Meeting of the Parliament 26 June 2019
I thank the Government and the minister for making time for the debate, and I am grateful for all the contributions that have come from across the chamber.
The Scottish parliamentary working group on tenement maintenance, on which I have been proud to serve as a member, was formed in March 2018. It set out to find common themes on how to improve legislation in this area. Remarkably, we did find common themes that had cross-party support and, which is perhaps even more important, had support from the experts in the field.
That is the strength of the working group’s report, as others have mentioned. We have not only cross-party support from four of the five parties—we are not quite sure where the Lib Dems are, but hopefully they will appear at some point—but, more importantly, buy-in from the professionals and from local authorities.
I, too, thank Ben Macpherson for bringing about the debate that took place a couple of years ago. The reason why I took part in that debate involved my rather troubled experience as a councillor in Edinburgh. I was pleased that Maureen Watt, I think, said what a good model Edinburgh had. If she had come here a few years ago, she might not have had quite the same experience. The local authority went through quite a difficult time with regard to how to deal with tenements, but the council learned from that experience and it has shown that we can move forward together. We need to work on that.
Everyone has mentioned the three recommendations. To save time, I will not go through them again. John Mason was right when he said that the difficulty will not be in agreeing principles but in how we implement the proposals in practice. I think that Daniel Johnson and others also picked up on that point. That will be the challenge for the minister and the Government when they come back in the autumn. We can agree on terminology and principles but, when it comes down to how we actually implement the proposals and the amount of money that will be involved, we will have to work closely together. Beyond that, there is the question of how we can sell the proposals to our constituents, because, as has been pointed out by other members, they will have to pay extra.
It is important to make the point that Graham Simpson started with. This is an issue not just for Edinburgh, Aberdeen and Glasgow but for lots of cities and towns throughout Scotland, because tenements were built not only 100 years ago but in the post-war period and even in more recent times. We have to consider what we are going to do with tenements that are being built today. I know that many people now have factors, and I think that that is the way forward. We perhaps need to think further about how we encourage—or even, perhaps, force—owners to have some kind of factoring service in their block.
I again thank all those who have done the hard work. I pay particular tribute to Ben Macpherson and Graham Simpson, who chaired the meetings.
We have set ourselves a target of 2025, which is the date by which we want the proposals to be implemented. That might seem a long way away, but the hard work starts now. I know that members on this side of the chamber and, I am sure, across the chamber, look forward to hearing not only the minister’s summing-up speech today but also, more importantly, what he will say in the autumn.