 Good morning and welcome to the ninth meeting in 2023 of the local government housing and planning committee. May I remind all members and witnesses to ensure that their devices are on silent and all other notifications are turned off during the meeting? We have had apologies from committee member Mark Griffin. The first item on our agenda today is to decide whether to take item 6 in private. Are members agreed? We're all agreed. Thank you. We are now turned to agenda item 2, which is to take evidence on the cost of living Tenant Protection Scotland Act 2022 incidental provision regulations 2023, from Patrick Harvie, Minister for Zero Carbon Buildings, Act to travel and Tenance Rights. Mr Harvie is joined for this item by Poppy Pryder, who is a lawyer from the Scottish Government. Anyvon Gavin, is a team leader at the housing services and rented sector reform unit at the Scottish Government. I invite the minister to make a brief opening statement. Good morning, convener, and thank you. I'm happy to be here today to present the cost of living tenant protection Scotland Act 2022. Incidental provision regulation is 2023. Now, as we've discussed with the committee previously, you're aware that the emergency act that we introduced last year had three key aims, firstly, to protect tenants, stabilising the housing cost by freezing rents, secondly, to reduce the impact of eviction and homelessness through a moratorium on evictions, and thirdly, to avoid tenants being evicted from the rented sector by a landlord wanting to raise rents between tenants during the temporary measures and reduce unlawful evictions. Last month, the committee considered and voted for regulations to extend some of those provisions beyond 31 March to the end of September this year. I was pleased to see that Parliament also voted to approve those regulations, ensuring that those important protections continue for tenants given the challenging and uncertain economic times that remain. While it's crucial that some of those emergency provisions continue for the time being, the emergency act is, of course, temporary. Therefore, it's equally important that we plan for when those protections come to an end. During the passage of the Bill Through Parliament, we acknowledged that termination of the rent cap may lead to a large number of private landlords seeking to increase their rent all at once, which could cause significant and unmanagable rent increases for tenants. In those circumstances, the existing rent adjudication process would need to be temporarily modified to provide a suitable adjudication mechanism that's fit for purpose. That's why the emergency act contains a regulation-making power to temporarily reform the existing rent adjudication process, which was brought in by the private housing tenancy Scotland Act 2016. That would support our transition out of the emergency measures and help to mitigate any unintended consequence arising from bringing the temporary rent cap to an end. Schedule 3 of the emergency act provides ministers with that power. That short affirmative instrument being considered today makes a minor technical amendment to Schedule 3 to put beyond doubt that the powers conferred on the Scottish ministers function as intended. It does that by renaming a title and heading, renumbering a section and correcting a reference. It will ensure clarity if and when Scottish ministers choose to exercise the powers conferred on them in that schedule, which are subject to the affirmative procedure, and it will be subject to scrutiny and approval both by this committee and by Parliament. The severity of the cost crisis and the urgent need to respond quickly meant that the emergency act had to be drafted and delivered at pace, ensuring additional protection could be offered to tenants as quickly as possible. That short technical instrument therefore clarifies a small part of that drafting, ensuring that the important rent adjudication provisions work as they are intended to when the time is right to bring the emergency provisions to an end. I thank the committee for their scrutiny of that instrument, and I am happy to answer any questions that you might have. Thank you very much for clarifying the clarification in that regulation. I invite members to have any questions. Myles. Thank you, convener. Good morning, minister. Good morning to officials. I wanted to return to some of the questions that I raised on our evidence session on 28 February, with regard to the use of data to measure the Scottish Government's intentions around this policy and the impact that the legislation is having, and specifically with regard to the use of private landlord registration data. I want to ask the minister what assessment he has made of the use of that data for real-life information of what is happening around this policy, given that that registration lasts for three years. If people are leaving, we will not necessarily know that those properties are coming out of the market. What wider assessment are our Government planning to do of the impact of the policy? I thank Mr Briggs for the question. It is why it is not technically relevant to the instrument that is before us today, which is about the clarification of drafting around the introduction of rent adjudication measures, if and when or as and when the temporary measures come to an end. I think that it is clear that when we made reference to the landlord registration figures earlier, we made it clear that it is only an administrative source of data. It does not provide the rich granularity of data that I think all stakeholders recognise is necessary. There is a longer-term reform that needs to be done to ensure that we have data collection in the private rented sector at the level at which we need it. While we do have that admittedly limited source of information through the landlord registration scheme, it shows no decrease as yet and perhaps a slight increase—only very marginal increase—in the number of registered properties since before the emergency measures come into force. Of course, Mr Briggs is right that there would be a time lag between any landlord seeking to make a decision about their future in the industry and deregistrations, but we acknowledge that that is the case and we have presented the information that we have available to us at the moment. Thank you for that. Finally, is the Scottish Government therefore looking at information to assess what impact this has had and what potential loss we are going to see of people potentially leaving the private rental sector and when is that likely to be published? If we look at different schemes across the world, there has been a sort of cut-off point or cliff edge where people have left the market and whether or not this will prevent that, potentially in terms of rent increases, but not necessarily for people deciding that when they can, they will withdraw private rented properties from the market and the impact that will have. I am not clear where the Scottish Government has any role to prevent that and where that data is actively being looked at now and provided to different local authorities who might then end up facing the consequences of more people declaring themselves homeless. Of course, we have a responsibility not only to ensure that the temporary emergency measures are necessary and proportionate, but also that they are appropriate, that they fit with the housing objectives that we have as well as taking that approach to the new housing bill to ensure that it is consistent with what we seek to achieve in housing. What we seek to achieve in housing is with Texas at starting point the recognition that the right to adequate housing is a human right. That has not been delivered by everybody in what is a situation in which the level of regulation on a number of standards is significantly different between the private and social rented sector, so we are seeking to reduce the gap in outcomes between those types of tenure. Our experience over the long term is that increasing quality of regulation of the private rented sector is clearly compatible with growth and viability in the private rented sector, and certainly the emergency measures, while I have noticed some people seeking to blame them for decisions around new supply of rented accommodation, have no impact on initial rent setting, only on in-tenancy annual rent increases. I recognise that there are some people who will argue against any form of protection for tenants or regulation in the market. I do not think that extreme position would be appropriate, but we do ensure and seek to continue to ensure that the measures that we take strike the appropriate balance between safeguards for landlords, which are included in the emergency act, but also continuing to expand protection for tenants. Are your officials looking at that data to publish it so that we are acutely aware of the impact? As I said in response to your first question, I think that everybody, landlord organisations, tenant organisations, housing academics and the Government recognise that there is a significant need for additional data and a greater depth, detail and granularity of data in the private rented sector. That is a long-term piece of work, and there will be further work that the Government brings for this committee's attention and for the attention of Parliament to improve the collection of data in the private rented sector. For the time being, we have noted that the information that we do have available, limited though it is, from the landlord registration scheme, does not show a drop-off in the number of properties available. I thank the minister for the evidence today and for going into a bit of detail there that was beyond quite the scope of what we are looking at just now. I now turn to agenda item 3, which is consideration of the motion on the instrument, and I invite the minister to move motion S6M-07858 that the Local Government, Housing and Planning Committee recommends that the Cost of Living, Tenant Protection, Scotland Act 2022, incidental provision regulations 2023 be approved. Members have any comments? No comments. Is there anything that you would wish to add? I think that we have covered it in the previous item on the agenda. Thank you. The question is that motion S6M-07858 in the name of Patrick Harvie be approved. Are we all agreed? We are all agreed. Thank you. The committee will publish a report setting out its recommendation on the instrument in the coming days. I now suspend business for five minutes to allow a set-up for the round-table discussion. Shall we get going? The next item on our agenda today is a round-table discussion about community planning. This is the fourth session in our post-legislative scrutiny of the Community Empowerment Act 2015. The inquiry is looking at the impact of the act on community planning and how community planning partnerships respond to significant events such as the Covid-19 pandemic and the current cost of living crisis. Many thanks to our panel for joining us today. We are looking forward to speaking with you about your experiences of community planning in your various different communities across Scotland. We are joined in the room by Ellen Wright, who is a community councillor in Glasgow, I believe. Lionel Most, who is the chair and secretary of Downhill, Hindland and Calvonside Community Council, and Louise Robb, who is the chair of Largo Communities Together, which is a development trust. Online, we are joined by David Watson, who is trust manager at the Kyle of Sutherland Development Trust. For those of you who are online, you can let the clerks know if you would like to reply to a question or join in the conversation even by typing an R in the chat function. There is no need for those of you in the room or online to turn on or off your microphones, as we will do that for you. I am going to begin our conversation this morning by inviting everyone to very briefly introduce themselves. I will begin. I am Ariane Burgess and I am the convener of the committee and I am also an MSP for the Highlands and Islands. Yes, I am Ellen Wright. I am the secretary of Highlands and Islands Land Community Council in Glasgow. I am also a member of the area partnership for ward 14 and the north-west sector Glasgow community planning partnership. I am Willie Coffey. I am the deputy convener of the committee and I am also a member for the wonderful constituency of Kilmarnock in Irvine Valley. I am Lionel Moss. I am the chair of Downhill, Hindland and Kelvinside Community Council with 12,500 residents. I am the representative on the area partnership and I am the substitute for the sector partnership within the community planning chain. Good morning, everybody. I am Miles Briggs. I am a Conservative MSP for Lothian region. I am Louise Robb, chair of Largo Communities Together, which is the area for our community development trust. We have been around since 2017, so quite young. Good morning. I am Mary McLeary MSP. I represent Clive and Cymoghau. Good morning. I am Paul McLean and I am the MSP for East Llydd. I was previously a 15-year councillor and councillor in East Llydd and in 10 years as a community councillor, as well, in Dumbart Community Council. On line, David, you want to introduce yourself. I am David Watson. I am the manager of the Kyl of Sutherland Development Trust, the development trust in the far north of Scotland. We have been established since 2011. We have also taken active role in community planning. We have employed and support staff for the Sutherland Community Planning Partnership, which is a subset of the Highland Community Planning Partnership for a number of years. As a result, we sit as a community organisation as a full part, not on the Sutherland Community Partnership. Thank you. My name is Annie Wells and I am the regional member for Glasgow. During the inquiry, we have each been exploring a particular theme. I wanted to invite Annie to begin our conversation this morning with some questions about the particular challenges that face your community. Annie, do you want to get the conversation going? Thank you very much, convener, and good morning to everyone. Sorry, I am not dead in person this morning. I am looking at the inequalities and the challenges that face the local communities. We have had witnesses in more evidence sessions describing the challenges that they face, and especially firefighting responses that we have had to see during recent crises. I wonder if we could just kick off by saying what do you believe are the main challenges facing communities? As a Glasgow member, I think that we will go to Ellen first, please. The main challenge that we have at the moment is obviously the cost of living. The facilities that we have in our area are unevenly spread. In our area, we have one of the thriving places, which I believe works well, but when it comes to the community planning partnership, we do not have much engagement with them at all, apart from through-area partnerships. I do not think that we are particularly listening to a tick box exercise at the end of the day. That does not help in my community, because if we are not in the thriving places that tend to be that we are ignored, we have problems as well. We have areas that we need to look at. We may need to rethink whether it should be so broad-based and look into smaller communities of need within award, rather than just in one area. I am the chair of Downhill, Higdon, and Kelvin-Side County, so we have 12,500 members. We are probably the most affluent area in the city, but we sit beside, for example, partake in our award, which is a very poor area. When community planning is thought about, it looks at our award as a whole. We have no public buildings in our area other than the schools, but an area like ours does not need that. We cannot, to a certain extent, fend for ourselves, but when it looks at us and we are lumped together with quite a poor area, the SIMD statistics are dragged down because we can manage, but they really cannot. There ought to be a more nuanced look at different areas. There are parts of partake that are okay, because it is beside the university as well, but there are bits of it that are unlike in our area, but there are bits of it that are really quite poor and deprived and are not getting the benefit of the kind of facilities that the public authorities have because they are seen in conjunction with those welfare areas. That is one challenge. Another challenge is, as Ellen said, that our community representatives, even I who live in a kind of bubble, know that there are deprivations in the surrounding areas. Yet, in a recent programme that the council did, they did not really engage with us properly to find out who was in the greatest need until the very last minute when they told us that they were just looking for red flags. They really did not want us to make any changes to what they were doing. It was only after we created a big fuss that they realised that if you are giving money to three lots of people here who are doing the same job and three lots of people here doing the same job, why are you not spreading that out a bit? We managed to persuade them to change a wee bit, but they were not too happy about that. There needs to be much more engagement with the community at the earliest stage. In Glasgow, the community planning, as I understand it, there is a strategic partnership at the top with absolutely no community involvement. That is the police, the fire and so on. The challenge for the community is that the next one down are the sectors and they have only got one representative from each ward. Then you have the area partnerships with one representative from each community council. It is a matter of communication. Although the minutes are available, the minutes are very scanned and the community is not getting a proper picture of what is going on at the strategic level and at these other sector levels. It needs to be much better and much more communication about what they are doing. I was reading the evidence that the two council officers gave on 7 March. To be honest with you, they were both saying that this is a learning process of eight years to learn about it. They need to get their skates on a bit and learn a bit more, but there needs to be more communication with the community who has the local knowledge. I hope that the process that we are doing at the Parliament with the committee will help on earth some of those things. Louise, what are your experiences? I think that our experience might be a little different. Largo and the Largo Ward are 3,000 voting residents in a relatively well-off area. You would think that there would not be deprivation, but what we found during the Covid time was that there was a lot of elderly people, very isolated family scattered around the world. From that knowledge, we are in the middle of a local place plan process. We are about halfway through. We have been very lucky in that we have been able to employ a part-time development officer to help us to run that and get it working. It will be in two levels, so there will be the local place plan that will go up to the Fife council to be part of the Fife plan, or at least our ideas around that. The rest of it really is our own action plan. We really want to just kick that into action ourselves and we will. The one thing that we are struggling with at community level is that we are all volunteers and we are trying to do in some cases the work that would have been done at council level with volunteers. I think that a little bit of capacity so that we can continue to be board members and employ some operational level would really change significantly what we could do. We ran a very good Covid resilience group that did operationally do things. We are also covering resilience going forward and we have a number of other projects and also availability of land. Our biggest request from our local place plan at the moment is affordable homes. We would like to do that using the rural housing burden route, developing a housing trust. That is a bit down the line, but that is where we are heading. We are pretty active, we are not saying that we cannot do things, but the capacity is going to be a struggle. We have good engagement and people are giving a lot, but can we ask volunteers to run toilets and to do all sorts of things? We would like to be able to pay someone so that people have jobs. That is where we are sitting, if that is any help. That is great and tremendous that you are on the brink of considering starting some community-led housing initiative. David, do you want to come in on the challenges facing folk in communities in Sutherland? Obviously, we are very remote rural and that plays a bigger part. There are some parts of Sutherland that are two and a half hours by car from Inverness with very little options for transport links, so we are certainly not anywhere near the commuter belt for well-paid jobs. We have been dealing with deprivation and inequalities for a number of years. Indeed, in 2019, prior to Covid and prior to the cost of living crisis, 42 per cent of people in Sutherland deemed to be in fuel poverty, and one in three children were deemed to be in poverty in Sutherland prior to Covid and the cost of living crisis. What those figures must be like now, I would shudder to think that deprivation and inequalities has been a big issue with us. The cost of energy is driving that up. We have a lack of broadband speeds, which makes it harder for it to earn well-paid jobs, childcare availability and low levels of public and community transport. I think that cost of living is a big issue. The high prices of energy are particularly—I mean that is an injustice that the high prices of energy that we face considering that we are a producer of energy is something that is really hard to bear. The environmental pressures and the transition to net zero is a huge concern for the future of our communities. The real issue that I see for the future of remote rural communities at the moment is the deep population that we are threatened by. Sutherland has got estimations of 11 per cent of population loss by 2040. Keith is even higher, I think, of 21 per cent. There are only 12,000 people in Sutherland. We cannot be a burden to lose many more. It is a really ageing profile. We really need to be not just accepting or mitigating the fact that the deep population is coming. We need to be actually looking at dealing with repopulation if we want our rural communities to survive. To do that, we have to create jobs that we have to create broadband. We have to have superfast broadband. It is more necessary here when we are not in the commuter belt than anywhere else. We have to have better transport links. We have to really look at homes as a real issue. I speak about homes rather than housing. We need homes for people to live. The rural burden is a great way of ensuring that they remain as homes. We talk about affordable housing, but the price of building a house now is meaning that affordable housing is becoming something that I am not sure can be delivered to most people. Attainable housing is what we need to think about. We need to allow young people especially with children to be able to live and work in other areas. I would love to be judged on primary school rules, raising primary school rules and attacking those rules and making sure that we can have the conditions so that parents with primary school aged children wish to live and work in rural areas is a real way where we work. If we do a vertical target of primary school rules that, horizontally, we present the things that are needed, such as homes, broadband, transport, childcare, and well-paid jobs, those are the things that are really, really going to make a different skills. From our perspective, the biggest challenge that we are facing is depopulation, but everything else, such as the cost of living, existing poverty, environmental pressures, feeds into that. It is a big challenge, but it is something that we are certainly at our planning partnership level and are willing to take on. Thanks for that, David. Annie, do you have anything more that you want to go on? I think that there are a couple of bits that I would still like to go on, and we have obviously spoken about the cost of living crisis, and I think that everyone has mentioned that, but I was just wondering if any of you had any evidence or experiences of where community planning has improved inequalities. Anybody want to come in on that? We did have the Glasgow Communities Fund recently, which was spread out across the city, but I would not have said wholeheartedly that it improved inequalities. It did help a little bit, and as I was alluding to earlier, it was a bit skewed because of the lack of community knowledge, and I feel that if the community had been involved at a much earlier stage, it could have been spread out. I know that it was a limited amount and there was a much, much greater application than there was funding, but, with a bit of community input, it would have spread much more fairly across the city. With community input, yes, and with the right kind of aims in view, yes, but it is not having any evidence that it is completely successful. A good example that we had recently was that Highland Council made a cost of living emergency funding available across the Highland region, which, as we all know, is a huge region. If Sutherland was to get what it was due on a population basis as a percentage, we would have been due something like 27,000 out of that. It was application-based, so it was for community organisations to apply to. The Sutherland community planning partnership works particularly effectively, and we have a number of subgroups for field poverty, food poverty, community resilience, et cetera. Those groups were made aware and supported each other and were supported by the agencies involved in the community partnership to make applications that were fit for purpose and absolutely dealt with the situation that needed to be dealt with. The fact that we speak regularly, we understand where the needs are. As a result of the applications that are made by Sutherland organisations, instead of the 27,000 that we would have got if it was divvied up by population, we ended up securing £68,000, which is 250 per cent of what we should have got. I put that down squarely to the fact that community planning, the support that our community organisations get and the knowledge that our community organisations get from the partners by working together well. I am convinced that that is why Sutherland does well when its funding bids open up. Another good example is that my development trust was recently very lucky to secure investment in community funding, a large fund from the Scottish Government. There is no doubt in my mind that our role in community planning in Sutherland and our ability to demonstrate that played a huge part in giving the confidence that we are an organisation that has the governance and strategic knowledge to be able to deliver that. Being involved in community planning certainly works for a mass from a community level. We have several subgroups that are forged in a way. We have a new group on homes, specifically on homes, and we really hope to be delivering that with cross community working together. Instead of just looking at one housing plot in Darnis, we are going to be looking at the whole of Sutherland and seeing where we are going. We see small wins with funding. The next few years, we need to move on to bigger staff with big funding, with homes as they need to enlarge in other places. That is where we want to see that it moves towards, instead of talking about £68,000, maybe talking about £6.8 million for homes. We are rural and we have a real housing need. The funding that came through the Covid period for the difficult parts such as heating and the ability to help people who were struggling, we were able to access that funding quite well through DTAS. We used that and we still have small amounts of it going into the right places. We felt quite well resourced through that organisation. Our next challenge is land and the bigger funding that we could use to make a difference. In our school role, we want young people with children to be able to come back and populate a place that has become very much a retirement place or a place for Airbnbs to be bought at least. We are in danger of tipping in the balance between what is a community and what is a holiday park bluntly. It is an issue across Scotland and the rural. Beautiful parts that people want to visit. I will move on to the next theme, which is usually led by Mark Griffin. It is around community empowerment. David, I want to come back to you. When you talk about the work that you were able to do in shifting the amount of money that you got from £27,000 to £68,000, it sounds to me that it is a lot about really great communication and a good structure and relationships. I am aware also in Highland from a previous session that you were involved in—our first evidence session—that not all areas in Highland have such a satisfactory experience. I would be interested to hear from you what was put in place or what evolved to make it so good that we could understand and support other community planning partnerships to get to that place that you are at. Yes, it was an interesting session that we had about a month ago. I certainly felt like an outlier because we have a very good experience in community planning in the south, and that did not seem to be the case everywhere. That is reflected, though, that across Highland the Sutherland community partnership is held in very high regard because of how we work. I think that the difference that we have in Sutherland—certainly, I think that there is an aspect that the partnership and the input is very much non-political here. We have very few councillors and a huge—at least a third of them are independent. It is less political, and it is more about looking at the team dynamic. It is certainly from my experience—I have been involved now for four and a half years, although I grew up in Sutherland and have only been involved in the partnership for the past four and a half years—everybody pulls together, everybody sees the bigger picture, and everybody is looking at trying to deal with the issues that the research that we undertake shows that we need to deal with. One of the biggest things, though, is that, intermittently for the past five years, we have been able to get funding through various sources to have staff that support the community planning partnership and support the committees and do development work. They are not admin staff. They are staff that do development work, and there are a number of initiatives that would not have happened if there was not the support of paid staff to undertake those. I definitely feel that, because we have managed to be able to have those staff, that has made a massive difference to Sutherland. There have been periods where we have not had funding, where we have seen things, despite the hard work, not being able to be delivered as easily. I still think that we have delivered to a high standard, but not as readily as we can when we have staffing there. We have only got funding at the moment until the end of March 2024. What happens then? Who knows as far as our ability to move things forward? I certainly know that the partners, the subgroups that we create, the initiatives that we undertake, and the way that those are staffed by professional development workers who can help to move things forward really helps to take things to the next level. As I said, that is along with the team dynamic. The other thing that makes us slightly different is that there is real community involvement. Keilis Llywodraethan Development Trust is a full partner. We are not a statutory partner. We do not have to be a partner, but we have been made a full partner because the partners understand that we have the ability to contribute and make things better and speak and move things along from the community. There is a community voice there, other than our third sector interface or the membership groups that represent the communities. There are community groups who are dealing at the coalface with fuel poverty, food poverty and environmental issues. We have that input alongside the staff, and everything really works. Even the biggest blackest clouds of silver lines, Covid, was certainly one of the blackest clouds that we will ever face. However, the ability to move online and the ability in a huge and spread out geographical area, where if somebody is coming from Darnis, that could be their whole day. Now they have the ability to have the hour and a half in the meeting. Our meetings are now much better attended. It takes away slightly from the networking away from the agenda, which is probably something that we are going to have to face, but we have certainly got more involvement on many levels because we are engaging on that level. However, there are a number of things that have come together and worked for Sutherland. I think that that works relatively well from what I have heard. It has got a very good reputation. The support from the Highlands and Islands Enterprise, at a local level, really helps that. Team dynamic staffing, working together, community involvement and not just having statutory partners sitting around and chatting about what might work, but looking to see what needs to happen and then trying to deal with it. That is helpful. I will throw into the rest of you if you are sparked by that, but I will be interested to hear your responses in the conversation. What do you think community empowerment really looks like? I think that we have heard it there and away from David, but from your own perspectives as well. My feeling and my experience of it in Glasgow is that we are a tick box exercise at the end of any process. The one that Llyrll was speaking about is a recent example. That is probably why it sticks most in our minds. We were invited along to the Glasgow funding review panel and really way to practically rewrite what was produced for the north-west sector. We should have been brought in in the third sector and should be brought in at the beginning. We are left too late. I am glad that we are here today. The reason that I came is that I was told that you would listen. We do not always feel that we might be listening to it but no action would be taken on it. It smooths over a bland minute in a meeting that we met and the discussion took place, not what the discussion was about. That is what our participation boils down to now. The first step of community empowerment for you would be to be at the table in the designing of the ideas, the projects and the funds. I have heard that from one of the thriving places organisations. We are not involved in anything at the beginning at all and we need to be or we need to be listened to even ask us what we want before you go into committee rooms and discuss it or whatever. We feel that we are a tick box exercise. I think that is the best way to put it. Lynel, what does community empowerment look like? What would be happening if it was working better than tick box exercises and being brought into the conversation a bit late in the game by the sound of it? That is right. Rather than feeling empowered, I think that we feel a bit impotent. The way it is structured—I was not aware of this until quite recently—that each local authority has a different way of approaching community empowerment. In our local authority, the top structure, the design structure has no community representatives at all. It consists of things like the fire in the place, which is fine, and the health board, but they are also representatives of colleges and housing associations. We cannot see how they can possibly be part of the community where they are effectively private bodies. Then we are reliant on this information trickling down, but invariably it is a very stark minute a report was brought in and approved, that sort of thing. We feel that we do not know what is going on. When we asked, in this recent thing we were asking for more information and they said, no, you are not getting that information, that is confidential. I could not see the long story, but I think that is when they are supposed to be transparent, especially when the councillor who was leading said that it was a robust and transparent process. That was disingenuous and I told them. The other thing, as Ellen was saying about the tick box, I noticed from Shaw Anderson's evidence that he talked about the development forum, getting up close and personal with people. It is called the Community Council Development Forum and good on them. They have it every quarter and this is Saturday morning, but we have a presentation, not a consultation. We have someone there telling us what is going on. For example, there was one recently about Glasgow and the low emission zone, but they were just telling us what they were doing. They were not listening to us. I could have chipped in about the lack of electric charging points, but they are not interested in listening, they are just telling us what they are doing. Community empowerment means to me the ability to be in at the table on an early occasion and at least to have some people and to have good communication, good and detailed communication from these early discussions. That is very helpful. Thank you very much. Louise, what is your experience of community empowerment? Probably quite different from a smaller community. We just take the bull by the horns ourselves in making the relationships with the bodies around us, like Fife Coast and Countryside Trust. They have a pathway that comes right through us, so we invite their CEO to come and do talks with us so that we get to know them, we get to know how to ask them questions. Maybe naively we are putting our trust in our local place plan process and we know that what will come from that is what we will action and what we will take systemically and put it into place best we can. We work right alongside the Largo area community council and some of them sit on some of our subgroups. That is how small we are, so it is human relationships that are actually working, not bodies. That seems to be working for us. We have a lot of councillors coming into the process and sometimes we keep them out. Sometimes we want them in, but we need to be able to make up our minds and then ask for the help we want as opposed to being told what would be coming. Maybe we are being naive, but that is the route that we are on right now. With the development officer, we will have a year and a half of her to put into place our top actions. The actual local place plan piece, the formal part, will be lodged next June. Probably earlier than that, we hope to have it in by the end of the year. That is the part that we have to live in. We hope that the planning at Fife level will take into consideration the things that our community is saying they would like to happen. We are mostly stating it in the positive as opposed to things that we do not want to happen. That is where we are at. It might be a very different experience from a city where the big things are going on. That is quite a good point. It is when you are dealing with so many more people and many more complex issues and trying to find your way through that. I accept that Glasgow is a very large area where sometimes people are completely apathetic and there are community councils who are dormant. Sometimes people shout too loud, but the authorities should be smart enough to be able to work their way through that. Is there some need for some skills development there in terms of communication and relationship building processes? That is correct to be able to interpret what is going on behind the silence or the chat. That is a good point. What is going on behind the silence? Everything is online. Information is online. There are so many of our citizens who do not go online and do not have the facilities by the through poverty age. That is a massive amount of people. I have tried to get hard copies. Just now we have had consultations in Glasgow city centre. I believe that Glasgow city centre is a matter for all of Glasgow, not just for the city centre. To discuss it with an elderly forum in my area, who are not digitally connected, I have asked for hard copies. Have I got them? No. Equally I have asked for community wealth building from the Scottish Government and I get centre link control to print out 45 pages myself. I do appreciate the days when we print out thousands of copies of things. Even if there is a central place in Glasgow, we could pick up the Glasgow housing strategy, which is 65 pages. Have hard copies available? People cannot participate online. I think that that needs to be looked at. There are excluding massive amounts of our population. That is a very good point in terms of how can we have community empowerment if we are missing a whole section of people who cannot engage in that way. They are quite good to be fair with people whose first language is not English. Elderly people have a voice too. There are systems in place that could be easily adapted, most likely. Paul, I am going to come over to you. If you want to introduce the role of the third sector in communities. I have been focusing on the third sector in community involvement. Some of the feedback that we have had so far has been about that it is very mixed from area to area. We are picking up on that. It is central to what is coming through. There is a need for recognition about what the community is doing and how they can be resourced adequately. We have heard that The question for me would be, if you had to take a step back as we are doing just now, how would you like to interact with your local authority? What they are not doing at the moment, but what could they do? The key thing for me would be, when would you like to get involved in a decision making? Where do you see the funding or at what level of funding would you need to feel that you are doing the best job that you possibly can? The second question might be that we can just encompass this as well, as we were just talking about the lessons that we learned from Covid. What happened in Covid was when Covid happened, local authorities and local organisations literally had to turn around overnight and get action plans and things overnight. Again, lessons learned from Covid that probably we have not learned in moving on from now. I will probably come to you first of all, Louise, just on that. During Covid, we felt that five councils' resilience help was really good to us. I think that this is the anniversary today of the shutdown. I can remember us meeting as a Covid group this day three years ago, going, okay, what can we do as the church, the community council and Largo communities together as a trust? How do we pull together? We did manage to act. We invited some of the councillors who attended that day, or just about attended that day. I feel that we are quite well supported. The piece that is difficult for us now is that we are growing lots of things and we are relying on the volunteers and, in fact, board members doing operational work when we are trying to do full-time jobs. I have a full-time business, but we are trying to do that. We are going to run out of capacity. How do we make that step to provide more services at the community level without it having to be more volunteering by the same few but also provide some jobs because they are needed in our community? That is what we are grappling with. Incidentally, we are getting a little bit of help from an accelerator programme, which is coming to do some facilitation with the board around how we look towards that next step. I would say that we are being helped. I do not know what our outcomes will be from that. If you look out there, you can get the help, but I think that gap between the volunteer level and how we can help to organise the volunteers at an operational level with some paid jobs is going to be our struggle if I am speaking from our experience. David, you mentioned the role of development at DTAS. I have had examples of working with DTAS and found them really great organisations to work with. I do not know if it is looking at more funding for example like DTAS to try to build that capacity in there. I do not know if you want to comment on that. I will come across to you in a broader point, but also around about DTAS and about what the support is for organisations such as DTAS. I will come on and tell them in line all about the broader issues. I do not know if you are just on DTAS. We have engaged with DTAS since we set up. We have had a number of development officers, all with different kinds of skills. We have found them on the whole extremely good at supporting us in taking the next step. It also gives us access a little to legal advice, accountancy advice, tax advice. As a body, I think that they have been invaluable to us in supporting us to make steps forward. I do not know if that can help you any more. No, it leaves at that. That is great. David, on that point, on development trust, about DTAS, but on the wider role, where would you like to be involved in the decision making? Is it resourced adequately? I think that you have touched on that point as well, but just on the DTAS and development trust point of view. We are members of DTAS and I hugely respect the help that they give to organisations. We are slightly different. We are in a relatively rural area with a small population. In that area, we cover 1,700 people. We have 15 staff at our development trust. We have been quite successful for a number of years and we work over a wider area, so we work over several areas. The DTAS funding for officers has now been absorbed into the investment communities fund. It was given to DTAS by the Scottish Government previously for DTAS to give two anchor organisations. I think that reinforcing the terminology of anchor organisations and community anchor organisations, particularly with respect to what happened during Covid when the anchor organisations were fundamental to the response, especially in rural communities, where people were genuinely not willing to leave their homes and did not know how they were going to get 12 miles to Tain or 25 miles to Dornach to do their shopping. How were they supported by development trust doing that? DTAS offered high-level support, legal and that kind of stuff, which is invaluable, and the funding that they intermittently get. They are in the same position that they are always going about for funding. As far as how we have managed to support the community planning process here, we have gone through a number of funds, the aspiring communities funders, where we initially got funding from, which is the Scottish Government fund, and now the staff that we have in support community planning comes from Highlands and Islands Enterprise, through its strengthening communities wing. What it does is allow each of our subgroups to have properly researched action plans and allow those action plans to be kept up to date and the action plans to be delivered against. It allows some co-ordination and responsibility, given to different organisations for different aspects, and a number of community groups, a number of anchor organisations and development trusts and other organisations across other and get responsibility for delivery of aspects for community planning's options. What it does here is that it widens the net of who can be involved by having that support, but if you have a lack of support, it almost comes right back to the statutory partners, because there is no way of throwing the net wide. We have had intermittent funding and it has been welcome. We have had some superb staff. We seem to be a recruitment agency for the likes of Highland Council and Highlands and Islands Enterprise, so we recruit staff and we keep nicking them, but that is probably a backhanded compliment to us. We have had some really big successes and we delivered in the end of 2019 a Sutherland fuel poverty summit, which got national media coverage and we had cabinet secretaries there representing us. That was as a result of our staff and the hard work that they were able to put in to support their networks. What you have to remember about the statutory partners is that it is not just in the third sector, but the statutory partners to a degree are voluntary in that as well, because they have full-time roles to fulfil. One of the problems that the staff helps with is that we have statutory partners, whether it be the police, fire service and NHS, who are very busy doing their other roles. Sometimes they are not trained in community planning when they get the roles that designate them as the representative in the community planning partnership. We also have a huge turnover of those as people move on. I think that we have had five chairs through the police since I have been involved in four years. Sometimes that can create difficulties, but when you have that staff support and those action plans, that gives the consistency and it gives the support to the statutory partners as well that there is something for them to work on. I think that it has been invaluable, but we always have to try to see where the funding is. There is no mechanism that we can say that we will go there for funding again. We have to make a case that it does good things, and I think that the good reputation that Sutherland has helped us with that. I am going to come across the line on, and Ellen, you touched on where Glasgow Council sits on there, and I suppose it would be where does the area partnerships and where do the TSIs sit on the support, or is that support there? Is that something that you think needs to be embedded further in terms of support for the community councils from the TSIs and from the area partnerships? Is that something that you think is sufficient at the moment, or what would you like to see? Ellen, I will probably come to yourself first of all. Within our area partnership, the third sector interface has a place and sits in our area partnership. I find that the area partnership works very well. We know what is happening in our local area. They were supported during the Covid crisis, however I must admit that it was the community that pulled together. The community, along with our councillors and MSP, pulled together. I know that within the thriving places, they were accessing funding for people in the area. We were helping volunteers at food hubs. It is a huge food hub in our local secondary for five secondary schools in Glasgow, but then the third sector got involved. I was involved as an area coordinator for mutual aid. The community planning partnership was last to come online. We were having community council meetings. It was easier to hold a meeting with our councillors. There were a couple of developments going on in the area. We were all able to go on Zoom. We had done that. Then we were told that eventually we would be doing teams. We asked for training on it, and we were told how to switch our computer on, basically. However, the community and the area partnership works well. Our area partnership has been put out by the community planning sector. The area partnership should be more informal, but ours has been more informal for many years. We meet locally, we call one another by first names. We are not sitting in Glasgow city chambers, committee room 8, talking in microphones. We all know one another. I do have a lot of spectrum area partnership. I think that they should be getting the funding to distribute and not the sector, if you ask my opinion. I agree with that. The area partnership works well mainly because it is only for one ward. We have four community council members on the area partnership with a third sector person, and they are very active in it as well. They know the area very well, the third sector person. We also have representatives from the police and the fire brigade. My gripe is always that those statutory bodies come along and give the report and leave. Then you are talking about something else, maybe about coming back to the low emission zone and the electric vehicle. You want to have a police view on that, how they feel about giving people tickets at electric vehicles, but they are not there now. They have gone back. That is a defect with the area partnership. We have been asking that the member stay for the full gamut of the meeting. During Covid, we continued our meetings online. We had them on Zoom, although if there was a council representative there, it had to be on Teams, but it was usually on Zoom. To be honest with you, we find generally in our—well, this is a community council, but even with the area partnership as well, the best conduit is the counsellors. The counsellors themselves give us the best support, and they at least have access to the officers that can get a response. Although the response is invariably standard, it is cut and pasted from somewhere else. Our problems are dissimilar from Ellen's in my community council area. All our problems are first world problems. We do not have a lot of poverty, we do not have a child poverty or anything like that, but people still have issues. They like to have enough glass recycling for their expensive champagne bottles. Still, we need to have the contact with the people. I find the area partnership level very useful and helpful, but above that level, we are left out of things. That is really helpful. We are having such a great conversation, but we are going to briefly suspend for a few minutes and then we will come back on. This has already been such a rich conversation. I am going to bring in the next theme, which is local outcome improvement plans and locality plans. We have already taken quite a bit of evidence on them. I would be interested to hear from you around the levels of awareness that those things even exist. I know that, certainly in my community, people do not necessarily know that there is such a thing as a local outcome improvement plan or even a locality plan. Also, to hear from your sense of your experience of local, if you do have experience of locality plans, are they targeting the resources where they are most needed? We have also heard in evidence that the landscape in terms of plans that have to be created with communities, with councils, is very cluttered and quite confusing. I think that something that happens is that people seem to get what we are talking about in terms of community planning partnerships, the services that are delivered to communities rather than the on-the-ground planning facilities. That also becomes a confusing thing. The other piece, which is an intention around the community planning partnership, is that we are trying to move to a preventative approach. It is what you were talking about, Lionel and Ellen at the beginning there, about the need for communication so that we can prevent things from emerging. We are aware of what is going on on-the-ground and in our communities, and we can move to support people where that is needed to happen. I am interested in all that, so there is quite a lot of packing in here, but I am interested in hearing all that. If you have a sense of, are we managing to get that preventative approach through those plans? There is a lot in there, and you can pick up whatever bits that have stuck in your minds and you feel that you want to respond to. I am aware, but I do not have much communication with the Cality Plan. Ours is a thriving place, but I can say that, as when they come to our area partnership to discuss their progress, they seem to do an awful lot of good work, and it is targeted where it is needed. Why? Because they are in the community, they are with the community and they are part of the community. Their offices are in the shopping centre. As far as I am aware, they are doing a very good job. Obviously, more money would be wonderful, but I think that they are doing a good job. In terms of your role in the community council, you do not have any opportunity to feed into any of that? No, that is one complaint that I have seen because one of them has responded to. Again, the plans are handed to them. Why were they not involved at the beginning? They are six years through the 10-year plan of their thriving place, and that is what they are asking for. It is the same that you will hear it from everybody involved people at the beginning. Anybody else experienced the loypes, as they are called? A shorthand or locality plans? Is that a local place plan, or is it different? My understanding of a local place plan and what has come forward recently is the physical planning on the ground that a community would decide more on the physical aspects, and that feeds into your local development plan in terms of where housing is going to be. A locality plan, and that is what we are looking at here, is more about the services. That is why, on a community planning partnership, you would have the fire service and the police. They are trying to pull in all of these different bodies that can respond. I thought that it was quite interesting. Last week, we heard from Fire and Rescue Service, and they are talking about how they are working at a community level through the planning partnership to build relationships. People trust them and have respect for them, so they are doing quite a bit of work around heating homes and things like that. To me, that is an interesting bit, because that pulls in the preventative aspect, because members of the fire service can get into people's homes and really find out if somebody is living in fuel poverty, what kind of help do they need through Home Energy Scotland and that kind of thing. Lionel? I am a bit of a loss here, because I think that we feel quite remote from the locality plan. As Ellen says, we have no input into it. I just about know what it is. A relationship with the police is quite good, because the police make an effort to attend the community council meetings. Although they will sometimes stay to the end—this is my gripe, again—we need them to stay the whole course—they will sometimes stay to the end, which is quite good. With the area partnership, they will also appear as well, although recently at the area partnership we have been meeting online, so what happens is that I do not know if I am going off the subject here, but the police and the other officers, once they have done their bit at an area partnership, they will switch off their camera and get on with doing something else, but they are still there to ask a question. Once we go on to face-to-face meetings, they will want to get away again. I think that if we had more input with the statutory bodies, if the community as a whole had more input with the statutory bodies, they would get a feel for what we want and what we need. With the police coming to our meetings, they know what our priorities are, and they will do their bit to help. However, if they do not listen, if they just come and give a report, they will come back to this communication again, and they will have to listen. You have talked earlier about community representation and joining up there. It is interesting to me that you are not familiar with Leip's local outcome improvement plans and locality plans, and it seems like that is something that it would be good if community councils were aware of them. We could be more aware of them, but to be fair, from what I have heard of them, there is not a lot of deprivation in our particular community council area. There is not a lot of organisations looking for funding for deprivation in our particular area. In the next area, which I was talking about earlier, there is perhaps more active and more awareness of that. David, you have indicated that you want to come in. First, although I am portraying some sort of utopia of community planning, it is not perfect here. I think that the one area where it seems almost universal that there is a bit of a struggle is the engagement between community planning and community councils. I certainly think that although there are some of our community councils that engage well with community planning, the bulk of them do not seem to feel that it is a requirement, and they do as and when. A more formal process might be interesting. In Sutherland, we have 17 community council areas. When we had locality plans, but because deprivation is harder to record in rural areas, we only had locality plans for five of the community council areas out of 17. Those worked well, and those were all chaired by different statutory partners. The fire and rescue service chaired the Sutherland locality group that we had, and the NHS chaired the Drora one. The statutory partners did not have an option but to get involved in the locality planning, which I think was good. They were tasked with reporting back to full partnership meetings on what had happened at the locality meetings and how the action plan was coming along. They were involved at that level. As a result of the recent place planning, which is a great step forward, I think that the definition of place planning—different people who speak to have different definitions—has to be worked out a bit more. As a result of Covid and the fact that we only had five of our 17 community councils represented, deprivation was present in all our community council areas. We moved away from locality plans at community council-level areas to area forums. We have a west forum, a north forum, a south and central forum and an east coast forum. Those forums then incorporate a wider body of people. Again, they are chaired by statutory partners, but they are making sure that we do not miss any of the areas. They are bringing probably wider action plans and more effective action plans together. That is still kind of embryonic. I think that the west forum had its first meeting last night, so we are still working through how that is going to work. However, we have hopes that we can create action plans for a wider area that, in reality, have the same issues. It is the same issues that are facing the different community council areas. Having 17 does not make any sense when everybody is talking about homes, everybody is talking about broadband speeds, everybody is talking about childcare. The area forums seem to work well, but that engagement with the statutory partners as chairs and their duty to report back on the action planning works really well. Engagement with community councils and engaging them in the process of developing the action plans that come out is crucial. We are sending out the agenda for the south and central area forums just now, and that has got every chair and every vice chair of the community councils now in the area on there. I think that at the last meeting, out of the five community council areas, we have four representatives. So, hopefully, we can help with that by doing this wider area planning. Thank you very much for describing what is going on where you are. It is very helpful. I almost feel like I need a diagram to follow how it all fits together. I might be getting back in touch with you for that. Louise, do you have any thoughts on that? There are only two pieces that I could probably link to. I really do not have personally much awareness of the wider locality plans. We are involved with Fife resilience plan, and we have good links with that. We have created a local resilience plan along with the police and fire that is going down to house level based on the major risks that we see. That is just about to go live. If that is an example of working in partnership, then we are doing that. Our local community council is chaired by Peter Aitken. We know him very well and work alongside him and help him with his housing consultations because they are really struggling for members. People are not stepping forward in what is a very valuable way of engaging with the planning aspects of the community. I do not want to speak out of term for Peter, but I know that that is his major issue—just getting people to step forward for this. Hence why we work alongside him to help him with consultations because he physically does not have enough people to do that, and we are okay about that. That is just getting along in a community. That is my experience so far and probably not as wide as others. Thanks for that. That also highlights an element of a lack of empowerment of community councils that maybe needs to be looked at in terms of funding, whereas development trusts—in a way, they got started because this is where communities could raise funds and take action and do things that they wanted to do. I will move on to the next theme, which is measuring impact. Marie is leading on that. I have been looking at the measuring impacts on community cpps and how they make an impact on communities. I am sorry to hear about your experience in Lionel and Eileen, but there is not much engagement with the community planning partnership and feeling as if you have been overlooked. That is something that we can feed back into our report after we have finished our evidence sessions. Do you think that community cpps target their actions to where they are most needed? I know that you touched on that a wee bit, Lionel, but maybe you could expand a bit more. In theory, they are supposed to, but they need information to do that. In the example that we give, the Glasgow Communities Fund, it did not consult with the community. It was very much a paper exercise, even without thinking, well, we need so many food banks, we need so many warm places and so on. They did not really look city-wide and speak to people. It was only at the very end when they spoke to us when they realised that they were not targeting the right areas, not because they were not giving money to people who did not need it, but they were not sharing it fairly across the city. I think that that was the major problem. That would not have been a difficult thing to do because the first thing that we said, why do not you have a map? For example, in licensing in Glasgow, they have a map that shows so that they know what is over provision and what is not. Why cannot they adapt that for the people who apply for grants? There is something called the Glasgow Council dashboard, which had come to area partnership months beforehand. When I looked up after the sector review, it had a map that is run by community planning, and it shows where all the grants are allocated. To expand in line with the review partnership, we were told that the people who allocated the grants before it came to us to review had geographic knowledge. They had missed out my entire ward, which is one of the fourth-largest area of deprivation in Glasgow. How you can do that, that is why you need to have the third sector and the community involved way before they did. At that stage, they had to change their mind. They had realised that they had things totally wrong. I was just going to ask a question as well. Can you give an example of one thing that you feel that the CPPs have achieved in your area? Obviously, if you can, it is okay, but one thing that you can have noticed that has been achieved? No, not really. The area partnerships, yes, because they are part of the planning process, yes. I think that the area partnerships are right, so I would say yes. I think that more power should be given to them. We do have something in Glasgow that they are looking at called citizens panels, which is quite a controversial subject, especially for community councils. Are we being listened to? We'll wait and see what the outcome of that is. I agree that, in community planning generally, the area partnership is quite successful, because having had experience of their meetings, you feel involved, you feel your head and so on. Frequent, not infrequent, let's put it that way, they do take account of what you say. On the other hand, the tiers higher up don't really work for the community as well. They are looking at the moment at the citizens panels in Glasgow, which is, and I noticed that Berndead Monachyn spoke about that in her evidence. There is a group of community, not a significant number of community councils who see that as a complete disaster, because what they want to do is enlarge the body so that it will be made up of third sector bodies, which is a good thing. There's no place for the community council at the moment on it. It will be made up of perhaps local health bodies, local education bodies perhaps as well. We feel that this is the wrong way to get to the grassroots of the problem. They need to get somehow, they need to be smart about getting to the grassroots and to reach the people who really need it. I think that the third sector is quite a good way to do that, but they seem not to be taking cognisance of the third sector at the moment. Thanks a lot. Do you seem to have a more positive experience? I'll pop the same question to you. Do you think that the CPPs target their actions within the most needed? Absolutely. During Covid, it was a perfect example of that, but coming out of Covid and probably more so in the cost of living crisis and the amount of fuel and food poverty that we've been able to target raising funding to help people with energy costs, to help people with poverty, across Sutherland. We're doing that by engaging with the community groups. It's probably easier in a rural area to engage at the grassroots of the third sector because they're not as hidden as they are in urban areas. However, we had 12 groups from across Sutherland visiting us here yesterday to look at our polytunnel, to look at our food larder, to look at all the strategies that we have in place and they're going away and we're sharing information with them. The sharing of information from the successful organisations is really valuable. What we've done is well because we're looking at environmental issues and food security. We've mapped where there is community growing across Sutherland and where there are communities where we haven't seen a significant community growing. We've applied for funding on their behalf to encourage them to have a community growing, to help environmentally, to help with food security and a number of things. We certainly, because we are co-ordinated at a CPP level, are able to target funding to make interventions that really work across the area. Again, we're speaking from a smaller rural area with a small rural population, but it certainly is making a difference. It is bottom-up. It's been led by the communities and the community needs and the community wants. The partners are respecting that and responding to that rather than dictating what is necessary to happen. We have had the flexibility to create separate subgroups where we feel that they are necessary to deal with issues that are a real concern for our community. A good example of that is that when we came out of the first lockdown in Covid, which everybody diligently undertook, there wasn't one case of Covid in Sutherland at that point. All of a sudden, in July, the floodgates opened and there were visitors from all over Britain coming to Highland communities. The communities lost their confidence in welcoming visitors. They went from the traditional Highland welcome to taking pictures of people's number plates to try to figure out where they were coming from. There was a loss of confidence. We set up a sustainable tourism subgroup to work with the communities to help to understand their needs and to inform visitors for visitor management. We put out a number of statements on how visitors should behave and how visitors should go forward. That helped the communities to deal with the issues that we are doing. That group has now fallen by the wayside because the actions that needed to happen are gone. We have now set up the homes and infrastructure group to look at the housing emergency that we are facing—as I mentioned earlier—the depopulation that we are facing. If there are not homes built—I am talking about homes rather than housing that can be lost into air, B and Bs and so on—but if there are not homes for people built and we are really going to struggle, we have set up a separate group for that. Again, that is led by intelligence for the community and community engagement. Without community engagement, to me, there is no point in taking that. If you are just dictating policy to communities, communities are not going to buy into it. Just for a move on to Louise. Lionel, do you want to come back in again? No, sorry. I just thought you were speaking. No, sorry about that. Louise, do you want to come in? Yes, I do not think that we have proper links to locality plans. It is in my notepad to go away and have a wee ask about that. Following on from David's piece, we too are responding with a subgroup around community assets, which I think its main focus will be affordable housing through the rural housing burden route, if possible. Land is our biggest issue, and that probably is not the remit of this committee, because we have had issues around the abandoned and neglected clauses in the Land Reform Act, but that is for another committee. We will get on and fight that one somewhere else. I will just come back to looking at the impact of CPPs. How should communities be involved in valuating the impact? Did you say evaluating? Yes, evaluating the impact of CPPs. I think that there is definitely a role for local authorities to speak to beneficiaries of their facilities and grants. From what I gather, the way that it works in Glasgow, is to give out a grant and then somebody writes a report saying, you know what the end of a couple of years is saying, this is all going fabulously. Nobody really assesses even a sample of the groups. They just look, everything is done on paper and its outcome. I think that there should be more engagement. Actually go out to see the groups, see how they are working and evaluate them properly, even if it is only a sample. I think that it would also be quite good if we gave a report in English, not in council speak or government speak. There is a massive difference between speaking to people or talking about the quality plans or whatever. They need to speak in English to people, so that we understand what they are talking about. It might even be helpful if we did something like some organisations do, what you asked for, what we are doing, what the outcome is. Make it simple, do not give us 64 pages. As community representatives, we are volunteers but we get stuff flung at us from all over the place. Give us the same clear outcomes. I think that I have used the word now, but tell us exactly what you have done and where we are going. I think that that would help and then people would see what they were doing. Thank you. David, how do you feel that community should be involved in evaluating the impact? I think that there are a number of things. I think that the one thing that we are looking at at the moment is longer-term planning and getting communities involved in that, looking towards a longer-term. I think that in the north-west it is 2045 that they are looking to, so planning for what the communities need in 2045. Again, we seem to think that we do engage quite well with that, and as far as what Lionel was saying about reporting, we probably feel that we are reporting to death on a lot of things that we are doing, so it seems to work okay here. However, as far as direct engagement is crucial, it is crucial that direct engagement is not done in isolation, so that direct engagement is done with the statutory partners alongside them, so that they are not getting a different kind of perspective from the third sector of the communities and the statutory partners, because they compromise. I think that what we need to do and what we always try to do is bring everybody together so that we can reach consensus. It does not always necessarily mean as big a compromise that if there is not an understanding of the two sides of things, we have to make a bigger compromise. The community is essential to this, because without our communities, what are we? There is no need for community planning without our communities. Unless you engage with the communities, unless the communities are at the very least in agreement with what is happening, but in the best case scenario, leading what is happening and that statutory partners are in agreement with what the community needs are within the parameters of the way that they have to work, that to me is what community planning has to be. Without our communities, I do not think that we can plan, so I think that it is essential. I do not think that I could make it any better, he said it all. We are going to move on to our last two themes. The first one is going to be led by Miles Briggs, and that is the culture of public bodies, and then Willie Coffey is going to come in with local and national leadership. We have heard and have written down a few comments with regard to attitudes of culture that you feel has not changed. I wrote down here, Ellen, that you spoke about feeling like a tick box exercise lionel. You mentioned feeling left out, and David, you touched upon communities being dictated to. I wondered in terms of how the Community Empowerment Act has helped to change a culture. Police Scotland, I think that you touched upon, seemed to be getting a bit of a green light for their role in actually engaging, whether or not that's delivered any change. I'm not sure, but I just wondered where you feel that the experience of how public bodies are now feeling they have to engage and then take forward has actually been constructive. Is it just that Police Scotland example or are there others? Within our area wide, we have several projects within one of the SIMDs where there is co-operation between the police, the fire, the HSEP, the councillors. When they work together, again it's at an area level where everybody knows one another, and when that happens it works well. I know that when police come to us at the timing of our meetings in the evenings, we do say to the police or the fire brigade after they've given us a report, please feel if there's something happening elsewhere to leave the meeting. In these circumstances at local level, yes, I feel we'll work together. I noticed from Bernadette Cmonachan's evidence that she was saying that the council is no longer the dominant partner. I feel that's just a veneer that really we have all these processes now, but as Ellen says, it is to a certain extent a tick box. As far as community planning is concerned, it's a tick box exercise. As a community council, we're very grateful for the ability to feed through our issues through the councillors and get our feelings known that way, and as I said before, sometimes they are responded to, but so far as the body is concerned, we still feel that we get a presentation rather than a consultation. David or Louise, did you want to come in on that point? If not, I wanted to expand to what you've all touched upon in various ways with regard to the pandemic and that emergency response. I've been quite interested in other work that the committee has done at looking at what seemed to be a period of time where some of the barriers were taken away and maybe that risk averse nature of sometimes public services not allowing communities to do what they want and take responsibility. Whether or not you think that's now disappeared or what worked to make you just do that, you mentioned you've all got round the table literally to see what the... I'm struggling to get my head round and my sense is that culturally communities are empowering themselves to action plan and then tell the council what they're going to do. I don't know if that is actually what is happening. My sense of that around our resilience plan is what has happened and it seems to be working. They are open to that and open to work along with what we are going to do, even down to little cards being placed in windows with emergency details on them. They're saying that's great, we'll know in that area if we have to go into house that the details are there and we can help someone. That's my wider sense is that if communities start to act for themselves, the councils seem to be open to us doing that for ourselves. In terms of that capacity building, does anyone else have... I think the initial response to Covid was an instinctive response by the communities. Within my community, yes, the third sector immediately swung into action. The actual physical community roundabout probably, we were there to support the third sector because a lot of them had to set up the Zoom, set up this, so we were sort of buffer zone to give them some time to get things set up and we worked incredibly well, however people have gone back to work. People were volunteers, they've got other commitments, schools are back, so there's less of that level, I would say. Another barrier to being involved with things is actually the time that we have meetings. If any meetings are held at Glasgow City Council, during the day people work and they can't always take time off. If you become part of a committee, say like the area partnership and then you join a couple of subcommittees, you're committing as a volunteer a lot of time and nobody objects to committing the time we want to, but the barrier to that is it's all during the day. I think that the council needs to open up more to be flexible to people's needs that want to help out. The other thing that I've noticed is that the post Covid the authorities are very risk averse whereas we resumed face to face meetings as soon as we possibly could. The area partnership is still meeting by teams and on the last occasion when I asked them, I've been pressing for a while to have face to face, but they're not totally against it, but there's no absolute consensus for it. There's still several members who are still wanting to be by teams, which is probably an excuse for something else. No, we are face to face. David, is there anything you want to add? A couple of things. I may have said the word dictated. It's certainly not our experience of feeling dictated too, but it's certainly something that we want to avoid, so it's not something that we've experienced. As far as the statutory partners are concerned, we get good buy-in from all the statutory partners, but I do feel that often people are promoted into roles without the necessary training and community planning and come to it without confidence in the ability to deliver their role and without a particular experience there. They are also kind of expected to do that on top of the job that they have, so if you're a chief inspector or you're ahead of area for fire and rescue, the community planning is probably not the highest priority that you have community planning. I think that to create some space for the people who are engaged from the statutory bodies to be able to engage with it properly and with support for them to do so, I think that that would help the statutory bodies to properly and better contribute. That's what I say from the statutory partners. From the Covid response, I think that certainly there was a need from the local authority and from the wider areas to engage with the communities because at that point in Covid nobody knew what to do, so the best thing to do was gather evidence from the most local sources that you could get on what the community needs were and that's local anchor organisations, community councils, whatever it may be. Things were made easier during Covid. Certainly from a grant funding perspective, the audit requirement dropped and it wasn't that things weren't audited and there wasn't a responsibility for properly spending money, but there were certainly less owners, but that's come back in a vengeance and it's probably worse now than it was before. That was a temporary thing, but that worked really, really well for getting necessary resources to areas that needed it quickly and without fuss to deal with issues that were there, so I think that needs to be looked at. Another wrinkle from the whole process is that most organisations move their application process online and I think that that can be problematic and I think that we have to, I think that we've embraced quite rightly and I've mentioned how teams meetings and Zoom meetings can work in rural areas for getting more people there. I think that we have to get trying to find a happy medium of the blend so we don't push everything online because if we do so then I think that it takes away some of that real community intelligence and community interest because you're just dealing, you're not dealing with an officer often anymore, you're just dealing with a screen and I think that sometimes can hinder the process. I think that the reaction from Covid was superb. The realisation that the communities were the best sources of information to try and deal with what was happening at a local level was really, really useful. Let's not throw the baby out of the bathwater and lose that because that engagement is really what is important at community planning level, grassroots. That's helpful. Thanks for that and just finally what I've taken away, some of the points Ellen you've made with regard to the area partnerships and you all know each other. Louise, I think you mentioned some of the success has been around human relationships driving that. In terms of who's maybe not at the table in these discussions I think I know you mentioned third sector sometimes it doesn't have the capacity to engage as much. Is there anyone specific you don't think has been able to to really get part of this? I asked, certainly it was pre Covid at our area partnership, we would like to see it expanded. We would like to see, well my personal view was I'd like to see somebody from the local school to hear the views of the children because we're constantly told youth, youth, youth but we don't actually hear their voice so often. We had also asked especially when it comes to planning members of the Glasgow disability alliance get people from that community so that we understand what their needs are so yes I think we could engage more people in the process at a local level not sitting high up at the city chambers. Anyone else have anything they want to add if not happy to hand back? We're going to move on to local and national leadership with Willie Coffey. Thanks very much convener and what a fascinating discussion that we've had and quite a contrasting set of views between the rural communities and the urban community in Glasgow. My theme is about leadership and I wanted to just get your views and your ideas about what leadership actually is and what successful leadership looks like and whether you think it's still a kind of hierarchical dominated by the councils as leadership demonstrated top down and where is your role in that and who are the leaders that make a difference in the community so I wonder if I could just touch in these issues please maybe because I'll start with you Eirland what does local leadership look like and what makes a success for the community planning partnership in terms of leadership? I think somebody who listens, somebody who listens and involves people throughout and I think in a way that's my in my opinion the area partnership works far better than the community planning it's a smaller area and we work together we don't necessarily somebody to tell us what to do but somebody who actually takes you along with them and who listens that's what we want somebody who listens and acts upon it it's not just a talking shop somebody who acts upon what we see okay Lionel what does good leadership look like? Well I think it's someone for whom I have respect and when we I mean I think I can think of a couple of my councillors in particular my councillors rather than the officials who we can rely on to help us out when we have an issue but you know there's no within community planning within the statutory body there's no kind of assessment of any of the leadership and or at least it's not we are not aware of it there may be some kind of internal review body but there's no assessment of the leadership of the officers within the council that we're aware of and there's no mechanism given to us of what's a success and what's a failure but I do find that as Ellen has said if we can trust someone if they listen and they get something done they can build your respect and that is a good leader. Do you recognise leadership when you see it? I mean one of the previous committees convener somebody said we all know what an elephant looks like but it's quite hard to describe it is it quite hard to to see and describe leadership actually taking place is that a difficult thing to define or is it kind of obvious? If you've got it you know it and if you don't you also know that you don't have it. In the context of the area partnership for example I wouldn't say necessarily that any one person is a great leader but there are people who support us whom we can rely on and whom you know and who we will follow. I can't really give any more than that. I don't know quite what you mean by a leader in that respect. If you know if you're saying is it someone who will inspire us to do something I don't think that that's someone I've come across. It's really interesting I'll just go over to Louise from Largo. What does effective leadership look like for you? Responsiveness and you know prepared to engage in a bit of dialogue to really find out what the issues are and then to point us in the right direction you know to be honest about what they can and can't do you know therefore we know what falls back on us to to use our leadership in the community. It's a huge question actually. Do you feel that it's still very much driven by the local authority up to you genuinely feel a participant in that process? We are completely the other way I feel that we just take the bull by the horns and do our bit and then we apologize later if we've stepped on toes unwittingly but that just might be what our communities become and there's lots of leaders in our community I would say who will make links and who you know if we put out a call we'll say yet we could pick up with that we know someone in that area and if those who are in the organisations like the council are prepared to be responsive and honest then we've got the best thing to work with whether they can do something or not but to be able to say yet I can help there or no that's probably not an area that we'll get much traction on right now but here's what we could do that that's so helpful to us. When you described earlier on that sometimes you don't let the councilers in that's quite an empowering thing to say and is that where you guys are you feel as though you're in control of a process you can contribute that's not leadership that's something else that's a different dynamic that's going on there but it's not that we don't want them there it's that we feel we should make some decisions at community level without their input first about what we need and then we actually engage with asking for what help we need rather than because a lot of that we can do ourselves we don't need to be a burden on the services if we can do a lot ourselves but where we want them is when you know for instance around the resilience plan we absolutely will involve them but they're not they're not you know an MSP is not needed down at sort of community pathways level we would go to Fife coast and countryside trust chat chat to the people that are involved there and get them involved directly which means there isn't the double leg going to the council and then to their hands you know their hands what do you call an organisation like that arms length that's what i was looking for an arms length so it's it's there's leadership in all of these organisations good leadership in many of them and it's about us connecting where we need to okay thank you for that baby dump up to you what is effective leadership look like from your experience the way it works for us it is very much although we have a kind of anointed chair it's a collective and it's a team dynamic and leadership is spread so that it doesn't it doesn't fall into to one person it's interesting because as i mentioned earlier so for our area forum the Police Scotland is the chair and it's the chief inspector for the area who gets the chair and i think we've gone through four i think it's at five or i think it's that we've been through in the five year they've been involved and only 50 percent of them i went to school with so but because so you do see different styles of leadership but as i said earlier because the community planning and and this type of working isn't naturally in the experience or skill set of somebody who has become a very very senior officer because they they're good at other aspects of policing they rely on the team and i think that the team the team is important so we certainly help there we also have more strategic groups from a council perspective we have our councillors and with only six councillors that we deal with and they to a man leave i would say that their party hats at the door when the community planning which i think is really useful because they are really reactive to what the community wants and we deal at a staffing level at the Highland council with the ward managers rather than senior staff and it's the councillors that take the lead and the councillors therefore are responsible for their constituents so it seems to work um that way as well um but i mean leadership is commitment and support for each other and as long as you see the commitment there are people who as i said earlier don't have huge amounts experience in in partnership working but as long as they show commitment and respect for the other um the other people there that's good leadership and i think that um you know we are in a position of where um people are listening to the anchor organisations and the grassroots organisations at the bottom and often you know i'll have councillors or councillor staff phoning at us and say what do we what do we need to do and that input comes in from the level that we have so involving the communities in the strategic direction and showing respect for that i think is a huge thing and yeah respect commitment and support that's good leadership okay thank you so much for that of you anytime or have you run at the time convener a few minutes couple minutes just to lastly maybe ask you about i mean there is national guidance on this in terms of the community planning and permanent act and so on are you aware of it you know and does it need to change what kind of recommendations might you have to improve the experiences that you're having just now ellan i read it yesterday i have read the community empowerment act there's certainly a lot of words in it um how do we improve it meet sure people follow it and listen and listen and involve people okay i would highlight that better communication better involvement at an earlier stage with the grassroots and for proper follow-up afterwards okay thank you louise national guidance yeah i don't really have anything else to add other than what line of land ellan i've said i don't know the act inside out so okay david lastly over to you any final recommendations on improving the process i think again from a rural perspective we understand what community planning is there to do for inequalities etc and it's very much dealt with at a community level but in rural areas businesses are a huge part of the sustainability of communities going forward and i think we have to find a forum or a way of engaging businesses with community planning at a level of respect that without the businesses without the jobs without the income without their ability to trade in our rural areas communities can't survive so i think community planning has and i suppose the place planning that we're all moving towards is maybe the first stage of that that allows us to engage and look at what the community needs holistically but i think if we take that out and we're trying to deal with inequalities without engaging with how we deal with and in the future inequalities by creating better jobs by creating careers for people by allowing businesses to maybe and be involved in solving the housing situation in rural areas i think we're missing a big part of what makes communities sustainable so maybe if there is some sort of tweak that allows what is recognised as anchor community businesses or something like that to engage and without the threat that the businesses are then going to take everything from it and give nothing back we have to be respectful of the fact without businesses the communities can't survive and without communities the businesses can't survive okay thank you very much to all four of you for those contributions thank you back to you convenient thank you very much willy and that concludes our our evidence for today i just want to thank you all for coming in and david for joining us online i think it's been really helpful to hear your perspectives as we kind of continue to take this process of community planning partnership evidence further and and that will richly add to our report i've certainly been making lots of notes and i heard that colleagues also have been making lots of notes so thanks very much for that and now i'll briefly suspend to allow the witnesses to leave the next item on our agenda for today is consideration of the following negative instruments valuation for rating plant and machinery scotland amendment regulations 2023 and town and county town and country planning general permitted development and use classes scotland miscellaneous amendment order 2023 there's no requirement for the committee to make any recommendations on negative instruments members will note that we wrote to stakeholders inviting views on the general permitted developments ssi and a couple of responses are included with the meeting papers if members are agreed we could write to the scottish government seeking further information on how the safeguarding process process will work in practice and whether councils offer clear procedures for raising concerns and complaints as suggested by rnib scotland do members have any comments on the instruments willy thanks very much convener i would say i'm still a little concerned about the permitted development one and i don't feel sufficiently clear that there are sufficient safeguards in that measure the minister did say that it doesn't disapply controls about obstructions but that doesn't still tell me that councils can just go ahead with this irrespective of the community views or the impact of that so there's a little bit of clarity in the middle ground for me and nair arianne about whether people can object to something or participate in a decision or the council should assess an application so it's still not clear for me i'm afraid but it still gives me a little bit of concern so we can we can seek reassurances in the letter that you were laying there would be supported by miles i agree with what willy said there i think there's some real need for guidance to be quite specific and for all councils to follow that and i met with rnib last week on a separate issue and we were discussing the use of ropes for example to create these areas and there's no real guidance or clarification of what that looks like and that's one of the key barriers which blind and visually impaired people often raise so i think it's important we we make sure that guidance is very specific if this goes ahead okay so taking your comments into consideration would you like some oral evidence i'm back i think it for so many people i think this is you know something they want to make sure they have firstly have inputted in but also that this doesn't have unintended consequences when it's rolled out so i think that'd be helpful i think it would be helpful too so just to clarify would you like to hear from the minister on on what's going to be rolled out or would you like us to bring in organisations like rnib i think probably just get the minister as we've read their submissions they are more concerned good all right so let's get clarity from the minister thanks very much for that yeah well that's right we will get clarity in a few days time on that one i don't know if ahead of that if we can ask you know as we ask the minister to attend whether or not they could provide the guidance for us to be able to specifically look at what's then going to be rolled out as with short term let's misinterpretation of that guidance can take place so i think that would be helpful for us to look at that before questioning the minister as well right well let's see if that's that's possible to you know the change of use as well and obviously like other than the premises that are in close proximity to dwellings obviously it's just the interpretation of that guidance so maybe right speak with that as well all good points okay so we need some more clarity and we want some upfront information thank you very much for that thanks thanks very much for that okay so just want to check that those comments were all on town and country planning are there any comments on the valuation for rating no no comments on that one okay thanks very much so we agreed at the start of the meeting to take the next item in private so as that was the last public item on our agenda for today i now close the public part of the meeting