 Good morning everyone and welcome to the tenth meeting of 2022 of the economy and fair work committee Our first item of business this morning is an evidence session as part of an inquiry into town centres and retail The session will focus on the view from the ground The committee will hear evidence across two panels David Gove, lead officer for Town Centre Development unit with Five Council Jennifer Hunter executor leader of culture accounts Roddie MacDonald, director industrial communities alliance Scotland, and Phil Prentons, chief officer at Scotland's town partnership. As always, I would ask members and witnesses to keep questions and answers as concise as possible. Members will direct questions to panel members. Please do not feel that you will have to answer every question. There will be questions, but everyone will get an opportunity to speak. There will be questions directed to everyone at some point. I think that I'm going to ask David to answer this one first before I go at this, but if other people have something to contribute if they let me know. In the session before recess, we had evidence with Professor Sparks and he did speak about policy decisions over the years that have caused harm to town centres. He talked about the importance of the town centre first principle being applied. I was interested in how, from a local authority perspective, how difficult that is to implement and what maybe prevents that approach. He did talk about out-of-town developments, so if he wants me to have a go at that, thank you. It is very difficult to balance out-of-town development against town centre first principle. There are competing pressures. I think that if you take an example from Cacodia—I won't name names, but a development up to the west of Cacodia a few years ago that offered 150 new jobs, I hasten to add, where I suspect that we knew at the start that that was really going to be sucking jobs out of the town centre and had other consequences in that it meant the closure of another big development within the town centre, which has left us with a large footprint that has been hard to fill over the years. There is that side of things. I think that there is also the public perception of what they want. Out-of-town is convenient. People can go and park their cars. They can walk very quickly to shops and things that they want to go and see. Obviously, Professor Sparks has probably talked about the difficulties with non-domestic rates and the mismatch between what the real-life cost of out-of-town is compared to a town centre location, which has evolved over the years. The difficulties that there is around that taxation system has been in place for hundreds of years, effectively. It is really difficult to balance and square the circle. People want convenience, things have moved, shopping patterns have changed over the years, people want to be able to go to one location, perhaps do one or two shops a week where in the past you maybe had daily shops picking up things from independent local retailers, grosses, fish shops and butchers. In some respects, we have seen a little bit of a move back towards that during the pandemic. Certainly, where I live in Edinburgh, in Stockbridge, there has been a real left in the local independence. I can remember that there have been queues waiting to get into the butchers and the fish shop in Stockbridge and also the bakers as well, which was a real change because in the past it has been busy but not to that extent. I think that I will leave it just there just now in case there is any more. Difficult. How have the town centre first principle in place? How is that particularly challenging? Is it to do with the size of the community? You have referred to Cacoddy. We have other examples in Fife of smaller villages that are probably doing a bit better than our main towns. Cacoddy is typical of other towns across Scotland. How do you—I mean, press is part to talk about a moratorium on out-of-town development, but you have talked about that people like out-of-town developments. What policies or what do local authorities do to try and move investment to town centres and secure it there? I think that we have really got to reinvent the town centre. It has not got to be retail focused. Retail has got a part to play. I think that we need to be concentrating on creating communities in town centres, converting lots of the vacant derelict space into housing, but also the infrastructure that goes alongside that, whether that be for leisure, whether that be for recreation, whether it be for work or whether that be just things like healthcare, for example. I think that that is the key to regenerating our town centres. All our locations are different. Not all the solutions will work in each location, so there is no blueprint to say if we do X in one town it will work in Y town. I think that we have got to look at what we have in place already. There are lots of great assets in town centres. There are lots of things there that we can build upon. Professor Sparks mentioned something about people valuing place. Over a period of time, we have lost the value or sense of value in town centres. To a certain extent, that has come back a little bit during the pandemic with people valuing local resources a little bit more. I think that there is much more that we can do to promote that and much more that we can do to try and help to stimulate that kind of regeneration. I have other members who might be asked what some of the barriers are to that vision and what makes it difficult to deliver. I was going to ask Phil Prentis from Scotland's town partnership if you would like to comment on the town centre first principle and how that has effectively been introduced and what the difficulties are in applying that. The town centre first principle has been probably the single biggest tool that Scottish Government and local government have had over the past six or seven years to try and change some of those behaviours that David outlined. Developers like simplicity and cheapness present the citizen with a fair accompli. It is dependent on cars. It is not sustainable, but that is an emergency. The climate emergency has crept up on us and now we have to remove dependency on car-borne development and journeys. We have seen some steady progress with town centre first principle. I think of good examples such as BarHead, where the decent-sized retail was put back into the town centre alongside council headquarters, health facilities and leisure facilities and that created a very resilient and sustainable town that works well for the citizen population. Likewise Kilmarnock has done a lot of good work around town centre first putting a college into the town and council headquarters. Dumbarton has done likewise recently by moving from an out-of-town location at Garchshake, moving back into the town centre, which in turn brings in footfall and vibrancy. There have been good examples, but the report that Professor Sparks led, the new future for Scotland's towns, calls out the systemic problems that developers currently can still find loopholes. It is much cheaper to build big box retail in out-of-town destinations, but it is not just the private sector retail. It is also the wider public sector. Hospitals are built two or three miles out of town where it is very difficult for age and demographic to access. It is not very inclusive. We see further and higher education institutions doing the same, councils likewise, agencies. It goes much further beyond retail. A lot of our investments are built on greenfield sites, which, to be honest, given the climate emergency, is not acceptable any longer. We need to probably take a firmer approach. I think what Professor Sparks and the review group outlined in the new future for Scotland's towns and, obviously, the town centre action plan that we talked about last week is to tighten up on the policy, the regulatory and the fiscal frameworks to give the commercial sector certainty. That is really all those guys want. If we tell them that they cannot build on greenfield sprawl sites any more, they will turn their investment towards the town centre and come up with an innovative long-term sustainable solution. Between the town centre first principle and the place principle, we have enough sense of direction of what we have to achieve. I think that the town centre action plan, marked 2, on a new future for Scotland's towns, gives everybody a route map. It is really just a question then of making sure that that happens and not taking a right off the ball. Some of those powers are reserved, some of them are devolved. We have to find a collaborative way through all of this, but I think that we have a good route map to build on good practice that has happened so far. We have to remember why we started to look at our town centres on the back of the last big crisis, which was the financial crisis. We realised that Scotland was a nation of towns, and towns are there for everybody, for the people, for the planet, for the environment, for the economy. We have to nurture them, and to be fair, sometimes we lean towards the gloom and doom. Scotland has some great towns, and we have a story book of our journey as a nation, from early kings and parliaments and poets right through to industrialisation and modern times. We have a strong culture, and we just need to breathe a bit of life back into the heart of our town centres. That leads me nicely on to Michelle Thompson's question, and then I will bring in Colin Smyth. Good morning, everybody. I would like to direct to my question to Phil and to yourself, Jennifer. We understand and we have had a variety of evidence of the ways that culture, leisure and tourism can support restoring town centres, but I am interested in a word that was used by the Scottish Town Partnership, which was about encouraging vibrancy and use of culture within that. What we are trying to, in my view, get away from is the proposition in a box, because culture is living, breathing, it is creative, it is dynamic and so on. I would like a bit of thought from you both what your insights are into that, and particularly highlighting some of the complexity that therefore comes with that, because I am not in any way suggesting that this is easy. Perhaps Jennifer, you might like to go first. Yes, there are loads that the culture sector can offer here, for all the vacant retail spaces. I will bring in vibrancy into town centres, both in the daytime and in the nighttime economy. In terms of some of the barriers to doing that, I just had a look at Mone Town Centre for the purpose of this inquiry. I phoned up the local business gateway and said that if I wanted to turn some of these vacant shops into a gallery or different spaces for different use, what would I have to do? The hoops that I had to jump through were absolutely massive, it would put most people off, so things like the use of the building. That is a retail unit, so you would not be able to use it as a café. If you wanted to put a café in it, you would have to get a change of use and even then they are only going to let you use this much of it, it depends on the square footage, and it just seems like there are barriers, barriers, barriers. If there is something that we could do to make it easier, short-term and long-term, for people to go in and redevelop these spaces to bring that vibrancy to the 10 centre, I think that would really help. I noticed in the documents that we got that you had put out a consultation to your members. Are you able to provide any insights off the back of that that helps to answer this question? Yes, so people are interested in maker spaces and also co-working spaces, so things like code base. You have a lot of creative freelancers who work in their house who always have, even before the pandemic, who prefer to be out in the community. Where can I think and will it actually, it's not only us now, now you've got a lot of people working at home who don't want to be, whose employers no longer provide an office, so they can all be part of that vibrancy in the 10 centre as well, so you could have somewhere like what's happened at mid-steeple and I think the committee are planning to concede. That can be developed, something like that can go right across any town in Scotland. There's a place in Hamilton town centre that I pass all the time, that was a big department store right on the edge of town, which has been vacant now for a couple of years. It would be perfect for something like that, and that's what I think most of the creative community see in the culture community is the potential. We're just waiting to get in really, but at the moment there's just so many barriers in the way that most people are just kind of individual freelancers, so they can't take on the amount of barriers that are there, they need some support to try to move things on, but they would be more than willing. Can I bring you in, Phil, at this point? So, Phil, have you got anything to add to the original question? Just for the witnesses, the Parliament should switch your mic on and off, because we have no difficulty with Mr Prenta. I've managed to turn my own mic on. I think that culture is a critical part of bringing back this vibrancy into our town centres. I've just said that our culture is something that's really the envy of a lot of places in the world. We've got such a strong history and a story to tell people, so I'll take a look at where that has brought life back into places that we're really struggling. Campbelltown starts off Scotland's story, where the Irish monks came across. It's got a long history of whisky making, which is starting to make a renaissance, but two years ago, they won Scotland's Most Improved Town Award, because going from all the sort of disinvestment around macrohannish and the industrial decline, they've started to just work more collaboratively about their story, the story of the Campbells, the story of the whisky tourism, the entire trail, the events and the festivals that they put on. Likewise, 15 years ago, Open was a sort of almost like a sagatour destination, old, dusty hotels. See now, it is genuinely a hipster location with lots of new investment restaurants. I go in and look at Open, and I think that the demographic has moved to be very European, middle-aged, with kids jumping onto the ferries going across to our islands. It can be done, and Open has a series of festivals bringing in the local culture, so visitors and residents can all enjoy that, from music festivals to art and craft. I'll take up Jennifer's points about barriers. Barriers are usually around cost or process, but they can be overcome. Look at creative sterling in King Street. Creative Sterling took over an old retail unit of three-story Wilco building and filled it with 100 bedroom craft and arts people. People who are on their own right would never be able to take a risk on renting a shop, but they can rent a shop window, they can rent a bit of space within that shop to sell their goods. It gives them another channel to sell, but more importantly, it creates something very unique in the heart of Sterling, which gives lots of people a reason to go into Sterling because they see a shop selling things that they would never be able to see anywhere else. I think that, where there is a will, there is a way. Culture, in my mind, is our DNA. It tells their story, and we have such a culture to celebrate. Covid has pushed a lot of things outdoors, and it did show that we could operate outdoors. Street festivals, markets, all of those types of activities should be further encouraged. Culture to me is the backbone of the Scottish society, and we should be celebrating it more and just doing more around it. However, there is a massive role to play. As retail repurposes and we repopulate our town centres, people will demand more of that. I will be an open leader today at a conference, speaking at a tourism conference. When I look at the time, there are two or three shops that are just for local produce. It is celebrating the provenance of Scottish food, Scottish art and Scottish craft. Again, that is a really compelling proposal, not just for resident population but for visitor population. Are there policy initiatives that the Scottish Government could choose to adopt beyond a framework that has already been set out and a welcoming open-mindedness to the vibrancy of what you described? Are there specific beyond what Jennifer has already mentioned? Are there specific policy initiatives that you think would be valuable? To be honest, I think that all of the answers are within the new future for Scotland's towns. Most of the barriers that Jennifer has pointed out are probably fiscal. There is a scale barrier for these smaller cultural organisations to overcome. The artificially high rental values in town centres act as a barrier. Repurposing the VAT element acts as a barrier. If that could be sorted out, you are removing the biggest issue, which is the cost risk to this type of organisation. I think that there is much more collaboration. Local authority will probably have surplus assets as they reimagine their states post-pandemic. They will not need as much office space. A lot of those offices are based in town centres. There could be rental discounts given to encourage that type of activity. I think that the public estate has a role to assist in all that, but in terms of government intervention, we need to move forward with the town centre action plan and we need to move forward at pace because we are in a climate emergency and all of those activities go towards sustainability, community wealth building and localism. All the things that multiply the impact on the Scottish economy, job creation and so on, we need to move at a faster pace. That would be my ask. Deliver on what is in the town centre action plan, stick to it, give certainty to the private and commercial sectors, nurture our culture by whichever means possible, and we have the gift to do that. It will depend on local collaboration and leadership. The Government's role in that is basically the bigger policy asks that are within the town centre review. I am keen to continue the question from Michelle on some of those devolved policy levers. Maybe I can start by coming back to you, Jennifer. If you were in front of the Scottish Government, what policy do you think they should be pursuing in order to break down the barriers that you referred to? There are a couple of things. There are rates relief. I think that that is a Scottish Government policy. You could have incentives for anyone to bring in vibrancy to a town centre through the arts culture creative industries if you could have rates relief there. I was thinking along the lines of should we be thinking about preventative health in rates? If you are bringing social impact to the town centre, should you have rates relief on that basis? Climate change? Are you offering people's 16 hours work a week, fair work, and a point system for how rates are paid? I know that that would work out really well for arts and culture sector. I guess that some of the other things are about the kind of networks that build those things together. There are areas in Scotland where you have quite strong networks between the culture sector and the local authority. Paysley has built all that together because they were putting their bid for the city of culture. During that bid process, they built a great network of people who can get behind bidding for cultural projects in the town. Quite often, you do not have that network in many areas because there is no bid for culture. It could work to help people to come together to put bids forward. Statutory consultees, too. We are never listed as statutory consultees wherever there is a list. It tends to miss off Creative Scotland and Historic Environment Scotland, although Historic Environment Scotland is on a lot more than Creative Scotland is. It would be good to be listed where there are statutory consultees in things such as city deals. If we are at the table, we can do a lot more to put forward what we could offer, but the problem is that quite often we are not at any of the tables. It means that we are not bringing the ideas of what could happen in the town. Can I put the same question? Can I bring Roddy MacDonald in and ask Roddy what his members are saying that they believe that the policy initiative should be from the Scottish Government to help to regenerate some of those town centres that your members cover? Thank you very much. One of the things that I think has come on to our table now is the NPF4 consultation and how we see planning in a much more holistic, joined up way. I would think that that would be a key policy driver as we move forward. Is there anything in particular that your members would like to see with an NPF that would really kickstart that regeneration of our town centres? Some of the evidence that we have taken is that it is well-meaning, but there are maybe some specific misses. Do you agree with that? Is there anything specifically that you would like to see within that that would really help our town centres? Well, there is the whole issue of land and property development, where we would require to look at land in a much more innovative way, and to assist our local authorities. Our 15 local authorities dealing with land, one of the big issues there is the risk involved in developing land. Sometimes land that they do not actually own themselves. One of the things that the Scottish Parliament Government and local authorities could look at is how do we de-risk our local authorities in terms of looking at land and property development. I think that we are able to sort that. That would be a really good starter for 10. The whole planning network, not just as planning but as part of a whole wider flexible infrastructure approach, looking at land. Land that was often not owned by the councils, how can we unlock that land sometimes? There have been issues of compulsory order issues and compulsory sale issues. I know that that is a key question for certainly one of our local authorities who have had significant issues with a telny restation. How do you unlock that potential if you do not own it? I think that working with the Scottish Government to allow legislation to smooth land and property development de-risk our local authorities. I think that that is certainly the best step in the right direction. As an MSP for the south of Scotland, I know the hotel and railway station very well. That is very useful, Roddy. I just wonder if I have time to bring in maybe Phil and just to touch on. Phil, you have referred to the report that has been published recently. We have had reports before and you have given an example of Kilmarnock, for example, where there has been some good work by the council. However, if you walk down Kilmarnock high street, the biggest growing population, sadly, is still to let signs at the moment. Why has existing policy not worked and how will this be any different from what is being proposed? I think that the original town centre action plan was a bit like the town centre first principle. It was a principle that was not a prescriptive duty. We were working on best endeavours and where we had good local leadership, we were seeing progress. We were seeing political prioritisation of the town centre, we were seeing progress. However, there were too many loopholes. Again, some of the systemic barriers around the cost inequality, etc., cost imbalance. I think that the new report, one of the key characteristics—we have touched on MPF4. Personally, I think that MPF4 cannot deal with everything, but it does set a very strong clear direction based on climate, sustainability and equity. I do like the MPF4. It is never going to be perfect, but I think that it is pretty robust. One of the key things that we need to look at is alignment of internal government strategies. We have the national strategy for economic transformation, we have digital, climate and culture, we have towns and regeneration, we have housing to 2040. If anything, we need to focus more on how the touch points between each of those strategies. Very often, it is the siloed working that leads to counterintuitive investments. Someone in the economy is seeking a foreign direct investment and just finds a greenfield site. If we had been joined up and taken the place principle forward, we would probably have found a more centric location where the jobs would have been in the town centre and people would have been able to access that better. I think that it is more about alignment. We also ask for best endeavours. I think that the difference between town centre action plan 1 and town centre action plan 2 is that it is tackling promptly the elephant in the room. The last national planning framework did not mention times. We are a nation of times. Time should be seen as critical in terms of our economic infrastructure, our environmental infrastructure and social infrastructure. Times are mentioned numerous times within MPF4, and that is the first time that has happened. That should fall down to regional spatial strategies and local development plans and local place plans. It is setting a strong sense of direction in terms of the policy framework. It also tackles the other elephant in the room, which is the fiscal framework and the imbalance. Almost a third of our economic activity has moved online. Not all of that tax has been captured properly, so there has to be an equitable approach in terms of digital sales tax, looking at NDR and modernising the system to make it fit for purpose, looking at moratoriums for out-of-town development, which are unsustainable, dealing with the VAT issue around refurbishment and retrofit. There are lots of things that the plan is trying to achieve. We have taken 50 years in terms of making poor planning decisions and being driven by commercial investment and developer-led decisions. It will take some time to unpick all of that, but I think that the work that has been done over the past couple of years around planning the town centre action plan, the national strategy for economic transformation housing to 2040, is basically sending us in generally the right direction. The other thing Colin would point out, there is always the money issue, the resource issue, and towns were never really seen to be a big political priority. The last town centre action plan, the first one, was a way back in 2009. We had to wait a decade for the next serious amount of funding that was in 2018, the town centre capital fund. However, I think that we are at a game-changing moment, both at the UK level and the Scottish level, in that the place-based investment fund has put £325 million on the table. There is an additional £50 million to go to vacant in Derlick land, which is targeting urban deprivation and brownfield sites' persistent problems within an urban environment. We have also got approximately £400 million from the UK government's leveling up fund. I know that there is lots of politics in all of that, and I am not invoking the politics. I think that town centres should be apolitical because they are for everybody. This has sustained resource over multi-year timelines, which then allows the local leadership to take bigger decisions. The shopping centre is no longer viable, it is falling down and there is no commercial interest. In the past, local government could not take that risk because they were not sure that they would get sustained funding. Now that funding is in place, whether it is from the UK or the Scottish Government, where they can take those bigger decisions. Fixing the town and city centre is a one-off. Once it is done, it is done. It is not like the health budget were it is spiralling out of control within the ageing demographic. It is just a one-off hit. I think that it is something that we should consider. To me, once it is fixed, it is fixed. It is certain for a generation, and that is something that needs to be considered. I think that there is a simplicity in all of that calling that sometimes is overlooked. We have a know-for provision of retail footprint. We live in a car-dominated, disaggregated system. We just need to unpick that gently and pull it back into the core so that we can deal with climate emergency. We can have housing solutions for a change in demographic. We breathe life by putting people and things back into town centres. In my mind, it is reasonably simple in terms of trying to achieve that. We are having an interesting discussion this morning. I would ask if people could be maybe a bit briefer in responses just so that we can try to get through as many as we can, but I will take advantage of being the convener and have asked a quick question around the Fraser of Allander report into the small business bonus scheme, which was commissioned by the Scottish Government and was published recently. Jennifer, you talked about rates relief. Does anyone have any comments on—I do not know if anyone has a chance to look at the report, but that is the scheme that we have in place for rates relief. Do you have a view on the scheme or how it could be applied in other areas? Not yet. I would have to get back to you. Sorry, but it has not come up recently. I will move on to Maggie Chapman, who will be followed by Jamie Halcro Johnston. Thank you very much, convener. Good morning, everyone, and apologies that my internet is a little bit dodgy, so you have audio only, but maybe that is a good thing for you all. Thank you very much for being here. My line of questioning follows on from the discussion Colin instigated. Phil spoke very clearly about alignment. That was one of the key things that Lee Sparks mentioned previously. The challenges of siloed working—it is one of my pet bug bears to siloed working not only within one layer of government but between different layers of government and other public agencies, public bodies as well. If I can bring David into this discussion, David, from your point of view, as a town centre development person in Fife, what are the key things that we need to be thinking about doing differently, doing better, to ensure that between UK and Scottish Governments but also local authorities and the other public bodies, public agencies, to better co-ordinate things? We are not reinventing the wheel in lots of different places. We are not producing conflicts between different things. As Phil says, it is about bringing planning together and focusing on climate emergency and our biggest societal goals. From your point of view, what are the things that we need to be doing differently or better? I recognise what you are saying about siloed working. It is something of a bug bear of mine over a number of years, certainly within the local authority that I work with. Those have been challenges that gradually have been broken down. I think that there is now more cohesive working between departments in the council. I also think that the creation of STP has helped to break a lot of barriers down because we are now talking to different layers of government but also other local authorities and sharing a lot more of the best practice, a lot more ideas and a lot more debate going on about the town centre plight, if you like. T-cap 2—you have to forgive me—was on holiday last week, so I have only looked at it very briefly. That gives us the direction of travel that we need. There is a lot of good stuff, as Phil has mentioned, already in MPF4 that helps to connect different functions within Government. In particular, from my perspective, one of the biggest barriers has been traditionally the disconnect between planning and the functions that we try to carry out in terms of town centre development and the speed at which things can happen. It is very frustrating for me as a town centre professional, but communities in particular want to see change and things move at a quicker pace. They want to see things that are going to make their lives better. That is the critical part to all that. We cannot just sit around waiting for things to happen. Everybody has got to get involved. Everybody has a voice. Everybody needs to be moving in the same direction. Phil has mentioned the climate emergency. We have looked at things about reusing buildings. I remember correctly that Malcolm Fraser's big pitch in the original town centre action plan was that we should not demolish buildings and reuse them. One of the key things for me is that we have to think about the embodied carbon in a lot of those buildings. We have to think about them in terms of what they could do. They are not all going to be repurposed for housing. They are not all going to be repurposed for things that we might want them to be. We have to think about that community at the heart of a town centre and what that community needs, what we need to build around that. I think that there is a lot of good work going on. I will probably leave it there. Phil is connected into lots of different local authorities, lots of different groups and lots of different communities. They all have different ideas about how things should move forward, but that is probably my take on it. Thanks very much, David. Robbie, can I bring you in on this as well? I am particularly interested in your members and the communities that you represent. How is it that we can—we know some of the things that we need to do. What is it that we need to stop doing? What is it that we need to change? We are not getting it right in terms of alignment, policy, coherence and those kinds of things. There is no silver bullet here. If you go into Peralog and South Ayrshire and you go to Preswick Town, then you go to Gyrddon Town, and it is so different. On the coast, we have a history of tourism, a history of cultural identity. One of the things that we have to do is to be honest that we have significant issues within our towns, but we have also got distinct strong identities. If we start on the basis that we can find local solutions with local networks supported by national bodies, that is a big step forward. I am not pretending that there is one particular route map out of this or individual route maps. On the bigger picture, particularly for my 15-member authorities, how do we optimise the new funding streams that are coming in on a UK and Scottish Government level? How are we making sure that the UK-shared prosperity fund and the levelling up funds actually hit the spot for our communities within the context of the Community Empowerment Act, ensuring that our communities are valued? It is not a tick-bocked exercise. It is hard work for statutory organisations to consult with local people, because it is lengthy and time-consuming, and it is challenging. My creedacour would be that if we look deeply enough, we will all have distinctive solutions for each of our distinctive communities. Let us have the confidence and the patience to develop those particular networks and frameworks. Let us make sure that, when it comes to funding coming particularly from the UK Government and the levelling up fund, that we make sure that that money hits the spot for our communities and also to protect our local authorities. It may sound interesting that we are going to go UK Government straight to local authorities. There may be a political context there, but we have to protect the capacity of our local authorities to deliver. An amount of work required by officers and members to produce bits, reports and assessments is very sizable. We have to protect our local authorities and make sure that they have the capacity to deliver for our communities and also not to forget about our communities from a community empowerment perspective. I hope that that helps a wee bit. That is really helpful. Thanks very much, Roddy. I will leave it there, Claire. Thank you very much. Jamie Halcro Johnston, to be followed by Colin Beattie. Thank you very much. Good morning to the panel. Can I maybe go to Phil first and then on to David with this question? We have talked a lot about the kind of changes that are going to happen. Obviously, there is going to be a lot of infrastructure changes. We have seen and recently during the pandemic issues around people and places and potential congestion charging being suggested. Obviously, there is going to need to be a lot of development in our town centres. All that has impact on them and their ability to certainly businesses to keep operating. I know that when we had the tram debates here in Edinburgh, there were real concerns from a lot of businesses that the work as it was on-going caused some to go out of business. Given that there are a lot of businesses that are already struggling post Covid, post the changes, or through Covid and the pandemic, as we transition to a new future for our town centres, how do we make sure that that is done in a way that does not lose a lot of existing businesses simply because of the disruption? Is there a concern that, for some of our town centres, things may actually get worse before they get better? I will try briefly to answer that. I have a long history of regeneration and infrastructure investment. It has to be done in consultation with the business community. Small businesses are the backbone of this country, so we have to make sure that any disruption is managed and that it is well communicated and planned. That is at the local government level, so it has to be done with planning, economic development and close consultation with the business community. However, by and large, it is usually short-term disruption for a much longer term gain. Hopefully, that goes somewhere. There is probably a risk of some places declining further in the short period of time, because Covid and all the various business supports, furlough, tax reliefs, etc. Have maybe kept some businesses that were already unviable on life support, giving them a wee bit longer? Ultimately, the truth will out and these businesses will close. We are in a period of fast-paced disruption, but we do have to move it a pace, Jimmy. The climate emergency is there, so we can see that visibly. We have to do things more radically and faster and more aggressively to get the outcome. However, if we retain and nurture our frontages, our ground floors and the high-level stuff that MacLeos is interesting and focus on the spaces above, what you are doing is repopulating and putting in denser consumption, more communities, passive surveillance around antisocial behaviour. If you look at Glasgow as a good example, Glasgow is the least densely populated city centre in Europe. If you are standing George's Court at 7 o'clock at night, the lights go out. If you are in Bruges or Antwerp, every space is lit up and people are living in flats. To be heard at Glasgow, they have acknowledged that a big drive for their sustainability is putting people back into the city centre, which then will secure the businesses in the city centre because they will have more consumers on their doorstep and more regular consumption. I think that we have a period of disruption, but I think that this is an opportunity to do things right and to make things better in the longer term. That is very much on that. I think that the idea of repopulating our town and city centres is one that comes through a number of times in the evidence that is given to this. David, if I could ask you, as somebody on the town centre development site for a council, how do you allow that change, that transition, that development without impacting on the businesses that you have already got there as new systems and new infrastructures put in place? To answer your question as best I can, I suppose, I agree with everything that Phil has said. I think that the key thing for us is the consultation and putting measures in place as best we can to try and alleviate some of that disruption. If I can take some practical examples of where we have tried to alleviate pressures on some of those businesses, we have a moratorium of works at key trading periods of the year. For example, if we are carrying out public realm works, we will stop during the Christmas trading period. For those who do not care, there is a big event that happens around Easter each April, well, apart from the last two years, well, previous to this year, the links market. We stop works to accommodate that, which is obviously a key driver for locals in the town. If I take some of the historic buildings work that we do, we try and work with business owners to make sure that, if we are causing any disruption through scaffolding or works, that we advertise that businesses are still open. We have tried to facilitate deliveries of goods and services to these businesses so that, if road networks are dug up, we get a solution in place where businesses can receive all their stock and everything else that they require. Cutting back to what Phil said initially, there is going to be disruption and it is about the short term, for long term game. We have really got to think about how we communicate with businesses and try to alleviate and listen to what they have to say, but, at the end of the day, we need to make those changes, things that are not going to stay as they are. We are on a path, a journey, just now that, unless we do something about it, we will have no tain centres left, so I will leave it there. Colin Beattie to be forward by Fiona Heslop. Repeatedly, the committee has heard that there is no one-size-fits-all solution to support our town centres. Repeatedly, it has been said that, in order to succeed, you have got to successfully bring together local communities and businesses. Despite asking for examples of that, there is just one that would stand out as a success. No one has been able to point to that, so I am going to ask the witnesses of any examples of how or where there has been an effective collaboration between the public and private sector, the third sector and local communities in order to achieve a success story in a town centre. I think that Huntley is interesting. Devran projects in Huntley might be worth having a closer look at what is happening there. They have really turned things around and more and more artists are attracted to go and live in Huntley and work there. They have put it on the creative cultural map of it. I think that five years ago, no one was really talking about Huntley, but they are now, so it would be definitely worth having a look into what is happening there at Devran. You have also obviously got Paisley, the city of culture and all the stuff that is the spin-off of the city for culture bid. V&A Dundee, that works both ways. I mean, I am aware that that is a city and not a town, but because of what was happening culturally in Dundee, anyway, is an attraction for the V&A and the Eden project. If you have a vibrant cultural place, it attracts more partnership projects. Instead, it works both ways—things coming in as well as producing things that are there. Obviously, you have got the Dymfriest examples that you will already know about the Stove Network and Mid Steeble Quarter, which I understand you are going to be visiting. The work that has been done in Scotland's towns, Highlands and Islands Enterprise is really changing. There are a lot of independent businesses there, especially food and drink and arts and creative industries. That is another thing where, if you give our community creative cultural community an opportunity, they will go. If there are opportunities, they can do something there that they will not be able to do elsewhere, they will move into that space and start taking that up. It is all about incentives for getting us into places to start the change. It is a bit of incentive in people's logo. North Edinburgh arts might be worth a closer look. Have you got any thoughts on that? I guess that the example that really floats in my mind is Loc Eileen in Fife. It was one of the first sustainable community initiative surettes. There was a lot of bluster about the surettes, to be honest, and a lot of enthusiasm that has not come through to real-life fruition, I suppose. However, one key project is Townhouse Square in Loc Eileen. That was an area behind Adderallic Church and Andrews Church, which we have repurposed with Fife Historic Buildings Trust and a community interest company called Loc Eileen into a climbing centre. That, hopefully, will open sometime this year. We have obviously been delayed because of the pandemic, but the work is substantially complete. The climbing tower is in place, and it is just now the fit-out that needs to be completed there. Townhouse Square, as it may sound, has a traditional townhouse there, which had lain empty. It was a council property. That has been repurposed as very nice affordable housing. It is on our social housing register for nice new flats. We also built, I think, 16 units alongside those houses. Our partners All Valley Housing Association have taken on some of the ground to the south of the site and have developed a nice new town centre development. That is a good example that has come through the process from the charrette. As some might recall, Loc Eileen was voted the most improved town in Scotland, I think, about six or seven years ago now. It has been a bit of a blur in the past few years. I think that that is an example that is maybe worth the committee having a look at. I think that it is important, without commenting on the examples given, to differentiate where there have been individual projects that have been tremendously successful and where there has been a comprehensive town centre plan involving the whole community and everything that has been brought to fruition and has actually made that step change, that difference in the centre. Phil, can I ask you to comment on that? I would point to Barhead. Barhead lends itself to the need for strong political leadership and long-termism. Barhead was the poor relation in Eastran for sure. He had very affluent neighbourhoods such as Newton-Merns and Giffnick on one side, and he had the post-industrial times of Barhead and Neilston on the other side of the authority. That came about through the 1996 reorganisation of local government. Barhead, 20,000 people, post-industrial town, quite a mixed demographic but leaning towards poverty. There was a disparity in the life expectancy of 17 years between a young man born in Dunderland and Barhead and a young man born in Stamperland in Clarkston. The politicians got together and said, let's get a conversation going with the people. Let's see what we can do collectively as a community planning partnership. A vision was created for Barhead, which led to all of the subsequent investments. Everything can't be done by the public sector. There's a certain amount of providing confidence and facilitation and that was all done. The private investment followed after that. On the longer term, we've got various groups such as the third sector interface who are headquartered in the town, business improvement district. Barhead is a town that you would never visit unless you had relatives there. However, if you asked the people in Barhead what they think about it, they'll say that it's much, much better than what it was before. We've got a health centre in the middle of the town centre. That brings in football. We've got a leisure centre in the middle of the town centre. Who would ever dream of doing that? We've got a small ASDA, which is now the typical ASDA footprint. To be honest, we stopped them selling comparison goods. We only allowed them to sell convenience, so we were only able to sell food. We weren't allowing them to sell white goods or clothing, because that would have put the other businesses in town out of business. All of that was done in a long dialogue with the various community groups, the politicians, local councillors and the truth be told, once we analysed the life expectancy, there had been an improvement over a decade of nine years in life expectancy. The health outcomes were all linked to creating a better environment, to creating more jobs, to giving people hope. It can be done. There are numerous examples across the country where the journey has begun and there is success beginning to blossom. Paisley is a very good example whereby the high street mall has been acquired by a commercial investor, working very closely with the local government and the community that was inspired by the City of Culture bid. If you cast your mind back on Dundee's being mentioned, Dundee lost the bid, like Paisley. Dundee lost a hull, but you would have thought that Dundee actually had won the City of Culture bid because of the investment that came, the V&A, the upgraded railway station, the sleeper's hotel, lots of investment, better collaboration between the two shopping centres, the universities, lots of things happening. Also at the community grassroots level, there was a lot of in-migration, the Syrian refugees and the council and the partners in the arts community nurtured those people coming in and created lots of activities to keep Maconfield welcome, to make them feel productive and part of the local society. It can be done if you get good local leadership prioritisation and collaboration, it can be done. Just to ask one last question here. During this discussion, we've been talking about all these initiatives and there's been discussion on the need for incentives. There's been discussions about business rates and the potential need for rates relief to provide that support. There's been talk about online retailers and the evening up, if you like, of the playing field by bringing in digital sales tax potentially. Looking at all this and looking at the people who are putting forward these initiatives and driving them, can those initiatives survive long-term without a public subsidy in some form supporting them? Rodyn, maybe I can ask you to come in on that. The question is, can all this be done with altruism and enterprise from a private sector? No, my view is that I don't think that that is possible. I think that there is a benefit here for the private sector and the public sector and the public services to work together, certainly. What I would refer you back to, and I'll share this with the committee clerks, is a piece of research carried out by the Industrial Counties Alliance and the Centre for Towns and Key Cities Group, looking at a number of initiatives both in Scotland and in Wales, because the Alliance has got 60 member authorities across Scotland and in Wales. Rwy'n bach o'r prifio, there are a number of examples of towns and, indeed, villages where very good practice has emerged in partnership with the private sector, with communities and with the statutory authorities. I am happy to make that document called Places with Purpose Available to the committee clerks to share with the members. I'll bring in Fiona Hyslop by Gordon MacDonald. We've heard from Phil about the number of different funds that are available, and we know from the examples that we've just been given that they have succeeded because there's a common alignment between different funding streams with its heritage environment, Creative Scotland or Towns and Key Generation, but the common theme is that there's a common vision about the story of the place and what they need to do. My question for David, though, is about that issue about risk aversion. Bear in mind that many council officers involved in towns have to get a return for the council. The council may own the properties, but there's a lot of pressure financially, and they're stretched in lots of different directions. Is there a danger that risk aversion can prevent the real step change that we need? It comes down to people, so there might be available capital investment, but I want to drill down on what is the people culture that we need and the people resource that we need? Bear in mind that, if we were to take the communities and the business communities with us and an artist, those are often the most entrepreneurial people, but they're also running businesses and they're time and effort and they can get exhausted by consultation, etc. How do we get that step change so that people become more embraced by the entrepreneurialism and become less risk averse? That's a key challenge. There's no doubt about that. We have, as you've pointed out, a great source of capital at the moment, but one of the key things that goes alongside that is the lack of revenue to run projects beyond their inception. That's particularly apparent when we're working with third sector organisations if you've just referenced just there. They need to earn certain amounts of income through assets if that's what we want to do, if we want to use community asset transfer or if we work with community organisations to purchase buildings, which we've done through using some of the Tencentre funds to repurpose long vacant redundant buildings. There's also an issue about the sustainability of that model, and as people grow older or maybe move on, who's going to take over the running of some of those buildings, particularly in community groups? The skills that go alongside that, so we're very conscious of the fact that we need to be upskilling communities to take on ownership of buildings if that's what they want to do or certain Tencentre assets. Has it been a barrier? Yes, it has been. There's no doubt about that. There are risks in a lot of the things that we do, but we've taken the balance view that we will take the risks. Sometimes we get it right, sometimes we get it wrong. We won't shy away from the fact that we do make mistakes and we do get it wrong at times. I think that the overall driver for this has got to be that we've got to try some things. Not all things will work, but we know what we have to do. We know that we have to change the future of our towns. We maybe don't know all the dynamics within that, but we've got to focus on doing something and making a change that's in the right direction. To answer your question as best I can, we can't afford to be a risk averse. I think that we have to try those things, but we have to put the mitigations in place to try and reduce the risk behind that. To Jennifer, clearly the Scottish Government has encouraged a more place agenda for Creative Scotland for funding, and you've given examples of some of those areas, but in terms of resource and capacity to enable culture and heritage and that wider arts focus to be at the start of development rather than nice to have at the end, as some people perceive it, what people resource do you think is required to get that engine of activity going, because again, freelancers often have to have other jobs to help their work, etc. It's the time that's required to help those engagements. What's your view on that? There's lots of ways that we can be involved, so it's things like from the festivals and events side of the town centre, so you don't need to capital for that. That's more about the town centre management coming together, working with the local creative community to say, can you help us? We want to maybe have four big focus points per year. What could we put on? They can work together to make applications for funding for festivals and things like that and for activity. In terms of the vacant buildings, that's a bit more of a challenge, because if we could have more local authority ownership of those buildings in the first place, we could then work with the local authority about what the social benefit is. I don't think that we would need that long-term funding. If you can take care of the rent, we could be running cafes, social inclusion projects, employing people in the community with special needs who can't get jobs elsewhere and who can work with us and who would be welcome with us. There's lots of different things we could do, whether it's part of the fabric of the high street or whether it's the addition. The other thing is, if you have what I've noticed a bit more guy town centre, it basically closes down at night, it's very much a daytime economy. They have some activities and things for kids during the day, which are all good ideas to add to the vibrancy, but come seven o'clock, nothing happens. They could be having comedy nights, they could be having boot clubs, there's all that stuff they could be doing. I don't have time to go round them all and make all those suggestions, but at the moment, the business improvement district is not talking to the people in the cultural community there and none of that. Those conversations are happening, so I don't know whose job it is to kick that off, maybe the local authority culture department, I don't know. I can maybe comment particularly, Phil Prentis, on the danger of risk aversion, but also the benefit of entrepreneurialism in the public sector, as well as working with partners in the private sector. Again, success is, I suppose that we better be refocusing on that than necessary where it hasn't happened, but your reflection on what is good and that we can follow it and perhaps what is the practice that we need to try and move away from. We are very much risk averse, but I think that the pressures through a decade of austerity has put local government officers in a difficult position. There isn't a lot of money to go around and they've had difficult decisions to make, which has led to the culture of risk aversion, but there is resource on the table now. We're trying to do things differently at a pace, so part of the place-based investment fund will see a series of scalable demonstrator projects, so we are currently engaged with a number of local authorities looking at the acquisition and repurposing of large shopping centres, looking at radical interventions around climate, and we can develop case studies from that and ensure with our local government colleagues of the wider public estate to see if we can get some of that moving a bit quicker. So I think that it's our job at government level and agency level, the likes of the town's partnership, to help to overcome the risk aversion and to give people confidence that some of those decisions just have to be taken and we have to look long term. Again, I'm pretty optimistic. The engagement that we've had with the private sector and the public sector around this could potentially lead to new financing mechanisms, new special purpose vehicles to get things happening. I think that the message here is that not one sector will be able to stand on its own feet post-pandemic and go on towards climate. That is very much about taking a holistic place-based approach with all the key stakeholders involved, investing and getting returns. I'm briefly going back to the deputy convener's point just about subsidy. This is not about subsidy, this is about showing the art of the possible. We need the flow of private capital back into this at a pace and I have to say again that I'm very encouraged that the institutional investors and pension funds are now looking seriously at town city centre housing at scale, which they can put money into, investable propositions for the long term. Again, it's a mixture of private and public. Some of those things haven't been done before, Fiona. We have to take a brave step forward and I think that the Government recognised that and said, let's do some demonstrations in close consultation with COSLA, Scottish Features Trust, Scottish Enterprise, Highlands and Islands Enterprise, so that we can learn from all that, but let's just do some of the big things that we've been thinking about and talking about. I said as a director in the UK task force as well that there has been a few things like that happening, but there's not a lot that we can learn from those guys. We know what needs to be done up here. I think that it's just a question of focusing on doing the right thing and stopping doing the harmful things. Just ask about the capacity of the voluntary sector and volunteers to be involved in those big projects that we've just heard about. There is capacity. First and foremost, we need to get by in. We have to have something that the third sector and the voluntary organisations can feel that, A, the equal partners are valued, their opinions are listened to. Once we get that respect agenda sorted, the third sector and the voluntary organisations will come in very effectively. Last Friday, I spent some time at the grain exchange in Aire. What you have there is a really interesting combination of council offices on the top floor and the top two floors, and on the ground floor, there is a market place where there is a mixture of groups, people, volunteers coming in, the rate of industries, etc. There are certainly examples of where you engage with the voluntary third sector in a respectful manner. You get a vision that is a shared vision, that is not the vision of the Government, that is not the vision of the UK Government, that is not the vision of the council, but that is a community vision. I reckon that the capacity of the third sector and the capacity of the voluntary sector will be huge and powerful. I would say that it is critical to make an authentic community response. We have talked a lot this morning about how we are starting to get the right policies in place and there is now funding becoming available so that we can tackle the issues of our town centres. What I am keen to understand is what are the barriers that we have to renovating empty town centre properties? Is it the VAT system? Is it the change of use regulations? Is it the absentee property owners? Or is it a need to reform the compulsory purchase system? What are the issues that we need to tackle on a practical basis in order that the policies that we are now getting in place and the funding that is becoming available can be used most effectively? Just before we start, if I can come to David, I was interested in a comment that you made in your written submission, which was that we have a culture of neglect around buildings, lands and species. Can you just explain that and maybe go back to the questions? One thing that we have noticed over the years and particularly around one of our bigger centres, Cacodi, is the number of absentee landlords that you have mentioned. Nobody is taking cognisance of the state of these buildings. I have another hat as well. I work with a voluntary organisation called Fife Historic Buildings Trust, which delivers our built heritage programme on our behalf. We focus very much on trying to bring historic regeneration programmes to our town centres. The other comment that I would make is that we have enacted a number of what we call stitch-in-time activities, which is basically taking cherry pickers along the high street, trying to remove some of the detritus, the rubbish, the objects, slates, bits of downpipe and guttering that potentially could be harmful to the public. We have given photographs to occupiers of the buildings, we have given reports and still nothing happens. We have done these exercises now in some times, three or four times and we cannot keep doing it. We just do not have the money to do it. Should it be the public sector's role to do that? I do not think that it should. I think that people are investing in assets and perhaps filming made a comment about unrealistic rental rates from owners. One of the issues is that building owners have invested in buildings at the top of the market and now those buildings are not worth what they once were. They are not prepared to invest further in them. The other issue is the absentee landlords. We have been pursuing somebody in the States for, to my knowledge, seven years and we have still not been able to get to do anything about a particular building in Cacori. On that issue of absentee landlords, if domestic property is left empty for more than a year, the attract double council tax, is there a need to do something similar for non-domestic rates? I certainly think that it would concentrate on the mind. There is also an issue on listed buildings. There is a listed building in Cacori High Street, which has been the bane of my life now for nearly 15 years. I cannot get the owner to do anything with it and there is nothing I can do particularly to make him do anything about it unless something starts falling off the building. It really lets down an area of the town, which we call the Merchants Quota, where we have invested heavily in trying to get businesses working together and to create a new makers market through the Adam Smith Enlightment project. It is very frustrating. If you can come to Roddy and ask him what he thinks the barriers are to renovating the city centre properties? We, as an alliance, did a fair bit of research on the land property, the early land property issues. There are a number of obstacles. One is time. The issues involved in land and property by their very nature are complex. Complex is not just in terms of their condition, complex is not just in terms of the history of the building, but complex is in terms of ownership. It is very difficult to get very quick solutions and that can lead to the spondency cynicism and nothing ever happens around here. That sort of feeling. In the past, we have had the issues around state hedgerows, which has made things more difficult. One of the things that we are looking forward to is how to address the obstacles of gap funding. It is quite clear that, from our authorities' perspective, we need a plentiful supply of gap funding. We need that to unlock land and product development in our town centres and wider conurbations. The issue of grants and not loans, our local authorities need support and help. Loans are not always or often the best way of going about procuring land, because what you then have are councils raiding their reserves at a time of significant pressures on council resources. My final point is about sharing the burden of the risk that we need to have a mechanism that allows local authorities to make investment decisions where they are not exposed to all of the risk. For example, a matching contribution from the UK Government or the devolved governments or development agencies would spread the risk, and that would ultimately be an interest of all the players. Those are the types of issues that have been from on-going discussions within Scotland and their partners and mails in England. Phil, can I ask you, is there a need to change the VAT system when you compare the rates that are applicable to new builds in terms of renovations? I think that the VAT basically coming in at 20 per cent is normally what would be a developer's proven. That, to me, and one fell swoop answers the question. In terms of planning, the MPF4 is encouraging more use of master plan consent areas. There is a designation of permitted development within that town centre, which should allow for much more ease in terms of change of use. I take that point. There are a lot of abnormals. It is hard to retrofit. Old buildings are leaky and you have to get them up to a certain net zero standard. The money that is on the table can answer some of that. In terms of CPOs, I can remember using CPOs myself. I am one of the few in Scotland that actually did that. To answer David's question about the absentee landlord, I had again jail in America. I just took an insurance policy out and went ahead and bought the property. I just said that we need, for the betterment of the local economy, we are going to build houses here for people. I am not letting some guy in a jail in America stop that. I took an insurance policy out and we just demolished the property and we allowed a house builder to come in. Those scale sets are not readily available within local government anymore. One of the suggestions that I have made to the minister is that, given the complexity of some of the big things that we are trying to achieve quickly—acquisition and repurposing of shopping centres, town centre living at scale, net zero and carbon investments—we probably need to look at some form of central resource made available to all the local authorities. Rather than inventing it 32 times, could we have a core team of specialised experts in terms of finance, carbon, planning and CPO legal, which then could be used and deployed by all of our local government colleagues on the wider public sector estate? Could the scales that are already in existence in different organisations such as the Futures Trust or the Enterprise organisations, but could we get that bolted together in a sort of place resource to allow our local government colleagues? David could call on that to fix Kirkcaldy. That, to me, would be a good recommendation to take forward. The point that was raised earlier, I do not think that this is a long-term subsidy game. I think that this is government using strategic investment to encourage the flow of private capital. Once that happens, a lot of the persistent problems will be dealt with by private investment. They will not allow reluctant absentee landlord to hold them back if they have got a huge amount of investment. They will deal with it in their own way. A lot of the burden goes away from the public sector. The public sector's role then becomes that we are the stewards, we are the facilitators, we use the planning system to help. I think that that is ultimately the goal that we are trying to achieve. Alexander Burnett Thank you very much, convener. David, if I could start with you, given your role and knowledge of council budgets. Council spends about £5 billion a year on various year goods and services. I would be interested to hear your views of how that could be used to support local businesses and what we are discussing this morning. I guess that the key thing at the moment is using local suppliers. Something that we are doing certainly with our work is that we insist on using where we can. It is not in all cases that we use local suppliers, local trades and local expertise. That is the key thing to consider as a starting point. There might be £5 billion worth of investment that is made by local authorities, but my little bit is nowhere near that. We are working on a budget at the moment of just over £100,000 of revenue a year, which goes nowhere when we are trying to support 32 tain centres. I think that I have a budget round about £5 million at the moment, which is on various projects, which is great. That is made up from council capital sums, but also the place-based investment programme funding and, as some of the members will know, cars and THI projects that we run with Fife Historic Buildings Trust. I will come back to the question. The answer is to use local. I was not thinking so much of your own budget, but more of your colleagues' budgets and what you might see in their various pots and how they could be spent in your field, and that joined up thinking. Certainly other departments are doing the same now. For example, if we take our roads and transportation department, it is using local suppliers where we can. One of the key examples is what we are doing in Inverceithing as part of the Inverceithing Heritage Regeneration programme. It is not a local quarry, but it is up in Angus, but it is the closest we can get a geological match of stone to do the new Tain Square in Inverceithing. We are using local contractors to do the work as well. That is the best way I can answer, I am afraid. Thank you. Phil, you have spoken already about supporting local, but particularly about moving away from subsidy, long-term subsidy and creating lasting support. What is your view on Scotland's first procurement policy? I am a big proponent of that. Procurement should be used more aggressively as an economic driver. We are driven too much by price. We will have to get the lowest price, but ultimately we could be given large sums of money to extractive organisations who do not have good practices around employment or taxation. We need to be a bit tutor about how we value what we are buying. Are there local jobs involved? Is there more resilience in supply chains and food security? The pandemic has shown the ills of globalisation that does not work in certain instances, mainly economic, but the beauty of globalisation is that it works around the vaccines and the shared knowledge of how we get out of the pandemic. Fundamentally, I drive towards more localism because it creates more resilience in the Scottish economy and it builds a multiplier effect and it has other benefits around employment and taxation. The Scotland Loves Local programme is a really good example of potential. We have funds going out to various community groups such as the Jennifer's sector and business-improving districts to get them more gel together, thinking about localism and driving more footfall into local economies. There is also the Town and City gift card platform, so we have 32 Scotland Loves Local Town and City gift card platforms, one for each local authority. Initially, that was to provide local currency that excluded the online jams that excluded gambling. It involved bricks and mortar businesses, so it was getting people back out of their homes away from the online shopping and getting them back into their town centres, whether it was for a haircut or for band groceries or whatever. That has now lifted to a different level because we are seeing partnerships coming forward with ScotRail and Network Rail. We could use that in partnership with corporates to incentivise people back to the office so that the ticket price could be included on the card. Historic Environment Scotland has enabled all its destinations. The higher and further education sector is looking at this gift card as being incentive for kids from deprived areas with high drop-out rates to keep them within the education sector so that they complete their journey. There are multiple uses. The Scottish Government's food poverty team is looking at using this mechanism to take the stigma away from poverty. If you have a gift card and you go to buy food or school uniform, nobody knows if you are rich or poor. There are multiple deployments, but, critically, that builds in on a multiplier factor for Scottish-based businesses, or businesses with a physical footprint in Scotland. The multiplier factor is close to two, so you go in and spend £3, but everybody gets the benefit of that. Between procurement and localism currency, there are ways and means where I think that a Scotland-first approach initially to get out of the pandemic is definitely what I would argue for. As you mentioned, those gift card schemes, I should just mention my register interests. We are participants of those schemes, so I am delighted to see those helping local communities. Jennifer, and then Roddy, would you like to add anything? Jennifer and Roddy are brief, because we are coming to the end of the session. Yes, just briefly to say that having worked in the music industry and seeing it disappear on to digital before my eyes, I think that those things happen always quicker than we think they are going to. I think that retail is in decline, I think that, obviously, food and drink will stay around. We have to consider what a town centre is for, and I do not think that the future of it is going to buy things. I do not think that it is commercial. I think that it is things like nursery spaces, healthcare, and to get together. At the moment, people go to the town centre as an opportunity to connect and belong in that community. I think that we just have to keep providing opportunities for connection and belonging, because that is what town centres are. A lot of people walk on the high street that really want to buy anything. They are just maybe hoping to bump into someone and have a wee chat. There is more chance of that happening if you go to the town centre. Just remembering that retail is in decline and the future is about what is the motivation for going to the town centre and opportunities for connection and belonging. Very briefly to say that, from a lion's perspective in terms of research, we need to focus on the distinctive strong identities of those places, their history, their current challenges and, from there, shape the future plans. There is not one silver bullet for all of our town centre communities in Scotland or in Gideon. That brings us to the end of the session. I thank all the witnesses for their contribution this morning. We will briefly suspend while we change over the witnesses. I now welcome the second panel this morning. We are joined by Danny Seapock, Development Manager of Love, Arlang Toon, Anthea Coulter, Chief Officer and Business Manager, Cluck Manager of Third Sector Interface, Gemma Cruikshank, Manager of Embrace Elginbyd and Mark Dara, Vice-Chair of OneLinlist Coatbyd. As always, I can ask members and witnesses to keep their questions and answers as concise as possible. Members will direct questions to panel members. You may not have the opportunity to answer every question, but you will have a chance to contribute this morning. I start by asking a few questions about the bits. We have two representatives from bits this morning. I will go to Mark first of all. I am interested in what are the key challenges in establishing a bid and what some of the limits of a bid might be. This morning, on the first panel, we heard about the importance of community engagements and bids in a bit more business focus. Culture counts expressed concerns that they did not feel that they were always engaged in the bid. Culture was not always considered. Mark, do you want to say something about the key challenges in establishing a bid and what the limits of a bid might be? I think that the biggest challenge with the bid is getting everybody engaged from a community point of view in the business. Ours is slightly different in terms of being the first bid to bring two bids together for our industrial estate and the town centre to give one big focus. We are also trying to work with the community groups as well. There are numerous within our town to try and engage the community in greater aspects so that we can achieve more. One of the big challenges is that businesses see it as another cost, especially with the increase in business rates and tax and other things like that. The general costs of energy and everything else that is going on. The challenge is how big things can you deliver. The bid is a great platform and it is essential for a lot of towns in terms of creating that business focus and achieving the bigger ambitions. However, it is how we are able to work with all groups and local authorities to bring the funding in to deliver those bigger projects. It is about enabling the bid to be able to do that. That is one of the biggest challenges that we have and having a bit of trust and empowerment to deliver it as well as some of the bigger schemes that we can do. I will bring Gemma in. Last week, Professor Sparks talked about sometimes having to look at superb bids. It is interesting that Llythgo did bring together two existing bids to try and create more momentum. Gemma, do you want to say a bit about the challenges that bids face and being established and continuing? Yes, I agree with what Mark has just said. We have the same issue. I think that trying to get the community engagement, a lot of people do not understand what a bid is. I think that the cost at the moment is what worries me if we are going to re-ballot. How do we say to businesses that we are worth paying this extra cost? At the moment, businesses are just thinking about how they can cut all their costs, and the bid might be the first thing that they think could go. I think that they are really valuable, especially in smaller towns, where I am based in Elgin. A lot of businesses there were not online. They were all very small, independent businesses, and I think that they see the benefit. We can help market them by trying to increase the footfall. We also have the Visit Murray Space Site bid, which is there as well. It is for the area as opposed to the city centre. We work closely together, so we have both parts there looking to help increase the footfall and increase the engagement. Visit Murray Space Site has been great in putting Elgin on the tourist map, but I think that the general challenges are delivering the projects. Especially with us being such a small bid, we do not actually get a huge budget. We have been able to deliver something that they actually see as huge values, which is quite difficult. We do rely on applying for funding and getting that extra income to be able to increase what we do. That is probably one of our main challenges, is trying to find funding to deliver projects that are worthwhile to our members. Do you want to reflect on the bid? Cwrcodi did originally have a bid, and I think that that lost the ballot. We now have our Langtun. Do you have any reflections on the effectiveness of bids or what love our Langtun is doing that is different from a bid? What I am hearing from the two colleagues here is very similar to what was happening in Cwrcodi. Cwrcodi, for all, was a bid company that ran for two terms. They did not lose a final ballot. They just decided not to have one. A lot of that was due to some of the... Cwrcodi's big town had three big major retailers there. By the time it was coming up to their second ballot, a lot of these retailers had gone. Of course, that kind of affects... The ballot is quite complicated in terms of establishing the bid. They did not run again. But when the bid was there, I was actually the area manager in Cwrcodi for the council at the time. We worked very closely with the bid. I certainly felt that partnership work in Wehad because, as you know, the five councils got local area committees, and our... Like all the area committees, having that localised approach and working with the bid, we felt that it did bring some benefits to the town, particularly in things like organising events, getting to understand some of the challenges of the businesses, but having that... What I felt was a really important liaison and shared sense of purpose. Together, we actually set up a group called Cwrcodi's Ambitions, which brought together the council, the private sector in terms of the bid and the businesses, and some other third sector organisations. I think having that collaboration at the time was really, really helpful. That's certainly one of the most important bids, whether it's a bid or a third sector organisation, is that if you can create that collaboration across these sectors, then you can start to see the results of it. What is Llyfr Langton different from a bid? We've no got as much money with good first thing I would say, but we obviously don't have the levy. So we are very much... We're currently a community interest company, but we're looking to get charitable status because we want to get into a lot more of creating employability and definitely getting into community wealth building. So we are a local community-led independent group. One of the advantages that brings that we find is we're seen as a bit of an honest broker, so we're not the council. We are very much a local group and we have made these connections as best we can with our local community, so we managed to get funding to get a group of an architectural firm to help us to look at ideas of repurposing some of the big large empty retail units we are left with now. The architects we use do have a bit of a social conscience, are used to this kind of work, and because we were able to provide the kind of visuals and thoughts and concepts and we'd already done a lot of online webinars and involved the local community, it gave us an opportunity to go out and speak to people face to face and talk about what they saw as the future for the town centre. When you have that sense of being the local community and if you're in Cercody and you're seen as a lovely long tune, people see that connection and it certainly helps us in that community engagement approach. Do you think that Cercody not having a bid is due to the downturn in retail, but it's difficult to re-establish it given that there's the degree of empty units at scale that Cercody has? I think that that was certainly a big feature. I wouldn't like to think that I could talk on behalf of the bid at the time, but I think that that was a feature as well. Something we mentioned, we talk about life cycles at town centres, so while the fundamental issues of what's affected town centres affects towns up and down the length and breadth of the UK, it all depends on what part of the town is in, so we just hit a very particularly bad patch where at that time a lot of the big national retailers and multiples were pulling out the town centre and either just going online or moving up to the retail park. I don't know if all of you heard the earlier panel, but I was exploring the multitude of ways that cultural leisure and tourism can support recovery of town centres. I'm particularly interested in the creative ways that you can do that, rather than the passive ways, which I described of putting something in a box in a what was formerly a retail unit. It's still intrinsically passive because I see it as a main, particularly the cultural element contributor to vibrancy, so it was just to see very quickly because I know we've got a lot to get through if there are any creative ideas particularly that can translate into policy initiatives for government as compared to other different agencies. So, whoever wants to go first, that's fine. I'm going to have to pick some of the amontai. Danny. Well, actually, as I mentioned earlier, we did do a consultation process. One of our big concerns was the big empty boxes. What came back, certainly from our local community and our public, we spoke to over 200 people and it was face-to-face conversations, which are always much richer. One of the things that I would say up front, which was good, was that people were recognising that town centres and high streets were no longer about big multiple retailers. What people are looking for is that mixture of independent shops, the kind of things that you have to go into a shop and do that you can't do online, which is, for example, a hairdresser, not that I would know, so there are things there that people have to go down to shops for, but what people are definitely wanting to see a lot more of is culture, leisure, events. We got a lot back about having a family-friendly town centre and that was just people going down with the kids and something for the youngsters to do, but also grandparents who are doing, who look after their grandchildren and again are looking for ways that it could be a bit of an event for them as well. The other thing about Cercodi, speaking for Cercodi, is obviously history in terms of Adam Smith was one of our most famous people and the Adam Smith Global Foundation has been trying to reclaim that. People are interested in their history and their culture. What people were also saying to us is that they give us ideas that they have seen elsewhere. Again, one of our bigger retail units, line 85,000 sqm, is looking at ideas of things like having indoor artisan markets, with an artisan bakery, a gin distillery, which has been mentioned quite a lot, but also having leisure events for people. Pop-up bowling alleys, for example, or even small cinemas of 1,500 people. That is a public telling us that that is the kind of thing that they want to see. There are a lot of opportunities to repurpose those buildings. It does come down to the subject of Filthy Looker. It requires a bit of investment. One of the things that we all need to realise is that those are not necessarily commercially viable at the outset. You are not going to see a lot of private developers coming in and doing that, so we need to find ways at how we kickstart those projects. Again, it is down to how we collaborate to see how we can take those buildings and repurpose them into the sort of things that people want to see. I have seen that in commercial properties that were traditionally somebody would have taken the whole building that has been subletted for SMEs—often micro-businesses, in effect—doing a similar model for artisans. As you suggest, the return on investment is not as clear-cut, so it might rule out some of the bigger private guys. If any of you want to come in, can we see something like that working? That does repurpose buildings. I appreciate that there is a lot of complexity around the funding of it, if you had a public-private initiative or so on, but any last comments on that? I think that Jame will like to come in as well, but I will take her first. Thanks very much. It is a really interesting and important point, because we have looked at this. We have got an unusual situation in Allawa, and I am a director of the Allawa bid as well, so I am wearing two hats. That is really important to say, because you have to have that collaboration happening right from the outset. Your governance of your bids or whatever organisation is running the business community or the organisation has to be representative so that you can shore up that innovation and creativity and be able to pull on resources right from the outset. We are starting to really get traction on that in Allawa, but we have to go through—we have an unusual thing—we are slightly different than Hercodic, because we have an older, ageing population in Allawa. We have a housing unit that is being built on a bed of derelict land—large, very significant, 64 units for older people, and it is going to be dementia friendly. We have got to take a completely different lens as to how we look at that town centre. That is not traditionally what businesses are looking at. They want traction on people coming through, but they are saying that we have to work with the third sector and the health community, because we have to make this work for everybody. That makes us have to look differently. We have had an old toilet in the town centre closed in 2018. We have been able to say how we look at the whole landscape of the town centre and the soul building and what we make it and how we look differently at it. We used the play standard tool, so CTSI got funding to do training for communities as the TSI across Clamannanshire. We used it for the town centre because it was at the start of the elected period of the bid. It was a great opportunity to do it. We worked with our planning colleagues in the council as well. It has 14 themes. The four themes that came out were particularly critical. I would say that it was low on everything, pretty much, across the board for Allawa. However, the four themes that were particularly highlighted were working local economy, care and maintenance, safety and, interestingly, influence and sense of control. The influence and sense of control to me is very much about that social connectedness that has come through, I think, earlier. Jennifer was mentioning it and, actually, Danny has just mentioned it there. Then we said, well, what can we now do together collectively, because we haven't all got the assets. The local government hasn't got the revenue to do things. The business improvement district, we only have around 100,000 a year, coming in through normally. We invoist 132,500 for this current year. What can we do? We looked at what the different elements and partners could bring to make that change. That is the bit that has been creative in our space. The CCTV cameras have been put in throughout the town. That has been paid for by the business improvement district. Third sector has looked at the care and maintenance element. We have created a new volunteer group, Alawr and Bloom, but we have also attracted in third sector organisations that are going to be relevant going forward. Fourth Valley Dementia Centre, run by Alzheimer's Scotland, we have done a huge amount of support to bring them to Alawr. A couple of other older charities, charities for older people, have come into the town centre. As well as CTSI, we have taken over an empty building on the high street. Then we have taken the Scotland's town capital funding and said, what can we do with that? Because we already have this collaboration, what can we do with it that will also improve? We have slowed down the traffic next to the housing development and the connection to the cycleway is better. We have opened up a narrowway pathway to make it much more open and safer. We have invested in the old toilets. The old toilets are going to be a multiple facility. They are going to be promoting health, volunteering, we have e-bikes outside, but we have a client manager tapestry that has been done as part of the great tapestry of Scotland. We are linking to the heritage and the story that is called Slow Tourism. It is unpicking. Again, Danny has mentioned that. That is so true, because it is what people are really connecting to, with local people and people externally. I would love to see Visit Scotland, if you can do one thing, is to get them to stop spending money on all the existing things and look at some of the places that do not normally traditionally get funding. I think that it is how that collaboration has worked to date and what we have the opportunity of going forward. I have lots of ideas on that, but I will let other people talk. I think that we have used a new investment model for that as well. It has been set up as a community benefit society. At the moment, we are offering community shares. It is the first time that we have ever done that in club manager. Local people can buy shares for £20. We are not getting a huge traction yet, because I think that the building is not ready to open. I do not think that people are seeing that kind of opportunity yet, but that is a way that we hope will fund and self-sustain it. It will have a maiden-clack shop in it as well as a gift shop, so it will be part of the fabric of the retail landscape, as well as being a health and health promotion and active travel point. I will now move on to Colin Smyth. I understand that Jim Orr would like to come in, but perhaps Colin can direct his question to you first. Thanks very much, convener, and good morning to the panel. Lots of really positive work taking place in our town centre, as everything from dementia-friendly housing to possibly curcoded gin, which sounds a really good option, but I am keen to build on Michelle's questions and to ask the panel, given all the good ideas and good work that is taking place, what would you see as the main policy lever, the main piece of support, that you could get from the Scottish Government to make what you want to see happen in your town centres? I suppose that I could kick off with Gemma what would help the bid to deliver what the businesses in the town centre of Elgin needs. Oh, sorry, I was waiting to see if I was unmuted, I am. Thanks, Colin. For us, I think that it's basically trying to, like we're saying, create those experiences, change the high street, basically, but at the moment, looking at retail, you know, retail are really suffering. They've kind of been the ones that haven't really gotten support through Covid and things, so they actually have kind of suffered about this time, so it's made it more difficult for them. Obviously, there's been the newly announced retail strategy, which I have looked through, and, you know, I think to me it's quite offensive to some of the retailers. They're kind of saying that they're not really upskilling people at the moment, whereas I don't think that's true. I think that, I think that looking at upskilling people within retail actually starts at the education point, so I do think that at schools, they need to start educating that there is a career in retail, you know, building that into people, because a lot of people will just leave from school to go into a retail job and then move on from that. You know, whereas the retailers themselves, I know the ones in Elgin, they do take on students, you know, and upskill them themselves. So, sorry, I know I said I can go off topic here, but I have got a point. So, you know, I think that the retail strategy is saying that didn't kind of, it's not like they had kind of spoken to the retailers of what they're currently doing, because I know for a fact that the ones in Elgin, they certainly are upskilling a lot of their staff, you know, a lot of them have trained them up so that they've moved on to be a manager elsewhere. So, I do think that recognising what the high street could be, you know, rates is another issue, but that's one that's talked about, really, in Elgin. As soon as you go into a certain area on the high street, the rates just go extremely high, which is unaffordable for independence. The nationals are all pulling out and leaving the big holes within the city centres, and I do think there needs to be kind of a responsibility taken for that and a re-evaluation of the rates, which I do believe is coming next year. But, you know, is it too late by then? You know, has the high street died? Has people moved on? So, I think that genuinely going and speaking to the local businesses help, you see what their challenges are, which is rates, you know, trying to get extra funding to them, which, you know, during Covid, it has been great for the hospitality here in beauty, so they have survived, but certainly looking at the retail, they have suffered. I mean, the retail strategy, as well, was saying, you know, they're talking as can benefit from getting you kind of digital training. So, in one respect, they say about, you know, improving their business, making it more futureised. But then at the next time, they're saying about redundancy for staff because businesses have taken on self-scan checkouts. So, you know, there's a lot of things there that I think doesn't sit well with a lot of retailers. You're kind of then phasing out retail within the high street, which, you know, I don't think is the case. I think that we still need both. We need services, experiences and we need retail because retail is, you know, it was the initial part of our high street, so we need to really keep that. So, I think that it's really looking at what the strategies are going forward and what the plans really need to be, but suit in different areas. So, for example, up in Murray, you know, that needs to kind of be looked at differently as opposed to other towns or cities, even. And I think, obviously, there's cost of living, which has all increased. So, there's electricity bills have all gone up. I just think, partially, at the moment, it's really difficult for independent businesses to survive. You know, with everything increasing, the price back loans coming back. So, I just think there needs to be kind of some recognition around that. Obviously, the rates are introduced again slowly over this year, so I think that there's issues around that. I understand that money has to be made back, but I feel like it is businesses that are paying for this. That's very helpful. Gemma, can I put the same point to Mark when it comes to your bin members on Linlithgow, what policy initiative would you like to see or initiatives would you like to see from the Scottish Government to support your members? Definitely, a big part of it that needs to change is probably around planning in terms of empowering the local authority and maybe investing. So, where we've got a lot of government money that's been available, there's certainly large pots of money that have been made available for town centres. If that money is used and focused at a local level, you can bring back into use some of these big, empty buildings. My background, I worked in Devonham for 20 years, so I've lived and worked in a lot of our high streets and town centres across Scotland in that time. Just recently, I've seen a report that said 90 per cent of those buildings were empty, and often when BHS collapsed, there were probably 75 per cent of them empty still. It's just a compounded issue that we've got these big, empty spaces. Now, the big crippling factor with those buildings is the rent from those from private landlords are very high to begin with, and the rates on top of that are also astronomical, and that's before you pay any other bills, staffing costs and all the rest of it, so you need some people with deep pockets to invest in those buildings. I think it's gone too far now that there isn't those sort of private companies that are going to do that. If government money was made available to local authorities to invest and take over some of those buildings, they could be broken down into smaller units. There's a really good example that you could look at, is Bobby and Co. They gave to the big department store in Bournemouth, where the landlord there actually had the vision to bring it together, pulling lots of artisan brands and other things, create gallery space and all the rest of it, to really try and revive that building. It's one of the few really, really good examples I've seen in the whole of the UK to revitalise a space, and that brings people into town. It brings football. The point that Gemma made, I agree a lot about what she said about a retail business, so I've got a leisure business and I've actually opened a retail business as well, so I see the challenges from all sides. You've got to have that mix now in the town centres. We've got that growth in cafe culture at local levels, probably at the detrimental city centres because people have been working at home, and we need to keep that balance now to keep people in the local economies as well, not necessarily in the big cities all the time or big towns, but in smaller towns around the country, so that we get that even spread of growth and sustainability. We talk about upscaling the workforce as well. That is something that is available. Some of the things that I used to do with taking on people who have been long-term unemployed through Devons is an example. There are lots of fair companies that will provide the SPQ qualifications that are all funded, and you can upskill people that way that can then go on. It improves their communication skills, improves their service skills, so they can go on, get pay rises and progress within those careers, and that is an important aspect. However, if we can take over some of those buildings, this is a big policy change really. It's how you take control of how you work with local authorities because I know from working in Cacody that five council were much more progressive and would work. Other councils are really restricted in terms of what they can do. They maybe don't have that expertise and knowledge to come out and also who can they work with, as well in different communities, to really look at the space at a local level and go, what is the solution that the people want in that town to bring it back to life. If the Government can open up that dialogue and help councils to develop that at a local level and entrust and empower the communities through the bed, through development trusts and then through the other organisation, we can really bring back a plan to bring individual talent centres to life again. That's very helpful indeed. I put the same question to me if I've got time. I suppose that, Anthea, you mentioned one example around, was it Scotland, but is there any other policy initiatives that you would like to see from Government to support the work that's taking place in Clackmannanshire? No, thank you. I think that there's a lot that can be done. We've got the same issue of absentee landlords, which I think was brought up in the first panel. It's almost needing the equivalent of the Community Empowerment Act or participation requests, which is an element of that, that you actually are insisting that people have to come to the table, those absentee landlords, in order to have those conversations. The new planning law is bringing in the place plans, but I think that that is always going to benefit areas where, for example, they've maybe got stronger community councils. We don't in Allawa. We're perfectly frank. We've got a fairly weak small community council, partly because it's a very deprived area. It sits within Allawa south and east, which is one of the 5 per cent top deprived areas in Scotland. We don't have a development trust yet. I'm hoping that that's something that will come out of the new community benefit society, so we can strengthen that. We need to have some way or some toolkit to be able to at least allow people that have got to insist that they get involved in a conversation about how we can use their buildings. The other side of it, and I think that Gemma's made a really valid point and would be one that I would make as well, is that rates are very expensive, but could we pump prime small social enterprises to start as training organisations? We've got an organisation called Colab that came in a couple of years ago. They've done some really good work with young people to bring them on digitally. Alongside that, they've actually been doing some work for the bid, and they've used money that came through the Scotland's town partnership recovery fund. We've now created the equivalent of Amazon Marketplace. It's Allawa first marketplace. Somebody could come into the town centre and get an empty building, but immediately have an online platform with shop facilities, payment facilities and everything, so they don't have any of the costs. It's quite innovative, but it's the bit about training the organisation that's done that. It's trained young people alongside, so could you do it? We've lost both our florists in the last month. No reasons other than illness, actually. One of them has Covid and has to retire. We wouldn't have expected that. Surviving businesses, so could we pump prime, pay a landlord to take over their building, put a trainer in there with a couple of apprentices and start a business, literally start a social enterprise on the back of it that becomes—but it also suits, obviously, our changing landscape of all the people within Allawa. There are things that can be done. Change of use, again, I spoke to the planners yesterday who I speak a lot with, and they said that we've been very, I suppose, reserved and risk a verse about changing, not looking at bringing housing in into shop, what has been dedicated shop venues. Maybe it's time for us to change that, and they were being honest with them. Maybe that needs to be again forced a little bit, that agenda a little bit more. Thank you very much for that. Finally, can I bring in Danny? You raised there's a lot of things happening according to Danny. What can Government do to support that work? First, there's been a lot of talk about collaboration at a local level. That is so important. While the fundamental issues and reasons of what has happened to town centres, as I said earlier, are common, it's the response that has to be very much localised and recognises the context of each particular town or what we're talking about. What I would like to see is that recognition that needs a really decentralised approach, not just at the council level but actually in that community and in that settlement, to encourage that collaboration. That collaboration will mainly be between voluntary and third sector organisations with the council, hopefully enabling that. I have to say that we have experienced that in a good way with Fife Council. It's trying to make sure that the funding gets distributed that way, but also to recognise that these things do take time to plan. You want a good cohesive plan over the next two or three years. It would be great to get away from the situation at times because, yes, there has been quite a bit of funding gone into town centres over the past couple of years. It's welcome. It gets a bit difficult, though, when some announcement gets made in March or April. There's a distribution of funding. It just suddenly arrives and, by the way, you've all got to get it all committed before the end of that financial year. That does not make for good planning and it certainly does not make good efficient use of funds. I know that it's difficult at all Government levels to do that, but some thought to longer term planning and trying to provide at least some sort of, even in these difficult times, some security that the funding could be there so it could plan properly. I often hear the phrase projects on the shelf. It's difficult to put projects on the shelf. It takes time to plan projects. Very quickly, again I would echo what other folk have said, non-domestic rates. Personally, I just think that it's an antiquated system. It's a blunt instrument to collect a property tax. Property taxes are good. Definitely in terms of local initiatives and local funding is used across the rest of Europe, as you know. I think ours has to be a bit more sophisticated than it is. I know that the Scottish Government, over the years, has tried to look at the subject and deal with it, but it needs to be better than it is. It can't just be based on a rateable value and a poundage that's set across the whole of Scotland. It just needs something a little better than that. Finally, I just have to say that town centre living and working has to be a big feature to the regeneration of our town centres. Our architects have surveyed the high street in Cercodi, and those properties that are above the retail level, over 50 per cent of them are lying empty. They are just lying there doing nothing. They're not even using the storage space. They're just not felt necessary because in the 30, 40, 50 years we've had a retail boom, they were worthless. The focus was on the retail space. Now we've got a lot of empty property there that could provide great living space and an opportunity to retrofit them and refurbish them in a way that would also be climate-friendly and provide a lot of much-needed accommodation. It has to be said that you will not get any housing developers getting involved in that. It requires a lot of retrofit and work, including access and stairways that have been taken away, which is not uncommon, you'll find in town centres across Scotland. But that is a great way to regenerate a town centre to actually have people living there. I think as I alluded to, to actually have a much more flexible planning system that allows for these changes of use. I think that these are the kind of big policy levers that we need to see constructed to help us to move forward and revitalise our town centres. Thank you. I'm going to bring in Maggie Chapman to be followed by Jamie Halcro Johnston. Thanks very much, convener. Good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining us today. Really just following on from what both Anthea and Danny were talking about there, we heard this morning about the need for alignment policy coherence. All of the different strategies, and Gemma mentioned the retail strategy, are coming together and not replicating different work. Can I ask Danny first if that's okay? What is it that the different levels of government, whether we are talking about Scottish, UK Governments, local authorities and other public bodies, what is it that we need to do better to co-ordinate policies to make sure that we don't have repetition, we don't have conflicts and, I think, importantly, we don't have big gaps? To try and put this diplomatically, I've worked in local government for about 30 years. One thing about government at all levels, whether it's UK, Scottish or local government, has always been this issue of, how do we all work better together? It is difficult because you're trying to deal with different types of legislation and regulations, and soon as anybody is part of a department or part of a profession, they're very, and I'd say this in a good way, they're very wedded to trying to do the best for what they believe is important in having a good society to live in, but these can clash. If you don't have that cohesion at the very highest levels and if you do have that bit of conflict sometimes, it will flow from the UK Government all the way down right down to local councils, and you do see that happening in terms of, I'm sorry, I'm just trying to pick some down in this, but simple things like, for example, coffee culture is a big thing that people talk about now, and we are seeing more and more people sitting outside, even in the colder weather, sitting outside, drinking coffees and having their breakfasts, the way the Scandinavian countries have done it for years, and it's again a way of people reconnecting with their town centre, but of course if you've got a cafe and it's a pavement that's less than two metres, then there's a real struggle to try and figure out how can we get this to work. Now that might sound a trivial example, but I think a lot of my colleagues here would say, you often come against what seems like silly things, important, but why we need the parts of Government to work together on that, and I think it's about trying to get the very clither kind of approach that recognises that we need a framework of legislation and regulations, but there needs to be that flexibility there that recognises that all towns are different and they're in different situations. Safety, people's safety, people's health have got to be paramount. At the same time, it's almost like what I was saying with the rates, if you have one blunt stick to deal with everything, eventually it kind of deals with nothing really. I think it's that whole spirit of decentralisation, and I'm not talking about it structurally, but that actual culture that says, you know, we know what we've got to do, we know there are regulations around, but how do we work together, how can we be more flexible and allow some flexibility for towns to try and respond to the way that they revitalise that town centre? So I don't know if that does answer your question. It's difficult to pinpoint one thing. It's more a culture of, as I say, working together and providing and allowing some flexibility. No, thanks very much, Danny. That is helpful. Anthea, I wonder if I could bring you in on the same kind of question, the notion of breaking down silos, policy, coherence, alignment and co-ordination, so we get that holistic and joined up working, what is it that we need to be doing differently or better or not doing? Yeah, I mean, I think Phil Prentis brought this up in the first panel as well, that, you know, the Scottish Government are actually creating a mountain of sometimes strategies and documents that actually have got touch points, but are actually not pulled together very well. And we see this across the third sector, obviously, a whole raft of pieces of work. I think he also picked up that issue around climate emergency and that we really need to make that at the forefront of some of these discussions because, you know, Allaware actually has free parking. It's an absolute bonus. It's been there for as long as I've been working there almost six years. And yet, through the pandemic, we closed actually the high street to make it safe. We brought lovely planters in and benches. It created a fantastic environment, but slowly it's been chipped away and we're back having, you know, because there's no ticketing, we're back with cars on the high street again. You know, we had this whole cut flowers, not cars, and we're back to having cars again. And it's frustrating because actually, you know, if we are going to create a different social connectedness around our high streets, then actually we need to be brave and actually make sure that we are, you know, we're not being pushed politically, our local politicians. And in our case, our politicians are quite, you know, they're around about a lot because we're a small county, everybody knows our politicians. You know, it means that we, you know, we have to be brave and that they had to be brave enough to say, you know, we're actually stopping cars. We want you to walk from the very near free car parking around the corner to the town centre and we want to create a much different atmosphere in the town centre. Partly also, we've got, you know, we've got 64 new units of dementia friendly housing coming into the town centre. We have to be safe as well. So I think there is, there needs to be some priorities maybe put, and I don't get me wrong, I know the Scottish Government has done that and the UK Government. I am interested in meeting the UK as well to add the UK minister for levelling up a couple of weeks ago wearing my sort of TSI hat along with SCVO, chief officer, chief executive Anna Fowley. And again, really interesting, he really wants to work with the Scottish Government in terms of how that money, that levelling up money, comes in. He's very prepared actually to see gap funding going in where needed to make things happen. But I think the conversations are not necessarily happening yet at a political level and I don't want to throw a bomb in here but I think it needs to happen quicker because exactly what Danny said earlier, you know, we were lucky. We had the collaboration in place because we'd already been using doing the test of change with using the play standard tool. Otherwise, I don't think it would have happened in the town centre in the way it would. We would not have got the change in the places that needed using that Scotland's town capital funding. So it would have maybe been a lost opportunity. So it was just good luck actually to some extent that that work had already begun. And we can't fault a lot when we're spending millions of pounds. We've got to have a lot better planning, a lot more cohesive planning, a lot more strategically looking across different areas to make sure that the whole thing works together better. Thanks very much, Andy. That's really helpful. I'm mindful of time, Claire. I'll leave it there. Thank you very much, Maggie. I'll now bring in Jamie Harcaw-Johnson. Thanks very much indeed. Good morning to the panel. I just wanted to question very quickly to Gemma and then maybe to Mark, because of nature of your areas and obviously Elgin in my Highlands and Islands region. Both areas that rely heavily on tourism is important. I just wondered, as we've talked about local taxations, what your thoughts are and what you think the impact of any implementation of as tourism tax in your area would be on local businesses, particularly for example in the example of Elgin, if Murray went ahead with it, but say Aberdeensia didn't and Highland didn't, whether you believe that could put you at advantage or disadvantage, how you would do that. So if I can go to Gemma first on that and then perhaps to Mark. Yeah, thanks Jamie. I actually think that it would be quite a huge disadvantage to Murray. I don't think it would be fair. There's a lot of issues around the money cuts on Aberdeensia cuts already, going off topic, but our stall holders, farmers markets and things, they actually get charged a larger fee at the moment than they do in holding their markets in other areas. So I just think it adds an extra reason maybe not to visit Murray, not to have a business in Murray. I genuinely just, for me, I can't see it being an attraction, I may be just seeing it from one side, I'm not sure, but to me I don't think it's an advantage for Murray. If we were to introduce the tourism tax, I don't know. I haven't actually spoke to our businesses about that. That's more of a visit Murray space sites area to deal with, but obviously we speak with them and things. So that's general feedback that they've said, is that the businesses, we don't want the tourism tax introduced. If there's any sort of tax on tourism across Scotland as a whole, I think that that would be detrimental to attracting all the foreign visits that we're getting. I think that we've been lucky in the last couple of years with people having staycations and visiting different parts of the country that they maybe haven't before, but now people will start travelling abroad again. We'll lose that domestic income and we need to really get back to thinking about how we can get tourism around. Now that does need to be sustainable. We need to think about the environmental consequences of that. A big challenge we've got is historic environmental Scotland that has kept things like Llynlifgo Palace shut. That really damages small town centres because that's a great attraction for us outside Edinburgh, but how do you attract people? Llynlifgo will get missed off the map, for example. People travelling from Edinburgh will go to Stirling, but Llynlifgo will get missed out because the palace is shut, as an example. However, there's so much other history to many of those towns in that. I go to Dornac and visit and it's amazing to see what the council up there has done to really make tourists feel welcome. There's lots of little tourist trails and signage and things, and even to agree, that reflects in the culture of people. I was up there last summer and I was blocking the pavement with a pram. I don't know if a man came up to me and I thought, oh no, I'm in the way and everything. He said, thanks for coming to Dornac. I was like, that's amazing that you get that kind of experience in smaller towns around the place. I think that if we can enable certainly local authorities, some of the big organisations to focus on tourism and leisure and other things like that, that will help to bring people in. It will help to keep people in our local towns and areas. I think that the point was made earlier about getting Visit Scotland into other areas so that we can market Scotland as a whole and what it has to offer, because there is so much out there, cultural, lots of history and everything like that, that we can attract lots of different people, different tours and that, that you can do. On the subject of tax and local authorities and that, if they can be enabled, one of the biggest things that could happen is to take the politics out of a council level, because a lot of it isn't really relevant to local people. They want services that are provided, they want business support, etc. If that can be removed so that the Government can then have actually a bit more clarity enabling local authorities to help deliver that quicker on the ground, that would make a big improvement as well to really get people out and about. Thanks very much. One of the last visits that I did before the pandemic was to Lynithgo and the Palace there, so it was an excellent excellent. Can I ask you as well, Mark, just very quickly? Obviously, there has been a huge amount of pressure on you to talk about some of that. People are not coming to visit some of the tourism sites, but the general pressures on businesses. Where do you think that your town centre is at the moment in terms of sustainability? How do you think the general health of the businesses are? I don't want to sound negative, but what concerns do you have for that? I will maybe come to general with the same question afterwards as well. It is definitely a challenge. Lynithgo, where it sits, we are outside of our... Because of the geography of the area, we have got the big hill between us and the rest of West Loving in effect. Fiona knows well the challenges that we face from different things that we have talked about and got involved in the town as well. The aspects that we have got there is that we are a bit isolated. It is also seen as generally quite a well-off area, a lot of people with money and all the rest of it. Unfortunately, that creates a negative as well as I see it in terms of that it is quite a fragile environment, really. It might look all right on the surface. We have generally quite good occupancy of units and other things like that. When you speak to business owners, you might think of a product cost x pound, but how much profit did they actually make because the cost of buying those goods and the cost of running a business on the high street and all the rest of it is actually quite high. A lot of those business owners take home very little money. They do it because they love it. They have the passion for what they do. No one is getting really rich out there doing that. That is not why people do it in some respects. The impact on that is that it can look all right. However, if you invest across the areas that look quite affluent and doing well, if you make them really attractive and it can be involving the pavements, the parking, all those sort of issues, so that you can bring people in and you can bring the tourists in, those areas will generate more wealth as well. We had a visit from Tom Arff and we talked about community wealth there. We gave him some feedback on some of the issues there that the Government can help. We talked about the longer term funding to get things up and running, not just the short term goals. However, if you improve the whole environment, you improve the landscaping, you have got trees, you have got places for people to sit and enjoy the cafe culture, the bars and other things, you will get people staying in them. There will be more wealth generated from that in the local community that can get invested, but it also means that local authorities will have more money and they can invest in some of the more deprived areas to bring them up. We can turn things around and create a really progressive culture that we invest in all areas to bring the whole country up as a whole, which is a different way of looking at it, but it would make a big difference. Thanks, in general, just as well in terms of in Elgin, how you feel the health of businesses are and any concerns that you have or anything that you are doing to deal with some of those issues. We are kind of like the same as Mark. We are kind of seen as the hub of money, so I think that people do tend to visit us as much because they think that they go to the smaller towns. Obviously, we are known as the whisky area as well, so that takes an effect as well, because everybody wants to go to all the distilleries, so they do not actually visit Elgin. We do have that issue around Elgin gets everything, so we do not need to worry about Elgin, which is actually not the case at all, because since I have been in the bid, it feels like Elgin gets very little. As we mentioned throughout the collaboration, it is such an important thing. The main issues that we have are trying to get the coffee culture introduced into Elgin, having seats outside and trying to work with the local authority to make that happen. It just becomes extremely difficult. There does not seem to be much leeway for it. It is just a straight-up no, which is quite hard to deal with. What we have been doing is introducing a pop-up shop scheme, which is in conjunction with the Moray Council, so we are doing that in partnership. We are trying to introduce businesses to come in, I could have said, for a longer period, but for a month at a time to come in, try other businesses to see if that works, and then they could move into other vacant property in the high street. We have been doing quite a lot of work around the vacant properties. We did research surveys trying to find out what people wanted here, and we did go round down the route of—majority was male and female clothing, kids' clothing. There were a couple of experiences, more like gym bars or kids' play areas and things like that. We have been contacting directly two people that we know are interested in opening these businesses. Another issue that we have is the vacant properties, the size of them that are left, so no one can take them on. That would be good. I know that the retail strategy does state about breaking them down into smaller units, so they are more affordable. What we have done is that we have contacted one of the agents that owns a certain area of vacant properties in the high street. We have said to them that there were previously restaurants. There have been multiple restaurants over the years and they have never survived. We have said to them that if they were able to change the use into retail rather than restaurant, that would work much better. We believe that the property will go, because we have such a high waiting list for retail. The agent has gone through the process of changing the use of the properties to make them a more viable sale. We are doing a lot more around the vacant properties. It is one of the issues that we are trying to drive in. We have got a lot of businesses that have been surviving for a long time and we want to keep them, but we also need to bring in fresh things to make people want to come into the time. We are hoping that, with the pop-up shop scheme, that will make a difference. With a high turn open in things, it will run for 30 months, so it is quite a long time. We have got 30 businesses signed up with a waiting list of others. I think that there is a lot that needs to be done, but Elgin will be the real talent point of what businesses are going to survive from Covid. We have been really lucky so far. I think that we have got one of the lowest vacant property rates in a city centre, so we are at 4.9 per cent. To me, that is quite low, especially when we have quite a high population of businesses in the town centre. Again, what was brought up was repurposing vacant buildings, which are above retail units, and getting them into living space. We have no-one currently living on our high street. We need to get people back in, living on the high street. Just before I move on to Colin Beattie, Danny, do you know what Cercode is occupancy? When we started off at Loverlangton a couple of years ago, our floor space vacancy rate was around 32 per cent, so you are doing a great job, Gemach, on the slide. Over the various sessions that we have had and the information that we have received from witnesses, including yourselves, I am struck by the fact that both local government and national government need to provide some financial support, certainly in the initial stages. There is talk about the need for business rate relief. There is talk about evening up the competition between online providers with local providers by bringing in some sort of digital sales tax. To what extent are the models that we are looking at dependent in the long-term on some form of external subsidy? Is there a point at which they become self-sustaining? And is there actually milestones leading to that? I will maybe ask Gunther to come in first on that one. Thanks very much. Without a doubt, the recovery money that went through—there were several stages, actually. Stage 1 went to bids, Stage 2 went to bids, Stage 3 was available to other smaller towns—I will come on to that in a minute—and Stage 4 went back to bids. They have been crucial, actually, because of the level of the levy bid. There is nothing that you can do. You can send out sheriff orders to wherever, and they still will not buy into it. We have a card provider, a card shop, who has suddenly decided that they really want to pay the bid levy. They want to get the benefits of being in the bid. They are now having to pay £2,000 for the past four years of unpaid levy before they get to the point of starting to pay their levy for this year. However, they are making that commitment and they are going to do it. It gets to a point where it is almost not worth them and they just keep rejecting the sheriff orders. That extra money that has come in through the funnels from the Scottish Government has been absolutely crucial for Alloa. We have used it to boost the Create the Alloa marketplace, which is giving the online platform for local businesses. That has been particularly successful for the butchers and fruit merchants. They are doing daily deliveries and that is what is paid for it. We have done banners that highlight the local heroes and the heritage. Again, they look great. We have used it for—we had Storm coming last year, which is this huge kind of walking puppet, but 3,000 people came into town. They might not come back, but they might also go, you know what, that was a really easy time to walk around. It was free parking. I could get to boost a few other places and have a nice cup of coffee within a short period of time. I would definitely say that, for a period of time, the Scottish Government needs to keep putting that extra bit of money in to help that. In a sense, through this transition period—I think Gemma was right—we do not quite know and mark the fragility yet of the retail sector. Our retail in Allawar is down to less than 30 per cent of the town centre venues, which is hugely different from what it was a while ago. There is a transition period where, yes, I would definitely say that you need to be putting that extra investment in and how you do it is complex. I would probably just use the bids as much as possible. When I said the small towns, we only have one business improvement district for a town. We have clacks first, which covers the industrial areas. For the recovery period, I was very aware that Tullybody or Dollar or Alva or Clackmannan were getting none of the recovery support. The TSI, just because I happened to be a director of Allawar first, I recognised the importance of it. I put in a bid for that funding and got banners, shop local, welcome back on all the other small towns around Clackmannanshire. If you do not have a traders forum or do not have that, you need to have some other vehicle to do that. The local authority certainly did not have the capacity at that time to do it. We also have a video made—a couple of videos—promoting the tourism, using the e-bikes and visiting dollar. That was again drivers. That was done by the Development Trust and the TSI. You have to look at the fabric and the capacity of an area to say what else can we put in here, or what capacity needs to be helped, and how can we enable the smaller towns to flourish and get back on their feet? Mark, perhaps I can bring you in there. It is a really interesting question about the support. The amount of money coming through from the Government has been fantastic to support different things and top-up. In the past, for bids, the percentage of funding that local authorities would put into it was certainly higher. The percentage would give you more money to deliver projects, and that has been caught back massively now to maybe just the contribution of buildings and maybe 10 per cent on top. The point about investment is that we need a different approach to it. We need to look at Government money almost as zero-interest loans or investments in communities. What you could do—we have talked about it before—is that we have a need for it. In our town, there are areas that need redevelopment, buildings that are out-of-date and so on. In the lift go, you have the whole vinyl area right in the centre of town, next to the cross, the whole historic heart of the town. If that money was provided to invest in the actual development, so in terms of not selling off to a private developer but keeping it in public ownership for public wealth and all the rest of it, that could be developed into smaller shop units for cafes, galleries or whatever. You could have that whole mixture with the housing above—it could be social housing—and it could be housing that is rented out to business executives because you have good access to the stations for people travelling in the cities and so on. There would be a return on those buildings, the rent from the shops rates and other things. There would also be the rent to that. Over a long period of time, that investment—the capital cost of building that—would pay back. You have that money to invest again in other improvements. If we took a different viewpoint to it, one of the things that we talked about as a town—this was with our local councillors and development trust—was that, when we have got these pots of money that we applied for, and you touched on this before, that money is there short term. Some of that money is probably wasted because you have not got time to plan and cost the most effective way of delivering an improvement. If you take the best approach, through the pandemic, certain things cost off a lot of money, whereas we know that those prices come down. If you can invest and you have almost got that seed fund, you have got some capital to invest, but there is a little bit of seed funding down the line again, it means that those opportunities, those growth things can become sustainable, establish themselves and that way they do become self-funding. It is a slightly different question. The committee has heard on a number of occasions that one size fits all does not work in terms of what is trying to be achieved in our town centres, and the key to success is working really effectively with the local community and businesses to establish this regeneration. One thing that we have not seen is good examples of where this has happened, not just on a project basis, because there are plenty of projects around that have been very successful, but on a planned basis for the town centre, where the town centre has been successfully regenerated, bringing together all the different elements of local communities and so on. Donnie, can you give me an example of where that has happened? In Cercodi? Not necessarily, but maybe in Cercodi. We are at the early stages of that just now. The work that we have been doing, started off as a feasibility study, and we called it The Future Is Now. It is now at a stage where we are about to produce, basically like a shared vision document, based on the feedback that we have received from our community. We will go back to them in the spirit of good community engagement principles, to say, this is what you said to us, is this right? That gives us the basis then to start looking at other sources of funding, to do some of these bigger projects that we talked about earlier. One of the examples, and the good examples that we have seen of that, and we kind of think we are just maybe a wee few years behind them, has actually been the midstiple quarter project in Dumfries, so I do not know if any of you know about that. Well, you will see a great example there. That has taken them quite a few years to get to that stage, but that is a very good example of a community-led regeneration project, starting from kind of small beginnings. I was going to say the stove or something was the kind of the birth and embryo of it all, to actually do something that became what I understand to be now is a £4 million project with community shares involved. I think that indicates the direction that travel for doing projects like that, and it is certainly a bit of the model and a bit of the influence and inspiration, I have to say, that we are following. As you asked, around external funding, when does that become self-sustaining? As I said earlier, some of these projects will not come from the private sector, and there needs to be the external funding that will be given to them. That intervention from whatever government level to get these projects off the ground, but I totally agree with Mark. They must be seen as an investment. We mentioned about town centre living and the amount of empty properties. They are right for some sort of social housing investment. It would be a big investment, but their turn would be huge. It is not just about providing accommodation and then bringing in the rents that accommodation will bring. It actually brings people living into a town centre. As somebody simply put it, if you live in the town centre, you are more likely to shop around the town centre, but it also gives it a lot of circulation and makes it more active. The more active a town centre looks, the more interested it becomes and the more people go to it. We need to have that vision, that that is the kind of town centre regeneration that we want to see. That is the revitalisation. You have listened to Anthony, Gemma and Mark. You have seen people on the ground who are enthusiastic about what they want to do and are winning their communities over to that and that is the best investment that you could make in town centres. That has to be financial, but it needs to be financial, a bit of long-term planning, a wee bit of security, but a belief that we all share that the return is going to be very worthwhile. I will make some progress, thank you. Fiona has a lot to follow by Gordon MacDonald. Thank you. I will come first to Anthea and then to Mark. We have heard that there is a considerable amount of funding available for town centres that can be used. We also know that there is a great deal of entrepreneurialism in the third sector, but also in the business improvement districts. Do you think now that that would enable that collaborative working with councils to work better? Clearly, they may have been in a period in which they have been risk averse because it has been very tight financially in that period of austerity. Can you give me a view on that and what would enable that culture for bigger projects potentially because people want to see the value from a bid and if it is a smaller project, perhaps they do not see that. Does that open up capabilities that perhaps were not there maybe five years ago? Absolutely. Culturally, in the last five years, we have moved so far, and that is partly, I think, alluded to the fact that our councillors are quite close to our local community and club manager. They all somehow did not want to let go of their own area and their own patch and maybe allow that kind of community empowerment to happen. They actually, quite frankly, got to a cliff edge where in some areas they had to release, for example, five village halls that were being managed by the council all in one go, but actually on the back of that, it has been hugely successful. The town centre has also seen that move to accepting and it has got to be equality. I think that Danny touched on that equality of understanding of what people, different partners, are going to bring to the table. That is why I am trying a community interest benefit company for the first time. It is also going to be a charity, so it has got that sort of a little bit of back up. The aim is exactly what Mark was saying there, that they are investing using the Scotland's Town Fund in what was the old toilet. It is going to be laying there forever, and it was the third sector that came forward myself. A couple of others said, why don't we turn this into an active travel hub, but it could be so much more? It is going to be an amazing building that is going to actually be a proper running business. It has got to be a business from the outset. There is no one trying to pretend. Charities of businesses we have to operate in a different way. I think that they have recognised that that could be in the end. We are getting three years of rent-free money, but we have to probably start paying rent in three years, so that investment will come back. We want to see that happening absolutely in other areas. There are other lovely historic buildings, and some of them are owned by the council. The office environment is changing. People are council officers, for example, and they are not coming in as much, so some of those buildings could be repurposed to different uses. That is what I have got my eye on next. We also have no swimming pool. Now, in the club manager, it is closed. We are looking at creating a new wellbeing campus and hub, which is fantastic. Again, we would like to keep it near the turn centre, so that it is easy for access and as inclusive as possible. Is there opportunities there for the third sector to be more involved? We are all a bit wary about swimming pools because they are very high-cost, so it has to be a mixed model. I think that there are real opportunities there and how it integrates better with some of our poorer and more deprived areas. I touched on training. Could we be using some of the empty vacancies to be mini colleges in themselves? That is where I see real opportunity to go forward. It is a cultural change that has happened, and it has continued to happen. It has just got to let go a little bit more. Thank you. Very briefly and for the record, we acknowledge that there is no proposal for any tourism tax in West Lothian, and that the Linnoschool Palace is closed because there is unsafe masonry. That point about culture change and the fact that business improvement districts could do more. What do you think would enable business improvement districts and your experience to do more? You talked about doing bigger projects because is there a risk that business improvement districts are going to do small things? I have a challenge in justifying what they are doing. How do we get that trust with all the public sector bodies to give it to empower business improvement districts to do more? It is a really key point. One of the key words that we have talked about as an organisation and working with the development trust and other groups in meetings is that we need to empower the local community. The reason the bid is the great vehicle for that is that it is the one that has got funding and it has got employed staff that can deliver things. A lot of other organisations rely on volunteers and that becomes more difficult to be able to do that. There is always that resource element to be able to plan and do that. We have that empowerment and are enabled to do that working with local authority and accessing their budgets. There has got to be a trust basis and the big part of that is between private and public sector really. Everyone needs to work together to really drive that. We have seen it and it is difficult to bring everyone together and get everyone on the same page and all the rest of it. However, we have achieved that in our town. We have got the development trust. We have involved many of the community groups through the community council, the high street traders group and even the church as well. They have big plans to build a hub and development to bring people into the town. There is more that needs to be done with it. If the local authority had that trust and was able to let go of things as well, for example, over the years they have had to stop doing certain things providing Christmas lights on the rest of which the bid picks up. However, that then uses up a lot of bid money. We had a good example where, if the empowerment and trust was there, we had the opportunity to run the car park in the town or could have taken that on as a community asset. It is a really simple business model. People park the car, you charge them a certain amount of money, you have got that money. We worked out that we could have employed a local person to look after that and maintain things, sweep the car park and things as a part-time job. However, the surplus from that would generate community wealth that we could have used to fund things like the Christmas tree, the Christmas lights and other things like that, which then means that you have more money available to do other things. It is just thinking about what income streams you can make and how we can do that. There is more work that needs to be done, but I certainly think that through the pandemic it has created that opportunity for everyone to be able to work together and do that. We need to do more of that to make things happen. Very briefly, Danny, because of your previous experience working from the council, but also working with community groups, what are the key elements culturally to enable people to have that trust and, particularly for local authority, to pass over power to decision making to local communities? It is down to the local authority having that trust. We talked about local authorities can be risk averse and we all know why that happens. However, building up a relationship with that community, and I would say in Fife that we are kind of lucky because we have a seven-area setup that allows for a certain amount of decentralisation, so there has always been a good relationship between the Cercor area committee and the bid at the time. I think that when you create that kind of relationship, because trust, you have to build trust and you have to build in relationships. It just does not happen overnight and it just does not happen because you have to give somebody a bit of money or a grant. I think that you need to build up that trust, but I think that again what I have heard a lot of this morning from all the colleagues is around the importance of collaboration. I think that one of the best things that local authorities can do is encourage that collaboration and give the support that is needed for a range of organisations. All towns will have a range of organisations that could come together and then do the work that is necessary that they feel they can do to revitalise their town centre. The funding that does come is to really trust that organisation with that funding. That is why I come back to why it is important that, if you know that the funding is going to be there, you will never know the exact amounts, but if you know that it is there, you can plan. If you can plan, you can demonstrate to the local authority that we have this and we are on top of this. Not only that, we actually talked to the community and this is what they told us. It really is about culture and trust and if you could build that up, it can really work. Danny, you spoke about the number of empty units in Cercodi and the 50 per cent of the space above the retail units were lying empty. I had a look at your website and it was quite impressive the vision that you guys have for the area in terms of cafe culture, independent shops, market spaces and so on. What are the barriers that are stopping you from making use of these empty properties? One of the biggest ones by far, and I suspect that this was touched on this morning, is landlords and property owners. Again, I do not think that Cercodi is on common this, the vast majority of the property. The high street will be owners who do not live in Cercodi, do not live in Fife, some do not even live in Scotland. A lot of what you would describe as absentee landlords is trying to pin them down. Sorry, what I mean by that is trying to find out who they are, trying to get in touch with them. They are not interested in doing anything. I am saying that one or two are, but the costs are very prohibitive. We were looking at a property, four storeys, a big retail unit at the bottom, three levels above. We had to look at that because we were looking to open an enterprise hub. Again, I was talking about training, support and so on. It is beautiful sandstone building as a fabulous building. These properties are gorgeous. They are great architecture, big rooms that they have a lot to offer. For us to see the one that we were looking at, I had to go up this rickety ladder into a hatch on the first floor in order to climb in to see the property above it because the external staircase had been taken away. I say to you that that is not uncommon. They have not been touched or used as they have been maintained and kept wind and water tight, but it is not just gaining the access. It is all the fire regulations now. Again, if you have done any work with local authorities on high streets, noise regulations are really prohibitive now. The amount of soundproofing, especially if you are above a pub or something like that, is a lot of money. That really prevents those properties. If they were commercially valuable, I could assure you that they would be developers in their tournament flats. It is just very expensive. What can we do to incentivise commercial property owners to bring their building back into use? I do not. It would probably have to be a variety of things. We would get back into looking at property taxes. Would you change the system? Would you give them some sort of subsidy? It would be being a bit lenient around the regulations. To be honest, I am not even sure if that is something that we really want to do. I am really struggling to see how you would get a commercial developer wanting to do that. I think that we would be far better going down the route. We have got so many great social housing associations, Length and Bread for Scotland, as well as the local authorities. The other thing about getting social landlords to do stuff like that is that it gives you something that we do not have in town centres a long, lasting, permanent, regular landlord that is going to be there for the long term. That makes things a whole lot easier, as well. Antheor, you touched upon the need for accommodation for startups. How much demand is there in your area for retail units and what are the barriers for folk getting access to the retail units? There has been change. I was looking quickly at our figures about sitting about 10 per cent vacant and there has been an additional house that was sitting slightly outside, within the bid area, but just outside the town centre that was artist residence. That is taken back, given up by the landlords and handed back to the council, so it slightly distorts the figure. We are not too affected because the vacant properties are spread over several streets. You are not seeing this linear impact, which has certainly helped Alloa, for example. We have seen some turnover in the independence, but we have seen an overcapacity in some areas. Nail bars, for example, and health and beauty in particular, and nail bars have been, unfortunately, associated with serious crime in Alloa as well, in modern slavery. I think that there needs to be some—we cannot let regulations go, but they are being allowed to come in and use those buildings. Are they the right buildings? Have we properly checked them? We have seen turnover happening, but I think that there are opportunities to drive a slight change in the look of building. It is having a conversation with some of the third sector of social enterprises that we have and businesses who might be interested in providing social benefits. It is back to that community wealth building angle. Would you bring your business if we helped you with a year's rent and you trained up a couple of apprentices? Would you have a go? That is the question that we have to go out and ask. Again, it has to be market-driven in the end, but you have this ageing population. You have all the people with a shoe shop work, with a hearing company at work. You have to look at—would a laundry company work? We do not know. There is an element of having some risk in there and creating some money that is around seed money that would stimulate some of the shops and environments. We do not see this change in turnover quite as much and variety. I think that everybody likes variety in the shopping area. Gemma, I want to ask you about the Elgin loyalty card. How successful that has been in supporting independent businesses and whether it attracts businesses to the town and the fact that you have the Elgin loyalty card? I would not necessarily say that it attracts businesses. They tend to find out about it more once they came and spoke to us about opening a business initially. I would not necessarily say that, but I think that it has been effective in keeping the loyalty there from shoppers 100 per cent. I generally think that it has made people think about supporting local more, shopping local more, so it has definitely driven that. The fact is that every quarter would you apply your offer to an £100 Elgin gift card. Again, the gift card is only spent within our members, so it is keeping that money local. It has given them an incentive to keep supporting local, so it has given that drive and it has raised awareness of what we have in Elgin. It has definitely promoted the businesses, it has promoted Elgin itself, so it has done that in support, definitely. I know that you said that you had a low vacancy rate, but do you have an issue with empty properties in Elgin? Yes, we do. We have a lot of absentee landlords as well, a lot of our business, and the upper floors, especially, would be cost as derelict. The roofs are caving in, but that should probably be a hazard. For me, the way to get around that is to give power to the local authority to penalise the owners if they have not maintained their buildings. That is the only way, but there is the incentive to help them as well, so it is penalising them. If they get them up to the standard and then they let that standard drop again, I think that they will then penalise them. We had the conservation area regeneration scheme in 2018 in Elgin. We were trying to contact landlords to say that we can get that work done for free. We can help improve your building, regenerate it and they never got back in touch with it, or some of them have taken it on, which is free work to improve their building. They have not maintained it until four years later if their building has gone back to the state that it was in previously. I think that there needs to be something around that. That was a £3 million project that needs to be done. That £3 million has just gone. We will never get the regeneration scheme back again. There should be some sort of fine or something to these landlords to say that they need to keep their building in a decent state, because at the end of the day it does become a health and safety issue. People are walking along the high street, and plates or something are falling off the roof. That is dangerous. I think that there needs to be more work around looking into the buildings and seeing how safe they are, because, as I said, there are a lot of buildings with their roofs caving in. As Dani said, I was the same. I was in a three-story building. We could not even get up to the top floor because the staircase was rotten with water coming in. It is like the base units are kept watertight and kept in good standard, but the upper floors are just left to rot. Thank you very much to the panel this morning for your contribution to the inquiry. That has been extremely helpful. Our member is now content to take the final items in private.