 Welgani gynnw Thank you for coming to the 19th meeting. Oedden nhaw bach wrth y bydd ar cy speculateig cyllid y Cal Minnesota. The information from all members to us to ensure that mobile phones are on silent love and with this notification turned off during the meeting. On the agenda, it's to create a decision whether to take items three and four in private. Are we all agreed? The next item on our agenda is to take evidence on the impact of the Community Empowerment Act on allotments and community food growing. This is the last of three evidence sessions the committee is holding during its current inquiry. We will be discussing this topic today with a panel of witnesses who each submitted written responses to our call for views last month. They represent allotments, community groups and food growing. Our witnesses today are Karen Birch, co-founder and chair of Abundant Borders, Ian Welsh, who is an allotment user, Roseanne Wood from the Trenent Allotment Association and Marie Dillator, who is the chair of Not Nogale Limited. I welcome all our witnesses to the meeting today. Karen, Ian and Maria are joining us remotely. For the record, I would like to highlight that, as an MSP, I have recently been supporting Not Nogale Limited in using the Community Empowerment Act to transfer land from the Scottish Government. It would be helpful if members could direct their questions to a specific witness where possible, although I will be happy to bring others in who wish to contribute. If witnesses do wish to comment, please indicate your desire to do so to me or the clerk and I will bring you in at an appropriate point. Karen, Ian and Maria, if you could indicate that you wish to come in, please type anar in the chat function in Blue Genes. I will now open up the session to questions from members and I will begin with first questions. The first theme is kind of around costs and benefits. I would like to open up with a broad question about the barriers to accessing allotments. Throughout the evidence sessions and site visits, we have seen the challenges allotment owners and associations have faced and overcome, and likewise we have heard about challenges faced by local authorities in providing allotments. Identifying these barriers to access is a crucially important part of this post-legislative scrutiny that the committee is undertaking. Given this, I am keen to hear your experiences of what the main barriers in accessing allotments in community-growing spaces are. I would like to start with Ian, and then I will go to Roseanne. Hello. Good morning. My focus is really around what is happening in the cities. From what I can gather, the current weighting list Glasgow and Edinburgh and Fife probably amount to something like 10,000, which is significantly more than the number of plots that are actually available in those places. Fife has taken a proactive approach for a number of years now, and I such have increased the number of plots that it had from 2007. Edinburgh and Glasgow have done a certain amount, but they are not anywhere near the trigger points in terms of legislation. One of the problems is that the trigger point of when the number of applicants reaches more than 50 per cent of the plots that a council operates was to be delayed by eight years. The trigger point for that is that eight years after regulations have been set, regulations were meant to be set in 2020, as I understand, when Glasgow airs still yet to be agreed and introduced. That adds a further delay into the process. Just out of curiosity, do you have an understanding of why that delay was put into the legislation? I was formally a president of the Scottish Allotment and Garden Society. I was involved with other committee members in negotiating with the Scottish Government over part nine and the detail in it. We became part of the child party group, which was four representatives from Scottish Allotments and four council representatives, namely Glasgow, Edinburgh, North Ayrshire and Fife, and officials from the Scottish Government. At the time, we thought that eight years would be a reasonable time for councils to prepare, because there is a clear implication for costs. As we all know, councils have been, for many years, struggling to meet costs. I, myself, recently retired from a ground services operation of packs operation, so that often is connected to allotments. We know that the budget situation is where. Creating new sites obviously requires funding. The resource that councils may have is land. The issue is often finding the funds to develop it. There has been success in terms of a lot of other sites being created, mainly in rural council areas. In 2007, we published a survey of where Scotland's allotments were. There were 6,500 then. It coincided with an upsurge and interest from people looking to have allotments in their area. In some cases, such as a place like Langham down in the Borders, there weren't any and hadn't been any for many years. Those groups became constituted and negotiated, either with councils or other landowners, often obtaining funds from lots of resources, climate challenge funds, to create the infrastructure that needs to create these sites. The problem in the cities is that people submit their name on to a waiting list. That waiting list may be held by the council, it may be held by self-managed sites on council land or it may be held in the case of my site, which is a completely independent one. People simply languish there until such times as an association or the council is able to offer them a vacant plot. My moan site now, which has 50 plots, is a waiting list that I understand of around 130. The kind of turnover that we have experienced in recent years would indicate that it could take five years just simply to work our way through perhaps the first 30 or so people on that list. It is very difficult for any association, be it independent or operating or managing the site on behalf of a council, to take forward the issue of creating a new site or representing the people who are on the waiting list. The problem is that the people on the waiting lists are not necessarily members of any organisation. They are simply individuals waiting for a letter to appear, offering them a plot. In many instances, that could amount to many years. Thank you very much for that. It is interesting to hear that there is a desire for the eight years to allow councils to prepare. In the meantime, we have had things like Covid that have brought that upsurge even more desire for people to get their patch for growing food. Roseanne, what is your experience in Trenent? Is it similar or are there other things going on there? We have 34 plots, and we have six community plots and the rest are all individual plots. Our waiting list is currently at 34, which seems a lot, but there are only nine that have not been offered a plot. We give people the chance that, if they were offered a plot and cannot take it for some reason, they can go back on, but they can go back down the bottom. We keep those people on. If they are offered once and do not reply, we will put them to the bottom of the list, and if they do not reply twice, then they are off the list. Just before Covid, we had nobody waiting for a plot, but Covid has sent it through the roof. We operate ourselves. It used to be the council, but they do not have the manpower of the chap retired, so they set up their association. We do everything. We allocate and keep up with making sure that the plots are looked after. I know that it says 50 per cent of plots, but ours, as I say, is not too bad. It is about two years. The person at the top has been waiting for two years now. It is likely that people have been given up, not since Covid. I think that people have just cherished them. I know that, in Musselbrae, people have closed a waiting list. They have 64 plots, and they closed it when it got over 100. I think that their waiting time is about 10 years. There are frequently complaints in the paper, but there is nothing that they can do. I know that they have now started to maybe half their plots. I believe that we have what is called half plots, but it is managed well. Nobody there thinks that they should have a bigger plot and some people do struggle. Maria, you wanted to come in. I thank you very much for giving me the opportunity to be here. I think that I wanted to raise a different issue of a different barrier. We are based in Inverness, where there are only two element sites. One has 60 spaces and the other one has 30 spaces. The larger one is rented from Highland Council. The other one is rented from a private developer in a short-term lease. Inverness has about 51,000 inhabitants. We are a growing city. I think that a key issue is access to land for allotments and community-grown spaces to be set off. Our experience as a community group has been looking to acquire a site that is already owned by Scottish Government and is part of the Scottish Bullfarm. We have placed an incredible number of barriers to try to develop the project. There is an issue that is not just about the running of the existing allotment sites but about how we ensure that access to land is facilitated to ensure that we are able to provide the sites as we move forward and that we have got this community basis. Thank you for that. Karen, do you want to come in? I think that we look at it in a different way. I think that we have heard three times already with looking at allotment plots. It is a case of finding quite a large piece of land because if a council is looking for a site, it is probably looking for a sufficient piece of land for maybe put on 20 allotments as an element. That is quite a large piece of land and it is also very resource intensive to run an allotment because everybody wants a shed and everybody wants their own area to store. There are a lot of community pathways to access allotment. Having an allotment site is quite a big ask. We look at things very differently in creating community gardens. That means that there is not so much of a need for a massive amount of space in order to satisfy the food-growing ambitions of a larger number of people. If we have an allotment site for 20 people, that is quite a big piece of land. We have community garden spaces that are on less than an acre and we would maybe have 20 people who are able to grow food collectively on that piece of land. Taking that approach—we are in the Scottish Borders just to emphasise that—we have not had any difficulty at all in accessing pieces of land in order to do community food-growing. That has been through the council, through its establishment of the green spaces team, where the council is looking to make more and more pieces of land available. However, the biggest success has been through housing associations because having a making facility for community-growing space has satisfied the needs of their tenants, but it also builds community within a particular area because people are involved in keeping a part of, for example, housing development nice and tidy as a community recreational space, as well as a food-growing space. Despite the title of the consultation on the committee, we do not have a huge amount of allotments, but we have quite a different approach to availability of green spaces and possibilities of food-growing within communities. That is great to hear your perspective and your innovation in looking at what might be a community-growing space. However, it seems to be that tension—from what everyone has said, it seems to be that tension—is happening in the urban, in our cities, where there is not so much growing space. Maria, you already pre-empted my second question, which was around the support and facilitation that is coming from the Scottish Government and local authorities, but maybe I could just pick up the same kind of theme with Karen and then maybe Ian around what we think that local authorities and the Scottish Government could do to better support allotments and community-growing spaces. Karen, do you want to come in on that? I think that as part of the food-growing strategy that the Scottish Borders Council had to create as part of the overall bill, what it came up with was not, in our opinion, a food-growing strategy, but it became quite a comprehensive community food-growing strategy. As part of that, it has now created a community food-grower network and a green spaces team, looking at how we can make that space available. I do not think that anywhere in the borders could be described as an urban area, but there are waiting lists in places such as Huykin and Gallashield, as I understand it, where there are population centres. There is more and more community space to get people involved. We need to try and be creative in the way that we look at food-growing and the way that we involve people. For example, the community food-growing site that we first established in Eimeth is a half-plot on the allotment, so we have five people growing food on that small plot in Eimeth. That has helped people who are on the waiting list. It has also helped people who are not sure about taking on an allotment space, so it is meant that we have been able to give them the skills and the help and build their confidence before they take on a larger space. It has also meant that people have not dropped off the waiting list so readily because they have had engagement. As a result of that, we have now taken on a much bigger community-growing space just out with the allotment in Eimeth. Again, it will act as a true community-growing space. We have volunteers all doing that and supporting community-growing, but it will also be a training centre for people who still want to have their own space and want it to grow things in their own way. We can be creative of blending community-growing spaces. There is a waiting list in Eimeth for allotments, but there are also overgrown spaces where people are not able to maintain the space and the community. There has to be something within the allotment society to give people the opportunity to be able to learn and make good and not expect something to be perfect in the first year. It may be three or four years before somebody then gives up that plot, whereas if we can be creative about helping people who think that they want an allotment to get the skills to be able to grow their own food, it also improves the success of their allotment tears themselves. That is a clear theme that has been coming through around the whole piece of getting people skilled up. Ian, do you have any thoughts on what the local authorities and Scottish Government need to do to be better facilitators? Can you hear me clearly? Direct answer to that in terms of the waiting lists in our cities is finding a way to communicate more directly with the people on the waiting lists. I know from the involvement that I have had in the past, both the Scottish Allotments and Glasgow Allotment Forum, there are concerns often with site secretaries about contravening anything to do with data protection by passing names on to other organisations or whatever, but somebody has got to try and find a way to alert the people on the waiting lists, particularly in a site like mine. We could choose to do that, write to them and say that number 41 on our list of 130 is unlikely to offer you a plot in a reasonably meaningful period of time. What you need to do is get together with other like-minded people, form yourself into an identifiable group and identify yourself with some sort of location. Now, it is interesting that EyeMouth was mentioned. EyeMouth was one of the self-start groups that I alluded to that occurred after 2005. It has been going for at least 10 or more years now, so they started from scratch, from nothing and done it that way. They have done it before the legislation came into play. There are other issues that need to be clarified to do with the status of many allotment associations, which is usually that of an unincorporated association. Perhaps there may be an opportunity later in the proceedings to come back to that. The main thing is to where the large waiting lists occur is to find some way of encouraging people to empower themselves and make use of the legislation, because they do not really know or understand what the situation is that they are currently in. Thanks for that. It is a really good point that we can actually get people together so that they can empower themselves. Maria, you want to come back in? Yes. Perhaps that follows quite well with the last comments. I just wanted to add a little bit to what I said earlier on. I think that local authorities have a lot of pressure now, and it is difficult for them to run allotment sites, but they can play quite a key role in facilitating the process of the groups being able to acquire land, in particular, brokering relations with other public organisations. Perhaps one of the gaps that the legislation has is that it only covers local authorities and does not really extend to other public organisations that might hold land. That could provide for food croing, and that is perhaps an area that could be improved. In our case, it is quite difficult to believe that the Scottish Government-owned bullfarm exists in the middle of Inverness. One would have thought that that has obviously been the scope to provide for the community where there should be the scope to collaborate closely with the community that lives there. We have faced so many barriers in terms of being able to take the project forward, and I think that that is partly due to a culture of working more closely with the community. That is another important point to put across that we need a culture that really is about collaborating with communities to help them to take forward these projects, and that will help that as well. We need more spaces to provide for allotments and food growing and help to solve some of the issues that we are dealing with. Thank you. Roseanne, do you want to come in on this at all? We are quite lucky in training. We obviously have six community plots, and the food bank has one that has recently been taken on. It is also an area called Home Start, which is for young families who are struggling. It has the allotment plot, but it is also based on one of the local schools that has a big garden, and most of the schools in Trinent now have a big garden where they grow and stuff, so they ask Home Start or us for help. We also help roots and fruits. Eastloading roots and fruits is a co-op. They have recently just got a garden, so they are going to do that. We are all collaborating with each other, which I think that listening to people is a bit unique. We have also got Ormiston groves, groves that we help, and there is a community garden down in Trinent. Some people say, how long do I have to wait? You can try Ormiston groves, because it is a small raised bed, or you can go to the community garden, where you can go for a couple of hours every week. You do not have your own plot, but you can help to grow things. We have lots of things that everybody involves with and keep in touch, so we are quite lucky in Trinent. I am now going to move on to a new theme that Miles Briggs is going to introduce. Thank you, convener. Good morning to the panel. Thank you for joining us. You have touched upon a lot of the questions that I wanted to ask, but I wanted to return to some more detail with regard to the auditing of current plots. It was something that you mentioned, Ian, in terms of splitting plots. I wondered to what extent the bill has meant councils have done that sort of work to look at how we really utilise the maximum capacity that is currently there. If you think that that has been done, or if we have just developed waiting lists, I might bring you back in, Ian, on that. I am not absolutely up to speed in current situations. I have spoken to representatives of GARF and the Edinburgh Federation recently to glean a little bit about what is currently going on. I think that there has been attempts in some instances to have plots. My own site was done a few years ago and then found that other people coming in wanted to recombine them. Our plots are round about 300 square metres and nearly all of them have a hut and a glasshouse on them. Sometimes that can make it a bit difficult to split. One of the issues is that you can have plots, but all that you are doing is calming more people on to the same amount of land. The size of the allotment that we tried to get over in the legislation was one that was established at the end of the First World War as the size of a piece of ground that would enable a household group of four people to provide themselves with most of their needs in terms of fruit and vegetables. It could be in the current climate and in the one that they might be moving into in the near future. That need remains as relevant now as it did then. The other benefits that come from an allotment social interaction, better diet, meeting people, effects on people's mental health, etc. Again, they will all come from being involved in something that uses up a reasonable amount of a person's time. Looking after a few square metres, will have benefits for many people that might be all they require. In terms of an allotment, it will not produce the amount of food that 200 square metres or thereabouts plot of ground would do. I do not know whether I am that kind of situation or not. No, that is helpful. Does anyone else want to come on that point? I cannot. When we were taking on the allotment, the association sent up that we had a chairperson, but he could not do it because there was a lot of work involved. Nobody wanted to do it, so they asked me to take it on. I said only if I have the right to get rid of neglected plots. They did, and thankfully the council supported us, because we had about eight neglected plots and it was horrendous. I had one beside me for eight years that was never taken care of, and that is what we do. We are quite strict with them. We have two inspections every year. One is in June, so if there are two plots, I know already that they are neglected, so they will be given 28 days to start doing work on it. We do not want it perfect, but we want the weeds cut down, and if they do not, they have got further two weeks and then they are evicted, and we have done that. It is only fair because we have a big weight list, and it is not fair for a few grown things to have a neglected plot beside you, because it does not help, but I think that that is quite unusual that we are very much so we do evict people. I just want to go back to what I said before, which is that I think that you need to be much more creative, because, as Ewan was saying, a lot of the thinking about the size of the allotments and why people have allotments relates to post-verse world war and people growing a sustainable plot for growing fruit and veg for the whole family. That, in our experience of talking to people and allotments, and we are supporting a couple of blended sites, is that that is no longer what people are doing with the allotment and that is no longer what they that might not be their main driver for having an allotment site, so I think that we need to be more creative about the size of site. Again, as Ewan said, everybody will use some of that site for a glass house and some seating area, so again within I think we need to be thinking creatively about that, because there is a lot of non-food growing space within allotments, so I think we can be able to let people have more growing space. If, for example, you were to say, well, there is a community glass house or there is a community tool storage area, then maybe half a pot would be sufficient because you wouldn't have the need to put a shed on your half pot, so I think it's just going back to, it's probably out with the scope of the discussions and I apologize if I'm taking the discussion in a slightly random direction, but I think a lot of the thinking on allotments goes back a long way and I think we do need to be more creative in thinking about these growing spaces in order to tackle both neglected plots and waiting lists. Thanks for that, Karen. It's a good point and we've seen communal composting areas, for example, which has helped to try to prevent that replication of everyone having a composting space on their allotment. In terms of other parts of the 2015 act being used, do you have any examples, for example, around common good land now being facilitated and potentially for what you were touching upon earlier, Karen, to provide for those starter smaller plots raised beds to make sure that people really want to do this and then can be transitioned into half a plot or a full plot? Has the act helped to develop that in any way? To answer that directly, I can only really talk about recent experience post food growing strategy in the Scottish Borders in that there is a renewed determination to make pieces of land available and to have that mapping exercise of what land is there, of what facilities already exist on the land and what the cost would be in bringing that into community use and community ownership. Certainly, that has made a recent difference down here. As I mentioned before, engagement with the housing associations, because they are also major landowners, that has been very productive down here for the creation of small spaces. In the rural community, it is difficult for people to get to a larger site often, so it is fine if you are in somewhere like Hoik where you can walk to allotment, but if you have somewhere in a more rural community you are not going to get a big allotment site built in here where I live in Western. There are not sufficient people for the site to be here for an allotment site, so we are looking for smaller pieces of ground to be part of the community rather than having to have that travel to a central site in Aymuth or where I have you. It has made a difference in thinking, certainly. Thank you. Does anyone else want to come in on that? Almost and grows, but they are sort of like I do 10 people there and they do have raised beds and you've got a different size of raised beds. Problem being, it's not very secure. I've never been there, I don't know where it is, but apparently it's beside a big walkway and there's no security, so there are two direct people there if they can get on and some people are desperate, but there's nothing that I can do to make them go up their waiting list. Come in as well. Yes, in the new governance week we have examples of allotment for some communities' places that are being used by imprudence. It's incredible edible to grow in small areas of good growing in town centre areas, but one key thing I wanted to bring up is that I think one thing that is quite critical for allotments is thinking about the quality of the land. One of the reasons we put forward Nogel as a community growing area is because it was a field that was already used for growing vegetables and was really good land for that. It's not all common good land by the appropriate and I think it's important that we think of using sites that are good for growing food for allotment and community growing. It's maybe a key point that I would bring up. Thanks very much, yes. I think that's a really important point. If we've got good land, let's grow food on it. We're going to move on to another theme, and Mark, I don't know if you've still got some other questions around the waiting list and trigger points. Thanks. The questions are around waiting lists and demand and communication between authorities and those waiting lists and we've had quite a bit of discussion on that so far, but just to ask generally, and I think that you probably know the answer from earlier discussion, what is demand like and roughly how many people are on waiting lists in your area and how has that changed since the 2015 act? I've only been doing the waiting lists for four years now, so I couldn't tell you how it has been. It was a bit of a gull, the waiting list, because when I actually got to find the waiting list that I was given, I had people that I had left years ago, so I don't actually know from there, but since Covid, we've got nine new people and we've probably allocated four plots since Covid, which we usually have quite a turnover every year, but not since Covid because I think there are quite, it was places for people to go to. Any of the participants online like to come in there? Maria? I'm aware that if for Indian Burness there is about 80 waiting for in Hawthorne and Blackthorne, the smaller side has closed their waiting list because they can't cope with any of their requests. Our own investigations were done when we did a community survey about a year and a half or two years ago. We had about 165 people expressing an interest, and that was used from a survey in one month. We know that with the pandemic, the demand has increased, so there are hundreds of people waiting to have an announcement at least in our India that we are aware of. This is one of the things that I was checking up on to update the figures that I had stated in my submission. Edinburgh's current waiting list, I understand, is 5496. I know from my involvement with SAG's committee going back three or four years. That's more than doubled. Glasgow is a bit more difficult because it may be that it decides to only take account of local authority sites. There are apparently 13 sites that have responded at the end of April, registering 1331 applications. Eight sites had still to respond, so that was 21, but then there are another 12 sites that are private, independent, like my own. The likely waiting list for Glasgow is 1800+. We do not know how many people on our list of 130 have their names on the council list. There is another independent site that only garns into that, but of course there are a mile from us. Many of the people who are on our list may be on that list. That is always quoted as an unknown factor. It should not be the reason for delaying doing something. The process of engaging with people, getting them involved and getting them to go through the process themselves to get a site has an effect of whittling out, to some extent, the people who may decide that it is not for them. Eventually, when people get on to sites, as has been indicated on what seems to have happened at EyeMouth, it encapsulates the relationship between the people of Scotland and the land of Scotland and, in particular, anything to do with working the land. We have become disengaged from that over a number of generations. It is always other issues about people not really understanding where food comes from and how it is produced. It is still because they think that it all comes out of the supermarket. That is where getting more people involved in growing can help address those issues. I want to touch on communication with people on the waiting list and what work local authorities can do to identify duplicate places on the waiting list. Ian, you touched on data protection issues, but there are ways around everything. If allotment associations ask the members for permission to share the data, there is a bigger role for local authorities to have comprehensive local authority-level waiting lists so that, with the permission of the individual applicants that councils can then start the co-ordination of those on waiting lists to encourage them to incorporate themselves, perhaps looking at particular sites in particular parts of the authority where authorities own land. It does not seem to me to be beyond the impossible to do something like that and have local authority co-ordinated waiting lists as long as people are given their permission to share the data. Perhaps I will come to Ian first. A few years ago, going back to 2005, when Glasgow Allotment Forum started, that changed the relationship between the plot holders and the council. What came out of that was the appointment of an allotment officer. A reasonably early stage of that, we had, at the time, because I was a treasurer on my own association, so I had access to the waiting list. I counted up how many we had. I think that it was about 50 then. I selected information to give to the allotment officer. I gave him it in the form of 50 people on our waiting list, 10 of them are in G42, 8 of them are in G43, etc. That helped him to decide, looking at that bit of the post code where people were, that it justified the reopening of a site at Crawford and Glasgow. It is one way of perhaps doing it, but that is passing it on to someone who is going to take it forward and implement it. I fear in some situations that the only way is going to be implemented is by people taking action themselves, community empowerment. It is what the legislation is supposed to be about. I really love your contribution. I love what you said earlier about the importance of allotments being about the relationship between people of Scotland and the land of Scotland. Not just the land, but working the land. I think that there is some truth there. I think that we are aware of that in the committee. I am going to move on to bringing in questions from Willie Coffey, who is joining us online. I am in good morning to everybody in the panel. Before I ask a few questions about guidance on the act in the 252 metres, on whether people who are on the waiting list are not participating in other examples of community garden spaces, the reason I ask you that is that East Ayrshire does not have any allotments that they tell me and they do not have anybody applying, but there are a number of examples of community garden spaces here, there and everywhere. By and large, do you think that the people that are on the list, Ian, you mentioned 5,400 or so in Edinburgh and maybe 1,800 in Glasgow, are they participating by other means or are they just not able to do so at all? What do you think? What is the picture? The basic thing that you have to assume is that if someone applies for an allotment, it is an allotment that they want. However, there is room for all sorts of misunderstandings. I have been aware for many years that television, programmes and use bulletins are used, and what is being described or presented visually is not necessarily an allotment. I do not think that I understood it myself when I took on my plot back in 1976. It has been a long learning curve. That is the problem. Unless you personally know people, you do not necessarily know what they may already be involved in. You have to assume that they have some basic understanding of what an allotment is. I did not know about the definitions of it and all the bits of legislation that used to be behind it, but when I went to the site responding to the letter that I had inviting me to come and be offered an allotment and I walked into the site, what I saw was what I expected an allotment to be. It was not a surprise to me. When the previous local government regeneration committee took evidence from it, as part of that process, some of the MSPs came to Glasgow and visited a number of sites, including the housing association site and the government, and they visited my site. We were fortunate that we had two women members who gave them testimony at that meeting. What they said was that they had only had their plots in less than five years at that point, and they came in and said, ìWe thought these plots would really big, and we were not going to be able to caught them.î Now we have reached a stage where we reckon that we do not have enough ground to grow everything that we want to grow. Those two ladies are still there with their families. They have families so they make use of what is available to them. It is very difficult to say until you can find a way to communicate directly with the people on these waiting lists. It is different in the city. The situations that happened in places like Eyemouth and indeed in Inverness going back again to the early 2000s was that people contacted us in Scottish allotments or contacted what was the then allotment regeneration initiative that I volunteered with. They would say, ìWe are looking for an allotment, what do we do?î, and they would explain the basic processes that it then was. It basically amounted to finding other like-minded people to burn themselves into a cohesive group. Now there is something that I hope will come up later on in our discussions about what the nature of that organisation should be. It tended to be just an unincorporated association then, but there are things perhaps in the legislation and I think in the interpretation of it that would appear in Glasgow that seem to require that the groups have to be more than just unincorporated associations. Okay, okay. Thanks very much for that, Ian. Karen, are you coming in, Maria? Yes, I have a couple of thoughts to add to this question. I should probably say as a bit of background that our organisation, Kennedy, has been started six years ago and formed as a company a few years ago. We have been dealing with members and allotment requests for a while. One thing that I feel that has transmitted to us is the frustration that many people have because they are not able to get hold of an allotment. It is something that they are quite disparate. They might not have a garden or any other space, and it is something that, as an organisation that has been working on this for a while, it is disappointing that we are not able to give them a timeline of when they will be able to access a site, but there is really a real desire I think from many people to get hold of that land, and they might be doing some might decide to do other activities, get involved in other things, but certainly we know from feedback we get that some people really feel it quite a lot, that gap really. The other thing I was going to bring up that is something slightly different is that one of our experiences is that we have had a lot of organisations that have approached us to use sites to rent a plot. It is not just individuals that we have been approached. Organisations have action for children, homelessness has caught in touch because they want a plot that they can use for their clients and also for their volunteers. It has been a new phenomenon that we have not realised the strong demand that there is from these organisations. Since Covid in particular, they feel that outdoor spaces are more safe. The opportunities that you have got for food growing in terms of developing skills for people that enable them to cope better with life and go hell with other sets of issues and perhaps even develop their self-confidence, and also in terms of giving people access to food in the case of families that have not got as much as it is quite important. I would say that there is a real gap there that is felt by many. I am agreeing and echoing what Maree has said. I think that she is covering most of what I was going to say. It is going back to what Ian said about people being on a waiting list. I think that we need to look a bit more closely at why people are on a waiting list, what they think they want with an allotment. Ian's experience was that when he went and was shown the site, he was exactly what he was expecting and he knew exactly what to do with it. There are people who have come through community garden experience who have been on a waiting list and have not wanted an allotment. They have wanted an opportunity to grow their own food, or they have wanted an opportunity to be involved in something that they view to be climate friendly, or they have wanted an opportunity just to be in an outdoor space, as Maree has said. I think that we could do a little bit more work to unpick what people think. The allotment model is so well developed and the word allotment is so well known. If you see programmes on the TV, they are talking about allotments and allotment spaces, that might be that people think that that is their only option. If they are looking for somewhere to get out of their flat or when they need an allotment, it might be that they just need some outdoor space, as Maree has said, to be able to meet other people in a safe post-Covid way. There may well be some work done to that to see that people actually want an allotment. That might feed into why there are so many plots that become neglected. What they thought they wanted was not actually what they wanted, so there may be something around that. I echo what Maree was saying. Can I ask you briefly for a response to the 250-square metre issue? I think that it was a new talk about it earlier. Does there need to be flexibility around that? Does local authorities have to allocate 250 square metres or could we be more flexible about that to give people some kind of entry level into it that is perhaps easier to manage? It might enable us to allocate smaller allotment sizes and spaces to people and get those waiting lists down. Does what Maree has used briefly on the 250-square metre thing that is in the legislation should be more flexible around that? Nobody in our allotment thinks that their plot is too small. I am only a family of two, but everybody has excess stuff and that all gets given away to the local food co-op. The families are more than enough, and they grow enough to do them. I think that the size is good, because if not, that meant that we would only have been 13 individual plots in three community ones. That is nothing, whereas now we have a decent amount. The half-plots are a good way to go. As I said, Musselbroff started doing that to get down the waiting list. I think that there should be some flexibility there. The size that was put in the legislation was a long and hard fight. We are trying to make it clear that it is there as a reference size, not a compulsory one, because my own experience of being involved with allotment regeneration initiative and going around sites then, and meeting people in places where they wanted to set up new sites, was that the existing stock of allotments, six and a half thousand. Most of them were not exactly the same size. I am not now that whatever size fitted best into a piece of ground to accommodate the number of people that wanted to have a plot. We certainly want existing sites to be redesigned to make them all 350 square metres. It is simply that you have to take off if your aim is to produce enough food and vegetables to make a meaningful impact on sustaining a household. You need something like that. My concern was that, if it got watered down too much, the space that is in the middle of those despires is currently sitting at. If that was the sort of size that would be an allotment, that is what allotments would end up being. We would not then be achieving the objective that we are meant to be doing, albeit that there are all these other issues tied up with it. There is no doubt that there is value in people having access to a smaller space that lets them start off and let them find out if that is for them or if the small 10, 20 square metres are all we need for what they want to do. However, those sorts of spaces are not allotments. They are not always defined in the legislation and they are not protected by the legislation. That is why, by 2007, there were only 6,500 plots left in Scotland, probably about 10 per cent of what there had been after the war because there was no protection or no perceived protection. I agree with Ian. It needs to have something that is protection to sound at what an allotment is, because that is the feeling that that is the amount of space that needs to fulfil that purpose of growing food for a family of four. There needs to be protection around that so that, as was said before, people who successfully manage that size of plot and are successfully growing food for their families on that size of plot need to be protected, but we need to be more creative in finding other ways and maybe other names. When the council creates an allotment plot, it also creates smaller spaces that can be called something different, and it also creates a community space within that so that we can have that flow through people because not everybody's motivation for having an allotment-sized plot is to grow food for a family of four. Thank you very much, Colin. The last word we'll be in, Maria. We've had some designs. We have a plan design and, based on the feedback that we received, we received a range of sizes, and even our large plots that we have planned would be smaller than 50 by 10 metres, 10 by 10 and 10 by 5 metres. Although I recognise that there is a point there about the protection of allotment as a growing food, there is perhaps the need for flexibility. We allow some of these plans to develop so that we enable more people to access heights and to cater for a variety of circumstances. Many people just want to do a little bit really and are also beginning and starting and they don't want to be overwhelmed, so I think he's recognising that everybody's circumstances may be different. It's important as well. Thank you. Thanks very much, Maria. I think that's happy with those responses, convener, and I'm happy to let other colleagues come in. Thank you very much. Thanks very much, Willie. We're now going to move on to questions around the local food growing strategies with Paul McClellan. Thank you, convener, and good morning panel. Just to explore, as the convener said, about local food growing strategies. I think that one key thing that Kenny came out in the papers that we had was that the community growing forum highlighted the fact that part nine of the act aims to go just beyond addressing adequate allotment provision, and it's a quote here. It also aims to include wider community food growing opportunities, especially in the areas of socioeconomic disadvantage and specifically in relation to food growing strategies. I know that we've kind of all touched on it so far around about the involvement, so I'm going to ask about the involvement of your own group in local food growing strategies with your local authority, and particularly around about just the point that was made there, around trying to include those who are experiencing socioeconomic disadvantage. Was Anna probably coming to herself first of all? I know that the East London Council has put together, because obviously it's my own constituency, local food growing network. As we know, there are areas of poverty in the top 10 per cent of SIMD and in pressing pans. I just wonder what your involvement was in the local food growing strategy and your thoughts or discussions are in about tackling or including those with the socioeconomic disadvantage? I've read it all. As I mentioned previously, we all help and we do have the food bank, we do have Homestat, but from them it was basically from the food bank joining our allotment that there was a discussion about health and wellbeing for the foresight area that I'm in for food poverty during the summer holidays and from that we've now started, we're only going to have a second meeting, but we have lots of community groups, there's the food bank, there's Homestat, there's Roots and Fruits and we're actually all coming up with a programme to how to deal with food poverty during the summer holidays. I've met the group's concern, so I think it's a great initiative. In terms of your involvement with the council and the food growing strategy, do you want to say a bit more about that, as there's been a great amount of discussion or is that something that could work a little bit better? If there's been no discussion, I've read it. I've had no discussion with the council purely because we know that they don't have the manpower and I think everybody involved in the area are quite happy. We've gone with it, we'll let the council know what we've decided with her, it's not going to be called the foresight food fires, so we're happy to go with that. We'll let the council know that we're not keeping the council out of it, we just appreciate they've got better things to do, we can do it, we're actually doing it. No, thanks, that's really helpful. Karen, I know that you're touching a little bit on your involvement with the Borders, I don't know if you want to touch any more on that, just in terms of the food growing strategy, but also around looking at the areas that we talked about socioeconomic disadvantage. Have there been any discussions or involvement in that regard? The council started to prepare the food growing strategy. I think that we were quite critical because it is a community food growing strategy rather than a local food growing strategy, so it doesn't really involve other local producers in the food growing strategy. Having said that, though, from the development of the community food growing network, they have now facilitated a Borders food growers network. That's working really well, we've done education exchanges between groups, for example, Greener Peoples, who run the community growing initiative over in Peoples. We did a visit to their garden and they came to this to our garden so we can share experience. The food growers network is helping a lot of organisations like our own, which are small organisations, they're helping us to build capacity as well. Abundant Borders started out at heart as a food insecurity charity. We work on a circular basis, so we teach people how to grow food in a sustainable way, and then we teach people how to grow healthy and expensive meals from the food that they can grow locally, and we base that on the community garden. We're looking at that as a way of addressing some of the issues that you've outlined there. I'd say that the council has been really supported in there, and we're working with the council and the Housing Association, in order to bring some smaller food growing initiatives into the hearts of places like Langley. Iain, if you want to come in and touch on the same points that I asked? Yes, I've just, the Highland Council has just published their food growing strategy earlier this summer. I think that it has been a very positive development because it's been accompanied by, you know, they've allocated a little bit of resource, they've got a project officer, and I think that that is quite key really in terms of developing the area really, and even just that makes a huge difference to groups like ours, that the fact that they really, to their credit, recognise the work that we're doing, even though we don't yet have a side, I think, has been really important for us. I think that it is making a bit of an impact, and I think that these things can help pave the way to make things better. I mean, obviously the Highlands itself, it's different to a lot of, I suppose, urban local authorities. Is there a rural poverty aspect to that at all, just, you know, by the very scale sometimes of the Highlands, and has that been discussed at all? Yes, I don't, I think, the wider the strategy has been developed, it just covers a number of principles and examples, so I think that they tackle a number of areas, and they see it more as a initiative that will facilitate activity rather than necessarily covering everything in that, so it is there really as a reference to promote activity. I'd say that in terms of poverty, it is an issue that is perhaps more hidden, and I would say, in our case, and I think, you know, the way to tackle this is not just with the strategies, but we need to really create spaces or initiatives that are close to those that need it really, and our own experience of being contacted by groups like Action for Children is that they do feel that having spaces that allow them to do activities close to where they are based, where they have the users is important in terms of empowering some groups to be able to access food and feel that they have a choice over the food they consume and they grow, so I think it is important to highlight, you know, that's just an issue that needs to be tackled by thinking about where we've got the opportunities where they might be placed in the sights. Thanks, Ian. Did you want to come in on that one at all? In terms of that issue to do with social debt comparison, what became clear to us over the period from 2005 up to when we were negotiating over the introduction of the new legislation was that in terms of the self-generated allotment duty activity exemplified by iMouth, Inverness, the Hawthorne site, all sorts of ones across the country, there was a noticeable lack of that kind of activity in the belt around Glasgow, and Glasgow is an exception because it had an existing network of allotments, so a loader's waiting lists that have grown, they already was, a reasonable amount of allotments in existence, whereas in many of the surrounding councils and what you could describe as the post-industrial belt, there were not so many allotments or none at all, and there wasn't quite the same evidence of this self-generating group. I think to some extent it's because people had become conditioned that the council does it, so if the council's not doing it, then it's not happening. That's the exact opposite of what it seems to me community empowerment is about. In recent times, there's been evidence of a more positive approach going on in the likes of North Lanarkshire, where there's been a number of new sites set up. They may have been more proactive in initiating the process. Then, through council, I used to attend their growing grounds, forum meetings, I still get minutes from it. It has not really grown in terms of allotments, it's got more or less the same number of allotments sites as it had at the beginning, but they all looked better than they did back in 2005-2006. I was involved until a couple of years ago with North Ayrshire Food Forum, which was set up to address the issues to do with food poverty, so it was a mixture of people from various groups involved in running food banks, other types of initiatives. Ian, I don't know if you can hear me, we just lost that last bit of your audio there, so I'm not sure. No, we can't hear you. It was just the last little tail end, and I think what you gave us was very insightful. I think that was a new bit for me around, there may not be more allotments, but actually the way in which they're being used has improved in that one place that you were talking about. Paula, do you want to continue? That's been real helpful, thank you. Okay, thanks very much. I'm now going to move on to questions from Marie McNair. Thank you, convener, and good morning, panel. It's great to see you all at the meeting this morning. I'm just going to touch on just exploring the committee's organisations and volunteering part of it. The committee has heard over the last few weeks about the importance of volunteering to successful community growing. How can local authorities help community growing allotments to thriving areas with lower levels of volunteering? I was going to direct that question to Ian. Ian, I know that you've touched on it a bit earlier, but I wonder if you'd like to add a bit more to it. I don't know if your sound is back on. So maybe we start with Roseanne, because I feel like I've been hearing quite a lot of volunteering going on there from her. It makes me realise that, in Trinon, we're really lucky, and I hadn't fully appreciated until now. We have something called V-Cell, a volunteer centre in Slothian, so if you want volunteers, you're just going to ask them, and they'll put something out for you. But also within our community groups, we've got the criminal justice team, so if we need anything done, any work, not just for the community groups, but for us, they'll do it for us. Obviously, the outskill, they have lots of volunteers that will help. New beginnings have lots of volunteers, as does home start. Even individual plot holders will help the other areas if they want, even just cleaning out a plot that's overgrown. So we have a good access to volunteers. We probably don't use a lot because we don't need them, because of the amount of volunteers that we have already in the allotment, so we are really quite lucky. I picked that up. Is there anything that you, Slothian Council, could do a bit more of, or be better at, that it would assist your group? No. We're quite lucky that the person that I deal with, most of the groups that I'm involved with, he just lets us run. He'll give us what support we need, and if I need to ask for anything, he's there, but he just lets us run because we are all quite, we know what to do. So I don't think, I'm just thinking from it, there's nothing more that he could actually do to help us because, you know, they're letting us do, they're there if we need them. Thank you. I'll pop that out to the rest of the panel, Karen or Maria. Would you like to add anything further to what was said? It goes back, for us, to what Maria said, and having the ability to do community growing, and so the ability to volunteer actually close to people where they need it. So that's why we've taken the view that we have small community growing spaces, so it can be a very small piece that's right outside, we're quite close with Berwickshire Housing Association, and so they now routinely leave a small piece of land that is then available for community growing. So we don't think, even though we are telling people who come and use the garden as volunteers because they do come in and volunteer, they're digging the beds, and they're growing the vegetables and all that kind of thing, we think of them more as community food growers, so they're not volunteering in the sort of traditional sense of volunteering and coming in and helping abundant borders to do something. I mean, we have the same sort of links with the criminal justice team if we need pass-laid and big infrastructure projects, but the volunteers are the people who come in and grow food for themselves and for their family, so we look at it in a slightly different way, but the key is that it's that community engagement and community involvement, because the community growing space is right at the heart of their community. Maria? Yes, I think it was going to touch on a different point that is not as much about the role, but the need for land or spaces where we can take forward that community activity. I would say one of the issues that we've got with Inverness is that fast-growing city, we've got brick and mortar everywhere, and there isn't really always the recognition given to the fact that you need community spaces for people to be able to develop that sense of community really, and I think it's important that this is at the heart of how you plan your communities really, that you allocate spaces that can be used for food growing and maybe green space as well, as a key element of any new area that you've planned really, so that facility is what allows people to really bring together, bring the communities together, and then once you've got those spaces, people will naturally volunteer, so it's not, I think, difficult to see that happening, and we know that that is key, because we see that in other parts of Inverness where there is a real desire, for example in areas like Cram, to develop more community activities, but there is no space, and I think that it is important to recognise that it is an issue as well of land availability, making land available for community food growing and green spaces, so thank you. You certainly pre-empty my second question. Can I just put a further question to you? Should community gardens have the same legislation as allotments currently do? Yeah, I would say that it's interesting, our project really, and this came from the community consultation we did. It doesn't just cover allotments, but it aims to develop communal areas for food growing and a wider, more commercial community growing area, and also have areas for recreation. I think that there is an increasing wider perspective of how we see these spaces, and the fact that they need to be more than just an allotment. I think that this is important to bringing the legislation up to date with how we use these spaces and what societies need. So I would say that there's certainly a wider vision, and I think that there's a lot of interesting projects out there that show what it's possible to do, and certainly the more communal model is also, I think, being taken forward in different places. I think that it is certainly something that I would support. Thank you. Karen, what's your view on my question about community gardens having the same protection in legislation as allotments? Because it's more about green spaces and providing those community spaces. I think our view really is that the community should be able to decide themselves how they want to use that space. We encourage community food growing within the spaces that we support within communities, but it's also important that they are spaces that people can just meet and that the community can develop that. I'm not sure how you would protect that in legislation particularly, but I think that if, as I have done in Scottish Borders Council, you have a focus on being able to make more green spaces available for the council to be looking very carefully at how it uses space and how it can release more space. We've got really good links with all of three of the major housing associations down here in the Scottish Borders, and they manage a lot of space. It can also be an issue if they have communal space that is being neglected. I think that it's more of a partnership approach than a legislation approach, because the sizes are so different and the uses are so different. I'm not really sure how that will go into legislation to protect that. Thanks, Cam. That's my stuff. Thanks, Maria. I think Ian wanted to come in on that question as well. Come on in, Ian. I lost sound and picture for a while there, so I didn't get all of that quick. Can you hear me now? Yes. Right, okay. I misspoke the question, because I seem to have been cut off. I was just asking about, should community gardens have the same protection in legislation as allotments currently do? I would think that there are a number of organisations around. I was involved with the allotment regeneration initiative that I referred to. That was a project that was managed through the then federation of city farms and community gardens, now called social farms and gardens. They are a representative body for people involved in that kind of activity. As indeed, they have some allotment sites that join them. Equally, there could be a reconsidered in Scottish allotments, since our acronym name was STAGGS could become Scottish allotments in growing spaces. My own thought on that at the moment is that the allotment is defining law, and at the moment, growing space is not. Again, I would have to refer back to why we have these views about this and its history. The fact that 90 per cent of the allotments in Scotland disappeared. My own memory of an allotment is going up Crow Road in Glasgow on a gadget that my dad fitted on the front of his bike to the allotment that my mother had looked after during the war on what is now part of Annie's land college. A lot of people's experience in involvedness comes from their early life, and that is where the break has been. Your allotments around less people have it as part of their life experience with all the things that come with that. I think that, in terms of the legislation, we have to be down to those that are involved in it to take up that issue, to have it defined in law, if that is what they wanted. There are bodies such as social farms and gardens that they could become part of that might provide the impetus. They have lots of experience in terms of campaigning and funding. I will pick up a couple of other questions. One of them is around the whole relationship with planning. Maybe it is not a question that is relevant to everybody in the group, but I think that some of you may have had this experience and done this work. If you have not, that is fine. I am curious to hear how communities can use local place plans to ensure that local authorities include community growing in the local authority development plans and to hear your views in general on how the planning system could be better used to ensure adequate provision is made for new and existing community growers. That is quite a lot, but in general, it is that local place plan piece. Anybody want to come in on that, Ian? I thought, can you hear me? I'm actually getting a signal on my screen. We can hear you. I think that it was 2018 at the last time, sorry, 2019, the last time we actually had our annual conference and they presented this booklet, Plan to Grow. It was drawn up for us by Stephen Tolson, who is a planner. It was arrived by holding a series of seminars with the assistance of Planning Aid Scotland to come up with a series of proposals and guidelines to do with the provision of allotments in community growing spaces. There is a larger report. Both of those are on the Scottish allotments website or should be. One of the things that I asked Stephen was whether he thought that it was worthwhile having follow-up sessions before the planners, because he was directed at the planners. He reckoned that, yes, I don't know if anything is taking place to follow one of those things, but it takes a bit of funding input in order to get it on the way. My own experience in relating to planning came from again going back to 2005, up to 2008, when all those new groups were coming in. The biggest pressure against any potential bits of ground that were identified anywhere to be developed was being sat on because of its potential for private house development until the financial recession of 2008 brought that to an end. Unfortunately, there is another and perhaps more important need that has an input into planning, and that is the need for social and affordable housing. What we have got to try and avoid is a repeat of what happened after the war, when lots of allotments, certainly in Glasgow that I know of, disappeared in order to provide better housing for people. It was a clear need, a benefit from it myself, but we also made lots of mistakes in creating all these big housing areas with little other type of provision as part of it, and some of them, I know certainly in Glasgow, have ended up being knocked down. I don't know what they have been replaced with, but hopefully when they are replaced, planning will ensure that there will be the incorporation into it of spaces for people to grow. Thank you for that. There is certainly an interesting invitation and challenge to planners around how we can provide housing with gardens, with growing spaces there. Maria, you would like to come in and then Karen? Yes, I would say that there isn't perhaps the importance given to these spaces in the planning decision making process. Normally, when you think about an alarm inside you, say I want that land that nobody else wants and it's far away, it would be the alarm inside. Rather than giving it the thinking about where is it that people will want, we'll be able to walk to, we'll be able to actually, without having to use the car, we'll be able to provide what they need. It really needs a bit of a mindset change to be able to approach this in the right way. Just to give you an example of the field we are looking at acquiring is within walking distance of six schools and 20 minutes walk from some of the more private areas. It's a site that could be at the heart of town and many people and it's easily accessible for many. It's quite an obvious place and it's good agricultural land. I think it's about thinking really about where we need to, where is the ideal place and location for these places, rather than just thinking it as an afterthought, what bit of land nobody else wants and we'll put that to a moment. It's important to plan these sites so that they fulfil the full purpose. I don't think we are yet quite at the stage where this is fully recognised in the planning decision making. While there is, I think, an intention and we see that in the local development plans and developing the sense of places, communities of living close together, I think it is still quite a challenge to get the decisions to be made in the right way when it comes to reality. I do feel that the planning system does not yet get a culture of allowing making the decisions in the right way. Thank you. Thanks, Maria and Karen. Yeah, I think there is movement in the right direction down in the borders, I'll say with the green spaces team and actually that mapping exercise because there have been a couple of incidents we've had recently where housing associations thought they owned a piece of land within the housing development and it's turned out it's still been owned by the borders council and that the process of who owns the land is not always clear. Once that's identified, the procedure to have a community asset transfer needs to be simplified. We're supporting a group who have just created allotments in community garden blended space and it took many years to get that asset transferred from Transport Scotland and that would seem to be because there was a mismatch between what was in the community empowerment so making sure that that land could be transferred to the community at a reasonable price and also a separate requirement from Transport Scotland to get maximum value from that piece of land. I think a lot of that needs to be simplified to make it easier for communities to be able to purchase land and for land to be able to come back into community use quite quickly but again it's working quite well here because of that enhanced partnership working so the benefit is now seen to be seen so for example the community garden that we support in guns was on the piece of land that all of the building contractors parked on and all the equipment was housed in while the housing development was being built so it wasn't prime food growing land but it was the land that was left once the house had been built because the last thing off as a port of cabins so again it's a case of being creative about the space that might be there once the development has been completed as well as putting that into the plan in the first place. Thank you both for those contributions that's really that's really helpful. I want to just pick up on another question which is around funding so I'm interested to hear whether your projects whether community growing projects and allotment association have access to grants and other forms of funding we want to know who the big funders are maybe that's so we can apply ourselves and what role does the Scottish Government have in this kind of funding space so I would say that this is maybe a question that's directed to well let's start with Karen and then see who else wants to pick it up. We are funded for most of our activities through the Robertson Trust and through National Lottery Community Fund. My big issue across all the different things we do is that particularly from the Scottish Government there is always a driver when you're buying for funding for it to be a new project so if you have a successful community food growing project that is successfully delivering food to the local community and addressing all those sort of issues of social isolation food insecurity and it's running and doing really well it's it's then difficult to attract funding for anything other than a new project so this constant driver to come up with a new thing creates a real burden in administration for the small organisations like our own so to have an acknowledgement that this community food growing in however all of us on the panel today do it in slightly different ways but are all successful in our own way in the way we do it within our own communities so to have an acknowledgement that this is a really vital thing that we're all doing that teaching people to grow food and allowing people to grow food is important and will be increasingly important with the cost of living crisis with climate change with all these sort of drivers it's really important that the community food growing is acknowledged as something that might be worthy of core support rather than this constant driver for okay when you did that last year but what new thing are you going to do this year and so that's it yeah that that's how I think it could be helped because we're constantly looking for project funding rather than the acknowledgement that this is a really vital thing that we're all doing thanks very much cown and just you mentioned large infrastructure projects so just before Maria comes in I just wanted to touch in so with your large-scale infrastructure projects is that where you get the you get that funding from the robertson's trust and the national lottery community fund for those no but actually the natural lottery community fund it's through that social isolation strand it's actually not through it's not the importance of the growing food particularly it's getting people in to a community setting and we're growing food as part of that so the national lottery funding is through attacking social isolation and the robertson funding actually contrary to what I just said it's actually acknowledgement that what we've done for the past three years have been really successful and really valuable and they've given us core funding for a further three years but that that isn't typical it's mainly that we're having to go for small amounts of grants all the time for so for example we're putting up a community pavilion in Duns and Outdoor classroom so that was separately funded from borders council we're looking to put a polytunnel in imath that was separately funded from a different funding stream so it's constantly these small amounts of funding to small to fund small things rather than have the project overall funded to be able to allow us to deliver across the the whole region yeah thanks for that and that's quite time consuming putting all these pieces together maria you wanted to come in on this as well yeah it was on a different aspect really and I think because we are following the community empowerment act as an asset transfer request we are on a different experience yet we haven't quite got to the implementation stage but I did want to highlight to and commend you the role that the Scottish Land Fund plays in supporting these asset transfers really in terms of we were able to get stage 1 funding that allows us to carry on that feasibility study and design and that's been really helpful and allowed us really to step up our work and develop the group as well and we are sort of looking at trying to access funds to purchase the site so and I would like to sort of you know commend as well Highlands and Islands Enterprise for the way they run the fund in a very supportive way to community groups and I think that a good model really in terms of facilitating and helping communities through the process and I know this is not quite we're not quite at the stage yet of taking the process the project on the ground but I think it's worth highlighting that for the benefit of the committee thank you yeah thank you for that because I think it does show us that there's the I mean in a way you're you're the you're the group that Ian's talked about the group of people that have come together and are trying to do the community empowered piece of work and and even there you can see that you've got quite a lot of hurdles that you've had to to jump over over the over the years that you've been working on this. Roseanne did you want to come in on funding for your project? We rent from the council and we're allowed to set our own rents ourselves which we do we have received funding from the area partnership and I think it was the Scottish government a fund for something but we recently got money from the mental the scotch government mental health fund we applied for that so we've got funding for the air so we can buy things like tools so we've been we've been we've been quite lucky with what the funding we've got which has kept us going but we as I say that think what what helps us is we set our own rent and we've agreed that every year it goes up by £2 so yeah great okay well I think that's that's we've come to the end of our questions I think oh Ian you want to come into the site I am on is independent and it was put under threat before the war by housing development that's for the men members to acquire the land which they done successfully in the late 40s early 50s so we sustain ourselves similar to what Roseanne described we set our own rents at our annual general meeting and we augment that with an annual open day where the proceeds go into our general funds and otherwise to operate we pay for the things that we need to do we have electricity and water to pay for and repairs over the years and that's one and if you can set up self managing allotment sites within the local councils or the other arrangements that are around then the only real funding that's needed in any big sense is that the beginning to put in the infrastructure because we've got 10,000 are there about existing plots it seems to have certainly in the main cities another 10,000 people looking for an allotment or something of that nature so that's going to acquire new land hopefully suitable land and I've been interested in the descriptions of what some people get offered as a retired gardener to put it no more sophisticated way than that and I am puzzled by why it is people seem to think that the best thing to grow wood on is raised beds on crushed rubble or something of that nature to get the best results you want to be on reasonable quality soil soil is the main asset that needs to be worked after thank you for that response Ian and I think you're absolutely right get starting off with good soil is a very good beginning having started a project on sand myself at one point not too distant past but you were mentioning things like you know you set the rent at a self-sustaining rate but you have you know you have on-going costs from you know one year to another and one of the things that's come up to us is Scottish water how do you find the you know the the cost of paying for your water I'd love to hear a little bit about that I gave up the treasures posed back in 2020 all the things it was so I'm not absolutely up to speed we've got an AGM in a fortnight we'll need to get a statement of what we're currently paying our water supply is metered so we simply pay the bills as they come in via the association account all what will happen is going to happen in a fortnight's time as we've not obviously with Covid had our open days so our only revenue is the rent and we haven't had an AGM to reset the rent if they deemed that necessary and so we get a financial statement we'll look at it we see what our outgoings are we pay on our area to our main office bearers secretary and treasurer and the person that looks after the the sort of general grounds out with the actual plots themselves and so we have to take all of that into account our main utility bills is electricity and and water now so I'm not aware of whether there's a current specific significant price rise in the offing it's just one of these things we will need to look at when we set a rent and whether we're going to try and have an open day again because the value of the open day beyond bringing in revenue is it's another way by which we link to the local community and that's always an important thing and allotment side shouldn't be an island exclusive to its members and no one else it should relate to the local community in which it sits okay I think that's a really nice that's a nice place to end with the the comment around the open day and the allotment shouldn't be an island and they should connect to to their local surrounding community and that kind of brings in the point that Maria is saying is that we actually want to see sites that are accessible to six schools and you know people be able to walk to them easily and and and get growing in and following that impulse so thanks so much for joining us this morning I think it's been really useful discussion to hear from you I think it's added another layer to the conversation we had over the last few weeks and as that's the last public item on our agenda for today I now close the public meeting