 Good Morning. Welcome to the sixth meeting of the local government housing and planning committee in 2021. The meeting includes all members and witnesses to ensure their mobile phones are on silent and that all other notifications are turned off during the meeting, including if they are using your services, your computers. Agenda itemsters, item 1, the committee to take items 11 and 12 in private. Are we agreed? We agreed Agenda item 2 is the panel on housing and planning. The first item on our agenda today is to take evidence as part of the committee's work on priorities in session 6. We will take evidence on housing and planning matters from a round table of witnesses this morning, and I welcome to the committee Cray McLaren, the director of Scotland, Ireland and English regions Royal Town Planning Institute, Claire Simmons, chair of Planning Democracy, Stacey Dingwall, senior policy manager of the Scottish Federation of Housing Associations, Calum Jomsjuk, national director of the Chartered Institute of Housing, Eleanor Foxon, national chair of living rent, Nicola Barkley, the chief executive of Homes for Scotland and Tony Cain, policy manager from the Association of Local Authority Chief Housing Officers. Thank you all for joining us today and thank you for the information that you provided to the committee in advance of today's meetings. We will move straight to questions. Before we do that, I just want to give you a little bit of guidance around how we are going to work this. What will happen is that members will ask a question and if they remember to, they will direct their question to one or two people initially. If you want to come in on that question, please put an R in the chat box to indicate that you want to do that and we will bring you in. I just want to run through the theme so that you are aware that we have quite a mixed panel here and so it may be that some of the themes that we are covering do not necessarily pertain to your area. The first theme is housing, which will focus on tenants' rights, homelessness and housing quality. The second theme is funding and resourcing of planning departments. Theme 3 is the Scottish Government budget. Theme 4 is planning in general. Theme 5 is net zero omission homes. Theme 6 is sustainable communities and placemaking. You are aware of where we are going in our journey this morning. I invite Eleanor Wittam to start with theme 1. Thank you convener and good morning to everybody on the panel. Welcome along to this morning. Before I get started and ask my question, I would just like to refer members to my register of interests. I am still a serving councillor at the NHS. I am going to explore some issues in theme 1, which is, as Arianne said, surrounding tenants' rights, homelessness and housing quality. The first question that I would like to explore, and I will direct that to Eleanor from living rent if I can, is whether the panel agrees that tenants' rights need to be improved and what they would like to see in the Scottish Government's upcoming rented sector strategy. If I could hear from Eleanor first and then if anybody else wants to come in after that, if you put R in the chat, please. Apparently Eleanor is not there. I have just been advised that Eleanor is not with us yet, so I am going to direct that question to Tony Cain from Alachow. Tony, if you do not mind kicking off this morning. Absolutely not. Thank you very much and thank you for inviting me along on behalf of Alachow this morning. I think that our view is yes that tenants' rights need to be strengthened in a range of areas, and our submission, for example, to this predecessor committee on the 2016 act in relation to private tenants was pretty clear on that. We think that the grounds for possession are too broad. We think that the protections for tenants from unlawful eviction are ineffective largely, and we also think that students' renting from specialist providers and, indeed, their own institutions ought to have better strategy protection than they do, and the 2016 act actually stripped away the protection that a lot of tenants used to have under the previous legislation. I do not think that there is any doubt that there is a significant need to improve protections for tenants. Certainly in the private rented sector, I think that there is still work to get done to examine the way in which social landlords engage with tenants, particularly on issues around rent setting as well. Our view is that there is a substantial change yet required to bring our rented sector to a place where it would meet our ambitions, if you like, in terms of the human rights to adequate housing, particularly in relation to security. Thank you very much for that, Tony. Do we have anybody else that is indicated to come in on that one at the moment? No, okay. I'm going to move on to my second question, and I'll direct this to Stacey from SFHA, if that's okay. How have tenants been affected by the pandemic? Are you concerned about increases in arrears and potential increases in eviction action and homelessness? If so, are there any further protections that the Scottish Government needs to consider? If anybody else wants to come in after Stacey, please press R in your chat. Thank you. Thank you for inviting me along today on behalf of SFHA. Throughout the pandemic, our members have worked really hard, and closely with the Scottish Government and other partners, to make sure that their tenants are protected as much from the pandemic as they could have been through providing access and funds and distributing that on behalf of the Scottish Government. They have, as I said, really worked hard to make sure that the front of those impacts have been mitigated where possible. On rent arrears, the data that was collected by the Scottish Housing Regulator over the last 18 months has shown that, thankfully, rent arrears, what we might have thought would have happened at the start of the pandemic, the situation hasn't been as bad as we might have predicted, but we are continuing to monitor that information through the social housing resilience group as we come out of the pandemic to make sure that there is no unimpact. Our members have also, in terms of rent increases over the past year, many of those associations have grossed them or set them at lower levels than they otherwise might have, so they have been very conscious of the impact on tenants throughout the pandemic. Again, I think that we have to wait and see how things go over the coming months in terms of whether any other support needs to be provided to tenants. Thank you very much for that, and I'm hearing that Tony, you want to come in as well? Just to add a little bit to that, I think that it is the case that many tenants have struggled with rent and they face the same range of problems that everybody else has during the lockdown period, but it's not universal across the rented sectors. I think that it's absolutely clear that there are relatively few tenants in the social rented sector who now have arrears attributable solely to Covid that would put their tenancy at risk. There's an opportunity to work with those tenants who have fallen behind to secure their tenancies and get them back on tracking paying those paying their rent. It's a much more complicated picture in the private rented sector and I think that there are a substantial number of tenants who have run up significant rent arrears and we are seeing an increase in the number of private landlords looking to terminate tenants. In that context, we were very much involved in the conversations with the Scottish Government around the tenant grant fund and we welcomed that. We think that that's an important addition to the tools that we have to prevent homelessness, and our expectation is that most of those resources will be used to save private rented sector tenants rather than the social sector. Thanks very much for that, Tony. I've got Callum that wants to come in and then I think that Stacey wants to come back in. Thanks, Eleanor. The one group of tenants that I'd like to speak about are women, women in particular. The CIEH, over the past few years, worked quite closely with Scottish Women's Aid to look at the gender nature of homelessness. In the last Parliament, quite a lot of work was done in acting legislation and work independently. A group put looking at recommendations to improve the experience of women, women at risk and women experience in homelessness. From our perspective, it would be very helpful for the committee to explore how those recommendations are actually taking effect. We might be aware that legislation passed and marks this year, but it won't come in effect until the end of next year, if not two years' time, which will help to protect women and their tenants by protecting them from homelessness. Any investigation that looks at not just the policies that have been put in place, but the practice that has been developed on the ground and how women's homelessness necessities abuse policies and a whole range of measures for being close to attack to look at the gender nature of homelessness would be really welcome. Thank you very much for bringing that up. Callum, that was a question that I specifically had for you later on, but you've already brought it on to the table, so it's good that you've got it there. I might come back to you before I come to the end of my questions to explore that a little bit further. Can we go to Stacey? Did Stacey want to come back in? Thank you. Just to follow up on what Tony alluded to and his answer to the first question, I think that it's just important to make the distinction between the experience of private and social rented sector tenants, especially over the past 18 months. SPHA published a brief in a couple of months ago, which outlined all the work that our members have done and continue to do to support tenants who have incurred arrears as a result of the pandemic, and it's certainly the case that none of our members would look to affect someone. It's definitely a last resort in terms of the support that they provide to tenants before it gets to that stage. Again, it's just important to look at the two different sets of tenants and make that distinction. Thanks very much for that, Stacey. I understand that we have Eleanor from Living Rent on the call. If I can maybe direct that question and what Eleanor would perhaps like to see in the Scottish Government's forthcoming rented sector strategy for the protection of tenants as well. Eleanor, if you want to. She's not quite there yet. Okay, we'll come back to that. Sorry about that. My next question is going to be surrounding what progress was, a kind of a health check, thinking about the progress that's been made with the Ending Homelessness Together Action Plan and the implementation of councils' rapid rehousing action plans. I'm going to direct that question first off to Tony from Milatio, if you can come in about that. Marpo, do you think I missed the first part of the question? Right, I'm just looking for a health check, your sense about how we are progressing with the Ending Homelessness Together Action Plan and the rapid rehousing action plans. I think that we might need it. Okay, so we're just going to suspend the meeting briefly just to check out their technical challenges here. Yeah, I'm not sure this is my link. I'll be operating from there. Okay, can you hear me okay now? Testing, testing, nodding heads. All right. Yes, great. Good. Thank you for that. Okay, so we are going to resume if you just want to pick up with your questions. Okay, I'll try that again. Tony, I was looking for you to start us off with how you feel about the progress that's been made with the Ending Homelessness Together Action Plan and the implementation of councils' rapid rehousing action plans. I think that you have to acknowledge that the pandemic last year has certainly knocked us off of course, so we've seen over the period since March last year a significant increase in the number of people in temporary accommodation. The difficulties in preparing empty properties for reuse has held us back in housing a number of folks, so we've probably lost 20 per cent of the supply of empty properties last year as a consequence, and we are still struggling across the social sector to bring voids back into use because there are now difficulties in organising the work, in getting the workforce in place, but also in supplies and materials. So we have been held back by the pandemic, but I think that setting that aside, councils have made excellent progress in understanding what's required around rapid rehousing transition plans, in developing support and engagement frameworks for those at risk of homelessness, but also in working colleagues in the housing association sector to ensure that more homes are available for homeless people. I think that one of the big challenges remains having sufficient resources to provide support that's required, but also critically that the interface with colleagues in health, particularly services around drugs, alcohol and mental health, still isn't working fully effectively. I have again in front of the predecessor committee to this one on a number of occasions to say that there were significant issues with the effectiveness of community-based services on drugs, alcohol and mental health, and those issues largely remain in place although work is clearly under way to address that. It's still a major issue, and we haven't cracked the issues around community justice and those associated with homelessness arising from liberation, from custody, either from prison or from remand offentance, or indeed from police custody on occasion. So the understanding of the issues is good, some of the joint work he has improved, some of the gaps remain as they were, but the commitment to the sector and, I think, increasingly the commitment to colleagues in the housing association sector remains strong. Everybody understands that ending homelessness should be a priority for us. Thanks very much for that, Tony. You have brought in the RSL sector in housing association. If we could hear from Stacey perhaps on SFHA's perspective on how they play a partnership role in the ending homelessness together action plan. Thank you. I would support a lot of what Tony said. Over the course of the last 18 months, there has been a real commitment to provide as many homes as we can. It's not been easy, just in terms of the issues that Tony has highlighted in terms of turning around void properties. Particularly at the beginning of the year, there were a lot of issues in terms of work. We had to work with the energy suppliers through the social housing resilience group, because there was a bit of a hold-up in terms of properties being made available because of that. When we are beginning to see the real impact of issues with access to the supply chain, access to materials and labour, that is having a real impact in terms of being able to bring the houses up to the quality in order to let them out to people who need them. It's just a real shame at the moment that things are having an impact on people being able to get into the homes that they need. We see ourselves having a strong role at that table. We have quite a lot of links, not just with councils but with homelessness partners as well. SFHA has two partnerships there, particularly in terms of housing first, in order that we can work with our members to make available more properties through housing first. Thank you very much for that. I'm going to hand back over to the convener, because my time is up now. Thank you. Thank you, Elena. Now we're going to move on to our second theme, which is funding and resourcing of planning departments, and I invite Miles to start us off with that. Thank you, convener, and good morning to the panel. During the evidence that we've been taking, we've heard unanimously from the views that we've sought around our planning departments not necessarily being in a good place. We've heard that nearly a third of planning departments have seen staff cuts since 2009. We've seen diminishing in real terms by 42 per cent over that period. I wanted to ask the panel, in your opinion, how do you think that planning departments are currently functioning in Scotland and what needs to be done to tackle some of the challenges? I might start with Nicola Barclay, then Craig McLaren, and if anyone wanted to put an R in the chat, I'd bring you in after that. Thank you very much. Again, thank you for letting me come and speak to the panel today. Miles, you hit on a really challenging problem that we have. I'm obviously here representing the house building industry, one of the largest customers of the planning system, and we have seen a real challenge getting consent through the system, not just planning departments also building control roads offices. Planning is part of a system, but the planning professionals themselves pursuing those consents have been really struggling. Through Covid, a lot of them were moved off to do other work to support their colleagues, but if the aspiration of the country is to increase the supply of new homes, which is a very clear it is, we need to make sure that the planning departments are well resourced. It's not just about making sure that those people who are currently in post stay there, but we need to be attracting more people into the industry, more people into this profession. I'm sure that Craig will have more detail on what universities can be doing or are doing to encourage more people into this really fundamental profession, to make sure that we've got a pipeline of talent coming through. In terms of cost, yes, we have an issue where we pay significant money for planning applications, but that money is not automatically ring-fenced to deliver the service. Entals need to use that money for other things, and they will do so. I think that that's a real challenge for local authorities when they have tight budgets. I do best use that money, but I do fundamentally believe that planning fees should be ring-fenced for delivering the service that customers effectively are paying for. Thank you. Thank you for that, Nicola. Craig, do you want to come in on that and then not be followed by Clare and Callum? Thank you very much. I thank the committee for inviting me to come along today, on behalf of our TPI. I think that you've had a very, very key issue. I think that our planning departments are in a very precarious position just now, verging on a crisis, to be honest with you. You've heard the figures. I think that we've seen over the last, since 2009, certainly since we've been tracking resourcing, the real decrease in the amount of staff applying departments and the budgets, which they have as well. It also seems to be the department that is taking the biggest hit through this period in terms of budgets. It's something that needs to be addressed specifically towards planning. I think that the issue that we have here is not just what we are just now, with the reductions that we've seen in staff and budgets, but also what's coming down the line. The 2019 planning act contains a number of new duties that will have to be taken up by planning authorities. A very large majority of them are unfunded. Research we've undertaken has shown that that could lead to a need for between £12 million and £59 million. We've also seen research that was commissioned by skilled development Scotland saying that with all the demands that will be put on planners in the next 10 to 15 years, things around tackling zero carbon, trying to reach zero carbon targets around implementing the planning act and all the different things that have to be done to ensure that we get more housing in place, it's shown that there's a demand for at least another 700 planners over the next 10 to 15 years as well. That's an additional, not just catching up, what we've got already. There's a demand that is growing as well for new planners. There's a need to try and think about how we resource assistance just now by seeing how fees can be reinvested within the system. There's a need to try and make sure that we have planning fees that cover the costs of undertaking the processing of planning applications currently just now. There's only covered about £2,000 of costs. I need to start to think about how, as Nicola said, we can make sure that we promote planning as a career. We get people into it and we have been trying that for a number of years. I think that there's something that we do at a national level to try and make sure that planning and planners, as soon as an attractive career option, and that there are different routes into the profession, will be keen to explore the idea of a planning apprenticeship, for example. It's quite long to be done. There's quite an issue to be faced here and now, but also in the future. Hello, panel, and thanks for inviting me to give evidence today. Yes, I guess the impact of funding cuts is that planning authorities tend to end up doing just what's required of them by law. To be honest, that's a little bit limited. The real casualties are our community engagement and enforcement. One of the big things that we see in the planning democracy mailbag is the lack of enforcement of conditions. Conditions minimise negative impacts of development on communities and on the environment, but regularly we're hearing that they're not being ignored sometimes with impunity. Developers know that planning conditions are often not enforced and I think that that doesn't help. Conditions are a way of building trust with the communities. They show that the system can respond to their concerns and is prepared to alleviate some of the impact. If they don't get enforced, that sends a very negative message to the community. I think that some research has been done on this by the University of the West of England into the lack of monitoring of compliance or conditions, so I'll send that to the panel if you wish. The second mailbag issue for planning democracy is the poor quality of environmental reports and ecology reports. Funding for planning needs to take into account the related services such as ecological expertise, particularly if you're going to achieve the biodiversity net gain targets that are now required as an outcome of national planning framework for. We know that planning departments and planners have been cut, but local government ecologists have been cut. Research has shown that that leads to variable and often poor quality ecological reports being received by planners. Our anecdotal evidence packs this up. We've got examples where communities put in phenomenal effort and have found that important habitats and species are present but haven't been recorded. This could be priority habitats and so on and impacts on tripless eyes downstream and schedule monuments and have been absent from reports provided by developers. Importantly, carbon-rich soils identified by community ecologists haven't made their way into the developer's report. All this leaves communities fighting a rearguard action of multiple failings beyond their control. It strikes us as a bit mad that most of the current expertise that feeds into planning decisions is provided by the applicant, but the in-house capacity to interpret and scrutinise those reports is lacking. There is a huge frustration and anger in communities. On a more positive note, work is being done on biodiversity net gain, the methodology around that and the Scottish Nature Network, which is proposed as one of the national developments. That is clearly going to require more resources—about 100 jobs and over 32 local authorities are required. Those are the kind of jobs that we want. This is about greening of the economy and a green recovery, so that is really important. Two more things that I would like to mention. One is about funding for public-led planning. We are hoping to see a bit more public-led planning in the national planning framework in order to help to deliver on affordable housing targets. That needs to be properly funded, and my final comment on meeting some of the resource issues through fee increases. As Nicola said, in this world that we are in now, the chief customer is seen to be the developer, and it leaves the community stakeholders behind. If you are going to get all your funding from fee increases, you have to consider where that is going, because there will be an expectation that the system works better for the developers rather than communities. Maybe it is about finding alternative sources of funding for those kinds of services. Thank you, Claire. Let's move to Calum, and then Craig wants to come back in. Thank you. I was just in response to Miles's question. I wonder if we could just broaden it out a little bit. Although I think that we are absolutely right to folks about planning, the housing sector at large has a—we need to look at the kind of professionalism, the education succession plan across the entire housing sector. As Nicola said, we don't want to look at one profession as narrowness. When we have a hugely ambitious agenda around housing in 2020-40, which I know that the committee will consider, I think that what is missing from that ambition that is there and that is a really welcome ambition is the focus on the people who are delivering it and the people who are going to be building the homes, the people who are going to be managing the services, the housing professionals that we are going to need to deliver on this 20-year strategy. We don't have clear pipelines for people in the housing sector, either from college, necessarily college school, university or out of the other sectors. We know that we have an ageing profession as well. How are we going to manage that? Who will meet the ambitions of housing in 2020-40? How are we going to manage that? Having a more proactive relationship with the Government and the skills development and the sector, we have to instrumental in delivering on the ambitions of housing in 2020-40. I would implore the committee to reflect on that as well as looking at the considerations of the planning department, which are absolutely worthy as well. Thank you, Calum. That's a very good point. Yes, we are wondering ourselves. If Cree wants to come back in and then Nicola. Yes, thanks, thanks, convener. I just wanted to follow up something that Claire had said around public light planning. I think that one of the most surprised by the planning act was the idea of having local police plans, which was a really, really, really good way of trying to make sure that communities can be involved in a very positive and constructive way about how they can shape the future of their place or the town or city that their neighbourhood is within. They could be really interesting and quite game changing, I think. One of the issues that we have with that is that there are no resources allocated to make sure that those are funded properly. The communities are given the money to take that forward so that they can work with planning professionals and others to look at what the opportunities of that area are. Also, the constraints are to try and build that vision for what that place looks like and then that route map to try and make sure that that happens. That's a big ask. If there's no resource pushed towards that, it could be something that means that we don't manage to get that more community-led, community-involved planning, which I think we all want. I just wanted to come back on something that Claire said about the reports that developers submit with their planning applications. That is a legal requirement for them to do so. They are equally frustrated that the councils, when they receive the reports, often don't actually have the skills in house to be able to reflect on them and then respond. What unfortunately happens is that those planning applications just get parked. They sit and they are delayed for months on end because nobody has the skillset to make a decision with the information in front of them. We also have to remember that the planning officers within a council are not making decisions in isolation of their other colleagues. They rely on people within the education department to tell them what school capacity is like. Education departments have been struggling to cope with those requests internally when they have other pulls on their time. Roads departments have to provide a road construction consent. If they haven't had the opportunity to comment on an application when it is live, by the time they get to do their road construction consent, they often are not happy with the layout. They are asking developers to go back and change the layout to do their own requirements. We have to remember that we need a joined-up approach within councils. They have to be well resourced and have an attitude of wanting to help each other to get their jobs done, whether it is to help your planning colleague, whether it is to help the roads departments to bring them all in. We have seen some great examples within local councils where they have pre-application sessions with the developer, with all those people around the table. Those applications tend to come through the system smoothly, as you would expect. Unfortunately, that is not happening right across the country with each council. There is going to be a lot of pressure on planning departments over the next 10 years, and it would be good at this point to set a good course and make sure that they are well resourced. I believe that Eleanor McLean would like to come in on that as well. Thank you for inviting me in the living room to give evidence before the committee. I would like to reiterate a point that was made by Claire Simmons earlier around the lack of democratic engagement in the planning process from the communities that a lot of those projects involve. A lot of our members in the union have experienced a lack of concern for how development plans in communities affect those living there. We are hopefully going to approach a fair transition into a greener system that will involve big infrastructure and household projects. It is essential that community interests are at the heart of those projects. We also think that community interests have to be prioritised over developers' interests, as we are in the long-term trying to build sustainable infrastructure for the communities that will live there. The small points with big impact are the consequences of poor planning outcomes. Is there a real cost to society? We just have to look at the downstream impacts of poor planning decisions and poor planning. It affects so much our climate, biodiversity, health, wellbeing, infrastructure stresses and so on. Funding planning is money well spent. Also, a quick follow-up to Eleanor's point on community engagement. Without resources, community engagement is always going to be a bit rubbish. It is 50 years since the Skeffington report on public engagement in planning, and we have made very little progress on that. That is hardly surprising, because it has not been funded and prioritised. I think that the great point about local place plans is that they will only be worse if the officers with the required expertise—community development skills and stuff like that—needs to be funded. That was a quick exploration of that theme around funding and resources in the planning departments. We are going to move on to sticking with funding. We are going to talk a bit about the Scottish Government budget for building affordable housing, and I am going to bring Paul McClellan in for that. Thank you, convener, and good morning panel. I just refer everyone to my register of interest in the Stam Stirling Existing councillor on East Lothian Council. The convener mentioned that we are moving on to the theme around the budget. We know that there are cost pressures coming through now on building new homes, particularly in the past few months. The question is about how adequate are the recently reviewed Scottish Government grant subsidy of benchmarks to allow social landlords to build new homes at affordable rents, and I will probably ask Stacey, Tony and probably Nicola to come in just after that, if that is okay just to address that point. Yes, thank you. Stacey was pleased to be a part of the working group, which reviewed the benchmarks earlier this year. There is a lot of discussion into that, and there is a lot of evidence that is submitted by ourselves and other partners in the group, particularly on the point that you have raised there around the increase in costs that developing social landlords are seeing. In advance of the group, Stacey published some research that found that, on average, the cost of building a house had increased by about £20,000 in the past five years. That research was carried out in February and March. Unfortunately, we are hearing every day from members now that those costs are only increasing much more rapidly than they have in the past five years, so we continue to collect and submit that to the Government for review. We were pleased in advance of that working group with the £3.4 billion investment to afford a housing supply over the next five years, which is what we asked for in other research that we carried out with CIH in Shelter Scotland. However, the issue that we have now is that, with one of the key aims of the Scottish Government of the review, it was for the majority of projects to come in at or below the benchmarks that were set within the group. Unfortunately, I think that, despite the evidence that we and others have submitted of what we believe that the benchmarks should be at the rate that they have currently been set at, we just have real concern whether that target will be met in the face of the increase in costs that we have seen just now. In terms of whether it will have an impact on the ability to meet the 110,000 target that we now have, we are just real concerns that there will not be enough investment in order to meet that target and provide the homes that we know that people desperately need in the country. Stacey, just as I said, it is over the next five years and I suppose it is what is going to come forward in the next five years. It is 110,000. It is not going to be almost like the 22,000 each of those years. Do you see that being impacted at all? I suppose that that is the only key thing of there are cost pressures coming through now. If we are behind in the first year, then the delivery for the next number of years after that is going to increase, it is going to come in difficult. Are you seeing issues in the next year, two years, which will obviously then be proved difficult in the latter years to deliver that 110,000 and almost plain catch-up, if you like? I think that that is the real concern that we are behind just now. Obviously, the previous programme is the role of the pandemic. In terms of some of the work that is collecting evidence of the individual components that our members have seen cost increases in, it is up to 100 per cent, I think, for some timber delays of 12 weeks. That is changing and increasing every day, unfortunately, so it is really hard to predict obviously at the moment in terms of where that is going to go, but it is not looking good. Let us just say that. I suppose that it is just the same question to Tony, and Nicollin might open it up after that, but Tony yourself is just the same question. I think that it is more complicated than just the benchmark system. We have gone through a very complicated process to review the benchmarks and what is included in them. Some of it is new, so what does it cost to install a fire suppression system, for example? Are we clear what it is going to cost over and above a gas boiler, for example, to install heat pumps? My concern is not that the benchmarks themselves are inadequate, though they may be. That will come out as we work through the process. My concern also is not that the Scottish Government has not made a substantial financial commitment to new social and affordable housing, because £3.4 billion by anybody's standards is a great deal of money. My concern is that we have not made any effort to understand what the investment capacity of housing associations and councils is. We have a 10-year old report, a 12-year old report, and that was the last time that was looked at in detail. The target, which is now 110,000, has been set entirely in a vacuum without any understanding of what that implication will be for the capacity of landlords to invest in other areas or the likely impact on rents. Rents in the social sector have been rising ahead of inflation for 40 years, but for the past 20 years, in order to deliver a fairly substantial investment programme around the condition of existing stock but also new supply. My concern is more that it now costs something in the order of £180,000 to £200,000 in mainland Scotland to build a new social rented property. It costs well over £200,000 in remote rural and island communities, but £270,000 is not unusual in our island communities. The overall budget is just not sufficient to deliver the number of homes that the Scottish Government is seeking the sector to deliver and to stay with affordable rents. The system allows councils and housing associations to ask for the amount of money that they need in order to ensure that rents remain affordable. Up until this year, council tenants, because their tenants pay the balance of this, have been paying 68 per cent of the cost of a new home. 45 per cent will be the equivalent in the social housing sector. That will change. That percentage will have to go down. That means that the call per house on the budget from the Scottish Government is going to go up. Our chances of delivering 110,000 homes on this financial commitment within affordable rents over 10 years or 55,000 over the next five are modest. I am not overbothered about that in the sense that the Scottish Government has made a big commitment and the sector will deliver as many houses as can be reasonably delivered within that. However, what we have not done is made a realistic appraisal of what we think is an affordable rent and what direction rents should be going in, what it costs to build a home and what the capacity of the sector is to deliver. My expectation is that we will get nowhere near 55,000 affordable homes in the next five years, 75 per cent at 75 per cent for the social sector, off the back of and retain affordable rents. My worry is that some landlords will be over-enthusiastic and will lose sight of the affordability question. I think that that is our bigger risk. However, there is no complaint in the sector about the scale of the commitment that the Scottish Government has made. We just need to be realistic about what it is going to cost and how much of that can be re-established by tenants in the social housing sector. Nicola, you have a slightly different slant with yourself. You and members deliver a large number of housing and there is an affordable element in that, so it is coming from a slightly different element from yourself. 25 per cent of nothing would be nothing. It is then looking for you and members to develop housing as quickly as we can to get that affordable element. I suppose that it is the same question to yourself, obviously, about the cost of house. I know that you have mentioned this before. The cost of building has gone up massively in the last number of months, particularly since Brexit. However, it is also, obviously, in the benchmarking. It is probably just coming from a slightly different slant from yourself, so it is the same question. I am happy to come at a slightly different slant. I know that Tony and Stacey are very close to the rents and the financial implications to the RSLs and to the councils on this. If I am coming at it from the supply side, who is going to be building these homes? It is mainly our members, whether they are doing it as part of their section 75 obligations or they are doing it as contractors as well. Many of our members have got contracting arms that are delivering these affordable homes. What I am hearing directly from them is that they are walking away from deals that they had previously done because they cannot afford to build them. The cost to deliver has just risen so high and there is nowhere to get that money back. This is before we even talk about the change in building regulations, which are coming down the line to meet the net zero targets. This is today's standards that we are trying to build to. The cost of materials, the lack of skills, the combination of demand across the whole of the country, but the same short supply of materials is just pushing prices up. It is a really dangerous position that we are in that we have contractors who are looking for work, who want to keep their staff employed, who are having to walk away from sites before they even put a spade in the ground because they just know that this development is under water before we even begin. That is not a way to run any business. I have real concerns about whether we can achieve the affordable housing target at all. Everybody wants to do that, but we need to find a way of doing it. Are you hearing from your members that these are longer term? I think that there are issues around a bit of Brexit and spline. I have met some of your members and they have said the same thing. Do you see that this is a longer term issue or is it something that you think is teething problems or is it beyond that? Is this going to be for the foreseeable future? I think that this is sustained. When prices go up, they very rarely come back down again. We see it on the four courts. The prices go up very quickly when the oil price goes up. It takes a long time to come down and when the oil price comes down, it is going to be the same across the supply chain, whether it is cement, timber or plastics. There is worldwide demand for these raw materials. If you are controlling that supply, you are going to push your prices up because that makes business sense and we have no control over that. Unfortunately, I am not sure that the Scottish Government has much control over that either, as much as we would like you to. I don't know if anybody else has one to come in on that one, but I'll bring in the second question. Eleanor Wood would like to come in. Eleanor Wood, would you like to? Yes, thank you. Living on would our kind of answer. We believe obviously that there is a need for a crucial and necessary transition in housing. I think that we think that this needs to grasp both in a new build and refurbishment of existing houses. We really want to stress that only increasing supply of affordable housing cannot solve the current housing crisis. It also needs to include refurbishment of the existing housing stock. Like speakers that have gone before me, we also have concerns about the budget. I set aside for the affordable housing programme while we have welcomed the effort and the commitment to build more social and affordable housing. We are concerned that the cost of that might transfer on to tenants in terms of rent increases. A lot of people do not have enough money to pay rent in a lot of cases to fund a just transition towards a greener housing stock. We are also concerned about the way that affordable housing is sometimes used as a blanketure to include a lot of housing options that do not tend to be genuinely affordable for people on the ground, such as mid-market rent. We want to see more houses benchmarks specifically to our council or social housing. We also want to emphasise that that was it for me, thank you. Thank you very much for those contributions. Thank you. First, I want to take back up what Nicola Sturgeon is saying. She is absolutely right. Developers are reticent to build. Landlords are reticent to build, but we are building costs right now. I know a number of constitutional landlords who are hedging their way to hoping to next year to building costs. The core costs will come down, but Nicola Sturgeon is absolutely right. We have no guarantee that there is a hope, but not an expectation that that will be affordable. If we continue to delay building because there is enough time, that is going to be more affordable. We are going to find it very difficult to catch up and build 110,000 affordable homes by 2032. Another substantial point that I want to make is that the homes are getting more expensive because we have increasing expectations and standards on homes. It is important that we should not look at that as a bad thing. That is imposit. We want to see what energy efficient homes are. We want to see greater space standards. We want to have more digital connectivity. We want to have housing for various needs so that people can live like them. Those are really, really positive, so we should not look at those as a negative facing sector. It is just a bit of the balance of where all those things are paid for. Whether this comes from tenant trends, whether we are going to see tenants being pushed into increasing affordability, or whether the money comes from the state. Ultimately, that is the choice for politicians to make about where that comes from. The direction of travel is correct. We should see increasing standards in the entire venti sector. The Government's approach to a whole venti sector strategy leans in that direction. Let us be positive about the new standards that we are seeing and that we are looking to develop for the venti sector, but let us also need to reflect on the good advance that comes from it. We have seen tenants being more and more, and social rents have taken over the past few years. That will only increase unless we see an increase of £3.5 billion from the Government. We are going to move on to explore our fourth theme, which is planning. It is around the national planning framework 4 and local place plans, which we have already touched on a little bit. The upcoming national planning framework 4 is a vital opportunity to underpin and encourage public-led planning that benefits people and the planet and ensure that national development fulfil climate biodiversity criteria. I realise that it might be difficult to answer without having seen a draft, but I am interested to hear whether there are any policy areas or aspects that you would expect to see in the national planning framework 4, which you think will merit particular parliamentary scrutiny. I would like to direct the question to Craig and then Claire. I wholeheartedly agree with you that the national planning, the fourth national planning framework, is a real opportunity. It should be seen as a document that can be a game changer, which should be transformational in how we live our lives. On the issues that we should be tackling, from what we have seen so far from the Scottish Government, there are some good noises coming out. I would like to direct the travel, particularly around using planning and the national planning framework as part of the green recovery, about the importance of embedding net zero into the planning decision-making process and using the national planning framework to do that. There are issues around health inequalities, active travel and issues that are quite strong in the drafts and the consultation documents that we have seen so far. As part of that, we have been saying that one of the things that we should be doing is trying to make sure that the national planning framework embeds a new purpose of planning about being in the long-term public interest, which should be the starting point for it. There are issues about the process for the national planning framework and the delivery that we need to look at. On the process and positioning, we think that the national planning framework should be seen as much more of a corporate document than the Scottish Government, a much more influential document, which is at the heart of the decision-making process and policy in terms of investment. We have been calling it a First Minister's document. We have seen that work in other countries, such as Ireland, where the T-shock has led on. That has been a clear link to the Treasury. The idea of having an influential document is really quite important. That relies on the national planning framework policy element being very clear and providing strong policy direction and trying to minimise any opportunities for wriggling out of different things, but trying to make sure that we get a clear idea of what is required and what should be done. The other thing that is really important about the national planning framework is that we need to shift it from being a document that is essentially about a vision to a document that is yes about a vision but also about how we deliver that vision. We have been arguing for the need to link the vision of the national planning framework into a capital investment programme to do this again in Ireland with the national planning framework, where we have got 20-year vision for the national planning framework and a 10-year capital investment programme attached to it. Therefore, put your money in your mouth, so to speak, so that idea of vision and delivery coming together is incredibly important. We need that strength of policy, we need that delivery if we are going to try to tackle the big-ticket issues that the national planning framework can look at, as I mentioned earlier, such as zero carbon and the viewing recovery. Where do you start? I could say a lot about the national planning framework. Partly this is because we are part of the planning democracy, part of the Scottish Community Alliance, and we have had workshops around the national planning framework because we see how important it is. I am also convener of the Scottish Environment and Link planning group. We have had several workshops around it and talked a lot about it. If I can provide the committee with our the link position statement response, which was quite a comprehensive document. The language needs to be clear about what we want to achieve. In the past, it has very much been framed around development, enabling and sustaining economic growth, and planning has been seen as a means of delivering government economic strategies. However, if we are going to move to a wellbeing economy or a green recovery, we need to decouple from this old language of growth. However, you embellish it with terms and adjectives around sustainability and inclusivity, it is still a growth model, and we need to accept that constant growth is just not possible on a finite planet. If we are going to deliver on net zero, we need to demonstrate clear progress on wellbeing targets, not growth targets. We have seen a trend where, increasingly, any development has become synonymous with the public interest because it contributes to growth, but not every development that contributes to growth is in the public interest. We need to meet strict criteria for development to be in the public interest and be prepared to say no to development that is not. Commitments to climate and biodiversity net gain are all hinged around difficult decisions on this, and it will be difficult. Currently, we have a system of allocating land for housing that is remarkably inefficient. We are expecting a lot of our housing to be delivered by the private sector, which is where the public-led planning is coming in now. We are hoping to see a lot on public-led planning in the document because that allows a more targeted use of land, which is much more efficient and much more climate-friendly. We will enable planning authorities to deliver on affordable housing, as Craig was saying. It needs to be a delivery document. We welcome the proposed Edinburgh City plan, because that shows the problems about delivering on affordable housing—about 60 per cent target—and how difficult it is going to find that to achieve, even when they are going to allocate lots of land for housing. The city plan allocates more land than the combined requirement for markets and affordable housing to allow affordable housing to be provided through the delivery of market housing. What the city plan is saying is that less land would be required if we are not solely relying on the public sector to deliver it. Public-led planning is much more proactive. It allows planners to determine what sites are best and the most sustainable sites. It offers a much more democratic model, which will fulfil commitments to placemaking. We welcome stuff on that. If you will give me a minute, I also want to talk about five-year effective housing land policies. There is currently a massive complexity around the area. The language around housing land policies is utterly impenetrable to communities. We need to swallow a dictionary in terms of housing supply targets, housing land requirements, presumptions in favour of development that contribute to sustainable development. It is a bit nut. We have even had to write a guide, which is 40 pages long, to explain to communities this one particular policy area. The language, calculations and details are driven by the fact that the development industry absolutely benefits from it being so complex. The litigation on five-year housing supply by the development industry is massive over the past five years. It requires detailed knowledge that only a handful of lawyers can understand. Even the Scottish Government has had to be careful in the wording of its policies on five-year effective housing land supply. As we have seen in the recent mischief created by the Serial Court challenges to Scottish planning policies on housing by developers, even despite that careful wording, the Government still lost the most recent challenge. We think that this problem can be resolved by the change in approach to housing land allocation and through a public land planning approach. There is no problem providing land for the market demand, but what we are not doing is providing land for outwith the market. We need to allocate land for just social housing. We need to allocate land for affordable housing, community-led housing, self-build and co-operative housing, rather than housing as a whole. Finally, have I got a minute just on local place plans? Okay, I was going to do a supplementary on local place plans, so yes. Okay, I'll come back to you on local place plans. No, if you just go ahead. I just wanted to say that local place plans put enormous responsibilities on community shoulders, but this should be accompanied by rights. If they are going to spend so much effort drawing up local place plans, you have to provide some sort of assurances for communities that they cannot be undermined by speculative developments that are not in the plans and not in the public interests. We want communities to be empowered. They need to be able to trigger public interest tests, and they should be given a right of appeal. We are still asking for a right of appeal for planning decisions that go against democratically agreed local place plans. Just a quick word on nature networks. As a national development—I said that, I haven't got to say—national nature network is a national development, so please welcome your support for that. Thank you, Clare. We are going to move on to our next theme just in the interest of time. You see that we could spend a whole day or a week together with all of these conversations. The next theme that we are going to pick up on is net zero emissions, and I am going to bring in Mark Griffin, I hope, if he is online, our committee member. Mark, are you there? Great. Okay. I want to touch on the theme of net zero, and I can ask a broad question to the members of the panel that are joining us this morning, just to ask the views on the adequacy of the Scottish Government's plan to meet the net zero carbon emission target, and perhaps a more specific question, as we are looking at targets to remove carbon emissions from heating systems by 2025. Just what can a certainty the sector have, because some of the sites that have been identified for purchase and development right now as we enter 2022 will need to be the sites that have zero emission heating systems plans right now? I do not know, perhaps I could direct that question firstly to Nicola Barclay. Mark Griffin, happy to answer that question. This is something that we are working actively on just now, is building standards consultation on section 6. The consultation is open until the end of October. We are working with members to make sure that we put in a really helpful response to this really important topic of net zero. We have known for a while that we will be moving towards SOT pumps or other non-gas heating systems in homes, and the industry is working towards that. In fact, many of our members are already putting in alternative supplies of heat to the homes that they are constructing today. The concerns that we have—I do not want to pre-empt our response, and I am happy to share our response to the consultation with the committee once it has been finalised—but the main issues that we have is that there is a supplementary step change being proposed, which will come into effect next year. It is a step in the journey towards net zero, which means that fundamentally we have two large changes to building regulations in the space of four years. It is very difficult when you are buying land for a three to five-year build programme. How are you appraising your land now if you do not know what standards you will be building to and how much that will cost to build each house? There are a lot of interesting issues arising just because of the timescales. One of the other things for the record is that we rely on software that calculates the sap ratings of homes. There are technical issues with the software that we are currently trying to grapple with, along with building standards, but we need to have a system in place to deliver those homes. We need software that works, we need a supply chain that can supply enough air source heat pumps for all the homes that we hope to be building, and we also need to have people trained up to maintain and fit this new style of equipment. We also need consumers to understand what this equipment is, how it heats their homes slightly differently than a gas boiler that many of us are used to. There are a number of dominoes in effect that we need to knock down in order to get to that net zero. I have concerns just now that many of those things are still challenges that we have not yet been able to overcome. As I say, we are working with building standards. I sit on their resilience group, and we are really keen that the industry works with Government to get to those net zero targets, but in a way that is deliverable for everybody and brings a supply chain, brings the consumers along with us. I want to make the point that we need to, although the housing unit is a really important part of this, one of the things that has been missing certainly at the last version of the climate action plan that I saw was the recognition of how we need to try to change how we use our places and how we design our places. The building environment has an enormous impact on how we travel and transport battles. We need to try to factor that into that and make most of that. The last version of the climate action plan that I saw is only a page on planning in place. There is a real demand there, but the transport emissions are a significant part of our emissions. We are really trying to see how we can make that work and make that much more important. I call for that, and as part of that, I thank the discussion around the national planning framework. I think that that means that we need to rely on some really strong policies that give confidence to planners, councillors and reporters in the Department of Planning and Environmental Appeals to make those decisions from a backed up and taking that all forward as well. Perhaps it makes me think that there is one thing that we need to think about as well as measuring the success of planning tends to focus now quickly on the process of planning application. In many ways, that is important, but given the particular demands of zero carbon, we perhaps need to think more about how we measure the success of planning by outcomes that we achieve on the ground between zero carbon and sustainable places as well. I am not sure who is doing the leading there. Calam wants to come in, Stacey and then Tony, and then we will have to move on to the next theme. I just want to make a quick point about it. I am absolutely sure that the homes of the next generation are built to a net zero standard, but the big challenge is going to be a resistant stock. In 20 years time, the stock that we see today is going to be the majority of the stock that we still have. The challenge is how do we fund that? How do we ensure that less so much in the social sector, for instance when the private housing sector both owner occupiers and private landlords, how do we ensure that we are getting funding to them? That is a tricky discussion and decision about how we will leave our money to someone who helps to increase the value of their own home, but that is the decision that the Government is going to have to face. We need to see that the entire housing stock, particularly private housing stock, improves its energy efficiency. If we do not particularly private rent sector, the likelihood would be increased in tenant rents. We have already talked about that, like a new standard. There is a point where we will have to leverage significant investment into private housing to ensure that we are improving that stock, as well as looking at the new stock. The fundamental challenge will be on the existing stock that is there to ensure that that reaches net zero. That is a great point. Stacey and then Tony. Thank you. I point the committee towards the report of the zero emissions and social housing task force, which is very co-chaired. The report was published last month and looked at not only the issues and concerns for our sector in terms of net zero, but also looking to start to chart some recommendations on our route map towards meeting the targets. Some of the key concerns that we did discuss in the group were touched on by Calums. The social housing sector has always been held to higher standards in terms of energy efficiency and, as a result, the homes in the sector are much higher standard in the other parts of the sector. Obviously, it is welcome that housing to 2040 is starting to move towards an all-tenure approach in this area, but there is quite a bit to go. It cannot be that even if the social housing sector continues to meet those targets, we are a small part of the overall housing system, so we really need to focus the efforts in the other parts of the sector that are still a bit behind. Nicola touched on the SAP software that she used. Similarly, one of the biggest concerns for our members, which is reflected in the report of Zest, is around the second energy efficiency standard for social housing, each two. The standard has been about a concern for our members for quite a few years in terms of whether it is the right thing to do. We published research and partnership with Changeworks earlier this year, which found that, even if our members invested the sum that would take for the sector to meet each two, which comes at a price tag of £2 billion, that investment would only reduce in a 9 per cent reduction in fuel poverty levels for tenants, which, by anyone's standards, is not a great return on investment. Members are being asked to make that investment, as well as the investment required for new supply. It is quite a heavy price tag for the sector to carry that alone. One of the key recommendations for Zest would be to bring forward, even sooner, the Scottish Government Committee to bring forward the review of each two to 2023, but we think that that is just still even too far away. We would call on the Government to urgently review that as soon as we can, so that the sector is clearer on what we are working towards and that we can all be confident that it is the right thing that we are working towards in terms of being able to meet those targets. I think that there are a couple of contexts for this part of the conversation, one of which is that we are told of climate emergency and the second one is that our ambition is for a just transition that nobody should be left behind. With those two points in mind, I would say that I point out that the private sector is going to be building houses that require to be retrofitted to meet the net zero standard for the next five years. The social sector will effectively be building net zero homes universally from next year, so we need to be clear that if this is an emergency and it is a just transition, then what do we mean by that? I think that the other point is to pick up on the Calum's point about the retrofit agenda, which is the absolute centre of that. It is where the great costs are. Our estimate is that in the local authority sector, retrofitting the existing stock is going to cost something in the order of £5 billion. That is the equivalent of everything that the sector has spent on capital investment for the past decade and leaves no space for other investment programmes and puts a serious question mark over the ability to deliver affordable rents. The Scottish Government has not yet done sufficient to understand the implications of the net zero retrofit agenda. It certainly hasn't allocated enough resources to do it without putting an unbearable burden on the rents of social housing tenants. We haven't got any metrics on what we mean by a just transition, but we also have a huge focus on the social rented sector, which at best probably accounts for about 2 per cent of all Scotland's carbon emissions. We do not have a zero carbon transition for transport. We do not have a zero carbon transition for agriculture. We do not have a zero carbon transition programme for industry, but we have one for the homes of the poorest people in this country who are not going to be required largely to pay for that transition. I think that there are serious gaps in the approach that has been taken. Serious risks both in terms of fuel poverty and rent affordability for people in the social rented sector, but also a fundamental misunderstanding about what's being involved. For many tenants, this will require substantial changes to their homes. It's not just a matter of swapping out the gas boil over a heat pump. You're going to have to put hot water storage back into homes, where this has been removed for 20 years. It'll mean reorganising kitchens. In some cases, it means changing layouts. It means losing storage. It means a heating system that functions in a very different way. I think that people have simply underestimated the scale of the disruption that tenants are facing off the back of this. As a consequence, they don't really understand what they mean by a just transition. If we get this wrong, this will be an attack on the poor in Scotland. At the moment, I think that there is a real risk that we'll get this wrong. Thank you for that, Tony. That's a very powerful framing of the situation that we're in. It's good to get that perspective. We're going to move on to our final theme. I'm going to bring Megan in for that. That is sustainable communities and placemaking. Megan, you're there great. Good morning, committee and panel. I also refer to my register of interests. I'm a serving councillor in North Lanarkshire. I'll also try and get through this. I've got a sore throat this morning, so I'll try and get through this without losing my voice. If I could focus on 20-minute neighbourhoods, please. I would like to hear the panel's views on the practicality of 20-minute neighbourhoods, especially when looking at more rural communities. If I could start with Craig McLaren, please. Thank you. 20-minute neighbourhoods is an opportunity to try and think about how we can create more sustainable communities. We need to get beyond the sub-rhetoric, which is out there just now. The name is quite useful, because it gets people to realise the importance of having local services and local infrastructure close to hand. There are a number of things that we need to try to operationalise the idea or the concept. There are things that are already in the Scottish Government's armory, such as the place principle and the town centre first principle, which are very useful principles in trying to set out how you can try to take a place-based approach to things and make sure that the services are located in the town centres, the village centres and our city centres. The issue with that, for me, is very much that they are principles. There is no real mechanism in place to see how we can be transparent if they are being applied, and if not, why not? I think that there is a need to try and see how we can make sure that we have a process that allows us to identify what the process has been in the decision, in taking decisions on development and asset management, and how they take account of those principles, so that there is something in there. I think that the bug of policy environment and context for that is really, really important. We have heard about local place plans, and I think that they have a really important role in that process. We need to make sure that they are funded, that they put communities at the front of that discussion and that debate. We have talked more about the national planning framework and how a strong policy basis for that can go some way to making sure that we get things in place, which can make those decisions, which are often difficult decisions, easier to make. There is some real potential in the digital planning strategy that the Government has put in place just now. It is investing £35 million over the next five years. One of the key things that it brings with it is how we can better map data. Spatial data can be a really useful background for helping us to make decisions and to provide evidence in taking forward decision-making on 20-minute neighbourhoods as well. You mentioned rural areas. I still believe that the principles of 20-minute neighbourhoods can be applied in a rural concept. We published some work on that recently. I will be happy to share with the community, both on 20-minute neighbourhoods and rural planning. The idea is that there is a hierarchy of things that people need to access. You should always remember that 20-minute neighbourhoods are about trying to make sure that you can get your daily needs within a 20-minute walk on backwards. That is about trying to make sure that we can invest in our rural areas and ensure that they have the local shop where you can pick up your loaf of bread, your pint of milk and the things that you need on a local basis. It is also trying to think about beyond that when you need things that are just a local need, but something that is no longer permanent in its nature. Thinking about the hierarchy of our settlements across rural areas and trying to invest within them so that they might not be within 20 minutes, but they are at least closer to hand and going to the big city to try to get something. That is how we can invest and try to make sure that our local settlements, hierarchy of those settlements, try to make those needs. I think that that concept is still well and good. For me, the biggest issue with 20-minute neighbourhoods is the retrofit aspect of it, particularly a lot of the settlements and the extensions and the places that we have put on at the edge of cities in the age of towns over the past 20, 30 or 40 years, which have been very much just about housing. We need to try to change that model and make sure that the services are provided in that area as well. How you retrofit that is incredibly difficult. I do not have an answer for how you can do that. When we start from scratch, we can see that we have got some really good examples. I often quote the Gorgals. It is a really good example of where we have a community that is rich in terms of its housing stock. It has got services and shops aligned to it. It has got public parks, it has got links to public transport, so there are models there that we can lean on and learn from. I think that Craig Hits on a really interesting point there. What do we mean by 20-minute neighbourhoods? I was really heartened to hear him describe what it actually means. It is important that we think of MPF4 as an opportunity to start looking at this in a lot more detail and bringing everybody with us. We were talking earlier about the planning system and what MPF4 would be, what opportunities it would bring for us. In fact, I think that it was Claire Simmons talking about the complexity of housing numbers and five-year housing land supplies. While the developers are very much knee-deep in it, they do not really want to be focusing on that. I am really hoping that MPF4 is going to give us really clear housing numbers so that we can move our energy away from talking about housing numbers. Let us focus our energies on place creation. At the moment, so much energy is drawn into that argument about housing numbers. Let us get a good, solid number in the plan and move on. One of the key things that I really have concerns with—I think that this is probably a slightly different hat-on than my home to Scotland one—is the gender and diversity issues that 20-minute neighbourhoods might bring to the challenges there. Allan mentioned earlier about women and the homeless agenda. We have to think about women and the idea of walking 20 minutes in the winter, in the dark, leaving your kids at home or if you are a caregiver. We do not have a level playing field here of who is walking within a 20-minute neighbourhood. We also have an elderly population. We just need to be really careful that we bring everybody with us when we are talking about what 20-minute neighbourhoods actually mean. I, for one, would not walk out of my house in the winter, in the dark, go and get a pint of milk or go in my car because I feel safe. We need to think of that in the round. It is not just a principle. Let us get beyond the rhetoric and show examples of what that actually means and how people use our spaces and how safe they feel in them. There are many reasons why people use their cars and safety should not be considered or something like that. It should not be dismissed as a non-green way of transport. People feel safe. I will stop there because I know that others want to come in. Thank you, Nicola, for raising that point. Tony and then Eleanor. There is no question that 20-minute neighbourhoods are a useful idea or a useful concept, but I think that we need to also acknowledge that this is not just about shops and bus stops. It is also about the way in which public services are delivered. We have been through an extended period in which public services have been retreating from and withdrawing from being located where people live and moving away from being reachable, being able to walk to them. Are we talking about neighbourhoods that have a 20-minute walk to a library? Are we talking about neighbourhoods that have a 20-minute walk to a swimming pool or sports facilities or to a community centre or even to a council office and schools and nurseries? My GP used to be a five-minute walk away. It is now a 25-minute walk away. The A&E service around here used to be a five-minute drive away. It is now a 25-minute drive away because it has been centralised somewhere else. Our services have been moving away from the concept of 20-minute neighbourhoods because they have been trying to centralise and concentrate because of the pressure on resources, because of the pressure on the money available to deliver them. We need to think again about the money that we invest in our services in order to make this work. It is not just a matter of better lighting, cycle paths and a shop just around the corner. It is a much more complicated debate from that. It requires an increase in investment in public services to make them more accessible. I would like to reiterate what Tonya just said about the 20-minute neighbourhoods that does not only mean shops but also will need sustained funding in public services and local amenities across the board. The idea of 20-minute neighbourhoods will involve a lot of planning happening on a local level. It needs to be a democratic consultation with local communities so that the 20-minute neighbourhood addresses the issues and the shortcomings of all the communities where people live. It cannot be something that is brought down on to people. As we said, people are engaged and brought along to make sure that certain communities and certain people are not left behind. We would also like to highlight that the 20-minute neighbourhood should include a locally-oriented use of land and vacant land in communities to ensure that especially sites that have formerly been used for social housing can be brought back into a green transition. I would also like to highlight that a lot of the times that increased investment in local communities has a direct effect on rent levels that can push communities out of their communities. I would really like to see that being considered in a holistic way, thinking about how we can keep rents down in areas that are receiving well-needed investment. We would like there to be consideration of rent controls, as has been suggested for the next housing bill, to be properly localised and to be able to address that issue. I would like to bring in my committee colleague Willie Coffey for a supplementary question. Thank you very much, convener. Good morning, everybody. I lost quite a bit of the discussion earlier because I was busy for that, and if I retread any old ground, I just wanted to pick up on the theme, if I may, and ask for the panel's views on the sense that our town centres particularly need to be much more than they are at the moment if we are to be successful in delivering this concept of place and sustainable community in the safe and pleasant environments and so on. It is just to get your views on this now. If a town like Kilmarnock that I represent has a number of properties, shops, buildings and pieces of land that are effectively abandoned by their owners and overgrown with weeds and posters stuck to windows and stuff like that, does that issue in your view play a part in this whole concept that we are trying to achieve here? If it does, what can we do about it to try and overcome that particular problem? I wonder if Craig or Tony have a view initially on that aspect of it, please. Go ahead, Tony, and then we will have Craig and then Claire. I hope that you would let Craig go first, but that is fine. I think that there is a substantial problem of empty and semi-derelected neglected buildings in many town centres and cities across Scotland. There is no question about that. I live next door of four empty properties and they have been empty for the better part of 30 years between them. I mean right next door there through that wall just there, flying empty for 30 years to a perfectly decent house. The powers that exist in the public sector to deal with neglected or abandoned or empty properties are simply not strong enough and we allow too much credence to the idea that owners have a right to enjoy their property in any way that they see and not enough in the public interest in ensuring that buildings, an important resource in our urban areas and in rural areas as well, are brought back into use and brought back into use effectively. I think that it is just a matter of being clearer about how much of that we are prepared to tolerate and giving local authorities the powers and resources to intervene. I think that part of the problem is that not all of these buildings have obvious uses that you can put to them. Some of it is about being realistic and a little bit hard-nosed about the point at which a building needs to simply be removed and you need to start again. The principal problem is that we allow owners to neglect and leave buildings lying. We are not sharp enough and quick enough and well enough resourced to intervene quickly and say, sorry, this is not acceptable. We need to bring this back into use. I stay in sterling. I can take you through around whole streets in the city centre where most of the upper floors have simply been abandoned for a very long period. Buildings that were sold out in the public sector 25 years ago that are still lying empty and undeveloped. I just think that we need to take a harder line on these issues and be clearer about the powers and the resources that are available to bring them back into use. We cannot afford to have buildings going back to the carbon agenda. There is substantial embedded carbon in these buildings. We cannot afford to have buildings lying empty whilst we build others to replace them, not to replace them, but to meet certain uses while they are lying empty. We just need to be a bit more direct about it. Thank you for that, Tony. If we could have a quick, brief contribution from Craig and Claire, that would be great. We need to wind up because we have another panel beginning shortly. I am happy to comment on that. I will be quick. I agree with what Gory said. I think that there is an issue with place blindness between landowners and some of them. I am nowhere near where that property is. Although the landowners have leased it out for 25 years to an organisation that is just a subsequent red bust and moved out, they are still getting an income, so they do not really care. We need to try to make sure that place blindness goes and what we do with that. There are perhaps opportunities through compulsive purchase orders and compulsive sales orders, which have been developed. We need to change the culture and how we use that as well. The final point that I would make is that what we need to also realise is that the solutions and the challenges of a particular town centre do not all lie within it. Some of the things that are outside of it can have a real impact on it as well. I am thinking particularly of a town shopping or retail park or whatever. I need to try and make sure that we can get the investment into the town centre rather than a retail park or something that is sitting out of it. We support what Tony MacDonald was just saying, but the recommendations in the report commissioned by Aileen Campbell are a new future for town centres 2021, which makes specific calls for national planning framework to strengthen the role of town centres and introduce a moratorium on greenfield sites and our town centres. Thank you so much for that. We will have to close there. As I said earlier, it is clearly something that we could spend a lot of time getting into more detail. I think that I am really taking away and I am sure that my colleagues are that getting the national planning framework for right is going to be a very important piece of it, but also clearly the issues around house building, supply chain, skills and many other things, including the big question that seems to hang around everywhere, what is affordable. Thank you so much for joining us this morning and I now suspend the meeting. The third item on our agenda today is an evidence session on six instruments on changes to local authority electoral boundaries in council areas containing inhabited islands. The council areas that are concerned are Corlea, Nann and Elin Menard, Orkney island council, Shetland island council, Highland council, Argyll and Bute council and North Ayrshire. Boundaries Scotland has reviewed the word boundaries within these local authority areas and published reports containing their recommendations for alterations. The Scottish Government has, via the instruments that we are considering today, presented the recommendations for parliamentary scrutiny and I would like to welcome John Swinney, Deputy First Minister and Cabinet Secretary for Covid Recovery, Maria McCann, Head of Elections team, Kenny Pentland, Senior Policy Officer of Elections and Craig McGuffey, who is joining us virtually, who is a Scottish Government lawyer. We are going to take evidence from the Deputy First Minister before moving on to a formal debate on each of the six instruments in turn. I would like to invite the cabinet secretary to make a short opening statement on the draft regulations. Thank you very much and good morning. I am pleased to be here today to present the electoral arrangements regulations for the six council areas that contain inhabited islands. The regulations give effect to the proposals submitted to me by Boundaries Scotland and I have a legal duty to lay them before Parliament. The Scottish elections reformat 2020 removed ministerial discretion to reject or modify the commission's proposals. Instead, the decision to implement Boundaries Scotland's proposals rests entirely with Parliament. It is vital for local democracy and for local service delivery that councils are as representative as possible of the communities that they serve. Regular reviews of council wards and councillor numbers are necessary to ensure that they reflect changes in population. Those reviews have been held under the Islands Scotland Act 2018, which offers additional flexibility allowing Boundaries Scotland to create wards that elect one or two councillors in wards that contain inhabited islands, as well as the two, three, four or five councillor wards that are permitted elsewhere in Scotland. I am aware of the opposition of Highland Council and Argyllun Bute Council to some aspects of the proposals and that their representatives have asked this committee not to recommend approval of those instruments. There will, of course, be differing opinions on the final recommendations, however I am pleased that we have heard that, in almost every case, the consultation process was meaningful and elected members and communities, for the most part, felt their voices had been heard. I am confident that Boundaries Scotland has discharged their duties competently and professionally. There would need to be very strong reasons for rejecting their recommendations. I hope that those comments are helpful and I would, of course, be very happy to answer any questions that members may have. Thank you very much, yes. We have a few questions. I will get started with a theme around the Boundaries Scotland recommendations. I am just interested to hear your views on whether reducing council representation in remote rural areas such as the north and west of Highlands would be detrimental to our repopulation efforts? The issues are, of course, related because one of the fundamental considerations that statute requires Boundaries Scotland to adhere to is the question of electoral parity between different localities. However, the other principle pillar of the framework that statute requires is, of course, that Boundaries Scotland takes due account of locality. On the question of parity between the population composition of wards, obviously, the more sparsely populated an area is, the greater the amount of land and the degree of rurality that will have to be considered as part of those settlements. There is, frankly, no easy answer to that. I suspect that the challenges of representing a large geographical area are now, I suppose, different to nowadays. I represent a large rural area. I find that approach different now in the light of the pandemic, because after 23 years of representing the communities that I have represented, I had never had a single video conference call with a single constituent that I have represented now and do it every week of the year. It has suddenly dawned on me that it is actually more convenient for my constituents, in many cases, to have that conversation with me remotely than having to travel endless distance to see me or me to see them. I think that there are ways around that challenge. Obviously, you asked me a very significant question, which is about the repopulation of sparsely populated areas. I think that that is a policy objective in its own right, which carries merit and should be reflected in the decisions that are made by Parliament in relation to the composition of wards, where the population volume merits that in applying the statutory principle of parity among wards. It is almost something about where we lose representation in those areas. There is not a person to advocate for public services and that kind of thing. It seems to me that, as we, certainly with the case of Highland, if we push towards Inverness, we would lose those voices and lose the infrastructure, both in people and services as well as roads and so on and so forth, that would encourage people to come back and live in those places. I think that there are different ways of looking at that question. Fundamentally, I think that that is a duty on the whole of Highland Council to think about those issues, as it is a duty on the Scottish Government to think about those issues and to take policy decisions that support the repopulation of those areas. I am not certain that the composition of the council and the decisions that are taken about that point necessarily lead to questions around the availability of public services in particular localities. Those are decisions for Highland Council, NHS Highland, the Government and various other public bodies who should be taking decisions because of the strategic importance of the repopulation question to be able to be advancing those questions rather than seeing this being repopulation being driven by the nature or the arrangements for electoral representation in a locality. I think that it would reflect pretty badly on any public authority if they were not taking the steps that could be taken to support repopulation if that was one of the policy objectives. Is it interesting what has come to light in a way in our work taking evidence that it seems that there is a common factor between Highland and Argyll and Bute north to Ayrshore side? They were very happy with the outcome, but with both Highland and Argyll and Bute you had a council that has got a large mainland and islands. One of the things that has been coming up as a question is around the fact that it seems that remote rural areas on the mainland are facing the same challenges as island communities, and should remote mainland areas therefore be treated in the same way when changes in democratic representation are being decided? I am struck by the fact that there are mainland areas that have in many respects some of the same characteristics as islands. If I think about the rhannacharia that I represent in Highland Perthshire, it is essentially an island on the mainland. There is one route into the rhannacharia and one route out. On the other end—that was a way out—it takes a long walk, not for the faint hearted either. Essentially, that route in is not dissimilar to accessing an island through one particular route. There are similarities there that perhaps need to be reflected on, and it is within Parliament's scope to ensure that the statute reflects that important point. However, in the nature of the statutory framework in which Boundary Scotland represents—I come back to the point that I made in my first answer, convener—there are two pillars to the analysis that Boundary Scotland undertakes, the question of parity and the question of locality, where I know that Boundary Scotland attaches significant importance to maintaining the cohesion that one would ordinarily think should be in place in relation to the nature of localities. We will continue with the theme, and I will bring in Paul McClellan with a couple of questions. Thank you, Deputy First Minister. It is really just expanding on the islands act that the convener mentioned. Obviously, the intention of the islands act was to empower island communities, and some of the feedback that we got from Highland Council, for example, was about the reduction of representation on islands such as Buton Sky. It was really just to get your thoughts and views on that particular issue. I think that the questions that the Boundary Scotland has got to wrestle with are essentially questions that are driven by what I think the committee has heard from Boundary Scotland are internationally strong practices about the nature and the configuration of electoral wards. Boundary Scotland needs to apply those considerations about principally around the question of electoral parity with a sense of understanding of the geographical entity and community with which they are addressing and considering. I think that what is important is that, as Boundary Scotland undertakes that work, it engages substantively with local communities. I am satisfied that Boundary Scotland has done that to good effect. I think that its ability to do so in the Highland Council provisions might have been enhanced had there been greater co-operation with Highland Council. However, in the other local authority areas, the committee has heard from those communities about the value of the dialogue that was facilitated by the approaches that were taken. I think that it is important that we listen, the Boundary Scotland listens carefully to the feedback from island communities, recognises the distinctive characteristics of those island communities and, of course, a number of the proposals that have come forward, the local communities are very satisfied with the arrangements that have been proposed. The next question is more specific and it is about Arran. Arran is going to be the only one member ward in Scotland, and it takes up 46 per cent of, say, the council's land mass, so it is really just getting your view on that specific issue. I think that that is a pragmatic proposal brought forward by Boundary Scotland. In some of my wider responsibilities, for example, since the Government was formed in 2007, I have chaired the convention of the Highlands and Islands, which, of course, includes North Ayrshire Council, because of Arran and Cumbria, where Arran is part of the territory that is covered by HIE. The importance of viewing Arran as a distinctive entity was a point successfully advanced by North Ayrshire Council within the convention of the Highlands and Islands and in a whole variety of other policy forums, where they acknowledge that there is a very specific set of issues affecting that community around the delivery of public services on the questions, the valid questions that the convener was raising with me, which are fundamentally about the delivery on Arran, the maximisation of the connections between public services and the important connections between that community and the accessing of public services on the mainland. I think that what Boundary Scotland has proposed is an approach reflective of the nature of that island community, recognising its distinctiveness, how so much of life is interlinked within that island and has, frankly, very little to do with what is happening on the mainland, but it crucially provides an advocacy role for a representative of that island to advocate for the connections between the island of Arran and the mainland. I think that that is an example of where Boundary Scotland has looked very carefully at the distinctive circumstances and has come up with what is, as Mr MacLennan fairly puts to me, a unique proposition. Thank you for that. I am going to move over to Eleanor Whitham to introduce a new theme. Thank you and good morning, Deputy First Minister. I am looking to explore how Boundary Scotland calculates total and word councillor allocations. The first question that I have is, what are the benefits of having similar voter to councillor ratio across all words in the same council area? Would having variations in the councillor voter ratio impact on effective and convenient local government as well? I think that the first point is to recognise, and Boundary Scotland has made this point to committee, that the question of parity of electorate is not a uniquely Scottish context, but a well-established international principle in relation to the design of electoral areas. Given its international standing, that principle has been a consistent part of the statutory framework that has supported Boundary Scotland since its conception in 1973. The arrangements flow essentially from the application of that principle, but, of course, that principle is not applied in an absolute sense. We do not have anything like identical provision between individual words, so there is an attempt to get to what I would describe as close to parity as possible, but in some circumstances that cannot be achieved because of the geographical factors that may prevail through population sparsity, for example, or which might prevail when we take into account the essential element of the connections between communities, which is the other principle under which Boundary Scotland operates. It is an understandable and characteristic of our electoral arrangements, but I do not think that it could be deployed on an absolute basis because of the variation that will take place between communities. If we can look at it from another angle, the electoral reform society says that there needs to be more emphasis placed on local community needs rather than on electoral parity between diverse words of the same local authority area, so can I have your views on that? I think that that is quite a difficult one to resolve, because we have taken decisions. If you look at the statute in relation to the parliamentary constituencies as they are composed here in the Scottish Parliament, there are particular arrangements that are put in place in relation to Nenielenshire, Orkney and Shetland because of their distinctive island characteristics. That is not applied in any other situation across the country. There will be a place where specific measures of that nature can be put in place. The point that Mr McClennan puts to me about Arran is an example of how that has been deployed by Boundary Scotland. There will be arrangements that require us to have electorates of variation in size because of that factor of locality, but if we do that in all circumstances, we will create really varied parliamentary constituencies or local authority wards. I think that that is a situation that is quite unsustainable, given the necessity for us to ensure that Parliament or a local authority is representative of the area that it is designed to be representative of. Now we are going to move on to a new theme, and I am going to invite Miles Briggs to bring that in. I want to ask a few questions with regard to the consultation process, specifically given the Covid-19 pandemic that we have had and how you felt that that has been conducted, for example, unable to have public meetings and directly held. As we have found as a committee, internet access has not been wonderful either across a lot of these communities. I just wondered if you had any views on the consultation process. Boundary Scotland will have explained to the committee the specific nature of the consultation process that it took forward. The committee has then also heard testimony from a range of representatives of different local authorities expressing their satisfaction and communities, their satisfaction at the nature of the engagement process. I am confident that, notwithstanding the challenges of Covid, Boundary Scotland has been able to undertake an effective consultation process. I have been quite struck in relation to my experience over the past 18 months, up until the election, that I had policy responsibility. It is a great privilege for me to have this policy responsibility to nurture the Gaelic language. I undertook a number of extensive stakeholder discussions around the Gaelic language, which included representatives mainly from the remote and rural areas of Scotland. I have two observations about that one. Connectivity was actually pretty good. I was very pleased with it and we had good conversations. Secondly, I probably encountered and was able to interact more conveniently with more people doing it digitally than if I had got on the road. Now, nothing would have brought me more joy than to go off and sit in community halls in the western isles on north-west Sutherland to conduct face-to-face public meetings. Nothing would have given me more joy. However, I probably would have interacted with fewer people if I had done that than to undertake a digital dialogue in which I sat at home in Perthshire, and there were countless representatives on the line who were able to interact directly with me for longer periods of time because I did not have to think about travel time and all the rest of it. There are swings and roundabouts in all of this, but I am certainly satisfied that there is nothing that I have seen that suggests to me that Boundaries Scotland has done anything other than undertake an effective consultation process. Thank you for that. One part that was also highlighted to us was with regard to the island community impact assessments. What advice did the Scottish Government give to Boundaries Scotland with regard to undertaking those? Is the Scottish Government satisfied that no separate impact assessments were required? Obviously, island impact assessments are part of the statutory framework, so an organisation has to consider in their judgment whether the nature of the approach that they take to satisfying that statutory requirement is a matter for Boundaries Scotland to come to that conclusion. Given the nature of the work that Boundaries Scotland undertakes on that question, that inevitably requires them to wrestle with the questions that we have been hearing in an island's assessment because they are thinking about what are the implications for representation, for the engagement, involvement and members of the community in all of these different undertakings. Therefore, I am satisfied that, by the nature of the work that Boundaries Scotland undertakes, they would be able to pursue that framework. Of course, any advice that they would seek from the Government on that question would be given within the context of the statutory framework that is available. Part of the island bill that has led to the review, are you satisfied that we will be using different boundaries that will be reviewed for those councils compared to the rest of the mainland? The principles behind a review that will come forward post council elections will already have different variations in council wards for those elections if they are approved by Parliament. Yes. Obviously, if Parliament approves the propositions in front of it, we will essentially be giving effect to processes that have been originated in the island's act. That was envisaged by the act that expressed the acknowledges that we may arrive at different arrangements in certain communities and that it is right to do so. If Boundaries Scotland consider that point and Parliament approves it, it is perfect within the statutory framework for Parliament to take those steps and for those arrangements to be in place for the local authority elections. Perhaps for completeness, I should say that, where Parliament is not to approve the regulations, I cannot conceive of how alternative propositions could be put in place in advance of the 2022 local authority elections in any circumstance where Parliament did not approve the regulations as part of the process. I do not think that there is sufficient time to do that. I invite my colleagues who are joining us virtually. Mark Griffin, do you have any questions for the DfFM? Thanks, convener. The Deputy First Minister's answer leads on to the question that I want to ask about essentially what happens next. The Deputy First Minister set out this morning and then wrote in the Government's obligation to lay those procedures. I just wanted to ask what the Government's position on those proposals are, whether the Government is satisfied with all of them and what the Government's proposed course of action would be if the Parliament chose to reject some or all of those SSIs and what the timetable for revised proposals would potentially be and whether that would align with a wider review of mainland local authorities. There are two points to Mr Griffin's question. The first point is what is my view about the individual proposals. Mr Griffin will know that I am not a minister that avoids questions, but on this occasion I am going to avoid that question because statute expressly takes ministers out of a review role within the process. Because Parliament has decided that, it is important that I do not express a view about whether one proposal is right or wrong. If Parliament has decided that ministers should be removed from a review process, I think that I should respect the rationale of that. On the second point of Mr Griffin's question, if Parliament was to reject any of the statutory instruments that are before it, let me get the sequence correct. If the committee was not to recommend approval, I would obviously look at that particular decision and I would be likely in the light of the committee not supporting a statutory instrument to seek Parliament's leave to withdraw the instruments that the committee was not prepared to support. I think that that would be the appropriate step for the Government to take. Should that then be the case, it would then be—I refer the matter back to Boundaries Scotland to look again—it is unlikely that the process could be undertaken and completed by Boundaries Scotland and then for Parliament to consider any revised proposals for Boundaries Scotland in advance of the 2022 local authority elections. The gold principle that came into force after the challenges that we faced in the 2007 Scottish parliamentary and local authority elections recommended that there should be no changes to arrangements within six months of an electoral contest. For elections in early May, that brings us back to November. I hate to tell colleagues how close November is, although they might be feeling that it is getting closer from the temperature this morning. There is no way that that could be done by Boundaries Scotland and completed by Parliament before November. The examples that Parliament was not to determine would have to be left until after the election. On the impact of that on wider Boundaries activities, I would have to consider what other issues we are putting to Boundaries Scotland from my recollection. I will ask Maria McAnne to give me some assistance here, but I think that there is some upcoming work that they are required to do. Yes. The position with regard to the local authority reviews is that they are now in a rolling programme, so they would plan to carry out reviews in batches of probably about six because that seems to have worked well. One of the real benefits of the rolling programme that has emerged and which has been mentioned both by the Boundaries Commission and by some of the authorities is the ability to have better consultation and better interaction, so that has been positive. They also have responsibility for the Scottish Parliament boundary reviews and that work will commence in 2022. They are currently looking at the programme for how to take forward both responsibilities and, if they have to do further work on any of the reviews that are before you, that would have to be programmed in as well. That concludes our question. Thank you very much. We have a lot of responses coming in to our call for views, quite a significant number. I just want to explore a couple that have come in in relation to Highland and also to our Gailan Bute. In her submission to us, Margaret Davidson, who is the leader of Highland Council, stated that we are strongly of the view that the changes proposed by Boundaries Scotland fails to recognise the specific Highland context, particularly in relation to parity, sparsity, morality and deprivation, and, if implemented, would result in a significant democratic deficit for the Highland. We have also had quite a number of respondents from Ailey Express concerned about their island becoming part of a new island only during Ailey, Dura and Collins award, and Ailey Community Council stated that we believe that the recommendation to reduce our councillors to two and to restrict boundaries to island only would narrow our horizons, risk exclusion from important issues that affect us all and reduce the collective strength of our voice within our Gailan Bute council. Can you, Deputy First Minister, respond to both of those? In responding to those points, I recognise the importance of the issues that Elena Putnam raised, but I come back to my point that I have answered to Mark Griffin, that where ministers have been taken out of the statutory process, it is important that I act in a fashion that respects that decision. I point that out simply to highlight the challenge on those questions, because there is no easy answer on any of those questions. Mr MacLennan put to me the situation in Arran, where Arran seems to be really quite pleased about having an island only representative who can fight the corner for Arran locally and with North Ayrshire Council and with a wide of public bodies. The community in Islay is taking a different view to that proposition, and I could sit here and argue the merits of both cases. It highlights the fact that there can be different approaches and different perspectives taken. In relation to the situation in Highland Council, I am struck by, and it goes back to the exchanges that I had with the convener at the outset of her questions about some of the issues in relation to Highland. There is a duty on local authorities, as there is on the Government, to take forward the necessary and appropriate policy interventions that meet the needs of individual localities. It should never just come down to what is said on a localities' behalf by a local elected member for that locality. It is how does Highland Council reach all of Highland? How does Highland Council do the right thing by all of Highland, as opposed to we will only do the right thing by a particular locality if the voice is strong enough from that locality? That is not representative democracy for me. It is not how you listen to communities and how you respond to the agendas about which they are concerned. Without wishing to give a specific view on the merits of individual proposals, those are the general sentiments that public authorities need to be mindful of when they are coming to those conclusions. I have heard that Willie Coffey would like to come in. He is joining us virtually. Willie, do you have a question for the Deputy First Minister? He has had difficult connectivity all morning, so I think we might have lost him. We have to move on. I think we will have to move on. The converse example of the ones that you were talking about. I want to say thank you for responding to our questions. I think that we are going to move on to the fourth item on our agenda, which is consideration of what is the beginning of considering a number of motions. The fourth item on our agenda today is consideration of motion S6M-00961, which the Local Government Housing and Planning Committee recommends that the Nahilan and Anyar regulations 2021 be approved. I invite the cabinet secretary to speak and move the motion. I move the motion, convener, my name. Thank you. Do any members wish to speak? The question is that motion S6M-00961, in the name of John Swinney, be approved. Are we all agreed? We are going to move on to agenda item number five. The fifth item on our agenda today is consideration of motion S6M-00961, which the Local Government Housing and Planning Committee recommends that the Orkney Islands electoral arrangements regulation 2021 be approved. I invite the cabinet secretary to speak and move the motion. I move formally, convener. Thank you. Any members wish to speak to the motion? The question is that motion S6M-00960, in the name of John Swinney, be approved. Are we all agreed? The sixth item on our agenda today is consideration of motion S6M-00959, in the name of John Swinney, be approved. Are we all agreed? The seventh item on our agenda today is consideration of motion S6M-00959, in the name of John Swinney, be approved. Are we all agreed? The seventh item on our agenda today is consideration of motion S6M-00974, that the Local Government Housing and Planning Committee recommends that the Highland electoral arrangements regulations 2021 be approved. I invite the cabinet secretary to speak to the motion, speak and move the motion. I move, convener. Do any members wish to speak to the motion? The question is that motion S6M-00974, in the name of John Swinney, be approved. Are we all agreed? No. All in favour of approval of the motion? All against approval of the motion? One, two, three, four. That's everybody rejecting the motion and there are no abstentions. So, that's zero votes, four and seven votes against and zero abstentions. We're now moving on to the eighth item of our agenda today in consideration of motion S6M-00973, gan cyfnod yn hwn, rwy'n trafnod y Gwaith Cymru i'r iechydigio amser o ardal a phylsoeddiadau Tiwil 2021. Felly, rydyn ni'n eu cyfnod i'n ffyrdd i'r gwybodaeth. Rasgafodd. Ryddynt wedi amdano gyfewid yn ei digwydd i gafodaeth. Milius. Rydyn ni'n gwybodaeth.死n i gydigio i'r gwaith hwnnw o hynny, rydyn ni'n g από chi i'r poffii on record our thanks to Boundaries Scotland. It is important to recognise the substantial work that is undertaken. From the correspondence that I have received, I know all members that there are real concerns still with regard to what is being proposed for both Argyll and Buton Highland. With that in mind, I would love to reject this set of boundary changes. Okay, the question is that motion S6M-00973 in the name of John Swinney be approved. And I know we're not all agreed, so I'm just going to go to all in favour of approval of the motion. All against approval of the motion, okay, and there are no abstentions, so that is zero votes for, seven votes against and zero abstentions. The ninth item on our agenda today is consideration of motion S6M-00975 that the local government housing and planning committee recommends that the North Ayrshire electoral arrangements regulations 2021 be approved. I invite the cabinet secretary to speak and move the motion. Thank you. Do any members wish to speak to the motion? The question is that the motion S6M-00975 in the name of John Swinney be approved. Are we all agreed? The result is that we are all agreed. I'd like to know if members are content to delegate the signing off of the report to myself. Thank you. I want to thank the cabinet secretary and your officials for joining us in person for this session this morning. Thank you. We're going to suspend briefly the next panel. The next item on the agenda for the committee is to consider two negative instruments as listed on the agenda. The instruments are town and country planning, miscellaneous temporary modifications, coronavirus Scotland regulation 2021, and town and country planning, care and rhyme border control posts, EU exit Scotland, special development amendment order 2021. I'm going to ask committee members if there are any comments. Anybody got any comments? I'd like to ask if the committee has agreed that it does not wish to make any recommendations in relation to these instruments. Agreed? Okay, great. Thank you. And I'm now going to suspend the meeting, close the meeting so that we can move into private session.