 Good afternoon and welcome. I'm Siobhan Brown, MSP, the convener of the Scottish Parliament's cross-party group on towns and town centres, and I'd like to welcome you to the 2022 Festival of Politics organised by the Scottish Parliament. This year we celebrate the festival's 18th year of provoking, inspiring and informing people of all ages and walks of life to engage in three days of spirited debate. We are delighted that you can join us here today and participate online for this debate on whose town is at anyway. I would encourage you all to use the question and answer box to introduce yourselves, starting with your first name only and where you are. You can also use that box to pose any questions you would like the panel to respond to. If you're keen to share your thoughts on social media, you can do so by using hashtag FOP 2022. A recent study by Power to Change shows that 20 per cent of UK high street properties are owned by distant landlords with no interest in local communities. The same study showed that 70 per cent of UK citizens are concerned about the decline of their high streets. With a sheer pace of retail change and these ever-increasingly complex ownership structures, what can local government and communities do to take back ownership? To answer those questions and more, I'm pleased to be joined today by an expert panel and let me introduce them. First of all, we have Leslie Riddock, who is an award-winning broadcaster, journalist, author, cyclist, land reform campaigner and a lover of all things Nordic, one of Scotland's best-known commentators and broadcasters. She is a weekly columnist for the Scotsman and the National and is a regular contributor for Guardian Scotland Tonight, BBC Question Time and Any Questions. We also have Phil Prentis, who is a chief officer of Scotland's town partnership, with 25 years of economic development experience across public and private sectors. He aims to drive sustainable change through collaboration and partnership and help to deliver the town centre action plan. We're also joined by Emma McKenzie. Emma is a head of asset management with New River and has a responsibility for the performance of its UK retail portfolio. A qualified chartered survey out with over 20 years' experience in the retail property market. Emma is also on the UK Government high street task force board member. Michaela Sullivan, who is the head of service and development at East Lothian Council and has experience in housebuilding and port industries and on large-scale regeneration projects. Michaela has a master's in civic design, an MBA from Manchester Business School and is a member of the Royal Town Planning Institute. A very warm welcome to everybody this morning. I'm keen to bring in questions and thoughts from the audience, but I'll get us going with a couple of questions first, if I may. Town centres are critical to our culture, our economy and also our environment. Over the last decades, they have been challenged and lost the nurture that has been needed. Is ownership the key driver in reinvigorating our town centres? Whose town is it anyway or whose town should it be? What are our panellists' views as to the biggest challenges facing our town centres over the next 10 years? If I could go to Leslie first, then Phil, then Emma and finally Michaela. Over to you, Leslie. Thanks very much. I would quake a little bit at being described as any kind of expert on this front. I do now write for the Herald to everyone on the east coast and they would be miffed if they thought they were the Scotsmen, but that all being put to one side. It seems to me—and this is now slightly putting my Nordic hat back on again—that the biggest problem that still faces town councils is the fact that I've just said it, they're not town councils. That's it. We've got towns that are struggling with all the sorts of different changes that Siobhan just described, some of those ownership structures that sit beneath it, funding difficulties, trying to get going, trying to lever in the enormous amounts of energy that its people have in every town and goodwill and desire not to be walking past, dereliction all the time, depressing. It's not as if people aren't willing to try to do something to help, and yet most of those towns that we're going to talk about today have no control whatsoever over themselves directly. That's weird. If I had a pound for every time I've had to point this out to people, I'd be wealthy now, because Scotland is sitting with the largest so-called local authorities in the developed world, not by a small amount but by a country mile. Just to give you a wee example—in fact, one wee example that was highlighted in a recent Nordic Horizons event that I did is with the tiny Faroe Islands. The Faroe Islands is probably nobody's even been there, but there are 18 little islands between Shetland and Iceland. They have a population of 55,000 pagora. We probably have got towns all over Scotland that are bigger. They have 55,000 people and they have 30 local councils. We have 32 for 5.3 million people. The recent event that we did had the mayor of Vaggar on. It's a town of 1,000 people. There we are. Would we even call that a town? It has about 20 per cent of income tax that is sent straight to that local council. They don't argue, they don't have to beg the larger municipality or the Government of the Faroes every year on a different basis. No. As of right, the same thing in Norway, the money goes straight off to those municipalities and the control that they have allowed them to build an international swimming pool of 1,000 people because they happened to be lucky enough to have in their midst a brilliant young man who became an olympic swimming champion. Building on his reputation and his home base, they self-built practically a swimming pool. The land was donated to them to the municipal council. They put sweat labour into it. The ladies of the parish were ending up painting the yellow lines on the bottom of the pool before it was filled. On the basis of that, they have now adapted their entire outlook of their town to being about an experienced culture, a memories culture. They are building brilliant memories of being a young person and a child in vaguer because that is what will get their young people back after they have gone on to further education somewhere else. They can do that because they control their town. Living on an island that only has about four or five thousand people on it, it would not even make a fraction of a corner of an area committee in the massive desert that is local democracy in Scotland. That is what we are missing. Everything that flows after this is trying to deal with this massive, unspoken about difficulty, which is the structure of our local government. I agree with a lot of what Leslie has said in terms of the democratic deficit. We tend to have much bigger local authorities that are quite distant, and very often they will focus in on one particular town to the detriment of a lot of others. Going back to the starting precept, Scotland is a nation of towns. We are still a relatively small nation, but towns are really significant in terms of our history, our culture, just wider society, the environment, the economy. We have to look at where we are just now and how we actually move forward. The question is who owns or whose town is it anyway. Some of that will be about ownership, but fundamentally it should be does the town work for the people in that town and what are the mechanisms to make that happen, make the town more relevant. Covid and climate have both provoked a step change in terms of what needs to happen. I think the only way forward will be genuine collaboration where the public sector becomes a facilitator and the commercial and social sectors work together to generate ideas. I am a big fan of community ownership, but I urge caution that the current economic construct actually works against communities. Where we have seen communities step up to the plate to take on projects such as the cinema project in Campbelltown or in Helensburg or across the country. Work, development, trust and others have stepped up to the plate. Mid staple quarter in the Stove down in Dumfries have faced massive challenges because the system is rigged against them. The work that was undertaken by Professor Lee Sparks in the town centre, the new feature for Scotland's towns, a lot of those fiscal measures need to be addressed, and the system measures need to be addressed, whether it is better recognition in the planning system and the planning hierarchy, the economic strategies and the climate strategies, but fundamentally even the taxation and the fiscal barriers to make it easier for communities to have ownership and control. At the end of the day, those towns belong to the people in the towns, they do not belong to the extractive economy or the absentee landlords. That is the sense of frustration that people feel too distant from it. They feel powerless, they feel disimparred in terms of being able to make change, but there has been some progress and I think that we need to take the learning from where we have seen progress and actually take that back to government to start removing the barriers and start to encourage much more of that happening. I am looking at this from an optimistic viewpoint. We are going to have to repopulate our towns more densely. That should be looking at social and affordable and net zero housing, which in turn just brings populations back into the heart of the town, because perversely Scotland, as a nation of towns, hollowed out of its town centres over the past 50 or 60 years. We put everything to the edge of town, we then allowed developers to come in and basically tell us what we were getting, and most of Scotland's nature towns are basically clone towns. You get the same thing. Now that clone model does not work and the shopping centres are not working because of online, so we have to rethink, but we should be rethinking this in a really optimistic and positive way. Think about more affordable housing in the town centre and denser populations around 20 minute neighbourhoods and sustainability. Think about our towns becoming eco towns with solar farms on the rooftops, green walls, pop-up parks, biodiversity. Think about a raging demographic in megatowns that is much more accessible and more attractive for people. Move beyond retail, there is a future beyond retail that brings in mixed use approaches and mixed places much more interesting. Moving forward, the key is collaboration. I agree with Leslie that there is a distance between the sort of democracy and the leadership, but that could be fixed reasonably quickly with getting the likes of development trusts and community councils working together at a sort of hyper-local level, but fundamentally being facilitated by local government and obviously central government as well. The bottom line is, and I will finish in this point, our town centres are critical in terms of economic, social and environmental infrastructure. They tell the story of Scotland as a nation, they hold our heritage and our culture, so we must do more and we must find ways to actually make them better. Thanks very much, Phil. If I could move on to Emma, whose town should it be and what are the biggest challenges facing our town centres for the next 10 years? Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for having me on the panel, Siobhan. Whose town is it? Well, it's everybody's town. It's the people who live there first and foremost. It's their town, and as an owner of assets, new river road, 28 shopping centres in towns up and down the whole country. From our perspective, we invest in towns, and we have to be part of that community. We have to engage with the community, we want to engage with the community, because without our asset, for that asset to be successful, the town has to be successful. The ownership of towns, and I take your point, there's 20 per cent of property in town centres that there's absentee landlords, but that, therefore, 80 per cent is known. We know who 80 per cent is the vast majority of a town centre, we know who owns those assets, and that's in itself as an opportunity. For those who are engaged and want to engage, that's what you have to focus on, is who is there to do something and to make a difference, because there are enormous factors that affect a town centre, which nobody can control in a small environment, and that's all the economic factors, that's all the technology changes that we're all seeing and experiencing, that's all the demographic changes that are happening, and all the infrastructure of our towns and cities and how places are put together. That's before we mentioned funding, and that's not only public funding, but private funding and banks and institutions putting money into town centres. All those factors are significant before you look at a town centre. From New River's perspective, we are an investor in retail assets, retail and leisure assets, and historically, town centres have been very much focused on being based on retail, and that's been the principal purpose for people to come into town centres. What Covid has done has very much accelerated a lot of what was happening anyway, so that oversupply issue of retail and town centres has only accelerated, and that in itself is an opportunity, and that's the opportunity for us all to work more collaboratively, and that's both the public and the private sector, because both have a huge part to play, and working with first and foremost the community and the people that live there to understand what are the drivers of the need of the people that actually live there, and we certainly, before doing anything that requires a planning consent, obviously we have public consultations, we do constant surveys with our customers to understand what the requirements are, but I think one of the biggest challenges is actually making things happen, because I think there's been so many panels and discussions and commentary and press and publications about what a town centre needs and how it needs to adapt and change, and I think there's a recognition that has to be much more mixed use and there has to be much more facilities for living, shopping, enjoying one another's company, engaging and leisure, and all those elements are going to make a town centre successful, but it's actually taking some action that's needed far more than talking about it, and I think that's where we all have to collaborate, work together, and come from the bottom up and actually speak to the people that live in these towns who want to engage and how we actively share the expertise, because there's phenomenal expertise in the towns that we operate in, and not only from the councils, but from retailers and community groups, etc, and really try and harness that will, because what's fallen out from the pandemic is that many people have reacquainted themselves with their town centres, and that's a wonderful thing, it's a positive thing. They've also taken on the fact that there's a responsibility to your local town and for a town to be successful, you have to use it and engage in it and be interested in it, and that's that appreciation of all people in a town and the businesses that operate there and to support those businesses has all risen up, so there's an opportunity just now to grab all of that and make change happen, but that takes collaboration, and I trust that that's the other element that people have to trust one another, and the public sector and the private sector have to trust one another to really make things change in a town, and certainly from our perspective, ownership is responsibility, because ownership isn't just a privilege to be able to own assets in any town, but it comes with that, it's obviously responsibility and accountability, you're accountable to the people in that town, if you've chosen to buy something in that town, you're accountable to them, and certainly at New River we feel very accountable to the people in our town to ensure that we're providing what they need and want, and that's what we have to listen and understand and hopefully deliver on some of that. Thanks Emma, yes totally agree, can I move on to Michaela please? Good afternoon and thank you for having me on the panel Siobhan. I find this whole area quite interesting, I work in East Lothian, and I'd like to put in a plea for us not to consider all towns to be complete basket cases. We have some very successful small towns in East Lothian, and Financial Times did a study during Covid across the whole of the UK looking at where people shopped most locally, and East Lothian came out at the top of that table across the whole of the UK, and that study was then repeated sometime after all the sort of lockdowns and so on ended, and East Lothian still came right up in, I think we were in the top five still, for people shopping locally in our area. Now it's not perfect, nothing's perfect and we still have our problems, but I think our towns are providing to a fairly large degree quite a lot of what people are looking for, and as a consequence of that people are continuing to use them, and I think it was Phil that made the point that quite a lot of places in Scotland have hollowed out their towns, and they've become almost exclusively areas for retailing, and retailing is something that takes place during the day, and people are starting also to sort of shop more online and so on, and that has left this deficit in towns, and I think it's very important, I'm a town planner by profession, and so town planners have thoughts on this, but I think we're going to have to actually try and move it forward in terms of policy and consider what towns are actually for, because I think a successful town going forward is not just going to be a retail area, if it is, that's not really what people are looking for, people are looking for towns to provide much more, and I think that our towns need a complexity of urban grain of the type that perhaps the more successful small towns that have continued to flourish have, and that is a town providing places to go and eat and drink, places for recreation, places to live, and so on. So, I think successful towns in the future are going to have much more of a complex urban grain and be mixed uses of residential and retailing and entertainment and restaurants, bars, cafes, all of those things. Now, how to actually achieve that is a much more difficult thing, and certainly from our experience in East Lothian, not all the buildings are owned by people who have any connection with East Lothian, or who have even East Lothian at its best interests in their ownership, and I don't have all the answers as to how we deal with that, but we do have, I think, to reimagine our towns, starting with the sort of planning policy and vision and so on and so forth, not continuing to have Class 1 retail frontages for great swathes of our town centres and denying the potential of other users, but reimagining and bringing those things forward. So, I'll stop at that point, as I no doubt the debate will evolve. Thanks very much, Michaela. I think that you're totally right that with town centres are not going to be the retail hubs that they were 30 years ago, and we didn't have any purpose in different uses such as leisure. If I could just move on to one question, I will come to the audience shortly. In Scotland, many high street buildings are owned by the public sector. What more can be done to encourage those bodies to divest or to repurpose, e.g. town centre first, financial incentives, housing, economic or climate strategies, if I could start with you, Phil? I suppose that if we go back to 2013, when Malcolm Fraser was undertaking the independent review into town centres, Malcolm visited roughly 100 towns across the country, big, small, urban, rural, island. It was fascinating because Malcolm was driven by social justice, and he worked out that 40 per cent of the built form was lying fallow. At that point in time, we had about 35,000 people who were homeless, and Malcolm just said, look, even if we just started to join up the spaces above shops, the public sector ownership, I'm not talking about just local authorities, but if you added up what the health boards had, what police and fire had, and they all tended to be decanting and moving out to a shiny big hospital in a field in the middle of nowhere, which depended on people having a car to get to. He said, why don't we actually just bring this all back into the centre again for sustainability, for community? There is a massive amount of public ownership across Scotland, disproportionate to the rest of the UK. If you look at the agencies and the likes of DWP and all the public sector, you will find that they've got a large footprint. They must start working together at that level of honesty, what is going to be disinvested, can we work more collaboratively in terms of hubs that service the public more widely? Fundamentally, they need to come up with political prerogative, they need to come up with a plan, they need to engage the community with that plan, they need to engage investors with the plan and then they need to start to deliver it. I think there's an anxiety about where do we start. The starting point is that conversation about what do our citizens need and what would make our town more vibrant and accessible, and the public estate can play a big role in that, whether that is selling it on to commercial investment or house builders for social housing or whatever, that will all form part of the plan, but I think local authorities and the public sector have got a massive stake to play because they own so much of our town centres. A really, really large chunk of our town centres is actually within the public ownership, and with the move to try and work more smartly post Covid, probably more agilely, a lot of that stock is actually going to be surplus to requirements, so it gives another big opportunity in terms of how that could be used as an economic stimulus for the town. Let's start off with the conversation, get some political leadership and prioritisation, engage the community throughout, talk to the commercial investors as well, deliver the plan. It's taken us 60 years to wreck some of our towns. It'll take a good 20 years to fix them, but we have to just move forward positively, and I think there's a big, big role for local authorities and the wider public sector to play in that. I'm sort of completely shocked to hear how much I must have somehow missed that key finding from Malcolm's excellent report, but that idea that 40 per cent of the built form is sitting fallow and presumably owned by the public sector in our towns in Scotland is really quite shocking. I mean, there are problems with all sorts of other forms of ownership there as well, but it's almost kind of who knew. I mean, it probably did take Malcolm some time to actually work his way through. This is common to every attempt to try to map who owns bits of Scotland. Of course, more attention has been paid to the rural landscape and the large ownership by large sporting estates, but this question of who owns the town centres and what's sitting there is pretty key. I mean, I would love to think that there was some way to get some civic energy, to channel some energy into that and effectively have a citizens assembly in every town to just hear what there is available and try to move in some way on the place plans that are meant to be happening, but I'm not sure if they're able to tackle this level of stuff sitting kind of in a bent. I was going to mention having just heard, I think, from Mikayla about East Lothian. I was a couple of years ago at the very excellent place in Dunbarh, which is a reuse hub, and that actually arose from the onerous leases, which is another cute thing that goes on. I had not heard about this until I spoke to them, but the zero waste hub in Dunbarh exists because it's in what was an old supermarket that was bought by a rival, closed down deliberately so as to not create competition for their supermarket and was sitting there unusable. There was no bid that was ever going to be successful if it was going to be on the supermarket, but when a social enterprise walked in, that would do okay, because that wasn't going to in any way harm their business. If that's what we're down to in the way that we can try to map and plan our way through towns, it is a really difficult situation. Just the final little thought is that a lot of people will think that solutions, and maybe it was Phil was touching on the difficulties that are facing communities going in and buying stuff. The main difficulty is—I was noticing that in one of the chats that's coming up. It was John Murray who was pointing out that all those community enterprises are volunteers. They're actually pouring their lives into doing stuff. They're also ending up having to make annual applications for grants to take on an asset that's going to be there forever. I'm sorry to be like Mrs Gloom personified here, but we have not got a match between what we've got in terms of reddies sitting in town centres, existing buildings and spaces, and the availability of that land to do things with actively. I would love to think that people power might be something that could begin to unleash it all. If I could just bring in Micaela on this point on how do we encourage those bodies to divest or repurpose from a local authority point of view? We have a project running at the moment where we have some town centre buildings, some of which have fallen into disrepair and are not in active use, because the previous uses have been moved to newer premises. We have a project at the moment looking at replacing quite a large part of what's actually one of our town centres bearing in mind that our town centres are quite small. We're not the city of Edinburgh here, but we're looking to do exactly what everybody's saying and to repurpose those buildings for affordable housing, some additional retail, pocket park and so on and so forth. I noticed somebody put in the chat that local authorities need some commercially minded folk. Having come from the house building industry, I'd like to put a claim in for being a commercially minded person. I don't think that I am alone. I think in many local authorities there are commercially minded folk and these projects are starting to happen as we look at what our town centres are going to be in the future. I think Phil's rightly said it's taken a long time for our town centres to perhaps decline in some places to the point where it becomes urgent that something needs to be done. Therefore, it will take time. With all these things, with any property development, you have to go through the consenting processes, you have to consult people, you have to build a consensus and you have to come up with something where the rent you'll achieve when you've finished pays the debt that you borrowed in order to be able to build it in the first place. That commercial reality doesn't really go away. It's true for local authorities wanting to develop as well as everybody else. I think these things are starting to happen. Maybe they could happen quicker or better. Perhaps having these debates is important in highlighting those sorts of things. I think it's a little bit for watch this space that there are challenges that may be overcome. There's also quite an important issue, and a couple of people have touched on it, around the upper floors. Retail in the past has been reasonably lucrative as a rental proposition. The upper floors of buildings have often just been used for storage or indeed not at all. I quite recently went into the upper floors upper ladder of a very complex building in Dunbar, which has been mentioned, where the ground floor had been turned into a shop what must be many, many decades ago and nobody had entered. They blocked off the route to the upper floors and nobody had entered the upper floors in literally decades. It's quite fascinating because this is not a council project. It's the ridge, which is a sort of employment trust that trains people in traditional construction skills and so on. The ridge is now looking to redevelop that building and use the upper floors. There are examples like that and things that we can do to change our town centres. It's not always going to be easy, and that's, as I mentioned earlier and I think other people have touched on, the fact that there are absent landlords who have bought property for completely different reasons from those who live in the town centre would like them to own it for. Thanks very much, Michaela. I am conscious of time and I did want to bring in some questions from the audience. I'll go to you Emma first, but the question is from Flowcans in Portobello. Here in Portobello we have a disproportionate number of fast food restaurants on the high street. Talking with the local planner, there is no mechanism for the citizen to influence the make-up of the high street. Can I please know your thoughts on that? I agree. It's a perennial problem, isn't it? It's getting the tenant mixed right, particularly when the ownership is disparate. Certainly, as an owner of shopping centres, we are far greater. Oversight and control are obviously who we let shops to when we try to get the balance right. High streets don't have that oversight and privilege that an owner of a whole asset has, but from the public's perspective, I guess it's engaging with any planning applications that are in. There is an opportunity to object to any planning applications and it's just being mindful of that and keeping an eye on a planning portal. Not everybody's notified, there's still neighbourhood notification that goes in if there's a planning application, but that's one of the routes is to go looking for it, to go and engage. Again, usually there's notices on lamp posts, etc. If there is a planning consent in the process of being considered. Again, it's from a council's perspective who are granting those planning consents that they also have the control as to what happens in that town centre, and that goes back again to really understanding the needs of the community and the wants of the community and the opportunity to engage with both the public and the private sector, and first and foremost, the people that live there to influence what actually happens. Thanks Emma. Phil, do you want to come in on this question? Yeah briefly, I'll just to back up what Emma has said. I mean, where you've got really highly functioning sort of collaboration around town teams, beds, councils working closely together, really applications should be notified, so the team should be made aware of what's coming, and we have to just consider wider societal issues around health and wellbeing. We don't want proliferation of things that could potentially be harmful, but we also want to get them mixed right for the place. So, again, get your plan in place, stick to it, and try to manage that in a longer term, but the planning process should be able to allow people to influence that in terms of objecting our raising concerns through groups, etc. Thanks very much, Phil. I'll move to the next question. Leslie, Graham from New Helensborough. What do the panel think about the Scottish Government's sponsoring, say, 10 big ticket events each year for which towns could bid for to stage? The intention would be that there would be a legacy from this event. As an example, I'm thinking of the one really big annual ticket, which would be the annual housing expo, similar to the highly successful Finnish expo. It attracts over 100,000 visitors in the month of August. Is that for me, Siobhan? Yes. I'm actually just about to go over to Finland to see one of their expos this year. They move it around a town every year. They've been doing it for decades. They have a bit of built new ideas about house building. It lets everyone come and see stuff, not just in theory but in actual practice. It leaves a legacy then of new homes for each new town that moves around. It's brilliant, utterly brilliant. At the risk of sounding like a broken record, but I will move on, I merely note that in terms of the number of councils that exist in Finland, there are 309. Scotland is 30. One of the reasons that this works in Finland is because you have a town council to engage with. You have somebody who's really going to take it on and run with it. That is one of the reasons that all those places find it easier to skip around and do stuff like that without getting bogged down. As Phil said, you've got massive councils. If there's going to be a fair that's coming to your council, you end up wasting time with every town in the council arguing about their gig. That's one of the issues of what will stop that kind of thing happening. I just briefly wanted to comment a wee bit on the previous thing about the question of people having uses of high streets and crucial bits of land in their towns that are being used for things that they regard as already over-served. Someone who's in this meeting but hasn't put in a question yet got in touch with me before this event and talked about a problem that they've got in Banff, where they've got an area, Canal Park. It's home to quite a lot of football teams, including the famous Devron Vale County FC, which my dad used to sport. That's being estimated. That contributes £1.75 million annually to the local economy. Local area—it's not even a council, obviously. It's in the massive Aberdeenshire council, but the Banff and Buchan area has decided to, despite the fact that locals are two-to-one against it, to sell the land to morrisons. Morrisons, in the meantime, has been taken over by what looks like, in the words of The Guardian, a company that focuses on debt, gymnastics and property deals. That is still in the process of going through. It's going to obliterate a bit of green space. There are 770 kids that use that football pitch. You could go on and on and on about how much that is useful. Meanwhile, McDuff, the neighbouring town, has just given planning permission for Aldi to set up a store. Nobody thinks that this is a good idea and nobody can stop this. It's actually being built on common good land. Historically, this is land that ought to belong to the people. Yet councils have just decided that that's them these days. They're about to go to the court session. At some date, they will not tell local people so that they can't actually find out what's happening. They can put in their objections and they can't afford a lawyer to go and argue on their behalf at the court event. However, I would guess that this will be nodded through and people will say that the council needs the money and what else can you do with it? I would also guess that this is happening all over Scotland. It's not good enough, and yet all the tools are stacked against. Those folk have done all the right things in terms of notification, putting in their submissions, putting in their arguments, getting, even getting the costing of if it comes down to money, how much that football team and all the different stuff is contributing and it means zip. Thanks, Leslie. I'm going to move on to the next question and I think I'll give it to you, Michaela. It's from Ronnie in Dumfries. Why do so many businesses move out of towns and what can be done to reverse the trend? Quite a number of retailers, I think, have sort of moved to the outskirts because people are notwithstanding some of the comments that have been made here. I think people are looking for choice in terms of where they shop and they are looking quite often to the larger retailers, particularly in the current climate, where people are looking for cheaper food when households are challenged and energy prices are rising and so on and so forth. There are issues around the way people want to shop and the type of shopping that people are actually looking for and how that plays out in a balance with what can then fill what were the shopping areas in the town centres. I don't think we can almost halt a particular tide if people are voting with their feet. If nobody went to out-of-town retailers, people would have stopped building them. I don't think we should try and stop necessarily retailers who sell the basic goods from moving to the outskirts of towns where it's perhaps more accessible, but what we then need to do is to reimagine what was left behind and make sure that what we actually put in place is somewhere that is desirable that people want to go. That comes down to a combination of things, policy, imagination and how we engage landlords. I don't have all the answers to that, I don't profess to have all the answers to that and perhaps also getting people more engaged in terms of the planning of their town centres. It does surprise me, people put in objections to planning applications, so people are motivated and interested in planning at the point where they can put in an objection to a planning application. Very few people actually engage with the plan and applications have to be determined in accordance with the plan, that's what the law says. I think where there's a deficit at the moment is allowing people to see the point, if you like, of planning and to come forward at the time when decisions are being made about places. There's a new provision in the 2019 Planning Act that allows communities to prepare their own local place plans and for those to then feed into the wider planning system, and I'm very much hoping that people will engage with that in our area and let us know what they do want. There's a lot of complexity about this, about who owns what and what can be brought forward. In the area that I live personally, there are quite a number of coffee shops, and when an application went in for a new coffee shop, the local Facebook page was full of armchair commentators telling us that we don't need another coffee shop, but at the end of the day, that's somebody's idea, that's somebody's capital, that's somebody's investment, that's somebody's business, somebody's livelihood, and said coffee shop appears to have quite a large number of customers. It's very easy for people to sit on the side and say, this is what we don't want, but actually when people do bring businesses forward in town centres, if they are frequented by the local population, then it suggests that it is filling a need and is providing what somebody wants. There are no right answers here. What I do think is that we have to be imaginative, we have to look at our town centres and say, what can this be in order that people will use it on a 24-7 basis? That is more than just retailing, it's about all the other things that I think make up a successful urban place. You can look at successful urban villages that form parts of towns. You look at somewhere like Stockbridge, there's no problem, there are probably a few voids, but there's no problem in those places. There are people living there, there are restaurants, there are cafes, there are bars, there are Sainsbury's local or whatever, those sort of smaller retail outlets. You can create these successful places and some of those, I would say, a similar vibe exists in some of our smaller town centres in East Lothian that people are proud of and feel are successful. That's the challenge for us all to think about what we want our town centres to be in the future, how, through policy, we can drive that and how, through other means, some of those are really quite complicated and whether you get into government-backed schemes to buy out owners who are absent and are not interested. Those things are always really complex, but there are some challenges there, really big challenges. The last question that we have is from Scott. I live and I work in the Loch Lomond and Trossick's National Park. A significant number of our villages and towns have what, on the surface, would seem to be vibrant, dynamic and well-occupied centres, but that is largely focused on tourism and needs lots of tourists. That means that many locals still have to travel to larger urban centres for everyday needs. What are the panel's thoughts on the role of tourism in town centres? Given that I'm sitting in Oban, which has just doubled its population since the start of the season, it's pretty relevant. I can understand what Loch Lomond and Trossick's is going to be very much dominated by visitors and a lot of how the centres are shaped up will be to serve as a visitor. I think that there's important learning in that large, for example, typical seaside town. There was a real agitation from the population that they were actually losing control and, again, the ownership piece came in. Why are we giving our town away to people coming down from Glasgow the weekend to get drunk or to have fish and chips or to go to Nardini's? In reality, a lot of the town isn't working for us as a fairly wealthy ageing demographic. I think that there just has to be a conversation about a decent balance. A lot more people are working gradually and they will demand a change in what's on their doorstep in terms of being able to provide for their everyday needs. That's an opportunity. The season in Scotland is predominantly quite short and it's going to be spring through to autumn, and then these villages tend to get cold and empty during the winter, so someone with a bit of imagination can look at how to extend the shoulder, but make sure that there's just decent provision for the core residents, the people who live in these towns, not just the people who come and visit them. Maybe going back to the question from the chap from Helensburg about the big expo events, I'm with Leslie. I think there's some really good innovations that could happen with that, but I would beg the question. You go to Helensburg, it's a beautiful town. You've got a sort of reinvestment of Cahoon Square. There's lots of markets and local produce that are produced and are showcased and sold in those areas. Why don't you put on more local things to celebrate your own local culture, get your various community groups to organise and to get people into the town? Helensburg's community cinema has 16,000 members. Those people come in towards the cinema, give them things to do when they're in the town. Tech ownership, don't wait for the big man to come and fix it because he's not coming. Do it yourself. In the open, the guys in the office next to me are planning open live. There will be 10,000 people visiting them. They've already done the Sea Shanty festival. They're in the middle of thinking about the Highland Games at the weekend. Every single week there's something happening, driven, designed and delivered by the local community. I do think that we can enliven our town centres with markets and festivals and events, concerts and performance, but that should be just local people taking the ownership and doing it themselves. Once in a while, the big actual thing comes and lands, but by and large you can drive a lot of energy and happiness and fun by just getting off your backside and doing it yourself. Thank you, Phil. We've got probably about 10 minutes left and I'd like to thank everyone for all those contributions. We are not going to get to every question that is in the chat, unfortunately. Before we close, I'd like to give each of our panellists one minute to sum up. I think that what we might do is if we could take it from Mike, who has put the question is, what is the first concrete step to get towards where we want to be? Can we start with Lesley, please? I'm trying to get to a stage where we have towns that run themselves again. I think that's what we've got to do, because everything else here is still fighting the fact that control ownership and everything else is sitting out with the town. You're always on the back foot when you get to that situation. Of course, every time you suggest a meantime solution, you end up, because Scotland has a great proclivity—I'm sorry to have on—but this Government also does for the kind of just managing to keep purple in long-type solutions that don't fix many of those problems. However, trying to get people together into well-publicised citizens assemblies, I hear that there are place plans and all sorts of inputs, but you'd really need to win back the trust of people, because as any number of community councils that have done this kind of work have been ignored. People who have had little campaigns over areas that I mentioned in BAMP, for example, have gone forward and been ignored. Every time they're ignored, you've lost the trust of those people and they won't get involved in the next well-meaning sounding thing that sounds like just another way to tick a box. Thanks, Lesley. Emma, can I bring you in, please? I think that the most important thing is the collaboration piece between all the parties at every level. Lesley said that local community at the starting point of that and actually listening to what people want and need. However, the other big influence is obviously funding. Whether that's Government funding or private funding, there has to be a commercial angle to make things happen. For the public sector or the private sector to invest needs funding and it needs to be commercially sensible. That whole piece is very much part of actually affecting any positive change and also to be able to educate one another and learn from one another. I think that that goes back to the collaboration of sitting and understanding what are the drivers of all the parties in that equation to make something happen. Certainly, we're happy to be open because we need to be with numbers on anything to be able to show this is what we can do, this is how we'll invest and this is how we can continue to deliver to our shareholders and likewise from the council understanding what drives them and then the people what they actually want because without understanding what anybody wants no change will be meaningful and have sustainability because for it to have a long term success it has to actually be ticking a box and delivering what people want that lives there. Thanks Emma. I totally agree with the collaboration being an ex-counselor. I was continually frustrated that politics got in the way of a lot of progress in that sense. I move on to Mikayla. Thank you. I think, as Emma has said, a collaboration between a wide number of actors who have an influence on these things is very important and I think also just starting to form a vision of what town centres are going to be in the future and to stop perhaps sometimes clinging to the past and look to see what do we want to achieve, what do people want here and then from that there's the complexity around land ownership and investment and so on and so forth and how you get to the point where people find in their town centre what they want to find there and those challenges are not they're not easy they don't have a simple answer but unless we start and unless we try things aren't going to change and we're just going to end up with boarded up shops with Tullet signs. Thanks Mikayla and Phil can I finish with you please? Phil can you hear me? I don't think we've got Phil. I think we've lost Phil unless he can come back. I don't think he can hear. I'm going to give him a wave but no okay so we must end there. I'd like to thank everyone for coming along today and making such a big contribution. I'd also like to thank our panel Betheliridog, Phil Prentis, Emma Mackenzie and Mikayla Sullivan for leading such an insightful discussion. Let me also thank my colleagues in the cross-party group on towns and town centres for bringing this event together and also for the Parliament staff for running it behind the scenes and can I take this opportunity to remind you that there are two more online events taking place as part of this festival which is disability and the future of work which starts at 3 pm today and the climate crisis hasn't gone away which runs between 12 and 1 pm tomorrow. There are also events in the Scottish Parliament building if you are able to join us in person and for full information and to book your ticket please visit www.festivalofpolitics.spot. That again concludes our event today and thank you very much. I'm just going to see. Phil, can you hear me? You're muted. I'm good. Technical problems, Phil. Okay. All right. Thank you very much everybody.