 Good morning and welcome to the 7th meeting in 2018 of the Finance and Constitution Committee. Just to let folks know, James Kelly may join us as we proceed this morning. James has been a bit delayed because of the weather conditions, I think, on the rail side of things, so hopefully he'll be able to make it at least part of our proceedings. The usual story for mobile phones, please, please put them in the mode that won't interfere with our proceedings. The first item on our agenda this morning is to take evidence on the planning Scotland Bill financial memorandum. We are joined for this session by Tammie Swift-Adams, who is the director of planning of homes for Scotland, David Wood, who is the manager of the planning and policy at Paz, Craig McLaren, who is the convener of the Royal Town Planning Institute for Scotland, and John Hamilton, who is the chair of the Scottish Property Federation. Welcome to you all and thank you for coming along this morning to take part in the proceedings. We'll just get straight into questions. There are a number of issues raised in your various written submissions, including issues around the funding of local place plans, the introduction of an infrastructure levy, the level of detail that might appear in secondary legislation etc. I wonder if each of you could outline what you consider to be your main concern regarding the estimates contained in the financial memorandum or any of the proposals therein. Who would like to kick that off? David, fire away. Good morning, committee, and thanks for having inviting Paz to give evidence. I'll keep this fairly short. As you probably know, we are a charity and social enterprise operating throughout Scotland, and our main remit is to help local people, local communities get involved in the planning system and the places around them. We very much see the planning reform agenda as part of the whole community empowerment agenda from Scottish Government about giving local people a voice in their places. Our specific interest in the financial memorandum was in the local place plans aspect, as you will see. We think that that is a very exciting opportunity for people to get involved at a local level in plan making in their places. We have commented on resourcing, which I think will come back to, and we very much see that resourcing question as part of the whole wider context, which a lot of respondents have mentioned about the resourcing of the planning system in order to make reform successful and achieve the aim of having a public trust and more local involvement in the planning system. In terms of the financial memorandum, I think that there are key aspects of the reform that are still to be worked out in detail and that the financial memorandum has not really been able to cost the levees, an example of that, but also the way in which planning fees are put in place in the future and also the cost to all parties for collaborative development planning. So the financial memorandum hasn't been able to cost those, so it doesn't really serve as a very useful tool to look at what will the overall cost be on developers and development, but on other sectors as well. I know that there is concern along quite a lot of parties that it doesn't help local authorities gear up for a more collaborative, more proactive planning system, and there's a risk of it being used by local authorities to find cost savings or cuts to departments, which I'm sure others will mention. I think that our main concern is potentially the nature of the infrastructure levy that's been described in the financial memorandum and the policy memorandum. It's not what we'd envisaged through the planning review process, which is an ability to have a clearer approach to developer contributions to pool that and spend that across a local authority area or maybe a sub-region. It's more along the land value tax model, which isn't something that's been significantly discussed to date, so I'd say that the nature of the levy is our main concern. Yeah, thank you. Good morning. I suppose that our concern or the issue that you'd like to highlight initially is the fact that there's a bit of a lack of clarity in terms of the resourcing for the planning system through the financial memorandum and what this new planning system will look like. The planning service and the planning system is under a hell of a lot of scrutiny just now and there's a lot of issues in terms of the resourcing. I could give you some figures to give you an example of that. In the last, since 2009, we've seen a 23 per cent decrease in planning staff in local authorities. We have seen, just according to the figures published by the improvement service recently, a decrease of 33 per cent in investment over the last seven years in planning services. It's one of the highest decreases across all services in local government. We've done some work from the Scottish Government figures that show that the average amount of money from a local authority budget that goes into a planning service just now in development management and development planning is 0.44 per cent of the total budget. That's combined with the fact that, if you pay a planning fee for a planning application, it only meets 63 per cent of the cost of processing that application. We're in very difficult times and we're heading towards a crisis in terms of resource in the planning system. We need to make sure that the financial memorandum gives us some clarity. We're worried that some aspects of it don't provide that. An example of that is the bit in it that talks about a saving between £17 million and £25.5 million from moving from five-year development plans to ten-year development plans. That's not a saving because that money will still be needed to deliver the development plans. Some people have read it as a saving and I'm particularly worried that financial directors in local authorities will see it as a saving because it shouldn't be. That clarity against that backdrop of increasing and severe pressures on resourcing in planning authorities is the key issue for us. Good morning. I'm the former chair of the SPF. I was also a member of the independent panel set up by the Scottish Government in 2016 for the review of the planning system. The SPF's main concerns are similar to what Tami outlined in terms of infrastructure and the lack of detail in the financial memorandum and, indeed, in the draft bill on how infrastructure is to be funded. The way that costs have been calculated in the financial memorandum in the absence of any analysis on economic benefits is that there are substantial cost estimates that are included in the memorandum that move towards developers and private sector funding. Without having a wider analysis of how the viability of projects will be taken forward and what the economic benefits or the changes that have been considered, it is difficult to get a view as to whether or not the proposed legislation is going to have the benefits that are intended. In the planning review, there were fairly firm recommendations. There were a number of quite strong recommendations concerning the creation of an infrastructure agency or an infrastructure commission. We are concerned that those are absent from the draft bill and are not dealt with in the financial memorandum. I think that those are quite serious omissions from the original report that was made in 2016 on how the bill is now being taken forward. Obviously, our job is around the financial memorandum, not so much the policy content, but the infrastructure—I will come to Murdo Fraser in a minute on that issue—at paragraph 87 in the financial memorandum outlines how the Government would intend to take that discussion forward before making use of the powers. Ministers are committed to undertaking a full assessment and collaboration with COSLA and other stakeholders as they go on to talk about viability of developments, economic growth issues and what the regulations will be. Do you accept that the Government recognises that there is still significant further work to be done here in recognising some of the concerns that you have raised and that they have outlined how they intend to deal with that in the memorandum? Yes, we acknowledge that there are proposals there that would be taken through a secondary legislation. We feel that the timing of the bill, we feel that more work should have been done on what the output and the reality of the proposals would be without necessarily proceeding with primary legislation with those matters not dealt with. Have we got this right that they are only at this stage giving themselves an enabling power and committing themselves to that full assessment that you are asking for? Am I right in that? Well yes, except for, as I said, there are omissions that we feel are important to be taking forward on the creation of an infrastructure agency. We feel that those are key points that should have been given more clarity and more importance at this stage of the bill. I am interested in following up some of the points that the conveners have already raised about the infrastructure levy. I think that we will be familiar with the section 75 procedure, whereby local authorities will seek to gain developer contributions for infrastructure, for education and for various other local amenities. That is clearly intended to be an infrastructure levy that will be on top of that, because I cannot imagine that local authorities, Mr McLaren is nodding, will want to lose any income from developer contributions. Can you say any more about what sense you have been given about what sort of rate that infrastructure levy might be set out or is that something that is still to be determined? There hasn't been any clear information on what the rate might be, but there's a clear indication that it's intended to be based on a proportion of the land value that arises through planning. We'll see that at vary depending on the type of development and where it is, but it's that issue that's one of our main concerns. We were anticipating a levy similar to SIL in England that's based on a costed assessment of what infrastructure is needed to support development in the area, and then that cost balanced against the viability of bringing forward development in a particular area. It's not dissimilar or that far removed from section 75 or section 106 in England. What's set out as the anticipated model in the financial memorandum and the policy memorandum is something based on land value uplift, as I say. That's quite a significant departure in the policy approach to developer contributions, which is partly why we think that this bill is premature. There's been discussions on a levy, but never any discussions on the levy being put in place on that basis. One of the things that the financial memorandum and the research into the infrastructure levy says that there will be roughly between £30 million to £70 million generated a year by it. I keep being told by people who are closer to them than I am that that's about two and a half schools, which isn't exactly the transformational change that we need in terms of infrastructure. Infrastructure is incredibly important. I talked to members from RTPI, from the private sector and from the public sector. They both tell me that they cannot afford to fund the schools, the nurseries, the doctor's surgeries, the roads, the infrastructure that we need. It's getting to a bit of a crux point. We're getting to the stage where there's large housing developments going through the planning system and no-one can afford that infrastructure. Is that your question? Sorry to interrupt. You mentioned a figure that's been talked about. Who's talking about that? Where's that information? That was in research published by Scottish Government, which is undertaken by Peter Brett Associates. It's on the Scottish Government website, which looks behind the infrastructure levy. I suppose that my point is that we need something different, which is going to provide a much bigger pot to allow us to have that transformational change in terms of infrastructure, because no-one's got the cast just now, no-one's got the money. We need to see how that works. Cotami's mentioned stuff like land value uplift. I think that Scottish Government are interested in that. They're looking at it. Land value uplift, where if you give planning permission to someone, rises because of that permission, because it's got a particular use. That's about seeing how you can retain some of that money and use that for infrastructure and the public good, not just for the person who owns the land. Sorry, Mr McLean. I just wanted to try and get a better understanding of this. I'm not clear whether the infrastructure levy is money that will be collected to a central pot and then distributed, for example, to local authorities through the normal disbursement process, or whether it will be collected at a local level and tied to specific development projects in the vicinity of any particular land that's being developed. Can you provide any clarity on that, or is that still on the ground? My understanding is that it will be centralised in section 75 of agreement, but we're still collecting that at a local level. I agree that that was a recommendation made in 2016 that the collection would be centralised. I think that there's a question being raised, though, as to who would collect the contributions. I believe that there are paternal issues with whether the central Government has the powers to raise that sort of funding or whether it would be collected by at local authority level. The SPF would have a major concern with the collection being made at local authority level rather than at central level. That has proven to be a problem in England with SIL contributions. We would anticipate that if contributions have been collected through local authorities, they'll be seen as another layer of section 75 contributions, and it'll be difficult to get accountability at a national or a regional level as to how that money has been collected and spent. It's another example of how the levy, as envisaged in the papers, is different to the one that we were assuming would come forward through consultation. The problem with infrastructure, in terms of the money that's collected and spent locally at the moment, the problem is that you can't sometimes pool that in the way that authorities at the local and sub-regional level might like to do. There's an obvious problem there that there's an opportunity to overcome. The levy in here goes far beyond that by saying that local authorities would collect the money, but it would then go centrally to the Government who would redistribute it around Scotland, not necessarily back to where the contributions arose for, which is a big policy departure. It also says that, in paragraph 89 of the financial memorandum, the envisaged infrastructure level would aim to capture a proportion of the increase in land value attributed to development, and the levy receipts would be used to fund infrastructure that supports the development. That would seem to suggest that the money, although it's being raised nationally, is actually being applied locally to support the development that's on-going. Is that not right? Is that not what you understand as well, Tammy? It's what's envisaged, but it's not what's set out in the bills, so the bill powers, and I guess it's just to keep options open, you could come forward with any type of levy, so that's the policy intention set out. That might be a question that is even more for the minister than for the panel, but I'm interested to get your view on it. If it's in effect a new levy being collected centrally, coming to the Scottish Government being dispersed on a basis that we don't currently know, if I were the finance secretary in the Scottish Government, I might think that this is a bonus extra cash I'm getting, and I can displace funding that I was going to put into infrastructure and spend on other things and just use this money instead. In effect, it wouldn't be putting any new money into infrastructure, it's just replacing money that's already there. Is that a legitimate concern or am I chasing here's? I think that that's a concern in the absence of an accountable body who would be in charge of accounting for that level of income. That's why we've felt that an infrastructure commission in the absence of an infrastructure agency would be essential to have that accountability. I agree that you have to guard against that being sucked up in the Scottish Government using it as a replacement. One of the things that is perhaps missing from the debate is how that could be made to work at a regional level, with that intermediate between the local level and the Scottish Government level, because it's meant to be a bit strategic infrastructure. The problem with that is that the bill is proposed and is trying to get rid of strategic development plan authorities. We need to make sure that we get arrangements in place at that level, which I think could help with the disbursement and the collection of the infrastructure levy, if it goes ahead. Good morning. I will quickly follow up on that last point that Mr Hamilton and Murdo Fraser were discussing there. Mr Hamilton said that there would need to be an accountable body. The Scottish Government is an accountable body. It's democratically accountable to this Parliament for decisions that it makes, including potentially the decision that it wants to spend additional money on other things that the community also needs, other forms of public spending. What kind of accountable body are you talking about that would be more democratically accountable than Government is to Parliament? Well, the question has been asked of us by MSPs and panel, so it's not only a question which the SPF are making. I think that I'd also referred to key agencies in the planning system and in the development process. There are numerous agencies involved in making contributions towards development. There are public funds available to those agencies. There are also private bodies, utility companies who are required to be funded and make investment in the planning system without having an overall co-ordination or any body that is co-ordinating public sector and private sector funding in the development process. I think that that will present challenges. Yes, I appreciate that. All of those agencies and other bodies are further steps removed from the democratic accountability that the Government has to Parliament. You said that there would need to be an accountable body. How would it be more democratically accountable than Government is? Well, as I said, we haven't directly raised the question of democracy, we've raised it at the point about accountability and how that funding is spent. Are they different? Well, another example that can be made is planning fees. Planning fees are collected at local authority level. There's no compulsion in local authorities to their democratically elected bodies. They're not compelled to use planning fees directly 100 per cent in the planning system. The point has been made here that there could be no real difference between that position and the collection of infrastructure levies. It will be outwith the remit of the collecting bodies. If there's no compulsion to spend that money in infrastructure and identify programmes, then the money won't be spent there. Sorry, I still struggled to see how there's a lack of accountability in that kind of decision. Ivan, somebody else wants to respond to that, perhaps at six points. In terms of accountability, somebody needs to be accountable for delivering infrastructure. I think that's what's missing from the planning system at the moment. What we found under the SEAL model in England is that because it's the local authorities that put SEAL charges in place, put the levies in place and then collect the monies, they effectively become responsible for delivering infrastructure in a way that they weren't before. It's not a role that they've been able to gear up to. That's partly made the levy in England a barrier to development rather than an enabler of it. In terms of accountability, I think what's important here is, and I understand the point about democracy, but if the democratically elected local authorities aren't able to or perhaps don't want to become infrastructure deliverers, somebody else needs to take on that role, that body doesn't exist at the moment, and they would need to be held accountable to making sure the money raised for infrastructure was spent on it in time for delivery. I think that there is an accountability, an accountable body missing at the moment, and I don't think that local authorities are probably the best place people to take on that role. Thanks, convener, and thanks, panel, for struggling through the snow this morning. At the two or three points that I wanted to pick up on, first of all, on the infrastructure levy, and I appreciate very much what Mr McLaren is saying. Certainly in my own constituency we have examples of significantly large housing developments that continue to be built with absolutely no plans for schools, doctors, etc., to be incorporated, to community centres to be incorporated in those. That is a significant issue. Just to clarify, are you saying that the numbers in the financial memorandum—the 35 to 75 million a year—is not large enough to support what needs to be done in the youth that that number should be bigger? The numbers that came from the research are 30 million to 70 million. They are the same numbers in the financial memorandum? Yes. When the modelling was done, people thought that that is not quite the level that we need. If we are going to have some transformational changes in terms of infrastructure, we need a bigger investment. Just wanted to clarify, the figures in the memorandum are not intended to show what additional money is needed to plug the gap between what money comes from development now and what more is needed to fund infrastructure. It is just to show, indicatively, on a levy, assuming that you want it to be put in place on a viable and viable level that allows development to continue. That is what is envisaged, which could be raised over and above what already comes from section 75. There are two answers to the question. Know the money in the figure in there is not enough to fund Scotland infrastructure needs, but know that does not mean that that figure should be higher. It means that there is another figure somewhere else that is the gap between what can viably come through development contributions and the rest of the money that is needed to fund infrastructure. We have not seen at the moment a modelling of the national infrastructure needs that you can use to see what that other figure or that gap is, but the answer is not just increasing what comes from developer contributions. You have to do it responsibly in the way that research is done and look at what is viable, what is the maximum potential to take from development and then... No, I understand, but wherever the money comes from, there is a gap between what is envisaged will be raised and what you are saying is required and whether that comes from core Scottish Government funding or whatever, I understand that point. Moving on to the second issue that I wanted to raise with Mr Hamilton about a comment on the financial memorandum that I am reading here. It says that the Scottish Property Federation estimated that project costs in some cases could be reduced by 25 to 30 per cent. Is that something that you recognise and it will obviously come from yourselves, I believe, but that does not seem to appear in the financial memorandum anywhere or am I missing something? I am not quite sure about the context of that statement. We do not anticipate a reduction in the cost of development in terms of infrastructure. We would agree with the position that Craig takes in terms of the scale of development. I work on the development of my day job, a development of about three and a half thousand houses now. The infrastructure spend and section 75 contributions on that project amount to close to 140 million. In scale, potentially per house, we are talking about infrastructure and planning gain costs of typically £30,000 or £40,000 per house. That goes nowhere near the figures that are set out in the memorandum as to the amount of funding that will be produced through the new legislation. I am sure that I understand that, but I will leave that to one side. I am focusing on the point about project costs. You are saying that you do not recognise that core that is in the financial memorandum? No, I do not recognise that. Scottish Property Federation has estimated that reducing delays and providing greater certainty to developers as the reforms are intended to do could reduce project costs in some cases by 25 to 30 per cent. I think that that is where we are looking at the potential for making efficiencies in the planning system and making earlier delivery. I think that what we are commenting on there is typically with house-building organisations where they have a large number of projects and they have to make plans around what prospects they have of securing planning consent in time. Organisations such as companies like that have an annual business plan and they have to focus on what business they can deliver in every year. I think that what has been said there is that if we have improvements in planning the planning service to improve the time for consenting, planning along with all other consents that are required for development, then that potentially could reduce operational costs. That is correct. It would be in that case where there are improved efficiencies. The legislation does not intend to create a better planning service, but we do not want to confuse where we think that added costs have been added in infrastructure. No, I am not talking about infrastructure, but I am talking about specific projects. Yes. I would say that operational costs would be where that saving would be made. Right. Do you have any idea how much that might come to you, because as far as I can see it is not included anywhere in the financial memorandum? No, I think that for a house-building organisation the main savings that will be achieved there would be in the business overheads. Most of the big UK house-buildings now operate on a regional level. If they are built, they may have £100 million worth of business in each region in the larger companies, and their overhead level could be something like £7.8 million as part of that business. If they did achieve a 25 per cent improvement in that, each of those companies could achieve £2 million in savings. You are talking about a reasonably significant number. It would be here, with that improvement in efficiency. Okay. Is that in the last… Sorry. I just want to say that, obviously, from the Hones of Scotland perspective, there are other costs arising from the bill that are not in the financial memorandum that would fall on the private sector. It might not be an individual project cost, but beyond the levy that we have already talked about and the increase in developer contributions, there are potentially going to be increases in planning fees as they are set now, as well as fees for other types of development management activity, including some of the work undertaken and funded by the Scottish Government at the moment. There is also going to be additional costs for preparing sites to promote them into a plan, particularly viability assessments. There are other costs as well, just in terms of the culture that we all know that we need to move towards. If we want planning to be a more positive, collaborative and productive process, that includes the costs of collaborating with the public sector and communities in the preparation of the NPF and LDFs, but also offering peer or customer input on performance work and making a contribution to councillor training. I think that you need to look beyond the traditional planning things that happen at the moment, such as planning applications and site promotion for plans. The house building sector knows that there is a lot more work that needs to be done to make planning work for them and for others. Again, none of that is costed, only the levy is costed in the financial memorandum, but all those other costs exist. Those are additional costs that would incur to developers where they are able to go through. Yes, those are things that do not cost money now that will in the future. Right, so just to recap on that, in terms of the financial memorandum, there is a bit missing here, which is the savings and project costs that is not included, and there is also a bit missing in terms of the additional costs that developers would have to incur to comply with the planning bill. So there are at least two things missing. David Wharton was in as well climbing. Yes, just to quickly follow on from Tammy, I think that it is really worth remembering that the whole issues of the planning reform process, housing and infrastructure and public trust are all linked up. A lot of public concern about new developments often expressed through the provision of infrastructure, so I think that we can see getting the infrastructure question right as almost a matter of preventative spend, you know, allowing development to be delivered more effectively and with an element of public trust if we can get this infrastructure question right. Okay, sorry, and just final point, I think against Mr McLaren's probably, as mentioned already, when we're looking at what's on here for the planning authority, the local authority savings, there's a number in there and I think it actually says it's a notional number. So I think what they're saying there, correct me if I'm wrong, is that if you add up all the time saving, notional time saving and cost of it, you would come to this kind of number. And I think it also says, as you rightly said, that that doesn't necessarily mean that you can extract that number from the budget, because what it should mean is that there's that value of time available for planners to then spend on other things, which in theory should, I would expect, relieve the pressure that the planning system is under in other areas. Is that kind of how you would interpret that? Yeah, I think that the key figure in there is for the move from five-year, statutory five-year development plans to 10-year development plans, and that's something we've supported because it means you're not a constant, we want a constant cycle of us producing a new plan all the time, and plans don't change that much, to be honest with, there's certainly areas and places which will change. So that move to 10-year cycle is a good thing, but the premise of that was that it would free up staff from producing and consulting on a development plan to actually deliver the development plan. The slight worrying thing for us is that the way it can be sometimes read within the financial memorandum is that it's a saving, because it's no longer attributed to a statutory function of the planning service, because the statutory function is the production of the development plan, not the delivery of it. And I think that we need to make sure that the Scottish Government and others make that clear, that there's not really a saving there at all, it's actually just transferring that from production to delivery. That's a really important point. Okay, thank you very much, thank you. Alexander? Thank you, convener. Can I note my register of interests around development, house building and construction? Good morning, pal. Tammy, in the Homes for Scotland submission in 4.6, you mentioned concerns over no improvement or worse reduction in service and the consequence of a slowing of delivery homes. Does wonder on this and the wider bill do you foresee an improved or an impaired delivery for what's being proposed? I don't think that there's anything in the bill that provides any that could provide us with confidence that planning performance and particularly the way in which planning services support the delivery of new homes is going to improve. I think there's a huge amount of reliance on work that happens outside of the legislative framework, more collaborative work, but there's not anything in place at the moment that guarantees home builders will have more of a role in development planning, which we think would help with making them more delivery-focused. In terms of what's on the face of the bill at the moment, no, and I think that's what we answered in the question. It's not guaranteed to help to deliver more homes. Thank you. I think that there's an important point that we made here about how you measure the success of the planning system. There's different criteria that are used. The one that seems to be used generally is the speed of processing planning applications. That is important, undoubtedly it is, but there are other things that are important as well. The outcome that the decision has achieved is incredibly important as well. There's a thing called planning performance frameworks, which are published by every local planning authority annually, which looks at a number of criteria and shows how they are performing against that, and they are marked by the Scottish Government. I think that what we have seen over that peak over the past year, four years, is that there has been an improvement in terms of the range of different criteria that are in there. There's still work to be done, undoubtedly there's still work to be done. I think that we all appreciate that. There's work to be done in improving the time skills for processing planning applications as well. Again, we need to try and make sure that we invest in that. Just now, there's very little money invested in that by the Scottish Government. Local authorities put some money into a pot with improvement service, which is matched by the Scottish Government, which goes some way to it. We've seen, for example, in England that there's been a new delivery fund announced of £25 million, which is to help people to deliver housing. That's focused on things such as how you can increase partnership working, how you can introduce innovation in your processes and your services, and how you can improve the design of places as well. We've got nothing of that scale in Scotland just now. I know that it's difficult and I'd love to have something like that, because I think that it could make a difference and it could be a bit of a game changer as well. I just want to ask about cost to communities. I note that the Royal Town Planning Institute has said that it's concerned about the failures of the financial memorandum to offer an estimated total cost of production of local place plans. Scotland has said that communities must be resourced to deliver local place plans. There's an estimate costing nearly £12 million to communities in the financial memorandum. Can I just ask the panel, is that a realistic figure and is it a fair burden to put on local communities? I'll take that first, if that's okay. I think that the money, the £12,000, £13,000 in the financial memorandum, is not necessarily to communities but the cost of supporting communities to produce local place plans. That's based on figures from down south on how they've taken forward neighbourhood planning. I think that the fact of the matter is that neighbourhood planning is a different thing from local place plans. There are similarities but differences. In Scotland, we've tended to go across the route of using charrettes, community focus workshops, taking place over three or four days, to start that discussion, to start that dialogue about what people want, what people don't want, what the constraints are, what the opportunities are and who does what in taking that forward. From what we can hear, they cost between £20,000 and £40,000 per event. If you take an average of £30,000 for them and you want to have a number of local place plans in each local authority, off the top of my head, if you're saying there's going to be three local place plans in each local authority, that's roughly 100 local place plans, that's £3 million all of a sudden. There's an issue to be looked at there as to how that can be funded. If there has to be a prioritisation in that, we would argue that it has to be best to go to those areas where there's going to be most change and probably those areas where there's less support, more disadvantaged areas, more areas which actually need to benefit from planning as well. There's a lack of—there's not a figure from Scottish Company. It would be good to hear what their figure is for Scotland as a whole, not just basing it upon the neighbourhood plans. Back up what Craig has said about the approach being used in Scotland, I think being a different approach from the neighbourhood plans. A key part of our work over the last four or five years has been, as a third sector organisation, has been helping communities, facilitating them to deliver what could arguably be called community-led plans. The project that we did with Isle of Rhum Community Trust was the example that the Government gave in the early planning review document. I agree that we agree that the figure that has been given in the financial memorandum is probably too low, particularly if the Government wants to continue the robust, charret-based approach, which we understand the Government does. This year's charret funding has been tilted towards local place plans. I think that if there's going to be public trust and robust engagement, a plan that is an outcome that the local authority is going to have trust in and respect for them, there needs to be funding that has been quoted in the financial memorandum that needs to be looked at. The £12 million figure cost to communities in the financial memorandum, I think that a lot of that is based on costed volunteer time rather than on actual money available to those communities. Like other stakeholders, Homes of Scotland and our members know that those local place plans have to work if they are going to make communities be more proactively, positively involved in planning and more positively involved in development as a consequence. I'm concerned that beyond that costed volunteer time, there isn't any firm money on the table in terms of the Scottish Government's support for neighbourhood planning. I think that there's huge amounts of money being spent in England on supporting neighbourhood planning, that's been several million pounds a year. I think that it would be helpful if the financial memorandum was able to give more positive confirmation that support of some form and hopefully the scale of that support will be forthcoming from the Scottish Government. There is some comment in the narrative giving examples of where the Scottish Government supports communities at the moment, but it's relatively small amounts that are spent on some design-focused activities at the moment. Communities, but the wider development community as well, need to see what level of support the Government is going to put into brand new examples of activity such as local place plans. Can I come in again, just to something else that has been said? Those local place plans are really important. They are one of the game-changing elements of the planning bill, and we need to make sure that they work, as has been said previously. One of the issues that we have is that there's a need to try to better link spatial planning approaches with community planning, which takes place across the public sector as well, and there may be opportunities through the local place plans to join some of that thinking up in terms of how public sector organisations work together to engage with them and work with the communities and then how they consider and take forward what's been generated by that consultation and see how that's split up amongst the different organisations and departments and local authorities as well. There could be some sort of saving in that, but that's very much what it depends on the idea of place making and communities being at the heart of community planning as well. I'd like to add that the emphasis on early engagement that's been recommended through the new bill ties very closely to the idea of place making Scotland. The charret process is not adequately funded in our view and isn't directly linked to local development plans as such. It's very much a parallel process. There's a very large number of registered community bodies in Scotland. I think that we became aware that there are something close to 2,000 registered community councils or community organisations. The amount of funding that's put through those organisations in general is extremely low. There's a high reliance on voluntary action through communities and there's a great deal of range between the activities and the time that people invest in those communities. In our view, to match the recommendations and early engagement, we feel that there has to be a more formal means of providing support directly into communities for local place planning. John, there's an interesting point that you make about LDPs and charrettes being similar in terms of what they do. Obviously, I've been involved in the charrette and calendar in my constituency and it's a very in-depth process that takes place over a number of days involving lots of workshops across the community. For a long period of time, it involves eventually the production of a high-quality report by the consultants involved and then further consultation at the end of all that. From what I read from material here, the LDPs are not meant to be at that level, which is almost an LDP part of the process, because the LDPs are supposed to feed into the LDPs in the future. To compare it with the charrettes, is it fair to compare the charrette process with the LDP process that's envisaged? The point's well-made. The charrettes are almost an ad hoc process, which in many cases is something that's promoted either through local communities having a voice through their own councillors to raise concerns, but it's an ad hoc process. It's not embodied in the planning system. We feel a wider, possibly more portable process. I'm not quite sure how I would describe this, but it's something that could be applied more widely throughout communities, especially where housing growth is a requirement. I apologise to Neil Hamilton for interrupting the minister's question session. Can I just follow up on something that Mr McLaren said about prioritisation of funding for deprived communities? Obviously, we've received evidence from Planetary Scotland as well, concerned about more deprived communities being less able to find the means to fund preparation of local place plans. Specifically about how we best support the deprived communities and whether the rest of the panel agree about prioritisation of funding for more deprived communities and if there's anything else that needs to be done to ensure that the poorest communities engage fully in what has been proposed. I think that the legislation is not going to cover that. The legislation is going to say that any community should have the right to prepare a local place plan and rightly so. It might have to be the case that either at national level or local authority level decisions should we prioritise a local place plan towards a particular community. We know that there may be capacity or desire or it may have been identified through community planning engagement. There would be a desire to take forward a local place plan, but I think that that's a aspiration that probably can't be put in the bill that has to be a discussion once the legislation is in place. You wouldn't want to limit too early where you were going to support local place plans as well as deprived communities. We need to see local place plans coming forward in the areas that are under the greatest development pressure, which is often the opposite of the deprived communities. They are part of a planning solution to a situation at the moment where the planning system is not delivering enough new homes. We know that community views and community concerns are part of the reason for that. If we don't support local place planning in the areas where there is that conflict at the moment, we are missing a trick. In my mind, everyone should have the opportunity to produce a local place plan. I don't think that all the resources for every community to do that is why I mentioned prioritisation. The reason I said that was because I felt that some of those areas would have less capacity to deliver that. They will also have less capacity to maybe crowdfund some money to do it as well and they will need more intensive work. There might be more of a need to generate some of the discussion around that as well, so that's why I think that there should be some priority towards some of those more disadvantaged areas. In many ways, the areas that need change are what planning is all about. Planning is about facilitating change. We agree with that. Local communities want to be engaged in the planning process. They should have the financial means of doing that. That won't apply to every community. There isn't an intention here to create a full, further tier of the planning system. Part of the recommendations in the review were to streamline planning and make it more efficient, but at the same time to allow local communities to be engaged where that's intended or is wanted by the local community. However, that will require some financial commitment from government level as well as voluntary services. There will be further costs on the development sector and the engagement proposals that have been recommended as well. It's still on the local police plan, so I could ask you to clarify a few things that I've just listened to. Paragraph 58 in the memorandum talks about the estimate that it's provided to help to support the development of the place plans, and it puts that figure around £13,000, and it takes that evidence from the knowledge that we have about coalfields regeneration trusts, which I'm reasonably familiar with from East Ayrshire. Are you saying from your evidence, your experience, that that figure is far too low? Could you tell us what examples you've perhaps worked with in Scotland that would suggest that it might be higher? I think that there is a general trend coming through in the responses that the figure probably is a bit too low. I don't think that local police plans have to cost the earth. Also, the more efficient you become, albeit that some communities may only do it once and it then lasts for a certain amount of time. I think that the Scottish Government has tried to do something new through rolling out the charrette approach. Although we don't necessarily want to be saying that a local police plan has to be a charrette, as I said, some of the projects that we have led are essentially local police plans. There is to manage a project like that. More than double, to be honest, of what the figure is quoted there is what is realistic, £25,000 to £30,000, possibly more, and it is leaf-creative that quotes the figures of £40,000 that they were funded to do an urban-based, in-depth charrette process. It is difficult to be prescriptive because every local police plan will be quite different depending on the circumstances. However, as Craig and Tammy have said, John is quite a big change to the planning system and how planning is going to be done. We should be realistic and ambitious about the resourcing that needs to go into it. One discussion that we have had organisationally is whether all the local authority funding that is going to be directed towards local police plans will all have to come from planning, because planning cuts across so many different aspects of public life and transport. I am involved in leading a community project. Adam Brown, I know that you have to look across the local authority to see where you might leave our funding from, and sometimes it might well be roads as well as planning sections. I will pick up on that point. For a local police plan to be meaningful, it has to address quite a broad range of topics that are addressed in local development plans. Planning being the sort of generic heading but environment, ecology, utilities, drainage and water, transport, education and health. For all those matters to be addressed in a local police plan, when you begin to break that down, you can see that £13,000 is probably quite a low figure. It is difficult to put a number on it, because it is going to change from place to place naturally. On average, we would expect that for a meaningful development report to be put together for communities, we would expect something in excess of £25,000 to £30,000, I would have thought. The figure that we have been quoting between £20,000 and £40,000 is just anecdotally from talking to different people as to what it has cost for surets. It is important to bear in mind that this is a fundamental part of trying to reconfigure the planning system to make it a much more front-loading and proactive service, where you try to get discussions about what people want in their community, contextualise the framework, the resourcing framework, the policy framework and the practical framework that they find themselves in. We cannot just use stick-and-plaster money for this, but we have to invest in it properly and it has to be done properly, because it will give a really good fundamental base for the way in which that place will develop over time. As John says and has already been said as well, and I have mentioned it myself, the idea of trying to link community planning and spatial planning, community engagement exercises through surets has got some mileage in it. Paz has already done some work called culture plus, which is not just looking at the planning issues, but at the issues and the whole round of those areas. Then figuring out how we should take that forward. Is that a planning issue that we should look at through the development plan? Is it something to be done through social work or education or whatever? There is some scope to join some of that up through the community planning process, but we need to try and get some support to try and push that as a principle across community planning partnerships as well. Have you got any examples that you can tell me specifically where that kind of cost indicator is a valid one? We are about to ask the minister this when he comes in. The only figures that I have got around the memorandum and the real examples from the Coalfields Regeneration Trust set around between £10,000 and £15,000 for those plans. Where in Scotland, apart from the leaf example, have you mentioned where else are we seeing local plans like this? I am not sure that we would be given that kind of cost indicator. As you have answered that question, can I just reflect on my constituency? I have to bring to bear what I know. Right across my constituency, in villages, towns and a bit of the urban of Stirling, there are communities right now doing future planning for themselves, producing local plans for themselves, producing local vision documents for what they need for the future. I might be lucky in my part of the world that goes on quite a bit. I am sure that in other places it does not. While those do not, through statutory means, have an impact on the local development plan, local authorities that are sensitive to these things are taking those on board already. A lot of this work is already going on at a low level in Scotland. As far as I can understand from the legislation, what we are doing is trying to turn some of that into a process that actually feeds the system on a statutory basis for people who feel that they have a better right. Currently, if I have got this right, there are many local authorities in the national parks who are already giving officer time to this activity. If that is already going on and it is already happening, some of those costs are already in the system. Is that not the case? For example, in the area that you have talked about in Loch Lomond and in Calender, as far as I am aware, the shirets that you have been responsible for— There is no just shirets. I understand that. There is a lower level in the shiret process. I will come back to that. The shirets themselves have been funded through the Scottish Government mainstreaming shirets programme, so there are some figures for that. The Scottish Government provides some money and has been leveraged from elsewhere, so there might be some costings that you could get from that. PAS has done some work as well, which you can look at as well. I think that your point about how the low-level stuff is going on is a very good point. We should not forget about that. There is a lot of work going on across communities trying to figure out what they want for their communities, and that is fed into the development plan system and the planning system. You are right—we should not forget that. We should be encouraging that. I think that the local place plans, as you say, are just formalising some of that. That means that the local place plans are best placed if they are at the start of the development plan process and they are inputting to it. One of the issues that we may have with local place plans is if they come along once the development plan has been published and how you square the local place plan with the local development plan if there are issues. The problem that I am trying to make is that a lot of the costs that we are talking about in some areas are already being met and supported by local authority activity, by officer time or national park time or in other ways. Some of those costs are already in the system. I think that you are right, but one of the ambitions of the planning bill is to further enhance community engagement in the system, so we need to support that as best we can. That stuff is all very valid and it is all very good, but we need to try to get more people involved. It is important to note that this is meant to put the decision on whether you produce a plan and what type of plan you produce into the hands of communities. That would be activity over and above anything that is already being led by local authorities. The way in which local place plans have been set out is very flexible. It is almost limitless in what local communities could try and do with a local place plan, but it will be limited by funds. At the very least, communities will want to produce plans that are not going to be part of the development plan, but if communities want them to be, they need to be producing something that is development plan ready. There is no point in spending limited about money on a plan that, if the community then wants to promote that into the local development plan at a later stage, finds that it cannot do because the robust assessment that a local authority would have to have done has not been done, having looked at impacts or options or viability, so I would not want to limit what a place plan could do. Patrick, I am delighted that your constituents are so much happier with the planning process than mine are, but I was on the committee possibly in this room that led to the scrutiny on the 2006 legislation, the last major planning act. There was a lot of talk then about upfront involvement and proactive front-loaded participation, and it all sounds very familiar. It does not just happen, and it has come across through from all your comments so far. It does not just happen, but it needs to be resourced. I have two specific questions about the way that it ought to be resourced. One is about who gets to direct that activity, who gets to organise and be responsible for financing that activity as well. Do we direct resources if we can down to community bodies, given that in some parts of the country there is a healthy scepticism about a local council-led process and people feeling led to where the council wants them to go on local plans or, indeed, about a developer-led consultation process in relation to specific events and people again feeling that they are being led in a particular way? Should we be committing resources directly through community bodies? Secondly, where that should come from, I am a little sceptical that the shift to 10-year local development planning cycles will save as much as is being predicted, whether that resource will just be spent in a different way, or indeed whether local development plans being regarded as out of date might lead to more in the way of disputes and conflict, which could increase costs. However, if there is any saving from that process at all, is that not a potential way? Shouldn't we be redirecting money that is saved from that 10-year cycle into funding communities to engage in the activity that we are looking for? In terms of the 2006 act, even within industry, we would agree that the intent that was made there on consultation was not delivered because, primarily, it created a one-way process where obligations were put on the applicant to go through a process that was not necessarily being received by the community. In the new proposals, we can see that it is intended that there would be more of a two-way process and that it would be more like real engagement. However, at the same time, the other party, the community, has to be well organised and has to be financed or resourced to be able to be engaged in that. In terms of the question that was being asked about communities that are already engaged, we are aware that there are some communities that are very active and I am aware that an example would be Kilmarnock, where they have been proactive and created their place plan and have been well received by the local authority. In some other instances, I am also aware of other communities in different local authorities who have spent a lot of time and effort putting their own vision together on place and it has not been well received by the local authority and it has had no hearing at all in the local development plan. For each of those communities to have an equal standing, there has to be more of a formalisation on how they would be financed and resourced to be able to produce their own place plans. I think that your point about the 2006 act makes it even more important that we get it right this time because there was research published last year commissioned by the Scottish Government which looked at the perceptions of the planning system from communities which did not paint a particularly good picture for planning and I want to change that. I think that it is a profession and we want to change that as well. One of the things that I would like to say is that moving away from a situation where the main times that people engage with the planning system is when they have to object to something. It would be better if we had a system where we actually got together at the start of the process and talked about what we wanted for an area, not what we didn't want and this is where the local place plans can be incredibly useful on the charrettes more generally and a more front loaded and proactive approach can work much better and from there we'd come to agreements and what we want and who does what, who's resourcing what as well. So I think that it is important that I take your point there and we need to get it right. In terms of resourcing, we've already seen some of the Scottish Government main streaming charrettes programme being commissioned directly by community groups themselves, it's not just going through local authorities, a lot of it does but we've seen more and more of community groups doing that. I would like to see that more and more of that happening as well, community groups taking control of it and doing the commissioning themselves and working with professionals to help them contextualise what's there, so absolutely. I do think that if there are savings made from 10-year development plan yet it's all about delivering the plan and it's about making, getting the engagement better so we could use some of that resources as you've said. As I mentioned earlier, I think that there's a corporate need here to try and realise that planning and placemaking meets many different interests across local government and community planning partners. So we should be thinking about community planning partnerships themselves, given us a priority in funding some of this because it can help them reach the issues which they deal with, not just in terms of planning but in health and education and all those other things as well. In terms of where you would divert the money savings from plan preparation, we'd agree with what's set out in the policy memorandum that it's important that that gets diverted onto delivering plans because plans are not coming forward in the way they should and that's a problem for development and Scotland's housing and economic needs but it's also a problem for communities so we're looking to plans to try and predict what's going to happen in the future but rather than just delivering anything, we need to be delivering what communities need and we need to be delivering something that developers can work with and are able to deliver. Under the new planning regimes that are out in the memorandum it's clear that it's going to be a lot more collaborative and front loaded and I think that's very important but the government hasn't gone so far as to take planning out of the hands of local authorities and give that to developers or give that to communities but it is clear that it expects local authorities to work more collaboratively in the future and I think there's opportunities to look at governance models at the local level that bring developers and communities together around tables with the local authorities to have more of a directional and shaping role in terms of what should be the strategy for the area and what policies, sites and delivery mechanisms do you need for that. Now none of that's going to come about from what is set out in the legislation because I think the government recognises that to some extent you need a bit of freeing up of red tape but it absolutely the you know successful future absolutely relies on that happening and again that work isn't recognised or costed in the financial memorandum so I don't think it's an issue of taking control and giving that to communities instead or to developers instead it's bringing all those people together and resourcing it. Yeah I mean we're an organisation that we help communities and individuals with planning place making but we're also an organisation that has professional planners working with us on a large contingent of volunteers several hundred planners and other professionals volunteer for us to help deliver our services so we too want to see you know a situation where there is public trust and what the planning system is for which is for making often tough decisions and the public good more specifically to the question about resourcing I mean I think the 10 year local development plan process there I've heard some local authorities saying that their expectation might be that local development plan staff might during that 10 year period depending on what is happening with the plan might move towards focusing on planning applications delivering them forward but equally it might be the case that a big part of the development plan plan planers teams role within the 10 year period is is actually assisting you know community groups we're doing local place plans I think the comment about local moment and trossaxe national park was interesting if you look at their approach to engagement they sort of used I think if I understand correctly used the charret process in some areas throughout the park to sort of create a culture where communities felt supported and actually wanted to go forward and produce their own local place plans and that is maybe again an issue of creating that culture can actually I think we shouldn't underestimate you know the importance of volunteering you know in producing these plans we were just doing some engagement and bonus with Falkirk council community planning partnership in a project last month and seemingly bonus is one and award for the culture of like volunteering that exists within the town but that's probably not enough in itself as I've said already to resort to create the sort of local place plans that we want to see you know as a sort of transformational change. Just to say that as a measure of the importance of community engagement to the profession 20% of RTPI members volunteer for plans and for a profession that's a hell of a lot of what a fifth of people actually volunteering you can't rely on that for the for the charrettes but I think it shows the commitment we have as a profession to trying to make sure that communities are engaged. Tammy, have you still got one? Yeah just one one point I think it was one that Mr Harvey raised and the issue of the the risk of the move to 10 year development plans leading to those plans becoming less relevant over time and community trust falling away I think we agree that's a definite risk we we're concerned about the lack of a clear trigger in the bill for reviewing plans if for example you get to a point where there's a significant shortfall in the housing land supply that's something based on current practice you can easily envisage happening across Scotland and I think the policy memorandum does say that might be a trigger but that's not in the bill at the moment and I think housing development and the extent to which that does or doesn't match site allocations the extent to which it doesn't doesn't match housing supply figures is one of the main issues at the moment where I think community distrust in and dissatisfaction with planning comes from so I just wanted to agree that that's a real issue and there should be a proper trigger in the bill that makes sure plans are updated if that happens. Yeah if I'd like to add to that because you know I'm aware that the proposal for a 10 year plan has created a lot of debate and probably some disagreement but you know I think it's intended that there has to be a longer vision especially in house building and in place making and you know that longer horizon is absolutely critical to able to produce good places. I think another benefit of it it avoids you know planning authorities regaring themselves every five years without having a proper review of what's been delivered what's been achieved in the in the five-year plan. In terms of housing targets I think it would be important that there is centralised targets and better updating of housing land supply rather than being put through a process of dispute every every five years but I think the review felt that there was improvements in technology where data can be updated more quickly and housing targets can be you know from a central source can be coordinated better into local authorities as well but you know I think it's recognised though and we would agree that there has to be an avoidance of or there must be a means of plans being updated sensibly through the 10-year period. I think Patrick's got a very small supplementary. I'd like you to do that once Patrick's asked his question. Thank you just very very briefly because you know I don't want to get into the policy discussion about 10-year cycles that's for the other committee to look at but I'm a little bit unclear as to whether the witnesses are saying you do think the projected savings the financial savings that the government is is setting out in the financial memorandum will result from this move to a 10-year cycle or whether we should be skeptical about savings on that scale. If I can come in here the savings that are in the bill are only notional insofar as they are savings in terms of producing a plan those resources will still be required to deliver the plan and to deliver and to support the delivery of the local place plans as well so for me it's not saving at all it's just a transferring from one budget column to another essentially. I would agree with that I don't think local authorities are likely to make savings from the change I think there's new delivery activity expected and on top of that there will be some mid-plan cycle updating and refreshing reading to be done so if anything there's more work to be done. In terms of the resource again the SPF would agree that it's not expected that resources are going to be taken out of the planning system we would expect them to be redirected. Now you know the efficiency and improvement and deliverability and targets being achieved throughout a 10-year period I think there are different types of efficiencies that will be achieved but it won't be on the cost of the resource I think the resource has to be maintained and retargeted basically redeployed. Okay that was quite clear I think in these answers but thank you very much the witnesses for coming along this morning it's very helpful in producing a report which we'll never be doing the financial memorandum so thank you very much I suspend this meeting just now to allow a change over witnesses thank you okay colleagues we'll now continue to take evidence on the planning Scotland bill and for the Scottish Government I welcome to their meeting this morning Kevin Stewart who's the minister for the whole government of housing Jean Waddey who's the bill coordinator and John McNairney from who is the chief planner welcome to you all and I would invite the minister to make a short opening statement please. Thank you convener and good morning to you all before we get into the detail convener I want to emphasise that the bill is just one part of a much wider programme of reform to the planning system building on the independent review that reported in May 2016 the overall review will include changes to secondary legislation under existing powers policy and guidance and encouraging broader changes to culture and performance within planning departments. We want to free planners from the constant round of preparing plans and give them more time to focus on engaging with communities and supporting the actual delivery of development. The aim is to remove processes that add little value and free up resources for more productive activity. I'm very clear that a strong planning system is needed to support the economy and communities and this is not about deregulation or weakening the system it's about reducing procedure that doesn't add value so that we can all focus more on outcomes. Overall our intention is that these reforms should be largely cost neutral for planning authorities but we have to take it in stages. The bill removes some big formal processes from the system so on its own it appears to produce savings. We expect those resources to be redirected to those other activities that we want to see but those will be required through secondary legislation or encouraged through new performance measures. The detail of those is not yet in place and so can't be specifically costed and set against the resources that are freed up by the bill. What I can say is that when those detailed procedures are worked out we will seek to make sure that they are streamlined and don't require any more resources than the existing ones while providing a more effective service. There are also other changes to be made to existing secondary legislation including to fees and to community engagement requirements and, while those are part of the wider review, they do not arise from the bill and are yet to be designed and consulted on so they are not included in the financial memorandum. As the bill is only one part in the middle of those reforms it is challenging to set out how the financial aspects fit together so I'm happy to help the committee further with any questions that they may have on those issues today. Thank you minister. You refer to costs yourself and efficiencies and the potential for transferring costs effectively. I'll need to just start in that area if you don't mind because in paragraph 10 of the financial memorandum it says that COSLA has suggested the timescales for changes arising to allow time to undertake fuller consideration of current costs. The Scottish Government will work with COSLA and the individual planning for it to gather more meaningful information on costs as detailed proposals emerge for implementation and development. Can you provide any more detail on the work that is going on with COSLA and the planning authorities in that area to gather that more meaningful information on future costs? I realise some of that at this stage can't all be defined but it would be useful to us to understand where you've got to on that journey. I'll bring colleagues in for some more detail but it would be fair to say since taking on this post that one of the first things that crossed my desk was the report from the independent panel into the review of planning. Since that point we have engaged with stakeholders throughout the process in order to get this absolutely right and we will continue to do that all the way through this process, not only just during the course of this bill but as we continue to change things including dealing with national planning framework 4 and Scottish planning policy. In terms of that engagement with local authorities, my colleagues and my officials engaged with local authorities on a regular basis. Only yesterday I met with the high-level group on performance, which includes COSLA, where it's fair to say that discussions around that table are often quite robust. We will continue to work with local authorities and they will help us to shape what we require to do over the piece. I'll bring in Mr McNearney first on some of those issues in terms of co-operation with authorities. Throughout the process, from the panel being established to where we are today, we've tried to work as inclusively as we can with the profession with other stakeholders. Once a bill provisions go through and whatever form they emerge, we'll be looking to provide guidance and regulation across a whole range of policy changes. In doing that, we've had a series of working groups that have met a few times now to help to define policy and give views across the different stakeholders that have an interest in that. We will reinvigorate that process when it comes to guidance and to regulations. We regularly engage with heads of planning, industry, COSLA and other stakeholders, and we'll continue to have as inclusive a process as we can do. There are different elements in the bill. Some of those we'll look to co-produce, whether that's the national planning framework or guidance or the regulations themselves. We'll try to be as open as we have been in the past. I should also add that in terms of heads of planning Scotland, who have been very helpful to us during the course of this progress here, they are currently updating their 2013 study on costs and the relationship to fees. Again, that's another piece of work that will be very useful in terms of our moving forward in that. I'll get into some of the issues that emerged in our previous discussion. Murdo, would you like to begin off in the area of infrastructure levy? Thank you, minister. We heard some evidence in the earlier session in relation to the infrastructure levy that's being proposed in the bill. I wonder if you're in the position to share any more detail with us around the infrastructure levy, how it will operate, what sort of rates will be set, or how it will be calculated, and what is the aggregate sum that you might expect to raise from us each year? Convener, right along the way, I've acknowledged that there's more work to be done on the infrastructure levy to develop a model that is fair and practical and does no impact on development viability. I think that you heard from witnesses earlier about the study that we undertook, which was by Peter Brett Associates, if I remember rightly, which is currently available for view on the Scottish Government website. I think that we require more work in this particular area, and that's why we're proposing an enabling power here, so that levy can be introduced once we have worked out all of the operational details. The model that I've talked about in the research shows a model that has provided some indicative costs, but that model itself is only one option, convener. We will carry out a full financial assessment and consultation on more detailed proposals when that time comes. Okay, thank you for that minister. You may or may not therefore be able to answer my follow-up questions, but I'll give it a go, because clearly this is very much at conceptual stage rather than any detail being proposed. Do you imagine that this will be a levy that will be collected nationally and then divvied out on a national basis, or will there be any linkage between how the levy is collected in terms of locality and the investment back into that particular locality? I would expect investment to go back to localities. This was a line of question that came last week at the Delegated Powers Committee as well. That is about delivering locally. It may be at a point that some of that money is held by Scottish Government. The example that I gave last week at the Delegated Powers Committee was, for example, the western peripheral route, where Scottish Government paid 81 per cent of costs, Aberdeenshire Council 9.5 per cent, Aberdeenshire City 9.5 per cent, of course. There may be good reason for that money to come so that that procurement can take place at a national level. What I can say to the committee, and I heard some folk speaking about it earlier in terms of the evidence that they give, is that this is not bonus extra cash for Mr Mackay. That is a very point. We heard this concern that this would be money that would be collected. We would go into the Scottish Government's pot and we would use to displace existing funding around infrastructure, so you are giving me a reassurance that that is not going to happen. That will not happen. Thank you, minister, for coming to talk to us this morning. Just a couple of detailed points to pick up on round about the financial memorandum as it stands to clarify. On the infrastructure levy at the moment, that number is clearly an estimate, but it is shown as a cost potentially for developers. I am not sure how you form that financial memorandum, but that money clearly would be getting collected and then put back into the system at a national or local level, should that therefore not also be shown as a gain on the local authority side of things. It is not really a gain because they have to spend it all on infrastructure. On the financial memorandum itself and the numbers that we have there, those figures that we have are from the research that was carried out in the modelling that was done by Peter Brett, with the lowest level and the highest level, depending on the modelling that they have. As I said, I think that we have a fair amount more work to do in this area. I have made no secret of that right from the beginning. That is why we are seeking the enabling power. Of course, we will continue to consult across the board on that, but that is something that we have got to get absolutely spot on right. I heard criticism earlier on from some witnesses about the situation south of the border, where some local authorities are currently using the system that is available to them there, others are not. What I am absolutely determined to see is a situation that is fair, balanced and does not impede development. A bit more work is required in this area. I am not sure whether you will follow through the fact that you are going to spend it, which means that you cannot count it again, but leaving that to one side. The fact is that, at the end of the day, all money gets spent. The second point that I wanted to raise was round... Can I maybe point Mr McKee to Parag 93 in the financial memorandum on this point, which states that the income from the levy that is discussed in paragraph 94 will be payable to the local authority. However, as the income will all be spent either on infrastructure projects or on administration of the levy, the provisions are effectively cost-neutral to local authorities. The second point that I wanted to raise was round about a couple of things that came out this morning. The Scottish Property Federation talked about, and it is in the financial memorandum, 25 to 30 per cent potential project cost savings as a consequence of streamlining measures that are affected by the bill. However, that does not appear to be in the financial memorandum. The second point was raised round about other costs that developers may have to incur to engage with communities as a consequence of provisions that were in the bill, which could also be cost to developers. That also does not include in the financial memorandum. I do not know whether the plan is to assess those and include them, or whether they are excluded from the financial memorandum. I will bring in Ms Wardi and then I will make some comment myself in that convener. The reference to the figure from the Scottish Property Federation of the cost of delays is really just for context. Across the entire planning review, part of the purpose of that is to try to reduce delays and make the system more efficient, but there is nothing specific that we can point to in the bill and say that, particularly, we will remove that element of cost. That was just really in the financial memorandum for context for the wider review as a whole. Right. You believe that there could be savings there, but you do not have enough details or evidence to quantify them and put them in the FM. The estimates that we have from the industry in terms of what those delays cost them, it depends very much on the individual project and the interest rates and all that kind of thing at the time. On the upside or the downside of your developer, the additional cost of developers may incur in order to comply with requirements in the bill. Is that something that has been looked at? I think that we have considered everything that is in the bill. Some of the things that were mentioned this morning were additional consultational individual projects. That is pre-application consultation. That will be an amendment to existing secondary legislation. That is one of the things about all of this, convener, because there are folks making assumptions around the secondary legislation before we have decided the secondary legislation. That is always particularly dangerous territory to be in, where assumptions are being made before something is even being brought forward. We have been very careful in terms of what is in the financial memorandum. It would be fair to say that Ms Wadde has lived and breathed the bill and, in particular, the area of the financial memorandum. What I would not want to stand accused of, convener, is plucking figures from the air and adding them into a financial memorandum without having the evidence to back that up. I am perfectly happy with that. That is clear and I understand where we are coming from on that. It is good to get that clarified. Alexander Stewart Thank you, convener. As with the previous panel, I will note my register of interests around development, construction and house building. In some of the evidence that was heard, there are some concerns about the impact of that on the delivery of housing. I wonder if you would like to comment on that. What aspects of the delivery of housing? In some of the costs of slowing down delivery with local authorities being less able to process applications and things quickly? I cannot see how that would happen. The bill itself is all about taking out a process and making a more effective system with a greater focus on delivery than there has been in the past. If we take, for example, the move towards local development plans moving to 10 years, all of that is about taking out a process and focusing much more on delivery. One of the things that I am sure many members will have faced from constituents and others hoping to develop in their areas is that they feel that what happens in terms of a local development plan is that one is introduced and immediately folk busy themselves coming up with the next local development plan without actually focusing on the delivery of housing and other aspects of infrastructure in an area. I do not know where Mr Burnett is seeing that being said that it may impede housing delivery. I would be interested to look at that if he has any evidence of folks saying that. Emma, I think that you are the area that you used to chat to the ministers about. Thank you, convener. Good morning, minister. Thank you for coming today. In the financial memorandum, it addresses changes to the proposed bill under many headings, development planning, local police planning, simplified development zones, development management, assessment of planning authorities, performance and infrastructure funding. It is all complex words and language. You said in your opening statement that you wanted to remove processes of little value, and it was about freeing resources. I am interested in the simplified development zones and the streamlining of those processes to reduce bureaucracy. How will that work? If we create those simplified development zones, how does that protect communities, community action groups and continue to engage the action groups and the public in community empowerment? By creating a simplified development zone scheme, local authority provides the type of development specified in the scheme that is automatically granted planning permission in that zone. The scheme can set out conditions, design guidelines and other criteria, including environmental assessment. That means that anyone who wants to develop within the zone does not have to make a planning application and does not have to produce various reports and assessments, as long as their proposals are in line with the original scheme. All of that is done in advance. The bill also provides for simplified development zones to grant other consent for roads, construction, listed building, conservation zones and adverts. That will make it more streamlined for applicants. Simplified development zones are therefore a way for planning authorities to proactively plan what type of development is appropriate for a place and to make it easy for people to bring forward that development. On the community aspect of all of that, obviously, we have still got some work to do around certain of those areas, but we will set out much more detail about the community engagement requirements on the preparation of those schemes in the secondary legislation. It will include early engagement opportunities and two formal representations. Ministers may also prescribe certain cases where a predetermination hearing should be held before they go ahead of that simplified development zone. We have heard concerns about costs and lack of resources and specifically heard concerns about the ability of the private communities to finance local place plans and building necessary skills to prepare local place plans. Where do you visage the poorest communities in Scotland finding resources? They need to fully engage in that process and what will the Government do to make that possible? As I have stated before, there will be the freeing up of resources that I would like to see going into helping communities and to aid development. I recognise that, in your previous session, there was a fair amount of debate around local place plans. We have got to recognise that many communities across Scotland are already doing that. You pointed out in your constituency, convener, and people in Llynyddgo have come up with their own local place plan in recent times without very much resource. We have taken a view on costs of basing that on what is happening south of the border in the case of neighbourhood plans. I have heard what people have said about charrettes, not every local place plan will require a charrette, not every local place plan will require a huge amount of resource going into it because the community might want to drive that local place plan. I recognise what Mr Bibby is saying about poorer communities who might not have the resource. I would expect local authorities to use the resource available to them to target poorer communities or communities that do not have the necessary where for all their resource. I would expect local authorities to target those communities and divert resources to them. One of the key things about local place plans, and it was briefly touched upon in your previous session, is the fact that they should fit in with some of the things that are already going on right across the country. Since being given this role, I have talked about a fair amount of intertwining community planning with spatial planning. There are huge amounts of community planning exercises that go on across the country. Some local authorities are absolutely spot on in the level of engagement that they have with communities in that regard. What I would now like them to look at and the legislation will want them to look at is bringing that together—that community planning, that spatial planning. I think that that will get much more communities involved, many more communities involved and many more individuals involved in the planning process itself if we intertwine both of those. I think that the freeing up of resource from some of the process that is coming out should go into local authorities providing resource for local place plans. I would hope that local authorities would divert and target resources at poorest communities first, because they are often the ones who take part in some of those things because they do not have the necessary wherewithal at their disposal. I very much agree with that. We have discussed that some communities are already active in that part, but, as the Royal Town for Planning Institute has said, without making new financial provision to support them, there is a risk that they will be inaccessible to a large number of communities in Scotland in order for local authorities to be able to target resources in helping most deprived communities. Will you make a new financial provision from Scottish Government to do that? I will not. As I have already said, there will be the freeing up of resource in local authorities from some of the processes that are being removed, particularly around local development plans. I would expect local authorities to use their discretion to ensure that that money is spent wisely on communities and on ensuring that plans lead to development. The Government itself also provides other resource already in terms of the Empowering Communities Fund, which is worth some £20 million. As I have stated, I would want resource that is currently being used by local authorities and other community planning partnerships in terms of community planning to also be used wisely in terms of creating local place plans. It is about bringing those things together. It is about diverting resource that is currently going into other things. I think that it is not beyond the wit of folks out there to ensure that we get the most out of the money that will be freed up and is available to get that absolutely right for poorer communities and other communities right across Scotland. Can I maybe bring in Mr McNairney to add to that a little bit? We have a smaller amount of money within planning and architecture division, which has previously supported Shirets. We have said that we could target that to support local place plans in the more disadvantaged communities. There is also a pilot, which is on-going just now with Weston-Bartonshire Council, which is looking at locality plans from community planning partnerships and a consultation on local development plans. We hope that that will emerge a local place plan, which helps to join up between spatial and community planning. I know that there has been a lot of focus on Shirets, which has been brilliant in terms of the investment that has gone into them, but they are also very intensive in terms of professional support. There are other lower-cost options, too, that help communities. The place standard, for example, is a free tool that can be used in a straightforward way to help communities come forward. There is also the volunteering aspect that Paz colleagues talked about earlier. There are different models outwith the Shirets, albeit that having been a very successful one in the past. We have a number of people who want to supplementary news. Have you got any more on that? Willie, Patrick and I will come to James. Minister, we heard earlier in the session that Mr McLaren is still with us. Engaging early to talk about what communities want, rather than objecting at the end to stop what you do not want, is something that we will all sign up to hear. I am sure that that is behind some of the principles in the bill, but with that process, I would imagine that if you shift the process more to the front end, you must surely shift some cost process to the front end, too, perhaps in the area of the development of the local place plan. Do you think that your estimate for the kind of average cost of this kind of process is a fair and inaccurate one, because some of the witnesses thought that it was a wee bit underestimating how much it would cost to do these kinds of things? Sure. I think that many of the witnesses talked about costs around about Shirets, which Mr McNair and I said, Mr McLaren said, are quite costly. However, not all of those local place plans require Shirets. Some of the base work around planning and the shaping of places, or how folk want to see their place shaped, of late that I have seen, was in Gallashield's academy, where Government put in some money in partnership with PAS to allow young folk there to use the place standard in terms of shaping their community. That costs next to nothing, and many communities use the place standard as a tool on a regular basis. That is free. That costs absolutely nothing. In your own patch, Mr Coffey, we see East Ayrshire moving quite quickly and trailblazing in some regards in terms of the work that it is doing in terms of community planning. I can see the spatial planning aspect being brought into that without very much hassle in places like East Ayrshire. I think that even the likes of Shirets themselves can often be a barrier to some folk who do not really understand what it is all about. The word itself has put folk off in the past. I did not really like it. I have talked to folk about trying to find a better way of describing what it is, whereby a lot of the community planning that takes place in local authorities and places right across the country seems to be able to bring more folk in. If we join those two things up, which will get more folk engaged in spatial planning than there currently is, that is all to the good. I do not think that that necessarily has to cost huge sums of money. I do not think that each local place plan requires a Shiret. In fact, many places have already created their own local place plans without any resource whatsoever, and in some cases they would not want the interference from anyone else in terms of the creation of that local place plan. David, I remember one of the skeptics in one of my own communities said, asked me what type of T-dance is that. There is probably an issue around that, Patrick. Thank you. Good morning, minister. You have talked in relation to how councils might choose to resource that community engagement. You have talked about that in relation to the savings that they are expected to make or that the financial memorandum suggests that they would make from changes to local development plans, and I presume that that means the shift to a 10-year cycle. I am looking at the accompanying documents for the 2005 planning bill, which became the 2006 act, and it says that a big debate there was about local plans being out of date. It says that this has led to uncertainty for all applicants for planning permission, as well as for local people. Inquiries are becoming more complex and slower to conclude, and it says that that is in part because 70 per cent of local plans are more than five years old. That was the Scottish Government's view at the time, or the Scottish Executive, as it was called then, and it was a generally agreed position that out-of-date local plans were a problem and were causing excess costs in the system. To what extent and how have you quantified, in developing this financial memorandum, the risk of increased costs in the system through conflict or tension or complexity of cases as a result of development plans being old? I will bring in Ms Waddie, and then I will make comment myself. Thank you. When the 2006 bill was going through the Parliament, as you say, the vast majority of plans were out of date, and 25 per cent were more than 10 years old. Where we are today, the vintage of plans is much better. Approaching 80 per cent of plans are less than five years old, so that is very positive. One of the key issues with our current plans is that there is not a focus on delivery, and that is where the panel and much of the bill is trying to turn that situation around so that we can have more certainty about the sites that are in a development plan that are emerging from the ground. In turn, that will not just help the development industry and agencies, but it will also help communities who, hopefully, will have more faith in the development plans that we want to see in the future. The key thing is that they need to improve the delivery aspect, and that is linked to funding and perceived savings. Our aspiration would be that, where there is what appears to be a saving from producing fewer plans, the investment in those plans being much more deliverable will add value. Authorities can still update the plans, given some triggers, and we can help them to define what those triggers might be. It could be around the emergence of local place plans, because housing numbers are not being delivered in the way that they were originally envisaged to be, so there might be triggers. I appreciate that. I suppose that my question is that, if all that work is happening and that resource shifts from more frequent planning processes in terms of developing plans into the implementation of those plans, is there also a risk that we will see an increased number of applications being passed contrary to local development plans? Councils simply decide that they are irrelevant now, and what was thought about 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 years ago when a plan was developed needs to be set aside? I do not think that local development plans, as envisaged under the new proposals, will be irrelevant in any way, shape or form. One of the things that you come across in a regular basis, or I have come across in a regular basis, not only is a member of this Parliament, but also as a councillor previously, are constituents who, I have to say, are somewhat frustrated with the system as it is. We have a situation in which some folk get involved in the formulation of that local development plan. That plan is then passed, and then immediately the local authority starts consulting on the next local development plan, which folk do not really get, has to be said. In terms of some of the documentation that underpins local development plans at this moment in time, that is extremely off-putting for people, and the key thing for me is to get many more folk involved. In terms of our proposals, Mr McNairney has talked about possible triggers for renewal. There is also the gate check process as well, which I think is extremely important in all of this. I do think that our proposals, as they stand, will make it much more easy for ordinary folks to get involved in a process that, at this moment in time, is kind of difficult for some people to get their heads round. The previous panel acknowledged that the savings to local authorities are notional, and if they end up using that money that is saved from less frequent local development plans into other areas of the planning system, we can understand what is stated in the financial memorandum. The total savings to planning authorities between £21 million and £31 million is expected to be absorbed by requirements to be made under regulations. You have also told us that you hope councils will use some of what they have saved to support the community involvement. Are you then able to say what regulations you will make, which specify how that money will be directed to community bodies to facilitate that work or to fund that work? I will take in Ms Waddie, and then I will come back in, convener. There are existing regulations that set out how a local development plan is prepared, and we expect to amend those to increase the amount of engagement required in those. We also have action programmes, which are going to become delivery programmes. There are regulations about what is in them and how they are made, and that will say a lot more about how the delivery side should be implemented. When would you expect to lay those regulations? I do not have an actual schedule. There will be further consultation after the bill. We will provide the committee with more detail about some of this, convener, in terms of timetabling. I appreciate that, but it is perhaps inevitable. To be fair, convener, I think that it is about whether there will be financial aspects about where the money will go that it is being saved from local authorities and whether it will match the minister's commitment to expect councils to use that money to finance community data. I appreciate that. I meant in terms of future subordinate legislation that is going to come at a future date. I mean, I am here to talk about the bill at this moment in time, convener. We will consult further in terms of secondary legislation as it is brought forward. I am quite sure that this committee and other committees of the Parliament might want to look at aspects of that at a later date. I will give Patrick O'Neill's. Thanks, convener. Just in relation to infrastructure funding in terms of the summary table in relation to planning authorities, that is described as cost neutral, but the additional notes talk about the use of a community infrastructure levy. Can you maybe talk through your view as to how that is going to operate and if it is cost neutral, how we ensure that there is adequate infrastructure spending coming from planning authorities? I should explain that James has got here, because after some difficulties on the travel front, because of Scotland's weather and other things, I am sure. James has already covered some of the details of your question that has been covered, but that will, obviously, be captureable in the official report. There is specific there that James raised. Convener, I did respond to Mr McKee around about that earlier, and I refer Mr Kelly to part 93 of the financial memorandum around about that, which I said earlier to Mr McKee that I would not repeat all of that. I appreciate that, and I apologise for what I have already said. Thank you very much for the witnesses coming along today. That concludes our consideration of the financial memorandum. We will produce a report on due course, and I am very grateful for you being here. We now proceed into private session.