rents in this way. John Mason, for taking the intervention. I mentioned a report by the CPG on housing earlier. One thing that we found was that there is a lack of robust data on rents in Scotland. Does he agree with that? I am sorry, but I have to say that I am not on either the committee or the CPG on that, so I would be struggling to comment in detail about that. Not all landlords have been increasing rents in such a bad way. I think that we have a challenge in drafting legislation that will restrain the bad landlords without punishing those who have been responsible. Some landlords in both the private and social rented sector have kept rents down in recent years and so do not have reserves or savings to absorb a rent freeze. Housing associations in particular have been in touch in recent days, as Mr Dorris and Mr Rennie have already said, and we had the SFHA, the Scottish Federation of Housing Associations, at the finance committee last Tuesday. Their main points would be that they have been keeping rents below inflation in recent years. They were looking at increases of perhaps 5 or 6 per cent next April, which would be well below inflation of 10 or 13 per cent. No, I think that I am going to carry on if you do not mind. Even this level of increase would mean curtailing new building. One association based in my constituency told me that, even without that legislation, they had agreed with lenders to borrow £90 million in the next few years, which was partly to refinance existing loans and partly for development. They are now reducing that borrowing to £50 million purely to refinance and complete existing projects. They will not commit to any more new build for the time being. If rents are frozen from April, they also tell us that improving properties for energy efficiency will have to be put on hold. Further restrictions on rent could mean staff reductions and reduced maintenance, and the main beneficiary, as has been pointed out before, of a rent freeze would be the DWP, who pays 60 or 70 per cent of all rents. The problem for most housing associations seems to be that they have to balance grant receipts, what they can borrow, reactive and cyclical maintenance, and rent increases. Any surpluses or deficits go in or out of that same pot. I used to work in this sector as an accountant, and I can confirm that this is the case. Restrictions on rent increases inevitably mean cuts elsewhere. I accept that even housing associations are not all in agreement. Members may have seen that Parkhead Housing Association, which is in my constituency, had a letter on the herald yesterday, arguing that they could and should have a freeze up to a year or maybe even more, but I think they would want to be allowed to catch up again in the future. However, I do not think that that is the thinking of the majority. I noted in the financial memorandum for the bill at paragraph 37 that it has accepted that, if the freeze goes beyond 31 March, the Scottish Government may be required to provide resources to protect RSLs whose financial viability is threatened due to a loss of rental income. That strikes me as a scenario that we do not want to be in. If we have to go ahead with the legislation, there is a better way forward. We simply have the six month freeze up to March. If we need to do that again to bring forward primary legislation at that point, will housing associations have a better idea of what is going to happen rather than having the dagger hanging over them for another 12 months? I think that we do want to perhaps review things in April so that there would be more differentiation perhaps between good and bad landlords, as I have suggested. Can I just also point out to Mr Balfour, I think that in his speech he suggested that the Government would have power to extend beyond 31 March, whereas in fact that is not the case. Parliament will have the opportunity to make that decision. Can I finally go on and say that in relation to local authority housing, which we do not have in Glasgow, COSLA makes the point in their briefing that quote, rent caps are really not needed for affordable housing as it is affordable. Therefore, I really have a series of questions to ask at this stage in the stage 1 debate. Are we distinguishing enough between responsible landlords, both RSL and private, who have kept rents down in recent years and those who have made excessive profits? For example, could we take past rent increases into account say over the last three to five years when we set limits going forward? Should it be an actual cap in money terms or should it be in percentages so that landlords with existing lower rents, even within the social rented sector, are not disadvantaged? I realise that I am running out of time, so I would just welcome the assurance that this legislation is to be in place up to 31 March. I welcome the fact that it is going to be reviewed during that time, but hopefully in the new year we can revisit this and consider different options after 1 April. We will now move to closing speeches. I call on Pam Duncan-Granthy to wind up on behalf of Scottish Labour up to eight minutes, please, Ms Duncan-Granthy. Thank you, Deputy Presiding Officer. People across the country are in dire straits. The Tories have abandoned them and the SNP are not doing enough either. I agree with the Minister Patrick Harvie in his opening remarks when he said that we are in a humanitarian crisis. Although the mortifying UK Government U-turn on income tax might hold back some of the irresponsible damage inflicted on the pound last week, we have now seen just how willing the Prime Minister and our Chancellor are to play games with our economy and with people's lives. Their haphazard approach introducing such severe economic measures with no consultation, no forecast and no cabinet oversight is terrifying. I will give way. I am grateful to her for giving way. Does she welcome the energy price guarantee that was announced over a week ago, two weeks ago, that supports families in this country and gives the greatest help to those who are in the most need? Does she welcome that measure from the UK Government? I welcome any measure, but I think that it has been wiped out largely by what they have done in recent weeks. I know that the SNP agrees with us on the recklessness that the Tories have wreaked with our economy, and Paul MacLennan certainly made that clear. That is why I cannot help but wish that they had not squandered opportunities to take action on rent years ago when my colleague Pauline McNeill suggested that they do. That is also why I wish that they had in more recently in March copied the Tory scattergun cost of living mitigations, and in so doing missed an opportunity to divert support to those who needed it most. Instead, they too lined the pockets of the wealthy while failing to do anything specific for disabled people and unpaid carers and barely scratching the surface for low-income families. Meanwhile, those Labour benches were writing them a fully cost of living plan, setting out how to do just that, using a targeted approach, rather than spreading the money so thin that its impact was diminished for those feeling the heaviest weight of the crisis. That plan included a temporary rent freeze and a winter evictions ban. My colleague Mercedes Villalba put forward a vote on exactly that back in June, and the SNP and Greens refused to vote with us. Today and on this occasion, I am pleased that they listened to us, to living rent and to the trade unions, shared the Tory ponch on for a U-turn and came round to the idea. However, I stressed to the Government and, as the chamber has already heard in some grim detail from my colleague Mark Griffin, there are real-life impacts of its delay. In the time since we urged the Government to take action, rents are already rising as my colleague Carol Mocken has set out clearly. My inbox is filled with constituents in Glasgow unable to afford a roof over their heads, particularly disabled people, young people and students. My colleague Michael Marra has set out eloquently the challenges that students are facing and that must be addressed. More families are finding themselves homeless than ever before, with homelessness among children increasing by 17 per cent since last year. Delays have consequences, and brave Governments take action without delay. Many are facing rent increases and forced over the summer months, as landlords responded to the cost of living crisis faster than this Scottish Government did. A rent freeze now is too late for them. Had the Government listened to Mercedes Villalba in June, or indeed my colleague Pauli McNeill in the last session, they would not be experiencing those increases. It is not just delays that have consequences either. The lack of ambition and scale of change of the Greens in SNP do too. Richard Leonard set those out perfectly angrily today. I have to say that I was disappointed to hear the minister's response. I am old enough to remember when the member would have been squarely on the side of tenants. Presiding Officer, like others, I too would like reassurance on some of the wider impacts of this bill and would specifically welcome the Government's reassurance that the bill will not impact the social housing programme and that social housing landlords will not face a black hole of costs to make essential improvements to their homes if the freeze is extended. On that point, I asked that the minister could tell Parliament in closing the date that it will be able to vote on his recommendations on the decision to extend or change the provisions of the bill so that registered social landlords can plan for the future. Presiding Officer, the SNP's fail... Can I have my time back, Presiding Officer? We're now tight for time, I'm afraid, so you'd have to accommodate it in your remarks. Okay, I'll try and fit it in. I'll take a brief intervention. Would the member agree with me that much of the situation-facing tenants is down to demand, outstrip and supply? The SNP's Government over the last 15 years failed to address the chronic undersupply in social housing? I agree that demand is outstrip and supply and that there hasn't been enough on that, but that doesn't address the problem right here, right now. The SNP's failure to act fast enough on rents was a failure to protect my Glasgow constituents and others across Scotland, but it's not just on pace that they've let them down. They have also let them down on scale, as I've said. We heard today and not for the first time that the SNP and Greens have put £3 billion into the cost of living crisis. They have not, and we must say this. This figure includes actions from years and years ago, some of which the Labour Government legislated for. The actual figure of the cost of living interventions from the SNP-Green Government, according to SPICE, is a sixth of that at closer to £500 million. That is welcome, but I'd ask that the Government don't overinflate action whilst families can't feed their children. All that does is mask reality and lead to complacency. Scottish Labour has set out a whole platform of ideas for this Government to pick from that they could up the scale of the support that they offer, but sadly, they have an inevitable pattern of shouting those down. Cabinet Secretary, say they welcome ideas from across the chamber but don't act on them. Maybe this bill is a turning point here, and if so, I'd like to seize the opportunity and invite them to consider our suggestions for further action. The Government could make transport more affordable, having rail fares and freezing them for a year, creating online fuel price checkers and supporting local authorities to reduce the cost of bus journeys. The Scottish Government could also not only save people money on crucial outgoings such as transport and by giving households a rebate on the water bills, but it could also help people to get out of problem debt, debt that people are now taking on just to afford basic essentials, not for TVs or holidays, for food and rent. I hope that the Government will consider action on debt in short order. When the Social Justice and Social Security Committee carried out our inquiry, we heard that public authorities often aggressively pursue debt, so there is much that the Government can do on that, including by ensuring that people in debt keep more of their money by raising the threshold of protected income and have funds from carer disability benefits protected, not doing so risks destitution. Action should also be taken to write off school meal debt. Aberlawer found that 11,000 families across Scotland are unable to pay for their children's school meals. Labour-led Scottish Lanarkshire Council have already set a gold standard on that by wiping existing school meal debt, providing relief to my constituents in Ruthergyn. The Government could and should do the same across Scotland. £250 million of council tax debt was referred to sheriff officers in 2021. If the SNP had kept the promise that it would first enter government on, to abolish council tax, that debt would not exist, however it does, and right now it is crippling people who are struggling. We believe that the Government should consider what more it can do to ease the burden of collection of council tax ar ears 2. After a pandemic and now a cost of living crisis, having come from the backfoot position from before, people are pushed to their limits, they need support, which is why it is essential to properly fund money advice services too. Those services are stretched to their limit and we need to make sure that they have resources they need to keep providing their lifeline services to anyone who turns to them. I welcome the aim and the bill to address the health and well-being impacts of unaffordable rent rises and ask that the Government set out in closing what they will do to support third sector organisations to help people. Scottish Labour, as the original proponents of the rent freeze, will support the bill this week, but we believe that there is far more this Government must do to address the cost of living in Scotland. We on these benches have simple, cost-effective, effective solutions in front of us to do this, and I hope that the Government will consider those wider actions, not leave a delay like they did on rent freezes, and set in motion the wider scale action that is needed to get people through the cost of living crisis and ultimately save lives in Scotland. Thank you, Mr Duncan Glancy, and I call on Mordel Fraser for around 10 minutes. Thank you, Deputy Presiding Officer. I should start by reminding members of my register of interests. I am a member of the Law Society of Scotland. I also have an interest in two residential properties that are let on a long-term basis. It takes a particular type of government to identify a problem that is affecting hundreds of thousands of Scots, and it actively proposes a change in the law that will make matters worse for them. It is a particular type of Government minister to put forward a policy when the evidence suggests that it will exacerbate the problem that he is claiming that he wants to solve. That is what we have with the bill before us this afternoon. I will start with a word about the process. Graham Simpson, in his contribution, talked about the fact that the bill is being rushed through Parliament in three days, with no time for detailed scrutiny or consultation with those affected. Mr Simpson is the convener of the cross-party group on housing. He is something of an expert in this particular field. I think that he probably knows what he is talking about on this subject, at least, Presiding Officer. I think that the comments that he makes about the fact that Parliament is rushing us through, when we only saw this bill, I think that five o'clock last night. There is no time for Parliament to give it the scrutiny that it deserves when it has huge wide-ranging consequences, as we have heard throughout this debate. Rush law is bad law, and I fear that that is what we are about to make. There are already significant issues in the provision of private rented accommodation across Scotland, particularly in our cities. Rents have been rising—that is true—fuelled by a shortage of available accommodation. Rose McCall, earlier on, reminded us that, just two weeks ago, the University of Glasgow was advising students that they might have to consider either suspending their studies or withdrawing from courses due to the chronic lack of rented accommodation within the city. Just last week, we heard that students in Edinburgh were having to be offered beds in dormitory-type accommodation, because there was simply nowhere else for them to stay. Letting agents report that there has been a significant and on-going reduction in the number of private sector tenancies coming to the market. Yes or go away? Given Mr Fraser's very passionate concern about supply, I am surprised that he has not whole-heartedly welcomed the measures that we have taken in relation to short-term letting, which has siphoned off what should be proper affordable homes for people into effectively untaxed hotel businesses. Mr Harvey does not even want to talk about the bill that he is proposing today, which is the one that has a negative impact on the supply of rented property. So already we are seeing private landlords frustrated by changes in tenant legislation withdrawing their properties from the market or selling them up or putting them into other use, such as short-term lets. Those properties, which are available, too often see a bidding war for higher rents. Fraser Gaye with me that the SNP-Green Government has failed to see the bigger picture, and I have just heard that right now. The interests of tenants and the interests of landlords are not in opposition, but by preventing any and all evictions and freezing rent, which sounds like an easy short-term solution, tenants may lose out in the long-term. I absolutely agree with that intervention from Mr Carson that it makes his point very well, Deputy Presiding Officer. I can understand why the Scottish Government, in response to the rising cost of living, thought that it was clever politics to bring in this six-month rent freeze to apply until the end of March next year. However, what it did not consider, it seems that this would exacerbate the difficulties that we have already seen in the private rented sector. John Blackwood, chief executive for the Scottish Association of Landlords, said that he had been in response to what was announced by the Government, inundated by landlords, saying that they will be removing their vacant properties from the rental market. The consequence of the legislation will be to reduce still further the availability of properties in the private rented sector, leaving students and others in an increasingly desperate situation. It is simply unbelievable that we have a Scottish Government and a Minister who are so arrogant that they cannot see with the outcome of their actions will be. At least from the SNP benches that we heard from Michelle Thomson earlier on, I think that there will be an impact on the supply of properties if the legislation goes through. It is not just in the private rented sector that we see concerns. A number of members, including Willie Rennie, Bob Dorris, Graham Simpson and others, talked about the impact on the socially rented sector. The Scottish Federation of Housing Associations, representing the providers of social housing across the country, have warned that this policy will threaten both the Scottish Government's ambitions on affordable house building and those on climate change, and their member's ability to provide their tenants with exactly the kind of targeted support that is required in these difficult times. Several of their members have already been forced to cancel plans for kitchen and bathroom renovations for the next several years, due to the projected loss of income from the legislation. We have also heard during the debate that the massive investment that will be required to help to meet net zero ambitions in our housing stock will be jeopardised by the legislation, as indeed will be the construction of new social housing projects. Willie Rennie quoted from the Kingdom Housing Association of Fife. I referred to him in the chamber last week. They expressed exactly those concerns that a number of other housing associations have also referred to. While the bill being considered this week only initially introduces a rent freeze for six months, there are real concerns that there are plans to introduce rent controls going further than that. A move that can only make the situation much worse. That point has been made very well, both by the Federation of Housing Associations and also by COSLA. I was very interested to see that, in relation to local government, in the policy memorandum in front of the bill, it suggests that, should the cap be extended, it will remove at least £50 million in income from the business plans of registered social landlords and at least £230 million over the four years to March 2027. Where is that money going to come from? Who is going to make that money up in the budgets of social landlords or in the budgets of local authorities? We have had no answer on that point from the minister and hope that will be addressed in terms of the winding up reports. Of course, as COSLA says in their briefing, it is extraordinary because this is the Government centralising power over rent setting. As they say in their briefing, rent setting has never before been taken out of the decision-making of local elected members as a sphere of government. Once again, this Government has nothing but contempt for local government and its centralising power in its hands. A number of members, Stephen Kerr and others, reminded us that all the international evidence shows that rent controls cause housing shortages. We have seen that in Ireland, following the introduction of rent control zones, only 716 homes were available for rent, as at 1 August, in the entire country. There are similar issues elsewhere. The average waiting time to lease a rent control property in Stockholm stands at nine years. As Jeremy Balfour said in Berlin, we have seen the emergence of a grey market in rent control properties, where landlords will now demand that tenants pay a ridiculous price for furniture, for kitchen appliances and other basic amenities, as a condition of renting, to get round the rules on rent controls. The danger is that we will see the same here. However, rather than looking at the international evidence, it seems that Mr Harvie and all those in the Scottish Government believe that the Scottish exceptionalism means that we can buck the trend and somehow introduce rent controls here without seeing the adverse impacts that we have seen elsewhere. There are serious issues in terms of the cost of living that needs to be addressed. The UK Government's substantial intervention to cap the cost of energy will deliver real benefits, particularly for those on low incomes who spend a high proportion of them on heating costs. Perhaps the Scottish Government can look at—of course it will. I am really surprised that any Tory member would try to give this argument. Given that Murdo Fraser must know that every penny and more of that is wiped out entirely by the cost rises of food and fuel because of inflation driven by his Government and for those who own their home by interest rates going through the roof, every penny of that and more will be wiped out. The Scottish Government has got a record high budget. The highest budget in the history of devolution. What are they doing to help those with the cost of living? They are making matters worse, perhaps the Scottish Government could look at supporting tenants with helping to pay rents rather than bringing in a rent freeze. It claims that it will support landlords who are facing additional costs. This is a fig leaf. Landlords are allowed in the event that costs and mortgages go up to increase rents by just 3 per cent more. If interest rates go up, as the cabinet secretary suggested, it might go up much more than that. Landlords will be left out of pocket as a result. Once again, we see an SNP Green Scottish Government not listening to those in the sector, not listening to those representing letting agents from private landlords, not listening to local authorities, not listening to those in the social rented sector, railroading through Parliament and the emergency piece of legislation without proper scope for scrutiny and amendment. I am failing to properly consider what the unintended consequences will be. I fear Patrick Harvie's legacy. As a result of this bill, we will be to drive up homelessness in Scotland, and that will be a very sorry legacy. Parliament should reject this legislation today. I now call on Patrick Harvie to respond to the debate minister for around 12 minutes, please. Thank you, Presiding Officer. It has been a lively and wide-ranging debate. I think that the differences of views and the divergent values that exist in the chamber on this issue have been well expressed. Of those who have criticisms and concerns about the bill, some of them have been expressed very seriously, and I will try to address them. Some have been a little more on the silly side. In particular, I find it difficult to take seriously the accusation from the last speaker that we are only doing this because we thought it was clever politics. That is from the party that thought it was clever politics to abolish the top rate of taxation until they realised that everybody outside of Tufton Street was revolted by the values behind that kind of politics. If the root cause of rising rents is a mismatch between supply and demand, why is he proposing a piece of legislation that will reduce supply? I do not accept the premise that it will, and I also do not accept that that is the only issue affecting rent rises. It is not the only one, but there are landlords who are simply raising rent too. I quote even one, to keep pace with the market. That is simply exploitation. I want to address, first of all, some of the slightly more technical points that have been raised. In particular, there are valid questions around reporting duties on government and the decisions about how any discussion around possible extension of those measures will be taken forward. The questions around whether there will be robust planning and reporting are very fair questions. I would like to make some progress. I engaged with the committee this morning and offered to remain engaged with them on this point, but it is also very clear under the terms of the bill that we had to review the operation of the bill every three months to consider whether the provisions remain necessary and proportionate. We will have to review whether the measures for a rent freeze and eviction moratorium remain necessary and proportionate in light of the changing economic circumstances, and that will include considering the available evidence of the impact of the measures and how that changes over time. Can the minister outline how the figure of 3 per cent was arrived at for the maximum increase for rents agreed by the adjudicator? That figure is not an absolute, of course. The provision exists within the bill for the Government to come forward with a change of that. We will look at that in light of changing circumstances. There have also been a number of calls throughout the debate for the Government to spend more money on all aspects of housing. I absolutely understand that, if we were able to throw money at direct tenant support more than we have done already, social housing provision more than we have done already, retrofitting more than we have done already, or indeed at the cost of running the tribunal, and the wider cost of living measures that Pam Duncan-Glancy mentioned, I think that we have a strong track record of prioritising these things, but we also have to say that we do not yet know what scale of brutal cuts are coming down the line from the UK Government. I am going to have to make some progress. The emergency budget review will have to consider all of those. Several members have mentioned the purpose and necessity for this measure. I welcome the comments from Mark Griffin from the Labour benches, recognising that thousands of people are being pushed to the brink. A crisis is indeed made worse by the UK Government. Eleanor Wittam spoke of a clear and present danger from the current cost crisis, and again, recognising that some of that lies the hands of the chancellor over the past couple of weeks. The measures in the bill do provide direct protection in terms of rent, but they do more than that. They also provide a sense of security. A good reason to ensure that all tenants in all sectors have equal protection, at least for the first six months, is to ensure that everybody has that sense of security. Emma Roddick spoke about the direct connection between a secure sense of being secure in one's home and the impacts on mental health. I would like to emphasise briefly a couple of points that did not come out very much during the debate, and I hope that we will discuss them later in the week. The measures on penalties for unlawful evictions and the powers for changes to rent adjudication will be very important in how those measures are implemented, and I hope that we will have further discussion of that later in the week. Very clearly, for some people in the chamber, the provisions signal the end of private renting or some sort of imagined hostility that we have to the rental sector. For others in the chamber, the measures do not go far enough. I have to say that I think that Richard Leonard's suggestion that the bill does nothing to strengthen tenants' rights is frankly absurd. It is very clear that some members think that none of this should be done at all and others are still demanding the impossible. Mr Leonard asked why we are not placing the onus on landlords. That is exactly what this bill does. Landlords will be the ones who have the opportunity to apply for a limited prescribed set of costs to be taken into account within clear limits. I think that I heard a call for an intervention. Does the Minister not accept that he is the Minister for Tenants' Rights? We have heard an awful lot this afternoon about the defence of landlords' rights, but does he not accept that the argument that we are making is that not that these should simply be temporary changes to the balance of power between tenants and landlords. There should be permanent changes to the balance of power between tenants and landlords. I do. That is why the Government have a long-term programme of reform under the new deal for tenants that we consulted on and that we will be working on permanent legislation. He is well aware that temporary emergency legislation needs to be justified as proportionate in relation to the immediate circumstances. That, indeed, is what we are doing. To move on, Presiding Officer, a great many members spoke about the potential impact, as they see it, on the social rented sector. That is extremely important to the Government. Miles Briggs and Mark Griffin, from different perspectives on this debate, shared some of the concerns on that. Some of those concerns are very legitimate. Some suggested that that measure has already had an impact on the rental income of RSLs. That is not the case. It will have no direct impact on the rental income of RSLs during that first six months. Indeed, how about the UK Government having an immediate impact on RSL's cost of borrowing? Just today, during this debate, we see yet again a major lender saying that they are increasing their interest rates. That will have an impact on RSL's ability to borrow. I guarantee you, Presiding Officer, that move was not a response to the Scottish Government's emergency legislation, that move was a response to the UK Government's many budget. I give way to whoever it was. Thank you, Minister. I am lucky at the financial memorandum. My problem is that you estimate the cost to landlords being somewhere between £3 million and £32 million, which will have a direct effect on Government income, because that will be less income tax raised. Could you not be a bit tighter on that? Do you have a feeling on how much income it will affect coming into the Government? I do not believe that we have precisely modelled the revenues of the Government through income tax. Many of the measures in the bill are subject to extension or potential early expiry if the economic circumstances change. For example, the measures on prescribed limited costs—the percentages of 50% and 53%—will be variable throughout the life of the bill. I was talking about the impact on the social rented sector and saying that the impact has not been to immediately reduce their rental income. That is absolutely the case, but we want to give the social rented sector confidence that the long-term impacts will be taken into account and that we share its priorities about its fundamental purposes. Social landlords exist for a social purpose, and they invest not only in quality of affordable rental housing but on retrofit, the net zero agenda and the wide range of other services. Government shares that priority, and the Government understands the ways in which the social rented sector is fundamentally different. Rental income is reinvested for the public good and the various other differences that have been mentioned. That is why we have invited representatives of the social rented sector and others to take part in a short-life task and finish group that will inform how those measures are used in the longer term. There have been very productive first meetings of that group that will recognise those circumstances. I genuinely believe that there is creative thinking already being brought to bear about how we go forward in a way that protects tenants without endangering those other issues. Is there a problem? I am trying to catch Mr Fraser's eye, so I do not have to call him out for carrying on a private conversation while you are speaking, but please continue. RSLs are not for profit bodies, they exist for social need, and we share their priority to protect those public investments. I want to move on briefly and talk about the private rented sector. There have been some claims. I am not sure that there are really justified claims about a direct impact on supply here. Over the long term, over the years, there has been an improvement in the quality of regulation of the private rented sector, and at the same time, the sector has continued to expand. Indeed, I have a quote here from one bill to rent business who has recognised that temporary measures are designed to support families facing fuel poverty this winter. They have gone on to say that we continue to believe that the delivery of PRS housing offers a viable revenue stream in the longer term. I am not sure that I agree with the idea that there is some direct impact between having short-term regulation fundamentally changing the long-term viability of the sector. Eleanor Whitham was quite right to point out that there are several countries in Europe with higher regulation than we have and rent controls, long-standing systems of rent controls, with a thriving rented sector, including with private investment. I think that in many ways there is an analogy here with the scaremongering that was brought in when people first debated a minimum wage. Some of those arguments clearly were born out of self-interest and did not come to pass, and I think that in many ways the arguments of rent controls are similar. However, there is a wider question here. If we do not do this, if we do not accept the responsibility to control some of the eye-watering rent increases that some of our constituents have been faced with, just because we believe that that is how the market works, then what are we to do? We will be leaving them with a situation that is simply unacceptable. It is clear that this cost crisis is being felt right here and right now by people who rent their homes. We are determined to take action to help people to keep a roof over their heads during a crisis that is not of their making. The bill that we have introduced presents a package that is both impactful and practical. It is radical and robust. Its purpose is to offer increased protection to tenants who are more vulnerable to the cost crisis than others, but it also recognises that some landlords can be impacted by that cost crisis by including safeguards that address specific, defined and limited circumstances that they will face. It also builds a bridge to the longer-term work that we are doing on the new deal for tenants. In conclusion, many of the important points that have been made in today's debate have been heard. I am grateful for members who have brought them. I am also grateful for the time that the committee took this morning to consider the bill. I look forward to the discussions that are continuing as members debate the bill over the rest of this week. That concludes the debate on cost of living tenant protection Scotland Bill at stage 1. It is now time to move to the next item of business. The next item of business is consideration of motion 6179, in the name of John Swinney, on a financial resolution for the cost of living tenant protection Scotland Bill. I call on John Swinney to move the motion. The question is that motion 6178, in the name of Patrick Harvie, on cost of living, tenant protection Scotland Bill at stage 1, is agreed? Are we all agreed? The Parliament is not agreed, therefore we will move to a vote. There will be a short suspension to allow members to access the digital voting system. Colleagues, the question is that motion 6178, in the name of Patrick Harvie, on the cost of living tenant protection Scotland Bill at stage 1, be agreed? Members should cast their votes now. That is the vote closed. Point of order, Claire Adamson. I would have voted yes. Thank you, Ms Adamson. I will make sure that it is recorded. The result of the vote on motion 6178, in the name of Patrick Harvie, is yes, 88, no 29. There were no abstentions. The motion is, therefore, agreed. The next question is that motion 6179, in the name of John Swinney, on financial resolution, cost of living, tenant protection Scotland Bill, be agreed? Are we all agreed? Yes. We are all agreed. We now move to the next item of business, which is a statement by Humza Yousaf on the health and care recovery and winter planning. The cabinet secretary, members who are leaving the chamber should do so as quickly and quietly as possible. In fact, I will pause to allow a change in the front benches here at the back.


Hi all, thank you for joining our session, the road to interoperability in cloud native continuous delivery. My name is Fahad Dermanji, I work for Ericsson Software Technology as a developer based in Stockholm, Sweden. I am also co-chair of the Continuous Delivery Foundation, Special Interest Group Interoperability. Hi all, I'm Karatana Mok, I work at CloudBees with the Jenkins and Jenkins X open source projects, and I'm co-chair of the Continuous Delivery Foundation's Interoperability SIG. Thank you for joining our talk on the road to interoperability in cloud native continuous delivery. In the context of continuous delivery, what do we mean by interoperability? Interoperability, composability, and extensibility are all terms to describe the openness of the system. That is, it's ability to offer components that can be easily used by or integrated into other systems. However, integration and interoperability will often used synonymously or not the same and have significant differences. Integration is generally understood as combining applications to function together. These applications don't necessarily have common interfaces, and often use different data formats. The result is often when engineering teams need to have these applications work together, they write the code. And these custom solutions have maintenance costs. In addition, services can be taken tightly coupled, and it can be a significant engineering effort to later replace one of the applications for something else. Interoperability, on the other hand, focuses on open interfaces and standardized metadata that enable controlled and defined access to services or information from a different application or system. Let's consider interfaces as an example of an abstraction which enables interoperability. If the interface is well specified and openly available, multiple service providers can implement the service and enable customers to consume the service in a known way using the defined interface. This provides a number of practical advantages. For example, if client A consumes a service by B through a well-defined interface, A could switch to C's implementation of the same service, which uses the same interface, and A should not experience any failures. How B or C implement the service is not relevant to A, which is only concerned with the specifications of the interface. The ability to replace one implementation of a service with another that operates in the same way without causing failures is interoperability. Well-defined public interfaces enable interoperability by enabling both access and multiple implementations. The result for end users of those interfaces is that they have a choice in which implementation to consume and the ability to switch between implementations without experiencing any failures. In addition to open interfaces, standardized metadata is another abstraction that enables interoperability. Standardized metadata enables systems to incorporate content from other disparate and independent systems. In other words, interoperability is achieved through data formats and communication protocols, which the systems can use to function together in a standardized manner without deep customizations. Definition of interoperability in the CI-CD domain is not different from how it's defined in other domain. It is about data and the exchange of it. As you can see on the slide, everything under integration is basically work that the end user has to do. And everything under operability is the result of work that has already been done when building the services that users consume. So the result is less work for end users. OK, when we look at the continuous delivery landscape, and this landscape has been developed by the continuous delivery foundation, we can see that the continuous delivery ecosystem is flourishing. There's a rapidly growing set of CI-CD tools available for end users, and this is fantastic. The new tools and technologies being developed bring fresh approaches to problems or issues within the CI-CD domain. However, the explosion in the number of tools is not without its challenges, interoperability among them. So let's look more closely at interoperability within the CI-CD context. First, pipeline standardization and or standardization in pipeline languages. The goal here is to have the ability to migrate or run pipelines created on one tool on another one as this. Next, the ability to connect pipelines, running on different tools in a standardized way. And pipeline data for traceability or visualization. The goal is to propagate data from CI-CD tools in a way that external tools can consume, regardless of what CI-CD tool created that data. We will look at two open source projects that help you gain more visibility into your CI-CD system and consider the work that they are doing to map the different data formats of different tools and how greater interoperability could help. For CI-CD events, we defined an event following the cloud events definition as a data record expressing an occurrence and its context. The goal is the standardization of events so that CI-CD tools that adhere to the standard can interoperate with each other. The common theme across the different perspectives is data and exchanging data across various tools that may be employed by an organization as part of their CI-CD pipelines. The data could either be in the form of pipeline definitions, consumed by pipelines as input, or produced by pipelines as output. This means that the definition of interoperability in the CI-CD domain is similar to how it is defined in other domains. It's all about the data and exchanging data. Among the activities of the interoperability SIG, we look at existing case studies, such as how Jinx and Zax incorporate Stecton as its pipeline engine to help users build and deliver software using the cloud well.  Jinx uses Stecton for standardized declarative pipeline APIs and build execution. When users install Jinx and Zax, Stecton is also installed into the Kubernetes cluster. When users create new applications or import existing ones, Jinx and Zax will automatically add pipeline as code Stecton resources to the Git repository alongside the source code and configure web hook handling for Git events. The Stecton pipeline resources that are added come from a base set of reusable pipelines that live in the Jinx and Zax pipeline catalog. The Jinx and Zax project essentially aligns its pipeline definitions with Stecton and makes it super easy for any test when the Stecton catalog has to be used inside a Jinx-created pipeline. That level of interoperability between CI CD tools is relatively rare and remains specific to individual projects. So now let's look a bit deeper into some of the benefits of interoperability, especially as regards the maintenance of your CI CD system. And then we'll look at some tools that some of the source tools that have been created that help you in this regard. So additional benefits of interoperability. Greater interoperability between components provides many benefits, including improved scalability, reliability and maintenance. There's much to be said about these benefits and Fatih will touch on how interoperability improves scalability and reliability. So I'm going to look at how interoperability can help improve the maintainability of your system. And as we know, the effort for cost of software is actually not in the initial deployment and its development, but in its maintenance. One of the most important ways in which interoperability helps us with the maintenance of systems is in managing complexity. In complex software, for example, with systems with many components and much of blue code to integrate them, there's a greater risk of introducing bugs when making changes. And reasons for that include that the system is harder for developers to understand and reason about, that there are some hidden assumptions and that the unexpected interactions and unintended consequences of making changes are looked. So reducing complexity greatly improves the maintainability of software. That simplicity is a key goal for any system. And making a system simpler does not necessarily mean reducing its functionality. It can mean removing the complexity that is created when you are implementing the solution that you are trying to solve. By reducing the need for application blue code, interoperability helps make your system simpler. It also reduces type coupling in the system. Again, making your system much more maintainable. It is likely that the CICD systems requirements will change. There could be legal or regulatory requirements that change the growth of your system will force some changes and new tools will emerge that you'd like to incorporate. The ease with that you can modify a system and adapt it to changing requirements is closely linked to its simplicity and its abstractions, such as standardized data formats. Good abstractions help reduce complexity and make the system easier to modify and adapt for new use cases. Increased interoperability can also help us with the operability of the system. So good operability with standardized data models can help make routine tasks easy by exhibiting predictable behavior and thus minimizing surprises, providing good support for automation and providing visibility into the runtime behavior and internals of your system with good monitoring. This increased visibility into your system can help with investigating failures and finding and fixing bugs. Good operability means having good visibility into your system's health and having effective ways of managing it. We're gonna look at two really interesting open source projects that can help you gain more visibility into your CICD system. The tools use variations of data mapping between different data structures to be able to achieve that visibility. And so we will consider how greater interoperability could help reduce that mapping work and facilitate expansion of the capabilities of these tools. So four keys is an example of a project showing insights that can be monitored by CICD event data. The DevOps and Assessment team has identified four key metrics that measure teams' software delivery performance. Now deployment frequency, that is how often an organization successfully releases to production, the time for changes, and that is the amount of time it takes to get a commit into production and time to restore service. Just how long it takes for an organization to recover from a failure in production? And change failure rate, which is the percentage of deployments that cause a failure in production. Using data on GitHub events in CICD prep lines and making inferences about links between incidents and the events evolved, the Forks Keys project generates the four keys to a metrics. One of the challenges of gathering these two metrics is that the deployment change and incident data are usually in disparate systems. So for the four keys, solution was to create a generalized pipeline that can be extended to process inputs from a wide variety of sources. The Forks Keys project in effect creates a mapping between events in different pipelines and tools in order to be able to generalize the data it receives. Standardized metadata for CICD events help with the mapping work that the Forks Keys project has to do between the different data structures or the different tools. Creating standardized metadata for CICD events is one of the main work streams of the Interoperability SIG and is considered critical for the interoperability in the CICD domain. So in addition, standardized metadata would help improve the maintainability of your CICD system by facilitating connections between pipelines and other systems. And we reduce the need to write adapters or Google. Standardized metadata of events in CICD pipelines would enable much greater interoperability between tools and platforms and more consistent data to be used for analysis. So now we'll look at the Gingotek CD indicators. So this add-on to the Gingotek CICD platform helps you gain visibility into your CICD system. These insights are based on the Dora metrics and the space framework. The metrics are generated using Git events as with the Forks Keys project. In addition, Gingotek has a Kubernetes custom resource definition for a Gingotek specific type called the pipeline activity. A Kubernetes controller watches a Kubernetes API server for these custom pipeline activity events. The two main types of event data, so Git events and cluster events are kind of mapped together and combined to create the metrics displayed in the Grafana dashboards, which is an example on the slide. But this mapping for now happens within the context of one CICD project, Gingotek, and not across multiple projects or tools. It's a different mapping that done by the Forks Keys project using different data inputs. But note that this mapping work between differing data formats needs to be done by both of these projects. So the tools and technologies that are used to construct CICD pipelines and the pipelines themselves produce a lot of data. Organizations will collect, store, and use this data in various ways to get value out of it. Within the interoperability set, we are focusing on ways to reduce the need for data mapping between projects, tools, and other data sources by increasing interoperability through abstractions. I mostly discuss standardized metadata for CICD events as one of the ways to increase interoperability. Currently, the CICD tools and technologies have no standardized way to produce and consume that metadata. That is why standardized metadata for CICD events is one of our main areas of focus within the interoperability segment. In addition, how such metadata could be consumed and produced is another topic. This is being looked at within the Continuous Delivery Foundation's events segment. Fatih will not speak more about the work we are doing within the interoperability segment and within the wider Continuous Delivery Foundation community. Thank you, Farah. I would like to start talking about Continuous Delivery Foundation, which is a sister commit to Cloud Native Computing Foundation. As we all know, there are many great technologies out there one can use to have construct pipelines and establish cloud native continuous delivery within their organizations. However, there's not without challenges and one of the challenges is the fragmentation within the CICD domain. It is challenging to adopt, use, integrate, and contribute to various CICD technologies. Here Continuous Delivery Foundation comes to rescue. Continuous Delivery Foundation was founded during March 2019 hosted by New York Foundation, providing neutral home to collaborate for the next generation of Continuous Delivery. There are various ways Continuous Delivery Foundation enables this. First and foremost, it provides home to various open source CICD projects such as Jenkins, Jenkins X, Skinnaker, Hecton, screwdriver CD, and more tedious. In addition to hosting projects, it also accounts for creation of special interest groups and working groups for community members to come and collaborate on various topics within Cloud Native Continuous Delivery. There are currently five special interest groups, security, MDOPs, interoperability, best practices, and events, each looking into different areas within Continuous Delivery. As you can guess, these groups help community members to find like-minded people to collaborate on a certain topic, reach out to the projects, and find ways to contribute to projects and broader Continuous Delivery ecosystem further. When it comes to the topics that are critical for interoperability within Cloud Native Continuous Delivery, I would like to talk a few of the key topics, we identified and have been working on, so you can see how it impacts our bandwidth to become better doing Continuous Delivery. Four topics I would like to highlight during this talk are shared vocabulary, standardized metadata, events, and policing. As you notice, these topics are not pretty disconnected from each other. It was similar for us as well. However, when we started diving into the topic of interoperability and get into the details, we began realizing that the problem is much bigger than just how to get the CIC technologies interoperable with each other with well-defined interfaces or by standardized approach. It is also very challenging to tackle these problems alone in our community, because there are already many things worked on by our sister communities that could help addressing them either by learning how they solve similar challenges or directly using some of the things they develop rather than us re-menting things. Let us start with shared vocabulary. Special Interest Group Interoperability was approved during January 2020 by Continuous Delivery Foundation technical oversight community. So we are a little bit older than one year. We were very eager to get hands-on with the technologies we are using and working with. However, we started noticing that even though everyone knows what continuous integration, continuous delivery, and continuous deployment are, the problems we use to communicate with each other as humans differed. Apart from that, problems used by different CIC technologies to describe the same thing differed as well, contributing to the challenges with human communication. For example, we identified three different terms are used by various technologies when they talk about pipelines, workflow, activity, and what pipeline. As you can guess, these impacts are a bit to communicate with each other since if I am using a certain technology, I naturally use the terminology of tool during my day-to-day communication, and I may have difficulty to put someone using a different technology since that person is probably using a terminology of technology they are using. We then need to spend few minutes to map the terms with each other or translate them so we can talk to each other. This made us realize that even before we start talking about technology issues, we need to put effort to improve how we communicate with each other. We spent few weeks to discuss and collect the terms used by different CIC technologies on a document, but no one remembers from those projects to describe the terms we collect from their projects point of view, and we finally create the table that maps different terms across different technologies with each other. This helped us a lot since we can now have an easy way to look at the terms we don't know and see what they mean for us using different terms. We pulled this document for the HEPA stone for CRCD, and currently it has terms for 14 CRCD projects. In addition to CRCD technologies, we include terms for software configuration management tools, such as GetIt, GitHub, and GitLab. This is a community-maintained document and we welcome contributions, so please check it out. Are we done with this? Definitely not. Since this topic is relevant to more the interoperability area, these topics continue to work by special interest group best practices, so they look at what sort of term was first time described, such as content integration, content theory, content development, and DevOps, who defined the term first time and what it went through over the years. The next topic I want to discuss is standard item data. The CRCD tools and technologies that are used to contract CRCD pipelines and the pipeline stem cells produce lots of data. We as users collect, store, use, and analyze this data in various ways to get value out of it. There are two questions we are looking at answers for metadata. First one is about what are the types of metadata we use, and the second one is about how we produce, consume, and use them. One of the contributing factors is the lack of standardized way for CRCD tools and technologies, which first what metadata is to produce and consume. How to do that? It is true that there are initiatives across various open source projects to align the way this is done, such as in Porto, Baranthes, Jenkins X, and Tecton. However, this topic regards a holistic and collaborative approach to identify the needs and challenges first, followed by analyzing existing efforts to explore possibilities to streamline how this is done, either based on existing efforts or by combining them to come up with a standard way collaboratively. Then comes what we are doing within Controversial Foundation, and especially in terms of interoperability. We are currently documenting the types of metadata we produce and consume, starting with commit and artifact data. In addition to this, as I noted earlier, we are not after creating our own team, so we are also talking with various committees to learn more about what they are doing, see the overlaps, gaps, and explore collaboration opportunities. The reason it starts collaboration with SPDX community since we know that they also work on some of these topics within the data. I realize I didn't talk about how question for the metadata, how the metadata is produced and how it is consumed. And this is on purpose since one of the Controversial Foundation special interest groups, special interest group events is looking after this, explore the use of events within CICD. As we have been discussing since the beginning of our talk, these continuous integration and continuous delivery systems do not port to each other in a standardized way. This leads to problems related to interoperability, multiplication of failure issues, and poor automation. Who address these issues? The topic of events was brought up by community members special interest group interoperability to see if there are others who want to take a closer look at using events within CICD given that events are everywhere, offering solutions to various issues such as stability, resiliency, coupling, traceability, and so on. The discussion resulted in the formation of a work stream within special interest group interoperability with the aim to look at events more closely. In February 2021, this work stream has become a top level special interest group within continuous delivery foundation to take the idea to the next level and look at standardizing around the events within CICD. This special interest group is looking at how events can help to create CICD systems with a big up of architecture that is easy to scale and makes it resilient to failures. Using events could also increase automation and connecting workflows from different systems to each other. As a result, empowering, facing, visualizing, auditing of the connected workflow through these events. Community members from various open source projects take part in special interest group events bringing their perspectives, thoughts, and ideas to the groups. Some of these communities are from within continuous delivery foundation such as Tecdon, Spinnaker, Jenkins, and Otelius. We also have participation from other projects such as Captain from Cloud Native Computing Foundation, Python. The group aims to provide reference implementations such as event listeners and event senders on top of cloud events. The last key topic I would like to highlight is policy or to be more precise, policy-driven continuous delivery. This topic looks at how organizations could define standard policies for cloud native continuous delivery pipelines. This topic was brought into special interest group in Tripoli recently and it gives us a different perspective as it comes to what issues like interoperability within CIC domain causes. We know that most of the CIC technologies provide ways to enforce security policies within the organization. We also noticed a trend within CIC domain by that policy agent for this so things look relatively encouraging. However, when we start going into the details and looked at various different use cases, we restart realizing that there are things to work on further to enable organizations to define standard policies seamlessly. One of the things we noticed that the use of open policy agent by CIC technologies does not necessarily mean things will just work across different CIC technologies since there are slight differences when it comes to how these technologies bring open policy agent. In addition to this, there are other things to take into consideration such as existence of external systems and their role in enforcing policies. As we try to illustrate in the diagram, when an organization uses two different CIC technologies as well as external systems as part of their policy enforcement mechanism, things get pretty tricky. Apart from that, there are other policies than security policies such as business policies. These topics will also need to be looked at further. As most earlier, this discussion started with a special interest of interoperability recently and we will reach out to various projects that are actively working on policy topics, policy agent, not the network automation platform, policy framework. Please join us if you have interest to participate in the discussions and contribute. So these are the four topics I've selected from the work we have been doing including Continuous Delegation Foundation. There are obviously more topics we are working on. So please join us and help us with these topics based on your experience and ideas and organizational needs. Until now, we talked about projects and communities. But what about end users? So I would like to touch to the end user aspects of Continuous Delegation and Continuous Delegation as well. I am from an end user organization and it is important for my organization to keep itself connected to the ecosystem and contribute to the projects we are using. This can't happen without active involvement and collaboration within our consort where we can take part in the discussions with the communities which will impact how our organizations utilizing these technologies as part of their Continuous Delegation journey. Apart from joining and collaborating within the communities, it is also important to highlight our needs, use cases and challenges to the projects from end user perspectives. Continuous Delegation Foundation end user concept provides such an opportunity and allows end user organizations to take part in the discussions. End user concept recently published, it is 2021 plan based on the input from end users. The public, the group plan to work on doing 2021 are measuring develop success, developer productivity and experience, including them, technical choices and governance and compliance. As you can notice, all these topics have relations to interoperability in one way or the other. For example, measuring develop success require organizations to collect key metrics to evaluate their work performance. It is very difficult to achieve that since the tools that are used by organizations, whether SEM or CI CD, they expose these metrics in different ways. So if you are from an end user organization, please join us at us with our journey within Continuous Delegation Foundation. Finally, feedbacks about future, which is what I try to summarize during discussions about key topics. We work with various topics within various specialist groups. As you can see here, the three Continuous Delegation Foundation specialist groups looks at various topics and will continue to study them. We would like to contribute collaborative Continuous Delegation Domain in various ways. White papers, case studies, as practices, specifications, and reference recommendations, and so on. In addition to working with these topics within our community, we will either continue collaborating with other communities such as CNCF, SBDX, Unified Foundation Networking, and so on, or look for new collaboration opportunities. It is critical that we assist the communities to work on this like a single community to tackle these challenges and collaborate with them. Thank you. Most of the work in the CI CD domain is driven by communities. And so we invite you and your communities to join us in the Interoperability SIG. The ideas incubated and specifications developed by communities tend to become candidates for de facto standards, for example, with cloud events. We believe that cross collaboration and pollination across communities and industries is key to addressing challenges. Because these bring diverse perspectives that enable us to develop better solutions together. Please, you join us in the Continuous Delivery Foundation's Interoperability SIG. There are links in the slides on how to find out more about the Interoperability SIG and the Continuous Delivery Foundation. We thank you for listening to our talk, your interest in interoperability in cloud-native continuous delivery, and we welcome your questions.


So our second talk today is shooting lasers at the countryside for faster internet So I'm James Harrison This is a talk on mobile mapping, which is a exciting and reasonably new field Which is starting to become accessible almost So I work for a company called giga clear previously worked at BBC R&D. We're hacking on archives Other things I do I look at stars. I occasionally make things and Partly build robots and then get canceled. Well, Roblox gets canceled. I don't actually end up finishing them Obviously I am not an expert on any of these things I'm about to talk to you about but I've broken enough stuff that I feel like I should probably come and share some stories and Yeah So bit of background on the company I work for because it's relevant because most of this stuff has been possible because of what they They do what we want is to give people faster internet in the countryside We build five to the home networks So we build fiber paths new infrastructure to homes in rural areas of the country And that means we've got to get fiber from a distribution point to properties over a very large amount of ground We've built around 70,000 properties so far. We're doing another 300,000 or so. We are hiring like mad So please come talk to your interested. We're in Abingdon in Oxfordshire So we basically did this sort of thing we drive around the countryside with more plows and that sort of thing And we're really interested in where we can do soft dig because doing this is really cheap and fast And if you need to start digging up concrete and things and that's really expensive and we try and avoid that so There's a pretty straightforward algorithm for this we want to figure out where people want fast internet and We then figure out how much it'll cost to go and build those areas and then we go build it simple, right? So the first bit is pretty easy modeling where people want fast internet. It's pretty straightforward You there's lots of no data sets and you can kind of do that Building it's also really hard because it turns out that digging up 10,000 kilometers of countryside is actually quite difficult Who's the thought? But the bit in the middle where we figure out how much it would cost to go build these areas and whether or not We can actually go and build those areas at all. That's really interesting because if you get it wrong That's a big deal But if you get it right that lets you go and build areas that people didn't previously think were viable and if you model that Well, it's great. And the trouble with this is the existing rural mapping sucks This isn't the digger OS OS are fantastic Master map is the commercially available best map of the UK bits of it are starting to become open days in now So if you're interested in this go look at what surveys website They've got a great map. It's the whole country in and it's a cadastral map, which means it has no gaps It's got a complete set of polygons that cover the entire surface of the UK. This is brilliant But it has a code of roadside natural which describes Stuff that's by the road and that is of a natural construction It's not man-made and that covers a lot of things like verge Which we can dig in easy Very thick hedge, which is really quite tricky We've had it miss things like streams and drainage ditches and sometimes we can get drystone walls where people have built Walls not told the OS OS haven't resurveyed the area in years and We go and try and dig holes in there and realize there's a wall there and we've had houses and things So this is the sort of thing we've sometimes found there's a hedge there. It's quite thick. This is a point cloud We'll come to this in due course And again something where it was just missed out that there's actually a house built on the side of the road here In the maps this looks like a continuous piece of verge that we could just plow through Not gonna happen. Unfortunately These sorts of things are significant because they do eventually cost us quite a bit of money And that can really affect whether or not we can go build in an area so we send people out to go and survey an area and Turns out that takes a lot of time and lots of people So if you're building fiber to the home in urban areas like BT and city fiber and other people You're averaging about 10 meters between properties. We average 80 meters so Straight out the gate. There's a lot more stuff to do Trying to get all that data back You can send people out to go and look at things and try and understand the terrain and whether there are any Obstacles and so on but getting all that information back in a way It's useful that lets us then correct those problems is really hard and trying to manage that much information at scale turns out It's You don't want to be doing it if you can help it Satellites are not useful for us because they can't see through trees and lots of our roots are covered in trees And they don't have great resolution Not quite sure what's going on with the display, but No, that's not happy at all is it No, so while we're trying to get this sorted Aerial photography is another thing we've looked at doing and again has the same issues with tree cover You can get a bleak imagery, which is where someone's taken a picture from the side And is looking at things sort of edge on and that can help but in most areas in rural areas It doesn't help that much at all See if we can get this working again Hey, okay, and Google Street View is another option that everyone goes Oh, she's street view and go through it and look at all the pictures and street view most of the countryside Google didn't resurvey since their original survey. So six seven years old is normal In rural areas, which isn't very useful for us. So mobile mapping is whether we come to Basically it's a process for capturing geospatial data from a mobile vehicle With a bunch of sensors strapped to it normally including cameras sometimes including things like light up So in order to do that, you need some sensors You've got to be able to figure out where they are. You've got to build that all into a vehicle you've got to get all the information somewhere usable and Somewhere accessible and make some tools to work with that data so made the main sensors that we're talking about today are lighter, which is a form of laser scanning and Cameras cameras are not useful for spatial mapping You can do photogrammetry, but it's really intensive CPU wise So it takes a long time if you've got a lot of images to get high quality photogrammetry And it's also quite prone to error So we have a classic case where we drive along and we take lots of photos of verge We think it's verge. It's actually a bank of 45 degrees, which is a real pain for us because we can't plow in that effectively So you try and Figure that out from photogrammetry. It doesn't always catch it So there's a few things where actually doing direct observation of distances is useful for us But cameras are really good for context So laser scanners Laser scanners are of two main types pulse based and phase based pulse based ones are usually cheaper and Usually with a pretty good Spatial resolution accuracy and so on phase based ones are more accurate, but have a shorter range typically So you it's a pretty simple idea you fire a pulse of light You wait and see for any reflections come back at that particular wavelength. You've just shot pulse out at and you then Have a think about it figure out where all those things that you just saw were in space based on time And so the nice thing is you can actually do Detection of multiple objects with good enough scanners that if you fire a pulse of light Say at a tree then the light might pass through a Leaf and hit a branch behind it and you'll actually see a reflection from the leaf And you'll see a bigger reflection from the branch which stops the Pulse of light and this works really well for mapping Verges and things because it means you can actually shoot through things like hedges and typically catch enough of the surface behind that Hedge that you can actually measure what the verge looks like below the vegetation And you can then figure out what the vegetation looks like how much of it there is and so on So scanner I'm most familiar with and that we use is a scanner from a company called Regal It's pulse based it can fire 1 million points per second and it has a mirror in the back of the scanner Which can spin at 250? Revolutions per second so 15,000 rpm. So that spins around and we effectively drive along With this on the back and it spins around and each time it spins. It's firing out a Large number of pulses which we're then capturing information from so this gets you initially some Events that are in the scanner's own coordinate system. So basically the angle it saw is at and an X and Y offset and Once you georeference that you get a point cloud point clouds are literally just a cloud of single points in space and That gets some if each of those points will have some attributes with it Like whether or not you saw multiple echoes or maybe it's just the point itself was a first echo last echo And if we want to we can add extra information in there We don't get any color because we're shooting in infrared. So effectively what we get is a an intensity view of the world in infrared but we can then overlay that with images to make some colored points and Usually we end up with horrible vendor specific formats, which we know to work around which is no fun so in theory We've got a demo here, which might or might not work Okay, I'm gonna go with kind of so this is actually a point cloud of the campsite which I can't see to control so this will be interesting and so this is actually a complete scan of eastern the campsite and grounds This has been georeferenced and colored. So we've got lots of metadata information about it So this is the sort of output we get this is online by the way if you just Look me up on Twitter. I'm at James Harrison. You can find a link to this. You can download the whole data set for free So thank you for my company for letting me drive the vehicle around here and collect all this So this data set is the output of About half an hour driving around site and then about two weeks of fiddling around processing it It's not usually that long, but I don't usually do the stuff hands-on so Normally it takes us anywhere between three to five days of processing to get a decent output And the nice thing about point cloud is that it's accurate within its self as long as your georeferencing is reasonably good So within a particular scan line, you might be talking about two to three millimeters of accuracy Which when you think you're driving along and doing a million of those measurements per second It's pretty impressive And you can take angular measurements you can take distance measurements using whatever tools you like and figure out lots about the world without having to do a huge amount of work So all of these things are pretty safe if you start doing aerial lidar that changes Most aerial scanners will be class 4 and we'll burn your eyes out if you look at them on the ground But all of the stuff we do on the ground is very safe low power nanosecond pulse lengths It's all pretty good Other stuff that you can get and if you're looking for a lidar sensor to hack on velodyne are usually the go-to answer They have a range of quite cheap sensors around the sort of I say cheap. They're still around two to three thousand pounds at the moment That's cheap in lidar terms and That is about as cheap as it gets today Z for last plus F are Probably the gold standard those are phase based sensors and that's pretty much the best you can get those are very very expensive Six figures and up quite happily We also want to take some pictures and if you're driving along at speed and you want to take good pictures Then you need to consider a couple of things you want a lot of dynamic range in your images So 10 bit or 12 bit dynamic range It's like you basically drive along and you imagine if you've got trees on one side of you and you've got bright sunshine on the other You can still see detail in all of the trees down here, but you can still see the detail in the bright verge to your right And we do some post-processing stones a bit so we can consume it easily Because we're driving along and mobile mapping rigs. We want to be driving at carrying twice speeds So we're trying to do You know 30 to 70 miles an hour We don't want anything it's going to give us lots of tearing in the image So we need a sensor that rather than being a rolling shutter where the image is read off from top to bottom Progressively is a global shutter. So we take the whole image data at once so The other consideration is whether we're using planar cameras or panoramic Plane of cameras usually get used on mobile mapping rigs as a way of adding extra information to panoramic imagery So you might have a detail camera looking at a road surface particularly hanging at the back of the vehicle Panoramic cameras are still what you need if you want The good contextual images that let you kind of get that Google Street view feel which is a big thing for a usability perspective The state is really hard to use unless you kind of think through how you're going to access it So most mobile mapping rigs and ours included use a camera from FLIR called the ladybug 5 It's a very common panoramic camera 30 megapixels global shutter 10 bits of dynamic range and Please if you're ever doing anything with rugged connectors, never put micro USB 3 on it ever Never that's a weatherproof USB 3 connector. We've killed three so far. I think You don't want those. Please use 10 gig base T or something So we now need to figure out we've got our sensors We now have to figure out where they are at each moment in time to be able to place that information in context And to make it a lineup So we need to use a coordinate reference system in the UK We have any ordinance surveys national grid and that's got a good relation to the all of the geodesic system used by satellite system So we can refer to that quite readily and accurately and it doesn't move over time Whereas the if you try and reference things to latitude longitude due to continental rift All of your measurements will be wrong increasingly over time So about two and a half centimeters a year at the moment. So We use these things and all things exclusively in post-processing effectively So GNSS GPS is one GNSS system GLONASS by do got a layer of other GNSS systems Those are how we figure out where we are accurately used to be do triangulation and things but Nowadays, it's pretty much the gold standard for surveying is a GNSS survey done, right? And you can get pretty good accuracy without needing any external correction sources, but still only a meter or so if you want to get better than that then you've got to correct for a bunch of different errors mostly atmospheric errors and pretty much the only way to do that is Use a better antenna to get better signals clear and reduce the effect of things like multipath interference use more satellites, so you've got more data to work with and Use more information about what the satellites were doing while you're recording your position So actually having accurate information about where the satellites were calculated after the fact But the only real thing you can do to make huge difference is to use a base station to correct errors So something that sits stationary so anything you measure in terms of movement, you know is error simply We are kind of care about accuracy a lot in this because When we get to processing trying to make overlaps and things like that will make sense If we have a more accurate trajectory to start with then we have a much better chance of making everything line up at the end So we're trying to aim for centimeters not meters and that's not an easy feat You typically end up needing to put a base station down The ordinance survey have actually got a huge number of existing base stations that run all the time and you can get the data for and there are commercial services that will take that and Interpolate between multiple base stations to figure out a virtual base station near where you're doing your survey work Which is usually faster And that lets you effectively figure out what the error is at that particular moment being introduced by the atmosphere and so on And that means you can correct your position down from meters to centimeters Now this is all getting a bit expensive It's getting cheaper happily much as lidar. Hopefully we'll be soon. I'll talk more about that later, but Survey grade receivers are still in the range with 10 to 15 thousand pounds if you're looking at cheaper systems That aren't quite survey grade But are still corrected with RTK, which is that the way you transmit these connections Then you are still looking at maybe 2,500 pounds. There's a now I think will be emulated reach which is about 700 pounds a station So it's starting to come down in price a lot of the stuff that people have been doing with drones has helped that a lot Because suddenly you need really cheap positioning because you might crash the drone. You don't put 10,000 pounds of scanner on it You can go open tools like RTK Lib for correction, which is kind of handy And you can get the correction data from OS for free so Once you've got a rough idea of where you are in the world in absolute terms We start to figure out where we are in terms of our attitude of the vehicle. So as we drive around we're rolling. We're pitching we're Turning around and GNSS even with multiple antennas and receivers won't give us that dynamic View of the world to the accuracy that we need in terms of temporal accuracy and spatial accuracy So in order to figure out where we are Any particular moment in time bearing in mind that we're doing a million points per second 250 Scanlines per second. So we really do care about it being precisely timed as well as Precisely in space. We need an inertial system. So inertial navigation systems look like these exciting boxes here Usually are integrated with the GNSS receiver. So there's a box that does your positioning and you have an antenna attached to it So typically these are made with MEMS accelerometers and those are exactly the same sort you find in your phone They're slightly more precise versions of it, which justifies the higher price tag And the same goes to the gyroscopes more advanced survey systems will use fiber optic gyroscopes Fox Those are much more expensive. They use a Magic System they're complicated They are really expensive to make they're really really really really expensive You're still looking at 10 points around plus for each of these things You can still get pretty good performance out of cheap GNSS receivers and IM use It's good enough for doing a lot of things if you're not doing laser data You can use a lot of this stuff that's out there if you're doing laser data You still end up needing to stray into this sort of territory So these things will be accurate enough that you can know where you are absolutely in the world without GNSS for about a minute You might get five centimeter accuracy still, which is amazing We also use GNSS as a base reference so as a time reference So all of our sensor data is being captured and time-stamped all of our position data is being captured and time-stamped so we know any particular moment where we were and what we captured and All of the things like event triggers for cameras are on that common time base So we just need to get all of our GNSS together Get rid of anything that we had really bad GPS signal Stuff we might introduce error with We feed all of that data and the inertial data into a Kalman filter which is a way of integrating all that information and Estimating some of the internal state of the the inertial system so things like gyro bias and things that let us figure out a better solution and We run that through a few times and we get some accurate position data around and We're typically to help that process. We actually drive for maybe half an hour before we start capturing any data at all Preferably on some nice fast roads with some slow corners in and that gets us a pretty good view of what the INS is up to before we start capturing data So what we end up from the GNSS is something it looks a little like this So this is just in green or through to blue Estimate of the position accuracy we're getting from GPS. This is the eastern side So we had pretty good GNSS throughout the entire survey and as we were driving away We kept running the recording there and you can see that we had some dropouts We had some periods where it was particularly poor and those areas We typically would either exclude or just treat less trustfully in the the algorithms that are processing the the data One other thing you can see there a green triangle that green triangle is the virtual reference station that we used to correct the data set So it was calculated So typically once you've done all of this stuff with all of this fancy hardware You can get down to a positioning error in absolute terms that looks pretty good and we're saying there that we're Usually for XY positioning below about three centimeters accuracy and we've got that at 480 Hertz Temporal accuracy so that gets it gets us a lot of data to work with We're trying to get the scan overlaid on top of our existing maps because we want to use them for Enhancing our existing maps. So we're usually targeting sub decimeter accuracy So below 10 centimeters in absolute terms the national grid So I could tell you whether or not it you're in one of those tiles on the floor or the next one over or better trajectory processing so figuring out that trajectory and making it as accurate as possible as we spend a lot of time Manually to try and get it as good as possible a solution because it's going to cause us loads of issues later on in processing If we have a really bad trajectory at any point, so we're really keen to get that as good as we can So once we've done that we might have some overlapping flight lines This is again the eastern data and you can see in different colors there different bits of the trajectory that we're processing separately and Those are overlaps because we've driven the same route more than once and you can see On this diagram You can see over here. We've actually got multiple Posts appearing and actually there's only one post we're driving past that the row of posts just up there and Because we've got multiple overlapping scans that have got slightly different positioning We're recording that more than once effectively So if we don't correct for that then we end up with interesting side effects like this so this is where we've got some Multiple objects appearing and again you can see there's actually a lot of error here And this is something due to the process of the data incorrectly If you have angular errors, then you get slightly different sorts of weirdness appearing so the trouble with all of this is that Everything literally everything in there is proprietary Standards proprietary formats and we have to get somewhere useful Which means we want to get outside of those preventive proprietary formats and into open formats So we process our information We do some basic classification of those points so we can say that anything's directly below where the scanner was was probably ground And then work our way out from that and try and label all the points to say okay, this is ground This is some vegetation. This is maybe a building looking at things like reflectance of the points We get rid of things like noise. So we sometimes while we're driving along we might scan Rain we try not to birds Or Occasionally you drive through a scan and you see this weird bird shape in the middle of space It's just we happen to be driving past a bird that was flying past us So we try and go through the data set and remove all of those sort of points because we're not actually interested in whether or not There was a bird there kind of cool, but and We then try and over align all those overlapping passes and get everything snapped to a single surface and Corrected for x y error an angle angular errors and so on you're solving for sort of nine parameters For each bit of trajectory. It's a very complicated thing And it doesn't always work perfectly And then we try and color the points in by taking our images overlaying on top of those Point clouds our images and positions and then casting rays out from the images the images are much higher resolution than the point clouds So usually we've got a lot of pixels to work with so we'll take an average from the nearest three pictures and the sort of thing So Unfortunately the hardware still to is inaccessible for this to have really become an open-source thing Hopefully this is getting it's going to become more accessible because the cost of the sensors is coming down and More data is becoming available online. There's a great set of data for aerial stuff at open topography dog And lots of information you can find there I'm gonna start speeding now because I've realized I've only got Yeah, not that long left three minutes left, okay So there's lots of potential for new algorithms and stuff we haven't really worked with yet We generate loads of data about a terabyte a day and we store all of that and then we do it on an s3 And use AWS for a lot of the processing because it's cheap and easy and it scales pretty well for this So we're capturing roughly five fifty thousand points and maybe two to three billion points of data per day of Information about the world we will get rid of some of the photos and things because we don't need all of them But we typically keep the point cloud for life We use QGIS a lot, which is our open-source GIS system and we built a plug-in which lets us access this information through all of that and some Custom rendering stuff, which I'm hoping will open source at some point soon So we didn't build our own one and we bought one off the shelf from a company called 3d laser mapping there are lots of other companies that do them and So we ended up with a van that looks like this. It's bright orange because that's our thing and In the back of the van we have our system, which looks like this You can see the laser scanner there the cameras on top the GNSS antenna on the top of that It's on the left So we just raise it out at the back of the van when we're at the start processing and off we go Other systems out there things like this is the Leica Pegasus 2 and this is trim balls and x9 It's got two of our scanners At different angles so you can record more points so It's kind of this is the sort of stuff you get out of it. This is from kind of over there And this is the intensity gradient. So this is showing you differences in reflectiveness between Different points so you can see here where we were driving over Was actually some tracks and so those will reflect more brightly in infrared. So we'll get a higher return value Interestingly with things like trees and so on branches will typically reflect more more brightly than vegetation Well, so you can actually take pretty good structural images of trees to figure out how many branches There are all this sort of thing or to see what sort of branches are there and you can things like removing vegetation to Virtually strip a tree back. She's interesting So the RGB stuff mostly works you can see some up at the top here some white pixels here We couldn't find any colors were blind. So we just guessed and in terms of detail There's a wire link fence somewhere down there And you can see you can pick up all of these individual wires. No problem at all With a very fast scanner, you can pick up an amazing amount of detail more Exciting pictures of things being not properly aligned. So You can do some interesting things like with this like you can take height maps and use those for Figuring out where you should put things in the world But there's lots of things you can do with this data. It's really really powerful There are all sorts of errors that you can introduce by processing incorrectly So here's a slight issue where these are not obviously natural features We've got a couple of flight lines down here that are perfectly fine But one that isn't because we've not managed to get a good correction solution for that. So in that case we've Will probably usually will just delete that flight line because we've got a good ones that cover the same area Some things we've hit on the road You should always check to make sure that roads are not private roads We were warned off this particular road by a gentleman with a shotgun We did not hang around And you should always check the height of bridges before driving under them so Very quickly so I'm being hurried on If you want to do this yourself, you can do a budget version Panoramic cameras and are getting pretty cheap laser scanners are getting cheaper Hopefully the stuff that's happening with automotive automation and Self-driving cars is starting to push push real change towards solid-state sensors, which will be drastically cheaper Than the big expensive things we have now and you can get pretty good I am used and GNSS for not a stupid amount of money still expensive, but it's getting there and If you don't need perfect precision and perfect accuracy You can get a long way with what you can get off the shelf for not a lot of money today Today if you want to go build what we did or do those sorts of things You're looking at half a million pounds plus if you want to do it on the cheap You can probably do it for more like two to five thousand pounds Hopefully in the year or three's time you may be looking at five hundred pounds. This is awesome because it's a really good way to collect data about the world at speed and to Try and take some power back from companies like Google Apple who are the only people who can go out and map these things at scale at the moment Then actually put it in that data in the hands of more people If you want to play around with the point cloud data Then there's a link in a second, but there's some great tools in PDAL Python and one cloud library Those are if you've got those three tools you can do a huge amount And yeah, there's a link there for the data if you're interested Come ask me questions and huge shout out to Andrew Godwin who made a complete 3d print of the campsite which if you want to come and look it up here