 Good morning, everyone, and welcome to the eighth meeting of the local government and communities committee in 2018. I remind everyone present to turn off mobile phones, and as meeting papers are provided in a digital format, tablets may be used by members during the meeting. We've got one apology from committee members today from Jenny Gilruth, MSP, who unfortunately can't be with us this morning. We'll now move to agenda item one, which is the planning Scotland bill, and we'll take evidence on stage 1 and 2 panels this morning. I'm getting a pleasure to introduce our first panel now, which is Tammy Swift-Adams, director of planning homes for Scotland, Jenny Hogan, deputy chief executive of Scottish Renewables, Gordon Nelson, director, federation of master builders Scotland, Sarah Boyack, head of public affairs, Scottish Federation of Housing Association, and Jonathan Fair, regional managing director Scotland, McCarthy and Stone. Thank you, everyone, for coming along this morning and understanding that we've got some opening statements before we go to questions. If we'll just go from my left to right then, can I ask Jenny maybe to start? First, thank you very much indeed for the opportunity to provide evidence to the committee today. Scottish Renewables is the voice of Scotland's renewable energy industry, representing over 270 organisations that include developers and installers, as well as community organisations and companies right through the supply chain. Many of our members are developing projects across a range of scales, from district heating schemes to wind farms, from hydropower projects to solar panels. Those businesses and communities are helping to deliver the Scottish Government's target to meet half of all of our heat, power and transport needs from renewables by 2030, a target that all major parties support. Those ambitions are extremely challenging and require a joined up approach across all levels of government and its agencies. While we welcome many of the provisions within the bill, we do believe that some of the proposals would have unintended consequences for our sector and, as a result, many of the Scottish Government's national outcomes. More specifically, we recommend a number of points and I'll just summarise a few of them just now. The bill will be designed to enable the national outcomes within necessary timescales while minimising costs. Sustainable development should be an explicit purpose of the bill, making clear that the delivery of the climate change plan and future climate change act, as well as the energy strategy, are facilitated. The process for reviewing plans and policies must be able to reflect rapid changes in technology and policy, which is particularly pertinent for energy and carbon reduction. The planning system should not be viewed simply as a service for developers but as a service for the public good, and that must balance a range of interests and should therefore be resourced by both public and private sectors. The introduction of a new consultee should be considered, tasked with advising on socioeconomic impact of applications to provide balance to those assessing other impacts, for example the economic development department of the local authority. That complex applications requiring EIA should be treated as major projects and not determined under delegated powers, or at least given that option. We also support the independent planning review recommendations and those of a number of stakeholders who have argued that front-loading community involvement is absolutely the most effective way to empower people in the process as opposed to looking at appeal reforms. Finally, I would just like to put on the record as well that we agree with the comments of Community Land Scotland, the Scottish Crofters Federation and others that areas of Scotland that are currently mapped and identified as wild land areas should be balanced with socioeconomic opportunities for Scotland's rural land, be that crofting, woodlands or renewable energy generation and other opportunities for income. Thank you very much Ms Hogan. Tammy Smith-Adams. Homes for Scotland is the voice of the home building industry. We have got over 200 members, including home builders, who are responsible for about 95 per cent of the new homes that are built in Scotland each year. As director of planning, I hear from my members on a wide range of issues. Planning is not their only challenge but it is one of the biggest. The need to deliver more homes sparked the planning review in September 2015, and two and a half years later we are not any further forward in terms of housing delivery. We need to build more homes. Homes for Scotland has scrutinised the proposals in the bill and the wider planning review through that lens, but we are not blind to the other ambitions behind the bill and we are aware of the many balancing acts facing the system. This bill provides a rare and crucial opportunity to help the planning system fulfil its potential in delivering new homes and the other development that Scotland needs. If we can get planning reform right, good performance should be the norm and communities and home builders alike should have better trust in the process that shapes our country's development. We strongly support the focus of the planning review on making planning more collaborative rather than introducing more opportunities for conflict. We think that the bill should acknowledge that collaboration more than it does at the moment. More broadly, the bill could be strengthened through some changes to what is proposed on development planning, infrastructure levy, performance and fees. It is important, for example, to maintain the strong relationship between the different components of the development plan. Finally, we are concerned that the bill and its accompanying financial memorandum overlooks the fact that to properly resource planning services and infrastructure delivery it will be necessary to look beyond the development community and beyond the planning system itself. The changes that we have suggested in our written evidence are intended to ensure that the bill achieves its intended objectives without leaving important details to chance. Thank you very much, Gordon Naleson. Firstly, thank you for the invitation to give evidence today. The Federation of Master Builders were the largest trade association in the UK construction industry with over 8,000 members, and we recognise as being the voice of small and medium-sized construction firms. Our house-building members who build on small sites typically of less than 30 units, and our consultation response per hour today is based on their experiences and views of small house-building firms across Scotland. That includes my opening remarks. Thank you very much. Thank you very much, convener. SFHA represents housing associations and co-ops across Scotland, and for us, an effective planning system is absolutely critical for our members to take forward their proposals to provide affordable warm homes, to meet people's needs and to deliver socially inclusive communities. Our recent research, produced with Shelter, shows that our members are making a key contribution to meeting the Scottish Government's 50,000 affordable homes programme and that they are tackling inequalities and delivering socially inclusive communities at the same time, but we believe that there has to be an approach so that housing is able to meet people's needs now and in the future. Our research highlighted the issue about ensuring that housing is accessible, affordable and where people need it across the country. For the planning bill, our ambitions are a stronger link between the range of housing needs that need to be met and the planning process. Affordable land is available where it is needed to meet those housing needs and the infrastructure is planned and provided to enable high-quality housing developments in our communities. The bill provides an opportunity to address issues around land supply and cost, absolutely critical. One of the motivators behind the bill, as has been said, was that there was not enough housing being delivered in Scotland. The bill makes provision for infrastructure levy, but we want to see land transferred at existing use value so that the uplift in value gained by planning permission for housing can be used to fund the infrastructure needed to service those sites. Finally, it is important that the planning system is resourced to take the ambitions in the bill forward so that housing associations and co-ops can ensure that there are collaborative developments with front-loaded consultation and deliver the place-making that people want to see in their communities to deliver high-quality places to live with active travel, green spaces and make that wider range of Scottish Government objectives. Thank you very much. Thank you for the opportunity to speak to today's meeting. I think that it is a particularly opportune time for this evidence session to take place. There has been a great deal of discussion over the past 10 years about meeting the needs of those most disadvantaged in society and also in the context of first-time buyers or generation rents. Unfortunately, there has not been the same level of discussion about meeting the needs of generation stuck, i.e. those last-time buyers who want to go on the final rung of the housing ladder. Just last Tuesday, Angela Constance, Cabinet Secretary for Communities, said when addressing the CIH conference that innovative approaches were needed to meet the housing challenges of Scotland's ageing population. She said that there was a need to take action to address the needs of our ageing population to ensure that more suitable housing and services were put in place to help individuals to continue to live independently and at home. Changes to Scottish planning policy in 2014 were certainly a step in the right direction, but, unfortunately, so far, there is little evidence that those changes have delivered on the original aims. However, if Scotland is to make any real progress in the provision of appropriate retirement housing, then therefore, clearly much more needs to be done. While the independent planning review highlighted the need to address the housing needs of our ageing population, unfortunately, there is no mention of housing for the elderly as a policy priority or target within the draft bill. In our discussions today, I hope to make a number of suggestions on how the planning bill can make a step change to ease the way for a significant increase in retirement housing that will help to achieve the objective set out both by the community secretary last week but by the Scottish Government generally in terms of saving its health and social care budgets and, finally, probably most importantly, will provide an appropriate range of housing options for older people in Scotland. Thank you for attending. Most of you represent the house building sector, perhaps not yourself, Ms Hogan. A couple of you have mentioned that it was an ambition behind the bill was to deliver more housing. I must admit, reading the bill, I don't see that in the bill. Do you? If you don't, what do you think should change? In other words, will the bill deliver more housing? I think we've said in our submission that we don't think that if you purely look at what's in the bill, there's nothing in there that specifically refers to housing or that is specifically designed to increase the delivery of new housing. Nothing significant anyway. If you look at the policy memorandum that outlines in full the Government's vision of how planning will be in the future, partly delivered through the bill but partly through other means, it's clear that for planning to be successful it needs to be delivering more homes. We've put forward a number of suggestions in our evidence, which we can work up in terms of amendments, which look at where the bill could do more to make planning a better enabler of new homes. That would include strengthening the relationship between local development plans and the national planning framework in terms of making sure local development plans bring forward the homes that are needed in local areas. Filling in gaps in the bill at the moment, including in relation to the clear need for better collaboration, both with the development industry and communities at large, at the early stage of plan preparation, in the policy memorandum, there's a clear reliance on that collaboration for planning to work both in terms of delivery but in terms of community trust as well. At the moment, the bill doesn't acknowledge that. It doesn't ensure that it happens either. I think that what we've suggested is that we look at housing need across the country and then we ensure that in every part of the country that housing need is then met. We need national targets, they need to be fed through to regional work and then that needs to feed through into local development plans. The suggestion is that we are going to have 10-year development plans with an emphasis on implementation, delivery and collaboration. With a properly resourced planning system, that means that developers can work through that system, whether they are socially delivering social rented properties or delivering housing to buy a range of housing choices across the country. However, one of the key things that we found in our ship research was that there is not that link between where housing need is and where housing is being built. That's partly because of the cost of infrastructure and a critical issue is the cost of land. We would suggest that that's one of the issues that needs to be looked at in terms of the planning bill and it's an opportunity. There's been work done by the Land Commission in Scotland that's looking at a range of options. We think that that debate needs to filter into this bill, either to be in the headline statements in the bill or to follow in terms of regulations and secondary legislation that comes afterwards. That comment about collaborative work that was made there is really important. If you look at developments such as Glasgow's Commonwealth Games, incredibly complex sites, there was issue to do with remediation, improving the quality of those land before anything was built. You got low-carbon developments, you got a mixed range of developments and it was done because the local authority was able to work collaboratively with a series of developers, including registered social landlords, so from targets, affordable land and collaborative delivery on the ground, making sure that that works at every stage is crucial. Gordon Nelson Thank you. Just to echo some of those comments, the bill on itself won't bring about the delivery of new homes, but in the policy memorandum that was referred to earlier, there is an aspiration there of closing the gap between planning consent and the delivery of new homes. What will follow from that in secondary legislation and guidance could help the speed-up of delivery in new homes in the right areas. In our approach, the front-loading approach should enable better engagement between small local house builders and the communities, so you get the right development in the right area at the right time. Certainly aspirations of the bill are there, but beyond the nature of the bill and legislation itself, there are significant barriers, not with what was mentioned before, the price and the availability of land. For many of our house builder members, a major barrier to entry is access to affordable development finance, which prevents many aspiring small home builders from entering the house building market. Scotland's desperate needs is more a diversity of housing supply and more entrants into the house building industry. Gordon Nelson I echo much of what has already been said. The only couple of things I would particularly like to highlight is that, in the context of the bill, for the bill to be effective in driving improved housing delivery, it needs to look at measures and ways to improve the speed of the process and ensure that, as a result of that, in addition, people involved in investing in housing delivery in Scotland have confidence that that investment will come to a legitimate fruition. Whatever measures are included in the bill, we have to have that as a focus sitting behind them as an intent. Michael Matheson Can you have something to follow up on that? Gordon Nelson I think that we all agreed that there is nothing in the bill that would deliver more anything. It does not seem to have any ambitions on anything but certainly not housing. I wonder if you can be a bit more specific about—we are looking at the bill, so we are looking at potential amendments to the bill. Are there any that you would suggest? A couple of you have mentioned having national house building targets. I think that, in Tammy, your written evidence, you suggested a more robust methodology. Sarah, you have mentioned this as well. Should we be saying something in the bill about a methodology for setting out what targets should be so that they would then flow down to local levels? Michael Matheson Tammy, I will bring you back in a second, because you were mentioned, but Jonathan Fair has indicated that he wants to make a comment on this, and then we will go to Tammy after that. Michael Matheson I think that setting clear national targets for house building across the sector, and in particular in the context of housing for older people, having that differentiation sometimes between different appropriate uses would be particularly important. Then monitoring that delivery through yearly statements and also by including appropriate policies and support of that aim within the bill, for example in NPF2, would indeed be the right way to go to ensure that more housing was provided and that the delivery of that was being monitored over time. In terms of the methodology, there is definitely a need for a clear methodology on how you develop a housing supply target and how you monitor how likely it is to be delivered or how successfully, in fact, it is being delivered. I do not think that I would necessarily argue to have the full detail of the methodology in the bill, but I think that there does need to maybe be something more in the bill for that to hang from. If the bill was going to say anything specific on home building, it would be a recognition that that is an important development in the national interest and that the NPF absolutely has to involve clear targets on house building if it is going to be successful. I think that some of the other specific amendments we would be suggesting to support that would be to make sure that local development plans are complying with the NPF where it sets house building targets to make sure that there is early collaboration with home builders among others when those plans are put together to make sure that they are more deliverable than the plans and the sets of site allocations that are in plans at the moment. I should have mentioned earlier that there is not any mention at the moment of a local development plan review being triggered in the event of a shortfall in the housing supply arising. That is something that is easy to envisage happening because it happens now. You would think that it would be a logical trigger for a plan review, but at the moment there is nothing in the bill or the powers that says local authorities will be required to review their plans where there is a shortfall. Gordon Nelson and Sarah Boyack Yes, I think that for us more in the bill to bring a more strategic consideration for local authorities of small sites within local plans and local development plans. One thing which colleagues of mine in England are encouraged by in the Westminster housing white paper is a stronger focus on small sites and speed delivery. Indeed, in that white paper, there are 10 per cent of allocations for small sites to be about half-hectare or less. There seems to be a more specified detail in the housing white paper of smaller sites for local authorities' plans. That is encouraging. For this bill, we could see more details specified on that or whether that comes through in secondary guidance and further legislation to be debated. Certainly, the emphasis more on smaller sites and specifying that on local authorities' plans should encourage more small house builders. Sarah Boyack Thinking particularly about making the connection between identifying housing needs and then feeding that through into the planning system, because local authorities do work on their ships and have work on housing needs demand analysis, but actually feeding that proactively into the planning system and then saying, where are the sites that are going to identify the delivery of that range of needs and to join up the dots between the different levels of planning, so from the national level, the regional level and then delivery in the local plans. If you look at the recent statistics, something like 10,000 people with disabilities and council waiting lists, 35,000 people with homelessness applications and over 162,000 people in local authority waiting lists. We have people saying that they want access to land and then there are the issues that have been mentioned about generation rent and people wanting to get their first home. How do we meet those needs? We know where they are and we need to feed that through into the planning system. Again, that is why land at the end of the day is crucial, because we need affordable land to provide a range of different house types and different needs. The issue of older people is being mentioned. That is an issue about accessibility in how we design our houses as well as the number of houses that we design and a range of choices for older people and throughout their lives there are people who need accessible homes as well, so there has to be a focus on the quality as well as the numbers and actually just digging down into local communities as to what that range of needs is. Three of you have mentioned the need for a variety of homes, smaller sites. Sarah, you mentioned initially the idea of a land value uplift model, which could be one way of delivering smaller sites. I wonder if you can give us your views on that. We will be asking about the infrastructure level later, so you do not need to talk about that. How do we deliver greater variety and get the smaller house builders with a foot in the door? There are more examples in the Commonwealth Games site, which was a huge set of sites, but it had a range of different people developing. One of the issues is about the role of local authorities in bringing land forward. One of the areas where it can be very successful is where local authorities and registered social landlords work in partnership, delivering land on the ground, where local authorities provide access to land, and building the high-quality development after consultation. A more collaborative approach to providing land is one of the ways that we can do that. It does not necessarily mean one or two small sites, but it can be parts of sites so that different builders can be involved in that process. If we have 10-year development plans, there is the opportunity for a focus and implementation of those plans. It is not a money-saving exercise to produce longer plans. You have then got to focus on the delivery. That is one of the big aspirations in the bill that we would want to see delivered. The importance of local development plans is critical in the context of housing to meet the needs of older people. Typically, developments to meet those needs occur in central brownfield locations. Smaller sites are prevalent in that area. They tend to be close to shops, services and transport links. If, in the context of local development plans, there was clear guidance and an intent to identify and protect suitable sites of that kind, then for a presumption given in favour of consent for specialist retirement housing, which is 10-year blind that might include sheltered housing or extra care accommodation, that would be a means by which those precious small sites could be encouraged, protected and secured for future development. Gordon Nelson, we will have to move on in a wee second just so we get through the bill, but Gordon Nelson? It is bringing forward more small sites than local plans, as I mentioned earlier. There are also more opportunities for SME house builders on larger sites. Whether we are looking at portioning larger sites and allocating them to the custom self-build model, which is more of a viable housing delivery model for small and medium-sized house builders. There are also other ways of looking at the planning system, which removes some of the barriers to entry for many small house builders. A lot of our members feed back to me that there is a huge amount of investment of resources up front as a small house builder, but limited certainty of outcome. The planning system, as evidence to us, has become more and more of a lottery over the years, with the cost of consent. For many SMEs having to commission consultants to do transport service, for example, because typically SME house builders do not have the internal resource to navigate the way through the planning system. They have to commission consultants and pay fees, which adds to the cost and adds to the risk and reduces the certainty of getting a return on their investment. There are many other ways that we could look at, both within the bill and beyond it, to make it easier to encourage more small house builders to build more homes. I just wanted to reiterate that we have a need to deliver more homes of all types. It is not just a question of one type of housing being in short supply or one type of housing deliver or provider being disadvantaged at the moment. The problems within the planning system and beyond it affect all housebuildings, so we need to take an all-tenure approach that enables everybody whoever they are looking to provide homes for to deliver more homes. Thank you. Just before we move on from that, if that is okay, Mr Simpson, you finished with that line of questioning. There are just a couple of supplementaries. The initial thrust of the question is, is there anything in the planning bill in itself that will increase housing, supply and housing building and housing completions? The answer seems to be, we will know that it might be part of the picture, but no, it is not. Mr Nelson was quite interested in what he was suggesting that whether there is something on the face of the bill or something in statutory guidance in relation to how the national planning framework or housing needs assessments or ships feed in to the development of whether it is local place plans, and we will come on to that later, I suppose what I am trying to tease out from the panel is whether if there is something additional on the face of the bill or something additional in statutory guidance, whether or not there is a framework here to help to deliver the increase in house building, if that framework must take account of all the things that you have all been talking about, not just where to build, but what to build and in what numbers to meet the national ambitions delivered and hopefully designed at a local level. Is there a framework there that can be built on, whether it is by putting something on the face of the bill or whether it is by putting something in statutory guidance in secondary legislation? There is a proposed new section 3AA2 to the 1997 act, which deals with the type of information that should be included when you are preparing the NPF. There are equivalent provisions on local development plans, so that provides an opportunity to state specific bits of work that needs to be done or specific information that needs to be taken into account, and we have suggested that that should include information on housing needs and information on education capacity in an area, because that is one of the big infrastructure blockers. I wonder whether we have the framework right, but it does not spell out explicitly enough of what should be taken into account when you are putting some meat on the bone to decide what we are building, where we are building and what numbers. Any additional comments on that before we move on? If the framework is not right, we need to know that as well. Local place plans, development plans, housing needs assessments, ships and the national planning framework, but it is how it feeds in and influences those things at a local level. Is the framework right at a local level, as proposed in the bill, if we can feed those things in, as opposed to what I am trying to ascertain? There are a couple of things that would be useful to clarify that would be in the relation to infrastructure, what level infrastructure is planned so that you can actually deliver sites. Thinking about a joined-up approach, you have had the new climate change plans come out this week, which has very high targets for low-carbon housing, and there is no real redicross between that and the planning bill. Any other comments on the framework in the bill, as it is designed, with its lack of clarity because of what is going to be left to guidance in relation to whether the framework is right or wrong, or should be added to, Mr Nelson? We are expecting to see a bit more in the guidance and second legislation. I think that the elements ingredients are there, but it is tying them all together. I think that, in the bill that is in its current form, there is not quite enough spelled out and detailed on the aspirations, particularly that a polystymae random are more or less there. However, there is a lot of work to be done about tying it all together and looking at the overall outcomes that we are looking to achieve, be it on housing delivery or in other aspects of infrastructure that the country needs. Before we leave housing any other, Monica, do you want to comment on the relation to housing? I want to pick up on Sarah Boyack's points about ship strategic housing investment plans for official report people and housing needs demand assessments. It sounds like, at a local authority level, there is a lot of work that goes on to map out housing needs locally. That is done separately from the local development plan process. However, we are now looking at the national planning framework as being the answer to, I suppose, showing the whole picture of what our housing needs does. We might see strategic development plans go. Do we have the right tools in place? Do we have the right data? Is the problem that it is not joined up enough and is that something that the bill could address or is there something else that it is missing? It is partly not being joined up. You are absolutely right there. If we are looking at our statistics for older people's housing, that does not automatically take you to one type of provision, but it means that, in all of our rural communities, we need that issue to be addressed and there are different ways in which that can be done. Whether it is explicit that different housing needs are going to be met in communities, just to identify numbers at the national level does not get you a local delivery. That is why feeding through into local plans is crucial. Having that process that is absolutely explicit, as you suggested, where you have housing demand identified at a local community level, feeding that through into the local development plan process and crucial identifying the sites. That will not solve everything for residential housing for older people. There might be social security or welfare issues that you need to address in terms of care issues that need to be provided, but in terms of the physical infrastructure, at least having that ambition throughout our communities is not explicit in the way that we have the system at the moment. Just leaving aside delivery and identifying sites, because I know that we will come into that. At the moment, are we doing a good enough job to identify needs? Do we have the right data, the right numbers or is that still a kind of unclear picture? A lot of people have questions about the methodology for housing need and demand assessments, and it is not a current consultation on that, but I am hoping that the Government will be open to amending that to support the work of the bill. One of the shortfalls in the need methodology is that it does not take into account whether there are hidden households that might be wanting or needing a home but currently do not show up on statistics. That includes young couples that are living with one of their parents, for example. I think that there are definitely shortcomings in the methodology. Just for the record, the committee does annual patrol through the ships that are returned to the Scottish Government when we follow up on that. I was just checking over the clerking team, I think, that we have still got that ahead of us. I know that they appear around Christmas time, and the Government does an analysis of whether we tend to follow up on that, and that is something that the committees certainly alert to. Andy Wightman, MSP. I want to move on to the question of strategic development plans on the national planning framework. There are very significant proposals in the bill to get rid of strategic development plans and put in place what appears to be a voluntary approach and new measures in section 3AA, which give powers to ministers to direct the information that is provided for the national planning framework. I am just wondering what your views are on the abolition of strategic development plans. We have evidence in the next session from Clyde Plan, citing the Scottish Government's research in 2014, saying that it still has yet to bed in and that it has still got a role to play. We will have to take a view on the question of strategic development plans, which seems quite important. That is the first question. The second is on the national planning framework, because the two are very much linked. Do you think that it is right that ministers should be able to draw up a national planning framework with things such as housing in it, which traditionally have been things for local councils to resolve? On the strategic development plans, broadly, we support the proposals on that. The point that is linked to that is regional partnerships. We feel that more information on how they might be resourced would be useful to get information on. It would be desirable for secondary legislation to provide a clear steer for regional planners towards the Scottish Government's national priorities. On the point of the national planning framework, we would agree that there should be a role for ministers and the central government to ensure that things that are strategically important and nationally important should be in the national planning framework. Something that perhaps links to some of the things that have been said on housing already is the area of district heating networks and low-carbon heating systems, which are local and exist in local areas, but which are very important for meeting our climate change plan and our energy strategy. There needs to be a clear link between that national policy and what is going to end up in local development plans. We have also supported getting rid of the strategic development plans. From my perspective, that is because they did not do the job that they were intended to do in delivering more homes by getting local authorities to effectively work together and look beyond their boundaries. We still think that regional planning is an important activity and we understand that it is intended that the national government will be working closely with local authorities and groupings of local authorities to include regional strategies and regional targets in that. I can understand that there is a desire to not just replace what has been one process-heavy part of the system with some other set of regulations, but you need a better balance between the desire for flexibility and a bespoke approach to regional planning that suits different groups of local authorities. The need to ensure that definitely happens and it is recognised in the system. The bill does not recognise regional planning or regional partnership working at all at the moment, and we think that that is a shortfall. I think that that could fairly easily be written into the arrangements on NPFs. Critical in terms of infrastructure provision and there needs to be a requirement that we have that wider regional planning. It has to be delivered at some point. If it is not explicitly there, then it will not be prioritised. Tammy, you said that there needs to be regional planning. Across Europe, there is regional planning. Regional planning is a normal thing. Is it your view that we need to replace—is it your view that the process that underpins strategic development plans is too process-heavy but that we still need regional planning? Is that your position? We still need local authorities to work together on the needs of a subregion, for example, or cross-boundary issues. I think that everybody expects that that would continue, but if it is not recognised in the bill and it is not resourced, it is not going to be effective. I think that local authorities who want to work together and will continue to do that need to be supported in those efforts. That is the key thing. There is an expectation that it continues, but the expectation is that it continues on a voluntary basis. Do you think that the bill should be strengthened in order to place a duty on local authorities to co-operate? I think that it is essential that it happens. I think that, to some extent, you can leave it to trust that local authorities will work together, but I think that the bill needs to do something to make sure that, where that does not happen on the ground voluntarily, the national government can do something to corral the local authorities and make them work together to build a stronger national planning framework. We are talking about strategic and regional planning. You do not think that there should be a duty to co-operate. I think that you would have to look at how that would be effective. There is a duty to co-operate. Has replaced strategic plans. The idea would be that that would give you the more flexible framework, but it would still impose a statutory duty to do that. I am thinking out loud here. It would allow people like Clydeplan, who are coming in later this morning, to continue with their quite robust process, but it would enable other authorities to have a more light-touch process, but everyone would be required to do a degree of regional planning. I think that an alternative to a duty to do something would be a check and balance in place to make sure that local authorities can be made to work together if they are not doing that voluntarily. I think that a duty to co-operate could be interpreted as an assumption that local authorities will not co-operate with each other, which is a challenge or a negative perception. It has to happen, but I think that there are different ways that you can support that. I am not trying to take a question off you, but I am just for the purposes of our stage 1 report. I am just trying to ascertain, because I think that we are too at the sea saying, let's get rid of it, but we have to assume that local authorities will continue to work together and others say, no. I think that Sarah Boyack was saying, keep it, I think. Is that what you were saying, Sarah Boyack? Would you be relaxed that if it went, if something was put in its place to make sure that local authorities and other key stakeholders continued to work together strategically? I think that you would expect. It is a good thing and it is up to them to identify in their area what are the key priorities. Unless people come together in the first place, you cannot make that judgment. Rather than my question for Tammy, do you think that it should remain a statutory duty to do so? The danger is that where regional planning is desirable, most places to a certain degree, that if it is not a statutory duty, local authorities drop all their statutory duties in the face of financial pressures and just don't do things that they don't need to do. That was my point. It is something that needs to happen, and then it is up to them once they are getting together to identify what the priorities are for action. Do you think that the bill should contain a statutory duty? I think that I said that at the start. There is a good dynamic here, so let's get some more things on the public record. Tammy Smith-Adams? To some extent, there is a duty on that in the bill because there is a stipulation that the Scottish Government can require not just individual authorities but groups of two or more authorities to work together in contributing to the work on the national planning framework. That is probably where the regional planning work comes in. The bill does not specifically say that the national government would work with regional partnerships. I think that the bill should say that, but there is a duty at the moment that the national government can use to make groups of two or more authorities work together with them on national and regional planning. That is a duty on them to help the Government to prepare its plan, which is not the same as regional planning. A final question on the national planning framework. Of course, the national planning framework is now going to become part of the development plan, and yet the national planning framework is drawn up by the executive. Parliament gets to look at it. This committee last time, for example, produced a report on it. We had a debate in Parliament about the report that the committee and other committees produced, but the debate was merely on a motion that we noted the reports. There is no democratic oversight of the national planning framework. If, for example, the Conservatives win the next election and come in as a minority government, they could, for example, allow fracking in the national planning framework against the will of Parliament. Do you think that there needs to be a stronger democratic oversight of the national planning framework? Everyone is taking a deep breath after Mr Wightman's blue sky thinking, let's say, at best. We will try and stay focused following that. Any comments on that? Let's take a couple of supplementaries. The supplementary is specifically on strategic planning, because we have a lot of other stuff to get through in the bill. I should just remind committee that I am a member of the Royal Town Planning Institute. Andy Wightman was exploring a good line of questioning on if we accept regional planning as a good thing, but there is no duty will it happen. I was thinking about some evidence that Craig McLaren from RTPI Scotland gave to the finance committee last week on the financial memorandum. He said that we are heading toward a crisis and resourcing in the planning system. We have heard a lot elsewhere about how difficult it is for local authorities to fulfil their statutory duties. If there is no statutory duty on regional planning or spatial planning at that level, how likely is it that local authorities will come together and, voluntarily or enthusiastically, put some resource into regional planning? I will come to Tammy first, but I am happy to hear from others. I think that it makes it more difficult to do something if you don't put resources into it, but what we have seen with the strategic development plans is that there are quite clear and detailed statutory duties there for local authorities in certain areas to form an authority and produce a plan. There have been resources put into regional planning, but it has not produced positive results for those regions, including in terms of housing delivery. I understand, to some degree, the desire to not just replace one process-heavy set of duties with another set and to look at how local authorities can achieve more if they are able to design their own approaches to regional planning. I understand that concept entirely, but it is quite right. It means that, based on the traditional approach to a financial memorandum, maybe you are in resource-stretched time, there is a risk that local authorities will not direct a significant amount of resource to that. There could be the option of the Scottish Government putting support funding specifically into new aspects of planning reform. I think that needs to happen on regional planning, on collaborative planning, on local place plans and all sorts of things that the Government is relying on people doing to make the planning system work. Certainly, based on how a financial memorandum works at the moment, if there isn't a duty, it doesn't get costed and it's not resourced, but I don't think that imposing a duty that doesn't work like SDPs is the right answer to resolving that. Jenny Hogan, I think that you have written everything from Scottish renewables. You also talked about regional partnerships, but you questioned resources for that as well. Tammy suggested that perhaps the Scottish Government would fund that. How realistic is that? Do you think that there is anything else in the bill that could be put in place to make sure that that working together at a regional level does happen? To keep it brief, I would basically agree with what Tammy said already. I think that we don't want to put too much in the bill to create effectively the same issues that we've had with strategic development plans, but we've suggested that maybe secondary legislation is the place to provide more of a clear steer, but broadly we wouldn't have anything else to add than what's been said. Graham Simpson, that's very helpful. Can I just check something? If there is a duty to cooperate in relation to strategic planning, could local authorities or stakeholders not just say, yes, we exercise that duty by meeting the other local authority, but we couldn't find common ground to that, so we've met our obligation anyway? Does putting a duty in actually drive that it will actually happen, given the fact that there's currently an obligation to do it but it doesn't seem to have worked anyway? Will the duty drive the change that some people are looking for? We'll ask that to Clydefan and others when they come in the next session, but does the duty in itself drive the change? Don't feel obliged, so we can let that tumble we'd move on and we'll take another member in. Tammy, briefly then. There's a duty to cooperate in England that's replaced the regional plans there, and it doesn't require people to agree with each other. Local authorities might have a meeting on a subject and talk about it. That's the duty fulfilled. It doesn't achieve anything more in practice. I think that there is also behind that the issue of resourcing. It was mentioned earlier in commentary that you can have the duty, but if the resources are not there to enable that duty to be fully implemented or the will to do so, then all those principles will fail. I think that there are similar concerns from our perspective in the context of local place plans—an excellent concept—but if local communities don't have the resources or the ability to engage fully with those processes, then all they will likely do is slow down the LDB process. Almost if you were next line of questioning, because that was a perfect segue, I should note our advice that I think pursued the matter of resources quite effectively, so that's not missed on the committee when we're looking at this. We'll move on now to Alexander Stewart. Thank you, convener. We've just touched on the concept of the local place plan, and it would be good to get a view of to what extent the introduction of that local place plan within the planning process and the system will enable communities to influence local development planning. Do you think it will? No, it's desperate to handle this question. Someone make eye contact with me. Sarah Boyack. You need to work out where the priorities are. One of the things that our members do a lot of work in is working with communities and adding value, so building houses but also thinking about the wider community engagement and community development. The language in the bill about upfront planning, collaboration—that's all good, but it does have to be paid for. I suppose that one of the comments that our members make is that getting through the planning process is taking longer and longer. It's a good thing, but there have to be resources, and there particularly have to be resources identified for communities that have been traditionally excluded, whose voices haven't been heard. If it's to deliver socially inclusive communities, that's got to be something that's got to be planned in from the start. I think that any business would legitimately want a local community to have a say in activity that occurs within its own area. I suppose that, from my perspective, I'd be concerned that the time spent developing that local place plan delays the LDP or the sequence in which it's provided means that the two may not be aligned. I think that that's the danger in the detail. I think that there are also circumstances where, arguably, communities who might best benefit from local place plans may not have the skill sets or the resources or the people able to engage with that process, whereas those who do, arguably, may not be the ones that most need a local place plan. That's an interesting dynamic. The plans could be running together and could be helping at the same time. Do you think that there's an opportunity for that to take place? Possibility, I think, for that to take place, whereas the LDP is in draft form, but I think that once it's settled and agreed, then it needs to take primacy. Nielsen wanted to cover that as well. Just to echo the point that's made earlier, I think that, yes, there have to be resources before LDPs and also the potential that they could exacerbate already. Long delays started by our members in the plan making process for house building could be a detrimental effect. Other thoughts we have is that the LPs need to be credible and deliverable and are the community reps sufficiently trained and knowledgeable to make a positive impact in developing LPPs and engaging with developers and the wider community? Also, from our experience, there's potential for conflict between community and community councils. There's that definition of a community and who's the voice and how they interact with other wider aspects of official community representatives. So, there's certain things in this that could potentially be a boon to many of our members who are building in their local communities and in their areas and within local authorities of Scotland. However, at the lack of resourcing and the lack of determining the impact on delays, we'd be careful in this regard. I think that the original question was about whether the local place plans will help communities to influence planning. I think that, from our perspective, they will. We think that if you're looking for a way of resolving community frustration with planning, the local place plans as they set out seem quite a good way of doing that. Part of that comes in the fact that they're very flexible. I think that the bill brings local place plans into the planning system in a way that they're not at the moment. Places like Lynithgo have been talked about before that have done their own local place plans, but they don't have a recognised place in the planning system. They would do in the future. I think that they're part of the planning system. They're likely to relate to the development and use of land, so they'll be material to decisions. I think that they give communities a very positive opportunity to influence planning without doing what neighbourhood plans have done, which has introduced lots and lots of regulatory steps that you have to go through in order to get that plan in place and regulated. Certainly, when they're coming in, that flexibility is a very positive aspect of them. I would agree very much with everything that's been said already on it. In our evidence, we've said that we will come further clarity on the role of the local place plan first of all, but also the level of scrutiny that's going to be applied to them. We've referenced some experience in England and Wales, for example, where there's been quite mixed responses to how those plans have panned out and, in some cases, even being described as anti-development. That's not to say that we're against it, but we very much encourage that model and that kind of front-loading of the process. There's enthusiasm within the communities to be part of that process, and you've identified that it's the resourcing, it's the knowledge, it can be the length of time that things take for it to then progress, and if the community who is representing are actually representing the community or the resection of the community that have an issue and want to then deal with that within the plan itself. Do you believe that, by having it, it will enhance that opportunity or will it still cause some issues going forward? I agree again. We can go back to what's been said already. It really depends on the resourcing of it, how it's managed and how it's ultimately scrutinised as well, but I agree that, broadly, it's a good proposal. Then we will talk about the relationship between the place plan and the local development plan. As we develop that, should there be a formal part of the local plan, should there be a formal part, should they have material consideration within that process, or should they simply have a regard to the content? When they are first brought in through this bill, having regard to the relationship, I think that if you were going to make local place plans part of the development plan, or put a much stronger obligation on local authorities and the national government to make sure that the development plan reflected local place plans, you'd have to put in a lot more checks and balances on how you prepare a plan and what can ultimately go into it. I think that the communities would lose the flexibility that they've got. No other comments on that, Alexander Stewart? You've identified what the aspiration is, but it's making sure that we can achieve that aspiration. The bill does have that aspiration to make it happen, but on the ground it's going to have to be resourced, it has to be implemented, and the timescales within the process would need to be part of that. I think that you've identified things to me. There are lots of supplementaries that are inspired by that. I think that this gets to the meat of the bill, the link between local place plans and development plans. Should development plans have to demonstrate how they have taken account and amended their development plan in order to have genuine process-driven activities to, at least where possible, support local place planning? Does that have to be more—whether it's a material consideration within the planning process? Should development plans do more than just have regard for it? Should there be a process by which development plans have to, in theory, at least be reviewed on the basis of a local place plan? That would certainly give it a bit more meat any thoughts on that. Lots of scribbling, but no thoughts. I think that if communities are going to feel that their voice has been listened to, that would certainly be one way of demonstrating that as the case. A process of review based on the content of LPPs before the LDP is signed off and finalised would seem sensible to me. It's the opportunity for communities to be brought into that process of planning their future and visioning what they want for the future. It is then joining the dots up to make sure that that happens. However, it has to be resourced so that people whose voices have not been hit hard. When a planning system is front-loaded, getting that right is going to be quite important, because that is the place where you want to encourage people to get involved. I am assuming—I never assume anything—that it would be beneficial, but not required, that local place plans would happen ahead of the local development plan, because I know that the local development plan will be there for 10 years if the legislation goes forward, but there are processes to amend it along the way within those 10 years. It could take account of a local place plan that happened a couple of years after the 10-year development plan. What is the sequence of events in an ideal world? Would it be local place plans feeding into a local development plan before it is actually drafted? Is there a best practice if the bill is passed? Do you think that it is? I think that, to some extent, it depends on what the communities want to use them for. If they want their local place plans to influence a local development plan, they could look at putting one in place at the right time for that process. Equally, they might find that they want to use a local place plan to fill in some missed detail or pick up on a change in events that happen since the plan has come in place. I think that there is not necessarily a perfect sequencing dynamic. I will do one more question that has lots of interest from MSPs to come on us. When we were talking about making sure that we were meeting housing targets in the social renting sector or giving a boost to the private sector, we were talking about strategic housing investment programmes, housing needs assessments and how development plans should be drawn up in a way that takes account of that to deliver it. Should local place plans have to do the same thing? There is no point in a community fric loading a planning system and a community saying, we quite like the balance of social rented housing to private housing here, we quite like more green space, we quite like it as it is. Let us do a local place plan that kind of sets that in stone but does not directly challenge significant housing needs within a community, for example. Should local place plans also have some guidance around it to say that they should have to take account and dovetail in with the national planning framework with strategic housing targets, the local development plan itself, because surely there has to be some kind of dovetailing with those national targets as well. Jenny Hogan? I think that it would be helpful to have some kind of guidance early on because I can see a scenario where if you do not have that and a community produces a local place plan and then further down the line they see the NPF, the LDP being developed with national outcomes in mind, and if they are not then taking account of for that reason then I can see that that would create some disquiet and understandable frustrations with the community. I would think that probably earlier in the process that they have some kind of guidance of these are the kinds of principles that the local development plan will be having to effectively adhere to or take cognisance of, surely that will create more of a positive mindset from the community early on. I know we have got the place standard tool, we have got surett processes and all those kind of things to consult and get out what communities want from where they live and place setting the standards around that. Should there be further guidance with local place plans to say that they should be meeting, they should be taking account of these local, regional and national priorities or should they just be consulted with and what comes out is what comes out even if it is often a totally different direction from every other part of public policy? Jonathan Fair? I think if local development plans and housing needs and demand assessments begin to proactively describe how you address the housing needs of a wide range of people, including older people for example, in a local area, then it would be important for LPPs to have that same structure and guidance, otherwise you would come to a place where LPPs and LDPs are in conflict with each other and then you go back to the fundamental question of which takes primacy. I can see circumstances where moves to smooth and streamline the process then get stuck in a loop of legal challenge and discord between communities and local authorities, that would be clearly extremely unhelpful. So consistency of guidance, consistency of parameters through each of the tiers of the supplementary information and work that carries on within local authorities or local communities is inherently important. Okay, so that was my money's worth asking questions around that. Kenneth Gibson? Yeah, I was really wanting to move on to another area, but just in this one, I mean, the panel actually think it's realistic to expect the majority of communities or anything other than a tiny minority actually develop place plans given the issues of community capacity we have across Scotland. I mean, certainly my experience of people who involve themselves in such issues tend to be very small groups within larger communities and in some communities which do not, they don't even have functioning community councils, for example. So is this actually realistic and is there a concern that perhaps you'd end up with a patchwork quilt in terms of the planning landscape across Scotland? Mr Gibson? Just before witnesses answer that, I'll take you back in later for your substantive questions. There's a number of supplementaries in relation to local place plans. Yeah. This is an innovative proposal, isn't it? And it comes from communities wanting their voice to be heard. So it is going to be work in progress and I think you can support that process through giving good guidance. You can resource that progress, that process, but it's not a requirement on communities and it's where communities want to do this. It's making sure that they'll have the capacity to do it and that they are listened. But I'm not sure how over prescriptive you want to be at the very start given it's meant to be bottom up and it's not something that communities have instructed to do, it's there encouraged and then given voice to do and hopefully people who are developers in the area will work with them. That's part of the ethos of registered social landlords is working with communities. So I think this is one of the bits of the bill that because it's new and innovative, as long as the aspirations are clear and there's a process for evaluating afterwards what happened and learning from it and when you can identify potential problems in advance, do that and do best practice. But in the end it's going to be up to communities and giving them the support to get on with it. With place plans is it something that should be developed only when the communities have themselves been seen to be consulting within their own community? Because often in my experience as councillor in MSP community organisations are in fact people who represent often only themselves and don't actually engage wider with communities. I'm sure people have discovered that themselves in their own working lives. So how should, if a place plan is going to develop, how widely should the community in which that place plan is going to be developed actually effectively engage with their own local community? Jenny Hogan? I would certainly agree with the point about defining the community and obviously in the renewables industry we have a lot of experience of certain instances where there are very small and vocal minorities that have very strong views on some proposals and that doesn't necessarily speak for the community. So I think that this really does come down to if this is something that's not required then you need to then see that through in the later parts of the process, in other words how much credence does it need to be given to make sure that balance is right. But I think that the best way to deal with this surely is to resource as much of that broad engagement at an early stage so that we do encourage the widest community to come forward and engage young people for example and people of all ages and economic backgrounds etc. So if we can try and get that part right and maximise the amount of engagement early on then that should minimise that risk of just having a few vocal minorities. Do you have any thoughts on defining a community? We'll take us on that. Move on, Mr Gibson, to some other supplementaries. Thanks, this gets to the nub of something in the bill and Sarah, you were saying that you know this is a good aspiration, it's novel, it's innovative. I think the challenge for us though is that is it worth it? Is it going to lead communities up the garden path? So at the moment the two bodies that can produce these are a community council or a community body under the community empowerment act, but local authorities duty in regard to local place plans are merely to have regard to it. They don't form part of the statutory development plan. The Scottish Alliance for People and Places, which I think SFHA is a member of now, say that they should be considered as part of the local development plans process, notably considering their content during the first stage of the gate check and the bill should make this link more explicit. Obviously there's a balance between giving communities the freedom to draw up plans, but on the other hand making sure that the effort that they put in is rewarded by some measurable impact on the planning system and that's the balance we're struggling to get right. So have you got any views about how they may be made a little bit more effective in order to persuade people that it's worth doing it in the first place? The resources and then being taken account of when the local development plan is being prepared. They are the two critical issues. The bill can't make provision for resources, but the bill makes provision for it at the moment is that planning authority shall have regard to the local place plan. Is that enough? Is that sufficient? I think I said before I do think it's sufficient and I think it gets debated, but I think there are relatively few things that primary legislation tells local authorities they have to have regard to in their planning work and now local place plans are one of them. So there is status in that. I mean I said before they've been made to be part of the planning system and there are consideration in other parts of the planning system. So I don't think we should underestimate the fact that having regard is something that means something and it's a duty on local authorities that doesn't apply to a lot of other things. I just agree with that point and coming back to the previous point as well that if you go further than that then you do risk small groups that have sometimes in some cases vested interests and how do you then avoid that impact. So I think it does come back to that encouraging wide early engagement and doing it in a positive proactive way rather than a requirement way. A couple more supplementaries in this area. Graham Simpson, then Monica Lennon. Yeah, thanks. So the problem here is the way the bill is drafted is we have this phrase have regard to, we've mentioned it already. Now let's just be realistic about the way the world works. If you say to a council you only have to have regard to something the danger is they will take one look at a document produced by a group or group of people. For example the groups in Linlithgow that some of us met and then they can say well that's all very well and stick it on the shelf. We've had regard to it. The problem is that that is what will happen because that's the way the world is. That's the way councils work. So you'll get communities however you define them producing these plans at great expense and great time and they will get ignored and that is going to put people off. You'll also have a situation where better off communities who are better placed to produce these plans may well go down the route worse off more disadvantaged parts of Scotland won't produce them. So you could have, as Kenny Gibson described, a patchwork situation. So our challenge as a committee is to beef this up and it does need beefing up. It's not strong enough. The phrase have regard to is not good enough. If we're going to actually involve people we need to involve them properly. So should it be and we've asked this question repeatedly already this morning, should it actually be part of the process of producing a local development plan that you should have to, at the same time, show that you've engaged with communities to produce local place plans so you do it at that point. So that actually means something because it doesn't mean anything at the moment. Over that, I should point out that the committee hasn't taken any decisions and I may come down precisely on the side of where Mr Simpson is, but the committee hasn't formed its view in relation to that yet. So clearly having regard to, for some committee members, won't go far enough. Jenny Hogan, you'd said that struck the balance about right. Is there anything else you would like to see in place and indeed the rest of the witnesses, I think, Mr Simpson, what if it wasn't a statutory duty, maybe it should be what else could you put in place to go further than regard to Jenny Hogan? I think just coming back to the principle of it, I mean that for us the ideal scenario is that the local development plan is something that truly represents the local community, the full community, and that communities themselves should feel that that local development plan is theirs. So to me that's how we should be, you know what we should be focusing on and that their elected representatives in their area truly represent their views. I think fundamentally that still comes down to the consultation requirements on local authorities to ensure that they are basically doing their job and fully representing their community. I think that the good thing about the local place plans is that they provide a proactive approach for certain elements at least of that community to put forward their ideas and their views, but ultimately surely it's up to the local authority fundamentally to represent their community at large. We will have the opportunity almost very shortly to talk about how we improve local development plans, as opposed to local place plans. Any other comments from witnesses about going further than having regard to what process you can put in place or just making it a statutory duty, that would be helpful. Any other views on that to inform the committee? Sarah Boyack, then Tami Smith-Adall? Just a very minor point. One of the suggestions that the People and Places Alliance was to just be more explicit that a local place ban has been produced when the local authority is doing its gate check on the local development plan. Not to say—and, by the way, we have had regard to not say anything about that, but to actually be expected to say where those views have been taken on board and included and where they haven't and why not. I would just be much more explicit on that. That would be a due process to the community not just saying, thanks, that we have seen that moving on, but to engage in what has been recommended. I think that I have actually set out a process that would best practice where local authorities would consider in a meaningful way local place plans rather than just saying that they have had regard for them. I think that that would absolutely be helpful. Tami Smith-Adall? Just a very similar point. I think that the evidence report is a good place where you could say that the local authority has looked at what local place plans have been produced in an area and how the local plan could help to take the aspirations of those forward. The bill is very quiet beyond the fact that there is going to be an evidence report on how the collaboration and work at the early gate check is going to work. I think that this is one of the areas where it is silent on that. We would want to see home builders involved in early collaboration. Communities would want to see themselves involved in that as well, particularly communities that have produced place plans. I think that if we addressed that wider gap, we could pick that up. Thank you. Morricle is very patient in relation to the supplementary for this. We are also going on to look at development plans in some more detail as well, so I don't know if you want to take it on to that also, Morricle. It's up to yourself. Sure. Just sticking with local place plans, we have taken evidence last week and we have been out engaging in communities. Some of us have looked back at the evidence sessions for the 2006 planning act, so some of the aspirations in the previous planning bill are still embedded in this one. That is partly because communities don't feel that they have an equal place in the planning decision making process. We can understand, for those of you who don't support equalising rights of appeal, that a local place plan is a remedy. Tami, you have described a situation in which your members would prefer to see regard to local place plans. Were that being embedded in part of the development plan? Could there therefore be tension and conflict around the status of local place plans in terms of the LDP process but also when it gets to development management? When planning consultants come along to represent clients and start to look at all the things that have to be taken on board, are your members likely to be talking down local place plans and saying, while it's a material consideration or you have to have regard to it, that the development plan says this and the development plan is king in this process? I wonder if we've come back in 10 years' time. Are people going to be saying, while front loading didn't work in 2006, that local place plans haven't worked in 2018, what's going to be next? The honest answer would be, it depends on what local communities are trying to do with local place plans. The Scottish Government is being clear that it sees them as an opportunity for communities to come together and do something positive but that they don't want them to underwrite what the wider system is trying to do in terms of delivering what individual communities but Scotland as a whole needs. A benefit of the flexibility is that there is a real chance for communities to come and do that if they're properly resourced. It's right to continue with the flexibility that's there at the moment to let people make of it what they can, subject to the resources that are made available of them, if they become a part of the planning landscape. There are mechanisms in place for local authorities to be able to bring that into part of the local development framework. If local authorities don't work positively with communities or local planning work, they'll be accountable to those communities on that basis. I think that that's why the Scottish Government has left a lot of things fairly loose at the moment compared to the previous act and the planning system traditionally. The reason why lots of things don't work is because we've put lots of regulations and process in place and that hasn't freed up people to work more collaboratively and collegiately together. I think that there'd be a bigger risk of us coming back in a few years' time and saying that local planning and local planning plans are a problem if they were very heavily regulated. Some of the changes under the 2006 act included early engagement with communities, particularly on major planning applications, so Jenny might be able to relate to that. Is there anything that you've reflected on in terms of how industry has approached that and perhaps Jonathan can add to that as well? There is now an opportunity for communities to engage with developers, other stakeholders before you submit a planning application that could have a big impact on a community. I understand that you have to submit a report before that goes to the council. Is there anything in terms of how industry has approached that that you think you could do better at? That was the big opportunity that was going to override the need for equalising appeal rights and so on. I might come to Jonathan on that. I think that early community engagement and clear opportunities for that community to influence outcomes of major applications are critically important in ensuring that people feel their voices being not just heard and ignored but heard and listened to and then responded to. As a business, it's something that we think very highly of and have had good experience of on each and every instance when we bring forward projects. That dialogue and discussion always results in changes to our proposals and always results in us having a much more rounded-out view of what our local communities views on our development might be. Doing that at the early stage before your plan application is submitted and then being able to demonstrate through the course of that process what's changed on the back of it gives us that good experience. It may be that best practice in that respect would be something that would be better as common practice, and that's my only comment, but I don't think that everyone within the house building sector necessarily performs those standards. I think that that's a really helpful answer because people who have been involved in planning know that if it's approached properly, it's a good thing for business and it cuts out a lot of the problems, but we've taken evidence from people who feel in their communities that, in a lot of situations, it's like a tick box exercise because you have to do it. It's another step to get through before you get to planning. They've said they don't really see any real evidence that their views were taken on board, nothing really changed in the master plan. Is that something that you recognise? Jerry Hogan. Yes, first of all, I would agree with those comments as well. For our members, early engagement is an important element. Across the whole development community, there are some developers who are better at it than others, but as an industry body, we very strongly encourage our members to engage early and engage in a good way so that communities feel that they've been heard and listened to. Generally speaking, I don't think that anybody likes planning by appeal, and that's something that our industry has a lot of experience in as well. It's costly, it doesn't always end up with a good outcome or at least a happy outcome, if you like, for certain parties. That's why we do strongly support that front loading and the types of approach that the local place plan has encouraged. I'm just thinking for communities who might feel that they get involved in a local place plan, they put a lot of passion, time and energy resource into it and they'll get to a point where it's quite low down the pick in order and developers or others will come along and say, well, the development plan has more weight. Thanks for doing your local place plan, but it's not going to make that much difference. Do you think that there's a danger? I think that there's good intentions in the bill, but is it a danger that people will engage in local place planning but then walk away feeling quite underwhelmed by it? You mentioned the LPP versus the LDP, and that's why it's so key that the LDP is ultimately the place where local communities' views are clearly represented. We've already discussed that with a previous question. If we can make sure that the LDP is right, we can get that balance right. A couple of questions on the local development plans, just to make sure that we pick up on them, and that would really help, because the deputy convener was talking about front loading of the system, and we have to look at how local development plans feed into that as well. For example, if we continue within the bill, there's the proposed evidence report and there's the gate check process. We've heard reference to that already. What is there within the bill in relation to the evidence report and the gate check exercise that you think is beneficial to that front loading and community engagement, and where do you think it just has to go further if we want to be as meaningful as possible in relation to front loading? Is it helpful to take some of that on the record before we move on to other areas that are contained within the bill? Stunned by silence. It's a fairly key part of the bill, so just something on the record would be quite helpful to scrutinise it when we do our stage 1 report. The only aspect of the bill that reflects that early engagement and gate check collaboration is the reference to the evidence report, but the bill itself is completely silent on the fact that that needs to be a product of collaboration. That's something that we've said in our written evidence, so I think that that is a major mission. I don't think that it's deliberate, so I would hope that that can get corrected. It's helpful. What else doesn't go far more from relation to that? Do you like to draw to our attention, even if it isn't your written evidence? Any further comments? Sarah Boyack? The only thing would be being absolutely clear about the continued relevance of the local development plan and making sure that you don't just do a gate check at the start, but that you keep it up to date, and being explicit in terms of the consultation processes and looking to involve communities, whether it's young people or people who are traditionally excluded so that they are part of that process of the development plan making, so that the emphasis is about making sure that people's voices were heard and listened to at the start of the process. That's helpful. We'll move on if there's no further comments, but we'll get the opportunity to put your comments on the record. Earlier, we talked about making sure that we know what we're planning for and we talked about housing needs as an example. We are, I squeeze for time, so I'm quickly going to try and run through the infrastructure levy because we know that the infrastructure is a constraint to making sure that development happens. Can I ask for your thoughts on the proposals in the bill? Will the infrastructure levy unlock development? Is there anything that we can learn from the experience in England on community infrastructure levy? Can we switch to Adam's? I think that as time has gone on through the review, there's less confidence that the infrastructure levy could do that. Homes of Scotland, right from the beginning when we put in written evidence to the independent panel, said that we supported the principle of a levy as a replacement for section 75, because it could give more clarity to developers on how much they were going to need to pay and when, and that would be better than what we have at the moment. The research that the Scottish Government has done itself on a levy has shown that it's got a fairly limited ability to increase the funds that already come through developer contributions. At the same time, there's been a review of SIL done in England that has shown that SIL hasn't been an effective tool. That's partly because it hasn't amassed enough money to pay for the infrastructure that local authorities want to deliver, but also because it's taken the responsibility for delivering a lot of that infrastructure off developers who are able to provide things and into the hands of local authorities who aren't geared up to be infrastructure providers. A much wider issue that's become clear is that whether you use a levy or section 75 or a combination of those to try and maximise the contribution that developers make towards development, you're not going to get anywhere near as far as you need to get to fully fund infrastructure. There hasn't been any look beyond developers and beyond the planning system to how you would fill that gap. It's quite a big change. It's a big bit of legislation and a change in policy direction. I'm not sure it's going to deliver the infrastructure that's needed, and I think that, to some extent, continued look at the levy is a distraction from the wider work that needs to go on on how you would fund infrastructure beyond what you can do through development. I noted it in Craig McLaren's evidence to the finance committee. The comment that in England there have been occasions where the infrastructure levy has been counterproductive because it's ruled out affordable housing because developers have said that it's too expensive when you pay the infrastructure levy to actually have affordable housing on site, so that's something that would be a cautionary note. In terms of the approach, we actually want to see a different approach taken by using the uplift of land value when permission is granted to a site to look at that as an alternative way for generating money. The issue about how you make sure that investment raised in an area actually goes to that site so that local authorities are able to generate that resource and then invest it to deliver the quality in the site that's being aspired to. That's a critical issue. Jenny Hogan? As we've said in our evidence, the main issue for us is that we're not clear whether energy projects would be affected by the levy, would come under the levy, so having greater clarity on what the intentions of the levy are would be helpful to avoid any confusion. On a similar note to what Sarah Hogan was saying, the energy industry and renewables in particular are under extreme pressure at the moment to cut costs largely due to revenue support being reduced or removed altogether. In the energy strategy itself, it's very clear that the Scottish Government's policy is to support as far as possible cutting costs and renewable energy. Creating new fees and levy runs counter to that, so we would raise caution on that point, too. I'll take Jonathan Fair next. I'll take you both back in a moment, yes. As a business that operates across the whole of UK, some of my colleagues have experience of still in England. I think that the comments that Tammy made about some of its weaknesses are pretty important. The principle of infrastructure levy is one that is broadly supported within the sector, but you need to recognise that that mechanism takes time to build up funds to be used to pay for the infrastructure that is required. It's critically important that the funds that are raised are then spent on that infrastructure, linked to the development that is actually occurred or required in the first place. I think that disconnect both in timing and in the investment intentions from funds raised by SIL in England and Wales is where that jaundiced view of its impact comes from. Thank you, Gordon Nelson. I've viewed that any such infrastructure levy shouldn't apply to the smallest sites for houses to be built or the viability of these will diminish even further, so they won't come to fruition. Also, from feedback from our housebuilder members in England and Wales suggests that the greater transparency and certainty in which the SIL in England and Wales's men's liver has not, in fact, been the case, and that most developers see no greater certainty in SIL than they do in the section 106 agreement. So, a note of caution and experience of SIL from our housebuilder members in England and Wales is there. Tammy Spiffard, would you like to back in? I just wanted to note some of our other concerns with the way in which the policy memorandum and the financial memorandum suggest that the levy might be brought in. So, initially, we'd all assumed that it might be a case of local authorities costing up the infrastructure they need to provide and then looking at how they recoup some of that through development. But instead, it's suggested that it could be done on a land tax basis, but more broadly than that, it's a bit unclear in terms of what the roles of local and national government are. So, the way the powers are framed or the way it's suggested powers might be brought forward basically say a local authority could choose whether or not to bring a levy into place in its local area and it would choose how it does that or what the level of the levy would be. There's also provisions then that say the national government could take some or all of that money up to its level and redistribute it around the country, which I would suggest is quite far removed from a simple infrastructure levy to get development within an area to fund infrastructure within that area. It's more of a selective tax on some types of development in some areas that cross-subsidise things happening elsewhere in the country. I think this redistribution idea with national government passing money around the country also suggests a misunderstanding of the point that I mentioned earlier. You're not going to be able to fully fund infrastructure from development, so it wouldn't be a question, for example, of Edinburgh just as an example being able to cross-subsidise infrastructure elsewhere, Edinburgh has challenges to meet its own needs. I just think that the way the government is elaborated on how it might use the levy just raises more concerns and problems than it resolves. I'm interested to know if there's any alternative ideas, but the planning bill doesn't have a purpose bill in terms of the purpose of planning. If we're here to try and make sure that we get fantastic places and we're all committed to placemaking, I think that someone in the panel had mentioned the role of the private sector, but actually this is about the public good as well. Are we getting the balance right in terms of investment and development? It sounds like from what we've talked about today about the lack of resources in the planning system more generally, are we trying to do placemaking on the cheap? Johnathan? I think that in terms of infrastructure investment, the problem is a combination of lack of resources but also lack of joined-up thinking. Where you have disparate organisations not thinking carefully about the implications of an LDP and what that means for their investment programme, whether that be in terms of public utilities or road infrastructure or schooling, that's where those conflicts arise. While the development industry is happy to meet legitimate contributions towards detriments that occur on the back of its activity, I think that there is a wider question about investment in infrastructure, public investment in infrastructure for public good beyond individual developments. Any other comments on that? It's just sparked a thought that it is about the delivery phase as well. It's not just about what goes into a plan, it's what happens afterwards. I think that the experience of our members is collaborative work with local authorities when different infrastructure providers are actually brought together can actually help get developments moving so that people are actually talking to each other in the same room and it's not endless conversations, so there is something about the resourcing not just to produce a plan but to implement it and do that with the stakeholders and the placemakers to make sure that you get that high-quality placemaking that we aspire to. I just want to final comment on the proposed infrastructure level. I think that if it did come through and it was payable, at least we'd argue that it would be from commencement, preferably from completion of the properties of houses. That way it makes a little financial difference to local authorities if you're collecting it, but it's a huge difference to SME developers, so a build-now-pay-later model, otherwise it lacks another barrier to entry and it'll disincentivise many existing home builders from upping their output. Thank you. A brief supplementary, we are pushed for time, a brief supplementary from MSPs. Thanks a lot. My impression is that builders on this panel anyway don't seem to want to pay for the infrastructure as it's currently proposed. Sarah, you suggested another model which was land value uplift, so I just wanted to ask a quick question on that. How do you think that might work? Are you talking about compulsory purchase of land? Probably horrify Tammy Swith's with Adam's, but how do you see that working in practice? There's a range of mechanisms, aren't there? You've mentioned compulsory purchase order, but there's a range of options if we're trying to get affordable housing development and affordable across tenures, then having the capacity to have land that is affordable to development and then you're capable of taking it forward. There are different mechanisms in our rural communities. There has been work that's been done through both community empowerment and land reform, where communities get access to land that wasn't being used. There's been suggestions that in urban areas in town centre sites, for example, using compulsory sale orders is one way to bring land into use, but we're looking at land value capture, the uplift of the value. The cost of the land is a major issue in terms of what you can put on that land, in terms of quality and numbers. The state gives the benefit to the person who owns the land and those who come to develop the land thereafter have to pay that and the people who pay, whether it's rent or sale, are paying that premium. It's looking at a more equitable way and a more efficient way of making sure that we can get use of land. There's a range of developers for whom this would be a very progressive step. I know that there will be a divergence of use perhaps within witnesses. We know that the Land Commission is doing work on this, so there is a timing issue in terms of where you are in terms of taking your evidence and the fact that there has been work published before Christmas that was looking at this in quite detail and also looking at the range of different options, whether it's compulsory sale orders, CPOs, different types of land taxes, so I think that it's material to the bill and it's something that's worth just having a pause and having a look at the different options. That's helpful because I was going to put that on the record that says me doing that. There may be a variety of views from witnesses. If you could maybe drop as a line if you feel compelled to say something in response to what we've heard just for time constraints, that would be very helpful. But apologies that we now have to move on to another important section within the bill, Andy Wightman MSP. Thank you very much, convener. I want to look at those proposed simplified development zones. We've had simplified planning zones, a couple of them, and we're not going to have any more of them, but the proposal is that we have these simplified development zones. I just want to ask you two questions. First of all, do you think that those serve any useful purpose? The second question is on process. If you think that those are a good idea, how do you think that they should be decided upon? The bill proposes, for example, that third parties can ask for those. It doesn't specify who those third parties are. They could be my sister in Switzerland. She might ask for one. It provides that there's appeals to ministers if local authorities refuse, and indeed Scottish ministers can make simplified development zones themselves. I note that the Alliance for People and Places has suggested in recommendation 11 that the simplified development zone should be included in the local development plan. Two questions, one on purpose and the second on the process. I have a name check for Mr Wightman's sister, which was nice. Who would like to go first on that? Jenny Hogan. We don't have a great deal of views on the SDZs. However, we do think that there could be an opportunity to align with some of the national outcomes, particularly in the climate change plan and the energy strategy, for example on heating, heat networks, that kind of thing. The Scottish Government's recently consulted on a strategy on local heat and energy efficiency strategies and district heating regulation has really ambitious plans for low-carbon heat projects in Scotland. Potentially, the SDZs could provide a clear steer towards heat and could help to really catalyze those district heating networks and other innovative solutions and other forms of energy, for example, at that local level. There might be opportunities there that those zones could be used for. Any other comments? Our only comment is the one that you would expect us to make, that we would still want to ensure that there was affordable social rented options, so that it wasn't mono-tenure and that there was an opportunity for local communities to see what is being proposed and where possible to make sure that it is part of the local development plan process and that it potentially amends the development plan. That's one of the Alliance for People and Places recommendations, as you say, for us. It's making sure that you have options of affordable housing as part of the process, where it's going to be a housing development. It's helpful. In other comments, Gordon Nelson. I just say that we agree that the potential of the zone of land through simplified development zones could allow more areas for new housing, but the focus must be on supporting the development of smaller sites, which, in these small sites, provide better design and scaling quality. So, of course, you just note that it could, in principle, support more small sites coming through, and, unequally, it mustn't be at the expense of master planning what essentially are large strategic sites, so I think that, in order to caution our perspective on simplified development zones. Jonathan Fair is just a final supportive comment. From my point of view, we are supportive of those SDZs. As we've said already, important questions are around how the resources to prepare them, to set them up and then to monitor their effectiveness can be provided within local authorities. However, the principle of anything that simplifies, speeds up and makes the planning process more straightforward should be welcomed. Any additional comments before Mr Huypin comes back in? Not okay, Andy? Useful. Some people in written evidence have suggested that we shouldn't be calling these simplified. We should be calling them better place zones or something, so it may not be simple but it may be better by planning. No one addressed my question on process. My sister in Switzerland should be able to ask for a simplified development zone, get refused, go to ministers, make one. How much freedom in the system does that allow anyone anywhere in the world to suddenly place demands on land in Scotland through the planning system? If you don't have views, just say so because we're short of time. No one's grasp of the nettle on that. Your sister is probably the Switzerland right now, saying, answer the question, but it hasn't quite... Where is she on to be? We are short of time, we better move on. There's still a few aspects of the bill we haven't explored yet. We really should look at your views on eco-right of appeal. I'm sure that a number of MSPs want to ask some questions in relation to that. We had a variance of views last week at committee where we asked a number of questions on it, so rather than me making a pitch for what my initial thoughts might be on it, I would ask the witnesses to say what they think, either the opportunities or the dangers are in relation to eco-right of appeal and what your views are on it. Just leave it as open as possible. We've heard, of course, about the front-loading of the system, and that's the counter-blast in relation to eco-right of appeal. It was kind of alluded to through the evidence that we had this morning, but no one particularly mentioned it, so let's get something on the public record so that the committee can take a balanced view when we look at the evidence that we receive over the weeks of evidence sessions. Jenny Hogan. We just simply very much agree with the recommendations that came out of the independent planning review on third-party right of appeal or eco-rights of appeal, which did look at the issue very extensively. We think that there are a number of risks in there, and they have been outlined by that report. I won't run through them all in detail, but clearly delays, costs and things are very much at risk. We very strongly support the front-loading, because we think that that is the best way to proactively engage communities' views in the process, rather than doing planning by appeal, which is what nobody wants, I don't think. Scotland, we're opposed to a third-party right of appeal in principle because we think it significantly disadvantages housing delivery and investment in Scotland, as well as creating new conflict within the planning system. We don't think that there's any way you could frame that in terms of a limited third-party right of appeal that would address those negative consequences. In terms of the existing applicants' right of appeal, they recognise the limiting effect that the planning system has on what individuals can do with their land, and it's not a right that's abused. We know only about a third of the planning applications that are refused are taken forward to appeal, so it's not abused in the way that some people think that it is, but it does deliver quite a high proportion of Scotland's new homes. The minister, in his own introductory speech, when he introduced the bill alluded to the fact that over five and a half thousand homes have been given consent through the appeal process in the last two years. I think that we need to not underestimate the contribution that the appeal process makes to the planning system at the moment in terms of delivering on new homes. I moved from Edinburgh to Dunbar last year, and the house that I live in came through the appeal process. It's just a small site of 20 homes. I think that there were questions at the local level over whether housing was the right use for that site. There had been some long-term ambitions to do something else with it that weren't really relevant anymore but were still in politicians' minds, so those homes eventually got permission through the system. That development is almost entirely occupied by people who've moved from elsewhere in Dunbar. I'm one of the two households that I know of that are people who've come in from elsewhere. That's provided homes to people who run the local music school, people who work in the local brewery, people who work in the power station. It's not that homes coming through the appeal route are automatically a negative thing in communities or a negative part of planning. If we had a third party right of appeal, it's possible that those homes wouldn't have been built and people wouldn't have had the homes that they think suit them. If we had a third party right of appeal, it would have caused a delay to that. It would have potentially pitched one individual's view over the fact that that development is now given a home to 20 families, most of them from within the same community. Any other views on that from witnesses? Oh, everyone's hands are going up. Let's go to Jonathan Fair next and we'll come to the other witnesses in a moment. I would like to repeat some of the comments that I've already made, all of which I agree with. I want to focus on the purpose of the planning system is to encourage appropriate, sustainable economic development within our communities. That development only happens if businesses responsible for carrying out those developments have some certainty that the substantial sums of money that they commit to bringing projects through the planning system have some chance of success to a timeline that's in some way predictable. Without those guarantees, the investment framework for whatever function you're involved in, whether it's housing or renewable sector, or for that matter, any walk of life or business, when that becomes so uncertain that you don't know when the answer will come or how many times that answer will be appealed at the last minute, people will choose to invest elsewhere. That's the biggest danger in that particular theme. Sarah Boyack? It's a very brief comment that we strongly support the primary and safe development plans so that they've been through consultation, communities are involved with the lengthy discussion that we had earlier about upfront consultation and that we feel that's the right balance in the bill. We see very much the importance of local plans and people proposing housing developments coming through that route as much as possible and keeping those plans up to date and that's a better alternative. Okay, and Gordon Nelson? I'm supporting the comments that I made earlier. I think the emphasis of the bill is on the front loading and I think that a third party right of appeal would, yes, discourage investment, ramp up the uncertainty and slow down housing delivery and also for many of our members who are looking to aspire to become house builders who currently work on repairs and maintenance improvements, it would act another barrier to actually follow them saying, actually, this is another risk to my investment to become a house builder of the future. So it would block a more diverse range of house builders entering the industry and also for some who already are. It may represent an existential threat to our house building models. We worked a business model and go back into working on repairs, mates, improvements, extensions, so there's a huge risk to developers if it was introduced. Jenny Hogan, I would take in briefly just before you answer that. There's a lot of interest from MSPs here in relation to that. Any MSP that wants to ask the question, absolutely, but only because of time constraints. We're going to have to be pretty brief in relation to that. Jenny Hogan? Just very briefly to add a couple of figures into the mix. Our members have told us that at the moment, the appeals process that currently exists can add anywhere, typically from six months to up to three years, to a project timeline. Cost-wise, it can be anything from £50,000 to £300,000. I think that we also need to consider not only the time delays but the costs that would be involved and who would be bearing the costs of any changes to the appeal process. Thank you to witnesses. I'll take Andy Wightman and then Monica Lennon in this. Jenny Hogan, earlier in the session, you said in response to a line of questioning from Monica Lennon that no one likes planning by appeal. You seem to be suggesting that you want to keep the applicants' right of appeal, so people like planning by appeal that way, but you don't want anyone else to have a right of appeal. The proposals that have been put to us are that rights of appeal would be equalised on the basis of compliance with a local development plan such that, where an application is being made that violates the local development plan but is approved, communities could have a right of appeal, where the local development plan permits a development but the application is turned down, the applicant would have a right of appeal. What do you mean when you say no one likes planning by appeal? What I'm suggesting is that we could risk having a lot more appeals taking place and the slowing down of the process by that. At the moment, there already is quite a lot of that in the process. There's a lot of that, but if we've got rid of applicants' right of appeal, there'd be a lot less. I would agree with the comments that were made earlier that we could not get rid of appeals entirely, but what I think—I would go back to a point that I made earlier about local communities feeling that the local development plan is theirs and that actually changes with the point that Sarah May has made as well about this needs to be a plan-led system. If we can get that front-loading and that plan process right so that communities truly feel that that is their plan, then I think that that's the best way to deal with this rather than using ultimately the appeals process, which at the end of the day is a bit of a sticking plaster approach ultimately to trying to fix problems if we can get as much of that dealt with in the plan as possible. Fundamentally, the planning system still does need some route to appeal. Any other brief comments on that, and then we'll go to our deputy convener, Tammy Smith-Tarrams. If we got rid of the applicants' right of appeal at the moment, we'd exacerbate the existing housing problem. We're only building about 60 per cent of the houses each year that we think we need to or that we were building pre-recession. If you took out of the houses that come through appeal on the scale that Kevin Stewart outlined when he introduced the bill, you'd be reducing that to 40 per cent. You'd be taking out a very significant amount of supply. In terms of the idea of framing a limited right of appeal or equal right of appeal around departures, that's a very difficult thing to do. A departure from the plan is hard to define. A lot of communities, I guess, would probably assume that if a site isn't specifically allocated in the plan, that's a departure, but it's not if it meets the broader aspirations and policies of the plan, including the housing targets. When it comes to appeals, that's the very crux of what you're often appealing or debating. Is this or is it not a departure from the plan? You'd have to have that full argument before you could even decide somebody had access to the appeal system, so it's just not a black-and-white measure. To stop you in full flow, anyone who wants to give us more information on this outwith this evidence session would be welcome, but to finish off on equal right of appeal and take her on to another matter, we want to cover before we close the session. Monica Lennon, MSP. I think that there is consensus across the panel that we want a plan-led system, we want it to be front-loaded because early engagement is best for communities, but if developers and applicants don't get the decision that they like, they still want to have the right of appeal. I've not been working as a planner for a while, but does that not seem like a bit of a contradiction where you want a plan-led system, you want front-loading, but you still want to have that right of appeal? Won't that undermine everything that the bill is trying to achieve? Okay, who would like to answer that? Jenny, hope it. So again, I would just come back to the point that the planning system is there for an applicant to put in their proposal and for the local authority to represent the local area. I thought we were running for time, but we will continue in a few more minutes. I was going to say much more than that because I am probably repeating things that I have said before. Ultimately, if the local authority and the local development plan are truly representing the local people's views, that should be the fundamental rights of the system. One of the problems is that Jonathan also talked about the purpose of planning. I am not aware that the bill tells us what the purpose of planning is. Again, there is interpretation and assertion here, and I think that that is an issue that we will need to address in our further scrutiny. Is there any circumstance—I have put it out to the panel—which you would ever think is reasonable that the community, not as a third party but as an equal partner in all of this, should have any right to appeal any planning decision, any circumstance, or is it as a matter of principle equal rights of appeal as a noble area? At the outset, we oppose changes in principle because of the impact on investment in Scotland and putting it at a disadvantage and because of the increase in conflict. Definitely, in principle, we do not think that it would be a positive change. Everyone else would be all against equal rights of appeal and principle. I suppose that there is another issue about where people's voices are actually heard. One of the suggestions and the proposals by the people for places in the lines has been about mediation and hearing what people have to say. I think that the process of making sure that people have been involved in that process and not finding out at the end is a critical issue where the planning system needs to be better. I think that we could have a session on its own looking at the fairness of appeals because if Tami's figures are correct and it takes between six months and three years and between £50,000 and £300,000, it seems like that route to appeal is only open to the wealthy few who can afford very expensive consultants and solicitors. However, if we finish on the point about the purpose of planning, should the bill state what is the purpose of planning? Jenny and your evidence talked about defining sustainable development. Does the bill tell us why we need to plan what that legislation is for? Is that something that is really fundamental to making this work? To reiterate, so clearly sustainable development is what we would like to see clear in front and centre in the bill, but ultimately the bill is there to enable Scotland's national priorities right across strategies from the climate change plan to the energy strategy, housing all of our priorities for Scotland as a whole should be enabled, facilitated through the bill. Any other comments in relation to the purpose of planning and not going on in the face of the bill? I think that there's definitely a need to better explain to everybody how planning works. It's not necessarily quite the same thing as the purpose of the planning and the face of the bill might not be the right place, but I think that a lot of the conflict and misunderstanding comes from the fact that we've got a plan-led planning system, but it's also very flexible for good reasons and it's also delivery focused and trying to fame a purpose that described all of that without maybe alienating some people who you know don't want that to be the purpose of planning could be quite an endeavour I think. I'm just looking at members we are now over time. Any absolute burning issue you feel you need to ask at this point before I move to close the session? I think that the issue of older people's housing hasn't even been touched on and I think it's important. I mean we've got a submission specifically from McArthur Thane Stone on that and I think we've all experienced the fact that in the 60s and 70s both the private and public sector built council houses and private houses which had no regard really for older people on hills, big steps internally, externally. I think people realise that that needs to change. If we look at the McArthur Thane Stone submission convener it says that the 2016 review noted that that future proofing is needed to ensure the needs of Scotland's Asian population are met, but the existing billing and company policy documents make no mention of older people's housing as a policy priority. So it was just to explore just very briefly one or two things that came forward in McArthur Thane's Stone submission to see what others have to say about it. One that there should be an requirement for local authorities to prioritise specialist retirement housing which should be regarded as important as a need for a equivalent to affordable housing and I take that that would include dementia friendly housing suitable for people with disabilities as well Mr Fair. I think that that's an important element to our views on on the bill that we do need as I said earlier in my evidence to ensure that we provide appropriate guidance on how to meet the needs of housing for older people within our communities. I think that we need to consider the impact of connectivity within locations that are appropriate for that type of development, the impact therefore on the size of sites and the location of sites and of course then as I said earlier on also ensure that having set those clear national targets for that kind of delivery that then has fallen through a local level and that may be through policy or through reporting and monitoring exercises. I think that also recognising that housing for older people across a range of tenures is appropriate and not just looking at one particular type of tenure in that mix is also critical to ensuring that we meet the growing demographic that exists within Scotland given the population changes that are due to come in decades ahead. The figures presented in Mr Fair's submission suggest that the number of people over 75 will increase from 440,000 to 800,000 by 2039. I'm just wondering what the clear national target for new-build housing for older people should be as a percentage of new-build and how that would be delivered. Secondly, throughout your submission you have mentioned on a number of occasions I have to say that central brownfield links between a quarter and half a hectare in size close to shop, service and transport links should be protected and presumption given in favour of consent for specialist retirement housing including sheltered housing and extra care accommodation. I think that's certainly from my view it's a step too far, I'm wondering. Obviously there could be other competing priorities but my experience is that older people don't necessarily like to live in such sites. I mean in my constituency 34 per cent of the population of Ireland are retired compared to 22 per cent of the mainland. They like to live often in rural settings, they like to live with views of the Clyde and all the rest of it. I'm just wondering how you come to that conclusion and what your view also is how we would mix it with affordable housing in that. That's because of time constraints, I can add it in some questions here, but affordable housing, what kind of target should be set in this issue that you've mentioned frequently of brownfield sites? Hold that answer there because once this answer is finished we are going to close this particular sessions of anyone else. That's MSPs opportunity for a burning issue, if there's something you must say as a panel of witnesses this will be your last opportunity as well. Mr Fair will take you first and then we're going to have to close once people get final comments. What will take you to say right yet? I don't have a view on the proportion of housing that needs to be provided for older people, but they are a substantial part of the demographic and currently an area where very small numbers of appropriate and relevant housing are provided for them, so there's certainly plenty to shoot at. In the context of the focus that we've rightly given to central located brownfield sites that are well connected, that's driven because older people are tremendously pragmatic about not just their needs at the present time but what their needs might be in the future. Therefore, being close to support services, support networks, friends and family, community and healthcare facilities, for example, tends to be a fairly important part of their thought process when they choose where they live. Equally, of course, many people enjoy rural settings, many people enjoy excellent outlooks from their property, in common with other parts of the population, people's needs are different, but, certainly from the feedback that we have, and we've monitored us quite closely with our client group, those are the features of retirement housing that they feel are most appropriate to them. In the context of affordable housing, I think that there are some real challenges in the planning system around the way in which affordable housing contributions are applied to retirement housing developments. I would argue that, by their very nature, retirement developments provide an appropriate level of affordable housing for that area and unlock other parts of the system that enable homes that are maybe more appropriate for families or people who are starting out in life to be released elsewhere in the system. That's another discussion there, on how that would fit in to see local development plans and 10-year plans to bring it back to what's actually in this bill. Sarah Boyack, I know you're wanting to come in there. Although we've got the future statistics, that is actually an issue now. The work that we did with Shelter on the Ships, one of the key findings was that we're not getting the types of needs met across the country, and one of the key gaps is in terms of older people's needs. There's a range of models. The key issue here is having a choice for older people, affordability, accessibility, in places they want to live, sometimes in bespoke retirement places, but other times people want to be in the wider community. That can be town centres and rural communities. For us, we want to see affordability so that there's a range of options, whether it's co-housing, which is innovative and being discussed, affordable housing, traditional affordable housing and housing for older people across the 10-years. Part of it is going back to making the connection at the local plan level, so that the issue is not missed. That's about joining up Ships research and the work on housing needs and demand analysis, so that we have a much better grasp on what comes next. The other thing is the innovative design of new developments, accessibility, digital inclusion and all that being planned in from the start. It is the building, but it's also the support services that come as a key part of that package. That's where the affordability begins to be challenging in terms of care and support at different times of our lives. However, having accessible buildings is the absolute start, but very much agree that it needs to be part of the proper process at the local level. Thanks for making reference to the local development plan and all of that. That's helpful for worse scrutiny. The three other witnesses are not an opportunity for a final comment. Do not feel the need to have one, but if you wish one now is your opportunity, Mr Nelson. Yes. Notwithstanding comments made earlier, which we've made and others on the panel too, about resources for planning authorities. One aspect in the bill that our members welcome is the proposals at monitoring and improving the performance of planning authorities and driving their performance and improving that, because the feedback that we have from members is that the major facts and delays and uncertainties that they experience as house builders is the inconsistent and poor performance management and leadership issues by planning authorities. The measures in the bill are taking note of that and seem to be addressing it, so we welcome further discussion and guidance about how that can up the performance of planning authorities. Repeating the point that many of our members understand that resources is a major constraint with the planned departments around the country. That was evidence in the RTPI's submission that we noted earlier this week. Thank you very much. Any further comments? Thank you for your forbearance in relation to that. It's been a lengthy evidence session. We've clearly not covered everything in the bill. It was just simply impossible to do so. I thank all the witnesses for your time here this morning. In a moment, we'll move to our second witness panel. What we are going to suspend for about 10 minutes or so to this will not reconvene until at least 11.20. Unfortunately, I'm going to have to ask the public gallery to leave at this point as well, but thank you very much for your time this morning. We're still on agenda item 1, which is the Planning Scotland Bill, and I have the pleasure of welcoming panel 2, our second panel of witnesses today. I welcome Kate Houghton policy and practice officer RTPI Scotland, Malcolm Fraser consultant architect, Professor Cliff Hague emeritus professor of planning and spatial development here at Watt University, Stuart Tate manager and Dorothy Mcdorald assistant manager, Clyde plan. I thank everyone for taking the time to come and give evidence this morning. It's been indicated that there's some brief opening statements that each individual organisation would seek to make, so we'll just go from my left to right if that's okay. Malcolm Fraser, could you stand up? Planning should be a wonderful, joyful thing. It unlocks enormous societal potential and resources. It also unlocks enormous financial resources. It's quite damning that in the context of these discussions it's almost seen as a problem to be fiddled with instead of taking radical measures to adjust the harvesting of money and potential. That may be from communities, but it's also from land value. The moment we accept a system where all the benefits, all the potential of planning accrues to landowners, and we need to use bigger levers outwith immediate planning discussions to unlock that. I'm concerned about taking more radical measures. Thank you very much, Kate Houghton. The Royal Town Planning Institute is a membership organisation and it's a chartered institute responsible for maintaining professional standards in planning. We're also a charity and our charitable purpose is to advance the art and science of town, country and spatial planning. We have 25,000 members worldwide and around 2,000 of those are here in Scotland. I should say that our views on this bill and the wider planning review are very much informed by conversations with those members over the last couple of years. We view this bill and that wider review as an opportunity to move away from a reactive planning system to a more proactive one. We believe that planners with the right tools and resources can make and deliver plans crucially that result in better outcomes for Scotland. As well as being here in my own capacity just to make declaration of interest, I'm also a chair of the Coburn Association. We've also submitted observations and clearly there's a degree of congruence between my views and theirs. Reviewing a planning system is a once-in-a-generation opportunity. The Parliament has had two choices. One is to assume that things will carry on pretty much as they are and look backwards to see what's happened in England and how well that's worked over the last 15 years or so. The other way would be to look forwards, look at the international obligations that Scottish Governments signed up to, take account of the likely impact of disruptive technologies on our places and think about how we deliver inclusive growth in a society where it looks like we see stalled household incomes and widening inequalities. I think the choice of looking back to the English experience would be good if it had worked, but what we've had recently is statements from the Prime Minister herself that we have a housing crisis in England. My proposition is that we really should shift the gaze and begin to engage with a different agenda. First I thank the committee for inviting Clydeplan to come along and give some evidence today. Clydeplan for those who are not aware of the organisation is a strategic planning authority for the Glasgow city region. It encompasses eight local authorities and covers a third of Scotland's population and a third of its economic output. We have a small team that supports a structure of governance, including a joint committee of members and a senior management team. We are at the end of a process of our second strategic development plan as part of the new system, of the old system or the current system, but what we have recognised is that regional planning is a long-term aspiration for the west of Scotland and has been since 1947 in the Clyde Valley plan that was published then. The statutory role has been integral to the planning system in Scotland for many years and we're now at a cross-show as to where that will position itself moving forward, given the terms of the planning bill. However, as our economic land use transportation patterns have evolved, it's important that we think about delivering economic growth across city regions and even the independent panel acknowledged the value of planning at the city region scale. The Scottish Government recognises that strategic planning is an essential element of the overall planning system. Taking that in context, it's about how it is delivered and the planning bill is seeking to remove the statutory duty to prepare a strategic development plan. Our view as Clyde plan would be that that would be something that we wouldn't wish to see happen. We still think that there's a role for the statutory nature of the plan itself, however processes around it could be changed to expand and enhance its view. However, if things were going to change and the preparation of an SDP was to be removed from the system, then we firmly believe that our regional spatial strategy is critical to economic delivery. Any role as part of a regional partnership should be a statutory duty within that partnership. I thank all of you for your statements. I suspect that that's a matter that we'll look at in some detail, Mr Tate. Can we move to questions then to Monica Lennon? Thank you, convener. Good morning to the panel and I'll just remind everyone again that I am a member of the Royal Town Planning Institute. A logical place to start, perhaps, is the purpose of planning. I note from RTPI Scotland, Malcolm Fraser and Professor Haig that you've all argued in your written submissions that the planning bill should establish a clear purpose for the planning system. My question is, should a statutory purpose for the planning system be set out on the face of the bill? If so, what do you think that purpose should be? It is very clearly under the UN Sustainable Development Goals that the First Minister has committed Scotland to achieving. It says that it makes cities and human settlements safe, inclusive, resilient and sustainable. You could argue that that's a bromide if it isn't delivered further down the line, but it's a strapline to have at the top of everything that we do. It can't really be better than it clearly ties into statements that have been made on behalf of Scotland that have already been accepted. I don't see why that shouldn't start off all our considerations and everything falls from that and should refer back to that. Other comments? Yes, we absolutely think that there is a place for stating the purpose of planning on the face of the bill. I think that the reason for that is that the review has been going on for about two years now and there's been a lot of detailed conversation and we've now ended up with this primary legislation, which makes some quite procedural changes to that system. It's almost important at this stage to step back and remember what we want the planning system to achieve for Scotland. The committee's questions as part of the invitation to give written evidence actually was very telling for me because you asked, does the bill provide a balance on several issues, X, Y and Z? That was an interesting question in and of itself because we need to ask, well, is that what we want the planning system to achieve? I think that it's important for all stakeholders involved in the system that we're all absolutely clear what our end goal is. Professor Hague? What's the alternative to having a purpose? Presumably there's two possibilities. One is that there's no purpose, in which case why we're doing it, or the other is that there is a purpose but we're not prepared to say what it is. That also isn't a great piece of administration, so I think logically there has to be a purpose. If you look at what's done elsewhere, I'd absolutely agree with Malcolm. We start with SDG11. For example, target 11.4 is about conservation of the natural and cultural environment. These kind of things need to be picked up and recognised. In terms of what might go in, if you look at South Africa, South Africa Planning and Land Use Management Act 2015, talks about providing for the inclusive, developmental, equitable and efficient spatial planning. Amongst its objects are to promote social and economic inclusion. Similarly, you can look at someone like Zambia who has explicitly written in to the preamble to their act a set purpose that picks up that kind of language. It can be done. I can't see why Scotland can't do it. Any other comments on that? I would agree with my other colleagues around here. I presume that the fundamental issue is the use of land in support of any purpose. It's about ensuring that the system is created in the use of that land in support of that greater purpose. The purpose can be beyond just planning itself. It can be a government purpose or a regional purpose or a local purpose. In terms of the purpose of planning, in terms of how it actually manifests itself as in the use of land. I think Dorothy wants to come in. We made comments in our submission about potential alignment of the planning bill across with the community empowerment bill, which references the Scottish Government's national outcomes. I think that there is a case for regarding this planning activity. I was taken with Malcolm's eloquent introduction as an integral part of our public activities. The national planning framework could become the spatial expression of the Scottish Government's programme for government. At other levels of the planning system, the plans should become and be seen more fully as the spatial expression of corporate planning activities and community planning activities. I think that if we got that alignment under the community empowerment act, which references the national outcomes and the Scotland performance framework, it would bring greater alignment with community planning, which has been an integral purpose of the planning review. Just one brief supplementary before we move on. We heard in evidence from Petra Beiberbach last week from past planning aid Scotland. I pointed out to Petra that in her evidence to the 2006 bill or what became the 2000 planning act that she was basically saying that not a lot of people know what planning is and what the system is for. Would having a clear statement of purpose in the bill help to better educate the wider public about why we have a planning system and why it is something that matters to them? I think that we will say yes. Absolutely. Great. Well, happy to move on, convener. Do you want to take up the next line of questioning? Yes, if you want to skip ahead. I was going to pick up on strategic development plans. I was really to Clyde plan, not only would your jobs disappear, but strategic development planning, as we know it, is facing the chop in terms of the bill. We heard in the earlier session this morning—I do not know if you were listening to any of it. Homes for Scotland, for example, were saying that strategic development planning has not been working. I suppose to begin with, do you understand where some of that criticism is coming from, not just in terms of Clyde plan but the other SDP authorities? I think that, first and foremost, we are at the start of a new system. The SDPs are only in their second iteration. I think that the critical element is potentially around the process of joint working and building relationships and trust as part of the process of delivering those types of documents. From the west of Scotland's perspective and the Clyde plan perspective, we were, I suppose, quite fortunate. We had a long legacy of joint working and the ability to transition into the new system for us was relatively straightforward, made perhaps other areas in the country that are coming at it in a different, a newer experience, take time to develop those relationships and trust to deliver the plan. I think that the other thing to recall is that the SDPs are there to perform one function and one function only, and that is to deliver the strategic development plan and the processes in which we set up are done to do that. It was the Glasgow model that was used to roll out across the other SDPs in the city regions, so we came from a better starting point. The documents themselves, in terms of where we have come from, have been produced on time and on budget, have set a clear spatial strategy. They have involved a fair degree of consultation, examination. We have involved our local authorities, first and foremost, it is their document to submit to ministers. That whole process takes time and it takes, as I said, trust and just to get people to come on board and understand what the processes are. Criticism perhaps, yes, is expected in a new system, but the principles and what lies behind the purpose of the documents remains valid moving forward. All the process-y things just now, regional planning isn't new. In terms of outcomes, what has regional planning achieved? Outcomes? In terms of better places, communities, infrastructure, what does it achieve? First and foremost, I think that it is about setting that vision and spatial strategy across a metropolitan city region, so eight authorities coming together, working and understanding what it wants to achieve, particularly on economic development, providing locations for economic development, housing, looking at what the scale and demand for housing is and disaggregating that across the geography, so setting that context for local development plans, looking at green networks, for example, and setting a context for the delivery of green networks. In terms of transport, looking at the way the transport system operates, and looking at what is required to make it work more efficiently in support of the broader strategy. Planning framework, and there is a clear focus on delivery in local development plans, and local authority planners aren't in a constant cycle of doing a five-year plan. Does that not free people up to be more focused? Could you lose that layer in the middle that you currently occupy? My view would be that it would be unwise to lose that particular layer. My personal experience would be that you keep it as a part of the strategy development plan because it allows the local authorities to come together to consider with other state codes and other partners what is the best way to plan for their city region. We do not live and work within one small local authority area. We do work on a cross-boundary basis, so consideration of housing, infrastructure, green networks, as I mentioned before, are all things that transcend local authority boundaries and have to be considered in the appropriate geography, and the appropriate geography, as we have seen over many years, is the regional scale. The issue around delivery and the disconnect between plan and delivery is symptomatic of a system of setup because the SDPs are set up to do just that one thing. That is to deliver the SDP on behalf of the authorities to Scottish ministers. Any system that changes could still have the SDP as a statutory document but could be enhanced around delivery by providing resources in the continuity around delivery plans to try and achieve that. It could move to a 10-year cycle as well. It is probably one of the things that I have always found frustrating around the SDP is that you produce it once it is approved four years later and you are submitting another document. For SDPs, that is a statutory document, it is long-term, so that cycle of replacement does not allow you to have discussions that you were referring to. However, the space is very much there for local authorities to come together and think about how they plan for their area. That is helpful. I think that it has some way to come in. With regard to the value of regional strategic planning, as Stuart pointed out, people in the natural environment do not strictly obey political boundaries if at all. I think that it is important to acknowledge that what is happening in terms of investment and development on one side of a border is going to affect what happens on the other side of that. It is perhaps instructive to note that, in England, where regional planning was dismantled in 2010, the UK Government is making available to English local authorities funding to produce joint core strategies by multi-authority arrangements. In effect, it is reintroducing an acknowledgement that some statutory regional planning is a good thing. Professor Heagley? I think that regional planning, as somebody once said, is the scale at which you try to solve the problem above the scale at which you last managed to solve it. There is an ambiguity about what a region is. However, without doubt, there is an increasing emphasis on the importance of functional city regions and the geography of that internationally. That is why UN Habitat now talks about urban and territorial planning. It is a French term originally, but we can call it regionally and get away with it. It is basically an issue of subsidiarity. Is there a scale at which problems are best addressed at the lowest feasible level? There is a strong case for saying that, within Scotland, the region is one of those and that a plan, rather than just a partnership, gives you a mechanism to do that. I wonder if I can throw in city region deals, because this committee, before I was a member, had a whole inquiry looking at city region deals, and we are increasingly seeing more of them being introduced in Scotland. At a time when we are trying to achieve inclusive growth at that city region level, does it seem an odd time to be abolishing strategic development plan authorities, or is there an alternative view? Thank you very much. Partly in response to your previous question about outcomes, we have provided a very clear context for the local development plans moving forward. We have provided additional context for development management decisions, but we have also provided a platform for collaboration. That does not sound like much, but I will expand briefly around, for example, partnership working at the level of the functional housing market area. That is important because cities cannot plan for their own housing needs and demands within the confines of their own boundaries. Finally, as another outcome, we have provided a platform and a context for the city region programme of infrastructure projects. That was there as a basis for the city region funding that came to the table on which to base key infrastructure projects. Many of the authorities used that as their first point of call to develop the projects that are part of their infrastructure bids. Malcolm Fraser? It is a larger point, but it is not sustainable that Scottish local authorities are cut off from their hinterlands, Edinburgh from the Lothians, Dundee from Angus, Aberdeen from the Shire etc. They need to be bigger to be able to plan better. They need to be about the same size as health boards or the city region deals, but they are already too distant from their citizens. It very much begs the question of the need for community councils, parish councils to be reintroduced and empowered given responsibilities. Subsidiarity should allow communities within Edinburgh, as they are doing under the community empowerment bill, but to take more responsibility for their own affairs and for local democracy to be reintroduced. I would be off for larger local authorities that can be better planned as city regions and re-empowered local community councils right the way around all our towns, villages and settlements within cities. Professor Hague? I think that the city deals strengthens the case for a regional scale of planning because the risk with city deals is because of a project-driven approach to development. You have a series of pet projects that happen that may be very valuable, but how do you integrate them? That is part of the role of the plan. I think that that is the point that I was going to make. The projects do not sit in isolation. They are a delivery mechanism for core components of a strategy for a city region. They cannot sit in isolation. They have to sit in the context of maximising investment to maximising the economic value of what comes out of them. I am done on that. Do you think that we should have a model based on the city deal model and that the authorities who are in city deals or growth deals could become planning authorities in their own right? I would suggest that I take Cliff's point that city deals are too focused on a bypass or a relief road or something like that. That would need to be relinked into proper regional planning. Part of the reason that regional planning does not work is that it is undermined by land speculation markets. We end up in a situation where all the north of Edinburgh is unbuilt whereas speculation is looking to get the green belt off Edinburgh to build on instead. I think that it needs to come the other way round. We want to encourage local authorities to work together to agree on their outcomes and that could be in a regional spatial strategy. Local authorities to choose their geographies in terms of that. When something like the city deal opportunity arises, there is therefore an agreed set of outcomes that feed into a wider corporate strategy. It is not just about spatial development, it is about economic growth, it is about health outcomes, education and so on. That funding comes available and you are able to target it at pre-decided priorities. That is a semantic point. Local authorities are the local planning authorities for the SDP purposes and they are still the local planning authorities when they work with the regional partnership city deal. It is where those things come together because there are two separate governance processes that are emerging. The planning bill would seek to remove the strategic development plan joint committee, so that would take one layer of governance out and could be potentially replaced by the city region partnership process if that was a direction that would align governance more effectively. Within that governance structure it would have to be charged to do things that support the proper planning of its area. That is where we talk about having a statutory duty on that partnership to continue regional planning, developing a spatial strategy that can shape future city deal investment or future investment as well, plus also feed into the national planning framework. The same kind of conversation, but it is two different statutory processes of governance that we are starting to look at here and it is whether you want to start to align them to coordinate planning and delivery in a way that should perhaps be missing under the current arrangements. In your case it would be the same local authorities, I think. Whether that would be the same across the whole of Scotland? Yes, but it would pick up a number of local authorities who are not in these strategic development plans at the moment, so you would actually mop up quite a lot more of the country by doing it that way. Can I ask another question? It is the flip side of the argument. I found, as a local councillor for 10 years, when we set up the city deal which I support, there was a bit of a democratic deficit in that local councillors were not really involved in any of the decision making. I can only re-speak about the Glasgow deal, which my council was part of. If we are going to have these regional partnerships, it seems to me that we need to involve councillors more rather than just having one body of officials and a council leader. What is your view on that? I see some nodding in your head. Okay, Raymond. Just before we move on, I thought that I would dig out some of the recommendations from the city region deal report. We drew attention to the fact that there was an enterprise and skills review and we name-checked another a few examples of where there is original co-operation strategies that emerge separate from the one that is seeking to be removed through the legislation. It is reasonable to contend that original strategic planning will continue, because it continues in a number of forms irrespective of the strategic plans that will be removed from the bill. Secondly, I am just wondering—Mr Tater and Ms McDonald think—that the local authorities that make up the Glasgow region would stop talking and co-operating if the bill goes through. That is effectively what the contention is. I cannot speak on behalf of all the local authorities. They have come together on the basis of the city deal funding. They have come together on the basis of the strategic development planning authority. They have come together under the auspices of Strathclyde passenger transport. They have come together on the auspices of the green network partnership. They have come together in a number of forms. The critical question for me would be under which what guides that form of development that they are all trying to seek and achieve. They are all doing different things. They are all wanting to deliver certain aspects of the growth of the city region. The thing that binds it together from a planning perspective is a strategic development plan at the moment. The removal of that could potentially undermine the broader consideration of planning issues. They can still come together on various elements but, in terms of planning, having that statutory duty to produce a plan, to think about the growth aspirations and the environmental impacts of that across the city is critical to ensure that those other pieces of the things that they come together on are joined up in a way that is meaningful. They are not thinking about transport, green networks, economic development and silos that are actually coming and where that happens. I absolutely appreciate why you would say that. We are just trying to tease out because it was the last evidence session as well about the need for a statutory duty to do that or would we expect them to do it anyway? A statutory duty in some ways is to do you want it to happen or do you wish to make it happen or hope it happens? A statutory duty gives you that ability to ensure that something happens. I think that that is very helpful. Only because I think that you are going to say something similar, Ms MacDonald can I bring in Professor Hane before we move on? I think that we all recognise the need for more integration. It seems perverse to propose a measure that will make integration powers weaker. The key bit is to try to take the strategic level of planning closer to budgets and closer to the investment priorities of the different stakeholders who are actually going to deliver the development on the ground. I would see the regional plan as a basis of negotiation for that that is followed up by the kind of partnerships, by the city deal and so forth. I see it as a dynamic process between them but I just do not see how removing it, especially as there is little evidence that it is seriously broken, if we think of the work that Kevin Murray associates did a couple of years ago. I just do not see how removing it actually helps us to deliver more development on the ground in the places where we want it. That is it. We are better move on now. There is a lot in this bill. We will move to Kenneth Gibson now. Thank you very much, convener. I would say first of all that everything that Malcolm Fraser said in relation to strategic development plans is something that I have been asking for for years, absolutely. I welcome that. We move on to simplified development zones. Just to quote from Professor Hague's submission, he says in a quote that simplifying the planning system could make it more equitable and expeditious and less reliant on the time consuming appeals system. However, the SDZ proposal does not deliver much change and, again, misses the point that the role of the planning system is more multifaceted than just regulating development. Professor Hague goes on to say that we should use the planning system to promote innovation that contributes to the sustainable development goals whereas what is proposed seems just a way of making it easier to deliver mediocre development. I wonder if you can expand on that and if others on the panel can give us their views. Well, if the aim of SDZ is to deliver what we want, then why do we not have that everywhere rather than just in certain areas? It seems to me that the problem is that we do not just want more housing planning permissions. We actually want a wider array of things. That means that at some stages what we want is to conserve areas or to conserve landscapes rather than simply to develop them. I think that the difficulty is that there is this kind of fix that has been put across the bill and the review. The real issue is that planning is blocking the delivery of housing planning permissions and that that equates to housing on the ground and housing of the type that we want. There are question marks at all those points. Whether planning is the sole blocking factor clearly is not. Whether it is the housing that we want because we need to be talking as we came up in the previous session about affordable housing, about mid-market rent housing, about housing for an ageing population and all those things. We want quality of place in terms of design. The risk is that we are getting on a track that is really risk missing the main point, which is quality development, which may have a strong element of conservation as part of it because that again is a more sustainable option often than new development. Therefore, the way that the SDZ proposal is couched is risk sending us on the wrong track. The idea of having areas identified in a plan where you are going to take special action is quite logical. It goes back to long history in planning of that, dare I say it, back to the old days of comprehensive development areas. Yes, you can use a plan to identify areas where you are going to do special things, areas perhaps where you are going to particularly encourage innovation, in design, in products, in energy, whatever. However, to simply see it as a way of speeding up development is really missing the point. I very much agree with what Cliff said in terms of SDZ having the potential to focus proactive planning. You have a site allocated in the plan and the SDZ could have a valuable role in saying the challenges on the site, whether that is access, whether it is utilities, whether it is contamination, whether it is financial viability. It gives a focus around which to get that site delivered. Without proper resourcing, they will not be able to achieve that aim. What they require is a lot of upfront work from local authorities in terms of master planning, in terms of working with stakeholders. Obviously, because it does not involve a planning application, there is no planning application fee associated with an SDZ. To make sure that they deliver good development, the right development, it will be important to make sure that the resources are there to frame them properly. Any other views on that? Do you want to follow up on that, Mr Gibson? Some of the witnesses in the previous session, interestingly, gave some interesting submissions. For example, Holmes of Scotland said that, fundamentally, simplified development zones will not be an alternative to a properly functioning planning system and will only be a supplement to the functions of a proactive planning authority. Given what Kate Houghton has just said, how do you feel about that statement? I think that that almost agrees with what I just said. To be honest, what I am talking about is that SDZs could be a way to concentrate efforts on delivery of certain sites. Of course, what we want—what this bill is supposed to be achieving as a whole—is delivery full stop on all sites that are allocated in a development plan, and that has been through the proper scrutiny. I think that what SDZs offer on top of that is perhaps on particularly challenging sites. It is almost an incentive and just a kind of carry-on cry that this is a site that we want to see through. On balance, do members of the panel feel that it enhances the bill? If you can simplify the system, it needs to be simplified everywhere. To simplify it in certain places just creates a whole level of arguing over where those places are and stops you doing something sensible elsewhere. If there are good measures that can be put in place that should be across the board, we should not be drawing lines around somewhere and saying that you can make a mess of that and not make a mess of it. If we are going to make a mess, we need to make a mess everywhere. Equal opportunity. That is more like the official terminology that is contained within the legislation. Any other comments in relation to that? It depends on the policy purpose of the SDZs. If they are about giving a planning permission in principle on easy sites to develop, I am not sure that they add that much. If they are about rallying people around getting tricky sites delivered with the correct resources, they could help. You are looking for more detail, basically, from ministers about what will deliver. I think that, in a moment at Graham Simpson, it takes more a little bit more of this. I mean, this was discussed in detail at the community's conference of sterling that we had as well, and the contention was that it sounds like really good, simplified development zones have changed the name, but it sounds like really good master planning where you are really speaking to a community about what they would really like to see in that land that has not been used and doing lots of upfront work around that. I think that Kate Houghton's suggestion and Malcolm Fraser's suggestion is why would not you do that everywhere? Therefore, going back to the policy intent, I will know the more constituencies in MSPs, bits of land that were desperate to see develop because it would be that final piece in the jigsaw for place setting and we cannot get the market to bite on it. We can think of lots of reasons why the simplified development zone could really work with massive community support, I have to say. I suppose what I am saying is that I am giving what my vision might be, but if there is not a clear policy statement and clarity around the purpose of it, might the lukewarm or irrelevant feeling that I am getting from the witnesses just now, would that change if there was a greater clarity as to the purpose of it perhaps? It has to be more diverse than the way that it is presented, so it is cliffhaggered people who are recording it. I think that this comes back to one of the big issues hanging over the whole thing, which we have not yet touched upon, which is the whole issue of trust and a sense of trust between communities and the system and the development industry. The difficulty is the way that it is presented that it will primarily be about speeding development for housing without having to go through as many hoops as normally in a planning system without necessarily having the great vision that Mr Doris has. That is one of the factors that reduces public confidence in this process. More supplementaries in relation to that. Gideon Simpson, then Monica Lennon. Yes, thanks very much. I will look forward to hearing Mr Doris' vision later on. Just a very simple question on simplified development zones. Simplified planning zones, as they currently stand, cannot be set up in certain areas—conservation areas, the green belt and national scenic areas. That provision does not exist in this bill for simplified development zones. That may well have been an oversight, but do you think that these restrictions should apply? Feel free to refer to my vision at any point during your answer, Professor Hale. I think that this is exactly the kind of point that I was just making. It is the kind of thing that makes people feel suspicious, that makes people feel that the value of things like conservation areas, which are much loved within Scotland, if any systematic research was done, people would see how valued they are. It gives the feeling that that is going to be given less priority and a hands-off approach towards approving development is going to be prioritised. If, at the same time as speeding development—which we all agreed that we want to see—we also see the bill as trying to address the issue of public trust, I think that this is a bit of a known goal in that respect. Any other views, Kate Houghton? Just to add in terms of the potential roles of SDZs in what we call market making, in terms of making a site more attractive to develop, I think it is important in terms of heritage and in terms of nature conservation as well to think about how we can do development in a way that is sympathetic with those objectives as well. Again, it comes back to the policy purpose of SDZs. If they are resourced to good planning, which allows, for example, a listed building to come back into use and to be refurbished as part of a sympathetic scheme, then that would obviously be a good thing. It is important that what they are not used as is a way to get around the proper scrutiny surrounding other consents that you need. Dorothy McDonald? I will be very brief. Just a generic point about the purpose of development planning. Development planning plans, in one very real sense, deliver just one thing, which is the ability to grant planning permission to land. SDZs may be falling into similar territory. My more substantive point is that, if we, the big wee, want to fund infrastructure and achieve development delivery, we should fund it and resource it. The bill is giving third parties the right to request a simplified development zone, but it would also give ministers the power to make an SDZ and there would be no restriction on that. I wonder how appropriate that is in a plan-led system. We have talked a lot on the bill about certainty in the plan, front-loading the public having confidence that their views have been taken to account. If we do all that, sign off our local place plan and then ministers come along and zone a simplified development zone, how does that fit well with the whole package of the bill? Is that a good thing? Is that a symptom that planning is broken and ministers no better? How would that fit with, I suppose, the views of communities? Do we expect that power would be widely used? The RTPI's position is that SDZs should be linked to allocated sites and development plans, so whether that would be the local development plan or the NPF. We think that amendment to the bill could really strengthen the role of SDZs, and you are saying that it would improve the accountability of them. In our thoughts and out for witnesses, I see nodding heads, Malcolm Fraser's agreeing should take once to make a comment on it. I think that the context within this is about facilitating development, and one of the key elements of the new system is delivery programmes and setting out how the local authorities will work with others to deliver the sites within the local development plan or the strategic development plan or the national planning framework. There is a mechanism for having a discussion and a context for how things are going to be taken forward, so community engagement could happen through that discussion around the delivery programme. We heard in the previous panel about planning being a barrier. We heard a third of applications that are refused and are taking forward to appeals. I think that Homes for Scotland is talking about building by appeal. If it gets to a point where Scottish Government, whoever is in power, is starting to get fed up because they are getting it in the neck because we are not delivering the homes that we need, could you see, would it be tempting for ministers to come along and designate the simplified developments, just to make sure that development happens? Malcolm Fraser. We have to set up a system that delivers development and allows it to happen in the right places. We cannot set it up and then countermand it further down the line because we do not like the outcome. We talk a lot about getting things right upstream and then add more processes and upend things further downstream. We need to take away the later chances to upend the process in order to focus on getting things right upstream. I, as an architect, have many times been told by planners that we are going to turn this down but you will win it on appeal. That is a simply unacceptable situation to happen. It is extending the process, allowing developments to become worse, allowing lawyers and consultants to make money out of the tail end of the process and holding back development. When we say that we need to get things right upstream, we need to apply that and not undermine it. We need to tell ministers that they need to get their simplified processes in early. We need to get the right land ready for development and then not let that go further down the line. Keith Houghton, do you want to follow-up? I was going to say something similar about the fact that—sorry, Monica, can you repeat your question? I suppose that I was exploring the risk of ministers using the simplified development zone power. If it is looking like planning is not delivered and we are not getting homes that we need, is it easy for fixtures to come along and designate a simplified development zone? Is that really appropriate? Is that where we want to be? I think that it is similar to what Malcolm Brown said. It is about getting things right upstream and what we are trying to do right now is design a system that prevents us ever being in that situation. I suppose that it is also important to remember that the Government is also democratically accountable, so that their choice to use those powers would be within that context. Does the acting committee agree that ministers should have that power? Should it be in the bill? As I said, we think that SDZ should be linked to the plan-led system, so that any SDZ that is introduced by a minister is linked to a site that is allocated either in an LDP or in the NPR. I think that Professor Hague wanted to comment on our supplementary from Graham Simpson. I think that this discussion highlights the extent to which there is systematic distortion in the logic of the bill. On the one hand, it is all about front loading, community involvement and rebuilding trust. On the other hand, when the chips are down, you can still lose out at the last stage, either through an SBZ or through the appeal system. I totally support Malcolm's view. The example that he gave should not happen, and I would agree on that. In the end, 95 per cent of planning applications are approved, so more. I am correct. The real problem in the system is in the appeal system. Most of the system ticks over okay. It could be better, but we would not be having a plan in bail if there were much more problems there. The real issue is in the appeal system and the inequalities in that system, and the extent to which, after all the front loading, the real decision can come at the very final stage and not be very locally accountable. We will look at the appeal system in some more detail later on. We are not ignoring it, we are just going through a flow of evidence. Graham Simpson, do you want to add something? Yes, we are all going to come on to appeals. If you decide that we need the X number of houses across Scotland, we need X number in this area, that area, that bit of land should be green belt, that is a conservation area and that is what is in your local development plan, then you would then say, well that land has been allocated for housing, therefore you can set up a simplified development zone there, but you cannot set it up there because that is green belt. Is that the sort of system that you would see working? Exactly. If SDZs were linked to the planned system and linked to allocations in the plan, then logically that is how it would work. You would have an SDZ, whether it were for commercial development or residential development, based on the allocation in the plan. The minister cannot come along and override that because the land has already been allocated for housing and local communities already know that there is a potential for housing in that area. Some similarities with your zoning systems that you get in most of the countries, particularly continental Europe, where essentially you get a zoning allocation if you are within conforming with that you are okay, you can go ahead. The difference is that they then also tend to be much more prescriptive than just a basic zoning, so I think you would not just want to say any housing on this site is okay because there comes back to questions about placemaking, about quality, about mix and so on. If you got to a situation where you were then sort of masterplanning the site and had done it that way, that would be different. I think that we have already said this. Yes, it could work well, but it does require resourcing, it does require a mechanism probably for land assembly and to ensuring that the development will actually go ahead and not just be a set of planning permissions sitting in a house builder's account. No, that's very useful. I mean, we've obviously, as I said in the earlier session, we've got to think how can we improve this bill in certain parts if we want to, so I think your answers are very useful in that regard. Okay, then we'll move on. Sorry, Dorothy, do you want to add something? I think so. To say briefly that, following on my earlier point, the development plan allocations, including SDZs, can be a very blunt tool to achieve that delivery and focus. They can bring it if the actors are working collaboratively and if it's resourced. In terms of development delivery, just to perhaps challenge in a way the inference behind the question and behind the proposition about SDZs, social sector house building programmes are currently at amongst the most buoyant levels in the last 10 years or so because we're funding it. Private sector house building programmes are at the lowest historically, certainly in our part of the world, and that's not because we didn't allocate sites and development plans and it's not because we didn't have SDZs. It's for many complex and different reasons, which I'm sure you've taken evidence for on from other panels. Okay, thank you very much for that. That's helpful. I'm really in a questioning now, Alexander Stewart. A number of you did give us some views on the infrastructure levy in your written submissions, but I'd like to try and tease that out a little bit more here in the committee. To what extent do you believe that the infrastructure levy can raise funds to unlock the potential for developments? I think, as the RTPI said in our written submission, the research commission by the Scottish Government showed I think it was about 75 million annually in the best case scenario, which would be helpful, but that's not of a scale that we need to overcome the infrastructure challenge. Dorothy just alluded to some of the complexities that prevent development coming forward. That has nothing to do with planning allocations or permissions. Indeed, it's about getting infrastructure that can service development. I think that that's going to need a lot more than the quantum of money that we're talking about. Professor Heak, do you want to add to that? I think that the answer to your question is to a limited extent. More so in some places than others, in places where markets are strong, you're more likely to get more, in places where markets weak, it probably won't generate very much. To rely on that, to see that as a game changer that will fundamentally alter and remove the blockages in the system, I think, is being over-optimistic with the best one in the world, I think that in the end we need a way that we tie the plan more closely to budgets and to investments. That means that public sector budgets, including bodies like the health service and other significant public sector landowners, but also the investment priorities of the range of infrastructure providers that we've got. In the end, I think that we're going to have to accept that the cost of providing infrastructure for the public good should come out of the public purse primarily. However, the value that's been created by that infrastructure should also be recouped by the public purse. That seems to me a fairly equitable and potentially more efficient way of doing it. Again, I repeat the point. If you look at something like the South African system, that's what they're talking about. I think that the infrastructure levy is fiddling where radical changes are needed. I go back to my opening statement. There is massive public good to be unlocked in new development, but there is also massive financial benefits to be unlocked in new development. It was calculated in Edinburgh in the next 20 years that more than £8.6 billion is going to be released. Even in places such as the regeneration in the north-east of Glasgow, if there's public investment there, the land value goes up around that public investment. All those gains are harvested by the landowners and by consultants who work around that. We need to go to a different system where we make a positive decision that the riches that are unlocked in the built environment accrue to the people of Scotland who need houses, new communities and not to the landowners who own the land. That's how we built the new town in Edinburgh. That's how we built the post-war new towns in Scotland. That's how the most active Asian economies work. If land is designated for housing within a strategic development or a local development plan, the value of that land leaps up from £15,000 an acre to £2 million an acre. It's a massive amount of value that's released. We need to get to a situation where that value is harvested by the local authority for the benefit of the people. They can then borrow against that rise in value to invest in public infrastructure schools, health facilities and roads so that housebuilders can get on with doing their bit. We can also designate land for different sorts of housing, co-housing and different ways of managing housing, intergenerational care, collective self-build. That sort of thing would truly deliver a plan-led system that's not just plan-led in name but has the financial resources to deliver. The housebuilders would like it because it lets them get on with things without having to wait for the drip of section 75 money or infrastructure levy, which will just be a micromanaged fight all the way down the line. It would be an absolute game changer. It's a matter of regret that these discussions around planning don't recognise that these bigger discussions are on going around land reform in other places. We're sitting in a wee silo not understanding that behind planning the issue of land and who benefits from land is of enormous import. You've identified many of the issues there to try to unlock the potential and make it happen, and it has happened elsewhere in other nations and other countries. For the bill that we have here, what would you indicate that we could do that through the bill that would make an impact that would achieve that goal? I don't know whether that's possible within what you have in front of you, but I think that at least this discussion needs to recognise that without the immediate planning discussion or planning silo, there are bigger undercurrents in issues going on in Scotland with the Land Reform Commission and that there are alternatives to infrastructure levy and section 75s. I don't know on an idea where all this bill could introduce that, but maybe what it needs to do is acknowledge that there are other methods of doing this and also talk about the potential and value of doing that. I'm thinking, for instance, about if Edinburgh invests in putting the tram down to New Haven, which it should do, then the value of all that land around New Haven will leap and again we'll be unable to build on it and there'll be cries for public subsidy or give us more green belt because we can't deliver houses around the tram stops, et cetera. The market is a wonderful machine for extracting all value out of all public subsidy that goes into it, as Churchill established and said very eloquently earlier on. We need to use the market but find a way to adjust the market so it delivers for people in communities and not just for landowners and market speculation. I totally agree with what Malcolm has said. I think that we need to recognise that this issue goes to the heart of the idea of inclusive growth or exclusive growth. The situation where somebody can make an absolutely staggering fortune by the standards of teachers, nurses, firemen, police officers is a major driver of exclusive growth. One of the challenges that we face, we know now, is how we actually make the pattern of growth more inclusive, more fair. If we disregard this issue, we're not being neutral on it, we're actually reinforcing the pattern that drives inequality. I think that we could do some substantive things. Going back to the purpose, we need to have a sideways reference to land reform and to the aims of the land reform programme and say that the planning bill aims to support and facilitate and integrate with that. In the end, we have to look at the Land Compensation Act of 1963, which gives the landowner the hope value on any transition to public ownership. Those are the kind of changes that could be made. I'll take you in a second, Andy. Can I check something? Obviously, the bill before us will take the power to introduce infrastructure levy, but the Government said that it's not intending to do it as yet. I think that it's the Scottish Land Commission that's looking at innovative ways of using land, including land value capture. Would it be helpful for this bill to at least consider taking the power over some of those things in the same section where we talk about infrastructure levy? We don't know what the end point will be for the Scottish Land Commission, so would it be appropriate to at least make sure that whatever the Land Commission is doing and whatever is in this bill, it talks to each other and it dovetails just in case those conclusions are of a similar nature to what the witnesses here are suggesting? Would that be a reasonable thing to do in the drafting of the bill? It could be, if that would be the definition of joined-up thinking. I'm sorry for the appalling viewer, Andy Wightman. It's just a brief full-up on the land value thing. The bill is a bill about planning, and it follows a long tradition of 70 years of town-country planning. In section 48 of the 1947 act, there is a provision for public authorities to acquire land at its current use value. That was a provision put in in order to enable Britain to rebuild after the war. It was also a provision that was built into German basic law for the same purpose, but it was repealed in the United Kingdom in 1959. If we were to amend this bill to reintroduce that provision, that is something that is at the heart of planning legislation. Would that help? One of the problems of that, of course, is that it would devalue the land on the balance sheets of landowners and developers all across the country. There may be an argument, for example, for restricting that to simplified development zones. Cliff Hague talked about public-led assembly at a fair price, master planning and then passing on development to those who want to procure. I think that that could be your way of trialling it. You could say, let's see what happens within some simplified zones and special action zones and see what happens. Clearly, the proposal that we have been floating would be controversial. There is no doubt about that. It would have the impact that you have said in terms of the asset value of various house builders and the investors behind them. In the end, we are talking about a system that is to deliver quality places for the Scottish people. We are not necessarily talking about a system that exists to protect and enhance the asset value of companies. Clearly, it is not quite such a divide, as I have said, because we depend on those companies investing to provide a significant part of the built environment to accept that. That is why I say that there is a transitional arrangement that you could come to. I think that going back to the convener's question that we should at least hold out the option in this legislation that things are going to be done differently. I go back to where I started. What we have got is a rerun of what has happened in England over the last 15-20 years, and it has not worked. It has not delivered the type of places and houses and access to housing that people rightly aspire to. Why repeat that model if we know that it does not work? I think that, in terms of joined-up thinking, it is important to make the link to the Scottish Land Commission. On the record, I would say that their approach has recognised the importance of land for development and part of their strategic plan. It is very important that, as we look at the issue and how we come up with a long-term solution to the problem, we work with the Scottish Land Commission to model and to carry out more research into how that would impact Scotland more broadly and how it could be implemented successfully. That research is on-going. To answer Mr Wightman's question directly, I suspect that repealing that particular part of the act would not be a complete game changer, but I would at least demonstrate to the Land Commission and others that, if other laws were altered or changed, planning has already thought ahead to take cognisance of that and planning was aligned with that potential. I think that that would be a very worthwhile thing to do. We are going to have to move on. Andy, could you maybe develop the question? Moving on to the national planning framework. I think that most people welcome the fact that there is a national planning framework. We are on NPF 3. We are going to start NPF 4 soon. It was introduced as a spatial expression of ministers' economic strategy and as a light touch spatial expression of that. The proposal on the bill is quite radical in the sense that it makes that part of the development plan. It also raises questions in my mind anyway about process. In March 2014, the Parliament signed off NPF 3 by a motion in Parliament that merely noted three committee reports as being the response of Parliament to ministers' national planning framework. That remains the property of the executive in Government. I raised the speculation in the earlier session to which no one had a response, but the Conservatives won the next election for my minority administration here. They used the national planning framework to reintroduce fracking. Parliament disapproves of that, but nevertheless fracking is in the national planning framework because it belongs to Government, not Parliament. It becomes part of the development plan and we frack all over Scotland. Two questions, really. Do you approve that the national planning framework should be part of the development plan? If it should be or if it should have a strengthened role, how would you think that we should sign that off? It is not signed off in the kind of way that the local development plan is signed off, which is a lot of participation and ultimately democratic sanction by elected members of the local planning authority. I should point out that Mr Whiteman has now raised the spectacle or spectre of a Conservative Government in this place twice. It is merely an illustration of the fact that planning legislation lasts a long time. It is worth noting that that is not even something that the Conservatives are speculating on at the moment, but I do not know who would like to answer that question first. Kate Houghton. Simple answer to your questions. Yes, we welcome the enhanced status of the MPF on the understanding that the scrutiny will be improved. I know that in the bill the scrutiny is extended from 60 to 90 parliamentary days, and we think that the scrutiny should go further than that. In particular, we are exploring the possibility that the MPF could be subject to parliamentary approval, and an alternative or perhaps additional form of scrutiny as well would be requiring the minister to report on the MPF and its implementation perhaps on an annual or bi-annual basis. Any other thoughts on that? I concur with what Kate Houghton was saying there about an requirement for a different process involved in ownership by members like yourself, because it does become a different document altogether being part of the national development plan. The ability of that document to raise the value of land is a critical element, which I am sure you all want to consider. I suppose that the question for ourselves in terms of the regional dimension is how that document relates to that regional dimension and what the ask of the MPF would be of the regional partnerships if they were being created or the relationship between a strategic development plan and the national planning framework. What are the rules of engagement between the two documents at the national and regional scale? At the moment that those rules of engagement are unclear, for example, if they are taking housing with the national planning framework set out, how would housing numbers be disaggregated to the relevant geographies below and what would be the role of the strategic development plan in that particular purpose or the regional partnerships if strategic development plans are to be removed? The document itself is going to be such a radically different document that the processes around scrutiny and approval and ownership of it are something that this committee should really have a strong think about. The other element in terms of the national planning framework becoming a statutory document is the wish of the executive to how it is going to deliver Scotland. How does that document influence budgetary spend? How do you align elements of government spend to support what is in the national development plan because that status has now changed? If I go back to an example of the strategic development plan, when it is approved by Scottish ministers, you get a letter that says that no part of this plan is guaranteed grant funding or expenditure. The implementation of that is such that you are working in different ways of doing that, that there is nothing that commits the minister to funding the strategic development plan even though it is signed off by Scottish ministers. There is a similar type of debate here around the role and function of MPF. Is it something that drives ministerial spend and supporting the delivery of it or is it something that is nice to have and will worry about it later? There are a couple of things in there for the committee to get their head around because of the enhanced status that it is going to have in the development plan hierarchy. Is there a client from witnesses in relation to that? Professor Hague, do you want to? I'm watching the time and I know there are other things that we need to get on to. I suspect that we are drifting to 1 o'clock. I did say that 12.45 would be an ambitious time to end. We will get to other things. I promise you. If we can have a moment, I think that the MPF has worked pretty well. I didn't really think much about Mr Whiteman's question, to be honest. That seems to me quite a parliamentary kind of question. However, one concern of God is that if we tie the MPF into the development plan system, will it actually restrict the capacity of the MPF to range quite wide and address some things that may fall out with the scope of the statutory system at the moment, especially if we don't have a declared purpose of planning that's taking on the kind of things that we've been talking about earlier this morning? One of the things that we certainly want to look at are local place plans. However, in early evidence sessions, there are concerns about the need to be resourced properly. We have to make sure that there is an equivalency of capacity across the country and across communities to do that. Can we start off by asking witnesses that said—I absolutely make reference to that if you wish to answer that question—are there opportunities in relation to local place plans in terms of front-loading community engagement with the planning process right at the start? I'm certain that it might or might not link to local development plans, which I'm sure we will come in to look at as well. I think that there is an issue that was touched on in the previous session about the timing and the relationship to the 10-year review. Did those things come before the review as an input? Did they come concurrent with the review, or did they come after the review, in which case do they have to wait another 10 years before they get adopted, or is there another review of the plan because we've now got a place plan? The resourcing and the timing issues are connected. The timing, and I apologise, because I justise other MSPs for cutting off witnesses, but in terms of the timing, my understanding is that whenever communities are ready to have them is when they can be delivered, would you have a preference for timing, or do you think that is right when communities are ready that they should be delivered at that point? Development plans, even if they are then set 9 years, 11 months and 30 days still to run, they should then still take cognisance of those local place plans? I'm slightly making this up as I go along because I not really thought it fully through, but what might work, what I float as an idea, is that after the announcement that there will be an LDP or an LDP review, there's an opportunity for communities to sort of bid in that they would like an LPP in their area, that if then the process of the LDP reviews these, considers its own priorities and where it sees particular action as being appropriate, and then identifies those areas that will be taken forward as LPPs in the subsequent bit. I wonder whether that would get over some of the problems of resourcing and prioritising and integrating the process, but I'm happy to be shot down on that because I haven't really fully thought that through. That's very helpful. I think that as a committee we're just trying to wrestle ourselves in relation to what local place plans will look like and what that dynamic will be with development plans, so that's a helpful suggestion, Kate Houghton. I certainly think that local place plans could be helpful. Subject to, as you've already said, resourcing, they all need resourcing for capacity building in communities for technical expertise as relevant, and to make sure that they're tied into other local authority corporate strategy. Subject to what Professor Hague said as well in terms of making sure that the timing is right in terms of the LDP, which will remain the strategic plan, small p, for the local authority area. Another condition that's extremely important is making sure that local place plans are properly tied in with other measures that are coming through, for example community empowerment. We know that, as part of community planning, local authorities are out there right now as part of locality boards consulting on locality plans and that conversations are already happening with communities. We need to make sure that local place plans strengthen the ability to take outcomes from those consultations and turn them into statutory spatial planning rather than adding another layer, which might be quite confusing, if that makes sense. We need to be very clear that when we go out and talk to people about their places and ask what they want to say, what outcome it is that we're looking to, and that people might be talking about a whole host of issues, some of which won't necessarily be to do with statutory spatial planning. What local place plans offer is the ability potentially to take those things that are relevant and to pull them into the planning system, but I think how all that is aligned, particularly with regard to community planning, isn't quite clear yet. That's helpful. Malcolm Fraser, did you want to come in? Having led several towns' charrettes, which is a form of local planning, at the sharp end of communities, there's great frustration in that the outcomes are almost universally set aside in terms of planning applications. Applications come in at variance with the output of the charrettes, and there seems to be no appetite within the planning department to apply the outcome of the charrettes to an incoming application. It might be a question for Kate as to how that should be strengthened at the moment. I understand that the local planners have regard for local place planning and charrettes. If they are told that it has to be material, or is there a form of words that will make planners listen, because at the moment they are not. They are taking the imperative of sustainable development that is called any application that comes in that they will say yes to, without applying processes that have been paid for, with public money, have involved local people, they have put time and effort into it and just seem to be set aside. That would be very helpful if you could answer that. Just for clarity, the legislation that is proposed will ask local development plans and planning authorities to have regard for local place plans, but it doesn't really say what have regard should mean. I'm just wondering if there should be a clear set process by which local authorities must consider local place plans and demonstrably able to have an evidence base to say why they've incorporated some of it into their development plan and perhaps why not others, or should it just dovetail it should be part of it? What do you think is the best way for resolving that? I think that that highlights once again the point about alignment and timing. For me, perhaps even more important than local place plans in terms of front-loading community involvement in planning decisions is the proposed evidence report that is part of LDPs. A lot of that will rest on making sure that that evidence report is transparent and that it is truly participatory. At that point, community inputs are heard, and there will be. There already are community action plans. There are already things such as urban regeneration forums, and all of the outcomes from those processes should be feeding in at that evidence report stage. Again, forgive me for saying the same as Professor Hague, I've been trying to synthesise this in my own mind. I wonder if a way of doing it is to use that evidence report to highlight the big strategic issues for all stakeholders, including communities, and they feed into the development of the LDP, which covers a bigger area as a more strategic document, and then perhaps feeding out of that local place plans, looking into some of the finer-grained detail at a neighbourhood level? It would be helpful if any of the witnesses had any views on what that evidence report should look like and be as meaningful as possible, because it's not really something that we've both particularly asked questions on as a committee getting relation to this bill. If front-loading of the system is getting that right, any thoughts in relation to that? Professor Hague? Again, I think that evidence-informed policy making is really important. We all recognise that. The bit that worries me is that the motif running through a lot, particularly the technical paper that supports the bill, is that it's all about saving costs. Evidence, again, costs money. We need to have a solid evidence base, which is one of the things that particularly used to apply in the old days of regional structure plans and research and intelligence teams that the old regional councils had. We need to respect that kind of evidence, but there needs to be qualitative evidence. It shouldn't just be a debate about the modelling of housing numbers. We need to take in community views about identity, about qualities of place and so on. Potentially, I really like the idea of an evidence report, but it needs to be inclusive in the way that it's done. One thing that worries me with the LPPs is that, again, if you read the technical paper, there's a lot of distrust that comes over as the message that these communities will be unrepresentative individuals who are going to go off and demand unrealistic things, so we need to hold them back. The only place that I've seen the word inclusive used in relation to the whole bill is in that technical paper. It puts a duty on the community to prepare in the LPP to demonstrate that it's inclusive. The balance has to be right in this, and it means going much more towards a crowdsourcing approach, tapping into local knowledge but also respecting that local knowledge. Malcolm Fraser, I'll take you in next, but we might not have time to cover it otherwise when you're answering those questions in relation to the relationship between the local place plans and development plans. The evidence report, but also the gateway check, is another safe guard of the system. If you have any reflections on that as you're answering this section of questioning, that would be helpful. We would have to answer that, Mr Fraser, but I'll just leave it out there. I was going to see convener that instead of the words have regard, the bill should say that it's not strong enough, it should say something like must regard local place plans or surets as significant material considerations. That would be a way to strengthen it so that communities don't feel duped by processes that aren't listened to. Any sympathy with other witnesses in relation to that, Kate Houghton? Certainly partial sympathy, and I think that if local place plans are prepared, they should certainly be taken seriously. I think that it also highlights again the point that local authorities will need to be a stakeholder in the production of them. I do believe that they should be community led, because I think that that is an important way of improving community trust in the system, but the local authority will also be preparing the LDP, which will be the statutory development plan. I think that it's really important therefore that throughout the preparation of an LPP, there is a conversation going on with the local authority about the constraints and about the context, so that what a community puts down in that LPP is deliverable. Can I just ask in term of alignment? We're going to move on in a second, and I think that I'm simply just giving you a heads up with the next line of questioning, but clearly we'd all like to see local place plans have a substantial role within the process. We've looked at issues around resource season, issues around capacity, and now we're talking about issues about whether that will dovetail or not with the local development plan. In the last evidence session, there was a strong focus on housing. I know that planning is not just about housing, but we were talking about building the right numbers of homes in the right places, in the right tenure type, for the right demographic, and getting all of that right. The housing needs assessments, for example, that local authorities go through, and that the SHIP plans to go through to inform all of that process. I'm not one to constrain local place plans, but what's the balance between flexibility for local place plans and saying to communities whoever they are that there are other things that you must take into consideration, such as wider strategic interests, such as the need for housing in an area, if those local place plans are to be taken as a material consideration in relation to planning? How much flexibility should they have in certain areas where perhaps that local place plan might go off in one direction, but the strategic needs might go off in another direction? That's not very succinct, but hopefully you're getting to what I'm trying to point out. If it's going to be a material consideration in terms of the planning process, how much flexibility should local place plans have in some of those issues? I think that it's seen as complementary processes. Obviously, you can see a situation where a local place plan says, not in my backyard, whereas there is clearly a strategic requirement to strengthen that, fortify that community. You just have to rely on planners in the planning process as being able to balance those two as both as material considerations. I'm not saying that Mrs McGullumface is saying that not in my backyard should trump regional and national requirements, but that they need to be able to be weighed by professional planning profession. Of course, Mrs McGullumface is allowed to say that, as long as there's a mechanism by which that can be dealt with within the planning process. Professor Higg? I think that you put really dilemma there very well. The more I think about it, the more I think what I said about five minutes ago, that it's actually kind of quite robust in this respect. If you actually had a process whereby the propositions for the local place plan would be, if you like, almost tender, pitched in there, this is what we want to do. There'd then be a process of negotiation perhaps, and then the local place plan is prepared, the negotiation with the local planning authority, and then the local place plan is prepared. That should avoid the situation that Malcolm's hypothesising, which you don't in the any of us wants to see, you know, wants an inclusive system. But thereafter, I think the closer the process is tied in to the development plan, the more crucial it is that it is respected as it goes through the latter stages of the system. What we absolutely must not get is a situation where community organisation has committed a lot of time and effort with the support of the council in preparing the local place plan, and then, two years down the line, there's a permission granted at appeal that contradicts that, and which basically they've had no saying. I think in that situation people will be scunnered, basically, and we mustn't get into that. So the more it's integrated, the more strength it must have in terms of being robust going through the system. Okay, that's helpful. We're going to move on in a second. Keith Noll, go take in for this, Keith Houghton, but this is your last opportunity specifically local place plans, and then we'll move on, Keith Houghton. It's very briefly, but I think it is worth saying again that statistics show that, since 2009, local authorities have lost 23 per cent of their planners. For local place plans to succeed, to be influential, and for people to be properly involved in preparing them, they will have to be resourced, and I think it's impossible to understate the importance of that. Okay. Thank you. I mean, it's just another point about the new relationship in terms of the national planning framework and its position in the development plan hierarchy now. Will the communities who are involved in the production of local place plans have an understanding of potentially something that's set up through the national planning framework, kind of a direct influence on their particular local place plan, and will they engage as part of that national development planning, national planning framework process sufficiently to understand the implications as it flows down through the regional, local, to their specific area, particularly around housing numbers, I would suggest, but there may be a real disconnect between the two. That's very helpful. We will now move on to the next letter of questioning, Graham Simpson MSP. Thank you. We're going to look at the system of appeals. If we can have a whistle stop to her through that, that would be appreciated. I think that you've all got different views on this, so this should be interesting. The question is, should we have a system of appeals? If so, what should it be? I would like to go first. Malcolm Fraser. The system is clearly iniquitous. On the other hand, long attritional processes are a public disaster. I've never seen a development get better during appeal. I've only seen lawyers and planning consultants win out of it. The application is usually built, but with much of the value taken out of it and worse than it started off as. The simple solution is to allow nobody appeals. That would have the very radical consequence of making sure that we got things right upstream of taking away the planners who say to me, we're turning it down but you'll win it on appeal, that's fine. Making sure that the right decisions are made upstream, getting development happening quicker, reducing the processes and the admin around it and focusing on what we really do and think about getting planning right and making sure that local communities are involved earlier on, strengthening the democratic processes by making planning committee members have to consider economic impact and impact on communities at the same time. To me, it's a win-win situation. I think that we've talked about an awful lot of things today, which are really quite significant in scope. We've talked about the purpose of the planning system. We've talked about local place plans, which is for the first time offering the public the opportunity to write their own plans. We've talked about public infrastructure. I think that what we have on the table here is the opportunity to make some quite transformative changes to the planning system. As I said at the beginning, to make it proactive and to make it deliver for everybody. I think that it's more important to focus on that rather than tinkering around the edges with appeals. We want to make sure that we've got a positive system upfront that is working properly. Professor Heak? I was at the end of the previous session and I heard the discussion there. One thing that struck me was the assumption that was being made by Scottish Renewables and the Homes for Scotland and the other industry representatives that if you had something like an equal right of appeal, it would mean that less permissions were granted on appeal. If you have faith in the rightness of your development application, the fact that it was subjected to an appeal by objectives for the third party shouldn't actually reduce the possibility of that application being upheld. The appeals part is the Achilles heel in the system. It's the point where there's maximum distrust. It's the point where there's maximum delay. It's the point where it's most inequitable in terms of the costs that can be incurred and the investment that can be put in. Again, if you look at other systems internationally, many of them have a system whereby the appeal is either back to the authority that took the original decision or that there's a tribunal that takes the decision but then the appeal is back to the executive of the authority. In that way, if you can increase the certainty, everybody agrees that by increasing the certainty, we're probably going to speed up the decisions and the amount of development that we can get delivered. The need to simplify it is a matter of efficiency and of equity. There's a strong case for looking at some of the models in which Mr Whiteman's questioning was opening up earlier on this morning. Doris McDonnell, do you take anything that you want to say? Just briefly, from previous experience, when collaborative working is working well within planning authorities and authorities, development proposals usually have a very happy and smooth journey. That's very evident in the case of applications for housing developments from registered social landlords, who tend to work very collaboratively with local authorities. Sometimes that's not the case with other private sector development and there's something about upstreaming the collaboration with developers and development proposals with working more collaboratively upstream with planning authorities. Malcolm Fraser, you suggest having no right of appeal, which is clearly equal, but people like homes for Scotland would argue that, if you remove our right of appeal, that's going to scare people away and scare developers away from Scotland. How would you answer that point? I think that you would have to answer it by saying that it's focusing on the process upstream and getting better results out upstream. It shouldn't mean that applications are turned down that would win an appeal. The point of it would have to be that those that win an appeal should have won originally. It would require a bit more professionalism from planning committees, I admit, but a bit more realism about the importance of development. I would hope that it could be advertised to those who were investing in Scotland as a measure Scotland was taking to make sure that its planning process was more robust and clear and open and would produce good results for good development quicker. I think that for telling people that the right development in line with development plans in the right place that delivers people what they want is going to get planning permission quicker and more simply without the agony of appeals, that that should be regarded as an attractive thing and not as something that would hold investment back. Can I put something to all of you and just see what you think about this? The current system of appeals goes all the way up to a Government minister, ultimately. Should we remove the right of a Government minister to have any say in local planning applications? Should it just be dealt with locally? I think that even though it might be a local planning application, that does not necessarily mean, as we have talked about today, that geography is complex and that does not necessarily mean that it does not have matters of national significance involved in it. Recourse to the minister is a longstanding feature of the system and the minister is democratically accountable. Who is he democratically accountable to? Well, the minister is elected as part of the Government. A local councillor is definitely democratically accountable for local decisions, but if a minister who is a member for, let's say, Inverness takes a decision on a planning application in Glasgow, he is not accountable to the people in Glasgow. With relation to the minister, it will only be likely to use that power when there are issues of national significance involved. That's just not true. The minister is using those powers left, right and centre, and it's not just on major applications. We are absolutely allowed to disagree with each other. That's the point of having these evidence sessions. Do you have any more follow-up questions, Mr Simpson? No, because I know where those will want to. I'm going to be having a member's debate next week, but I think it's been shoved around with parliamentary business looking at the issue of incinerators and planning and public health. I'm going to use an example to illustrate my question of energy from waste plants in Lanarkshire where I'm based. That goes back to 2013. There was lots of front-loading, lots of up-front engagement before a planning application came forward. The communities in the widest sense were heavily involved across different council ward boundaries and so on, because that's the kind of application that has an environmental impact that kind of doesn't respect very local boundaries. That was refused by the local council, the planning committee on a cross-party basis. The developer used their right to appeal that, irrespective of a Scottish planning policy, because there were guidelines in the SPP that said that this development wasn't acceptable and it got approved on appeal anyway. That was 12 months after the appeal was lodged, so that created a lot of uncertainty and tension. The developer was entitled to have that appeal violated the local development plan. It wasn't consistent with the Scottish planning policy and what's happened is that the developer's gone back in and now they want a bigger and bolder facility. That has been a route for the developer to get more out of the system and communities feel really let down. They acted in good faith and engaged in that process. When we talk about equalising the system in my head, I keep thinking about that example, because that is an example of where the community did get involved. They gave up their Saturdays, they gave up their evenings, but at the end of the day, the people who got afforded the planning consultants and lawyers were able to make the appeal and win. What does that say for democracy? Is that the kind of planning system that we want to have? We're trying to make the system work better. Aren't we defending the status quo if we say, leave appeals as they are? Let's hope that what's proposed in the bill is going to be transformative, even though we've got no evidence that there's going to be resources put into planning to make sure that it's transformative. There seems to be a lot of, let's leave appeals aside, Petra Beiberback said last week it's a conversation that we could have but not in the sense of the bill. Why are we putting it aside to deal with later? I think that the example that you're giving in that situation more generally obviously took place in the existing system. What we're talking about here is trying to bring a new system in with a new focus, which has things like local place plans involved. Crucially, it's more collaborative, not just about local authority planning and communities but all of the stakeholders involved so that there should be more certainty about proposals in a development plan being the proposals that will come forward because you've upstreamed decision making from the outset. That is quite a radically different approach. As I said, achieving that approach and committing to it is actually an awful lot more radical than tinkering with appeal rights. What would a community need to do? If you have a development plan, which owns a piece of land for something that isn't incineration, for example, and you've got certainty in your plan, you've got a Scottish plan in policy, you've got criteria about proximity between people's homes and incinerators, are we saying then that the route to try and make sure that the community is heard is they'll have to come up with a local place plan, which tries to argue something else should happen in that area other than incineration? We're not changing the plan-led system, we're still going to have a plan-led system, we're still going to have national guidance. What is it in this bill that would give constituents a different experience from what we have under the present system? Just before you answer that, others would like to reflect on that line of questioning as well if they could come in as well. I want to make sure that Mr White has time to ask. I know that he's got a question, so I apologise, Monica. I think that the answer to that one is that local place plans are important, but I think that, for me, even more important is getting the engagement right in the local development plan and making sure that a priority in the early stages of the local development plan is getting collaboration from all stakeholders, including communities of place and communities of interest. We're settling on that there should still be an appeal that could overturn all that at the end. In an ideal world, there wouldn't be a need to use it because you have had collaborative decision-making up front, and I think that we want to focus on getting that part of the system right. I think that there's that divergence of views here, which has absolutely allowed some reflections on that before Mr White meant to ask a final question, Professor Hague. Can I diverge from Kate? I'd like to believe it. I'd really like to hope that it could all work like that, but, unfortunately, I think that the real world probably isn't going to. If we see what's in the bill and, again, looking at the technical paper, what's offered in terms of the up front bit is the local place plans, which none of us are quite sure, as we've seen, just what they're going to be or how they're going to work. That's a little bit of a wing and a prayer without being disparaging. It may be great, but we're not really rock-solid on that yet. In terms of the pre-application consultations, I think it says that it might go from one public meeting to two. That's how the scale goes on that side. The other side is that we know from Ms Lannan's example that the scales are very heavily weighted, so I just don't see how this accounts to balance. In the end, again, a lot of this is a dance of subsidiarity. Mr Stewart made the extent to which ministerial decisions are taken on the basis that this is a matter of national significance, stretches the definition of what really is national significance. It's just too easy at the moment for local views to be overridden. Mr Fraser, I'm taking in the second. I'm just going to cheat a little bit here, because we have to close this evidence session imminently. Mr Whiteman, if you've got any final considerations that you want the witnesses to give before we close the evidence session, could you roll together your question as well? Very briefly, just on appeals and a specific question to Clydeplan. My understanding, and indeed Petra Beiberbach said this the other week, that when the 1947 act was passed, it nationalised development control. Prior to that, landowners could build a house on the land without the consent of anybody else. It's not strictly true, there were some planning before that. However, it nationalised it, and it made it applicable everywhere. Naturally, many landowners were concerned about whether competent decisions would be made by people who hadn't made those decisions before. It was conceded that they would have a right of appeal on the merits of decisions, but that was to be a temporary, temporary 10 years, was what Petra Beiberbach said, while the system bedded down. I just observe that the fact that this is a part of the system, it need not be a part of the system, and it was not a part of the system, as I understand it, it was ever intended to be permanent. What was intended to be permanent was good plan-led development, so that people knew what was appropriate and what wasn't appropriate, and applications would follow. The question for Clyde plan is just a technical thing. In 8.2, the level of human resources available to the four strategic development planning authorities significantly reduces the commencement of the planning review from 15 professional planners to resources today of seven. Can you just clarify that seven people are responsible for the production of all strategic development plans in Scotland? That's the core resource within each of the strategic planning authorities, but they rely on joint working with their local authorities to supplement that resource to deliver the plan working with wider stakeholders. The core resource in terms of those who are employed by the strategic planning authority to do the task is those numbers, but we work on a joint working basis, so our reach is within to our local authorities to pull in expertise as we require it. Mr Fraser did not get the opportunity to come back in there. Please do continue the relationship with the committee and write to us if there are additional observations, but there is so much to discuss in this bill that we could have done equal right of appeal for the entire two hours or place planning for the entire two hours, and this is just how it works, unfortunately. Can I thank you for your patience and your participation here, what is now this afternoon no longer this morning? I'm afraid. We thank you for your time. We now move to agenda item 2, which has previously been agreed to take in private.