at the moment. We are seeing a huge demand from our clients for more sustainable buildings as they embrace ESG. There are, I think, 200,000 or over 200,000 non-domestic buildings in Scotland, so you can see the scale of the challenge involved there. Moving on to skills, I think that the thing has been recognised, I agree, with everything that's been said regarding skills shortage. You know, an engineer, a plumber, you know, works in both domestic and non-domestic, so the challenges exist across the sector. I understand that RICS are working closely with the Scottish Government and Skills Development Scotland to try and address some of these skills shortages. Thanks very much, Neil. It's really great to have a different perspective from each panelist. I'd like to bring you in a bit later, Neil, on the commercial side. Will it, over time, have an impact on the value of the building if it's not retrofitted? Are you seeing, you know, is the market catching up? I'll bring you back later on that question, but I just wanted to give you a heads up about the question that might come. Let me come back to the general question of financing, because we know that the private sector will ultimately have to finance the vast majority of this. I think that the Scottish Government has estimated the overall cost being £33 billion, £36 billion with, I would guess, the vast majority of that coming in some form from the private sector. I just wondered if you had thoughts on how, if you've seen any examples of good joint working between public sector and private sector, or do you think there's still a bit of work to be done there, and what role could perhaps the Scottish National Investment Bank play in this area as a catalyst, as a bridge between public sector and private sector financing? Fiona, it's a white topic, so I'll welcome your thoughts on any particular aspect. I think that the cost issue to start with before we move on to the financing, the costs are substantial, and I think that we need to recognise that the costs that we're talking about sit on top of the already very significant inflationary costs that you'll have picked up on certainly over recent weeks in terms of supply chains, et cetera. The Scottish Government's recent consultation on section 6 on energy standards suggested that there would be a 3% to 6% uplift in costs as a result of moving to the proposed changes. We estimate that that figure is actually closer to 15%, and that's on top of things, for example, the price of insulation. Is that about 63% this year so far? That's costs that are provided directly from our members who are building at the moment. Windows up about 30%, so if you're thinking about two of the key factors that you'll be looking in terms of improving the efficiency of your building, and then the costs of something like moving to a non-gas heat solution, recent work carried out by SFHA estimated that it's about £2,000 to £5,000 more than a default gas boiler and solar PV panel per home that you're building. The costs really are very, very significant in this. In terms of the financing, you're right, ultimately, somebody has to pay for that. I think that what's quite interesting is the role of the customer. As Tom mentioned, his customers are the tenants who are paying rent, and I'll let him talk about that side in more detail, but the customer side from a home buyer perspective, the operational efficiencies that you might save over the lifetime of owning a home. As individuals, I don't think that we fully look at that in terms of making an increased capital cost decision at the time of purchase of the property. For example, if, and I'm not saying that it's £10,000, but if we say that it's an extra £10,000 per home, is the capital cost of this? Do you, as a home buyer, value that extra £10,000? The answer is that I don't think that we do at the moment, and I think that there's a huge raft of work that needs to be done around about customer and public readiness and awareness for this. You mentioned the role of local government and it's an interesting research carried out by CIEH last year for housing day. It estimated that about 40 per cent of the people who were surveyed would like to move into an energy efficient home. Interestingly, 82 per cent of those people thought that the Scottish Government should support landlords or homeowners to meet those standards, and 34 per cent thought that the Scottish Government should cover the entire cost of that. I think that there's a huge public awareness issue that we need to deal with in terms of the financing and cost of this. In terms of some of the other solutions of it, we think that one of the things that could be looked at will be looking at LBTT. Is there some way of incentivising the purchase of more energy efficient homes in LBTT could be one way of doing that? We know that there's been a significant shift to the use of the take-up of hybrid and electric cars, and in a large part that was driven through changes to company car taxation, which had a lower company car tax rate for electric vehicles. We can see that changing consumer behaviour in that way has led then to a bigger shift. I think that we need to start looking at some issues around that. Rather than necessarily being financial grant contributions towards the cost of it, how can we incentivise consumers to make those financial choices? Absolutely. Thanks very much for another good point. In a sense, you almost want, instead of perhaps homeowners getting a new kitchen or conservatory, maybe if we can get the message out there, the best way to add value to your house is to retrofit and decarbonise. Very quick, brief and supplemental. Those were extraordinary numbers, 63 per cent increase in insulation costs, windows up about 30, timbers up as well. In reality, does that mean that house prices will automatically have to go up because their own materials or the price will have to be passed on? At the minute that's just a simple matter of fact, and those costs that I'm talking about are not dealing with net zero. They are cost of building our homes as they are built today. We estimate that on top of that, a further approximately 10 to 15 per cent to deal with the transition to net zero aspect of it. We're talking about very, very significant cost impacts. If we'd had the 10 to 15 per cent without the very rapid cost inflation that we've seen over the last 12 months or so, it might have been slightly easier to integrate, but it's a further addition on top of that. I don't think that customers are ready for it. Those numbers are quite remarkable. Tom, would you like to bring in on the question of finance, please? Of course, yes. I think that we've seen a number of key initiatives that we've taken forward, and every single thing we've done has been in partnership with others. We were an early investor in Sunamp, the battery and thermal storage maker, and we're partnering with Sunamp in a number of different areas to help with PV and a battery that does hot water for our customers. We've found that we have to take this partnership approach, and a lot of the things that we're trying out are grant funded as well. I think that what we're finding, however, is because a lot of this stuff is early, that even people we're pulling in and partnering with sometimes are getting into trouble of it being new and unseen cost and all the rest of it. One partner of ours went bust relatively recently in one of our schemes. We're at that stage in the market where there's going to be risk and there's going to be more risk than there would otherwise be. I'll pull out one example that we've used in Midlothian, which is our heat share project. We partnered with Sunamp and the green economy from SP energy networks. This was an example of an older person's development, so over 55s, and we put in a mini-district heat system. It wasn't fully decarbonised because we couldn't, at that point, in that area, at that development, find a way that would fully decarbonise and wouldn't put up the costs for the customer. We've put in thermal storage, we've put in PV, and at the same time there is a fallback of gas. That's effectively an interim position that we will move to a sustainable solution when we can. But what we've seen from our customer's point of view, there was a fair bit of disruption, more radiators required, so it was quite an intrusive upgrade. However, the feedback is that the bills are down, they're able to heat their homes affordably, and the experience now it's all in has been very good. That's just one example where we've said that we can't, at this moment, in this area do everything, so we'll move to our halfway house. I think for us that future proofing as we move forward is really critical. So we'll do what we can when we can, and we'll future proof it to allow us to move forward. So I think that the need for grant and funding for people to be able to test things out is really, really important. If you go out and drive through Craig Miller, you'll see the solar panels on a lot of the roofs. 99% of those will be as a result of investment that we've put in or we've used Scottish Government funding or we've partnered. We find that for the cost of living for our customers that solar and battery is actually really quite good. So I was with one of our customers a few weeks ago who'd had the battery put in and the solar put on, and I asked her what had happened to her bills, and she said, I just pay the exact same, I've always paid. Now, okay, we didn't, in that case, reduce bills, but bills have gone up, you know, in that time period, and we've insulated her from those price rises because of the storage and the battery storage and the PV. We will then move to fully decarbonised for her when we can. But I think part of the challenge we're finding, and I'll get a little bit technical on this, I'm afraid, but when I'm sitting down with our technical teams, we have a patchwork of properties, some of which the spades are going in the ground at the moment through to things which are 100 years old, and that means that our approach across our stock, across Scotland, has to be different. And we're finding that as we're doing our visits to look at what can we do at this scheme, we need a more creative approach to how we deal with it. We can't just say, we're putting a heat pump, that does the job. It could be a ground source, it could be a ground source that links to district, it could be all sorts of things. So I think the creativity needed to answer the question to fully decarbonise one of the keys, the one-size-fits-all solution for us, and for my team, that's just not feasible because of the stock that we've got. Granted for a new build, that could be quite different. So I think that from a personal, from a business financing point of view, we are investing more in properties across all of our UK stock in Scotland. It's up 20%. We're also adding in, we're seeing the cost of our repairs and the numbers of repairs going up. So customer expectations are rising quite rightly because they want more from us, and I'm comfortable with that approach that we're spending more money in customers' homes making them better. However, the additional cost increases we're seeing, inflationary costs, staffing challenges, and everything that kind of pulls through is meaning that we're now finding that we do, that there is a finite amount of capital available. And we've got, at the moment, SHQS, there's LD2 that's just been done, that we've just completed. We've got, of course, net zero. We've got each two. And the kind of list goes on of different requirements of investment needs that we need to put into our properties. And again, I agree that it's the right thing to do. The point is that we only have a finite amount of capital to invest, and we need to make choices about, you know, a new kitchen, a bathroom, a heat pump. So I think that the funding piece from government is probably the key to unlocking this. I think when we're looking at pulling in from the government fund for investing in, you know, the net zero heat sources, what we're seeing is that, effectively, the grant will cover off the additional cost it would, we would have, generally speaking, as a rule, the additional cost we would have if we were just to put a gas boiler in. So the incentive there is what's the right thing to do so we should be doing it, of course it is. But if we really need a change in the market and we really want to see this complete move away, then a little bit like the point about EV cars and company car schemes, how we incentivise people and businesses to go, it would be madness not to do this. And it would be madness not for us not to put in a heat pump or to decarbonise at this point. And I think that's the key. We're very comfortable that we need to invest in our properties and we will do for the future and we need to decarbonise them. But I think if we look wider to really get that uptake, there needs to be the right incentive scheme for individuals and for businesses as well. I mean, we will continue to innovate and we'll continue to test things out and sometimes it may not work in the way we want it to, but that's all part of this learning curve and we want to be at the forefront of it. On the new build piece, the grant is very welcome and it's very helpful. But again, it's similar to the point about retrofit. If we turn the dial on that, I think we will see quite a big change quite quickly. As the market goes, it's in our interest and it's obviously the right financial thing to do to decarbonise and to go net zero now. Fantastic, Tom. Thanks very much. A number of my colleagues want to follow up on a number of the points you made. Neil, I guess there's a different dynamic in the commercial sector because my right in thinking the expectation is that perhaps there's not as much money will come from the public sector to retrofit and decarbonise commercial buildings. Do you cover SMEs, small companies as well? Because I imagine for some of the smaller companies that would be a big issue. What are the sort of like trends in financing you're seeing in the commercial sector? It's not an area that I'm involved in directly, but I think I take on board some of the points that have been raised, particularly by Fiora on the value of property. I'm almost going back to the question that you'd raised before, if you don't mind, if you could answer that question. So there's always been a bit of an issue with making that investment in a sustainable property and actually you are the developer, but the tenant is the person that benefits through lower utility bills. That historically has been an issue. GLL did a fantastic piece, a research paper called Sustainability and Value in the Regions, and for one of the first times we found identified a link between making that investment in sustainability and ESG and creating an additional value to the commercial property. So what we identified was that properties that had environmental certification schemes such as Bream were the commanded hire rents over a period of time and they suffered less voids from tenants. The other interesting piece was that we found that the less sustainable buildings are more liable to the prospect of what we call a brown discount so that they're going to lose value quicker because they haven't been future proofed. So we think that's a compelling argument to invest in sustainable property and it's very much a trend that we're now seeing over the past year, 18 months. There's been a huge move towards that sector. In Sir Leymans terms, would that be office buildings, warehouses or are you looking at manufacturing premises just to get a sense of what type of building you're looking at? We cover a range of sectors but offices tend to be the main sector so you can see the shiny buildings that everybody can relate to and a lot of the net zero carbon research has gone into office buildings. So the likes of the UK Green Building Council has set some of their net zero targets based on office buildings which are hugely challenging targets relative to where we are just now. So it is a case of not just saying that this building is decarbonised, it's looking at the energy efficiency of the buildings and it's probably a case of bringing the average energy usage of a property or energy usage intensity down by about 60% from where we're at just now. So it's not just a case of let's strip out during a retrofit for example, let's strip out the gas boilers and we'll put in heat pumps. You also need to look at the wider insulation efficiency, lighting, et cetera to reduce that energy consumption. Great, thanks very much Neil. Let me bring in some of the other members. I know they want to follow up in this area. I think Mark Ruskell who's joining us online has a supplemental. Mark, I'll bring you in at this stage. Yeah, thanks convener. I just wanted to just query a point that Fiona made. I think you said Fiona that costs had gone up. The estimate of costs from the Government was that costs were going to go up about 6%. For renewables and insulation. You said in reality that it's gone up 15%. Is that across all building materials and services? Or are you actually picking out the renewables and the insulation and other retrofitting materials that's having gone up proportionally more than everything else? Or is this just an uplift in building costs more generally that you're talking about? That's a couple of different things. The 3-6% figure that came from supplementary papers that the Scottish Government had prepared in support of the section 6 consultation. In those papers, the evidence suggested that the additional costs... Sorry, let's forget about any inflationary costs that we have at the minute. Just assuming we were as we were in 2020, the Scottish Government consultation suggested that there would be an additional 3-6% cost in terms of delivering the transition to net zero. Our members looked at what was going to be required under the section 6 consultation and suggested that it wouldn't be a 3-6% uplift, it would be a 10-15% uplift, simply just in terms of delivering the net zero requirements. The other costs that I've talked about, the insulation and the windows, that's something that has happened since then. That's not being taken into account so the insulation, for example, that's just been since the beginning of this year, from then to end of June, is estimated at 63%. So none of that was taken into account when the consultation was carried out on the section 6 work back in 2020. I guess from the householder's point of view, the other thing that wasn't taken into account was the cost of energy, though, which has obviously gone up substantially. The savings would be substantial, wouldn't they? If you're buying a new house at such a high standard, you're thinking, I'm not going to have bills of thousands of pounds, it's going to be substantially less than that if I've got a PV on the roof and a battery. It should be, also recognising, though, that what we're talking about is the electrification of heat. Although you may be using less, at the minute we're moving on to a form of heating that is more expensive to run, albeit that you're running less off it. So you're beginning to get some of those benefits in the short and longer term, but it's still this dilemma between your upfront capital cost and making the connection between that initial upfront capital cost and making savings over the next 10, 15 years. And I think, as individuals, the public hasn't fully made those connections. I think we're starting to make the connections and there's no doubt that over the course of the last few months we're probably starting to make those connections a little bit quicker, but I'm not sure that we've made them as quickly and on the scale that we need to really deliver the whole-scale transformation that we're talking about in the timescale that we need. Okay, back to you, convener. Thank you very much, Mark. Next up is Liam Kerr. Over to you, Liam, please. Yeah, thank you, convener. Good morning, panel. I'll direct several questions, but just to specific people, if I may. Fiona, just on that point you've just made and in an answer to the convener earlier, the Scottish Government puts a cost of £33 billion on decarbonising heating in its heat and building strategy. From what I'm hearing from you that so far this morning, that figure may already be out of date. Do you think that's a fair conclusion? Yes or no? It probably is, but I don't have the facts in front of me that would I go get up to that. But what I can say is that certainly the initial estimates in terms of the section 6 consultation are significantly less than what we think the reality is. That's simply just for the new build. I think that the timing has been unfortunate in terms of the wider issues associated with Ukraine, and the wider cost inflationary issues. I think that all of these things are just combining at the minute that would make those figures, in my view, really to be unrealistic at this point. Thank you. Tom, on the point that you made to the convener earlier, do you think that there is adequate funding for social landlords to meet retrofitting costs, to meet each two, to meet the EPCB rating? If not, where do you think it's realistic to get that funding from? Is that going to come from central government? Is that going to come from local authorities, or do you need to leverage private finance? I think that it depends on the social landlord as the honest answer. The stock that each social landlord is having to deal with is so different, if you like. The challenges and the needs and the cost will differ by organisation. Talking from a places-for-people-Scotland perspective, we're one of the bigger organisations. I'm pretty confident that with the current Government decarbonisation fund and approach, plus the finance that we would invest into our stock, that we can manage the different challenges that we've got, like I said, each two SHQS net zero. I think that where my fear would be is that I don't think that every social landlord across Scotland necessarily has the access to capital that the bigger organisations have. The questions for me would be when you've got some really ageing stock and you've got significant numbers in terms of your investment required, how are you going to balance all of that off? If I give you an example of some of the stock that we have in the city centre of Edinburgh, we've got an older person's development on the Royal Mile. We've got flats and apartments that are sitting as social rent flats that, if you sold on the open market, would sell for £0.5 million or above. Our asset base is very strong. I strongly believe that mixed tenure having communities that are mixed and your tenure is irrelevant in terms of your social standing and stigma and all that kind of stuff, it's absolutely right that we have those apartments available for social rent in the city centre of Edinburgh, 100%. However, there are assets that we're sitting on and they're worth a significant amount of money. If we were in a position that we had to choose, you could quite easily end up in a situation that you would need to sell some assets to invest in others. We're not in that position to be clear and I don't think that we will be. For other organisations, there might come a challenge that they have to sit there and say, it's not affordable for us to decarbonise some tenement blocks. How can we financially make it work? The answers are either government funding, additional finance or they need to find ways to finance themselves, which might mean selling those and acquiring properties elsewhere. I don't think that that can be the answer for any social landlord to be having to sell properties because of the financial situation and the investment they need. It's just not tenable. How we avoid that is probably one of the absolute keys for it. There's a place of people in Scotland where we'll have a mixture of finance options available and we will pull in what's necessary. We're fortunate in as much as we've got a large UK group that will support us when they need to and that gives us capacity and options and means that we've got the ability to pull in lots of different initiatives to help with the situation. I think that it's a really difficult one and I think that for each social landlord the answer will be slightly different and slightly more nuanced. Thank you. Neil, I'd like to ask you a question. The Scottish Government is proposing regulations requiring new homes to use zero-emission heating systems from 2024. Do you think that that's realistic, both in terms of the cost but also in terms of the skills and supply chains that are going to be required to install and maintain that? Yeah, as I said before, it's not my area of specific experience. However, I am going through a self-build process at present myself so it's quite close to my heart. My own opinion, as somebody who is dealing with retrofit on commercial property, is that it would be foolish to not, to the point that was made by Tom before, be foolish to not decarbonise buildings that are new builds. I couldn't see the sense in installing gas boilers to a new build, particularly in the timescale of 2024. I fully appreciate that it's going to be challenging. If you speak to plumbers on an anecdotal basis, they have certain qualifications that allow them to be a gas boiler or an oil boiler. Sorry, a gas plumber or an engineer, the same for oil and it's a separate accreditation for the installation of heat pumps. It's a combination probably of plumbing and electrical expertise that's required for installation of heat pumps. From my point of view, it wouldn't make sense to me to proceed on that basis. Fiona, what do you think on that? From 2024 zero emission heating systems, is that realistic from a cost perspective, but also in terms of the skills and supply chains? In a simple answer, no, I don't think it is. The intention is correct, and I agree that we should be very clearly moving in that direction. However, if we look at the overall supply chain readiness, I just don't think we're there. I think it's important to note that many of the supply chains will work UK-wide. The majority of homes that are built in the UK are built in England. They're not built in Scotland. A significant amount of the supply chains will be geared up to delivering the volume that's needed for their volume customers, which is in England. Their timescales are slightly longer than Scotland. A simple commercial reality of many businesses in the supply chain, is that they will probably be more focused on delivering the whole-scale changes that will be required for the bulk of their customers, which will be in England a little bit later than what we're talking about in Scotland. I don't think that the supply chain in Scotland is fully ready for the challenges to come substantially ahead of what might be required in England. I'm not saying that we need to push back years, but there needs to be a little bit more realism in terms of when this can be delivered. As I said at the outset, the physical building of the house is the easy part of it. We haven't got the supply chain and the skills leading up to that. The other issue is the grid capacity. We're being advised by members at the minute that already in certain parts of the country they are unable to get large-scale connections on to the grid. There's insufficient infrastructure there to accommodate that. If we move to a significant electrification of heat plus the installation of AV charging points, for example, we're already being advised by many of the DNOs that there simply isn't the grid capacity at the minute. That's not to say that the investment isn't happening and that this is taking place, but it's the pace at which it's taking place. What we're suggesting is that we need a much more joined-up route map to the delivery of the 2024 targets and beyond. We've been asking to try and engage with Scottish Government to help us to work with a broader industry and supply chain to get that route map so that what we are getting is a date that is realistically deliverable as opposed to a date that we would like to get to but might not be deliverable. I'm very grateful to you all. No further questions, convener. Great, Liam. Thank you very much. Next up, we have Monica Lennon. Monica, let me hand over to you, please. Thank you. Good morning to our panel. There's been some interesting points made this morning about future triffing. That takes me back to some evidence we heard back in May from the existing homes alliance. There was a view expressed that there was a frustration that homes that we're building right now perhaps are not fit for purpose. Theresa Bray of the existing homes alliance said, the fact that we're building new homes that will have to be retrofitted is appalling. No-one who moves into a new-build home should have to retrofit their home. That should be built into the price. We've heard today about some of the challenges there and points have been well made. In terms of that view and that desire to future-proof or to get it right now, how do we navigate that? I think that Tom has made a few points about more joined up working and feeling has talked about a need for a route map. One of the questions that I have is the idea that homes are not fit for purpose the ones that we're building today. Is this in relation to insulation? Is it about the heating systems? Is it both? What can we do to improve this situation? Let's start with Fiona. I think that there's a challenge that view that we're not building homes that are fit for purpose at the minute. That's simply not true. We know that already the operational emissions of our homes are around about 75% less than they were back in, say, 1990. So huge strides have been made in recent years. What we're talking about now is the final tipping point to getting them to net zero. It's not that they're not fit for purpose. It's not that they haven't been challenging. There's been continual improvement in the build standards and in the quality that we've got. The changes that will come into the building regulations in October this year, the section 6 changes, will take us to that next bit. It's that final tipping point. It's important that we keep that in context. That final tipping point for the new build is such a tiny proportion of our overall carbon emissions from our homes, the majority of which comes from our existing stock. So, whilst, yes, we need to keep addressing that we're not adding to the problem, the bit that's being added, as it were, is of such a small, small amount compared to where the bulk of the problem lies, which is a retrofit of the existing stock. So it's there. It's a journey. It's not if it was as easy as saying, yes, we should build it all today immediately, then we would. But it's not quite ready for that yet, but we're almost there. So a large amount of work that is going into existing new build homes, for example, whether it's insulation, et cetera, is already taking us very far along that journey. So any retrofit that would be required would be much, much more minimal than something that was even built five or 10 years ago. Thank you, Fiona. Before I move on to Tom, I just wanted to pick up the point about building warrants, because we've had some discussion about that, too. I wonder, from a Homes for Scotland perspective, if you can say, does the current process of building standards verification and the issuing of a building warrant adequately assess the energy efficiency and general standard of the property, we've had some questions about assessing the quality of work to ensure that the energy efficiency measures have been adequately fitted and do you have a view on that? Our view is that the standards are set by government and the homes are built to those standards. As those standards are improving, the build techniques are improving to keep up with it. One of the points that I will make is with regards to the skills both in building control and in planning departments, as I touched on at the outset, what we're now expecting to be delivered by the home builder and then verified by the local authorities, it's a very different skill set than we have currently. The upskilling and resourcing of the local authority both planning and building control will really be essential in the future. For example, the NPF4 is indicating that there's a requirement for large developments to have a whole-life carbon assessment that's looking not just at the operational, but at the whole-life. Building control, for example, through the building standards at the minute, is still only looking at operational carbon simply because we don't have the skills and understanding at the moment to look at the whole life. If we are moving to a whole life at some point in the future, do we have the skills in planning departments who may require this assessment? Is that skill sitting in a planning department to assess the information that's being provided to them? It's not a slight on local authorities. It's simply the reality of the pace at which things are changing. The whole system needs to be upskilled. What we don't want is to find any further blockages that's stopping us from delivering the homes that we still need. When we're talking about the improvements, we still need to remember that Scotland needs to be delivering around about 25,000 new homes a year. We estimate that there's a backlog of around 100,000 homes that should have been built in Scotland since around about 2007 that haven't been built. If we're continuing to add more pressure on to what's needing to be delivered, is the rest of the system still working to make sure that we can keep delivering at the same time? How do we reconcile that? Fiona Hyslifawr, and you mentioned in PFO, which is still a live issue for the Parliament, is under scrutiny. You touched on that need for a better alignment between planning and building standards. Tom, you've talked about a need for a more joined up. Do you want to add to anything that Fiona Hyslifawr has said? For me, simplicity is the key here. Now I know that it's an incredibly complex landscape here, but trying to get everybody to go in one direction, so everything lines up through from inception of project through to a customer moving into a new home, I think that's the key that it all lines up. I think that what we're hearing today, and what I'm hearing from my teams, is that we do have conflicting policies and each two in zero net are a good example of that. I can't talk in detail about the building standards piece, but it feels as though things are slightly fragmented, so if we can find a way, if we all agree that we need to move to net zero, and that's the end point, how does all of the different parts of legislation that we're required to do as a landlord on one hand and then in our development hand on another, how does it all combine and line up into one way of doing things, and then that will give us the long-term stability and clarity of what's required, because I think that some of the challenges we're seeing in terms of, you mentioned why haven't people moved to zero net, net zero full stop for new developments. Well, there is fear that things are going to change and that, you know, within my organisation we talk a lot about not doing something and then regretting it later because we have to go back, we want to do it once and we want to do it right, so I think that that piece around how do we, because I support what Fiona is saying about this fit for purpose challenge is some fabulous developments that are out there, there's some great mixed tenure and people are, you know, there's a load of place making going on, but I hear the challenge that just says, well, why not? And I think that's part of the problem and I think that people will be a little bit fearful of it. If you look at some of our developments, we've got Tawnograin in Highland, we've got Chapleton up in Aberdeenshire and I think that if you look at the way those big developments of ours have moved forward, you can see how early phases or earlier phases will not be zero net and will require retrofit, but the stuff we're doing now that's coming online is starting to be all about net zero. It's a timescale thing as well, that it's just taken a bit of time because, you know, a project can go from inception to delivery, it can take three or four years. And I think that's part of the reflection of it feels like there's a lag and that's more of a nature of the situation we're in. Thank you, Tom, and the committee we've been enjoying getting out of the Parliament to see some of the good and innovative practice that exists across Scotland. Neil, I don't know if you want to add to that. Yeah, just as a chartered building surveyor myself, I think I would echo what Fiona had said regarding the quality of housing being constructed. I think the Scottish technical standards of the building regulations dictate that buildings are being constructed to a high standard, so a home that's built now will be built to a far higher standard than it would have been, say, 20 years ago. What strikes me is that the difficulty, if the skills shortage and material shortage is causing an issue with installation of heat pumps, for example, the technical piece on heat pumps are not an expert on it but I have installed it, I've retrofitted it into my previous home. Essentially your boiler becomes redundant or can be retained as a backup, but what you do need to do is increase the size of your radiators because your heat pump operates at a lower temperature. I wonder if there might be some opportunities to think about that retrofit piece to make it as easy as possible. Whether that's going to be 10 years down the line or 15 years down the line when your gas boiler becomes inefficient, because it doesn't make a lot of sense from an embodied carbon perspective to put all that effort and investment into installing equipment that's essentially going to be redundant in due course. Thank you. We've had a written submission hopefully from Homes for Scotland that touches on some of the skills challenges within local government and we've heard in the inquiry quite a lot about the planning workforce within local authorities. There's been a 20% reduction from 2011 to 2020. We've heard, we've not heard as much about other professions that work within local government. From a risk perspective or a surveying perspective, do you have any comments to make about the building standards workforce within local government? Is that an area that's also presenting challenges? Yeah, I think there's over the recent years there has been a reduction from what I've seen in the number of building control officers with planning officers and there's been redundancies in the past in certain local authorities. I think it depends across local authorities on how much resource is available at a given time. I would imagine in larger city centres there could be some challenges that can cause delays. From a practical perspective we often are working for commercial clients who are looking to fit out in office so that they can start their business or relocate following a move at the end of a lease. The timescale for coming back on a building warrant application and having it validated is very important to the overall programme of delivery and the consequences of not getting your building warrant approved in time is that you don't get into your contractor, can't be appointed and then you can't finish the project on time so it is very important that the Scottish Government and local government continues to try and invest and recruit for these important positions. From a planning perspective I just wanted to point out that there's a huge lack of what we would class as net zero carbon buildings in Scotland in the commercial sector. My firm had a look around Glasgow last year and there was only two properties that met the net zero targets that have been set out by UK, GBC and other bodies. In Edinburgh I think the last major development that's being completed at the moment is the Haymarket and that has taken on board very good sustainable practice but that's been pre-let it's 390,000 sqft which has been pre-let in Edinburgh and I think the next property that's going to be available in the city centre is 2024 so we've got this demand from our sector for sustainable buildings but there's not really the supply there to fulfil that demand at the moment so we appreciate that retrofit will have to try and fill that gap I think that the stat that's used widely is 80% of buildings that will exist in 2050 are already built so you can see the challenge that we have to retrofit as many existing buildings as possible without affecting the character of our towns and cities. Before I pass back to the community the time other colleagues have questions it's been really good to get your commercial insight as well on the panel today you've just given us some examples there I suppose of the lack of sustainable buildings in the commercial side that's in Scotland you must work in your company with colleagues across the UK how does that compare to other parts of the UK? I think what we've found is that the net zero carbon standards have been led by industry so we've been finding our feet on what these targets should be but ultimately trying to dramatically reduce energy usage whole life carbon has been mentioned we're looking at operational carbon but embodied carbon is the piece that's very much resonating with our clients they want to know where materials are coming from they want to know their overall footprint and that's another skills challenge that we're all stepping up to just now but across the UK I think the same problem exists is the truth so very challenging that's really helpful, thank you Neil, if you've got any of those research papers that are publicly available it would be great if you could share them with the committee sounds like there's some really interesting data you've uncovered OK, so next up Don, who's joining us online Natalie, I'll pass over to you, please Thank you, convener and good morning to the panel we've chatted this morning about the impact on citizens in terms of cost and disruption and now evidence suggests that people are more motivated than ever to make changes to their lifestyle to transition towards a net zero and I think the statistic that I heard this morning was that 40 per cent would like to move into a more energy efficient home so I'd just like to ask what pressure you feel that there is from customers for more energy efficient homes and do you feel it's currently a defining factor in choice when purchasing a new home sorry, I'll go to Fiona first please OK, thanks you're right so the research I'm referring to is work that was carried out in 2021 for housing day so yeah 40 per cent would like to move into more energy efficient home but interestingly only 14 per cent had made the decision had considered energy efficiency when making their last house purchase decision or their last house move decision so 40 per cent would like to but in reality only 14 per cent had so I think there is a momentum towards it I think it's simply a reflection of society as a whole, we're all much more aware of this I think where the reality will bite though still comes down to cost that making a home purchase is a very costly decision and at the minute if for example you're buying a brand new house that's sailed say for £250,000 and 10,000 of that might be made up from the new the net zero piece of it if you're comparing that to a house that's five doors down that's exactly the same size house but maybe is 10 years old and is selling at £240,000 for example but it's got significantly less operational efficiency so as a customer you might want to make that right decision you might want to buy the newer build property that has more operational efficiencies but when it comes to it if it's £10,000 more because you've had to add on to the capital cost will you as a customer make that decision and that's the dilemma that people are finding at the minute that it's an expensive decision for people to make yes you may be making those savings over the longer term but has our mindset moved round to that that what do we as individuals what decisions do we need to make to address our individual role in tackling the climate crisis and I'm not sure that we're all as individuals in that just yet I refer back to as I mentioned something like LBTT then for as an example where you could do some form of fiscal incentive to make that decision more financially attractive for a home purchaser to help them do the right thing so following on from that then do you think that that energy efficiency there is being promoted to people in terms of when they're purchasing homes do you feel that those buying and renting properties do have that adequate information to judge the efficiency of their new homes I think it's improved sorry just following on from that while I've got this train of thought do you feel that consumers are adequately informed and protected so for example my colleague Monica Lennon referred to homes being built right now which are not retrofitted so are buyers aware that there will be that further work required in the future so I think there's a bit of chicken and egg about that I think the consumers are being informed of the energy efficiency of their new home purchase I can only talk about new homes not about existing housing stock but if you're buying a new home and they're just being built you will have a full information pack with regards to your property what's in it, what's required during the course of this year consumer code and ombudsman that will affect the new build house sector and again that provides additional requirements for further information to be provided about the ongoing upkeep and maintenance of every new home that's purchased again only for new build so I think if you're buying a new build home you will be very informed as to what you're buying the operational cost if you're buying an existing property build I think as a consumer you probably have some information but maybe not as much as you might like obviously the APC information will be available but that doesn't give you the whole story about the overall efficiency of your home I'm just going to come back to you again just on that point because I know we've kind of talked about that incentivising and giving people more information in terms of those incentives you've said that people that are buying brand new homes will be fairly informed but for those current properties that will require work in terms of that sort of information campaign we've chatted about the need to maybe show people potential long term savings or refer them to their house value that might decrease over time if they've not had this work done is there anything else that you feel should be involved in that information campaign? I think that that would be very welcome I think anything that informs anything that will educate customers sooner rather than later because I think as a society we talk a lot at the minute about the changes that industry needs to make and that business needs to make but obviously it will ultimately all come down to changes that we as individuals need to make so I think if I were setting out some kind of education and information strategy I think I'd be very much focused on individuals and what this will mean for you as an individual so we're beginning to get this concept that we won't be able to buy our diesel cars in next number of years are we making sure that the customer is aware because if you think back to the probably how full your in bag was when in February this year there was introduction of the new sprinkler systems and the changes, you know, the queries and concerns that you probably had from constituents about oh I didn't know this was coming, didn't know how this was going to impact me, how this is going to cost on me that's going to be nothing compared to what they're going to find out in a few years time when they find that they can get a new gas boiler for their house that they're going to have to get a whole new system put in and I don't think customers at the public are simply not aware that these changes are going to be coming down the line industry are aware because it's our job to be aware of it and we're planning for it I don't think the public is thank you, thanks very much apologies I kind of focused on Fiona there but I'm not sure if Tom or Neil have anything to add to that if not I'm happy to pass back to the convener thank you Tom over to you just a quick one really from me on this I think the for our social intense in particular I think the it's all about cost of running so whether it's decarbonised whether it's gas, whether it's solar I think right now when we're out in communities talking about net zero would be the wrong conversation for them it's about how much is it going to cost and I think if we can find that for tents and for retro if we can find that way that we can reduce the cost it's the your costs are going to go up even more than they are which is the thing that as a social landlord it's a not can't sleep at night kind of thing isn't it so so that's the piece for my customers that it's all going to be about running costs because we take the capital cost in the investment no I appreciate that thank you and I think in terms of moving towards any sort of aspect of a more environmentally friendly life there's always added cost implications so it's important to keep that conversation going for for yet absolutely people in poverty sorry I'll pass back to the convener now thank you okay Natalie thank you very much next up is Jackie Dunbar Jackie over to you please thank you convener and good morning panel we hear a lot to get to net zero that the public and private sector have to work together so can I ask you what you think the key challenges are going to be to make it necessary for that partnership to happen if I don't know if that makes sense at all Neil can I come to you first because that's in the broader sense of commercial land how it's in I think yeah well I'll try and answer as best I can I think you know generally speaking we are acting on the commercial side of things and I think from you know what would be mentioned before about planning for example it might be helpful to engage between the parties to you know given this lack of net zero carbon buildings that we have on the horizon you know to try and work in partnership more to you know where you've got a developer who's interested in you know investing in a city or a building and making that redevelopment you know they are paying a premium you know for that net zero carbon piece which is over and above the building regulations so I think it would be helpful if the local authority could understand that and appreciate that investment to help her and almost work in partnership to try and deliver these types of buildings and give them you know perhaps a bit more time in terms of pre-assessments and that sort of thing given that that's where we're trying to get to and do you think that the distribution network operators are well prepared in regards to what's coming forward it's not one for me to to answer but you know it is one of the first questions that we do ask if we are moving towards a you know to decarbonise a building is you have to look at the capacity of the network and you have to get in touch with the utility provider and you know have that conversation but you know you can see pressure coming down the line as we move towards fully electric buildings okay thank you Tom would you like to add anything not on that point no I think could you just repeat your question sorry my first question it was just to ask what the key challenges you think will be to make sure that the public and private sector work together yeah thank you from our experience we're doing it so we will partner with whoever the best people are to get the job done really and I think that particularly in Edinburgh we work closely with the City of Edinburgh Council in various guises so I think that those relationships are often there and it's a case of you know back to my earlier point about how we try and just line everything up so we're just all facing in the same direction because for me whether it's an affordable property that's part of you know the part of places of people Scotland whether it's you know a local authority property you know the more affordable housing is the goal that we're aiming for you know and I think that that's the key is that we try and get to a place that it doesn't matter who's doing it it's the best people for the job and that will be a combination of public, third sector and private and I think that's that will be the key and on a project by project basis I think you will see that a lot of that partnership is already happening it might not be massively visible and the City of Edinburgh Council just announced a zero net development in Grant and a few days ago with CCG so things are happening and I think the innovation is there so for me it's about more of that and just making sure that policy backs all that up so we're all in the same direction so you don't see any sticking points in the future or? I see plenty yeah I think the challenge for us the biggest sticking point is that pace about how we can do this quickly it's ever so important that we decarbonise as quickly as we can and we keep it affordable but to the point that I made earlier I've made a few times the single biggest sticking point for my customers is going to be the cost of heating their homes affordably and bring it back to that but that's what we really care about Fiona I'm looking at you I'm not sure if you'd like to come in we found back to our response to the section 6 consultation last year we made a proposal to the Scottish Government that we thought there should be some form of joint working group staring group call it what you will that works together to create this route map and that that route map that that staring group should include ourselves DNOs supply chain and within Scottish Government we think it should include for example more homes division as well as the building standards division and those dealing with the new build heat standards because all of these parts of the jigsaw I think are all bits that are all at the minute from our perspective there's lots of bits of pieces that are all working in their own bits but we're not seeing that route map and it's the route map that we need to get it delivered your second point about the DNOs again our understanding is that they are working on it and are moving that transition but it's a huge beast to move and to turn and I refer back to my point beginning that the building of the house is the end part of it and all the rest of those bits are in line so are the DNOs fully ready I can't speak on their behalf but from our perspective we don't think they are as ready as some of the legislative and the intended policy time scales might like them to be and that's not to say that they're not moving that direction but I'm not sure that we're all moving at exactly the same pace that policies moving at the same pace as the supply chain and the skills and I think it's just a little bit more co-ordination would help get us all to the end point in a much more effective manner OK, thank you If I can go on to local authorities a little bit if I could ask you I think they're getting better at involving the local communities and asking them what they would like what they would like to see going forward with that in mind how do you think the housing sector could actually help maybe developing us and support the local government reaching out to the folks that will actually be living in the houses in the future I think certainly through the planning process there already is quite substantial engagement right from a very early stage in the process so I think that there is definitely a role for the home builders and local authorities to be working together on it I think some of the concerns that we still have so for example major housing applications in Scotland on average it was taking 59 weeks for a decision to be made for major housing applications that's compared to 16 weeks as a statutory and major business applications taking about 22 weeks compared to that and even those who have a processing agreement in place only 33% of those were having decisions made within an agreed timescale so it's already a very lengthy and very delayed process in getting these applications through to build houses that people need so again back to the investment and the role of local authorities as we need to be making sure that there's investment and resources in the local authorities to help deliver whatever kind of homes wherever they're being built they need that planning system to be working in support of it and at the minute it's not certainly not in the effective way that it needs to be Is this maybe more a question for Tom but how do you think you can bring the local community with them when there is new significant housing building hopefully a way to take place I think we're very connected to our custom base so we spend a lot of time listening to their concerns talking to them in the communities but also polling on a variety of different aspects of what we do so I think there is if you think about the 10,000 customers that we've got there is a very easy access for us when we're working with local authorities to understand need and I think how that flows out into what we do with new development so I mentioned some of our newer kind of signature developments at Long Nydry up at Chappelton at Torna Grain all those developments is all about community and we take a very sensitive approach to even what the houses look like so if you go to Long Nydry and then go up to Chappelton you'll see it's completely different because we're wanting it to fit in with the essence of the community that was either there or in the area so I think that that understanding of local need and what people want into more rural communities like where I'm from in Perthshire you need to talk to those people you need to understand what they need so I think that we can quite easily work with customers and to understand what they want and I think what we know at the moment is the key things that are sitting we've talked about cost of living but the other things that are in customers' minds is the speed of repair and unsurprisingly it's the basics that customers want they just want to live their best life do their thing and not be bothered by their landlord and I think if we take that as a general rule that the bits that concern them are the basics making sure that they've got the things they need to do that so when we then move that into into new developments I think local authorities work together what's interesting is when we have new build coming on in any of our communities the community know so they're well aware when there's new build because there's a huge appetite within our communities to get the the newer houses if that makes sense so there already is a real connection to what's going on into communities can more be done? yeah I think so but that's just about us having the ear to the ground and the connection to people and that's something that as an organisation I'm conscious of time convener so I'll pass back to yourself great Jackie thank you very much final questions from Mark Ruskell Mark over to you please thanks very much convener I'm aware that we're up against time so if I could ask the panel for some reflections on two issues please one is where you see the role for passive house standards or passive house equivalent standards what some of the opportunities and challenges might be in that area and then secondly just around EPC certification as well and where you potentially see opportunities for reform of that process can I start with Neil please yeah again it's not my area of expertise but passive house is certainly an aspiration that I think subject to costs and I believe that it would be a cost premium to go for passive house and others would be better placed to advise them on how realistic that is on a wider scale I think it's something that certainly individuals may aspire to and I would encourage them to do so if that's what they're looking to achieve from their development on EPC certification it's certainly an area of debate what I find in the sector that I'm in is that I work for clients that operate across the UK and the minimum energy efficiency standards that have been introduced in England and Wales are fairly clear on improvements and the kind of road map that takes you to EPC be ultimately by 2030 there has been a lot of consultation in Scotland from what I have observed and I think just in summary it would be helpful just to get to the end of that process so that we have clarity and we can give sound advice to our clients thank you Fiona I think in terms of the passive house standards it's my understanding that by the time we have moved to the standards that will be introduced in Scotland by 2024 and the ban on gas boilers effectively and the other building regulation changes that are likely to come in at that time that we as an industry will be at or almost at those standards I think it's important again to touch back on the cost again setting aside any other inflationary costs at the minute that a typical two bedroom house would say roughly 17% additional capital cost from the way the house is built at the moment to moving it to a passive house standard is roughly 17% and again that might be something that's acceptable to as Neil said to individuals who are wanting to achieve that if we're still trying to deliver that in terms of the overall volume of homes that we need in Scotland I think it'll be a challenge to be delivering that at that pace and scale at that additional cost as well if we were just to say right it's all to go tomorrow but as I've said already we are well on the journey towards that and by the time we come to 2024-25 we'll be at or very close to those standards I've got no particular comment on that On passive I think moving to a place where where customers don't need to heat their homes is absolutely an ambition or use as little energy as possible without doubt how we get there and whether it's affordable at the current scale at the moment I think is probably the question as an ambition 100% very much behind it On EPC I think that is something that is challenging so we've been looking up at Tourne-Grain about how for the next phase what we do around decarbonisation and the sun amp thermal batteries that we have installed elsewhere don't come into the SAP calculator for EPC which means that for us it's often absolutely the right thing to do impact the EPC and in fact it might impact it in a negative way so that's one of the examples of where having everything lined up the EPC and net zero has to just go together it has to be one of the same and at the moment I think there are examples where it's not lined up and it would mean that if we were purely to focus on EPC we would move to air source rather than necessarily use the battery installs as of right now so I think that's something that we need to kind of from a policy point of view we need that to support the end goals and whether it's battery whether it's heat pump all of it is decarbonised and I think that should be reflected in the EPC That's interesting, I've had personal experience of EPC in my own house not reflecting batteries and then having to go to Home Energy Scotland and get a fresh certificate that recognises batteries exist and that there might be a good option Can I just end with one question back to yourself Tom and that's around the second energy efficiency standard for social housing and the Government's just announced this morning that they're going to bring forward that review for this year of that standard what would you be looking to come out of that review? I think for us that we I'm going to kind of repeat what I've said but all of these things just have to line up and we have to find a way that our customers can heat their homes affordably and we reduce the requirement for any heat source because we insulate it, we go fabric first and then we follow up with appropriate heat source and we keep that focus on cost and I think that if we're able to find a way to drive industry in one direction then we will get where we need to so I think for us we will of course follow and engage with Government throughout any discussion on it but the simple fact is that we need it to be simple and we need it to really make sure we have customers and people at the heart of all of the policy and I think if we do that then we'll find that we get to the right answer thanks very much back to you convener thank you Mark I have one very final brief question for Fiona you mentioned a couple of times the need for a joined up route map between local government and national government the submission paper from Homes for Scotland refer to a national delivery agency to do that I wasn't sure if that was a reference to the the Scottish Government's energy national energy agency or because that's a virtual agency and it's not going to be fully operational until 2025 or was that a reference to that agency or was it a reference to the need for something more I think what we're talking about is just in terms of the delivery of all homes in Scotland so regardless of tenure regardless of location regardless of their net zero position I think our view is that at the minute there's insufficient joined upness in a system that helps focus on delivering more homes so something similar to what's happening in England, Homes England for example where there is a much more joined up different bits of government funding streams et cetera the release of large scale public assets for housing development a lot of that is coming in a much more co-ordinated manner so that's really what we're suggesting that helps align all the different parts of the system I'll go back to one of my previous points that we should be building around about 25,000 new homes a year of all 10 years in Scotland we estimate we've got a backlog of around about 100,000 what we were building so 2,000 and 60,000 and 7,000 so something that jointly helps us all work in the same direction to be delivering those homes that would certainly help the committee as well you were nodding a lot there did you want to come in? I'm in complete agreement our experience of how we're currently structured and set up that overarching mind would be very welcomed that brings us to the end of our allocating time thank you all for joining us it's been a fantastic session we've covered a wide range of important points so thanks for taking time out and being in front of the committee this morning thank you that concludes our public meeting and we will now move into private session thank you