Meeting of the Parliament 14 May 2024
I, too, add my congratulations to the committee, the minister and the Government for getting the bill to where it is today. The bill is better today than it was at the start of the process, and that is an achievement by all members of the committee and the minister. However, this is very much the start of the journey rather than the end.
I was interested in Mr Coffey’s remarks. If we go back to the previous session of Parliament, Andy Wightman, who did a lot of work on this issue behind the scenes, brought together the Scottish Government, the lawyers, the surveyors and the insurance companies. The issues that Mr Coffey addressed in his speech were highlighted around five years ago; those were the key issues that had to be addressed.
There is a bit of frustration among the professionals and, more importantly, the home owners who live in these properties that it has taken us, as a Parliament, so long to get to where we are today. From the conversations that I had at the meetings that Mr Wightman organised, it became pretty clear that there would have to be something separate in Scotland due to the legal system and that progress had to be made quickly. It was also clear that Government and politicians would have to be involved in the process, because if we simply left it to mortgage lenders, surveyors and owners, it was not going to happen. I am pleased that we have got to where we are today, but there is frustration that it has taken us so long to get here.
Having a single assessment is important, and it is good news for people who are facing a difficult situation. I am interested to know how much work the Government has done in private to find out whether there are enough surveyors with the experience that is required to do the work that needs to be done. It was highlighted a number of years ago that it will require specific experience that not all surveyors have. It is clear that most of the properties that we are talking about are in Edinburgh and Glasgow, so it will put pressure on the surveyors in those areas to carry out the work. I hope that that issue is being addressed.
One of the slight difficulties with a framework bill is that a lot of the detail will come in secondary legislation. In his summing up, will the minister let us know how quickly the secondary legislation will come forward? We do not want another delay while regulations are consulted on, drafted and laid before Parliament. I hope—I am confident—that the minister will already have been working on those instruments with his officials behind the scenes. If he could give us some indication as to when they will be laid before the Parliament, that would be very helpful.
I will finish by echoing the remarks made by Willie Rennie. The ultimate success of the bill will lie not in how well we have done here, in the Parliament, but in how quickly people are able to get insurance, sell their houses and, most importantly, feel safe living in the flats and houses that we are talking about. I know that the minister is an optimist by nature, so I wonder whether he could give us an indication, in his closing speech, of when he thinks the properties that we are talking about will have had the assessment and when the work will have been done. Will it be in two years or three years, for instance? Could he give us some indication?
16:40