 Good morning and welcome to the 13th meeting of the local government housing and planning committee in 2021. I would like to ask all members and witnesses to ensure that their mobile phones are on silent and that all other notifications are turned off during the meeting. Our first item this morning is consideration of whether to take items 4 and 5 in private. Item 4 will be an opportunity for members to reflect on the evidence that they have heard earlier in the meeting on retrofitting housing for net zero. Item 5 will be the committee's chance to consider its approach to scrutiny of the recently laid short-term lets regulations. Do members agree to take items 4 and 5 in private? Everyone agreed. The second item on our agenda today is to take evidence as part of the committee's work on retrofitting housing for net zero. We will take evidence from three panels this morning. This will not be by any means the committee's only session on the issue but the committee hopes today to understand more about the cost and funding of retrofitting, how retrofitting can be done in a way that considers a just transition, public engagement on retrofitting and the skills, supply chain and infrastructure necessary for retrofitting. On our first panel I would like to welcome to the committee Professor Ken Gibb, director of the UK collaborative centre for housing evidence at the University of Glasgow and Chris Morgan, architect and director at John Gilbert architect who was involved in the project that we are going to be discussing. Thank you for joining us today and we will move straight to questions. Witnesses, if you wish to respond to or contribute to the discussion, please add an R in the chat box to indicate this. We will possibly direct some of our questions to someone specifically but because there's just two of you we probably have a bit of time, we've got about 12 questions to get through. I'm going to get started and I think maybe I'll start with Chris. I'd like to ask you if you could give a brief overview of the purpose of the Nidry Road project. Okay, can everybody hear me okay? Absolutely, yes. Okay, the Nidry Road project, which I believe some of you saw and I'm sorry I wasn't there to guide you but I know my colleague that it's a passive house level retrofit so it's called NFIT and it's an attempt to show that you can get extremely energy efficient performance from an old building essentially. That building will be more energy efficient than new homes essentially and that has an obvious benefit both to carbon emissions and to fuel poverty. We reckon that very roughly people will be spending about £10 to £15 a month on their heating living in those flats so that's an enormous reduction down from it's normally around £100 so you just can't get fuel poverty when you're paying that little for your heat. In addition to being energy efficient, we wanted it also to be healthy so there are a number of issues we've done to address the health and wellbeing of tenants and thirdly that there are a number of things to look at as it were the heritage of the building so we're looking at how the building is looked after itself, how the fabric is retained, cared for and how we don't damage Scotland's heritage in the way that we do that. Is that okay? Yeah, no that's great certainly we yeah so myself and a few others here today did come along to the Nidda Road project and it was great to see the work that's being done, the care both on keeping the exterior the front side of the building but also I think the impression I got also was there was a good consideration on actually changing the space and making it a more pleasant interior environment not just in terms of insulation but also use of space so that was really great to see that there's an opportunity to do that as well. I'd like to ask Ken Gil if you've got anything else you would like to add to that question around the purpose of the Nidda Road project. You don't have to but just in case you want to make sure something gets said. Well thank you I think the thing I would add is that this is very much a demonstration project it's what's possible it clearly is a radical project in the sense that it seeks to and hopefully will achieve a net zero outcome in a pre-1919 tenement so it's a very important precedent setting project which has lots of lessons for thinking about the retrofit of older buildings, recognising the scale of those older tenements in Glasgow and for those reasons we think it's potentially a very useful lesson learning project. Two other things I'd say briefly as well as one is that you will have recognised when you were there last week it's a building site and it's a project which is on-going so secondly my role in this is I'm leading the evaluation that there's a research grant from the Scottish funding council to undertake for this work so a lot of that evaluation really only begins when the building is handed back to the housing association which will be out early next year so if I'm going to talk about some of the evaluation it will be very preliminary tentative and before we have a lot of that data. Thanks very much for pointing that out. I'm going to move on to the next question and this is around energy efficiency so I think again maybe go to Chris on this. What type of energy efficiency and low carbon heating measures does the retrofit involve and have there been any technical challenges involved in designing and installing those measures? Right so the energy efficiency measures are largely the same as normal so we have insulated the loft a lot, we have insulated the ground floor a lot, we have put external wall insulation on the back of the building as you would have seen I think and wall insulation on the inside of the street facing walls so the difference between the insulation that we have done well there are two differences one is that we have closed up the gaps so in conventional work broadly speaking the easy bits are done but not the difficult bits and the difficult bits are things like where the roof meets the wall or where the wall meets the floor and you often can't get the insulation to join and the trouble with that is the analogy I use and everybody's sick of it is holes in a bucket you used to have 10 holes in a bucket and now you've got six so you think you've improved things but in reality the heat still moves out of the building so our job with passive houses is to close up those holes all of them so that there is more effort taken to messing about in the corners of things the tricky things a good example is at the first floor choice for example and this is the reason why it's it's difficult for this to be representative because if you own one flat but you don't know the flat above or below this would be very difficult and why you need a broader and strategic approach is that we we don't just stop the insulation at the floor and the ceiling we take the insulation up through the floor up through the ceiling and down through the floor so that all of all of these gaps are joined up now that's not something you can always do but it has to happen because the heat gets lost or the moisture can get out of the building and into the wall and that's an issue so we've closed up the gaps and that's a difference the second thing is that we're concerned about the risks of internal wall insulation so this is a little bit technical but essentially one difference between our project and others is that we have tested what would happen with moisture in the stone walls and what we found is that there's a high likelihood that there would be excessive moisture and that could lead to decay of the timber lintels over the windows and the timber floor joists so we've gone to extra trouble and cost to design we've used vapor permeable insulation with fibre and we've designed it in such a way that that shouldn't be the case and that's not normally done but our our expectation is that that means that we won't get rotten floor joists and we won't get rotten timber lintels and that's an issue in the future for retrofit I think. The we use triple glazing but I don't think that's particularly unusual it's just heavier windows which can be an issue and we've used mvhr which is this heat recovery ventilation which is a bit of a faff but fundamentally not that difficult so I would say it's it's mostly the same as other renovations with more insulation more care taken at the corners and an unusual solution to the internal wall insulation because of moisture and health. Thanks for that I'm curious about the the insulation material so we saw on the back of the building it was completely covered in a thick insulating material which I can't remember the name of now but I think you said that that's maybe wood fibre made of wood fibre. On the back it's mineral wool one of the issues we've got at the moment post-Grenfell is that anything that goes on the outside of a building under our insurance terms needs to be non-combustible so and quite a lot of the plastic insulations that you might normally see aren't non-combustible and I would prefer to use wood fibre because it's a natural material but that is also combustible so we've been forced really post-Grenfell to use only non-combustible materials but it's not ideal the mineral fibre that we're using is rock wool basically because there are issues with moisture but the the fire risks are trumping that at the moment. Right okay that's interesting because I guess where I wanted to go with the the wood fibre insulation is is is that something that we could start manufacturing or is it manufactured in Scotland just trying to think about it. No it's not manufactured again it's not manufactured in Scotland and it would be wonderful if it was. Great just thinking about the kind of shortening the supply chains and you know being able to grow things here. I'm going to move on to another question around planning and building control so just to hear if there were challenges that you encountered getting the project through planning or building control that you had to address. We had almost no problems with building control. Building control took a very light touch approach to this on the basis that they said well when when you're improving a building where as long as you're not doing something that's obviously contradictory to the general health and safety of the building regulations will support you so for example the windows were we had designed the windows in such a way as to allow to to be compliant with the building regulations in terms of fire escape and child locks and so on but the planning department insisted that we didn't do that and that we did something which to us is less safe but the planner said it had to be done in a certain way so we then had to contact building control and say well we'll be we're being asked to do something which doesn't comply with modern fire escape and safety standards and building control said look you're improving the windows we'll just let you go with whatever planning tell you to do so building control were very good planning were very difficult it took a very long time and they were in many cases for good reason they were essentially against almost all of the sustainability things so without without sort of getting into too many details i would say that the planning legislation as applied to that project was was was directly counter to most of the sustainability things we were trying to achieve okay so that i'm not saying that we were wrong to do that because in many cases i sympathise with what they were trying to achieve but but it but it was counter to some of the broader sustainability issues that we were trying to address so in considering the speed with which we need to be rolling out retrofitting across Scotland that sounds like maybe an area that we need to look into and address to to just smooth that over somehow yeah okay i just want to actually come back on the energy efficiency piece my understanding is so we're basing everything on e p c c rating that's our kind of like where we're trying to get to and what i learned shortly after election is that that rating is i'm not sure i've got this right but maybe it's a benchmark to a house in milton keens or something like that but i but i heard that in the in the kind of like building industry there is questions about whether that is the energy efficiency rating we should be working towards it i've just wondered what your thoughts are on that i didn't know how how much opportunity i'd get to speak but i'm i would certainly say that the the sap calculation methodology and the e pc ratings are are not the way to go forward they're not an accurate map of either buildings or where we need to go so the the very big risk to my mind is that if we stick with e pc ratings we will go through the the difficulties that we're all discussing at the moment of ramping up retrofit and the strategy and the money and the funding strategies of all of those aspects and we will spend all this money and we won't in fact achieve either the carbon emissions or the reduction in fuel poverty because e pcs do not in fact measure the energy efficiency of buildings particularly accurately they obviously do a bit that they're a system owned by a private company which if you press them they will admit it is not an energy efficiency calculation it's a compliance method so it's a way of demonstrating compliance with the building standards but it isn't specifically an energy efficient methodology efficiency methodology sorry and there are there are quite a lot of problems with it many of which can be could be resolved and some of which can't so for example in order to be a compliance method you have to assume certain behaviour in in the occupants and of course occupants then go and do something completely different so you don't necessarily get an accurate method but that's not the fault of sap the but there are a number of things which could be changed in it which would make it far more efficient it could also be calibrated against reality which it isn't so my a lot of my understanding of this comes from testing buildings so we run a project in the office called have lab where we go and test buildings that have been retrofitted that we physically test them we do air tightness tests and thermography and we talk to the tenants and these sort of things and we we have discovered that on the whole buildings don't don't operate at all has designed because because reality and what to stop in the EPC tell you are quite distinct things thank you for that i think that's an area for exploration either for our committee or for the NZ committee can i can give i see that you would like to come in too yeah i just want to make two two quick points first about planning i think as i said earlier this is a demonstration project and i think part of that is to provide guidance towards people like this Glasgow city council to help them when they move forward with the strategy for for the traditional tournament stock and i think one of those bits of learning that we get from the project is that given that midway road is not a not in a conservation zone it's an absolutely bog standard tournament of its type that it runs up against sustainability objectives and heritage objectives as it were run up against the way the planning system works for normal standard tenements so if one is considering pursuing a bigger strategy then the planning system has to move and policies have to be set precedence have to allow things to move forward in different ways the other thing i'd say very briefly about EPC is that our colleague on the project Professor Tim Sharp who's an architecture professor at Strathclyde university is particularly good on discussing the problems with SAP and EPC and and he would point to literature as well academic literature which raises some of the problems with EPC and SAP that chris has already raised. Thank you for that that's great so i'm going to move to Eleanor Witton with another question. Thank you very much convener and before i start my questions i would just refer everyone to my register of interests i'm Stella Serving councillor in East Ayrshire council so i'd like to direct my first question please to Professor Gibb and you've already alluded to the fact that this is a demonstrator project and obviously in its very early stages so far are there any cost benefit analysis of the demonstrator project available we've already heard from Craig at a question on the fuel cost reductions for tenants but i'm wondering in terms of the project itself how would it compare to demolishing and refreshing the stock totally thank you okay thank you well that's really good question we're actually doing this right now we're trying to make sense cost benefits is quite a big part of the overall evaluation but it's more work in principle at this stage than in practice because we're still waiting for some of the costs to be actually available so but let me explain what we're trying to do we you need to have counterfactuals against the work of the of the retrofit project so we're comparing it with if it's only been a basic refurbishment of the properties and we're comparing it with a demolition and new and new build so we can see quite clearly in terms of embodied carbon and such like that there's clearly an extensive cost to new new build we can also see that the refurbishment on its own almost by definition would be cheaper than doing the refurbishment plus the retrofit that's just by definition true but on the other hand the refurbishment will have further costs attached to trying to seek improvements so for instance if it fell under the ish rules which it would do if it was social housing as it will be they would need to achieve those standards so there would be further costs that would have to be met to do that we also recognise that outwith enofit type retrofit we expect the energy performance of new build and the energy performance of the refurbishment to have gaps in performance they won't do as well as we think the enofit would do so there are further energy costs or carbon costs attached to that we also think that because we would have social tenants or mid-market rent tenants in the properties that there would be a distributional profile so there would be a positive distributional effect a redistribution of resource in favour of lower income groups then would be the case if it was just the population as a whole so there are a number of points of principle but unfortunately at this stage we don't have all of the costs to basically pin things down but I want to make the point that we are trying to do this on as close to a conventional green book approach as we can but one which includes fully the monetised value of carbon savings and the monetised value of embodied carbon that's our aspiration and we hope that that will be available in the new year early new year thank you very much for that really brilliant explanation of that I'm going to hand it back over to the convener because I think one of my colleagues has a supplementary question on to that question yes I'd like to bring in mark griffin who's joining us online thank thanks can we are good morning I just wanted to ask further to the question around costs and obviously if this rolled out nationally you would expect costs to come down because of scaling up the project to expect unit costs to come down but I just wanted to ask about whether the panel felt it was reasonable that as we move out to mix tenure models where they're potentially owner occupiers or even in the example that we have just now whether you would expect the burden of the cost of the initial project either to fall on tenants and increase rents or to fall on a non-occupier whether you think it's reasonable to expect the social landlord or the owner occupier to pick up all the costs and whether that is feasible or not whether there has to be a greater incentive through government grants to cover this whether or not that would hold back any potential national rollout I'll go first thanks for the question yeah we recognize of course that this is a very very unusual demonstration project in the sense that it's an empty lock and there are no tenants living in it it will be so it will be run but owned by a social landlord we should bear in mind the fact though that the housing association through private finance is making a very major contribution to the cost of the project so their tenants will be you know repaying rents you know as part of the the cost of the thing so but yes I mean it's undoubtedly the case that NFIT standards by definition is higher cost than some of the other kinds of retrofit around EPCC and such like that that we gear so so so much about and clearly there are a whole set of issues as soon as you have multiple ownership in a tenement and we absolutely recognize that so it's been interesting looking for instance at the Glasgow city region scoping research for their plans for a retrofit economic strategy that there's a very strong recognition of how do you manage the different interests of owner occupiers private landlords as well as social landlords and I think personally that we need to have a well communicated route to owners be they landlords or own occupiers which give them a menu of choices they are asset owners so I think I think there's a sense where they can certainly contribute and share it in the cost but but yes absolutely depending on people's resources depending on their income depending on their on their wealth actually as well the actual value of the property we need to think about grants we need to think about loans and low cost loans we need to think about payment deferral mechanisms where costs might be transferred forward in time until a property is sold but we need to have institutions to be able to organise all of that I think all of those things are important and we do need it needs to be just so we obviously have a lot of people who are owner occupiers who are not wealthy who don't have high incomes who may be older in life and have less resource so there's a whole set of tactics and strategies around that and we haven't really begun that yet I think what reflecting on this single project tells us about is also about the variety of housing in Glasgow and the variety of situations that individual tenants in tenements have and owners in tenements have there's about 70 odd thousands of these tenement flats in Glasgow and so all of those things have to be considered and underlying all of that sorry I'm so I'm going on so much here but underlying all of that I think is the fundamental maintenance of tenements themselves you know there's little point in thinking about retrofit if the property fundamentally isn't maintained in a sustainable way in the first place and we know that many tenements need considerable repair there are real problems with that and I think well reflected in the previous parliaments tenement maintenance working group who did such excellent work and all of that pointed towards the need for fundamental tenement law reform so there are several layers here of things that have to be done we're exposing one particular issue within a broader kind of ecosystem of how to make tenements work and be sustainable so I absolutely accept the complexities and the high costs that are involved when you look at the city as a whole or Scotland as a whole but it's actually part of a broader set of housing questions which there are themselves challenging but have to be have to be exposed and embraced thank you for that we're going to go back to Eleanor for a follow-up question thanks very much convener so following on from from that issue and professor gibb do you think that the heat and building strategy provides sufficient clarity about the Scottish Government's approach to multi-tenure buildings thank you I think it's a beginning but I don't think it's an end I think the again referring back to the Glasgow city region grant report it's clear that you can you can kind of scope out the the level of resources that are required to achieve even a fairly in their case I think a modest improvement relative to what we are talking about in the midway road but they are identifying a significant gap of funding which they look to come from the UK government as well as the Scottish government and so there are assumptions about what resource will be available and critically when it will be available because this will take more you know a decade or two and there are those other things going on so the critical area for multiple tenure ownership is the tenement I'll not fall off people in Glasgow and Edinburgh live in tenements but we also need real progress with the kind of tenement law reform I think to make all that happen so so that it's not just about it's not just about the the building and heating strategy it's complementary but really fundamental things alongside it that also have to we also have to make progress with as well thank you very much thank you and we're going to go to miles briggs with the question thank you thank you convener good morning to the panel I wanted to ask a few questions with regards to engagement with tenants and specifically around decision making on these projects going forward I just wondered in terms of south side housing association how that was taken forward and best practice around that as well maybe chris I think you've got your hand up yes but I knew I was mute there are quite a number of ways that we can engage with tenants so just to say when we study buildings and we discover that things don't work the way we predicted one of the biggest variables that we discover is that people use buildings in way that we didn't we didn't anticipate and particularly often don't understand the controls in their buildings so and there are lots of reasons for that so in in this project Ken has alluded to a professor Tim Sharp who will be running the engagement with with the tenants I think in collaboration with south side housing association there will be meetings with the tenants before they go into the building there will be meetings with tenants at least one or two anyway once they once they've entered the building we we have provided something called quick start guides which are a very basic introduction to both the building and the the control systems the services within that building because we find that information on services can often be you know it's a sort of 50 pages of german text about your boiler wiring system which you know nobody needs to know but understanding how you keep warm in the keep warm in winter and cool in summer those sort of basic things that's useful to give people we've also taken some control to make sure that the controls themselves are clear and obvious and well explained when people move in and there's a little bit of work about explaining to people why it's worth taking trouble with there you know it's not just a question of sticking the thermostat up it's about understanding the interrelationships and it's not particularly complicated but many people don't understand how their building works so just taking the time to engage is a really really important part of of getting the energy efficiency that you're hoping for thank you for that I don't know if Professor Gibb wanted to come in yeah just to amplify that really we think this is an important part of the of the evaluation as well as being tremendously useful part of the demonstration project itself so we are we are using tried and tested techniques to do these pre and post occupancy surveys we will have to do the post occupancy surveys twice because the tenants are likely to move into the properties in around march time so we're going to miss the first winter we will be monitoring them while they're in the summer is it where so we want to try to make sure we come back and do another survey with with the residents the following march or so we're also with the permission of the tenants and that's still to be decided we don't know who the tenants are yet but with their permission we want to monitor the building and actually have sensors in the building to see how temperature and moisture vary and such like so the idea is to compare their lived experience of being in the property their ability to use the documentation and the training that Chris has just talked about but also to have a kind of objective measure against that of how the building is actually performing at the same time that we are again in a really privileged position to do this because we will have an empty property with new tenants coming in and we may well not have all of the tenants wanted to participate in this but we just need a small number of them to stick with it and we'll have a tremendously valuable set of data that comes out of that and we think that there's lots of really interesting questions about how people actually use buildings particularly when they're they're being able to live in a cottage is quite different to anything they will have lived in before so that's quite exciting thanks for that thank you okay we're going to go to questions from Paul McClellan thanks convener and thank you panel and before I asked the first question I just refer everyone to my register of interests I'm a seven councillor on east of then council at the moment again this is probably for yourself professor give this to yourself and it's really around about you've touched on this already around about the role of the city council but broader what role that councils would need to play in facilitating similar work across wider areas and just in addition to that as well it's really just your comments on looking at probably a wider local heating energy strategies you know whether that's a way ahead because I think each local authority is obviously different in how it would scale this up so just your views on that and I think you touched also on the valuation of the project and just to say a little bit more of event and to add in about how you would share the findings of that as well right certainly okay the I'm in I sit on the housing portfolio of the Glasgow city region so I've been involved in watching how the strategy has evolved over time and that seemed to me to be a sensible level of examination of the issue because it's effectively a local labour market area you know it's a functional economic region which makes sense to think about construction and skills and supply chains as well as it does to think about the housing market as a system you know so that that as a strategy seems to me to make sense but clearly local government per se will be in different geographical places and in different combinations of those functional economies but seems to me that partnership across local authority boundaries where there's a kind of economic rationale for it must make some sense at some at some level so that's the starting point for me I guess so could you remember what your first point was? Yeah I mean I think I know about the city council facilitating the project but what role do councils need to play in facilitating I suppose similar work across wider areas I think you've almost kind of touched on that as well just with the point you mentioned about that and yes I think the other thing I was going to say with regard to that was I think the city council's been an excellent partner of ours they've not only put a lot of capital funding into the project but they've been a partner in the sense that we've talked through various stages of the work with them and I think they've wanted to have you know the nature of a kind of pilot like this or demonstration is to surface problems and I think we have surfaced some some issues and challenges and we've done some public meetings of late and the head of housing in the council was able to say even at this stage there are elements or components of this work which will be replicable or usable in the strategy we will of course recognise that there are very idiosyncratic and specific features of the mid-development but I think that that's a really interesting partnership which relates to their housing strategy, specific tenant strategy and the retrofit strategy so that's a very important part of it. On the evaluation, the evaluation is really four or five separate but linked evaluations which we'll try to synthesise so we're trying to understand in real times that where the decision making that's been made when we start off with a retrofit on paper and then try to make it real what sort of decisions do you have to go through what can we learn from that and what can other projects learn from that we're doing the cost benefit analysis that we talked about before we're doing a kind of building performance evaluation which Tim Sharpe is leading on with working with Chris and we're going to try and synthesise these arms and we're also going to have this pre and post occupancy qualitative research linked to the building performance measurement so we've we've as you'll probably know we've made a film already about about the project which is available on youtube and it's been well watched widely watched we're going to make a second film once the residents are in and once we've done some of the post occupancy survey work we will certainly be disseminating in the normal way hopefully through face-to-face events but almost certainly on a webinar basis at the minimum and there will be a series of publications there'll be a main report there'll also be policy and practice briefs there'll be a summary documents as well and we will you know we are very aware of the really high level of interest and engagement in this project so we at Scottish Fund and Council are really keen that we promote what we find as widely as we can and that's certainly what we intend to do so we'll probably start publishing working papers and things of that kind in the February-March time I would think. Thank you and just just one other question that's probably this time to Chris and it's just Chris briefly if you can it's really talking in about the issues or if you've had any supply chain issues or availability of skilled labour and I think that's obviously then how we then to look to scale this up if that's a problem you know is there going to be issues with supply and with skilled labour I know it's hard to say and looking at scaling that but in your view at the moment do you think that would be an issue? There have been delays that the contractor asked for an extension of time on the contract because of delays largely due to materials rather than labour I believe but it funnily enough because some of the materials we had specified were unusual or European that there wasn't such a backlog on requiring those so that was the biggest problems they've had are with things like mineral wool and plasterboard I think because everybody wants them at the moment and there are backlogs. Skill shortage not really although they did have problems initially sourcing somebody to do the lime plastering because lime is a relatively traditional skill set it's not just cement and we needed it to be lime so that it didn't crack and move but on the whole no I think the difficulties that have happened to the project in terms of supply chain have been more to do with you know the current issues around Brexit or Covid rather than any sort of major structural problems that we've got. Yes I think that's a fair comment. Okay thanks Steph thank you. Thank you very much for that we're just going to go briefly to Miles Briggs with another question and then Elena Whitham and I would just invite you to keep your answers tight. Thank you convener I just wanted to ask a quick question with regards to what evaluations likely to take place to look at how this work can benefit the health of residents specifically you've already touched upon the evaluation period Professor Gibb not taking in winter but I just wondered how that would be maybe also measured. Well thank you for that I think that a significant part of the building performance analysis is exactly about that we're very interested in the internal circulation of air of moisture you know there's obviously an extensive literature it says these things are associated with health problems and I know Chris is of the view that the kind of natural materials that we've used and the decisions not to do certain things like chemically treat things are important parts of trying to improve the health of the building and hence the people inside the building. Chris might have some more to say about that than I have. I think it's key that passive houses is generally considered a comfort strategy so it's about keeping people warm that's the number one issue is keeping people warm when it's cold maintaining the air quality there will be subjective discussions with people but there will also be objective measurement as Ken has said to do with air quality moisture temperature those are the main things but then there are also things like the chemicals the BOCs which we are which we will be looking at as well. Thanks. Thank you and Eleanor. Thank you very much convener it's already been alluded to during this the evidence session this morning that there's going to be tensions between balancing up the needs for climate change being addressed and also Scotland's belt heritage so if we think about that in terms of the planning system how do you think that that's going to affect our ambitions going forward and how do we square those two together I know that's a big question but I'm going to put it out there because I think it's going to be one of the the major issues that we have when it comes to retrofit and our belt heritage thank you I'll go to both of you but we'll start with Professor Gibb thanks. Well yeah I agree it's a it's one of those classic points where there needs to be movement it seems to me and I think in a sense that's stating the obvious I go back to the earlier point about if we're serious about protecting the tenement way of life and its neighbourhood and its wellbeing factors and the things that it does so well as well as the actual building heritage then we have to recognise that there's significant climate change net zero related work that has to be done and there's clearly a significant cost to that but it's a it's a political choice at some level that has to be made which requires a shift in some of the the nostrums that that exist at the moment again I think Chris is probably better placed to discuss this than I am but that's what I'll say yeah Chris if you want to come in yeah the the easiest way to answer it I think is that is what we've done at Newdry Road which is to say that we recognise that the public said the public space the street the the public facing we want to try and retain that as much as we possibly can that limits our ability to reduce the energy consumption so what we've done is we've compensated at that by by insulating at the back so I think the way we've approached it at Newdry Road is the way that strategically makes sense which is to protect the public space visually but to work hard on all those unseen aspects in terms of insulation and covering up and then there are issues with the renewables and where you can put them and so on and so forth how you deal with windows but yes I think the way we did it at Newdry Road is the way forward you keep the front relatively similar but you work on the back and you accept you accept defeat from a heritage point of view at the back of buildings in the courts in the red courts I think that's a reasonable compromise and I think that that generally could have could apply more widely thank you very much thank you for that and I'd like to just actually come on the back of that to ask if there are any other inner fit projects tackling other types of housing stock in Scotland that you're aware of because clearly it's not just going to be tenements there's other other housing stock and maybe go to Professor Gibb on that yeah well again we kind of showcase it in our in our film that we made there's a Queens Crosshousing Association development of multi stories which is inner fit improved by collective architects and they're mentioned in our film and that seems to have been highly successful as well so and it's as radically different from what we're doing as what they did but it's exactly the same principles and being an msp who represents the highlands and islands have more rural areas are you aware of anything happening rurally or have we not gone there yet again I would defer to chris I think okay chris yes we we're working on a number of inner fit projects including you'll be pleased to know a domestic retrofit in Fort William so yes it works at any scale it's worth mentioning that we are also working on retrofit two other standards some of which are less onerous than inner fit and the one that's probably worth drawing your attention to is one called the AECB retrofit standard AECB is association of environment conscious building but they have developed a standard which is less onerous than inner fit in terms of energy efficiency but broader in terms of its remit towards maintenance heritage and health and moisture and that sort of thing and we we will be hopefully undertaking a similar retrofit project in govern hill just i mean 200 yards away to that standard with govern hill housing association that's what I'm hoping will take place and I think that that standard may have broader applicability because it will be slightly easier but with a with a broader remit and that is what you're knowing about thank you for that it's good to know that there are other things it feels like we've got so much work to do here that it's good to hear that there are examples and and also of this other standard thank you for drawing our attention to that as well so that's all we've had time for this morning clearly we could talk more it was very very good to come along and see the building and the work being done and I think yeah I'm I'm hoping that people will have a great home when the project's done so thanks it was good to meet you both thank you we're going to suspend to allow change over witnesses welcome back and we're going to continue taking evidence on retrofitting housing for net zero and we welcome our second panel this morning we have bruth cus cuth brtson he's the chairperson of east ayrshire federation a tenants and of tenants and residents aran hill who's the director of policy and membership from the scottish federation of housing associations brian liske chief executive y altland housing association limited and eric logey who's the chief executive of rural housing scotland thank you for joining us today and we're going to move straight to questions and if witnesses if you wish to respond or contribute to the discussion please put an hour in the chat box to indicate this we only have 45 minutes together unfortunately so we'll probably direct our questions to somebody specific and if you feel like there's something that's not being raised in response to the question please come in but don't feel that you all have to come in because two people have come in it's just because of time clearly we could speak to you all day on on these issues so i'd like to start around the theme of cost and financing and we'd like to ask who would i like to ask actually having said that specificness so i'm going to direct my question initially to aran hill around the do you believe that the scottish government are sufficiently aware of the cost involved with retrofitting homes at a national level thanks convener so i think my starting point for that would be that housing associations are still themselves working to understand the the cost of retrofitting and reaching new standards and we currently have the the energy efficiency standard for social housing version two on the table and some work that we've done at sfha with with changeworks estimates that the cost of that would be about two billion pounds now if you compare that to compare that to scottish government's own figures they say about six billion pounds for the whole sector including local authorities so they're fairly similar estimates what i would say is that when we when we did that work with changeworks that two billion pound investment was estimated to when we reduced fuel poverty by about 25 percent and i think when we look at funding and when we look at the standards that are that are driving that funding it's really important that we align those two things a bit better and we know that in the same way in the same way in which we we build homes funding for energy efficiency measures will be a will be a partnership effort between between government between housing associations and between private lenders i think the question that we probably haven't fully grasped collectively yet is what that balance is between those three partners fairly well established principle when it comes to new development but lending for new development is incumbent on the additional rent that you will make as a result of those new homes being built it's not obvious of that at this point where further revenue will be made from energy efficiency to service the additional lending that will be needed so i think i would point to the work that was done by the zero emissions task force earlier this year which the sfha co-chaired which talked about the need for a sector capacity assessment to look at some of these issues to understand what the balance of funding is to understand how much we can bring in from private private lenders how much government can afford and what we need to see is really to match that ambition that government has with the appropriate level of funding i think that the short answer is probably at the moment we haven't quite seen the level of funding we we need for the ambition that is there but there's still work to do to better and better understand where that's coming from the exact bill and i think to inform that a review of those standards aligning the standards better with fewer poverty targets and as well as efficiency will be really important thank you for that and i'd like to add on to that just kind of adding to that question how can local authorities and housing associations prepare for the scale of the work and the investment ahead and i think i'd like to bring someone else in so maybe bring in bruce cusper cuperson on that and you can pick up any response to the previous question too yes i think this is someone that's got to happen for us to reach zero emissions in social housing but there is examples of local councils and local housing associations and people in the private sector working together during types of retrofit and getting the houses involved like what we were doing in east Asia for quite a week while and there are examples throughout scotland that this system works in areas but i think it will need to be a little more robust and maybe better defined thank you for that and i'm going to go on to a question for Derek Logie and please do put an hour in the chat box if i'm skipping over and you really do want to come in on anything but yeah for Derek are there any specific cost implications for retrofit projects in rural and island areas i'm sure there are i'd love to hear more about that how do these costs compare to each other and is this recognised sufficiently in existing funding well by and large property in rural scotland all there's two main differences one that's older and two it's often in the private sector and a similar 85 percent of buildings are either owned or occupied or in the private rented sector so social housing is really just 15 percent of people who live in rural scotland live in social housing so the measures and the very welcome measures such as ish and all these things are not measures that are reaching rural scotland or reaching 15 percent of the population there and the issues that come with older buildings which are stone built which are perhaps more exposed which are perhaps more have more challenging weather conditions mean that the issues to tackle those are required are more extensive because it's interesting to see that if you look at the level of loft insulation in homes in rural scotland is actually quite high yet the level of extreme fuel poverty in rural scotland is still also extraordinarily high and something like a third of households in remote rural areas are in extreme fuel poverty and that points to the fact that there's measures beyond increasing loft insulation required there's measures which are more expensive which are required such as external wall insulation which is its own problems regarding planning etc internal wall insulation which also has its own problems regarding room sizes and restrictions on those with a lot of older properties aren't necessarily the biggest properties going on so these are all like very expensive measures I was speaking to the development manager of the Isle of Alva yesterday who are renovating six homes there and they are aiming to try and get to D but their ability to do that is limited by the physical constraints of the building but also by costs associated to trying to overcome those for example you know a lot of the lot of those older properties have no space beneath the floors in which to put under full insulation the joists in the ceilings and in the walls are narrow so they can't really put an awful lot of insulation in those and others have an existing concrete floor and they're not going to go to the expense of breaking that out and putting a new one in and they can't put insulation on top of the floor otherwise you wouldn't be able to get into the door into the homes through the door so there's a number more extensive measures that are required and they require a lot more funding and they also require that funding to be they need a lot of navigation around that funding because at the moment it's a bit of an alphabet soup in terms of how you get a hold of funding and where you get it from and so agencies like Tansgal or Alley Energy or the SkyMolcash Energy Advice Service are really important in terms of helping people and pointing people towards getting a hold of the right funding that they require and I think those are essential because I think up to now my impression is that we have been able to spend a lot of money dealing with the low hanging fruit to the stuff that's easier to do and by and large that stuff is those homes that have been in towns and cities. Thank you for that. Yes, I think that that is possibly the case. Brian, I think that you would like to come in on this as well. Yeah, I think that it was a kind of previous question as well on the funding element but the two I think are linked together. I think it is more expensive to build in rural areas if there's no question on that. It's recognised through the new build standard so when we do a new build product scheme the Scottish Government sets a target within that and it also indicates within a kind of locational basis but the increase will be based on tenders from the past. From a Shetland perspective our costs are recognised as being 34 per cent higher than it is on a national basis. We think in realistic terms it's actually probably close to 40 to 45 per cent but that's the figure that's being recognised by the Scottish Government already. The question then comes back down to funding. Your first question was in relation to that. I think that the underlying issue I've got with the funding availability is that zero energy and zero carbon is now clearly seen as a strategic priority by Government but the problem then looks back down to that the funding has not been allocated on a strategic basis. Funding is still being allocated on a bid process and we are then competing against other organisations and the point that Derek Nair with that low hand and fruit is absolutely right. So the Scottish Government for its public money can get more bang for its buck by going into urban areas but it is if you use Scottish Government figures 34 per cent cheaper to do in Shetland but we are in Shetland with the highest wind speed in the country, the highest level of fuel poverty in the country but the cost of the element in doing that work is more expensive and if we are competing against other organisations for that funding whether it's through eco funding whether it's through area based schemes or warmer home schemes we are in the competitive scene. Scottish Government needs to take a strategic priority on the funding element as well as a strategic priority on the targets of the setting. Thank you very much for that. It's good to get the Shetland high wind speed perspective and the higher percentages in terms of costs. I'd like to move over to a new theme on just transition and Eleanor Wittam is going to pick up there. Thanks very much for that convener and I'm going to start with Bruce Cuthbertson from the Stearshire Federation. Now Bruce I know that you love to scrutinise the housing revenue account and how the housing improvement plan fits into that locally and then nationally in terms of the role that you have with the tenant improvement service as well. Do you have a fear that tenants are bearing an undue cost of retrofitting socially rented homes locally and nationally? I think that I should say at this stage that I'm part of a national HRA group and a rent affordability group with the Scottish Government. It differs from place to place but the system itself for the individual is slightly flawed. If we look at rent setting at the moment, it differs slightly from area to area but basically there's a proposal put out to the tenants and it will say that we will do so much capital programme work, so many kitchens and bathrooms, so many central heating systems, so many roofs and so many envelopes on the building and then you pay a choice. I think that this year is one and a half, two and a half per cent above last year's rent and that for the individual you're actually paying for the upgrades to somebody else's house and it could be 10, 15 years before you actually see a saving in your house. Individually, when the EPC comes into this as well, I don't want to jump the gun a wee bit but whatever way we decide to look at this, there's got to be some sort of saving. If we do a certain amount of work, we put insulation in the outside area, make sure the rest of the houses insulate, et cetera, et cetera, we have got to say that if we spend this amount, increase your rent by £2 a week, we will save you £3 a week on your power bills and it's got to go but that kind of happened in the present system so I see poverty getting worse before it maybe starts to get better and I don't really like the view at the moment but I may be wrong. Thanks very much for that Bruce and I'm going to ask now to add in from an SFHE perspective on it. We've already heard from Bruce there and also from Derek with regards to fuel poverty and I'm just wondering how retrofitting and housing for net zero can be delivered in a way that's consistent with a dust transition so perhaps to waden it out a little bit and Aaron I would like to hear your perspective thank you. I don't want to talk exclusively about funding today but I think that some of this does come back to the funding question. Ultimately as a housing association when you're making the level of investment that is required to deliver the energy efficiency measures that we're looking at there's absolutely no question from any housing association I speak to about the commitment to do that and that is the right thing for the environment, for communities and for tenants but we have to find a way to fund it and that either comes through increases in rent or through increases in grant funding and we need to make sure that that balance is right because as Bruce has just said we can't end in a situation where where energy bills come down slightly as a result of energy efficiency measures but rents increase astronomically that is not a position that any housing association wants to be in so we need to get that balance of funding right from government we need to make sure that there is enough grant funding to allow housing associations to make those decisions and to keep rents as low as possible I think the other thing that's important here is is about the impact on energy bills I think we can often assume that investment in energy efficiency will result in lower energy bills when we know that it doesn't always a lot of the assumptions around retrofitting moon tenants from gas boilers to electric heating system and we know that electric costs more so we think that one of the ways you can get around that is the fabric first approach you absolutely have to invest in the fabric of the home first you have to ensure that those properties are as airtight and as energy efficient as possible before addressing the heating systems and what we've seen in previous iterations of funding from Scottish government and this is true across the UK and other parts of Europe as well I don't think it's something that's exclusively happening in Scotland that investment has gone into heating systems we've seen incentives to fit heating systems which might not then work with the footprints of that property or with the energy efficiency of that property as it stands we need to be looking at the whole system to be able to deliver that just transition we need to get the funding right we need to get the staff and it's right we need to get the incentives right he breathed low as it actually genuinely reduced energy bills as a result thank you very much aran thank you and we're going to go to my colleague willy coffee who is joining us online to for the next theme which is public engagement and local communities thanks convener and good morning to everybody in the panel I just wanted to find broadened the question to the wider issue of public awareness public engagement where do you think we are with this now the target for us is to try and get a million houses zero emissions over the next 10 years that's that's over a hundred thousand houses per year between now and then um broadly speaking maybe turn to Bruce first you switch your perspective on the awareness of the public about this whole agenda that we're embarking on here are they signed up to it are they aware of it are they expecting it to be done do they anticipate helping assistance to get there just just a flavour of what you think we need to do to raise public awareness of whole agenda thank you I think with recent events in Glasgow copyright six I think it is in the forefront but I was actually talking to somebody yesterday with us and there is similarities between achieving what we're trying to achieve in Covid in the vaccines you have people that say it doesn't affect them you have people that will if you like to say I'll sign up for the vaccine and see it and the other says various other options so there's a definitely a parallel thing public engagement yeah there's plenty of talks and that's especially on the television in the COP26 actually I think area for area there's got to be conversations and organisations like myself and nationally we've been talking about this for quite a week while so the work is getting out there but I think it's time that we actually got our lead on what's actually going to happen I think we've got to lay out the journey where the stops and I'm aware of the figures of million and it's to some people that's not achievable I was part of the zest working group during the summer and I think it is achievable what it's got to be government led and I'll include the Westminster government in this when it comes to the affordability thing because a lot of the discussion is around affordability the the tax system between gas and electricity has to be looked at if we're trying to get away from gas someone is going to be made to make electricity cheaper and the word someone else that was coming up in the zest was the fact that all this retrofit work was VAT on top of it so in one hand we're looking for grant funding and then we're paying a lot the various organisations are paying a lot of that back in VAT so I think the tax system telling has got to be done to make it more affordable and I think it's not so much that we have to achieve it I think we've got to the phrase just transition has got to take place and it's running about affordability thanks for that Bruce just maybe to the other members of the panel how do we take the public along with us in this this journey the government's intending to set up the national public energy agency hopefully to coordinate a lot of this what kind of work do you think we need to do to engage much more directly with many more of the public to make sure that they participate in this whole agenda if I can if I could just come in on that I think that I think that Bruce's spot on I think in what he said and we have seen I guess this kind of peak of public awareness now around around climate change and around the needs for action I'm still not convinced that at large people have fully understood what that means in terms of individual consequences and the consequences to to homes for example so I think that there's still a journey to go on there it's a really interesting piece of work carried out in the north of england earlier this year by the northern housing consortium and they ran a social housing tenants climate jury and the recommendations from that climate jury are really really interesting the number one recommendation is the work on energy efficiency needs to be done more quickly people's homes people are anticipating that work they want it to be done and they want to see it done really well the majority of the other recommendations are around communication so I think there is a unique role that housing associations can play in that communication that their tenants I think we're probably going to have to see slightly different models of tenant engagement if I'm honest on this stuff you know I think when we think about what the model of tenant engagement has been in the past we have often seen some of the same people some of the same faces engaged in that and this is going to be this is going to have an impact on everybody's home the housing association is going to have to think about how they can deliver slightly different models of engagement how they can have those conversations about what it means there's going to be a degree of education to that and so how does this new heating system work in my home what does it mean in terms of one of your previous witnesses was talking about tenant behaviours in passive house for example in homes that are particularly tight open in the window back heating home I also then think the role of local authorities will be really important we've heard a couple of mentions already about local heating energy strategies and there is a duty within that for local authorities to consult locally and widely with communities and when we think about some of the other types of energy system local heat networks those sorts of things that journey is going to be really really important so there's a long way to go I think but it's something that needs to get the forefront of all of our lines at the moment. Thank you Aaron Bryan and Derek any other comment you could add to this about the wider public engagement agenda and how we improve it? Yeah I think generally well yeah I think would you think it would be honest with the public we need to have that honest conversation because who as you said in million homes offer gas on to zero carbon heat post at the moment is effectively moving that either on to an electric heating system or a districating system now if we move that to an electric heating system you've seen you've all read about the increase in costs of electric heating at the moment but you look at 25 to 28 pence per kilowatt hour for electric as opposed to four pence a kilowatt hour for gas so even if we get a coefficient element along with the heat pump we're not bridging that gap between the two as it stands at the moment the average cost difference between running a house on gas and running a purely on electric is about 1600 pounds per year we need to be honest about it I think the other question we need to kind of erase that point and again it's a question back to government if what it is we're actually trying to achieve is it the zero carbon element because if we move a million homes off a gas and move it on to the districating or move it on to the electric heating that each target we as social landlords have got to try to meet by 2032 as it stands at the moment will get worse in those million homes because it's based on an EPC rating and EPC rating is based on the cost of heating so if we move away from a very cheap cost of heating to an expensive cost of heating EPC rating will get worse so the level of funding required to bring us up to that level again once we move off of that cheap carbon expensive fuel then becomes more and more expensive for either landlord or for government or however that funding matrix then comes back into it thank you Brian Derek a final comment not this point yeah I would just add I think I think it's really important that we invest in in local information provision I think some of the most successful areas which have engaged with the public on energy efficiency and fuel poverty have been those areas where there is a local provision such as in Scannol Calsh with the energy advice service that the Localsh Sky Rising Association run and they do things like even just persuading people to change suppliers you know and helping them work that through and doing things like just paying for paying for the electricity usage on a new supplier for example for a month just to prove that it's more viable but there also help you navigate that you know talked about the alphabet soup of of energy measures and and the the new minister different schemes that you can get involved in I mean I stay in a rural an old house in a rural area and you know I've been quite you know we've got money to help us put in a biomass and various things and move away from oil but you know it takes a lot of effort and a lot of time and a lot of energy to actually do that and you really need somebody holding your hand and I think those local agencies like Tansgall and the Scannol Calsh have been really important in doing that. Thanks very much to all of you for your answers to that issue but to you conveners thank you. Thank you Willie and yeah it was very good to hear those responses. I'm going to move on to some a question from Megan Gallagher but I'm just going to do a little adjustment because we've got 14 minutes left for this session so if we can keep our answers to the point and succinct and come in if you really feel like something has not been raised so Megan. Thank you very much convener and before I ask my question this morning I would like to refer everyone to my register of interest as I am a Serving Councillor at North Lanarkshire Council and my question relates around a rate of pitting and protecting communities because I'm quite interested in the relationship between rate of pitting and protecting the distinctive characteristics of individual places so I would like to ask the panel how do we protect the character of a community and similar to Willie Coffey's question how do we involve communities to make sure that their views are represented and again that element of protection in terms of their community is in place and if I could start with Aaron please. I think you're on Aaron oh gone again oh yeah sorry I've lost my connection briefly there so I might have missed the question okay so Megan could you ask the question again of course I can Aaron it relates to the relationship between retrofitting and protecting the distinctive characters of individual places so I'm wondering how do we protect the character of our current communities and similar to Willie Coffey's question how do we get members of the public and our communities involved in that process so their views are being heard and their love of their community is protected. I say on apologies for the connection issues I think that so I think that there was a response to this earlier from from one of the witnesses about how they've achieved that on the on the tenement building I think that's a fantastic example of kind of protect the public realm and look for innovative solutions the tricky bits that often people can't get into in retrofit really getting into the insulation and kind of thinking about that I also think there's something cultural here about about the approach of of planners and the approach of local authorities Megan maybe you want to pick up with somebody else and then maybe we'll get Aaron back but yeah is there someone else you'd like to ask the question to? Of course and if I could go to Derek please because I'd quite like to hear from a rural perspective as well because of the the makeup of rural communities so if I could ask Derek please yeah I mean I think in terms of the kind of neighborhoods and settlements and communities in a rural perspective the word talked about the kind of how the stock is older and kind of stone built and it requires kind of different measures to to help insulation and some of those are will compromise the the kind of the look of vernacular buildings for example you know you can't necessarily do external wall insulation on those properties and you know the internal wall insulation is is problematic because the rooms can be small and it can take a good good bit of the of the room from you so so actually dealing with those older properties is a real challenge and one that's going to take a lot of expense and perhaps even technological innovation in terms of getting thinner more effective insulation in terms of of communities and working with communities I think that's really important I think communities have been can be at the kind of forefront of this in terms of helping to helping other people in their areas get a hold of all the measures that they're entitled to because I think there's a lot of people sitting in cold damp homes who are not aware of everything that they're entitled to or all the support that's available to them and that's part of why I'm emphasizing the need for kind of local community-based approaches to us. Thank you for that Derek and I believe Brian would like to come in too. Yeah I think there's a few things on there in terms of that particular community and I think one of the things we really look at certainly from a rural perspective up in Shetland is making sure that we have sufficient factors and labourers and everything else that we need to carry out and maintain and carry out the work that we need to try and do. Part of the issue around that was back down to whether or not they're interested in doing this kind of work. The amount and level and value of work that we've done on reprefitting properties in the next 10, 15, 20 years is incredible and I think there is an opportunity there for localised contractors to take advantage of that. Unfortunately the barriers that are currently put in place in relation to achieving those standards required to carry out that work as a result of the funding mechanisms that's in place makes that an attractive option and my worry is that we'll end up in a particularly in a rural perspective having big national contractors coming in to carry out that work on a local basis for us and any benefit that we will see from that level and value of work not being done locally and then that being moved out and basically lost to that local community. I think we can make sure that local community aspect isn't lost to that so I think to me it's making sure we really engage with not just the community but the contractors within that community, find out where the barriers are for them not carrying out the work that they should be doing and finding out whether there's anything that we can do as a group to try and improve that situation. Thank you Brian and I believe that Aaron is back with us. Maybe you'd like to come back in on this and then we're going to move to questions from Paul McLean. Yeah, thanks convener and again apologies to the issues. I think the question I was responding to on planning and on kind of preserving local heritage. I think what I was talking about was kind of the culture of planning departments and the leadership that's going to be required locally here and that's going to be that's going to be enormously important in terms of responding to sustainably. It's really important that we protect the heritage of local communities but it needs to be compromised on both sides so I'm not sure if I got to this bit of my response when I was responding but you know there are stories of planners for example saying that solar PV should be on the other side of a roof to protect the local characteristics that you then lose the solar gain from that and that stops us having the kind of sustainability benefits the energy efficiency benefits that we would want from some of those developments. So there's a bit of education needed I think both in every part of the sector because this is going to require new ways of working it's going to require new technologies and things that we've perhaps not seen before and we won't be familiar with but there's going to have to be a bit of compromise on both sides so we're not always going to get the perfect development we're not always going to get the perfect retrofit but there needs to be a bit of give from planners and from local authorities as well around them. Thank you very much for that response and I'm going to move on to which we already started to touch on but Paul's going to pick up on skills and supply chain. Thanks convener it's just really to build on the point that Brian made and I think it's really important the point you made he said obviously that the next 10 to 15 years the scale of what we're looking at is huge but I think it's really important to reiterate there are massive opportunities on the back of this as well so I think one of the questions I wanted to ask was around about it's building on what Brian said around about do we have sufficient scale labour at the moment to scale up and what is the Government and I suppose councils and I think you mentioned as well Brian about your own housing association need to do to make sure we scale up that work and I suppose it then comes back to the point around about do we have a pipeline of work it's there to attract business in and so on. Just to add one final bit I think there's been discussions around about local heat and energy strategies we had in the previous panel I want to ask around about would it be easier for example for each local authority to be looking to plan in that regard as part of a broader national picture and Aaron I'll probably come to yourself if that's okay and I'm probably Derek from a from a rural point of view I know Brian's touched on that but Aaron if yourself if you wouldn't mind just open up. Yeah thanks I think on the supply chain more widely there are issues with both skills and materials so on the skills point we've known we've known this opportunity is coming for a long time but we don't yet quite know exactly what that opportunity looks like and I think that means that the colleges for example and the local education providers haven't yet been able to kind of make the commitment to the skills that we are going to need and so there's kind of this opportunity all on the horizon but we haven't quite got there we know that there are fundamental skills which whatever heating system we land on whatever retrofit method we land on we will need so plumbers electricians for example let's make sure that we are planning for those let's invest in that education and get people on to those courses and there will be other kind of accessory jobs around that which we don't yet know what they look like and we'll just need to be fleet of foot and agile in responding to that as they come there's a specific issue around skills and I can see Brian wants to come in so I'm sure he will cover this around as 2035 which is the standard effectively for assessing the whole house and and the efficiency of it and how we respond to that that qualification is not always available everywhere it is expensive and that could potentially provide blockages to us delivering some of this work so we need to see some investment in that in the short term to get people past 2030 qualified and get that understanding out on the wider supply chain I will say and I'm not going to go into too much detail on this at the moment it's really difficult at the moment the supply of materials not just in terms of costs costs are up about 20% 25% year on year and that's kind of that's the whole market but also access because now we are seeing suppliers not being able to provide those materials we are seeing lead in times really extended and so action to ease that is going to be really really important as we're going to be seeing demand for new materials new technologies and that's only going to go get worse if we don't shorten those supply chains if we don't invest in bringing those materials into the country where we need them. Aaron just one quick supplementary you mentioned about skills and workforce do we need a national a national workforce planning strategy around about this particular issue he touched on everybody's aware of it but do we need a national strategy around about this and you've you very briefly sorry so yeah so I'm going to be working in Scotland for a couple of months so I don't feel like I know the education system well enough to perhaps comment on that but I think it does need to be driven by government both nationally and locally thank you and I think Brian wanted to come in on this yeah it was the past 2035 issue that Aaron can raise there I think that's a really important issue today so that's got to touch on them and we just answer past 2035 is now the standard that we got to do all retrofit works to as of June 2021 so any government schemes funding schemes are now all linked to past 2035 that requires any staff that you have carrying out retrofit works to that standard to be really qualified training only became available in scotland in october to be qualifying in past 2030 so despite it coming in as a requirement from June training is only available from october onward so we're well behind to begin with in terms of getting the staff up to speed and accredited to carry out that work as a requirement to get staff up to what the classifies in sdq level six now the belief is that the report granted from government is that will take up to 200 hours per person to get to that level of qualification that's a significant amount of time as a company we're losing somebody to do that kind of level of training somebody's basically been doing that same work now could be for the last 20 or 30 years so the allowance allows for a ratio of one accredited person for every four on site but when you're working in rural areas most of the contractors that are carrying out this work are one or two man bands which requires both the members of staff to be doing it and if they're doing 200 hours worth of work they're not actually able to work as a company during that period so it is putting people off we are seeing contractors leaving the sector in terms of the use to do breakfast for work they're not doing that anymore it's too complex it's too expensive and they can't afford to do it so they're picking up cheaper and easier work breakfast kitchens extensions whatever else it might be and moving away from that breakfast market and i think that's something we're really trying to get on top of in how do we support contractors and make this an easier an easier route um we've seen a massive drop out rate as well through past 2035 from the applicants applying for homeowners there is a requirement if you're doing any kind of fabric insulation or airtightness work to your house and that includes kind of draft proofing or cavity wall insulation all the stuff that was touched on in your first session from Gillwood's if you do that you've got to increase the ventilation to the property now what they're saying is each window needs to have a minimum i'm getting technical now about 10 000 square millimetres per window of ventilation if you're doing any of these types of work you also need to ensure there's through ventilation in the house there needs to be a minimum of 15 to 20 mil air gap below each internal door the only thing you're doing certainly there is like the shetland if you're punching holes in your outside fabric is you're creating air moving into the house by cutting down the internal doors you're creating drafts within that house so the ability to actually you know you can insulate that wall as much as you can you can insulate as much draft proofing as you want you punch any kind of hole into the fabric of that building in the area like shetland you're just increasing the draft measures that's required in that property and what we're saying is a lot of the public are saying i don't want that i'm not accepting that in my house in the dropping out at a very early stage so we're saying a massive reduction of people wanting to actually take part because of past 2035 but actually what we're saying is a huge drop off for the contractors carrying out that work as well thank you thank you very much for that kind of reality stark reality check brian i'm going to move on to the next and final theme on infrastructure kind of fitting and if anyone else wanted to come in on anything this is we'll be we'll spend about five minutes here and if you need to tuck something else into your responses because you weren't able to come in earlier you're welcome to do that but myles we want to pick up thank you thank you convener good morning to the panel yes i wanted to ask about the questions around infrastructure here in edinburgh the panel may be aware of the statutory repair scandal which we've seen in previous times and so i wanted to specifically start by asking what problems might arise when trying to look towards retrofitting mixed tenure blocks of flats and does the panel believe that the heat in building strategy actually provides sufficient clarity around the Scottish Government's approach to that multi-tenure which we've seen buildings across scotland especially tenements i'll maybe start with aran and then if anyone wants to come in yeah thanks for that question i think i don't feel entirely well placed to kind of comment on on the mixed tenure elements a bit but i think and i'm not fully aware of the edinburgh issue previously but i think that this is something here in that Government's Government's focus in heat and building strategy certainly in the early years of that strategy is very much on social housing and i think that that is an admission that social housing is the easier bit of the market to do because government have the levers they have the funding mechanisms and they have that relationship with with social landlords and i've highlighted a few challenges today we think hopefully articulate just how difficult that bit of the market is going to be but if that's difficult then the homeowners and leaseholders and others are going to be even more challenging and i don't think we've at all grasped that nettle yet i think there will be lots of learning from what social landlords do lots of learning from the engagement with tenants and to engagement with communities and local heat and energy strategies you need to inform that but there's a lot more to do i think what's important is i said in my last answer it will be it will be times where work that is done is not perfect and it's important that government have mechanisms in place to address that so only emergency redress schemes for example where perhaps technologies fail that those sorts of things will be will be really really important there's a lot of learning to do before we get there does anyone else want to come into that question or brian and then bruce what are we saying in the heat and building strategy i think it has been recognised that the complexity around all the 10 year blocks targets being set to achieve most of standards is 2033 they've recognised that that might not be possible in multi 10 year blocks and they've extended that through to 2045 so if they have it recognised that complexity they've also said within the document that they will develop a bespoke regulating standard for mixed 10 year mixed use buildings so i think we need to maybe push for that i think the earlier we can get that the better because obviously as you can allude it to miles this is probably one of the most complex areas around zero carbon is dealing with our kind of mixed 10 year blocks of flats and we need that regulation that we're going to have to deal with that now sooner rather than later so we can start planning and bruce yeah mixed 10 year blocks are a problem today we're in a problem for the last 10 years i'm starting looking out my window the new i scoot that a housing scheme that's been done up except for maybe 12 or 12 or 14 houses which creates a problem and i'm talking about blocks of wha where the council doesn't have owners that that's the problem the tenants living in those houses cannot get the upgraded work to save them money in the fuel bill at present because to replace the insulation in the building to do they've got to tie into a neighbor's house in the annoy and there's got to be some sort of aim similar to the missing share scheme where if money is the problem and in a lot of cases the reason why the work hasn't been done is because the people can't afford that so there's got to be some sort of grant funding or some way that when a private residence could get the work done on a later stage they could claw back the money where maybe the government could cover a certain amount of that and they'd both get it in the share of the housing it would make the communities look better and i think that's an opportunity when you put the questions earlier on about community coming into it i think this is an opportunity to bring communities closer together there is technical problems there will always be technical problems but allow the community to be part of the solution to the problem thanks for that bruce that's a really interesting point and something which i think we all want to pursue especially around you know interest free loans potentially for people who own their properties but i also wanted to ask and i'll maybe bring Derek in on this point and you can cover both the first and this question is whether or not the current planning and building standard systems are helping to facilitate this retrofitting activity and i'll maybe bring Derek in so now you had your hand up there yeah i had my hand up i was kind of i was trying to shoehorn another answer into that previous one which was regarding support for the for the rural private rented sector because i think it's really important that we actually deal with this and we haven't talked about it at all in that the kind of the level of support that's available is is minimal and i think that's it's going to have it's having consequences right now which is the the fact that you know private landowners and landlords are unable to to afford the the work that's required to bring properties up standard and so they can't recoup that through rents so rents become unaffordable so what's happening is that older stock and other stock in remote areas has been sold off or it's being converted into short term lets so we have a kind of hollowing out of the rural private rented sector going on and i think this you know the the advent of airbnb and short term less and things is encouraging that anyway and i think what from the other side of things the fact that the pressures on rural private sector to to bring the properties up to standard and someone something like 63 percent of properties in that sector of epcs of fng so it's really essential that they brought up the standards but they they kind of need support because all that's going to happen is that their the properties will move out of that sector and it's a vital sector within within rural scotland where social landlords are you know a lower percentage of the of households than anywhere else so we need we need the the provision that's brought in by the private rented sector because particularly for local business employing people or schools bringing the teachers or doctors finding somewhere to to live or even chief executives of housing associations trying to find somewhere to live so you know that's the point that was actually worn in there you did it well is anyone else wanting to come in on that second question i asked i can't see anyone else on the screen at the minute no it doesn't look like it if not i had a tiny final question which was with regards to unintended consequences and i wondered specifically to maybe go back to some of the points you've raised today Derek with regards to rural fuel poverty and you mentioned 15 percent of rural scotland living in social housing so you know in terms of addressing these issues is going to be more difficult i wondered if the for example the impact which the recent decision ministers have taken to halt the installation of energy efficient oil and LPG heating systems that's clearly going to have an impact and doesn't present many alternatives for people to look towards when they're off grid and so i wondered if the panel had any specific concerns around that or issues they wanted to touch upon maybe bring Derek back in on that and if anyone else wants to well yeah i mean i kind of i sat for for a time on the rural fuel poverty test force and we spent a lot of time talking about kind of transmission charges in the northern scotland and brellustine i think that's you know a big consequence of moving towards a more electric based heating systems but at the same token we really shouldn't be installing oil boilers anymore we need to look towards alternatives we need to to either either buy a mass or ones which are on your source heat pumps and things although those demand high levels of insulation in order to work more effectively so i think i'd be a retrograde i think it's a retrograde steps to to support the installation of of oil oil based systems i think we need to try and work around ways in which we can make electrical systems more more cost effective to the people who are using them which demands better insulation in buildings and more more investment in that thanks Derek and i think brian wants to come in on this as well yeah no i think it's a very pertinent question to be honest at the moment somebody asked a question before about a just transition and i think this kind of underlines part of the thing we need to be conscious of is why is this just is it just that the ruling areas can't access what would be a relatively cheap form fuel when urban areas are still allowed to install gas boilers so you're right we can't install oil and lbg systems now in rural areas where that made up about 50 percent of the install installs that are being carried out but if you're doing that in an urban area that is on gas you can still install a gas boiler where's the justness in that gas is currently four pence a kilowatt hour a 74 electric is 25 28 pence a kilowatt hour the equivalency of oil is about 68 pence a kilowatt hour so to not allow that access to that oil based system and you know Derek's right we shouldn't but the reality is given the cost unless we can deal with that cost we're putting in systems that are simply not affordable for people to use and while we're still allowing gas to be used why are we not still allowing these other systems it's unconstitutional to me that one system in rural areas where you don't have the choice is not being allowed the same choice as somebody in that urban area i think one thing to follow on behind that is to be conscious of and i understand that it's not within the scottish government watch parliaments purview is the cost of the the tariffs themselves if you take an electric car if you look at your electric bill that you get and like i said it's currently about 25 pence a kilowatt hour is about the cheapest one you will get 24% of that bill goes towards what you call environmental and social costs that's the payment that comes off of that that goes towards funding eco project if you take the gas bill 1.8% of that bill goes towards environmental and social costs we already recognize that scotland 97% of our electric grid is renewable but we're still applying a 24% charge against electric systems fund decarbonisation of systems when gas is recognised as being the high carbon cost heating system only gets a 1.8% charge applied to it if we remove that element from electric heating you would knock 67 pence a kilowatt hour off your electric bill now that still wouldn't bring it into the purview of the cost of gas or oil but it brings it back down to somewhere that's probably a bit more affordable where it is at the moment and i would again within that is having that conversation with the UK government try and make it a more equitable position recognising that electric is the future in relation to zero carbon heating thanks very much for for that answer brian actually i had made a note to get a bit more detail on exactly that point that you raised and i think that that certainly as you say we don't have it's not within our our powers to handle that but i think we do need to start pressing on the UK government to start looking in a different direction in terms of that so i think we've come to an end clearly we could chat on about this really important issue and very challenging issue for a lot longer but i just want to say thank you very much for joining us this morning and i'm going to now briefly suspend the meeting to allow for change over a panel welcome back we continue taking evidence on this very important issue of retrofitting housing for net zero and i'd like to welcome our third and final panel for this morning steven good who's the chief executive of construction scotland innovation centre elizabeth leighton who's the director of existing homes alliance scotland and professor lauri mackleroy who's professor of architecture at the university university of strathclyde thank you for joining us this morning and we will move straight to questions and witnesses if you would like to respond or contribute to the discussion please add an hour in the chat box to indicate this we have about 45 minutes this morning and what we're trying to do is direct our questions specifically to somebody but do come in but i may not always take you just in the interest of time so i'd like to start and we're going to i don't know if you saw the panel or previous panel but we're going to run through the same theme so we're going to start with cost and financing and i'd be interested in hearing from you whether you believe that the scotland government are sufficiently aware of the costs involved with retrofitting homes at a national level and i think i would start with steven good on that one thank you convener i think certainly from the conversations that i've taken place already today and from the work that we are aware of there's a building body of work around the costs that are involved in retrofitting but i think we are at a point where there's still a lot to do to understand the clearly examples from the new road project that was tailored earlier there's a lot more to understand just exactly how some of the more complex aspects of the aspects that are impacted by perhaps planning requirements and various different aspects are are actually going to be considered in the round from a cost point of view and then the other aspect of cost i suppose that we are focused on i suppose that innovation centre is around that issue of skills and upskilling and how do we develop the competencies and capabilities across what is going to have to be a much much broader workforce in this area going forward so there's some there's some costs i suppose we describe as the sunk costs to build that capability across the industry that we need to do significant investment in and then yeah i suppose and other members the panel will be better placed to address some of this but i know a lot of the practical project activity that's on the way at the moment needs complemented i think by perhaps a more strategic approach maybe to the pilot project so the early pathfinder projects that we are seeing coming online at the moment and we need a really comprehensive review process i suppose of all those in both domestic and non-domestic to be able to build a much clearer picture of where those costs are actually going to sit as opposed to where perhaps the perception is around really sit at the moment. Thank you and perhaps i could bring in Laurie McElroy. I would agree with Stephen and i also start in on the previous panel i think that one of the main issues around funding is that there is a lack of coordination between what happens with private homeowners and private renters and the social sector. I think it was Bruce who was speaking earlier in the previous session about the fact that quite often you end up in a situation where there's one household blocking a whole block of for example foreigner block flats or other houses from being retrofitted and we really need to put a bit of effort into looking at these blockers and bottlenecks. I think it's really important that we also that we go in once and we do a full job a full whole house retrofit and we do that well. I think that one of the problems that we've had in the past is that there's a pressure on for example on local authorities and social landlords to do as many as possible as quickly as possible and one of the problems that we have then is that we have unintended consequences of things not being done well or things being partially done and then i need to revisit which is actually a really inefficient way of doing it so i think although there is awareness within the Scottish Government of what the real cost is but there's a lack of co-ordination of activity around making sure that this happens in a logical manner to meet. I think that getting fewer done well is more important than getting done as many as possible, as cheaply as possible and this is where a lot of our efforts are focused at the moment is maybe something that Elizabeth might pick up on. Thank you. I believe we might have lost Elizabeth for a moment so I'm going to continue. I'm going to ask another question to Laurie. I'll keep with you. I'm curious to know what you think about private financing. Will that be required to roll out retrofitting at a national scale? Yes, it definitely will be required. When you look at all the figures and I think that the Government is quite open about the fact that there is a certain amount of money available from Government but it will cost very much more. I don't have the figures to hand at the moment but it's a factor of tens and even 100 more to do the full job that needs to be done so we need to look at private financing. I know that there's a lot of talk about green finance out there but we don't seem to have all the ducks in a row, so to speak, in terms of what I think is really important is that, if, for example, we're going into an area where it's mixed tenure, we need to be looking at all housing together and we need to be able to offer ready-made packages that owner occupars to make it as easy as possible for them to opt in because at the moment it's too easy for them to opt out because it's too complex. I think that we'll come on to it later but there is a nervousness out there about the fact that all of this might not necessarily save people money. It will, in most cases, make people more comfortable in their homes but it won't necessarily save them money if we transition immediately to low-carbon heating. I've got another question that might be for you, Laurie, but also maybe Stephen can come in on that while we're waiting for Elizabeth to come back in. Given the relatively high upfront costs of some retrofitting measures with long payback periods, do you believe that financial support is currently in places that are adequate? If not, what is further required? We've touched on that already, but what do we need to signal for things to move, things to get things in a row? What do we need to be doing there? Sorry, I've lost the thread of the question because it morphed in something else. Could you repeat the first part of the question for me? Yes, sure. It says about the high upfront costs of retrofitting measures with long payback periods. Do you believe that financial support currently in place is adequate? No, I don't really. I think that, for example, there's a change coming in some of the schemes that will actually reduce the amount of money available for retrofitting measures due to changes at a Westminster level. Rather than a percentage of the costs, they're reducing it to something like £5,000 towards costs of installing, for example, heat pumps. I think that we're throwing everything at the moment at one or two technologies when energy efficiency is the first and foremost thing that we should be doing, because the new innovations and technologies won't work unless the housing is insulated to the level where it requires the minimum amount of energy. We need to focus on getting the insulation done. I'm not saying that we do it first and then go and look at the heating systems, but we have to make sure that we're avoiding unintended consequences by retrofitting homes that are already in the best condition that they can be before we install new energy systems. Brian was talking earlier about the cost of gas compared with electricity, and there's a massive difference at the moment partly due to tax, which could be dealt with by Westminster at least in part, as Brian said, but unless we can reassure the public that their energy costs won't escalate, then we have to make sure that we make their homes as energy efficient as possible in the first place, if that makes sense. Absolutely, thank you. The fabric first approach but not just fabric everything together, as you said in your previous response, and I just wanted to welcome back Elizabeth. Yes, technology still needs to be finessed here, so maybe I'll Elizabeth with you coming back. I was asking in the question about the high upfront costs of retrofitting measures with a long payback period and whether the financial support currently in place is adequate. Just from your experience of the existing homes alliance, do you have any thoughts on that? Yes, thank you very much and apologies for connection issues. The Government is aware of in the round what the costs are, and they are massive. They are huge. It is a big challenge and we have some support in place for the self-funding market, which is very welcome and much more than is in place south of the border. That will have to increase over time if we are going to achieve the numbers, as was said in an earlier panel, where it will have to be about 100,000 homes a year on average that are upgrading. The Government has its own target of a million homes to be net zero emissions heating by 2030. We think that there should also be an increase of support in the fuel poor programmes, fuel poverty programmes, former homes Scotland and the area-based schemes, because they will have to deliver, as was said, a whole house approach fabric as well as zero emissions heating. That is more cost per property and there is also a principle in the heat building strategy that there is a principle, a promise, I like to call it, of no detriment that nobody is going to be worse off as a result of that upgrade to their property. They should not be, they should be in a warm and affordable to heat home that is healthier for them. We also need new models that will accelerate the pace of retrofit. We have been working with changeworks on a report that looks at models of collective purchase, bulk buying, payment plans, community ownership and third party ownership. Different ways of going faster with neighbourhoods of homes that can be taken forward as a group that would be more efficient and cost effective for everyone. Those are a few ideas about how we can look at the question of who pays and make it a fair transition. Thank you very much for that. I am going to bring in Steven on that as well and then we are going to move on to our second theme, which is just transition. Steven, you wanted to come in. Thank you, thank you, convener. No, just two very grief related points and I would entirely agree with Laurie's position around the strategy. I think that having a whole-house retrofit plan that might be implemented in stages but it is a plan that is consistent with what needs to be done to that property or that collection of properties is absolutely key. The progress towards that is something that could be managed or could help the affordability of the upward cost aspect of it. It is not necessary—there is not necessarily—everything needs to be done at once but the plan has to be delivered in a way that is affordable. The two parts that are relevant in the context of affordability up front costs and the long-term payback were touched on in the previous session. The issue around that and the balance of that seesaw between incentivisation at the moment to new-build over retrofit. I think that a seesaw has to swing back in a more equitable way towards supporting retrofit more adequately. Also, the issue of surveyors and house prices and valuations potentially needs to be considered in the context of whether it is a business association or a private landlord or a private owner. The investment that they are potentially going to make in decarbonising their home needs to be a equivalent of recognition in the valuation of that property. If we have a streetwear on property, it has been retrofitted at the cost of £20,000 or £30,000 perhaps. Are we having those conversations to make sure that that is reflected in the on-going value of that property in the future? That is one of the areas where, if that was factored in, it was more understandable and there was that recognition at some point down the line. If you were to sell your property, for example, of your homeowner, I think that that would encourage more people to make the investment because they recognise that they might get some return on that investment. Thank you very much for raising that. That is a very interesting point. We are going to move on to the just transition theme, and Eleanor Witton has questions for that. Thank you very much, convener. A few of the questions that I had to ask have already been answered in your previous question, so I am going to slightly change my question a little bit to reflect that. I would like to direct it to Stephen. We have heard a lot about the issues in terms of the burden of costs on either socially-rented tenants or owners and the long payback time and perhaps even the fact that measures might not reduce bills down for individuals. I suppose that the question I have is whether or not, or what actual opportunities and innovation you can see in terms of just transition in terms of retrofit and offering in the country as a whole. So Stephen, just to put that to you, if you can talk about that, thanks. Yeah, not sure. I mean, not surprised for persons around the innovation centre, because I think that there are huge opportunities around innovation and around retrofit in a whole number of different areas. So from the development of local supply chains and the development and innovation around new materials in new processes, we have heard previous sessions around innerfit and passive house and very different recognised standards that can be achieved, the reference to the quality control aspects of it that can be delivered through things like past 2035 and 2038 for non-dynastical buildings, I think. There are huge opportunities to really invest in building the capability across our workforce in the built environment. Around the huge task that we have ahead of us, I guess, in terms of retrofitting our existing buildings. That, in the context of a just transition, I think, makes the built environment and construction industry and related supply chain parts a hugely attractive place for other industries, perhaps, that are transitioned away from what they do to recognise that there is a real opportunity in the built environment. We need the transferable skills that will come from industries such as oil and gas to help us to innovate around the products, processes, systems and finance models in all the different areas where we know. Again, a very simple point that we are supposed to make is that we already have a lot of the really good innovations that are already available to us. We just need to deploy them at scale. Again, to previous panel members that have spoken this morning, we need to prove in evidence that those systems are capable of delivering the sort of improvements that we want, but we need to stop, I think, a constant cycle of pilot projects. I guess there is a point at which we need to do the pilot programme that aims all pilot programmes, I suppose, in a simple way to think about it, and then we move to a mass deployment and scale up. In a just transition sense, I think, creates a huge number of opportunities to develop the workforce and attract new talent into the sector as well, because they see it as a sector that is really up in its game around tackling the climate crisis and providing solutions. I think that that is where the built environment being a big part of the problem needs to be a massive part of the solutions as well. Thanks very much for that, Stephen. I wonder if Elisabeth, if you have anything to add from an existing Homes Alliance perspective on that? Yes, thank you. I agree with some research that shows that it is going to be tens of thousands of jobs, up to 20,000 jobs a year, that could be created out of a large-scale retrofit programme, looking at both the retrofitting for fabric but also the zero emissions heat side of things. Definitely a huge opportunity, but along with that comes the issue that we have to plan to support the reskilling, the upskilling of the workforce, so that they are not just in the central belt. They are not coming from south of the border, but we are having those jobs created and sustained all over Scotland, so that we are winning that just transition. The heat and building strategy has a plan in terms of supply chain in there, but that really needs careful monitoring to make sure that we are matching the demand that is going to be built up alongside with the jobs and the skills in the right places. I was pleased with what Stephen said about innovation, and we have a lot of the solutions now that can be deployed. We have manufacturers in Scotland who can expand like Mitsubishi, and there are other manufacturers of heat pumps that are considering moving an operation up here for manufacturing, as well as the installation. That is another evidence of where they see the opportunities in Scotland because we are further ahead with the retrofit agenda than in England. Part of that story has to be getting our regulations in place, because until the supply chain is convinced that the Government is going to regulate for standards of both fabric and zero emissions heating, they will not make their move. However, as soon as they are certain that those standards are coming and the heat and building strategy promises a consultation in summer of 2022, it is difficult for them to make those investment decisions. I would like to see the Government be much more forthcoming about the targets that they have set in the strategy and to work with business about how they can make their investments to meet the demands that they are projecting alongside the standards that will come for all sectors of housing, not just the social sector, not just private rented but for owner-occupied as well. That would be a huge game changer. We are going to move on to our third theme, which is about public engagement in local communities. I would like to bring in Willie Coffey, who is joining us online. I thank you again, convener, and good morning to everybody. I wonder if I could just ask you for your perspective on the wider issue about public engagement and awareness of the whole agenda. If you were listening to the previous panel, you may have heard me say that the target is a million homes in the next 10 years. It is about 100,000 homes per year that we are expecting to deliver zero emissions and heating systems for. What do you think we are in terms of the public awareness of that? What might the role be for the national public energy agency in helping us to get there over the course of that 10 years? Who will be Stephen Winf like to kick off? Sure, I certainly can do that. I think that we are at a really interesting point on the back of, for example, COP26, the awareness that the couple of years in the lead-up to that and the focus on Scotland through that experience. We have a time-bound opportunity at the moment to really engage on the back of those big international events to capitalise on the public's interest in that space. There is significant increased awareness, I believe, around the climate and wider natural crisis that we are facing. I think that it would be a real missed opportunity if we do not capitalise on that engagement with communities, with individuals, to really help to raise awareness in one aspect, to raise knowledge and understanding and to build that appetite across communities, as I touched on, to really think about innovative ways in which we can take that interest and that appetite to do the right thing and really turn that into mechanisms that we can use to deliver the right kind of impact and at a scale of pace that we have never seen before. Some of those ingredients, some of those things that have happened in the recent history, have sparked an interest in this area that we have never seen before, so I think that that is hugely positive. I think that the agency will have to play a vital role in that transformation of here's what good might look like and here's the challenge that it faces us into. Here's how we get involved in doing things in a way that we can all contribute as citizens are supposed to do, and that for me is probably one of the—shouldn't be mentioned at the context of my last answer—but that aspect of the commitment that people are going to be asked to make towards their own contribution to help and solve the climate crisis is one where, yes, there's an individual aspect to it, but there's a kind of citizen aspect to this, as members of communities, I think can work incredibly well together when we're given the right sort of framework to work within and that's where things like the agency could potentially set up really good frameworks that local communities, interested people, can have conversations with perhaps—I know from family members—some people are just not engaged in this topic, despite me boring them over every opportunity I get about it, but some people are just not as engaged in it in others, and I think it's that conversation that needs to happen. I think that the public awareness campaign, everything you would want to do if you were trying to push out a massive campaign and just been through 18 months of massive campaigning around Covid, we need to take the same sort of approach and almost make sure that no stones are left uncovered in terms of how people can have those conversations. Thank you, Stephen. Elizabeth, then, Laurie, perhaps? Yes, I'm really excited about this because I think, you know, the commitment that they do have for a public engagement strategy, but they need to go big and it's something that we have called for in the Scottish budget, that there needs to be a significant dollop of cash put towards a large-scale engagement programme that isn't just a top-down mass communications effort, but it's really tailored and it's supported by the local advisory organisations that we heard about in the previous panel that are absolutely so critical to making this happen because they're the trusted credible communicators on the ground who are really going to convince people that, yes, it's a good thing to do and how you do it. We're in a great position in that we have Home Energy Scotland already and an independent national advice service, but it has to be, again, hugely scaled up, and they have a network of partners on the ground. Gats need to be filled so that every piece of geography of Scotland is covered by that partnership network with multi-year funding, so it's down to mouth depending on a grant from a charity here or there. We need a customer journey that, from the start of engagement, right all the way through to making sure that the person knows how to use their system and that it's actually using and if it's working and if it's not working, they know where to go to get redress, so there's trust in taking forward that retrofit statement's point. They know that they're adding value to their house, not risking it, so we think that those pieces together, the national energy agency, will play a careful part, but we can't sit by and wait for that to be created. We have to take that forward in tandem with our existing delivery and advice infrastructure so that that gets ramped up in this next year and really gets people excited about how their home is going to be a nicer, warmer, more comfortable place to live. I agree with everything that's been said so far, but I think that there's a general awareness of the fact that we need to do something, but people expect someone to do it for them. Those who want to push ahead are not always clear about where to go. I know that Home Energy Scotland does a great job, but even as someone who works within the industry, I don't find that organisations like that are accessible enough to the general public. Even if someone wants to put a heat pump into the house, they don't know where to go, they don't know what funding is available, so we need to have a much wider, more general campaign around that, even through the national energy agency to set up some network of local champions within communities and ways of spreading the word. We have to make it as easy as possible for people to get involved. I know that, for example—I know that this is an anecdote, but I know that in the street where my mother lives, she lives in an ex-local authority house—the understanding of what people who were with the local authority were going to get in terms of an upgrade and how long people who were in their own homes had to wait to join the party seemed to me to be ridiculous, and then one company came in and then another one came in. Eventually, my mum had her house upgraded, but the point was that it should all have been done seamlessly. She shouldn't have known that there was a difference between what was happening with her and what was happening with others. I think that we need to make it easier, but I also think that we need to raise awareness, but not from a top-down perspective, to take people along with us. I know that that is not easy, but I also think that funding plays a big part in that. As soon as people become worried about funding and worried about being asked to do something that they do not think they can afford to do, they will back off, whereas they need to get them through the door so that they can find out what the opportunities are. Thank you for that, Lorie. Everybody is really interesting and helpful answers. Thank you for that. Back to you, convener. Thank you, Willie. We are going to move on to another theme, local communities, and a question from Megan Gallagher. Thank you, convener, and good morning, panel. You might have heard from the last panel that I am quite interested in the relationship between retrofitting and protecting the distinctive characters of individual places. How do we protect the character of a community whilst implementing retrofitting? How do we involve communities to make sure that they are behind the planning that is involved in retrofitting? I think that one of the first answers that comes to mind is that, by retrofitting, we avoid demolition in destroying communities. The conversations that were had before the cost benefits of doing a whole house retrofit and taking a whole life approach to it means that we are saving money in the long run and there are all the co-benefits in terms of wellbeing, community cohesion and resilience. That is the first benefit of doing a retrofit in the first place and doing it in a way that takes the whole house approach so that it is fit for purpose in terms of our net zero future. That investment is well spent going forward. A lot of the area-based schemes can offer us lessons of involving the community where research has been done to show that communities are proud of their neighbourhood. It looks good and people want to live there and they say that it has improved their health and wellbeing. I think that the local heat and energy efficiency strategies, if well enough resource, should be able to work with local groups, local development trusts, community organisations to involve people in the decision making about what is the right approach in their community, those models of how they would pay for it. How can we do that in a way that we can perhaps take it on as a community asset or we can arrange a collective purchase? What is the right solution for us? That would again be a way of engaging people with the transition that is in a much more positive way. However, I mentioned that word resource. It means that local authorities are going to need the resource and the capacity to develop and then implement those local heat and energy efficiency strategies. I think that we are all aware that they are pretty thin on the ground and so that again is something that we called for in the budget that resourcing has provided. I agree with what Elizabeth Sehran said. We have been working with some local authorities where that is their approach, where they have a strong community and they do not want to uproot that community. They are focusing on improving the existing area, even in homes where the homes are really in quite a poor state. However, if they can, in any way, retain the social cohesion in that community, they are doing that. One of the ways is for whoever the housing is owned by to speak to tenants and homeowners in the area to look at different approaches that are appropriate to their lifestyles and to have a much more engaged approach. One of the dangers with retrofitting of existing homes is that people are often told—one of the lines that we hear a lot is that the occupants need to be taught how to live in their home. That is a ridiculous statement to me, but it is a bit of a misnomer or a misunderstanding of the fact that if people are having a home that they have lived in for 20 or 30 years retrofitted, then whoever is doing the work should be learning about how the home is used and how people live in the home at the moment, so that it is as easy as possible for them to get the most out of the retrofitted home as possible. As I said, some local authorities are already doing that. There is also quite a bit of work going on in Ayrshire and Dumfries and Galloway on looking at health benefits. That is another thing that can be used as a lever because there are clear records beginning to marriage of the health benefits of living in a warm, dry home compared with the state that people were living in before and reduced admissions to hospitals. There is a lot around that from a community perspective that the word on the benefits of all of this needs to be spread more widely. I am happy to pass back to your shelf, convener. We are going to move on to some questions from Paul McClellan on skills and supply chain. Thank you, convener. Can you be touched on around local heat and energy strategies as well in that regard? I will come on to a question on that. I was really just wondering about how can the Scottish Government and officials and councils, in addition to industry, support the development of the necessary skills to upscale retrofit work? It is establishing a pipeline as well. We heard from the previous panel and about some contractors moving away. The need to supply the pipeline to make sure that that happens. Elizabeth, you will probably come to yourself first of all if that is okay just to open up. Yes, as I was saying earlier that needing that certainty through the regulation but also with the local heat and energy efficiency strategy is going to tell people in a sense what the destination is. Until they know that, people and often the supply chain will be reluctant to move. The faster we can get those done and we have encouraged the Government local authorities to start implementing those that have already been developed because there are some that have been done in the early stages. On the supply chain, there is an interesting example, the heat pump sector deal, where the Government has been working with industry, in terms of preparation to meet those targets. What do they need from Government having that conversation? I think that their interim report is out, final to be out soon, but it would be very interesting to hear how the Government responds to that. If there is scope to do similar types of sector deal arrangements or at least informal arrangements with other parts of the industry and find out how programmes like the area based programmes could be improved to allow them to make more investment going forward, multi-year funding, multi-year arrangements that they are delivering on those schemes, I am sure would help with that situation to give them that security. I do not know if you would like to touch on that, and I suppose, Stephen, from your point of view, talking about the pipeline, I do not know if you want to say anything on the pipeline about how to develop that as well from that point of view. I will bring Stephen first. I will go first. I think that there is a lot of really good work going on at the moment on looking at skills and making sure that colleges are able to upskill existing workforce as well as making sure that young people coming into the construction industry have the right skills. I think that something that could be looked at, I think that we have touched on it already, is that if that became a more regulated thing in terms of building regulation requirements for retrofit, that might even increase the attractiveness of it. However, the work that is going on at the moment is already having an impact, but the biggest problem seems to be with supply chain availability. I know from speaking to a number of social housing providers with large area-based schemes that there are very few providers able to do large-scale retrofit programmes. A lot of them come up from down south, not that there is anything wrong with that, but we do not seem to be building a capacity at the speed that we need to build it in Scotland. That is something that Stephen can pick up on. It seems to have been exacerbated through material shortages post-Brexit, but I know of one scheme that was purportedly funded by Bays, where the supplier came in and told the local authority what they would do rather than adopting the approach that the local authority had requested. I know that the scheme fell apart because of that. I think that there seems to be a bit of a… What is the word? Because there is a dearth of competition, the people who are out there have one way of doing it, which is not always the best way of doing it, and that is all that is on offer. There is a lot around that, and we really need to ramp that up very quickly if we are going to move it forward. As you said, Stephen, in the supply chain and the pipeline, the key thing for me is that there are big opportunities. I know that there are challenges, but there are big opportunities for industry in that, so just to your comment on that. The opportunities are immense for the entire sector, and to the points that have been made previously, the opportunity to develop local capability is massive. A couple of things in terms of the pipeline. We contribute to the construction leadership forum, which is a partnership between industry leadership and government. That has been developing over the past 18 months the restart plan for industry post Covid, the recovery plan for industry now, and now moving forward to the transformation plan, which is very much focused on the opportunities around zero carbon. Within that, we now have pipeline tools, so public sector organisations are able to share their programmes moving forward on a dashboard effectively that Scottish Fisher Trust posts. That gives tractors or the clients supply chain partners the opportunity to see a little bit more clearly down the road and around the corner about what is coming. That can help to build a little bit more confidence in that decision to invest in skills or technology or innovation, whatever it may be, so there is real value in having those tools. As they get more sophisticated, as there is more content in there, which always has that slight degree of uncertainty, but it is certainly good to see what that pipeline looks like if it is a contractor or an architect or whatever. That gives confidence to businesses in one aspect around the pipeline. The other aspect of it is around the opportunities for businesses that are—we work with quite a number of businesses that are looking at the materials innovation side of things, so developing new circular, perhaps recycled materials products that are locally manufactured from either our natural resources. Timber has been an obvious one that we should be doing a lot more with in a sustainable way. Those businesses are much more confident that the direction of travel is going to be in a way that is much more obvious now around the move towards net zero, the move towards circular sustainable body carbon being a really important part moving forward. I think that industry partners are spotting and things like the Scottish National Investment Bank are investing in some of those real opportunities to create local supply chains that support local pipelines that are delivering really innovative solutions that are not just suitable for our challenges in Scotland, they are eminently exportable, which I think in a kind of economic development sense are huge opportunities for Scotland as well, because we have great capability. We need to scale it up, yes, but when we do that, we have the opportunity in the reverse way to lauri touched on, rather than having contractors coming north of the border to deliver solutions, we would have the capability to export that south border and elsewhere, which I think should be a key part of this proposition. Thank you for those responses. I am going to move on to the next and final theme, which is infrastructure and questions from Miles Briggs. Thank you very much, convener. Good morning to the panel. I wanted to ask maybe the question I asked to the previous panel to yourselves with regards to problems around mixed tenure blocks and properties and how retrofitting can be taken forward there. I just wondered if you would outline your views to the committee with regards to that and any experience you have already had of that being one of the barriers that we are likely to see to meeting those targets. I am not sure who wants to come in first on that. Maybe go to yourself, Professor or Elizabeth. I will come in quickly. Obviously, it is a big blockage. The obvious solution is if we have a cross-tenure standard, so that every property has to meet a high standard in terms of energy efficiency and zero emissions heating. I would include holiday lets in that, which would also help to solve the problem of people shifting their properties to holiday lets to avoid regulation. With tenements, we are aware that it is difficult to, there are difficult legal issues involved with that, but there has been a very comprehensive report with recommendations done by the cross-party working group, the tenements working group in the previous Parliament and the law commission has been asked to look into that. We recommend that additional resource was provided to the law commission so that they could take that work forward at speed rather than over several years, even five years before we will have recommendations on how to address those legal issues, which I think is unacceptable. That would be our approach to that. The other will be engagement. I would say that it is more on a voluntary basis that more of the type of community engagement we are talking about would have to blockers. Thanks for that. Another question that I also had was with regards to the current planning and building standard systems that we have in place and how that can really help to turbocharge and take forward this retrofitting activity. Is there anything from your experience around that, which you think is also preventing us moving forward at a faster pace? Laurie, do you want to come in on that? There has always been a view within building standards that the focus should be on new buildings, but the recent discussion around building standards reforms have included a more clear view of what constitutes a major retrofit. We are beginning, at last, to move in the direction of existing homes coming into the free in terms of requirements for upgrading in terms of a change of use or if any major works are being done. It is something around 25 per cent of the value of the home, and it is the same for non-domestic buildings. We are beginning to move in the right direction on that. We should be firmer on it and clearer on it. One way of dealing with the issue that you just asked Elizabeth about is about triggers and encouraging people in mixed-tenure accommodation to get better engaged. If there is a change of tenancy or ownership, there is a requirement to upgrade to a certain standard and that could be built into building standards more explicitly. If a house needs to be rewired, for example, or if a roof needs to be repaired, that is an automatic at the moment that you could not sell a house in that kind of state of disrepair, but the same thing could be included for housing and change of occupancy in terms of its energy efficiency. We are beginning to move in the right direction, but we have not quite done that yet. What does the panel think is really needed, especially for private residents, to look towards how significant costs we are going to be expecting people to meet boilers scrappage schemes or interest-free loans backed up by the Government? Does the panel have any other suggestions on how we could actually make private residents able to realise some of the future costs? Hi, Stephen. It's been a year and I'm happy to bash it up. Some Governments have struggled with the challenge of how do you incentivise people to do things that perhaps they don't feel overly incentivised to do? I suppose that some of the points that have been made there by Laurie are part of the answer—some of the lessons, I suppose, from the experience through Green Deal historically. I think that one of the big challenges—this is where I suppose it starts to think about this in a very systematic way—is that people would be much more inclined to invest in their building to deliver savings if they had a much, much higher degree of confidence that those investments were going to deliver those savings. That's where we have historically had a fair number of challenges in so much that the promise—I think that Chris made the point this morning from John Gilbert architects—that there is a risk that you ask people to invest in solutions that, on the surface of it, the design intent is going to deliver the benefit, but the reality, as the deliverer doesn't deliver those benefits, is that we need to understand that it's through pilot projects that the duo and others are really good pathfinders for if we build and gather the evidence appropriately for them. They can help us to inform where we can and should make those sorts of investments. Where are the incentives that are going to work? I can't remember the name of it, but I think that, in a global context, I believe that there is a German system of the Green Deal that has been in play for probably the last 20, 25 years. As I understand it, it is one of the most well-used and most confidently backed up in terms of certification approaches that we are certainly aware of. That is something that we should be looking at as where are the international best practice models from countries that have perhaps been doing that a little longer. How can we learn and perhaps adopt? It needs to be invented here necessarily. If there are good ideas and good solutions elsewhere, we should be quite open and willing to adopt them. Thank you, Stephen. We've all just scribbled down the German system, so we'll be a way to investigate that. Would anyone else like to come in, or if not, happy to hand back? Elizabeth? I'll comment on both planning and building standards. Just comment on the new build standards. Those could be brought forward and implementation even accelerated in publicly funded projects. That would be a huge boost in terms of your pipeline question that you were asking. That would also bring down the costs for everybody, because that would be a huge investment in heat pumps and a changing of people's mindsets of what's good in a new property. On planning, I think that there is a promise to look at restrictions for primitive development. We should be absolutely making it easy for people to install these renewable technologies. On traditional buildings, that question was raised earlier. How can we do that in a way that preserves a character but also gets us to zero emissions? After all, it's no point preserving the character if those buildings don't survive the impacts of climate change, so we have to keep our eye on the prize. On financing, there are ways that we can design regulation to ease the pain in a sense, ease the cost by making it at the point of sale, where it can be picked up in the sale price, or when you're doing refurbishments, when it would be more cost-effective to do refurbishment, and also when the support mechanisms that we were talking about earlier—the loans, the cash fact, the boiler scrappage—there are schemes to make this easier for people so that it is less of a burden and then to see the return on their investment when they sell their house. I want to explore a little bit something that I've become aware of and to see if this is useful. It's around the 44,000 empty homes across Scotland, and I've begun to think about intervention points into this retrofitting initiative. Obviously, an empty home in a tenement wouldn't work because we want to do the whole building approach, but in rural areas, I'm just beginning to wonder if we could bring empty homes back online, so to speak, and before we house people in them, actually use them as the potential for retrofitting, so that people are going into houses that are retrofitted. I'd love to hear your thoughts on that. Maybe we'll start with Laurie. There has been a fair amount of work done on looking at that in the past. I suppose that it depends who owns the home. I think that one of the—there's been quite a lot of resistance from rural private landlords to some of the retrofitting agenda in terms of the huge costs. However, as you say, in terms of creating demonstrator homes across the country, it is another risk of there being another pilot scheme, but it is a way of spreading knowledge and spreading the benefits. There should be a requirement for homes to be in a fit state to be occupied, and therefore a home shouldn't be able to be led unless it comes up to a certain standard in terms of energy efficiency. It might also be a way of testing innovations in terms of energy systems and materials across the country and allowing smaller SMEs to test out the territory in a small-scale way. Thank you for that. Does anyone else want to comment on that before we close? I would just say that it should be a point of principle that public money is—if it's supporting bringing empty homes back onto the market, as they've done in the past, then public money should be investing towards meeting our wider goals on fuel poverty and climate change as well. They should be bringing them up to the standards that are proposed in the heat building strategy, but it would be a very welcome initiative to help to bring more homes back onto the market in rural areas, but it's a problem in urban areas as well. Thank you very much for that. We've come to the end. Unfortunately, as always, we never really have enough time, but it's been very helpful. I think that all members of the committee agree with me to hear from you and the other panels this morning on this. As I said at the beginning of the morning, this is not the first time we're going to be taking evidence on this. It's been very helpful. We're going to be leading a debate in the Parliament in January on retrofitting, so hopefully we'll see what comes out of that. Your contributions have been very helpful there. Thanks again, and I'm now going to suspend momentarily for the witnesses to leave. The third item on our agenda today is consideration of the ethical standards in public life, Scotland Act 2000, register of interest amendment regulations 2021. This is a negative instrument, and as such, in the absence of a motion to annul, there is no requirement on the committee to make any recommendations on it. I'd like to invite committee members if they have any comments. And committee members online? Any comments? No, okay. So, the committee has agreed that we don't want to make any recommendations in relation to this instrument. As agreed earlier in the meeting, we will consider items 4 and 5 in private. I now close the public part of the meeting, and we will move into private.