Susie Fitton, Maeve McGoldrick and John Mills

Chapters

• 00:00 - Introduction to the Housing Scotland Bill
• 03:09 - Key Amendments and Their Implications
• 05:48 - The Role of Local Authorities in Homelessness Prevention
• 09:01 - Challenges in Implementation and Resource Allocation
• 11:52 - The Importance of Collaboration and Data Sharing
• 15:10 - Addressing Domestic Abuse in Housing Policy
• 18:02 - The Carrot vs. Stick Debate in Housing Legislation
• 20:46 - Future Directions and Key Amendments Needed
• 24:08 - Conclusion and Next Steps

Kieran Findlay

Hello and welcome to the Scottish Housing News Podcast, where in this episode we’re exploring some of the latest amendments to the proposed Housing (Scotland) Bill, focusing in particular on homelessness prevention, but with a nod to other areas too. I’m Kieran Findlay, and with Jimmy Black, we’ll be diving into the cross-sector collaboration that helped shape the amendments, how these changes might be implemented and what potential challenges lie ahead.

Jimmy Black

So to help us, we’re joined by three key voices in the housing sector. Susie Fitton as policy manager at the Scottish Federation of Housing Associations, known as the SFHA, Maeve McGoldrick, head of policy and communications at Crisis, and John Mills, head of housing at Fife Council and co-chair of ALACHO.

Now Stage One of the Bill has passed and the Bill is at Stage Two with amendments under consideration. We’re going to focus initially on part five of the Bill. In short, just to give people an explanation of what it’s all about, a much wider range of public sector agencies will have a duty to ask people if they are homeless or threatened with homelessness, and they’ll also have to act positively to help them.

What does that mean? In Parliament, Jeremy Balfour MSP asked what that duty means for, say, at 2am for a nurse in Accident and Emergency. What would she or he do if confronted with a homeless person in a ward full of people who’ve been waiting more than four hours for help? And the Justice and Social Security Committee recently heard amendments designed to clarify the duty and other aspects of the Bill.

So Susie, the SFHA has worked closely with Crisis and Homeless Network Scotland on a long list of key amendments. Can you walk us through the most significant changes that you wanted and those that were adopted?

Susie Fitton

Stable housing is one of the most fundamental of human needs and the Housing Bill contains vital measures to prevent homelessness and stabilise people’s housing situations in part five. And these measures are a result of many years of work and consultation going back to the Homelessness and Rough Sleeping Action Group in 2017.

And SFHA strongly supports the intention of these proposals, which is to shift the focus to interventions to prevent homelessness rather than simply respond to it and to help reduce reliance on temporary accommodation, which has been an increasing feature. So the Ask and Act provisions and the duty on relevant bodies such as local authorities and housing associations, but also health boards and the police, and we’ve supported a range of amendments that would expand the Ask and Act duties to GPs, for example, because of their unique position in terms of often the first point of contact for people who are at risk of homelessness, community planning partnerships as well.

These duties provide that those in contact with people at risk of homelessness should ask if an individual is homeless or at risk of homelessness and seek to try and take action if they are. Now… listen, I’m not going to tell you that these provisions are going to solve the housing emergency. And I think we’re all going to be talking about the essential need to provide more houses if we are going to tackle this issue. But there is a role for the people who actually interact and relate to people in housing need and people in housing precarity to ask about someone’s housing options and to seek to signpost them to the support that they need.

The key thing for us though, and I’m sure John will be in agreement with this, is that we don’t want these provisions simply to load more pressure onto a system that is under so much strain. And we don’t want these provisions just to end up as some default referral mechanism to local authorities. So it’s not just about Ask and Act. It’s about all of the things that underpin how we support people to avoid homelessness in the first place.

Jimmy Black

OK, Meave, Crisis proposed greater clarity on the definition of homelessness and called for a right to review for homeless people who believe they should have a better service. We also wanted local authorities to have greater duties to help people who are intentionally homeless, whatever that means. Were your amendments well received?

Maeve McGoldrick

So just a bit of clarity on the first one. What we’re calling for is greater definition of threatened with homelessness. We’re not necessarily calling to open up a conversation about the definition of homelessness as a whole. So it’s very much the amendments focused on the definition of threatened with homelessness.

Yeah, we have, as you say, an amendment on intentionality that was discussed actually a couple of weeks ago within the committee and got quite a broad debate because there were a few different amendments put down on this and some are suggesting that intentionality is removed from the system altogether. So not just within the prevention side of things, which is what our amendment is suggesting, but for it to be removed from the whole system altogether. And the general take from government on this is that they agree with that in principle, but we’re not in the place where it can be removed from the whole homelessness system and there might be unintended consequences for doing so.

So there is support for removing it from the role of prevention. And the belief behind that is that we want to try and encourage as many people as possible to come forward as early as possible. There are other amendments, as you said, around the right to review, which is basically trying to drive more accountability into the system. It’s one thing to have more duties come in under prevention, but if we don’t have accountability measures for good or poor delivery of those new duties, then they become less effective.

We have quite a few amendments that are very much based around regulations. So putting in place powers to bring about secondary legislation at a later stage. And in terms of, as you say, providing greater clarity on the prevention legislation, this is the intention, and they fall under key areas. So one is that sort of definition of threatened with homelessness.

And the second one, which I think is probably one of the most crucial aspects of the legislation, Ask and Act, what we’ve called for is an amendment to provide a power to put in basically greater detail under what should be prescribed under the Act duty, in particular, for those other public bodies.

So in the legislation of the moment, as it currently stands, there are what’s called reasonable steps outlined for the local authority to deliver on its six-month, potentially plus, prevention activity. So there will be a degree of prescription in that respect, a bare minimum, but by no means that’s the limit whatsoever. And our sort case to government was you need the same level of detail to be in for other public bodies so that you really balance the level of responsibility and accountability for delivery of good quality preventative support.

The challenge in this is we don’t know with a huge amount of confidence exactly what should be prescribed under the Act duty for the other public bodies, quite simply because this has never been done before via legislation. So we have this really quite unique model, which we’ve looked at and can’t see it actually been done anywhere else in the world in relation to developing legislation. The new, quite unique model is that we will have regulations to provide greater detail on this legislation and link that to the pilot activity that we heard government announce £4 million for prevention pilots.

So what we want to do is use those pilots to really drill down and effectively test out this legal framework with all of the relevant public bodies and identify what is that best practice for those range of public bodies of what type of tools are within their toolbox that we can then put that back onto the face of the legislation through regulations at a later stage.

And then the other area for our amendments is around the assessment model. So we put in an amendment to ensure that there is an assessment process that’s conducted. So, diagnosing people’s support needs is absolutely fundamental to getting this package of support right. And if we don’t do that diagnostics in a holistic manner, we end up with a siloed system. And the whole point of this legislation is intended to bring about a more holistic model of support that acts much earlier on.

So getting that diagnostic tool right of what those support needs are and putting together a joint package of support where all of the relevant public bodies can work collectively together and case manage the household is really, really critical to this actually being a success on the ground.

And then the last amendment that we have, I’m summarising these, there’s quite a long list, but the last big one is around commencement. So we’ve put in an amendment to ensure that the legislation as a whole is delivered and is commenced no later than the end of December 2028. And then that gives us two years to really flesh out the thinking about how do we get from the pilot learnings to the point where we’re ready for full-scale implementation.

When the Bill first came out last March, we were quite concerned that it was very, the narrative was very much, there’s prevention measures being put through parliament, but don’t worry, they won’t come in for a long time. We’ll deal with the housing emergency first and then we’ll look at prevention. And we pushed government really hard on this and we have seen a bit of a shift in the narrative because from our perspective, and if you look at the last homelessness statistics, we’ll show you the council is doing a really good job actually of getting people out of the homelessness system and closing cases, but the flow into the system is higher than the flow out of the system.

And if government’s response to the housing emergency is simply to deal with crisis management response, we’ll be forever chasing our tail. We need to reduce that inflow into the system in the first place, alongside targeted measures to get people out of the system. So we’d really stress quite strongly that what we want is to create a system where we’re trying to drive prevention activity today, tomorrow, as quickly as possible, but hold off on the legal commencement of those duties until three years down the line when we’re very confident of what should be expected of each of those public bodies and making sure we have the infrastructure in place for them to work well together.

Kieran Findlay

John, we’ve heard local authorities declare openly that they can’t meet many of their current duties to rehouse people under the Homeless Persons legislation because they don’t have the resources. Here’s another law coming at you, potentially asking you to do even more. You can have officers from several other agencies bringing even more homeless cases to your door. So the first question has to be, from a local authority perspective, how feasible is it to meet these new homelessness prevention duties?

John Mills

I think from a general perspective, I was an original member of HARSAG and the Prevention Review Group. I think if you talk to heads of housing, particularly, and colleagues within council services, particularly homeless services, there is that overwhelming pressure at the moment on many local authorities in Scotland.

While recognising that, the right thing to do is to invest in prevention because if you just focus on crisis response alone, which is important because you’ve got to deal with it on a daily basis and we’re not all meeting the legal responsibilities that we currently have and I’ll come back to that, unless you start really pivoting and gearing towards prevention as part of that overall response, you’re ultimately going to keep firefighting for years and years and years and you’re never going to get out of the housing emergency.

And I do agree with Susie’s point, the bottom line here is you need to build loads and loads of social rented houses over a number of years to get out of the crisis, the emergency situation that we’re in. And that has to be our focus.

It’s interesting that when we talk to colleagues, which we are doing and local authorities and health and social care, police and fire and other bodies that could be impacted by the new duty, they’re asking the question, what does this mean for us? So the job of a local authority, particularly the housing authority, is to educate. Education is to certainly start working closely with social care, both children and families and adults, is to work as closely as we can, although I don’t think this has really started with Police Scotland and other bodies. We are talking to RSLs, they are our key closest partners.

So that preparation work for the new duty, I’ll come back to Maeve’s point about the implementation date, has already started. What we’re maybe not able to do under current resource restrictions and homelessness is to really ramp that work up to the level that most heads of housing would say is right. So it’s about pacing this and it’s about the implementation period which Maeve has referred to and the COSLA position and certainly ALACHO’s position is we’ve asked for the government to consider a 2028 implementation date.

That’s the kind of timeline we’re talking about, three years of activity being properly resourced and that’s still the big gap from the government. We need resources, additional resources to start training, start preparing the ground with other partners to more effectively work together.

And in Fife, we’re investigating what we call a no wrong door approach, a whole systems approach to homelessness. And we’re starting to develop that in one of our areas, Cowdenbeath by summer time. So some of the barriers to that collaboration and partnership, which Susie referred to as data sharing, which can’t be underestimated, the focus on the customer, giving them the earliest opportunity to talk about housing and housing options, personal housing planning is an important part of that. But if we don’t crack data sharing between those partner agencies across the public bodies and with RSLs, then we’re going to be in some difficulty because people are not going to get a joined-up view of what they want and what they need.

They’re going to have to tell their story several times, might be in an A&E, accident emergency situation where a health practitioner is asking them the question, do you have a safe home to return to? And if not, what’s their response? All of that takes time and preparation and resource to do that.

Jimmy Black

Jeremy Balfour MSP, he pointed out that if agencies fail in their duty to ask and act, there’s no stick to hit them with. Should there be a stick, John?

John Mills

Well, we work within our Scottish housing regulatory regime. So I’m assuming that once the new duties are placed on, well, I’m just talking about local authority, housing authorities here, the regulator has to have a role in assessing the implementation of the duty placed on housing authority. So that’s one part of it. There needs to be a tie-in with other regulatory bodies responsible for other public sector agencies. So that kind of tying in to hopefully our streamlined approach to regulation on prevention has to be part of this debate and discussion. So I’m not sure where we are with that, but that’s certainly something we’d be interested in.

Local authorities in general would not welcome financial penalties being placed on local authorities, where a time when many homeless accounts on general funds in Scotland are in significant deficit. I don’t think financial penalties are going to make a huge difference to us. It just puts us into deeper deficit. There needs to be a much more meaningful aspiration to do the best we can together collaboratively within the resource base that we have.

We’re assuming we will have more houses to let over the over next few years. We’re assuming that through collaboration we’ll be able to intervene as early as possible to identify vulnerable people. Children at eight or nine, for instance, we can identify families going through the education system with education and look to build further supports around them.

So there’s a number of things that don’t cost a hell of a lot of money to do better close working, but some of the hard edge of prevention services will require additional finance and housing resources. So that’s our bottom line. I think we’re very willing to work with the government to actually develop the statutory guidance and actually then seek to have an effective implementation plan with partners. That has to be the focus over the next three years.

Kieran Findlay

Yes, I saw that Maeve would like to come in on that because we’ve heard about the importance of balance of accountability. So did you have something to add to what John just said there?

Maeve McGoldrick

The most fundamental thing to get right in this systems change is getting the right culture in place to meaningfully prevent. And part of that is about the willingness of all relevant bodies to see this as relevant to their agendas and worth doing. And you get piles and piles of new legislation and new duties, it just becomes a tick box exercise. And if that’s what we end up with, we won’t have an effective prevention system.

I think this comes down to making sure the carrots and sticks are in place. Those sticks need to be about accountability, whether John says it’s through those other relevant bodies’ own regulation systems, or we bring a more coherent right to review in place for the systems as a whole at some point. But in terms of the carrots, part of that implementation phase over the next couple of years really has to be about those that are willing to come forward today and put your hand up and say, I want to be part of this and I’m going to give it my best shot to try and understand what is within my toolbox to be able to try and help somebody stabilise their housing, but also deal with those root causes to homelessness. This isn’t just about housing, it’s to do with mental health support, physical health support, to do with family breakdown, addiction, money management, et cetera.

So it’s looking at what those other services can meaningfully do to help stabilise that housing situation. And part of the carrots is to identify what are those shared outcomes that result through this integrated service provision. Stable housing will just be one outcome. There will be a range of other outcomes to do with poverty, to do with, as I say, family mediation, to do with health outcomes, et cetera. That if those bodies come together collectively, there’s benefits in it for other agendas outside of housing and homelessness.

And I think one of the challenges that we have, as John said, quite a few of us were part of the origins of this work, through the action plans and different government groups. And that’s wonderful. But the challenge is it’s come via the homelessness system and the homelessness sector really lobbying for this. The success is when it’s not seen as a homelessness service, when it’s seen as a preventative early action service that has housing at the centre of its components, but it has a range of other outcomes that sit alongside that. And I think that’s where the vision that we want to try and shift to.

So to get that culture change and buy in, whether it be the front line of public services or whether it be the minister with that brief. It’s about how do we have collective appetite for doing this and will to do it as well as the accountability to make sure that they do a good job on it.

Kieran Findlay

Susie, we’ll move on to domestic abuse in a second, but just keen to get your thoughts on the carrot versus stick debate there for relevant bodies.

Susie Fitton

For housing associations, the Scottish Housing Regulator will obviously have a role. And I think, as John says, the tie-in with other regulatory bodies for the other relevant bodies involved in Ask and Act will be really important. And just to echo the points that have been made about the culture shift and the need to create this preventative early action service and culture where there’s this coalition of the willing and the committed in terms of stabilising people’s housing situations and the broad range of supports.

But I was thinking back, I started out giving housing advice and casework to disabled people who were living in inaccessible homes, many of whom were essentially homeless because it was unreasonable to expect them to continue to occupy the house that they were currently living in. I started out doing that 25 years ago. And at that point, I knew exactly where to go to get the bespoke casework and housing options advice and support that people needed to really think in the broadest sense of the term about what their actual housing options were.

And in the time that I’ve been working on housing policy, and particularly from an equality and disability point of view, the type of services that people could go to to get that support have been diminishing, not increasing. And it’s collaboration, it’s casework, it’s getting very involved in the detail and in the options that leads to a preventative and a prevention culture.

For me, it shouldn’t really be about thinking about challenge and carrots and sticks. It’s quite, in a legislative process, these are the kind of things that we have to discuss and think about. But actually, when we think about individuals and we think about households and we think about solving and stabilising housing issues, it’s really about providing housing options support in as many different settings as we can and ensuring that the quality of advice provision is such that we protect people from receiving poor information and that we support the assessment of potential homelessness by people with sufficient experience and expertise and that we ensure that high quality advice is resourced properly.

Kieran Findlay

The SFHA has also proposed new duties for social landlords relating to domestic abuse. Many social landlords would probably say that they already do this, but Maggie Chapman MSP feels it’s not clear that the provisions of the Bill will cover people who are trans, people abused by family members or victims of honour-based abuse. What does all this mean in practice, Susie?

Susie Fitton

So domestic abuse is one of the leading causes of women’s homelessness in Scotland. We therefore welcome provisions to update the definition of domestic abuse as it applies within a housing context and that a requirement will be placed on all social landlords to develop and implement a domestic abuse policy. Much of this is largely already being delivered by housing associations. We’re aware of some really, really good practice in the sector. The efforts to formalise this process is welcome.

We want to support our members to specifically consider the effect of domestic abuse in the accrual of rent arrears where eviction action is being taken and to fully consider further actions that can assist victim survivors before eviction action for rent arrears can be taken in court.

At SFHA, we recognise that there’s work to be done in the sector in relation to being responsive and supportive to victims and survivors of domestic abuse. We saw with the Policies Not Promises report from Scottish Women’s Aid and the Chartered Institute of Housing in 2023 that despite good intentions and over 70 Scottish social landlords signing up to the Make a Stand domestic abuse campaign, that many social landlords in Scotland still didn’t have an effective policy in place.

So we want to provide a supportive environment and a practice sharing environment. We’re working at the moment to create a peer support network for our members in this regard. We recognise that there’s room for improvement here. We hope these provisions and a statutory requirement will be the driver for positive change. But we know that our members have a unique role in their communities. They’re well placed to spot the signs of all types of abuse, including hidden harm, such as financial abuse and emotional abuse. And we know that many RSLs are already doing some fantastic work in this area. I visited Berwickshire Housing Association recently, who’ve got some excellent forward-thinking practice in this area. Almond Housing Association, for example, are thought leaders in this area.

But the key thing for us is that resources support leadership and culture change are also needed and we need to have open discussions about the challenges of meeting the needs of trans people as you mentioned. We’re also calling on the Scottish Government to set out a timeframe confirming when the measures in the Domestic Abuse Protection Scotland Act 2021 will be implemented. So that would allow landlords to apply to the court to end the tenancy rights of someone who has been abusive to their partner or ex-partner if the abused person wants to continue living in the house. So we also need some alignment in terms of the provisions that already exist but haven’t been enacted.

So there’s a number of things that we’re calling for in this regard. But I think the key thing is to recognise that there’s no lack of appetite from members to support victims and survivors and to be inclusive and to take account of equalities considerations around that. But I think there is a need for support and training in the sector because these can be challenging issues for a housing association to encounter and to deal with appropriately.

Jimmy Black

John, thinking about the housing options approach, it’s been mentioned a couple of times. Mark Griffin MSP expressed concerns that people would become trapped in prevention. They might never reach the point where they were actually accepted as being homeless in terms of the Act. So the fear was that the Ask and Act duty might become another way of gatekeeping. So do you think the new duties could actually increase delays and cause homeless people extra stress?

John Mills

I’ve got a difficulty with the whole concept of when people say gatekeeping. I mean, I don’t think we can give that any credence here where we’re trying to act early, intervene early and try and help someone into a sustainable housing option. Surely that’s positive. That is the best course of action we can take.

One of the issues that I’m personally investing some time on, I’m chair of the Rapid Re-Housing Transition Planning subgroup on behalf of COSLA and the Scottish Government. So we are now looking at what does prevention mean in the context of rapid rehousing. And that must mean, because HARSAG basically asked that rapid rehousing is the default position for councils and local RSLs, that should mean that we try and make sure that people are sustained in existing accommodations safely with support if required, or move to more suitable accommodation without ever having to come near a homeless persons officer.

So I wouldn’t say that’s gatekeeping, that’s positive application of housing options. The approach has been around for years and years. We’ve had various debates with the regulator about housing options approach and gatekeeping. I’ve robustly defended it. I think it’s good practice. And what we need to do is enhance that, make the scope of housing options greater and much more varied for people’s wants and needs. At the moment, I think it is too narrow and that has to be a huge effort to try and widen the scope in different tenures, different sectors to try and get people into a housing option of their choice where they’re going to settle and hopefully sustain their accommodation.

So that’s not gatekeeping, that’s positive use of housing advice, housing options approach, identifying with the tenant or applicant a suitable housing option and enabling them, clearing the path if we have to, but enabling them to gain access to that with support. So I think that’s really all positive stuff. I don’t think there’s any concerns from our point of view as heads of housing that we would ever seek to try and prevent someone exercising rights that they have under the legislation.

Whether we can meet those duties and rights is a good question. I mean, we’re obviously in the housing emergency. Not all local authorities, some are, but not all local authorities are meeting the duty to provide temporary accommodation at point of need or to house someone suitably in suitable temporary accommodation. That’s the kind of anxiety that local authorities have about new duties. It doesn’t mean they’re not welcoming them. It means to say, look, how are we going to meet that if we can’t actually meet basic legal rights? But the legal rights of people to seek help earlier in the process absolutely is the right thing to do.

Kieran Findlay

So Maeve, just before we round up, if you did have a chance to add one more amendment or see something strengthened in the Bill, what would that be?

Maeve McGoldrick

I think the big one in this is about budgets really and money. The purpose of doing prevention is primarily to ensure that we minimise the suffering and the indignity that individuals face having to declare themselves homeless and go through the homelessness system. And that’s the huge avoidance we would get by intervening earlier and trying to stabilise housing. But the other practical side of this is for more cost-effective public services to be delivered. We know that preventing a problem is much more effective than the sticky plaster solutions to try and address the problem. And the two silver bullets on preventing the problem is enough homes, building enough homes really is essential to both prevention as well as getting people out of the homelessness system. And the second one is ensuring that people have the help that they need.

I don’t know if there’s a nice amendment stemming from the Christie Commission principles of we all buy into that concept of prevention, but we really struggled to put it into practice. And maybe this piece of legislation is the first tool to really start to deliver on that Christie Commission in practice.

Susie Fitton

If you’re asking for one key amendment that we would like to see on the face of the Bill that we haven’t touched on, we are urgently seeking an exemption for mid-market rent homes from private sector rent controls within the Housing Bill where these homes are provided by a Registered Social Landlord or its subsidiary.

Mid-market rent is a unique and valuable option for people who cannot access home ownership or the social rented sector and it provides options for key workers, for students, for short-term workers, those leaving home for the first time and many other key groups who might struggle to afford private rents.

And demand for mid-market rent is extremely high across Scotland. Many of our members experience hundreds of applicants in a day or they have to remove advertisements after one day. So there’s a clear need for additional supply of these homes and they have been caught up, unintentionally perhaps, in these rent control proposals and they are not needed. Rent control is not needed for this type of housing. So local housing allowance and broad rental market areas effectively act as existing rent controls for mid-market rent properties, but provisions within the Housing Bill will have a perhaps unintended, but no less detrimental effect on the supply of mid-market rent homes if they are not made explicitly exempt.

So our sector needs the certainty that an exemption provides in order to attract the private investment needed for mid-market rent development pipelines. It provides strong value for money on public grant and it helps deliver both affordable and social housing developments. So if I had to call for one key amendment that would in many ways support prevention without being in that part of the bill, it would be that.

Kieran Findlay

The call for resources and more social housing seems to be at the nub of lots of conversations that Jimmy and I have on this podcast. But if you had the magic wand, which amendment would you add or wave through on this Bill, John?

John Mills

I’m just a bit cautious about that, Kieran. I mean, I think there’s over 100 amendments, so I’m not going to propose any more. I think that’s enough. Just commenting on housing supply, obviously, the Housing to 2040 Board has looked at this, the Housing Investment Task Force has just reported to the Scottish Government. So we basically need to, in my view, have a change to the housing finance system in Scotland because it’s currently not delivering the volumes, the variety of tenures that we need to support people’s needs and wants in Scotland. So I think, I don’t think it’s about this Bill, I think it’s about the Housing to 2040 strategy and vision that we need to keep faith with.

And I think Susie made a point earlier about the need for longevity in terms of political ambition and commitment. And I think that’s a critical point because if a government is committed to building enough affordable housing supply and indeed market housing, I’ve no problem with that at all. It needs to create the political stability. And at this time in the world, I know that that’s easy for me to say, but it needs to create political stability over several administrations to actually meet that ambition.

And at the moment, we saw last year, and I think has been widely commented on, that there was a cut to the affordable housing programme in Scotland. That was disastrous in my view, because it sucked energy out of the programme, which is like a big oil tanker, you need to keep it steered in the right direction to keep the speed up to deliver.

As prices increase across the world and particularly in the UK for building properties, it’s going to be increasingly difficult for any political administration to achieve any target it sets. But there’s got to be that consistency across all parties to keep to that political commitment to actually make this a success. And although I wasn’t around after the Second World War, I do recognise what happened in the country after that major event, that they realised they needed to replace what we got, we talked about in terms of slum housing and in poor housing conditions, if increasing numbers of people don’t even have a home to call their own, then that is absolutely not acceptable in a modern society.

So there needs to be a consistent commitment across the political groups going into election times that come what may, we will keep faith with the need to invest in social housing.

I don’t think Susie will get the exemption on mid-market rent. I think there is an absolute case to boost mid-market rent provision across Scotland. It’s in very heavy demand. It is a solution for many people that won’t meet priority needs, points levels in terms of allocation policies. So we would look for whatever mechanism the government want to come up with to try and encourage and incentivise MMR, mid-market rent development, but really focus on social rented housing.

So don’t think that’s an amendment to the Bill, Kieran, but that’s what I’m trying to work towards, certainly in COSLA and ALACHO and others.

Kieran Findlay

Excellent. Thanks everyone for your time. I can’t promise, like John said, that all the amendments will get through. I certainly can’t promise that you’ll get political stability in the near future. But what I can say is that it was agreed that the consideration for Stage 2 should be completed by the 29th of May. So mark that date in your calendar, everybody.

My thanks for this episode goes to Susie Fitton from the SFHA, Maeve McGoldrick from Crisis and John Mills from Fife Council and ALACHO. Jimmy and I will be back with another episode of the Scottish Housing News Podcast in a few weeks. Thanks.