 Good morning, and welcome to the fourth meeting of the local government housing and planning committee in 2022. I would like to ask all members and witnesses to ensure that their mobile phones are on silent and that all other notifications are turned off during the meeting. Our first agenda item today is to invite our new member, Graham Day, to declare any interests relevant to the work of the committee. In doing so, I would like to welcome Graham to the committee and I look forward to working with you. Graham. Thank you, convener. I am not aware of any interest that I should declare that I am not aware that I have done my decoration of interests. Thank you very much, and good to have you join us. The committee's next task is to choose a deputy convener. Before doing so, I would like to put on record my thanks to Elena Whitham for the work that she did on this committee as deputy convener. It was a great pleasure to work with her, and I wish her all the best as she begins her new role as convener of the social justice and social security committee. Parliament has agreed that only members of the Scottish National Party are eligible for nomination as deputy convener of this committee, and I invite members of that party to nominate one of their number for this post. I nominate Willie Coffey, please. Thank you, Paul. That's great. Do we all agree to choose Willie Coffey as our deputy convener? Looks like we have agreement. Congratulations, Willie. I look forward to working with you in your new role. Our third item this morning is consideration of whether to take items 5, 6 and 7 in private. Item 5 will be an opportunity for members to consider the committee's response to the Finance and Public Administration Committee on the medium-term financial strategy. Item 6 will be a chance for the committee to agree its approach on the scrutiny of the coronavirus recovery and reform Scotland bill. Item 7 will be an opportunity for the committee to agree its approach on the scrutiny of the social housing charter. Do members agree to take items 5, 6 and 7 in private? Looks like we have agreement there. Our first item on the agenda today is taking evidence on the draft of the fourth national planning framework, or NPF4, which is probably how we will refer to it for the rest of the morning. This is the third of five evidence sessions to the committee. The focus on today's session is housing. Next week, we will be looking at local government issues, and on 22 February, we will hear from the minister. I would like to welcome warmly to the committee this morning, Tony Cain, who is policy manager from the Association of Local Authority Chief Housing Officers, Andrew Fife, who is the chair of the Scottish Housing with Care task force, Tony Aitken, vice chair of the Scottish Property Federation Planning and Development Committee from the Scottish Property Federation, David Stewart, who is the policy lead from the Scottish Land Commission, and Nicola Barkley, who is the chief executive from Homes for Scotland. Welcome this morning. We are going to move straight to questions. Witnesses, if you wish to respond or contribute to the discussion, please add an R to the chat box to indicate this. Just to say that we have a range of questions that we want to get through, you do not necessarily all need to come in on all of them. We tend to have a practice of directing our questions initially to somebody, one or two people, but if you really want to come in on something because there is a point that has not been covered, you are welcome to do that, but I also will also maybe have to come in and cut you off at points, and I hope that you do not take that personally, but we want to make sure that we cover all the questions that colleagues have. I am going to start off and I am going to direct this question initially to Tony Cain and David Stewart, but others are welcome to come in. Obviously, today our focus is on housing, and I am keen to hear whether you believe that the draft NPF4 will lead to homes being built in appropriate places to meet the demand across urban, rural and island communities in Scotland. If not, I am keen to hear the detail. Sometimes the conversations that we have been having so far in evidence sessions have been quite high-level, and it will really help the committee in our scrutiny if we can really understand some specifics on what needs to be outlined in the framework that would help to do that. It will not hurt, I think, is the obvious opening question. I am not entirely convinced that the planning system is the only or principal driver of where and how many houses are built in Scotland. I think that the activity of the developers is probably more important, and they are not driven necessarily by the same objectives and concerns as the planning system. However, I think that it sets out, within obvious limitations, a sound overall approach to the planning for housing. It is, broadly speaking, an extension of previous approaches. There is not much in it that is radically different other than the location of some of the decision-making around early stages of planning. It is not going to obstruct the process, but I would say that it is not my view that the principal problems that we have in delivering the right home in the right place are related to the planning system. It is a framework in which we can all work, and local authorities will use it as best they can to deliver the best in housing terms for their communities. Our view would be that the objectives of NPF4 are the right ones, things like delivering 20-minute neighbourhoods, supporting rural repopulation development in town centres. Given that we do not have the delivery programme yet, there is still a real question about how Scotland can make the fundamental change in the way that we deliver housing to meet some of those objectives. At work, we did a review of Lanford housing and found that, at the moment, Lanford housing is delivered very much through the market and private developers, and they hinted that their objectives are mitigating risk and making profit for shareholders. I would argue that, if we are going to deliver on some of those objectives in the NPF4, there needs to be housing land market reform and there needs to be more public interest-led development of the time that we saw at the Commonwealth Games Village in Glasgow, with the public sector playing more of a role in assembling Lanford development and enabling development. By doing that, that could reduce the risk for the private sector and enable them to develop in places such as town centres or rural Scotland. Thank you for that. Nicola Sturgeon, you would like to come in. Yes, thank you for that, convener. You asked for detail and specifics. Unfortunately, we believe that the NPF4, as it is currently drafted, is likely to reduce the number of homes delivered thereby exacerbating the crisis that we have in housing delivery. We know from reading Housing to 2040 and reading Scottish Government's population strategy that there is a real desire within government to deliver more homes so that everybody has a home and we can meet housing need. I am sure that we will get into the detail of the minimum all-tenure housing land requirement, but the way that it is currently designed excludes large sectors of the population that are in housing need. I am happy now or later to go into the detail of why that is the case. I think that that is going to come up a little bit later, so thanks for that. Tony, I see that you want to come back in, but maybe what I will do is I will move on and bring in Graham Day. He has some questions and maybe you can come back in around that. Graham, if you would like to come in and ask both your questions, that would be great. Thanks, convener. My first question is about the specific change in nature of national planning policy as a consequence of NPF4, where we see an increased focus going forward on issues of place, livability, wellbeing and emissions reductions. I am interested in the views of the panel on whether the planning system, as it currently exists, is set up both in a cultural and practical sense to deliver on the outcomes and the changes that are going to be needed. Do you want me to ask my second question now, convener, or I will come to that later? You would come back to that, but I am just giving you the space to do it. Is there anyone in particular who you want to ask that question to? David, Tony and I are obvious people who we go to in this show. Great. I will bring in David Stewart and then Tony Kane. Thank you. I suppose that it is similar to my answer to the previous question. To deliver those changes, which are really quite major, there needs to be more of a focus on delivery within the planning system, but, as Tony has said, there are other mechanisms or approaches that can help. I would argue that implementing some of the recommendations of the vacant and derelict land task force, which one commission is part of, and the reform of the housing land market, could help. We talked in our review of land for housing about public interest-led delivery, and I think that to make those changes and deliver in places that the moment in the market currently does not, because there is too much risk or they cannot make the return, we need to really see a fundamental shift and a focus on delivery. Thanks for that. Tony, do you want to come back in? I would agree with David. An ambition for a plan that approach is absolutely right, but we are a long way away from where we were 40 or 50 years ago, when local authorities and public agencies were definitely drivers of development and delivery within the planning system. They are not that now. They are not resorted to do that. They are not necessarily skilled to do that, and the delivery process is largely led by the private sector. If we want to change the way in which the process is led, we need to re-equip particularly local authorities and give them the confidence that they can take decisions locally and that those decisions will stick. I do not think that that is where the sector is at the moment and that they are not currently in control of what gets built. It is essentially a passive process. A plan will be approved and then planners will, for the most part, wait and see what appears in the planning inbox, and there is nothing in this document that will change that. Can I just pick up on that point? Does that lend itself to the situation where planners are risk averse or lacking innovation because they are fearful that, if they do, if they might go on a limb a little bit, they will not be supported by the regime that they are working within? I am not sure that it is a concern about not being supported by their own authority. It is not always clear that the Scottish Government or central government will support actions that are determined locally. Confidence in those decisions is important, and I would put it no more strongly than that. If you want to control development, you have to control land. Local authorities and public sector do not control the land supply or the decisions that are made about particular sites that are largely controlled in the private sector, and it is those interests that determine the starting point for discussions around any particular site. If you want to change that, you have to change the approach to land ownership and land control. My second question concerns the content of some of the submissions that the committee has received where they have raised concern about the wording of national planning policies covering issues such as 20-minute neighbourhoods, community wealth building, carbon emissions and human rights, the assertion being that the wording is insufficiently clear for decision-making purposes. Does the panel agree with that? Is it more a case of the language that is used or is it actually the substance of what is there that is the problem? Is there anyone specifically who would like to pick that question up? Throw it open. Throw it open, okay. Who would like to come in on that? You can put an R in the chat, that would be helpful. It looks like Nicola. Tony and then Nicola, great, thanks. I've actually deferred to Nicola because my response has gone out of my head, my poor. All right, Nicola. Thank you, Tony. I think that there's a lack of clarity around the description and in the appendices that the glossary isn't clear about that there is no definition of community wealth building within the glossary. The people are having to assume what that means. I think that going back to your previous question as well about planning departments, not only do applicants not necessarily understand fully what that means, planning officers are having to use their own judgment to work out what that means. For the first time, MPF4 will be part of the development management process. It will require this document to form the decision making on applications that come in. Previously, it's been a high-level document but this is really going to be embedded and it's going to have real bite so people are going to have to rely on the words to decide whether or not an application is approved or rejected or amended or whatever. If the wording is too loose, we are just going to end up arguing and every single planning officer and every authority will have their own interpretation just as every developer, every applicant will have their own interpretation. I think that clarity around the language is fundamental if we want this new MPF4 to be successful. Thanks, Nicola. Tony, have you remembered to come back in? My apologies. I agree with Nicola. I think that there are a number of points in which the language in the document isn't as clear as it needs to be. I think that it isn't as directive as it might be. The words like should and may appear more often than perhaps is helpful and being a bit more directive would be helpful. I also think that points in which some of the conceptual approaches are confused as well. One that really jumped out for me was on page 15, Affordable Homes, which talked about affordable homes being provided to offset the impact of second homes and short-term lets. I absolutely do not think that that is why we provide affordable homes in rural areas. I think that there is something deeply problematic about simply giving up on the impact that second homes and short-term lets and investing £200,000 a home to make up for the fact that the market is driving properties away from availability to local communities. There is some woolly thinking in there, and there is one or two key areas where the language isn't properly defined and isn't properly developed. Thank you. Thanks for that specificity. It's really helpful. I don't see anyone else wanting to come in on the question, so I'm going to move on. I'm going to pick up a question about how well do you think that the NPO4 links with other Scottish Government policy and investment priorities, particularly around housing. We had that kind of brought up in the last session where there were lots of policies already in play and a sense that it didn't link, but specifically around housing. Do any of you—I'll just put that open, because I'm aware of others—haven't had a chance to speak yet—open to anyone? Have you noticed any policies? Are they linking well, or does the framework undermine it or step over it, not even acknowledge it exists? I'll speak specifically to senior housing, which is kind of my area of expertise. In terms of linking through with other policy, it's important to start with the legislation. If you look at the planning Scotland act 2019, the Scottish ministers have a duty to report on housing need every two years in respect of older people and how the planning system helps us to build more housing the lessons that we need. Similarly, if you look at the call to action produced by the Government of Scotland for the future, if I can quote directly, it says that NPO4 will also need to fulfil a statutory obligation to set out how it will support home for older people and disabled people as a result of the planning Scotland act 2019. If you then follow that logic through to NPO4, you've only got in that document three references to older people in 131 pages, and two of those references come in the annexes. To my mind—I'm similar with housing to 2040—there's very little mention of independent living. To my mind, that doesn't equate with some of the other policy documents that we've seen before or consultation documents. On a similar theme, when I look through NPO4, there is no reference to the Government's document, Housing to 2040. Housing to 2040 is the core document to deliver the housing that we need over the next 20 years. Also, when I look at the Scottish Government's first population strategy that was produced last March, it talks about the lack of adequate housing and the inability to live near your extended family as being a reason why we have reduced birth rates. This is a document that is talking about how we changed the demographics of the country, how we have more working-age people, how we increased the birth rate. That makes a clear link through why housing has an impact on our population. However, NPO4 does not refer to that at all. There is a real disconnect with the document and why does Scottish Government policy. NPO4 is the spatial manifestation of Government policy. It should be showing us in physical form how Government policy will be implemented. It very clearly recognises the climate emergency and rightly so and it very clearly references the nature crisis. Housing should be the third leg of that stool. We have a housing crisis, but it is completely disregarded here. All three of those crises, if that's a word, are of equal importance. They do not sit particularly comfortably together, but that is the job of Government and everybody within the environment of working in Scotland that we need to work out how we strike a balance between all three of those issues. The way that NPO4 is drafted at the moment, housing will not be delivered for the people that need it, and that is a fundamental concern. Tony, I see that you would like to come back in. With the last statement from Nicola absolutely, I think that there are, but I also agree that there are weaknesses in the links within this document and some other strategies that either are in place or should be in place or will be in place. I don't think that it deals directly enough with population challenges that we face and the 2020 projections, which this is not based on, raise some genuinely worrying concerns about what Scotland is going to look like in 30 or 40 years' time. If you look at the pattern of population decline, which is now becoming established, it is focused in West Central Scotland, particularly Ayrshire, Inverclyde, Argyll and Bute areas, and we have massive over-concentration of development and housing wealth in East and around Edinburgh and the Lothians. I think that that is hugely problematic. The overriding part of the crisis, if we are going to use that language in housing, is around affordability. There is absolutely nothing in this document that will bear on the problems that we have around rising prices, particularly rising land prices and rising health prices, which are distorting the economy. We have a housing sector that sucks in investment, particularly around private renting, where excess profits are available and deflects it from other places and other more productive places in the economy, from which we benefit more. I think that there are lots of challenges around connecting it. I also agree that housing to 2040 does not appear. The principles that underpin housing to 2040, which are powerful, also do not really appear in this document. I will now move on to bring in Miles Briggs with some questions. Thank you, convener. Good morning to the panel. Thanks for joining us this morning. I wanted to ask a few questions with regard to the minimum housing or 10-year land requirement. First, I want to ask what your views were with regard to the process and the methodology that has been used to establish it. I will maybe start with yourself, Tony, as you touched upon issues with regard to housing in Lothian. If anyone else would like to come in, can you put an hour in the chat? The methodology that has been followed around the minimum or 10-year housing land requirements has been established as part of the overall approach to assessing housing needs and demands for 20 years. The HND approach is as sound as any other approach that I have worked with, but we have to acknowledge that it has produced numbers that many people have expressed concern about because they seem very low in some areas. That is being driven by the demographics. It also points to the fact that more homes are not necessarily the principal concern. It is not obvious that there is a shortage of homes in Scotland. It is clear that there are access problems and substantial affordability problems, and those are the areas where we need to focus. As a platform for allowing local authorities to make decisions around their own local needs, properly connected to their ability to grow or rather sustain their local economies and meet local community needs, they are fit for purpose. This is an art, not a science, let's be honest. However, the important point now is how you translate that into land allocations and how you ensure that the land allocations are built out in the right way. However, we have a problem. We have a huge problem with almost a booming economy in Edinburgh and the Lothians and in the south and east of Scotland, and huge challenges with population decline and economic decline in many rural areas, in many island communities and in the west beyond Glasgow and places like Ayrshire. The whole of Ayrshire is projected to have a falling population within four or five years based on the 2020 population projections. That is an enormous challenge economically. The economic strategy, I understand, is being developed. It needs to be tied together. Nicola Sturgeon and Andrew Whittle would like to come in. In terms of the process, it might be helpful to explain how I understand the process that has happened. The Honda, the housing need and demand assessment generated initial numbers for each authority. Each local authority was asked to review them, consider them against local evidence and make any adjustments that they wanted. They were given three months to return back into Scottish Government. If a local authority is normally doing a Honda, it usually takes between six and 12 months. In some cases, authorities did not have the time or the resources to do very much, which is why some of them did not—the numbers did not change. Other local authorities were already about to start their Honda process. The Tay City region and Argyll and Bute did primary research, because they were already planning to do it. They had the funding and the resources in place to do the work, which is why we have this disparity if you compare what went out to what came back. We need to make sure that all councils have both the time and the resource to do this work properly, because the Honda number underpins everything else that happens afterwards. The national dataset on housing need takes a very limited view of what constitutes housing need and has only two very acute forms of need that are counted. One is homeless households in temporary accommodation and the other is overcrowded households that include at least one concealed family. However, there is a large number—there are at least six that I know of that are not included—and, just to give you a flavour, I will not tell you them all just now. I am happy to put this into a written paper afterwards, because it is quite detailed. For example, an overcrowded house, which is, say, a family with two children, born a girl but only two bedrooms, is not counted as having any need. Single person households, adults living together, friends in a shared flat, those adults are not counted as having any housing need, or a single adult who has had to go back and live with his parents or her parents, they are not counted. If it was a couple living with parents, they would be counted. There is a huge sector of the population who are not in the houses that they want and are unable to grow start families and have all the things that made my generation took for granted because we are not counting them at the very beginning of the process, so we need to get the process right. Hondo needs to be reviewed, root and branch, to make sure that we are actually creating the baseline numbers that we then are providing for, and then we go on and have the conversations about where, what type of housing, what tenure it is, but unless we have the number right in the first place, we are on a hiding to nothing and we will be planning for decline, which I do not think the Scottish Government wants to do. I will stop. Thank you, Nicola. I appreciate that. I see that Andrew Nex, David and Tony Akin. Yeah, thank you very much. I think that Nicola has articulated that brilliantly and highlighted that many of these hondas, the definition of need, is far too narrow. I just wanted to add to that point in the context of senior housing, because another party that is not considered in the context of the Honda is, for example, an older person living in a four bedroom house, which may well not be appropriate for them in terms of accessibility and other matters. That is a really important point, because if they are not considered within housing need, then it is seen by local authorities that there is no need to build any other form of accommodation for that type of person. We very much have this gap between mainstream housing and going into a care home and nothing in between. If we do not do better to offer more housing choice to that type of person, they are stuck between a rock and a hard place, because they are not ready to go to a care home, but they are finding it very difficult to live in mainstream housing. We should not underestimate the benefits of providing better housing choice in that space in between, because ultimately, if you can provide that choice for someone that gives them the confidence to go and live somewhere where they have a chance to interact with loads of people, feel less lonely and have a better quality of life, that is great for that person, but it also frees up that four bedroom house for a couple who want to move into that house to start a family, and it goes even further down the line, because they move on, therefore that becomes available for a first-time buyer. Without having to build more housing, you are freeing up to lots of housing down the chain, so I think that that is an important point to make. Thank you, convener. I would echo what people have said so far about being important to get the numbers right, but I suppose they would caution against focusing too much on numbers on their own, because our review of land for housing finds that, under the current system, we are not delivering, as people have said, enough homes suitable for older people, but we are also not really meeting the needs of young people, and that has actually been a problem since the 2007 recession, and a lot of SMEs who would perhaps develop flats and towns at centres went out of business, so I think that we need to go beyond just thinking about numbers and thinking more widely about meeting needs and delivering, so that it better serves the wider needs of the population. Hi, good morning. I will just state that I believe that the minimum all-tenure housing requirement is not set high enough, in my view. Unfortunately, we often find that with minimum housing requirements, there is often little compulsion for local authorities to increase and provide more housing. Very often, due to the fact that providing housing development and more housing development is difficult for councillors to undertake, there is often quite a bit of politics involved, stating the obvious. If the housing numbers planned for are too low to meet population needs, then housing affordability gets worse. Put in very short terms, if there is too much demand for available supply, the price increases and those are real issues. Putting it in the simplest form when I saw the NPF-4, when numbers discussed it at about £200,000 for Scotland, as Nicola alluded to before, substantially below what we currently provide. We are posing a new NPF-4, which has got real teeth as part of the development plan, but it is actually proposing less housing than we have provided previously. That is quite worrying to touch on and without getting into technical Nicola and Fruva behind the process. We are not here just to point out discrepancies, but we are also here to try to provide the committee with solutions. In that regard, I believe that a very simple solution, as Nicola alluded to, there are only three months or thereabouts for local authorities to come back with these figures. That is why I believe that the figures are actually so low, because there has not been a need for a Honda assessments to be undertaken fully. Perhaps a consideration or a recommendation that the committee might wish to make is that an NPF-4 policy requirement is for councils to undertake the full and robust housing needs survey. In that way, we produce a number where we are providing the houses for each of our communities over the next 10 years of the NPF-4. I hope that that is helpful. Thanks very much, Tony Aitken. Now, Tony Cain would like to come in as well. A couple of observations. I think that there is a risk with housing needs assessments that it can turn into a rabbit hole. One of my experiences working in those areas in local government probably does not matter very much whether the need for affordable or particular needs housing locally is 2,332 or 4,598 if you can only build 300. What you need to do is make sure that the 320 that you build is going to serve a purpose and meet a need in your community, and you need to make judgments about which of those needs are the most pressing. However, it is an art, not a science, and there is a whole rabbit hole that you can disappear to if you are not careful. The other comments that I would make is that in terms of housing for older people, housing for older people is fundamentally an issue in the unoccupied sector. A vast majority of people over 60 and over 70 or 80 are owners. During that, 90 per cent of people over 70 are owners. Meeting their needs as the age is something that needs to be done in the unoccupied sector, because the public sector simply cannot meet those needs in total. I think that that means that you have to look at what is being built in unoccupation and the extent to which it is actually meeting the needs of older people and creating opportunities for them to downsize. Finally, I very quickly echo what David has said about the lack of attention being paid to the housing needs of young people. When we talk about young people, we tend to talk about students and the university path through student accommodation. We do not talk about how young people who do not go to university move on and secure their housing. What about apprentices? What about people who have got jobs? What about people who are at college and not at university? We do not have a pathway and we do not have a clear approach to ensure that. We do not even have a service strand, particularly within the public spin and public set, about ensuring that we meet the needs of new-forming younger households. It is very definitely a gap. Thank you. Miles, do you want to come back? Yes, please, convener. Thank you for those answers. That was helpful. I think that you are right that it is an art form, not necessarily a science, but one of the issues that I wanted to raise, which was pointed out in Homes for Scotland's useful briefing ahead of today, was around flexibility. How can we point towards what that should look like? One of the issues that was highlighted was alternative sites being given planning permission for housing, if those allocated in local development plans do not prove to be deliverable. If we are not going to see a change in how those estimates are brought about, what that would look like to be able to direct new developments specifically to where they are needed and just wonder what your thoughts were on that, I will bring in Nicola as I mentioned Homes for Scotland's whole for that flexibility. Thanks, Camina. Thank you. You are right. We have in policy 9B a mechanism for bringing forward sites, which have already been identified. If we have to go back to the first principles, one of the biggest challenges with the planning system is keeping the communities that will be impacted by new development up to date, so that they have an ability to comment on suitable sites. We are keen that the sites that come forward for housing communities already know about them. The policy says that longer-term sites should be brought forward early if some of the shorter-term sites are not delivering as planned. One of the fundamental issues with that is that the chances are that they have been identified as a longer-term site for a specific reason, probably because they are waiting for a big piece of infrastructure to be delivered and it is in somebody else's capital spending plan, for example Scottish Water, and that they will not be coming to this particular project for another five years. You cannot bring that site forward very quickly—it just does not happen like that. It is whether or not we need to have another bank of sites available that communities are aware of that can then be fed in. As much as the policy says that we should not go down the rabbit hole of housing numbers, if we get the housing numbers right to start with and allocate enough land to deliver those housing sites, we need less flexibility. The constraining of the supply is stopping us from delivering the houses that we need because of one site that has been allocated that cannot be delivered and that you have nowhere else to go and that you end up not being able to meet the needs of that local population. We need to look at the flexibility and relying on longer-term sites is a little bit too simplistic to answer when you think of the technical reasons why sites can come forward quickly. I want to bring in Tony Aitken. Tony Aitken, you wanted to come in on the previous question again, but maybe you want to come in on this and you can bring in your other points. Yes, thank you for that. The phrase of going down the rabbit hole of numbers is not something that we wish to do today, but what we want to be quite clear about is that if a local authority says that we need 1,000 houses over the next 10 years in our local authority area, there has to be a requirement to ensure that we deliver 1,000 houses because failing to do that means that we are failing to deliver the homes that our communities need. That is a main point that I wish to make. We are really focused on ensuring that housing delivery is brought forward and delivered in full because we are failing our communities and the people in our local areas by not providing the homes that we need locally, so that is a really important point. It is not trying to go down a rabbit hole of numbers, it is trying to provide the homes that our communities need and ensure that they are delivered. Some of the points that were made by Nicola in so far are short term sites, long term sites, but having alternative sites available to fulfil those supply requirements if there is a difficulty of a site coming forward, that is really quite important. We are talking about the planning process as if it is some kind of straight jacket around where and what can be developed. It has always been the case that what is built over a planned period will include a significant number of small sites, often developed by smaller construction companies, which appear opportunistically. In some areas, there are higher levels of windfall sites than others, and the authority that I work for could typically expect a quarter or more of the housing output to be on backland sites and windfall sites that appear opportunistically. It is not the case that it is only the land that is allocated that is ever built on. There is, in the way that the system works, the way that the use of buildings changes, always opportunities for additional sites to come forward. The pipeline is about good planning. I think that if a site is there for a good reason, there is a longer term site. The other thing that occurs is that there is a rather glib reference to the allocating sites that are not being bought forward. The allocating a site that has been included within a local plan is difficult. In fact, the only sites that I have ever known to be taken out of a structure plan or a local plan have been publicly owned sites, and it is always a contest with the private owner if you deallocate a site. There are some reality checks in there as well around the way in which the system works in the real world. Happy to hand back to you, Camilla, for the time that we have got. Thank you very much. I believe that Paul McClellan would like to come in on a supplementary on the same theme. Thank you, convener. I will build on the points that Nicola and Tony made about deliverability, because I think that that is key and the flexibility in that. Is there mechanisms in place to formally review that for both local authorities and the Scottish Government? As we know, we can set out a plan. Various things happen. There could be infrastructure issues going on, demand could drop, but is there a requirement for formal reviews for local authorities and the Scottish Government to make sure that we deliver what is out there? If we are freefall short, it will exacerbate the problems that we are talking about. I will probably ask Nicola and Tony after that. Thank you. The primary way of checking whether sites are coming forward for development is through the housing land audit. Every year, every council will do that. You will know very well the self-pill from your own council. That is a way of doing it. I would need to double-check whether that needs to be reported back to Government and whether a national Government is checking on housing numbers being delivered locally. I do not think that they do, but I would not want to mislead you there. I can come back to you on that point. One of the positives that we must mention is that the plan talks about housing delivery. It focuses far more on deliverability than the previous plan, the previous NPF. That has to be welcomed. What we now need to do is to make sure that that can happen and that the rest of the document does not block it from happening, which is a whole different topic. That is key. Nicola is to make sure that you are right from a council point of view in terms of how the Scottish Government ties into that and makes sure that that deliverability is the key thing that we need to deliver. Is the funding there to support so much of what is in there? I totally endorse the idea of Brentfield First, who is paying for it. A lot of sites have no value because of the amount of remediation that is required to bring them up to a kind of safe standard for people who have put houses on top of it and to have gardens. It is a big challenge. I will be touching that later on in some of the questions. Thank you for that. Tony Akin, I don't know if Tony Cain wants to come in after that. Hi Paul, thank you for your question. I think that the focus on deliverability is really important. In terms of mechanisms for actually ensuring that we are hitting the targets, there are quite a few local authorities with quite well-developed development plan policies where there are safeguards and checks in place where if housing numbers are not coming forward, then there is a policy safeguarding place where other sites have to come forward. Some local authorities proactively plan for this, Paul. I would warmly welcome and again recommend to a committee that words of that nature are included within NPF4. I don't see them there currently. I think that gives that extra layer of flexibility and focus on deliverability to make sure that whatever the eventual number is, we have had a little bit of a debate about that, but we ensure that it is delivered on the ground. In my professional planning spears of 25 years we are about, if we do not deliver enough homes, it disproportionately affects some sectors of our community. It is quite rightly mentioned earlier on that it is particularly hard-hitting for young people and for people possibly less well off. The reality is that flexibility to ensure that housing land requirements are met in full and the words in the NPF4 to bring home that point would be warmly welcomed. Just very quickly, almost all of the major sites within any local development plan will have a developer associated with them and that developer will be very good at understanding deliverability. Generally speaking, the local authorities and developers are good at working together, understanding deliverability concerns and working them through. Issues around infrastructure are likely to be the most pressing element of it and we still do not have a properly effective approach to delivering infrastructure first. I think that some of the work that David Stewart and his colleagues have been doing around land value capture and how you fund infrastructure is genuinely very important. I think that there will be emerging issues around the electricity grid as we shift away from fossil fuels and put more demand on the grid. That is something that we probably ought to be worrying about. I would also draw a distinction between deliverability and viability. One of our frustrations in the world of social and affordable housing is that affordable housing requirements on sites are very often the first thing that is sacrificed against viability. I think that we should be in a place where we are clear that public policy objectives are not negotiable on the viability question. Ensuring viability within the whole of the public policy framework is the responsibility of the developer. If the developer cannot bring forward a site that is viable within that policy context, it needs to go away and have another think about where it will develop. I do not think that we should ever be negotiating away social housing and other community infrastructure requirements off the back of the profitability. That is the word that we are looking at here of those sites. I thank you, convener. That was very helpful. Paul, you are up with your next question. Do you want to pick that up? Yes. It is kind of difficult, but I think that it would be great to ask it anyway. Yes. Thank you, convener. This is to Andrew. You have obviously mentioned the delivery of housing needs for older and disabled people. You have touched on some of the issues that are there. Are there any specific changes that you would like to see in NPF4 that you think would add to that? I think that you are right. We have a growing early population. It is what changes that you would like to see in terms of that that would make that easier for local authorities to pick up, and through our national targets as well. That is for Andrew. Thanks, Paul. The word targets is probably the first thing that I would like to address. We have the MATLAR, which outlines targets for local authorities for more general housing. It is important that, somewhere within the document, we have targets for senior housing. I use the word senior housing as a general catch-all that encompasses the public, private and voluntary sector. I am particularly advocating for the housing with care task force, but the most recent terminology is integrated retirement communities. We are talking about retirement villages that come with services on site. Just to give you a flavour for how far we are behind versus some of the leading nations in the world. For example, the likes of New Zealand, Australia and the USA have around about 5 per cent supply versus a number of over 65s in their country in terms of housing with care. For Scotland, at the moment, that level of supply is well below 1 per cent. Based on some figures that we have done as part of the Scottish Housing with Care task force, we are looking at approximately a gap of 40,000 homes, which would need to be built in order to come up with those standards. Andrew, on that point, can you clarify to the committee just how you got to that figure, just so that we understand that? That is the really important point that you mentioned, is understanding that demand, and it comes back to the point that Nicola talked about to Honda before. This is trying to understand the actual demand and need for extra care with housing with care. Can you give me a little bit back then about how you actually got to that figure? Yeah, so the figures in terms of how we established how many housing with care units there are in Scotland specifically come from a mixture of housing with Linn studies, data from the Elderly Accommodation Council, some good data from Knight Frank as well, which landed us around about a figure of two and a half thousand units, I think. I am happy to clarify that later, because I am trying to balance a lot of things here. Effectively, what we are looking at is the population of New Zealand and where supply stands there and calculating the gap between how many units they have and how many units we have. That is how we have reached that figure, which is certainly open to debate, but the broad point is clearly that there is very little housing with care in Scotland, and we see that as a failure of the system. Just to address what we would like to see in MPF4, there are a few different mechanisms that would help to bring forward sites and make them viable crucially. One of the big things is a separate use class order. This is a difficult type of housing to clarify, because it is somewhere between mainstream housing and care home, so use class 8 and use class 9. A separate use class would allow local development plans to allocate sites specifically, which could be brought forward. This is the crucial thing. There seems to be a misunderstanding or misconception amongst Scottish planners and Scottish ministers that housing with care operators can compete on sites with mainstream housebuilders. We have seen that in some recent decisions. There was a planning decision at Mill Timber that was appealed, and the Scottish Minister said that there is no reason why there should be any difference between a housing with care operator and a mainstream housebuilder in terms of what they can pay for the site. That is a fundamental misunderstanding, because the build costs are up to 25 per cent more expensive for a housing with care operator, and they have to put in all the services to make that site run as it should. It is addressing things like that within MPF4. It is crucial that, at a national level, there is clarity on establishing the need in line with the planning Scotland act, so that local authorities are not effectively making up their own policy on that. It has to come across the board. Those are the crucial things that I could go on, but I will consciously go on. Before I ask if anybody else comes in, I was just going to refer the members to my register of interests of seven councillor on East Llywyddyn if we have got to mention that at the start, but I do not know if anybody else wants to come in. I can see Tonya coming in just now. Just if you are familiar with housing with care, there is an interesting question here about the way in which public policy has developed. We have been pretty clear in the world of affordable and social housing that care is one thing and housing is another, and our objective is to deliver homes that meet needs and care that is flexible. We do not build housing with care because we deliver the care flexibly around the homes that people are in. That has been the policy position for 30 years, so we are not, other than in relatively specialist, broadly speaking, congregate provision. Very often driven by economics, and that is problematic when it comes to delivering high-quality care and high-quality housing. It is cheaper to deliver care to four or five folk together in one place, but it is not necessarily better for the people who are getting their care, and that is a difficult balance. However, there might be a distinction between housing and care that are being delivered broadly speaking in a public policy context and the whole private sector market for housing with care. In the public sector, we look to commission care as care distinct from the way that we commission and produce housing. The private sector has developed different business models, and I do not think that we have ever really debated the issues of principle around which of those we necessarily prefer and how we balance the two. It is certainly the case that big chunks of the care sector are operating in price ranges, but the public sector simply cannot… There are issues around the national care contract and the pricing in there anyway, but the public sector does not pay the same rates that private providers charge and that some more wealthy older people are prepared and able to pay, which is perfectly reasonable. There is a policy debate about how those two elements to the system work, but in the public sector, we deliver care in people's homes, in the homes that they choose to live in, and we commission it independently from the way that we commission housing. I will briefly respond to that. I totally accept the distinction between the public sector and the private sector, and I fully agree with Tony that it is important that we work together, because, as you say, for many people, the types of housing with care that you see down south are the likes of oddly villages and inspired, which come with all bells and whistles. That is not affordable for a lot of the population. One thing that I would say is that 68 per cent of older housing in Scotland is in the social rented sector, versus 73 per cent of people over the age of 65 who privately own their homes. There is a clear lack of private housing, and there is demand. It has been established by Age Scotland, who has done surveys, and my own research with the University of Aberdeen. We asked loads of people what types of housing they would like to move into in the future. I think that it is important to clarify that there is a demand for this type of product, and it needs to be built. Care and housing can very much exist together. It is something that falls within the remit of MPF4. We are talking about sustainability, cutting travel times. I would argue that it is more sustainable to have someone on site in a housing with care development, providing care without having to drive from house to house to house, than providing care in loads of different people's homes. Also, in the concept of the 20-minute neighbourhood, housing with care is great at delivering services on site, which allow people to live really good lives in close proximity. The public sector and the private sector very much need to work together on this. We need social care to establish solutions, but there is definitely a need for more private sector stock. I am going to move on to a question from Megan Gallagher. Before I ask my question this morning, I would like to refer members to my address, as I am a serving councillor in North Lanarkshire. We have spoken a little bit about the wording of national planning policies such as 20-minute neighbourhoods, but I would like to discuss the practical implementation of the 20-minute neighbourhoods in the draft MPF4 plan and the development of course of existing cities, towns and local centres. A couple of the panel has mentioned sustaining local community needs, but I would like to ask the panel, will the policies laid out in the draft MPF4 direct appropriate development in those centres, or will we continue to see the same approval of out-of-town developments? If I could start with Tony Aitken, please. Thank you. I think that the out-of-town development that you referred to is certainly out-of-town retail development is a phenomenon that happened in the 80s and 90s, and that market is on the way, so to speak. I think that there is less requirements for that. In my respects, the 20-minute neighbourhood concept is sound. I think that what we have to do is ensure that it applies to… When I read it in the draft MPF4, I thought that it had a very much a city centre, a town centre focus, and we have to have sufficient adaptation, but it can also apply to, shall we say, a lot of population of Scotland living suburban areas and to make sure that they have the right range of facilities and community resources. I would also say that a lot of new development, commercial real estate development, health provide these facilities in these communities, new schools, new hospitals and the like, which the Scottish Preparatory and Property Federation members help to deliver. With new development, we can improve the range of 20-minute neighbourhoods with those most urban areas. That is one of the challenges. A broad definition is required, and that has been referred to by earlier contributors. Out-of-town development is certainly for retail on the way. One area that is not housing slightly is that there is a big requirement for storage and distribution facilities in the edge of each of our towns and cities. There may be a live our lives now and we want things delivered within a day or two. That puts big pressure on the edges of our cities for storage and distribution facilities. In that regard, we have to plan positively for those going forward, because that market is not going to change anytime soon, if anything. It is getting more and more competitive. I have not seen too much reference or requirement for that. I would probably like to see a bit more of that from a Scottish Property Federation perspective. We have a very successful—from North Lanarkshire, you will be well aware—of how successful Eurocentral has been in the question of asking a national planning framework where is our next Eurocentral, where is our next big storage and distribution facilities to give that market the capacity it needs. I know that it is not exactly housing, but I hope that there are examples of challenges that lie ahead in which we have to meet going forward in this document. The 20-minute neighbourhoods will be key to that, and new development can help to deliver and improve those 20-minute neighbourhoods. Active travel linkages—two of them—is a good place making, and that is what we are all subscribed to. I am really keen to respond to this, because in some ways I think it gets to the heart of the ambitions of NPF4, but also the real challenge and the question of how we actually deliver on its objectives and reform what we do at the moment. If we do not provide support for delivery and look at issues such as land market reform and how to reuse vacant and derelict land, I suspect that we will not meet those ambitions. Developing in centres will be higher costs, there will be more risks. There is the issue of assembling land where there are different land owners. I know that North Lanarkshire Council has a very welcome focus on developing services and housing in town centres. Maybe just to suggest a couple of ideas from the land commission's work that could help to deliver development in town centres, we proposed the idea previously of compulsory sales orders. The idea is that where land is vacant and it is not being used, then there will be a compulsory sales order and someone who has a development plan for the site will be able to buy it. We also recently provided advice on tax reform on land to the Scottish Government. One idea that was developed in the course of that research was to encourage development on brownfield sites or vacant buildings. There could be incentives, so for example, there might not be council tax charged for the first three years that a new property was developed. We need to get to grips with those issues to really fundamentally where we deliver at homes. Just following on from David's points, our members have no issue at all with 20-minute neighbourhoods, so they like the concept of it. They probably would like a bit more detail on how they deliver in new places, although there is a big push for reusing brownfield land. That is not going to meet all of our housing needs, so we have to make sure that any new greenfield releases are connected. We have to remember that housing is not being delivered in isolation. The majority of people living in the houses are then going to a place of work and Tony touched on Eurocentral. If I look at policy 16 in the document, which is land and premises for business and employment, 20-minute neighbourhood is not referred to there. People are moving from their house to their work and home again, so let us join up the policies. If we are going to have that as a key plank within the document, make sure that it feeds up beyond housing. That would be my key ask. Of course, we need to work together in the public and private sector, because so many of the policy objectives will be delivered outside of the site that is owned and controlled by a developer. If you are having to put in active travel linkages, that tends to be a land that is not owned by you, so you cannot do it. I noticed that the Edinburgh Council is currently CPOing a lot of land to the west of Edinburgh to put active travel routes in. We need a much more streamlined, connected approach to deliver those policy objectives. It does not hold on to any one person to do it. The aims are laudable. The practical delivery of it will not be easy unless we all get around the table at the start and work out how it is done. Who is paying for it all is a very fundamental question. I am worried that it will sit in the plan and will not turn up outside our doors, which is what we actually want to happen. I am picking up on a point that Nicola made earlier on. To the extent that you are looking to create 20-minute neighbourhoods in urban areas by reusing existing land, Nicola has already made the point that it is expensive and difficult. Ownership patterns can be a major obstacle. Those are the types of developments in which you absolutely need to have a public sector agency needing the process. Developing for the possibility of councils, for example, building for sale is something that is currently being looked at by colleagues in Scottish Futures Justice, which is a really useful conversation. It is within the types of inter-urban and brownfield developments that that could be most effective. We have a substantial problem of dereliction in many of our town and city centres. My other point about 20-minute neighbourhoods is that it also needs to start to inform public service delivery and design. If you want a 20-minute neighbourhood in which you have health services and libraries and a post office and leisure facilities and parks and a travel system that supports that, particularly in rural areas, where, if you do not own a car, you will genuinely struggle because public transport is very often woefully inadequate. You cannot have 20-minute neighbourhoods if you do not invest heavily in the local provision of public services. The past 20 years have been largely about decentralisation of public services and stripping them out of local communities. How many communities have a library within three miles, which is broadly speaking the guidance that library professionals would give about access to libraries? It would fit with the 20-minute neighbourhoods. We have lost many of our most accessible public services, and if you want a 20-minute neighbourhood, you will have to invest in them in a substantial way, and that is not what is happening at the moment. I really appreciate the consciousness of time. We have a few more questions to get through, and I would like to bring in Willie Coffey. Thanks very much, Ariane. Good morning to the panel. I wonder if I could go back to a point that Tony Gain made earlier. Tony, you were talking about disparity in housing supply between East and West Scotland, and you mentioned Ayrshire in particular. Is it fair for us to expect the NPF-4 to address that issue? Should there be a direct linkage between the NPF-4 and that issue? We are talking about economic development and regeneration, and housing and land supply will generally follow that, would not it? When we start talking about things such as 20-minute neighbourhoods, it implies a more distributed, balanced economic policy to have to take place in yew, and we are just talking about it a moment ago there. Do you have your thoughts just on that issue? Ayrshire, in particular, I mean the north of Armanach is pretty much booming in terms of housing development and Sturton as well, but for the rest of Ayrshire, that is not the case. Do you have your thoughts on that issue, please, and whether NPF-4 is the place for us to try to address this? I think that there have to be limits on what NPF-4 could do. I should say that, when I point to the issues, I am simply picking an area where, substantially, I mean it is not just the issues, because it comes all the way around into Inverclyde, where we have a medium-term challenge around population decline, and there will be areas in there that are booming, and the local authorities are working hard to address the negative impacts of population change. I absolutely know that, so I am not picking on NPF-4 in that sense. I am not saying, no, that the economic strategy should be built into NPF-4. What I think I was saying is that we need to have a clear connection between our ambitions for jobs and good quality and well-paid jobs across Scotland and how we try to develop the housing system to support that. At the moment, we are at risk, I think, of presiding over a differential or a two-pace development process, where some areas, quite substantial areas, genuinely struggle with the challenges of economic decline and population decline, and other areas just suck in wealth and suck in investment. We need to balance that. The economic strategy is clearly a very important part of how we balance it. I understand that it is in development and it is not in this document, but it is not really referred to very strongly in this document either. How do we get jobs into Argyll and Bute, into Borders, into South Ayrshire, into our island communities so that we can sustain those communities and grow those communities in the way that we want? How do you deliver support for older people in island communities? It is very often, as island communities decline, that older folk are last to be there. When you see island abandonments, it is generally speaking the last two or three older folk who leave because they cannot be certain of getting the care and help that they need. It is integrating those different elements of the planning process that I am pointing to. You point about 20-minute neighbourhoods. My apologies. I did not quite catch it. The concept of 20-minute neighbourhoods implies that there needs to be a broader and more distributed set of services, whatever they are, and economic opportunity. Is that what you would understand by the implications of developing a policy? Absolutely. It is a measure of the way in which the urban planning has changed. I was brought up in a town where everybody worked in the town. It was half an hour's trip from London, Welling Garden City, but almost everybody around me, all the families around me, worked within the garden city. Nobody committed. It is now a commutatown. The employment opportunity is of just ebbed way within the town, and it is not unique. Everybody now travels to London. How do you reverse that kind of change, or how do you build a different trend in where jobs are located? I mean quality jobs. I do not think that the answer to jobs in rural areas is to encourage people with well-paying city jobs to move out and work on IT. I think that it is about how you create jobs that are rooted in those areas that are in agriculture, but jobs that are directly linked to those communities into that land, not necessarily tourism, which features in one or two places because it is insecure and it is low paid. It is about how you build sustainable jobs in those local communities, particularly in rural areas, and how you build an economy based on that rural area, whether it is an agricultural economy or a forestry economy, or whatever it is. I do not think that folk having jobs in the city working remotely is the main part of that challenge. I think that it is developing genuinely circular local economies that support quality jobs in that context. It is hugely challenging. There is no question about that. I will throw it open to the panel. It is turning the focus on our town centres, the urban setting and how we encourage and promote housing in the town setting. You must be sure to be aware of many of the issues that you can see in any of Scotland's high streets, where you have parcels of derelict land and so on, and often empty derelict shops with the blight in the urban landscape. How do the panel think that we can address that issue? One of the associated issues that we heard from the East Ayrshire officials the other week was about when trying to put some housing and encourage housing developments in our town centres. We have to be increasingly mindful of flood risk, and that is an increasing problem year on year now. Do you think that we need to be pushing some ideas of how to solve that if we are serious about redeveloping our town centres and making them the attractive place that we want them to be to live? I could ask David to start with that one and maybe Nicola to come in. Thanks very much, deputy convener. I think that it is a really important issue. I am aware to the extent of the challenges close to Kilmarnock town centre that we have been involved with, some work looking at supporting development. Just briefly to say that vacant and derelict land is such a huge issue for Scotland. Work the land commission was involved with, found that a third of the population lives within 500 metres of vacant land, and when you get to areas that are higher, and this is a multiple deprivation that goes up to two thirds, so it is a challenge. However, what you can achieve if you can develop on those sites is huge. The answer to delivery there is that you need to have this public interest-led development approach that I talked about before. The market won't deliver on those sites on its own, and you really need a range of public agencies to work together on issues such as flood drifts and planning at a more regional level. I believe that the key agencies who are a group of statutory planning consultancies such as SEPA and Architecture and Design Scotland have been talking to the Airshire Council about that site. Maybe just to mention that the Clyde mission, one of the national developments, that approach is planned for there, where it is looking at the land and the Clyde corridor in the round and not just looking at development and vacant land bills but also looking at flood risk adaptation and taking a more regional view. That is the approach that has to be taken along with, as I said, earlier, looking at mechanisms to incentivise reuse of vacant land and buildings. Nicola Sturgeon, are you coming in on this one? I know from my membership the kind of developer that is attracted to inner city redevelopment sites, whether it is conversions or whether it is a new build within an urban core. It tends to be the SMEs, and we have seen since 2008—I think that it has been mentioned earlier today—that so many SMEs went out of business. The challenges now are twofold. You have got fewer people interested in developing, and those who are still around and are working and can do this kind of work are dealing with far more challenges than they were in pre-2008. The planning regulations, the technical consultations and all the additional reports, assessments and surveys that they need to do before they can build on the small sites, which were bread and butter back in the day. It is much harder for them to do that. As David is saying, I think that we need this joined-up approach. I have seen the brilliant work that the Scottish Empty Homes partnership has done to bring Empty Homes back into use. Maybe we need a similar approach for whether it is residential, commercial or other uses that have been identified. We have to work in a partnership approach to bring those sites forward. Then we have to bring the key agencies, the infrastructure providers. One of the biggest challenges—you mentioned flooding—one of the other biggest challenges is that Scottish waters policies will not allow you to connect into a combined sewer. That is a fairly technical issue. However, if you are building rock or flats, you are not allowed to connect those into a combined sewer. You have to create new separate surface warfare and foul drainage. That is incredibly expensive if you have them to go out with your site to do it. If there was some kind of flexibility to allow that to happen, because whatever was on that site before connected into the combined sewer, if we had more flexibility, we would see fewer hurdles to bringing brownfield sites back into use. Conversation with Scottish Water, why is that a problem? Let's unpick it, and work together to create the solutions. However, we probably need a body—whether it is SFT or somebody else—to lead on how we bring those vacant and derelict land sites back into good use. Whatever that use might be, it might not be development. It might be turning it into a park landscape, but development is not always the answer, depending on where those sites are and often what is in the ground. How contaminated are they? That is a huge issue, obviously. Thanks for that, Nicola. Is he requesting to come in, Andrew? Could you also say something about the other point that I made about derelict shops on the high street and whether we are in with a realistic chance of being housing above the shops—that concept that we are all familiar with—if the shops underneath a particular redeveloped set of flats, for example, still look in a pretty awful tarnished derelict state? I cannot imagine how they would be attracted to live above a shop that has been empty for years with graffiti and windows and vegetation growing out the doors and gutters and so on. How do we tackle that particular issue, do you think? That is an interesting point. What I wanted to raise initially was that I certainly understand the obstacles of which clearly there are many in terms of redeveloping vacant land in town centres, but when I am doing feasibility studies for older people's housing, whether that is housing with care or just more generally the McCarthy and Stone model or some more house-builder model, what I am looking at is the suspicious logical needs of older people. I am trying to establish—I just got a bit of feedback on that. What I am trying to establish is whether or not there is good access to services, whether there is good access to transport. Does that place give that older person residential satisfaction in terms of their needs? Town centres have a lot of positives, because obviously you are still interacting with the community and you have got close access to all the things that you need. In terms of attractiveness, if there was a shop below that was not particularly pretty, that could potentially be problematic, especially at the higher end of private housing with care market. There are several examples down south in terms of places like Battersea in London that have extremely expensive versions of housing with care, which I am not suggesting is the best model for Scotland. What I do know is that a lot of the developers down south and operators of housing with care are very interested in central sites, particularly in Edinburgh and Glasgow, and perhaps that represents an opportunity to make better use of a vacant or derelict piece of land. I think that someone else would be better to answer your second question in terms of what could be done to address vacant commercial premises. I think that the difficulty with this whole area is that the way in which our city centres and town centres are being used is changing and has changed. The pandemic has had an impact on the office and the role of the office. We are seeing a contraction in town centre areas where they have expanded over the years, taken over formally residential properties, turned into offices and now they tend to contract back. At the moment, that is happening in a very unplanned way. Assets that were once valuable and productive are now becoming worthless and unproductive and later on a blight. There is always a question mark about who takes the hit when somebody's asset is simply overtaken by changes in the economy. Entrepreneurs are meant to be risk takers. If you buy something that turns into rubbish, you have got rubbish and you should not expect anybody else to bail you out. That often seems to be the case. Even with that attitude, whether people agree with it or not, it is expensive to redevelop and redesign and sometimes demolish and rebuild those properties. I think that we need a particular focus on that. It might help if we had a development agency whose task it was to drive that process. There are very particular skills and risks, but we also need to be a little bit cautious about the way people's aspirations are changing and how people feel about living in town centres and who wants to live in a town centre and how that town centre operates and functions and meets their needs. Much of the talk in recent weeks or months has been folk looking to move out of urban areas and buy more space because they are now working from home. I think that that is a niche view. Most folk are still not working from home because they do not have jobs and they have other kinds of jobs at home. However, there is something about understanding those changing views around those spaces and working with the grain of that change in demand and desire rather than trying to invent it. It is difficult and it will take time, but there is no question that there are too many derelict and underused or unused buildings in our urban areas. We do not have a properly effective way of addressing that. Thanks, Willie. Tony Aitken wants to come in on this, so let's give him the mic now, too. My apologies, I did not see you. Thank you. I think that there is one manner in which we can improve and ensure that there is less dereliction or vacancy in shops to increase the flexibility in the use classes order. We can go from one use to another. I always believe that a property being utilised is better than it being vacant because planning policy prescribes that that is not an acceptable use in that area or something of that nature. I think that greater flexibility in the use classes order could perhaps assist that. There is also a wider commercial property debate about premises, and it is probably a separate committee to do with rates and the rates levels in some of our towns and cities. That has been seen as a barrier, which has perhaps increased some dereliction and vacancy rates, as well. It is very complex, but anything that can encourage the occupancy of shops within our towns and cities is welcome, and that should be fought through fully. Thank you very much for that, Tony. Thanks, Willie. I want to let you know that we are almost at 11.30, but if it is all right with everybody, we will run over a little bit. I am keen to bring Mark in with a few questions and then maybe see if there is anything else that we need to bring in. Mark Griffin, would you like to come in? Thanks, convener. The draft planning framework states that we want an infrastructure first approach to be embedded in Scotland's planning system. I wanted to ask members on the panel this morning what they feel an infrastructure first approach should look like, whether NPF4 will deliver that and, if not, what changes would it potentially suggest? I will come to Nicola first. Thank you. I am happy to take that question. What is infrastructure? It means different things to different people. Is it the road? Is it the water? Is it the railway line? Is all of that? Is it the education provision? Is it the healthcare provision? Is everything effectively that you need? Some would say that housing is an infrastructure as well, but that might be a different debate for another day. We absolutely support an infrastructure first approach, because one of the biggest challenges to getting science out of the ground is the lack of infrastructure and the lack of joined-up thinking when a site was allocated in the first place. So often, we have sites allocated in the planning application and education departments say that we do not have any capacity in the school, but we need to put a school on that site as well as housing. That is a very simple example of where an infrastructure last approach has been taken. It just delays sites and you end up in years and years of negotiations arguing with the landowner, with the developers, with the council. It is just not how we should be delivering homes. That is not a plan-led system. The plan-led system needs to make sure that any site is allocated. You already know that there is water available, but it is not on a floodplain. There is capacity on the road, there is capacity in the school or you are going to do something about all of those things. It is really important that we programme the sites to tie in with when infrastructure will be provided. I mentioned earlier that we cannot always bring forward longer-term sites because they are longer-term for a reason. That is principally around delivery of infrastructure. It is a real issue. I am not convinced that there is enough detail in MPF4 to tell us whether that is deliverable. There is no delivery plan that we have seen yet. I know that they are waiting until they have a finalised draft of the MPF4 to create a delivery plan. It would have been really helpful even just to have a draft so that we could have seen their thinking around that. That is probably the biggest issue that I have heard from members. There is just no route map. How do we get from this document to delivering on the ground is that local authorities are very good at delivering plans. It would be great if the Scottish Government could do the same. Infrastructure is absolutely fundamental to getting the communities built that we want with all the infrastructure that they need. Show us your workings and let us see what you mean by that. I am fully supportive of an infrastructure approach in terms of delivering the quality of places that you would want. 20-minute neighbourhoods and active travel, that approach is essential. It is too early to say whether MPF4 will deliver it. I echo Nicolaus's points that, without being able to comment on the delivery plan or delivery programme, it is difficult to say. If I could mention a couple of ideas from our research that can help to deliver infrastructure on sites, we carried out research looking at how some European countries deliver housing in place making. In Germany and the Netherlands, they have mechanisms for land value capture or land value sharing that ensures that the land value from a site is used to fully recover the infrastructure costs. That is generally then built, first often by public agencies before then being handed back to developers to build out. Secondly, from our review of land for housing, we proposed the idea of a land agency to start to assemble sites and make them ready for development. This is something that Ireland has instituted. They have set up an Irish land development agency to make sites development ready, particularly on the sort of brownfield sites and towns and cities that developers might find them challenging to take on. Thanks, David. Tony Cain would like to come in on that, too. I do not think that we currently have the tools to run with a properly infrastructure land approach. I think that there is too often a delay or hold-ups in playing that. I absolutely agree with David that we need to start looking at some of the recommendations that the land commission has come forward with, thinking about how we develop those so that we can take better control of the infrastructure to the reprocess. To be fair to colleagues in the development sector, section 10 and section 75 approaches, which are pretty much embedded in the current approach, are cumbersome, time-consuming and imprecise. They are a form of taxation on the development industry, but it is not a tax that you can predict on that basis. It becomes contested. We can test the public policy objectives as a way of trading to deliver a viable site, and that seems to me to be wholly inappropriate. We need to have a serious conversation about the land value capture options, for example, and how you start to use those to deliver the incentive. Do you want to come back in with any more questions? Yes, please. Just one more question, convener. Thanks for those answers. I just wanted to touch on whether national local government structures and funding will deliver some of the outcomes that we are talking about, and whether they feel that perhaps the Government should be producing a capital investment infrastructure plan to deliver some of the issues that we talked about in that first question. We have heard about concerns about the resourcing of the planning departments, whether that is sufficient to deliver the outcomes that we would like to see delivered in the draft MPF4. Nicola Sturgeon, you would like to start. I am happy to comment on that, Mark. I have heard the evidence that has been given in previous sessions, and many others have commented on the lack of resourcing within planning departments, being a fundamental issue for delivering policy objectives of MPF4. I wholeheartedly agree that that is a massive challenge for all of us. Nobody benefits from under resourced planning departments, and it is not just the planning department. We have lost the conservation officers. Even having somebody in the education department who is able to comment on capacity of schools is a skill set that is being lost. There are so many parts of the council that have to feed into the process, and if they do not have the resources, it just slows everything down and makes delivery difficult. A capital investment plan from the national level would be hugely welcomed. I am not sure how realistic it is, but it would be hugely welcomed. I am going back to Tony Cain's point. We have been using section 75s for many years. I know that there is talk about looking at an infrastructure levy. We have seen, unfortunately, in England how the community infrastructure levy did not really work very well. We are now trying to look at another one. Let's maybe learn mistakes from other countries and try to develop things. As David said, point to other countries where they are doing things well in Ireland and see whether there is something that we can work on together in Scotland. Developers are happy to pay, as they do with section 75s already, and Scottish Government developers may have to work together to deliver what is required. The only other thing that I wanted to mention is that Scottish Government or local authorities need to remember that infrastructure often crosses the boundaries of local authorities. We used to have that middle tier of regional councils that would do a lot of that regional infrastructure delivery. We do not have any obvious mechanism for doing that now. Housing development sometimes crosses boundaries as well. We have got to be quite creative in that and not be too prescriptive that it is just a local authority or just Government and look at what is needed across maybe housing market areas that do not take account of local authority boundaries. Thank you, Nicola for that response. Tony Cain, you would like to come in on that as well. Just to agree with and reinforce what Nicola Ruth just said, the production resources across local government over the past 20 years have had an impact on a whole range of things that most folk would never notice but remain absolutely essential to be able to do the detail of that kind of work effectively. As well as seeing the resources in planning services to thin out the conservation officers going, enforcement activity fading away, those are issues. We have also lost in the world of housing the capacity to carry out housing needs surveys on a regular basis, even house condition studies. We now have almost no reliable evidence locally or nationally about the condition of the existing stock. The house condition survey that is currently run by the Scottish Government is having to aggregate three years of data to get one report each year. The sample is too small to give you regular updates on trends in house conditions. Even things like the development of play areas, for example, and how you ensure and maintain them to a high standard to make sure that they work effectively. You offer play for younger children and for teenagers in the right way and in the right locations. Those are specialist services, those are specialist activities and they almost do not exist in local government anymore. That is the consequence of what we have seen over the past 20 years. You can debate the niceties of the language, but local government has been stripped of resources and is now substantially less effective than it was two decades ago. Mark, are you complete with your questions? That brings us to the end. There were a couple more questions that we could always write to you on. One in particular was to do with the consultation process and the other one was to do with the conservation and retrofitting. We have learned that that has not really been picked up well and yet we are about to embark on a warmer homes process. I want to give a moment for, if there is anything that has not been touched on, specific improvements that we really need to hear about in this moment. That would be great, just mindful of time of course, but if there is anything that you feel like, oh yeah, I really want to convey this to you or just open that up for a moment. It was really just a very specific point just in regards to policy 9 and it is effective with the concept of high-quality homes that meat needs throughout lives. I certainly appreciate that it is a good thing to make general homes more accessible. I think that the concept is fundamentally flawed because you cannot realistically create a home that will suit everyone throughout every stage of their lives, even on the basis of the number of bedrooms. If you are a single older person living in four bed houses that I have touched on, that might not be suitable. Regardless of how accessible that home is, it probably does not fit your need as well as something else could do. I think that that needs to be reconsidered because I think that the concept is fundamentally flawed. I appreciate that level of specificity that is so helpful. Tony Akin wants to come in and then Tony Kane. Thank you. Just to say one thing about brownfield development. It has been touched on slightly, but this point has been made. I just wanted to make sure that the committee were aware of it. Brownfield development often means higher-density development, plattad development. That is welcome and re-using and repurposing those sites is sound planning, but it is also to state that that only caters for one sector of the residential property market. We are still a requirement to plan and to provide a full 10-year range Andrew Touchden housing for elderly. I would also like to emphasise the requirement for young people and young families to have houses with their front and rear garden. That is really important, but we continue to plan for that. From a Scottish property federation perspective, the requirement for brownfield development is producing in certain circumstances less employment sites. Obviously, if we are turned to residential vendors, there has to be a proper plan for future employment sites, because if brownfield land is developed for residential, which outstrips the value of an employment site, we have to make sure that those local jobs are provided and kept locally, and we have a proper plan for future employment and commercial real estate sites in plans. That should be a key plan of NPF4 as well. Thank you, Tony. Tony Cain, David Stewart and Nicola. I think that the point that I would like to make is that this plan will not make any difference in the medium or long term to the fundamental challenge that we have in our housing issues. I want to switch back to principle 2 from housing to 2040, which says that one decent home per household takes priority over second homes and investment returns on property. That is a principle that underpins the Scottish Government's approach to housing overall. I think that it is the right one, but I am not quite clear how this document supports the delivery of that principle or changes the way in which the housing system operates so that it delivers genuinely affordable homes. Thanks very much. That is clearly something that we will need to look into a bit more. David Stewart and Nicola. For sustainable, the rule of sympathetic, rural and rural planning. Sorry, David. Tonight, I am just going to interrupt. We missed, you were clipped off a little few times. If you could start again, that would be great. You want to hear everything that you have to say. Sorry, I just wanted to mention the importance of providing support for sustainable rural housing and the rule of sympathetic rural planning and development policies. One other thing, if I could, the benefits of in-depth early community engagement to delivering better places and also securing support for housing. Can you expand briefly on what you mean by that support, support for sustainable rural housing? Support in terms of, I suppose, public interest-led development to help to de-risk sites and develop feasibility studies for sites and just address some of the challenges around infrastructure. That could be a land agency, it could be support for existing bodies such as Community Saising Trust or Saisa Scotland Saising Trust. There is something that we have not touched on, which is policy 9i, which is land that is not allocated for house building will not be supported, and then this policy is an exception policy, except when such and such. I would be asking, or we will certainly be asking, that there is an additional exception included, which would be if there is no remaining land in the pipeline and the proposal satisfies site assessment criteria, then sites can be brought forward. That would actually make planning authorities have larger than minimum pipelines because if they allocate too little and it all gets built, then they'd have to release unplanned sites, so it actually could work as an incentive to them to allocate enough sites in the first place. The only final point is that policy 30c needs to be removed. Effectively, it says that it stops anything other than brownfield sites from coming forward, if not in the plan. That's too inflexible, especially going back to David's comment just now about rural. You may not have access to brownfield sites. It seems to be in a very odd place. I'm being in policy 30, but it's a policy that seems to be tucked away at the end there but could cause a lot of issues, let's put it that way. I really appreciate the opportunity to raise all these with you today. Thanks so much for that. I think that the committee could speak on behalf of them. We really appreciate it and clearly we've gone over time because we really needed to hear all the good things that you had to say. I appreciate from everyone the points of specificity. That was very helpful for us to get a clearer picture from your perspectives of what needs to be addressed as we look at the draft and take it forward. Thanks so much for being with us this morning. I always say this, but we could spend the whole day talking about these things. It's absolutely fascinating and clearly everybody wants to do well for making Scotland a better place for everyone to live. As I previously agreed, we're now going to move into private for consideration of the remainder of the items on the agenda. I now close the public part of the meeting and we will move into private.