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I want to pick up on the point that has been raised repeatedly about broadband being a physical constraint on access to a lot of critical services and capabilities. For example, I think that there is not a fixed-line broadband connection into certain geographies. Do you feel that the NHS should do more to provide satellite broadband services to all staff to give people the assurance of knowing that they can have access to the basic infrastructure that is required to carry out consultations or to access key services. Is that the sort of thing that might be worth looking at? Perhaps you could offer a perspective on that, Mr Dickson.

Thank you very much.

Panellists might be familiar with the work of the University of Glasgow and Marie Curie on the dying in the margins project, which highlighted the reality of terminally ill people dying at home, particularly in poverty and with poor adaptations to their housing situations. What is your experience of how end-of-life needs and wishes are being addressed in rural settings? Are there particular challenges in supporting people in those areas to have the death that they want, challenges that we might not see as much in urban areas, simply because those people do not have the same autonomy of decision making about staying at home in the final stages of life? Does anyone have a particular view on that?

Just to be clear on your point, do you agree that the current remit of the Scottish Housing Regulator is inadequate to safeguard community control of assets?

I have observed 18 separate regulatory breaches, conflicts of interest and procedural abuses by the interim director and management committee co-optees at Reidvale Housing Association. I and other members of the Parliament have written to you about that today. If a potential transfer partner has breached data protection law by obtaining the personal contact information of a target housing association’s tenants to canvass them, without their explicit consent, with unsolicited text messages and calls, what action will the Scottish Housing Regulator take in that instance?

If I may come back briefly, convener, I appreciate the challenges in governance that Mr Walker and Mr Cameron have outlined and which I am sighted on as well, but the fundamental point is that this is about 900 tenements in a highly desirable part of Glasgow with no debt secured against them, and it is unusual for a housing association to have that level of fiscal headroom to raise capital through secured debt against the properties.

Furthermore, there does not seem to be any proactive effort to support the community to improve the governance of the housing association without having to surrender control of the assets.

Also, several professionals who are engaged in community-controlled housing associations across the Glasgow area offered to come in to the housing association to support the restructuring without having to surrender control of the assets to a large national housing group but were denied en bloc by the Scottish Housing Regulator. Those are matters of concern, as I understand it, in terms of co-options on to that board. In the light of that and what you have said today, we should consider how to strengthen protections for community-controlled housing in Scotland.

Thanks, gentlemen. How does the Scottish Housing Regulator’s oversight of the loss of several community-controlled housing associations to takeovers by a large national housing group square with the Scottish Government’s community wealth building and empowerment missions?

Do you not think that community control of asset wealth is in tenants’ interests?

Standard 7.3 in the SHR’s regulatory standards of governance and financial management states that a registered social landlord must ensure that there is “adequate consultation” before engaging in an options appraisal. Why was that not done at Reidvale Housing Association in Glasgow? When it was reported to the Scottish Housing Regulator, no action was taken, allowing the housing association to carry out, post appraisal, a consultation that had predetermined that there should be a transfer of engagements owned by the community to another housing association, assets that are conservatively valued at over £100 million and have no debt secured against them.

At that stage, of course, the precondition for transfer had already been set. The regulator has a role in overseeing those processes. In the case of Reidvale, we know that Places for People group, a London-based organisation, was present at Reidvale’s annual general meeting, posted promotional material on Reidvale’s website, sent targeted literature to tenants, put up signage in the area and struck a deal to take over a community centre owned by Reidvale Housing Association after the housing association withdrew funding for it. Do you think that that sort of aggressive and insidious lobbying is appropriate?