Welcome to the Parliament podcast. It's been a year since the Scottish Parliament declared a national housing emergency, and in that time, 13 local councils have also declared local housing emergencies. It's a topic that's rarely out of the headlines. The local government, Housing and Planning Committee wanted to look at how the housing emergency is being tackled by the Scottish Government and local authorities.

And they also wanted to explore what a properly functioning housing system could look like in Scotland.

Last year the committee took evidence from a range of experts and professionals working in the housing sector and have just published a report outlining their findings, including a list of recommendations on what they think the Scottish government should do to combat

the issue. To discuss the report, I'm joined today by committee convener Ariane Burgess. Ariane, welcome to the

podcast. Great to be here. I'll start by asking you to go back to the start of the process to ask really,

what was the inquiry's remit and what was it set up to achieve? Well, housing is our middle name, local

government housing and planning and we've been quite busy with housing over the years since I've

been convening it and a deep fascination because there is a challenge around housing in Scotland

in general. And as a rural MSP, housing is the number one issue in terms of tackling homelessness,

but also tackling the economy.

And that's also something that will naturally flow into an urban situation.

So we wanted to look at this housing emergency, as you've said in the introduction.

That was declared a year ago. And it was actually

local authorities before that, I think four or five before the parliament actually declared an

emergency were already pushing for that and already declaring their own local emergencies. And so we

thought we wanted to get behind and really understand what the government needs to do in order to address

this issue.

And through our work, we've kind of come up with some recommendations and kind of pointing to.

So it's been really a brilliant piece of work talking to stakeholders or really understand

the issues.

At one of the first meetings of the inquiry last year, you asked those giving evidence

what they felt constituted a quote-unquote housing emergency.

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