Scotland's Sustainable Housing Strategy

7. Monitoring

The Sustainable Housing Strategy Group has played an important role in developing this strategy and will monitor its early implementation during 2013-14, while key policies continue to become embedded. The intention is to build up a relationship with the Housing Policy Advisory Group ( HPAG) over this period to enable HPAG to take on the role of monitoring the implementation of the strategy after that point.

HPAG was set up to help Ministers to achieve the housing priorities set out in Homes Fit for the 21st Century. With a focus on outcomes, the group works in partnership with the Scottish Government to identify barriers to delivery and ways to overcome these. This makes it an ideal group to oversee implementation of the Sustainable Housing Strategy and integrate it with other plans for housing.

The Fuel Poverty Forum will continue to lead on monitoring progress on fuel poverty. Scottish Ministers are required to report progress towards the 2016 target of eradicating fuel poverty, as far as is reasonably practicable, every four years. The last progress report was published in November 2010. The Scottish Fuel Poverty Forum published its interim report of the Government's Fuel Poverty Strategy in June 2012. The final report is expected to be published in Summer 2013.

This strategy's plans for sustainable housing include the housing policies on climate change set out in the second Report on Proposals and Policies ( RPP). Ministers have set annual targets to reduce carbon emissions in Scotland - the current targets are for each year to 2027. Although there are no statutory targets for housing the information about residential emissions from the Scottish Greenhouse Gas Inventory is a useful indicator of trends in the residential sector, and we will continue to use this information to monitor progress.

We will also continue to monitor progress towards the 2020 'milestones' set in the Report on Proposals and Policies - see Annex A.

The annual Scottish House Condition Survey is a useful source of information about progress towards the milestones and a wide range of other information including:

• house condition,
• energy efficiency and other elements of the Scottish Housing Quality Standard, and
• the percentage of households who monitor their energy use (an indicator in the Low Carbon Scotland: Behaviours Framework)

This information will help in monitoring the success of actions in the different parts of this strategy.

We will also:

• continue to monitor Scottish Government-funded programmes and publish this information on the Energy Saving Trust's website, and
• use information provided by Ofgem and the UK Government to monitor delivery of ECO in Scotland.

The second Report on Proposals and Policies will be published shortly, following Parliament's consideration of the draft RPP2 document. A third RPP is due to be published in 2016/17. We will carry out further analysis in the intervening period to develop a proposal to support further technical abatement through improvements to the carbon efficiency of the housing stock, if these are still needed to meet the statutory climate change targets.