 Good morning and welcome to the 10th meeting of the local government housing and planning committee in 2022. I would 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. Willie Coffey and Graham Day are joining us remotely for today's meeting. Mark Griffin will also be joining us remotely but is unable to be here for the start of the meeting. The first item on our agenda is to decide whether to take item 3 in private. Item 3 is consideration of the evidence that we have taken on the Scottish Housing Regulator's annual report. Are we all agreed? We are all agreed. We now turn to agenda item 2, which is to take evidence on the Scottish Housing Regulator's annual report for 2020-21. We are joined for this session by George Walker, who is the chair and Michael Carman, the chief executive. I welcome our witnesses to the meetings. Members have received copies of the annual reports and accounts along with a short summary of work that has taken place since the period covered by the report. Before we move to questions from the committee, I invite Mr Walker to make a short opening statement. Gavina committee, thank you very much. It's so nice to be here in person and see you all in person, so thank you very much for having us. The regulator's annual report, which we published in November 2021, is what we're here to, in part, discuss today. I hope that the union families and colleagues are well as we continue to work through the recovery from the pandemic and what the unfolding situation in Europe means. We're certainly pleased to be here for our first in person committee meeting, as I've said. I wrote to you back in July 2021, as you may remember, to set out our priorities. We're meeting a wee bit later than normal due to the pandemic on this report, but much has continued to happen since March 2021. I provided you with a short update note last week, highlighting some of the work that's happened since March up to now. Before we get into a discussion, I thought that it might be useful to set out for you our current priorities and what we're up to, really. You will see these features in our forthcoming corporate strategy, which we plan to publish next month. That will have a strong focus on the quality and safety of tenants' homes and for Gypsy travellers to have sites that meet the standards determined by the Scottish Government. Alongside that is vital that landlords meet the needs of people who have experienced homelessness, and we will be having a particular focus on landlords' provision of temporary and settled accommodation. We are very well aware of the rising household costs for tenants and their families, so I don't think that it will surprise you that affordability and value for money are very much at the forefront for us. Effective governance and financial health of RSLs remain vital, and that underpins much of what we will continue to focus on. We will also continue to help to empower tenants who are or have experienced homelessness, Gypsy travellers and others. That is the key statutory objective that Parliament has set us. In the past two years, we have seen the challenges of responding to the crisis, and it is clear that agility and responsiveness are likely to become increasingly important. Landlords have and will increasingly need to adapt to the world that is changing as we emerge from the pandemic. We appreciate that landlords are recovering and they are working hard to get through the backlogs that the pandemic has created. On top of the recovery from the pandemic, we know that landlords will have to respond to new and emerging challenges, too. We are facing a very challenging economic context, which might be the most challenging in a generation, with many tenants and their families facing increasing financial hardship. Landlords, too, of course, are being asked to respond to the climate emergency to decarbonising heating in homes, while, at the same time, they are experiencing growing problems and supply chains that are driving up their costs. There is need to invest to protect from increasing incidents of cyber-attack. That is not an exhaustive list of the challenges that we are facing. We know that resilient organisations cope better, so building and testing organisational resilience, including the capacity to handle unexpected events, has become even more critical for social landlords. I do not think that it would surprise you if I say that we are starting to give some thought and to do some work on what a regulatory focus on resilience might look like. We will continue to work with all of us stakeholders to support the recovery in social housing and deliver shared gold. I am sure that, as you said at the beginning, you will have lots of questions for us, so I will hand back to you and we are happy to take any questions that you have. Thank you very much, Mr Walker. You touched a little bit on the pandemic in your opening, and I would love to hear a little bit more in detail. I am interested in hearing how the regulator responded to the risks arising from the Covid-19 pandemic, and how has your response changed as the pandemic progressed? Why do not I start on that one? I will maybe let Michael Pick up on some of the more risk elements, but I will make a start. Almost two years ago, not quite to the day, but on 17 March 2020, our business continuity plans kicked in, and we moved all of our staff to working remotely from home. We were in a pretty strong position because we had done that before. Our office at Buchanan House had to be evacuated, so we had been through that. We were lucky compared to some parts of the sector that we were able to hit the ground running. We since then worked with staff to ensure that they have all the equipment and support that they have needed to work from home, but we started out pretty well. The next day, on 18 March 2020, we began to recognise publicly the issues that landlords, tenants and service users faced. Important to that, we changed our regulatory focus. That focus meant that we postponed the publication of engagement plans, which were imminent and all but the most critical regulatory engagement. We extended the timescale for regulatory returns because people clearly were in effects and needed time to respond to those things. Since then, we have been working with sectors across the social housing resilience group, which the committee is aware of. That has been an important tool in social housing through the pandemic. We have been monitoring the impact of the pandemic on social landlords. Since May 2020, we have published monthly and laterally quarterly dashboards gathering data and trends. That was to inform the Scottish Government and, in particular, the Scottish social housing resilience group. We have also provided a whole range of advice to businesses and landlords on cyber security, fraud and ungovernance. To follow up, we have restated our corporate plan, but I do not think that it would surprise you if I say that our priorities remained pretty much the same. They were tenant resident safety, homelessness, affordable rents, value for money and a focus on the governance in particular on RSLs. We are at that point now where our current corporate strategy comes to an end and we will publish a new corporate strategy to take us through 2022 and beyond. We will, of course, share that with the committee as soon as it is available. There is an initial starter for 10, if you like, on some of the actions that SHR has taken. Michael will comment on some more of the landlord aspects, if that is okay. Absolutely. It is also worth saying that, aside from having the capacity to move quickly to working remotely, we have been really fortunate by how resilient all our people have been over the past two years. We have had a strong focus on the wellbeing of our staff and our board members, but it would be important for us to recognise the significant contribution that they have made to being able to continue to deliver effective regulation in the most challenging of context. George has said clearly that there has been a significant impact from the pandemic on social landlords, the bodies that we regulate. We have said on a number of occasions now that they were among the first in their communities on to the front line to help tenants and residents to meet some of those very immediate challenges in the early days of lockdown. They moved at pace to adapt to the new and challenging environment in which they found themselves operating. We saw them use their knowledge of their tenants and local communities to respond to the most urgent needs. They have worked hard to mitigate the impact of the pandemic on their tenants, people who are homeless and other service users, but that means that they had to prioritise that work and activity over other more routine activities. One of the consequences of that is that we saw certainly through the early stages of the pandemic a build-up in backlogs of some of the more routine service delivery elements, routine repairs, planned maintenance activity, for example. Landlords are now working to recover back from those backlogs. That is likely to be an activity that landlords are going to have to plan for over the coming year or two before there is a sense of getting back. Obviously, some of the challenges that I am sure we will go on to speak about in more detail in due course make that all the more difficult for landlords to address some of those significant backlogs that have developed over the last two years. It is interesting that you had already had an experience and it is modelling resilience, because you had systems in place that you were then able to act on very quickly. That is interesting. I wrote down when you talked about resilience in your opening what resilience would look like. I look forward to hearing more of that in the future when you published that report. I want to pick up a little bit on the impact on staff vacancies and how that affected your work in 2021. Could you update the committee on the latest positions on recruitment and whether any staff vacancies or budgetary pressures remain that might affect your current work plans? Happy to do that. I can tell the committee that we are currently recruiting to nine posts in the housing regulator, six permanent posts and three temporary posts. It would be fair to say that we actually started right away to fill vacancies, because we had some vacancies in place when we moved into the pandemic. In particular, we stepped up the pace of that once we knew what our budget settlement for 2021-22 was. That was a helpful settlement, which I can come on to. It is fair to say that recruitment has been tough over the past couple of years. In particular, on-boarding and bringing in new people who are recruited was very slow. Through the Scottish Government's HR, we are struggling. I do not suggest that they were not doing their level best, but it was a tough old time to bring people in. On-boarding was taking about eight to twelve weeks, and that is after a year that recruited someone and contracts were signed, et cetera, et cetera. It is quite a while when you consider that recruitment processes take time too. Over the course of the past two years, we have welcomed about seven new external staff into SHR, and we have managed to recruit both from within and from within the Scottish Government to a number of posts. Our recruitment, as I have said, is on-going to the nine vacancies that we currently have. In terms of our financial position and where we were, certainly as we went into 2021-22, we were a bit worried. The reason we were worried is that 80 per cent of our costs are for staff. Regulation is a people game. There is not a lot of other costs where 80 per cent is for staff. We have a budget settlement, which is £4.9 million for the coming year, and that is a modest uplift, which we are very grateful for, in particular, as we realise that times are very tough financially. What that allows us to do is to maintain our current staffing cohort, which allows us to continue to recruit to the vacancies that we have, because that helps us to cover the hard-earned salary increases that the staff are being given. At the moment, we have some gaps. We are working hard to address those, and we feel that we are in a financially stable position. Clearly, we would hope that that would continue into the future, as I have explained, because regulation is a people business. Maintaining the budget to keep our staffing levels at what they are is very important to us. You mentioned that recruitment was tough at that time. That was during the context of the pandemic. I mean, something that committees hearing across the board on a lot of different sectors is finding staff is difficult. I just wonder if the recruitment is tough in general, or was it to do with the pandemic? I think that I am just trying to get a sense of, do we really face a kind of crisis in terms of finding people to take on jobs in all the sectors? I think that we have not necessarily found it difficult to attract the right calibre of individual into our organisation. The challenges that we have been experiencing have been ones that have related to the process of recruitment and the timescales involved in recruitment, and that has partly been as a consequence of us relying on the Scottish Government recruitment process and recognising the challenges that they have been experiencing in supporting recruitment across a large number of public body organisations. That is the element that George touched on in terms of how long it had been taking, for example, once somebody had been made an offer for them to actually be able to take up that post, anything up to about three months between that. That has created some real challenges from us, and on certainly on one occasion an individual had, in the meantime, secured an alternative position, so we had to start the process again. It is more the logistics of the recruitment process that has been challenging for us, not necessarily being able to get the right type of people. That sounds reassuring. I would like to go back and touch a little bit on how you were able to move very quickly to remote working. Could you tell us a little bit about how you supported your staff to work from home when that became necessary? Great question. Let me start with the board involvement. The board was seeking reassurance from Michael and the executive team about all the actions that we had taken. Because we had been through this before, as I touched on earlier, we felt that we were in a strong position, so there was a lot of discussion at board on the actions that we were taking that staff had the right equipment and so on and so forth. Very helpfully, we have all sort of a pretty open culture at SHR in that we have a variety of staff members who sit in on board meetings, so certainly I, as chair, used them as a touch point to get a sense of how they were feeling and what they were doing and those staff members who came along well. Virtually came along to our board meetings by video call, so we started there at the board to get some sense of what was going on, but I know that Michael will have some detail on that on some of the survey work and getting a sense of what staff wanted, so I want to steal his thunder on that. I think that very early on, the first challenge was to ensure that people had what they needed to be able to do the job in terms of the right equipment, and that included anyone who would need for specialist equipment to have that available in their home. Once we got past that physical support, we started to move more into considering how we can support people's wellbeing through that. I think that, as it became clear that the position of working principally remotely was going to be for the longer term, that became much more of a priority and a focus for us, so we have regular wellbeing conversations with all of our staff. We look to ensure that we can be as flexible as we possibly can to accommodate their domestic position and situation, their carer responsibilities, so we have been able to flex things like how we operate the flexi time system, for example, to accommodate a wider variety of working patterns. I think that it has been tough for people. I think that it has unquestionably been a benefit for some people and some people enjoy it, and others have found it more difficult. We have fairly recently reopened our office, but that is on a very limited basis. Principally, at this point, it is for people who have a personal need to be working in the office, and we will look to open that up as the restrictions allow us to do so. Throughout that period, as I would say, the principal focus for us has been ensuring that we are able to continue to communicate with staff, that we are able to bring people, at least virtually, together as often as we can, and very much to have that focus on regular conversations with line managers around wellbeing. It is interesting that the remote working has brought to the forefront the whole wellbeing piece and the importance that that is really needed to play a role in organisations. You talked about this a little bit earlier, Michael, on the work that staff are carrying out, but I would love to hear a little bit more about the fact that the regulators' work involves engaging with landlords and tenants, and then suddenly we are moved into a remote world. I would love to understand how the work was carried out. Were you able to be effective over the past year? The answer to that is broadly yes, although there was undoubtedly some activity that we have not been able to undertake. We have been very clear about that. We have set that out in all of our publications. In Georgia, we restated our corporate plan in 2020 just to flag that we would have to change the areas of work that we were focusing on, because there were some aspects that simply could not be done. For example, we would undertake thematic inquiries that would involve us going out to landlords to see what practice was, where there were examples of good practice. That has not been possible, obviously, to do that type of work. Equally, we would have fairly regular in-person engagements with social landlords, and that activity has not been possible. Having said that, we shifted very quickly to using the range of digital platforms that are available to us, and we have been able to do most of our work effectively utilising those platforms. I think that in some situations the type of engagements that we have to have are probably better done in person, but we have been able to do what needed to be done, broadly speaking. It is also worth saying that stakeholder engagements are an important aspect of our work. We put a lot of time and effort into stakeholder engagement, and we try to keep that as a key priority throughout the pandemic, although it has unquestionably been more difficult to do that under operating under the range of restrictions that we have. We have continued to promote a strong tenant voice throughout the pandemic, and we have been able to continue to meet regularly with the regional network Scottish Housing Regulator liaison group, and they have contributed to our consultation on the temporary changes that we made to our regulatory framework to respond to the pandemic. We have also participated in a range of conferences, webinars with tenant groups and with tenant representatives. We have continued to work with our national panel of tenant and service users. That falls around about 500 tenants and service users from across the country. If we look at landlords, we engage with landlords directly using a range of digital platforms. As I said, although that has not been ideal, we have been able to deliver almost all of our work with landlords effectively in that way. We have started returning to in-person events, and we are doing that while maintaining that capacity to operate digitally and virtually as necessary, or we are preferable. We have also started to attend in-person meetings with landlords in the very early stages, and we hope to build that back over the coming months, while keeping all the appropriate safety measures in place. Great, thank you very much. It is good to hear that kind of overview of what you have been doing. I am now going to bring Willie Coffey in with a couple of questions, and he is joining us online. Willie Coffey, thank you very much. Good morning to you, Mr Walker and Mr Cameron. It's nice to hear the committee. I just wanted to give you a wee chance to look ahead and identify some of the possible risks ahead for councils and landlords. George, you mentioned a few topics in your opening remarks. You were talking about increasing costs, affordability rents, cyberattacks and so on, and so forth. Can you give us a little flavour about what you see the risks that are going ahead and how you are trying to engage with various landlords to try to minimise the impact of those tenants? I am happy to pick that one up. Unfortunately, it is quite a long list of the risks and challenges in the landlords' operating environment, and that list is not limited to some of the topics that you have already touched on. I think that rent affordability and financial sustainability is unquestionably going to be a very prominent feature in the coming years. George had already mentioned that we are looking at what is arguably the most challenging economic conditions for families and for landlords in a generation, if not more. Landlords have a range of expectations, either already on them or will be coming their way around the climate emergency and the drive to decarbonise heating in homes. We have been seeing supply chain disruptions, which are then resulting in increased cost and labour and material shortages. We were seeing that as a consequence of the UK's exit from the EU and the pandemic. Obviously, the situation in Ukraine is further exacerbating that. We anticipate that we will see supply chain disruption for some time to come and that that will unquestionably have some inflation pressure in social housing, as it will across the economy. Cyber security is becoming an ever more important consideration for landlords, as for all organisations. We are also seeing evidence of increased expectations and requirements on landlords that have come out of the pandemic around their tenants and residents. They might be expecting different types of services and different responses from landlords. In part that is because landlords stepped into that space at the outset of the pandemic to respond to the emerging needs that we saw then. We are seeing a challenging situation at the moment around homelessness and the numbers that are currently in temporary accommodation. There are all of that. Those risks and challenges present difficulties for landlords that can lead to difficulties with governance, financial management and a cyber attack that can be entirely paralysing for an organisation. Those are the kinds of risks that are out there. We look to take account of all of those in our annual risk assessment of every single landlord. We look to understand the level of exposure of each landlord to those range of risks. That drives how we would engage with a landlord to get an appropriate level of assurance that they are setting themselves to respond effectively to that set of risks that present in their operating environment. I was just going to ask that. That is quite an extensive list, isn't it? In fact, it is just about everything that you can imagine. It is potentially highlighted as I was going forward. What about the landlords? Have they got robust plans in place to try to do their best to deliver much of that? Catching up on the backlog of repairs is a big one. I know that other members in the committee will have had constituent inquiries about that. Are you seeing signs that there are robust plans in place, perhaps with some timescales attached to those, so that tenants can get some kind of comfort that they can see forward and see ahead? We have put out a number of pieces of guidance to landlords to support their business planning approaches, including in response to the challenges that have emerged during the pandemic. What we look to do is understand from their business plans how effectively they are setting themselves to respond to what is coming down the line. At the moment, the sector is financially in a reasonable place. It looks like it has the capacity to do what it needs to do in the coming period. However, just picking up on the point that George MacDonald touched on, we are giving some thought to whether we need to develop our approach to regulation to ensure that it is a much stronger focus on a deeper organisational resilience so that landlords are in a position to respond to whatever comes their way. At the moment, most organisations plan on anticipating the risks that will come. The last couple of years have shown us that that is an increasingly difficult thing to do. What we are looking at now is developing a way with the sector that will enable them to enhance and maintain their organisational resilience so that they are best placed to deal with what might come, whatever that will be. Most of the councils have probably set their rent budgets by now anyway. I just want to detect any flexibility in the levels of rent being set and asked of tenants because of the experiences that have come through that you have just described. Is there any evidence that there has been a bit of flexibility in that or is there a different approach or new thinking to recognise the difficulties that people are going to face? We will get information from landlords starting from the beginning of April on what their performance was last year in relation to the charter and what they are doing around rent increases and further financial planning. We will be in a better place to see exactly how landlords are setting themselves probably in about August time when we have had a chance to fully consider that. What we know is that most landlords last year drove down the type of rent increases that they were applying. Last year, the average rent increase was around 1.2 per cent. We could see that that was very much landlords adjusting their planning to respond to the immediate situation that was in front of them, which was tenants in very challenging situations. The intelligence that we have, including from the Association of Local Authorities, Chief Housing Officers and the Scottish Federation of Housing Associations, is that it looks like the average rent increase this year might be around about 3 per cent mark. At the point where those rent increases will be applied, which will be in April, where anticipating inflation might be closer to 7 per cent, that shows that there is potentially an affordability gain for tenants in that situation, although that is always assuming that their income is matching those kind of increases. However, what it does do is introduce a real challenge for landlords around the business planning in a context where their increase in their revenue is not matching the increase in the costs that they are going to be experiencing, and that is going to be something that we will be paying close attention to in the coming year. Okay, thanks very much for that, Michael. Back to you, conveners. Thank you. Thank you, really. George, I noticed that you wanted to come in there on a response to an earlier question. Yeah, thank you, convener. If I might just add one thing on business planning, where the questioning started, and that is that Michael and I have regular engagements with membership bodies, the Scottish Federation of Housing Associations, we are having a meeting with a lecture this afternoon, and so on. Almost every discussion that we start with landlords and landlord bodies talks about the worries that they have around business planning as it relates to the cost of net zero. I would say that, as a regulator, that is the part that, at the moment, we do not think is necessarily built into the long-term business plans, bearing in mind that housing business plans roll out over 20 and 30 years. Certainly, there are worries around that and those long-term costs and how that will be afforded. There is no debate at all about the importance of the move to net zero and that is something that everyone signs up to. Partly, that discussion and the fact that that keeps coming up that leads us, along with other things, to this resilience work that Michael and I have referred to. However, I did not want to leave the subject of business that I am planning pass without drawing that to the committee's attention, because it is clearly very high on the worry list of landlords and how they square that circle. Thanks for that, Georgia. I think that that is really great that you brought that up, because the net zero piece is also impacted by what Michael was talking about earlier, around supply chains and labour scales. There are a lot of questions around how we are going to do all that work. I am going to move on to bring in Miles Briggs, who has some questions. Thank you, convener. Good morning, Mr Walker and Mr Cameron. Thanks for joining us this morning. I wanted to ask a question with regard to how you monitor social landlords and the progress against the Scottish social housing charter and how that information is then used within your regulatory framework. Maybe start with that and then come on to a few other points. I am happy to pick up on that. We monitor progress against the charter. That is a fundamental activity for us. The principal way in which we do that is to collect a range of data from landlords every single year. We analyse that and then we report it back out to people in ways that we hope they find helpful. An important aim for us in doing that is to empower tenants to enable them to hold their landlords to account and we do that by giving them information about their landlords' performances in ways that they are able to use. It is probably important to say that we set up those approaches in consultation with tenants and in particular focused on the areas of performance that tenants told us mattered most to them. Every year, we publish a report for tenants on their landlord. That is a report on each of the 180-odd landlords setting out its performance in the areas that tenants told us mattered most. We then provide an online comparison tool that allows tenants and others anyone who wishes to use it to compare their landlord's performance with that of others that the tenant can select. Each year, we publish a national report on the charter that summarises the performance across all landlords. Importantly, we also require each landlord to make our report to tenants available to all of their tenants. Each landlord must also produce a more comprehensive assessment of its performance on the charter and provide that to its tenants every year in the autumn. That is how we bring in the information and push it back out in ways that we hope are accessible and usable. We then take all that information and every year we carry out an annual risk assessment for both local authorities and RSLs. For RSLs, we also bring in the financial information that we collect on an annual basis. We consider landlords' performance against the charter and look to understand whether we need to get further assurance or need to see some improvement. Then we set out the engagement plan that we produce and publish for every landlord. That is a very quick pen picture of the approach that we take around monitoring progress with the charter. Thank you for that. That is helpful. I want to further ask how you use that charter to drive performance. Every MSP is probably used to complaints about repairs and very poor living conditions that people are in. I have cases when I have been an MSP of people not having mould issues in their homes fixed for years and going to the council and fighting to get that rectified. I wanted to know in terms of how that charter can drive performance. Where are the examples of interventions that that charter has led you to go and take up those issues? It is probably important to stress that it is for landlords to ensure that they achieve the standards and outcomes in the charter. Everything that we do is to ensure that that is understood appropriately by landlords and that they are clear on their responsibilities. In part, in monitoring and ensuring that we continue to monitor, it keeps that very clear focus on the charter for landlords. I also mentioned that one of the things that we aim to do is to empower tenants to hold their landlord to account. One of the things that we have seen develop, along with support from Scottish Government over the past 10 years or so, is a strong body of tenant scrutiny that has now become well embedded in most social landlords in Scotland. Those are ways that drive performance improvement in landlords. We directly engage with landlords where we identify concerns. We have seen a number of those in the past couple of years, with a particular focus around tenant and resident safety issues. There have been a number of statutory interventions that I have had a focus in on those areas, but principally our approach to driving improvement in the charter is through monitoring, reporting, engaging, empowering tenants and keeping a strong focus on the part of landlords on their responsibilities around the charter. Thank you for that. During the scrutiny of the revised charter, the committee has received a number of submissions. Particularly one that I picked out was with regards from Living Rent, arguing that the current process of landlord self-assessment against the charter indicators is not suitable to delivering the charter outcomes and that they would like to see a more robust and accountable regulatory approach. I just wondered what your views with regards to those concerns would be and whether or not what you have outlined is almost a toothless tiger in being able to go after individual landlords to try to improve all those outcomes. It may surprise you to hear that I do not consider our approach to be toothless at all. It is an effective regulatory approach. I have not had any direct engagement with Living Rent, so I am not entirely sure what might sit below their concerns. I would be very happy to have that conversation directly with them. We do have a range of statutory powers and we utilise those statutory powers to require landlords to provide us with relevant information to undertake inquiries and investigate and inspect if we require to do that. Then we have powers that can require landlords to achieve performance improvement to a certain level or at a certain time. If it requires to go to that level, we can put in place special managers to undertake necessary improvements. Those are a range of tools that are there for us. Our approach is principally starting off with engaging with landlords to fully understand what the situation might be, to understand what their own improvement plans and agenda would be in relation to the issues, and then to seek appropriate assurance that they are delivering against that. How often have those powers been used by the regulator? We have used our statutory intervention powers in 12 landlords over the past eight years. It is a significant step to use statutory intervention powers, but they have been used where we have felt that it was necessary to safeguard and promote the interests of tenants and others who use the services of those landlords. What were the circumstances around those cases? I understand that if you do not have the detail to hand on that, you could write to us. They vary. We publish a report on the conclusion of every statutory intervention. I think that we have now published probably around about nine or ten of those reports, and they set out the full details of the circumstances that led to our intervention, what the intervention delivered and the outcomes of those interventions. It could often be that there was a range of different things that prompted the intervention from some concerns that we had in a couple of cases around tenant and resident safety, including in relation to gas safety and asbestos management. Often, the root of some of the difficulties in those organisations was poor governance, and that is the area that we ended up having to focus on our improvement activity. That is great. Thank you very much. Mr Briggs, if I could just add one thing to that. Michael touched on the fact that we have conducted 12 statutory interventions where we use our statutory duties. I would not want to get lost in that, though. The huge number of engagements and interventions, albeit non-statutory, that take place frankly every day, will be happening today with the regulator, with landlords. A statutory intervention is usually the end of quite a long engagement process, and many of those processes and engagements do not become statutory. Statutory interventions tend to happen, probably not exclusively. Michael will know the detail better than me, but it is mainly where a landlord does not have the capacity to deal with the issue. Therefore, we step in and make it statutory, and perhaps in some cases I have appointed a statutory manager, or where frankly they are unwilling to deal with it. Again, we step in, but there are literally hundreds of cases where there is on-going dialogue and engagement, where landlords are engaged with the issue and are dealing with the issue and are providing the regulator with assurance or reassurance, whichever word one wants to use. I add that because that is a part that might not be as visible, albeit now, because we publish an engagement plan on every single social landlord in Scotland that has a visibility there, but often that engagement might not have been statutory. Thank you very much, George, for bringing that to the front. I think that it is good for people to hear that and recognise all that work and all those engagements that are taking place. I am going to bring in Graham Day with some questions around social landlords' maintenance of their homes and opening that up beyond that. Thank you. Before we move on to that, I will go back to the line that my colleague, Miles Breggs, has been interrogating. Out of those 12 interventions and the many other non-statutory interventions that you have carried out, have you in all instances been satisfied with the outcomes or have you ever felt as a regulator that you could have done with more powers in order to achieve an outcome that would have worked entirely satisfied? If you were in a position to look at the outcome reports that we have produced, we set out the conclusion of each of those interventions. From my perspective, in each of those interventions, the interests of tenants were protected and tenants all ended in a better place than they had been prior to an intervention. From that perspective, I would say that they concluded as we would want to and that the powers that were available to us enabled us to deliver those outcomes. Considering whether there are different or new or additional powers that would help us to do our job, we are looking at it at the moment because we are aware that there is a housing bill being proposed to be brought forward before the Parliament. We have had an initial engagement with the Scottish Government around whether there is any value in considering our statutory framework to see whether there are any improvements in that framework that could be made. At the moment, I do not necessarily have any obvious matters that I would suggest bringing forward in that regard, but as we work our way through that, that is something that we could obviously bring to the committee if we felt that that was appropriate. Okay, thank you. That is useful. I wanted to look at what your findings have been. Recognise us for the points that we have already covered about the challenges of the pandemic and how landlords have been maintaining the quality of their homes. To ask you how satisfied you are that social landlords have from bust procedures in place by and large to deal with tenant complaints about the quality of their homes. I was quite struck by something in your report where you were looking at the existing tenant satisfaction with the quality of their homes and a discrepancy between the level of satisfaction amongst tenants of local authority homes and those resident and RSL properties. I wonder if you could say something about that. I am happy to pick up. In terms of that disparity, I think that that is a differential that we have seen in a number of years. That is certainly not something that has emerged in that last report that you referred to. I certainly know that if you were to ask COSLA or the Association of Local Authority Chief Housing Officers, they would point to the fact that by and large local authorities will have older properties in their stock and that that will have an impact on the maintenance requirements and indeed the facilities and amenities that are available to tenants in those homes. However, local authorities and RSLs are subject to the same standards and requirements. It is important that local authorities are able to consider how best to meet those needs. You also touched on complaints. One of the routes that we provide to tenants to bring matters to us is what is referred to in the legislation as significant performance failure, where there is a systemic problem in a landlord that impacts on a number of their tenants. Those tenants are able to bring matters to our attention and we can investigate them. We have had a number of significant performance failures that have related to maintenance issues and we have processed those through and engaged with the landlord appropriately. For individual tenants, the landlords have in place the model complaints procedure that is set out by the ombudsman and that ultimately takes anyone who is making a complaint and dissatisfied with the response that they get from their landlord. They then have the option of taking that complaint to the ombudsman. In terms of that process, we are satisfied that there is a process in landlords to respond to individual tenant complaints. I am conscious that the outcome for individual tenants may not always be the one that they want and that that will in some way drive some of the satisfaction scores that you see. To pick up on that point, I take this entirely that that discrepancy is not new. It has been over a number of years. Let us imagine that particular local authorities are seriously lower down the satisfaction scale than others over an extended period. Is that something that you directly look at and would have an intervention, even a low level intervention, with that particular local authority on? Yes. Each year, when we do the annual risk assessment, we look at that range of information that you are touching on. If a landlord is persistently in the lower quartile of performing landlords, we will pick that up with the landlord and look to get assurance that they either understand what sits behind that and it might be an explanation around the age and nature of the stock that they have in their management or to get assurance around the improvement plans that they have in place to start to address that. I am not going to move on to questions around charter awareness from Megan Gallher. I refer members to my register of interests as I am a Serfyn councillor in North Lanarkshire. Good morning, Mr Walker and Mr Cameron. Thank you very much for coming along to the committee this morning. As a convener, I am hoping to ask questions in relation to the Scottish social housing charter among tenants and I am wondering, as we have been discussing, the relationship with tenants and their rights. Do you think that there is enough awareness about the Scottish social housing charter among tenants and how do you raise awareness among tenants? I am happy to start on that and then Michael might come in. In terms of awareness, before I say this I am about to say that at times I possibly see a biased group of tenants and I do not mean bias in any untoward way but what I mean is that a lot of the engaged in eyes chair of the housing regulator have, as you might expect, is with formal tenant groups, the regional tenant networks, the liaison group that Michael touched on earlier and so on. When I am engaging with those groups, I find that the awareness around the Scottish housing charter is really very high through the roof. The second area that I see it, although maybe with a wider group of tenants, is things like at the various conferences. Now they have not been happening in the last couple of years but the test and T-pass conferences tenant engagement groups I am generally at and they are a much wider group of tenants and I see again a very high level of awareness. I use that word bias because I recognise that that is not everyone in tenancy right across Scotland but I do have the sense that the awareness of that is really very, very high. In part with those groups we now have something interesting and new happening in that we have two tenant members of our board, one of whom is a local authority tenant and one of whom is a tenant of an RSL. In fact, it is now Colin and Helen, those two tenants, who take the lead for us with the tenant liaison group and getting involved with those things so we get insight there too. My sense is that awareness is high. We certainly do a lot to try and keep that awareness up. I talk about it to anyone who will listen, frankly, because I think that the Scottish housing charter is something that we should be very proud of in Scotland when I engage with others in housing in other parts of the world, in the UK. I have heard the words envy used, there is an envy of us having that because for a regulator having a benchmark, if I can call it that, to regulate against is a really good thing. It is a powerful regulatory tool, so that is my sense, but I do not want to mislead you, Ms Gallard, to thinking that I think every single tenant knows that it is out there and exists. I am certainly very well aware that there is much more that we could do to keep that to the forefront, but our route is through the formal routes that I have described. Michael, I do not know if you would add anything more to that. I think that it is possible just to touch on some of the ways that we seek to promote the charter. In many ways, I have spoken about those already in terms of how we look to get accessible information on the charter out to tenants. That empowering tenants with good information is one of the critical aims of our regulatory framework. Publishing the reports for every landlord, publishing the national report and promoting that heavily, particularly through our tenant networks, are ways in which we are able to get the charter out as far as we can within tenants. In many ways, I think that the critical thing is that tenants have an understanding that their landlords are obliged to deliver certain standards and outcomes for them, whether they know the name of the charter as such. I am not sure, and I suspect that there are plenty of tenants who do not necessarily recognise the name of the charter, but the principal thing for me would be that they understand that they have standards and outcomes that they can expect from their landlord. That is what we would aim to promote as fully as we possibly could. Going back to the tenants who sit on the board, because I think that that is a very interesting concept, and it allows you to hear directly from people who are renting, who are a tenant, as part of the charter. How are those tenants selected? In what areas are they from? Do they sit on the board for a particular term time? How does that work? Good questions. They are appointed in the same way that everybody else is. They are appointed the same way that I was and my other board members. They are appointed by Scottish ministers through the public appointments process. I can claim no credit as chair for the idea of having tenants on board. That was in place. There was a tenant on the board previously at SHR when I joined as chair. She was excellent, by the way. However, I was part of the process and part of the panel that made recommendations to Scottish ministers when Lisa's term came to an end and we were looking for a new tenant. The response to that recruitment round was so good and so strong that we did something unusual that perplexed the public appointments team. I asked the panel to support and they did, to go forward and to request rather than having one tenant on the board, we could have two. Rather than recruit two new board members, we could recruit three. Helpfully, the housing minister was happy to support that at the time. Happy chance meant that we ended up with a local authority tenant and an RSL tenant on the board. They come through that route and neither of them are shy. They are challenging board members in the right way and they are very engaged. One of them, Colin, is very engaged with the regional tenant networks and did he chairs one of the regions? I forgot which one it is, but he is very involved with that. More and more we have let Colin and Helen step forward and, if you like, lead and help. Alongside staff members, of course, are engaged with the tenant liaison group and so on and are very engaged with that. I think that it is a great thing having tenants on our board and, indeed, I think that it is a great thing that so many RSLs have tenants on their boards too. It is a really powerful thing in Scotland. Did that answer all of the points? It did, yes. Thank you very much for that. Finally, if I could touch on marginalised groups as well, because you mentioned their bias and I am just conscious that there will be groups out there that perhaps do not know about the charter. I am just wondering whether there is a deeper work going on behind the scenes to make sure that we are tapping into those communities, because it is so important that they know their rights as well. I think that that point is absolutely right. We have a range of different groups that we will aim to engage with. We have spoken already about gypsy travellers and we have a responsibility for factor donors and people who have experienced homelessness. We engage with organisations that represent those individuals, because they can be not always straightforward groups to engage directly with. However, through our work with the national panel, we have been able to do that. We have been able to participate directly with a number of gypsy travellers and also with people who have had lived experience of homelessness. That has been able to give us direct insights into the priorities, interests and challenges that those groups have faced. That is the route that we will seek to maintain to ensure that we can have that insight from those individuals. We are now going to move to questions from Paul McLean. Thank you, convener. Good morning, Mr Cameron. Mr Walker, can I defer everyone to my register of interests? I am still a serving councillor on Eastwood and Council. I suppose that this is a question to yourself first of all, Mr Walker. One of the obviously year's started objectives is to protect the homelessness of homeless people during the pandemic, and you have kind of touched on this already. Just to say a little bit more about how you have fulfilled that. You mentioned, obviously, about a concern about increased numbers and temporary accommodation. Just to try and expand a little bit more about that particular point that you raised. Let me start on that and I will get my thoughts to come in on some of the detail. I think that probably one of the most significant steps that we took, which raised one or two eyebrows at the time, in the start of that, in particular during the pandemic was that we made the decision to engage with all 32 local authorities across Scotland. Why? Because we were concerned about the resilience of homelessness services and so on and how they would cope during the pandemic. Normally, we would engage where we have evidence of underperformance or challenge. I very much remember the debate that we had at the board around that when Michael put that forward and the board was very supportive of it. That was the starting point, was to get out there and talk to all local authorities around the issue of homelessness and so on. In particular, if you remember, the focus was really around early on making sure that during the pandemic, everyone who was homeless had somewhere to sleep at night to protect them from the virus as much as anything. All of that was going on, which led to exactly what you referred to. An awful lot of people in different forms of temporary accommodation, hotels and all sorts. As it stands today, I forget the exact number of 13,000-plus people in temporary accommodation and that has risen over the course of time. That is the fundamental approach that we are taking. I have just spoken to two serving councillors. I would not dare to tell you what the roles are in local authority roles, because you know them. Obviously, local authorities are very excited to play a key role in that. That was our starting point and that was to engage there. There is more detail. Michael, would you like to add some more to that? I would be happy to add in some of the detail. On an annual basis, we consider the information that local authorities provide to the Scottish Government on homelessness applications. During the course of the pandemic, we have been collecting information on a more regular basis to support the work of the social housing resilience group, firstly on a monthly basis and then on a quarterly basis. That has included some key information around homelessness services. It is probably worth giving you a bit of a feel for where things are sitting in terms of the last quarterly return that provided information up to the end of December 2021. At that point, we are receiving around 8,000 applications each quarter from people who were experiencing homelessness. In those situations, most of those individuals had been offered an accepted temporary accommodation, around 7,700 people in those circumstances. As George has highlighted at the end of the last quarter, there were just over 13,000 households in temporary accommodation. That is not the highest that has been during the last two years, but it is still a very significant level of families in temporary accommodation. That is probably the biggest challenge that local authorities are facing at the moment in relation to homelessness. Is the management out of temporary accommodation of that number of individuals into permanent accommodation? I suspect that that is going to be, again, something that councils are having to respond to for a period to come. It is not going to be something that is a very quick fix, and it is something that we will be monitoring in response to over the coming year. I suppose that the key issue that you mentioned, Mr Walker, about the 32 local authorities, was in terms of resource, both financial and manpower. Was there anything that struck you from that? If we are talking about how we deal with homelessness and the current backlog in where we are, is that an issue going forward in terms of is there enough resource? Is that going to be an issue going forward into the next year, because we are not just going to flick the switch and we are out of the pandemic, because it is going to be that recovery period? It is difficult for us to give a specific view on the local authority resourcing position, because we do not have a remit to consider that. You are picking up. I think that it is unquestionably the case in our engagements with local authority homelessness services that they are very much recognising that there are constraints on their resources and that those constraints may very well impact at least on the timescales for the recovery out of the pandemic. Having said that, I think that some of the biggest challenges is that transitioning people out of temporary accommodation into permanent accommodation, and having the inadequate supply of appropriate and suitable permanent accommodation, is possibly the thing that I imagine will be of most concern to most local authorities at this point. I think that that is probably particularly acute in some of the major urban areas. That is really just touching on, obviously, your annual performance support when anything that talks about is how to demonstrate your ineffective public body. Now it lists that in the report. I am just wondering if you want to highlight or expand on any of those points. I know that you have touched on a few already, but anything else you want to expand on or touch on about what is covered in the report? I am happy to touch on that. I think that much of that starts, for me, as chair of SHR with transparency. If you are a public body, we all operate within the appropriate principles of behaviours and standards, but the key among those is that my favourite amongst equals, if I can put it that way, is about transparency and openness. As a regulator at SHR, we work really hard to be completely transparent about what we do. It is one of the reasons why, in a framework review, we introduced the idea of publishing an engagement plan for every single social landlord in Scotland. That had not been the case before, which is simply for landlords who we had a certain level of engagement with, but there is an example of that. Similarly, the reports that Michael referred to, whenever we have engaged on a statutory basis, beyond all the other ones that I touched on in response to Mr Briggs' question, again at the end of that, we publish a lessons learned report and a full account of what went on and why and what the issues were. I think that those are key to that. The second thing is in checking in on our own governance and how we behave as a board and an organisation. We use some of the key tools that other public bodies have available to them, such as internal audit, which I think is a very important tool. We encouraged, in the last framework, social housing landlords to use as well. I am very happy to say that we have always had substantial assurance from internal auditors in terms of what we are doing. We have audited all those different things, and we have also had unqualified audit reports. Those are some of the things that we look at as an organisation, certainly as a board in terms of us looking and challenging Michael and his team for how we are working. For me, that is probably where I started, which is all about being as open and transparent as we possibly can be. Throughout this morning, I have been making notes about the fact of the board and how you are modelling such great governance with the tenants that Megan discussed with you, but you also mentioned that there are staff members on the board, too. I think that that can only lead to good governance and direction for an organisation to have people with that on-the-ground experience. Mark Griffin has been able to join us, which is great, and I would like to bring him in and give him an opportunity to ask questions. Thank you, convener. Apologies for not being able to be here for the whole session because of family commitments. I want to clear at this point from members' attention to my registered interest as an owner of other rented property in North Lanarkshire. I just wanted to ask Michael and George their views on the Government's consultation on a new deal for tenant strategy. Within that, there is a proposal for a new housing regulator for the private rented sector. I just wanted to ask, given your extensive knowledge of regulation of the socially rented sector, what your view is of what a private rented sector regulator could and should look like? I will make a start on that, but I bet the regulatory expert to my right will have some comments as well. It is a complex one, and it is a difficult question. Mark, I do not think that it will surprise you if I say that a chair of a regulator thinks that regulation is a good thing. It is a helpful thing, and it helps to drive up standards, so I start from that point of view. There is a difference between the regulatory approach that we are able to take as the social housing regulator and some of the challenges that might be faced for any regulator in the private rented sector. Probably the biggest among those, I would say, is that SHR regulates corporate bodies, SSLs, boards, committees, leadership and local authorities. In Scotland, the private rented sector has a fairly heavy domination, although it is not exclusive, with landlords who might own one, two, three and a number of properties. There are not so many of the big corporate landlords that we see, for example in the United States or in parts of Europe where private renting is significant. We think that that could pose a conundrum for how you do that, because regulation of an engagement with a corporate body such as I have described for SHR comes with very different challenges than regulating what might boil down to individual landlords. I suppose that, for me, the key question that we will pose is whether that work rolls forward. I welcome the work that is going on in the consultation. Is it regulations or is it a regulator is the answer. I do not really have an opinion on that. I am just drawing attention to the differences that might be in regulating those two. That would be my starting point for the challenge that might be faced on that, but I say that as someone with a bias who thinks that regulation is a good thing. I think that to emphasise the point that George has made that the two sectors are very different and therefore may require quite different responses from a regulator or from regulations. I think that we have had some early conversations with the Scottish Government just on an advisory basis on how it might develop its thinking around a private sector regulator. The key point that we have emphasised is that the starting point has to be an understanding of the risks or behaviours or challenges that you are seeking to address through regulation. Understand them and they will start to point you in the direction of the most appropriate responses. Thank you for asking that question. I think that that was great seeing as we have been having that discussion with the minister on the private rented sector and the new deal for tenants. That brings us to a close. The one thing that I am really so much that came out of this discussion has been very helpful for us this morning. One thing that I would look forward to hearing more about and discuss the fact that there are worries among landlords around the net zero question and how we are going to do all that retrofitting and look forward to hearing that. I think that something that comes up to me around that is something, Michael, you talked about not necessarily in relation to net zero but just in terms of challenges facing landlords with respect to the quality of the housing that they have to work with. Going forward, a thing that we need to really be pushing for is good quality, good standard housing, especially in light of the fact that the Government has plans to build 110,000 new homes over the coming 10 years, maybe a bit longer, and 70 per cent of that is going to be earmarked for social housing. That also brings up another question for me, which maybe we do not have time to go into this time, but maybe we can touch on it in a year. Does the Scottish Housing Regulator have the capacity if we are going to be taking on 70 per cent of 110,000 new homes? It seems to me that you are going to be growing, but growing from a really great position from what I have heard this morning. Thank you for joining us. I thank the witnesses for their evidence today. We agreed at the start of the meeting to take the next item in private, so as we have no more public business today, I now close the public part of the meeting.