 Good morning and welcome to the 31st meeting of this year of the Rural Affairs, Climate Change and Environment Committee. Before we move to the first item of the agenda, I would like to remind everyone present to switch off their mobile phones. They may affect the broadcasting system. However, committee members and so on may be using tablets for providing meeting papers in digital format. Next, I would like to say a few words about Nigel Don. I welcome to the committee Michael Russell on behalf of the committee. I would like to thank Nigel Don for his hard work and contribution during his time with Racky. I wish him well in his new role with the Public Audit Committee that he has gained a true statistician. With that, I move on to agenda item 1, which is a declaration of interests. I welcome Michael Russell as the new member of the committee and ask him to declare any relevant interests. I declare three relevant interests. I was a director of and I am a member of the Colin Trive and Glenderal Development Trust. I am a member of our Girl Community Housing Association, which is involved in the provision of rural housing. I have a contract with the Scottish Hydro SSE for the provision of renewable energy through solar panels. I suppose the less relevant one is that I am a former environment minister. I thank you for your welcome too. I am not at all welcome to the committee. Agenda item 2 is a decision on taking business in private. Just to be clear, the second item is to decide whether consideration of its draft budget 2015-16 report, which we have already taken evidence in public on, should be taken in private at future meetings. Are we agreed? We are agreed, thank you very much. Agenda item 3 is the board of legislation. Today, the committee is to consider the negative instrument south ar and marine conservation amendment order 2014, SSI 2014 stroke 297. Members should note that no motion to annul has been received in relation to this instrument, and I refer members to the paper and ask if there are any comments please, Mike Russell. Convener, simply one comment. In somebody who has a constituency interest in this area of sea, there was a difficulty with Creel fishermen who were not consulted at the start of the process. This was a process that was truncated and very urgent, but I do think in future when drafting takes place the interests of all users of the marine environment should be borne in mind. The Creel fishermen went through a period of some considerable worry to discover whether or not they would still be able to access the waters. Licences are in our understanding being given, but I think that for the future it should be noted. I think that it is very useful. Fortunately, we have the relevant minister here at the moment, maybe not, but I am sure that we will be able to pass it on to Richard Lochhead to remind him about that. Are the committee agreed that it does not wish to make any recommendations in relation to the instrument? We are agreed. Dr Aileen McLeod, Minister for Environment, Climate Change and Land Reform, has joined us for the first time. Welcome to your post, minister. On behalf of the committee, I would like to congratulate you on your new role and we welcome you to look forward to working with you. I would also like to take this opportunity to thank the previous minister, Paul Wheelhouse, for all his valued contribution to the committee's work and wish him all the best in his new role. Agenda item 4 is sub-ledge. It is in welcoming the new minister to give evidence on the public water supplies Scotland regulation 2014 draft. This instrument has been laid under the affirmative procedure, which means that the Parliament must approve it before provisions may come into force. Following the evidence session, the committee will be invited to consider the motion to approve the instrument under agenda item 5. I welcome the minister and her official supech deputy director drinking water quality division in the Scottish Government. Angus MacDonald wishes to make a point. I feel obliged to declare an interest in that a close family member in Stornoway has an action against Scottish Water in the Court of Session, which relates to water quality. Therefore, I will be recusing myself from items 3 and 4 and take no part in it. Items 4 and 5? No, 3 and 4. That is all right. The current agenda, the time working from is 4 and 5. We know what you mean. It is this item. No bother. Thank you very much for that. Minister, do you wish to make a statement about the instrument, please? Yes, I do. Thank you very much for this opportunity to make some opening remarks. Before I do, I would like to put on record how much I am looking forward to working with the committee in my new role. I am keen to be as helpful as I can be with the work of the committee, and I am sure that I will be a regular visitor to this committee. I am very much looking forward to working with you all. I should also add that I have with me this morning a supech, who is our deputy director of our drinking water quality division, who may also help to answer some of the committee's questions. In Scotland, 97 per cent of the population receives water from public water supplies, which are provided by Scottish Water. The other 3 per cent of the population receive their water from private water supplies. Those supplies are regulated under private water supply regulations. As you are aware, Scottish Water is a statutory body, which delivers drinking water to 2.4 million households throughout the country. Water provided by Scottish Water for human consumption purposes must meet the same quality standards, regardless of the size of the supply or its location in Scotland. The main purpose of those regulations is to ensure that the quality of Scotland's drinking water continues to be of a high standard, which satisfies the requirements of the EU drinking water directive. In particular, the regulations aim to protect human health from the adverse effects of any contamination of water supplied by Scottish Water. They do so by setting out the requirements to be met and how they may be enforced so that consumers receive a supply of safe and clean drinking water. The requirements of the drinking water directive in relation to public water supplies in Scotland are currently implemented by the Water Supply Water Quality Scotland regulations 2001 and various amendments. I believe that it is timely to replace those existing regulations with a new set of consolidated regulations to aid transparency and enable some revisions and new provisions to be introduced. The new provisions include firstly a requirement to risk assess each treatment works and its connected supply. Although provision for risk assessment was not included previously, Scottish Water has been risk assessing its treatment works since 2006 as a requirement of the directions that Scottish ministers give to Scottish Water. The approach is promoted by the World Health Organization and it has been embraced by many regulators throughout the world. Secondly, as a new provision, it also requires Scottish Water to identify drinking water abstraction points and monitor the quality of water at those points. That aligns with the requirements of the EU Water Framework Directive. The regulations also introduce new offences. It will be an offence for Scottish Water to supply drinking water, which has not been disinfected and subject to adequate treatment or to supply drinking water from a treatment works in contravention of a requirement of a notice. The duty to treat water and disinfect is included in the regulations, with the specific aim of the protection of public health. We believe that, given the gravity of the duty, it is considered appropriate that there should be an offence for Scottish Water to supply any such water that has failed this duty. In addition to the new requirements, we have included a number of minor changes. For example, the standard for taste and odour was a specific quantitative value in the previous regulations. It now mirrors that of the directive, which is that the taste or odour of the water must be acceptable to consumers and that there must be no abnormal change. To conclude, convener, a very high standard of drinking water quality is important for Scotland, not only for the health of the people living in Scotland but also for the large number of visitors that are coming to Scotland each year. It is therefore important that we continue to ensure that the standard of water in Scotland is the best that it can be. I would ask the committee to support the regulations, and I am happy to answer any questions from the committee. Just two questions, really. We are told that there is not anticipated to be a considerable financial impact because the number of such failures in any year is expected to be low. I just wonder what the basis for that assertion is, what the stats are if you happen to have them, as to the number of breaches that have occurred previously. Also, just for the purposes of quality, why the change, the new requirement in part 6, is that it is Scottish water rather than local authorities that carry out this duty? In terms of part 6 of the regulations, why we are changing the current regulations, certainly the Water Quality Scotland regulations in 2010 introduced a requirement for the investigation of a failure in a public building. Those regulations were put in place specifically to address any infraction risks that Scotland had not transposed. That specific requirement of the drinking water directive, when the original transposing regulations were made back in 2001. At the time that the 2010 regulations were made, as the local authority were given the power to take enforcement action against building owners, it was believed that the local authority should carry out the investigation. The practical implementation of the requirement has not been straightforward. Scottish water must determine for any sample failure whether that failure is due to its supply at the point of entry to a building, regardless of whether that is a domestic or commercial property. It must therefore investigate that and, if necessary, carry out inspections to ensure that any backflow of contaminants into the public supply could not occur. Now, when failures in public buildings have occurred previously in the past three years, local authorities are often reliant on Scottish water to carry out an investigation. We also had a specific example of this, which was a serious contamination incident back in 2012. That involved antifreeze from an air conditioning system entering the domestic distribution system at our laboratory. In that example, the local authority did not have the necessary expertise to investigate that failure. Our policy is very much for Scottish water to be required to investigate any such failure and to be able to recover its costs. On how many failures there have been in 2013, there were failures in four public buildings? I wonder why the consultation was only six weeks, which does not seem too much of a time, and I wonder how robust the member is saying that there is not any significant financial effect that is thought to come from the new regulation. The consultation generated 11 responses, including Scottish water and eight of the local authorities. There were no particular concerns that were raised during the consultation. Some of the points that were raised by Scottish water may be addressed in guidance, and, certainly, the Scottish Government said that it would consult with Scottish water in preparing any such guidance. Scottish water also agreed in the response that a business-regulated impact assessment was not needed because there were no additional costs on businesses. Are there any further questions now? There are no further questions. I thank the minister. I wish to sum up. Agenda item 5 is the Public Water Supply Scotland Regulation 2014 draft, which we can debate up to 90 minutes, as you know, if you feel so inclined. I hope that it is not. I want to shorten the winter. That is the way to do it. I invite the minister to speak to and move the motion to the Public Water Supply Scotland Regulation 2014 draft. I invite members who wish to make a comment or speak. No members do. I wind up. I am happy to waiver that. I put the question on the motion. The question is that motion S4M11703, in the name of Aileen McLeod, be approved. Are we all agreed? We are all agreed. Thank you very much and thank you minister and your official for that brief appearance. I'm sure we'll be seeing more of you in due course and look forward to that. Thank you very much. I will have a brief suspension just now to change over witnesses. I shall move on now to agenda item 6, which is the Community Empowerment Scotland Bill. The item today is for the committee to take evidence from two separate panels of stakeholders on the Community Empowerment Scotland Bill. The first panel will focus on rural context of the bill and the second on the urban context and ECHR issues. I welcome the panel today, John Hollingdale, chief executive of Community Woodlands Association. Simon Fraser, Slyster, Anderson, MacArthur. I welcome CUM, Lecturer in Law, the School of Law and Aberdeen University. Rory Dutton, Development Officer for the Development Trust Association Scotland and Sarah Jane Lange, director of policy and parliamentary affairs for Scottish land and estates. Welcome to you all. I refer members to the papers and we will open the questions with one from Graham Day. I thank you for the morning. This is more a scene-setting question than anything. I just would like the views of the panel on whether they are satisfied about the extent of the dialogue and the consultation both on community right to buy and crofting community right to buy, and perhaps a view on whether it might have been more appropriate if the Part 4 provisions had been included in separate land reform legislation. The microphones are obviously dealt with centrally by the control there, so you don't need to switch them on and off. Just indicate to me and I'll bring you in. Anyone want to kick off? Yes, John. I think in general we've been happy with that. There's been quite an extensive consultation process. We've concentrated more on Part 2 rather than the crofting community right to buy, but I haven't responded to that. In terms of which bit of the legislation goes in which bills, I think that was a question that was asked by several of us a year or two ago when it became apparent that there was this double stream that was the land reform review group and community empowerment bill, and we asked the question, would it be better there? At that time we didn't know that there was going to be this new land reform bill coming up, so I think at the time we were happy that something was being done about some of the issues around community right to buy, and if community empowerment bill was a vehicle to make that happen then we were happy. With the benefit of hindsight perhaps you could say it would all be better in the land reform bill, but we didn't know that at the time. Looking at it from the perspective of the crofting community right to buy, I think that the consultation was fine. Obviously the changes, the suggested changes to Part 3 have come on a long, pretty late in the day, and it is going to be essential to ensure that the enhanced community right to buy, which, in a way, mirrors the present crofting community right to buy, is brought into line with whatever is done to the crofting community right to buy as a consequence of the new measure. In terms of the general consultation, the way that there was the exploratory consultation and the follow-up consultation, I think that there has been plenty of chance to get involved in the consultation exercise. In terms of the positioning of measures within something that might be headed land reform, you might even hark back to the 2003 act when some people thought the access provisions in part 1 of the land reform act should not have been in that act, it should have been a sort of access act, but to a certain extent, as long as the law is on the statute book, if it's somewhere that's fine, it would be optimal if it had a better, clearer title, but I think that the way things have developed, as John has mentioned, you can now see why it's ended up under this heading, as opposed to land reform heading. I'm happy with the consultation. As has been said earlier, we were primarily interested in the other elements of the community empowerment bill when it was in the early stages, and with this coming through, maybe with hindsight, it could have been part of the broader land reform, but we've certainly got no complaints so far. On the crofting community right to buy, we've been more than happy with the consultation that's taking place across the country at the moment. As Rory and others have said, the discussions community empowerment bill have been lengthy and extensive. We probably would have liked more consultation on the definition of abandoned neglected land, which I'm sure we'll go in to talk about later. On where it should be placed, we've all agreed that land reform is a process. All land reform measures don't have to be in one bill. Land reform is affected by various pieces of legislation. I think that it's just to ensure that people have clarity on what's happening. I think that Simon referred to changes and how they impact on others. I do worry that if we have parallel pieces of legislation dealing with the same issue, we may get some confusion along the way. I think that I want to put this to you at this stage. Given the fact that part 3 of the crofting community right to buy is almost a live issue in terms of court proceedings and so on, it's important that the changes that take place in that, which we'll debate at stage 2 and investigate further, are dealt with before the amendments that are made to the community right to buy, so that we're most up-to-date at that stage with what the regulations will say. If things are dealt with in that order, it might answer your question, Simon Fraser. We agreed about that, so that's something to know to think of the future. Good morning, panel. This is again a bit of a sort of scene-setter, really. But back in June, the convener of the local government and regeneration committee wrote to the Minister for Local Government Planning expressing a few concerns about the information provided, if you like, in the policy memorandum itself, and in fact described it as a little more than a superficial overview, which is quite a criticism in some ways. The bit of correspondence went back and forward and a few things were clarified. But at the end of the day, the policy memorandum actually devotes less than three pages to the whole of part 4 of the bill, and at one point summarises 20 sections of the bill in a mere seven bullet points. My question is really quite simple, which is, do you feel, or maybe to simplify this, does anybody not feel, that they were provided with enough information to fully explain the aims and policy choices and provisions within the bill? Or are you satisfied that there was enough information provided? As a stakeholder in Parliament Bill, I feel that we got quite a lot of information. I don't think that that was fully reflected within the policy memorandum. I think that the Scottish Government did a great job in trying to develop the plain English guide, which I think was very useful. I am not sure that we have had enough convener and that information. I think that I have come to that conclusion having discussed elements of this bill, because we have different people thinking that the same provisions mean different things. If you have that, it means that somewhere along the line of the explanation, either at the explanatory notes or the policy memorandum, aren't providing enough information on what we are trying to deliver. John? I think that at a policy level, particularly for those who are involved in this on a regular basis, then we all understood what was meant and probably what was intended. What was missing, and I think that we will probably pick up on this later, is how certain specific provisions in the bill as introduced were expected to deliver the outcomes in the policy memorandum. At that line-by-line basis, there are some gaps. You want to achieve this, but you are saying this and that does not appear to work for us. I probably start from a slightly different position than most in that I am really interested in this kind of thing, and I engage with legislation quite regularly. I did not find it too problematic, but I appreciate my starting point as being a little bit different to some. I thought that there was a fair amount of explanation to allow me to understand it. Any of those differences may come out in further discussion, so I am happy to leave it just now. Thank you very much. The financial memorandum, Jim Hume. Good morning to the panel. Just regarding the financial implications, the memorandum states that it does not anticipate that there will be any significant additional costs on the Scottish Government regarding this legislation, but it does go on to state that there is a large degree of uncertainty on the level of costs regarding community rates and the landowners. I would be interested in the panel's views on what costs they anticipate will come from the legislation for rural communities and landowners and also for public bodies. I have just made the point that, to say it in the wider context of the community empowerment bill, I think that you cannot just look at the cost of this measure alone, because if you are to have significant things happening in community empowerment and greater transfers of assets and land ownership, it does need a greater support for the likes of the community anchor organisations, capacity building, support training and financial support for them, so I have just made the point that you cannot just look at the financial implications of this bill in isolation as it is part of the wider community empowerment agenda. I think that many of the provisions are demand driven, and I think that that is one thing where it is very hard to actually gauge what the costs will be for the Scottish Government, especially if they are to take on the costs of running ballots and other elements of this. We do not know what the demand will be across Scotland for the use of these provisions, especially if they are extended to urban Scotland, so I think that it is a very, very hard financial memorandum to pinpoint the exact costs. Would come out with the legal costs, the costs of setting up plans and the specific costs that would be quite useful for us to know? In general, those costs following on the community, if I can look at it from that end, tend to be met if not from public funds, then from lottery and that sort of thing. There may be a bit of pump priming from HIE in the earlier stages, not a vast amount, but there is inevitability that there will be a cost that will have to be met because the average community seeking to take on a project of this nature will not necessarily have the funds to take it forward themselves, even in the initial stages. In the past, HIE were able to assist quite substantially, and that seems to have been moved into the Scottish land fund and PERSH, but there will be a cost that will require to be met from some source. John Hollandeil? I think that the biggest cost overwhelmingly is the acquisition of assets at the end of the process, and if we have a Scottish land fund of £10 million a year, then there is £10 million a year of Government money at the moment going towards acquisition. I am sure that that would get spent, but it is very difficult to predict what proportion of those acquisitions would be coming through these provisions. Even if there was no community right to buy or it just did not work at all, it is still quite likely that there will be £10 million worth of community acquisitions coming through the national forest land scheme or local authority asset transfers or private sales. Picking out the impact of this bit, the community right to buy purchases so far have been a relatively small proportion of the overall big picture, so I think that that is a very difficult one to get a clear number for. The other direct costs are those of the Scottish Government, whichever branch of the Scottish Government ends up administering this and running that, and that is some on-going staff costs and then ballot costs and so on. Even if you had 100 ballots a year at £3,000 or £4,000 or £5,000 a year, which seems highly unlikely to me, that is still only the cost of one acquisition of 100 hectares or whatever. Those costs seem to be relatively small to me, but again, it is very demand-driven and difficult to pick out exactly where they come. Just to follow on, I think that we are starting to hint at it. It is obviously difficult to look into a crystal ball, but we will have to try to think that we will need additional support for applications, especially if there is an increase, generally speaking. Yes, possibly. I think that both Rory and I work for organisations that do that support for our Members. If, as a result, the floodgates open, we would be swamped by demand. Actually, I do not think that that is all that likely to happen. We would expect a gradual increase in demand, and we might need some help to do that, but I do not think that it is a vast task. I do not think that it is an extra vast task for high or whoever within Government is supporting and administering the scheme. It is, in terms of if a community previously had to incorporate as a company limited by guarantee, they had to do that already in the 2003 act scheme, so the existing sources cannot be looked at, it is just a case of giving the existing, whatever support might be there, beefing that up a little bit. In terms of anything else, an analogy might be the recent introduction of the crofting register in terms of that obviously going to introduce some element of administration cost, but, to coin a phrase, you cannot make an omlet without breaking eggs. If the policy goal is there, there will be costs somewhere, but that is something to be met. Convener, good morning to the panel. It is a quick supplementary, I think, but one or two panel members have mentioned high, and I wonder about the support beyond the Highlands and Islands in relation to communities and costs specifically, especially in view of the fact that although the land reform review group has made recommendations, as we all know about the different bodies that might be set up in Government, but that is not necessarily going to happen even in spite of the announcements about the consultation, not to pre-empt the new land reform bill. I am just wondering if there are any comments on support beyond the Highlands for communities. Rory Dunn. The Scottish Government is funding the Strength and Communities programme, which we are helping to deliver in partnership. It is only a relatively small number out with a higher, I think that it is about 25 groups, and they are already established groups. If you like, that sort of capacity building is very welcome, and we would like to see that rolled out more broadly. There are also small grant schemes, investing in ideas and things like that, from the lottery that people can get assistance for. However, I would probably concur that, where there is an opportunity and there is not an established group, there is a deficit there of support for getting an organisation up and running to then be able to then take advantage of that, because it is quite a lengthy process. OK. That is fine on that point. John Hollendale, perhaps, has a slight distinction between support in terms of helpful folk who can talk you through it. To some extent, that is less of an issue, because there are organisations such as our own and Ditas who do that across Scotland. If there is less of that coming outside the high area, then that is less of a problem. The big issue is that Highlands has also been able to financially support the development of community groups in a way that Scottish Enterprise has not happened in the Scottish Enterprise area. That is obviously a gap that us and Ditas are not in any position to fill. I think that some of that has been a long-standing issue or debate is whether Scottish Enterprise or whatever body works outside the high area. There should be someone with some sort of strength and in communities remit, but that has not happened yet. Yes, that is a long-standing issue, which has been raised in committee after committee about what Scottish Enterprise does in that respect. We will take that on board. Move on to the Land Reform Scotland Act 2003 in removal of land-based barriers. Given that the objective of the 2003 act was to remove land-based barriers to the sustainable development of rural communities, I would like to ask the panel how well it has worked in practice and how rural Scotland has changed as a result. I refer to the submissions and note that the community woodlands association has said that the complexities and hurdles contained within the act have severely limited its use on the ground. Would the panel agree with that position? You are going to start, John. Yes, I think that it is clear that the numbers of successful acquisitions through the act are pretty low, I think about 16 or so in 10 years, which does not seem a huge positive track record. Obviously, it has a wider symbolic influence than that. The existence of the act sets a framework and there have been other transfers to community ownership that have happened because of the act being there and it was easier to just negotiate a settlement. In that respect, it has had a very positive effect. It is probably fair to say that the rate of change, there was not a step change in the rate of community ownership. Roughly looking through a membership of 150 or so organisations, the median age is about 2002-2003. In other words, half of them were around before the act. If you think about a lot of the big iconic buy-outs, they predate the act. It did not completely change the practical delivery of community ownership or the practical extent of community ownership in an enormously radical way. It has definitely helped, but perhaps not to the extent that we had hoped it would. John has said that I echo a lot of what John has said. What I would say is that, having checked yesterday what the register of community and land had in terms of its registrations, it has currently got 175 registered interests, not all of which some of them have been deleted. Some of them have been activated. 40 of those relate to Fife. There were a lot of registrations around Kinghorn law because there was individual ownership. You can discount a few in terms of how many of those are actual five applications. Those might be one community, if you know what I mean. That, as John has said, has not had a marked effect since 2003. Symbolically, it has something, but bureaucratically, in terms of how many actual changes have been affected—for example, there was the bottling factory in Lachwannach, the old crystal clear factory—there had been a lot of attempts to take that on, and that kind of burnt out and nothing really happened. So whether or not the 2003 act has been effective in that particular instance, it may be not, but overall it is a more difficult question. Back what John was saying there about the fact that this is in the background, even if things do not appear on in the stats—for example, local authorities are aware that a community might put a community right to buy a registration on a property if things do not start moving—I would say that, yes, there are low absolute numbers. The bottom line is that it is not a right to buy, it has been a right of preemption if it comes on the market and tied to that. It is of respect. Your registration expires after five years. It is quite onerous for volunteer organisations to go through the registration process. Can they go through that again after five years? I think that the bottom line to me is that it is a right of preemption and a lot of assets that communities will be interested in do not come up on the market. I would not disagree with anything that has been said so far. As John said, the transfers that have happened through the act are only one part, but I think that everyone would agree that the act itself has probably not delivered the aspirations of many at the time that it was introduced. We supplementary to that. I would be interested in your views on how you think the experiences to date have informed the community empowerment bill as it is currently drafted? One of the things that has just come through in the community empowerment bill is that ownership is only one aspect of empowering communities, understanding how community planning works, what a community needs are, whether ownership will meet that need. The community empowerment bill takes all those things into consideration and starts to try and look at community ownership in the round of an effective local decision making and community planning framework. I do not think that it goes far enough, but I think that it is a start. A lot of those things came out, a lot of the problems about relationships, communication, other barriers to development all came out. They are all drawn out because of problems that people were experiencing with the 2003 act and they have been recognised in this new bill. It does not go far enough? No. I think that when it comes to community planning and local decision making, you cannot legislate for all that. I would like to see something in the bill about community councils, their role and how communities play an effective part in local decision making by local authorities and other agencies. For me, community planning still feels like the same agencies around the table. It does not feel like bottom-up involving communities of geography and communities of interest. We have made comments to the local government regeneration committee about the parts and community planning. I think that, especially from my rural point of view, the framework in which community ownership sits is very important, which means that we have to have the community planning partnership working effectively. Indeed. First of all, John and then Rodi. I agree with Sarah-Jane that ownership is not the only means for communities to achieve their objectives. Having the community right to buy within the broader community empowerment bill is a useful recognition of that because there are lots of other bits that support community aspirations without ownership elsewhere in the bill. As far as the specific amendments to part two of the Land Reform Act, there are a lot of positive amendments in there. At some level, they are a bit cosmetic rather than addressing some of the structural problems with the bill. They will undoubtedly smooth the process and ease matters. It is a bit like this model of cars, not very good, but now it will have airbags and a catalytic converter, but it still only has one gear and petrol rationed. It is not going to go very much better. I think that that is a bit of an issue to my mind that it has not addressed some of the fundamental structural problems with the way that part two works or does not work. The good things are things like allowing sceos to be members. Fundamentally, if your community body is a sceo or a company limited by guarantee, it does not change the fact that you have to go through this registration process and then sit there for five years, re-register, sit there endlessly until the landowner decides to sell if they ever decide to sell. Fundamental issues are about whether you need a registration process. There is a two-step process that is very much at the whim of the seller, a bigger issue than what form of community body is it that is sitting there waiting. I might have a point about the registrations. I also looked at the register the other week just to get the up-to-date stats. 175 registrations listed of which 124 are deleted. That is 124 registration processes where communities are not all separate 124 communities because, as we said, sometimes there are multiple registrations from a single community. That is 124 out of 175 instances where the community has done a huge amount of work because it is not an easy process to get to that stage and it has not happened, it has not worked. Then there is 30 or so that are sitting there waiting for the land to come up and 16 where it has gone through. That suggests to me that there is a structural issue that communities are not really, the majority of communities are not being able to progress through the scheme. Did you want to come in at this stage, Dave Thomson? Well, it was an issue that I was going to pick up on generally. I mean, I'm happy to deal with it just now if you like. Well, since we're talking about registration. Ah, okay. Good morning to the panel. Yes, I'm interested in whether there should be, you know, the panel's views on whether there should be a need to pre-register at all. A lot of the evidence that we've had so far indicates that a great number of registrations have been late in inverted commas, registrations and so on. Obviously, communities, you know, the amount of work they have to do to register an interest and they've got to try and anticipate what's in the minds of the land owners, which is basically impossible to do. And how is a community going to know if a particular piece of land that's been in one ownership for hundreds of years, there's no indication whatsoever it's likely to come up and then all of a sudden it comes up? Why would a community register an interest in property like that, you know, that has never been in the market for a long time? So I just really wonder whether we shouldn't be simplifying the process and allowing communities, just as the norm, not requiring pre-registration, early registration at all, so you wouldn't need to re-register. Now, if we're going to have to re-register, then five years certainly seems a very short time, you know, it should maybe be extended and it should be a much simpler process to re-register. You should just be able to say, I want to re-register or something pretty simple. So I'd like to get your views on this because I'm just, I just wonder whether there should be any need at all to register early. I would agree that this definitely needs a good look, because that is, I mean, people use, you know, the word scannard or whatever. It is a big job to register in the first place, some people give up at that stage because of the process involved and, yes, I mean, five years soon passes and you have to think about re-registering. So yes, it would be great to extend it to 10 years or whatever or to look at options to do away with them. I mean, I don't have the stats as to how many are actually late registrations, but a lot of the ones that we get involved in speaking to people about, because as you say, they can't anticipate what land is going to come up. There are probably several different assets that could make a key difference to their community. Do they put a register of interest in them all just in case any of them come up? Perhaps there are several different ownerships involved. So I would add a greater emphasis on what we are now called late applications, which would certainly help. And the option of doing away with the pre-registration, I can see why it's there, but I think that's definitely worth exploring. The idea of having pre-registration is that you want to encourage communities to be proactive, and I think that we agree that proactive thinking ahead is better generally than simply being reactive to opportunity, but having encouraged communities to be proactive and place these registrations, then there's no reward for that. As you say, once you get past the individual iconic site, the lighthouse or the disused military base, which the vast majority of communities don't have anyway, it becomes a much more generic process. If I was designing the thing from scratch, I think the way to do a system is to have encouraged communities, however you structure and define them, whether it's through community anchor organisations and so on, to do some sort of community development planning and identify the sort of land building assets that they need to deliver the things that their community wants, whether that's a piece of land for allotments, for affordable housing, for a children's play park, for a community woodland, and be in the position where they have specified if we need land for affordable housing, then there's clearly certain types of land would fit that specification and other bits, you know, the thousand hectares out in the moor isn't useful, but you have a kind of specification laden, then when land comes on the market, then they have a point to pre-empt, or the possibility to pre-empt, if that land fits their previously announced specification. In France they have a system, I'm not going to give you the French name, you'll be pleased to hear about, essentially land development and rural settlement associations that just have a standard pre-emption on land when it comes up the market, so everybody selling land in, I believe it's rural France and I don't quite know where they draw the line for rural France, but these organisations, which are I think the 20 or so run on a regional basis, decide whether they want to pre-empt to buy in and then sell on if it's in the public interest, and I don't know whether they frame exactly as public interest and sustainable development, but essentially for those purposes, so the good of the community they will buy and then sell to the local farmer or whatever. So I don't see why we couldn't have a similar system here where there was kind of an automatic right of preemption that at least someone had a look and said does this fit with an existing community development plan, if it does then we give the community the option if not go on with the open market sale. That clearly doesn't breach European human rights rules, otherwise it wouldn't have run like that for 40 years in France. It makes a difference when you've got local government and not original government to actually focus on the plans, the structural differences, but I mean I think in terms of the principle of the way you can operate that would be workable. Malcolm Coomber? I've got three points to make. In terms of the purpose of registration, one's been alluded to and it sort of focuses the community and singles out an asset and programmes what they're going to do. The second role of registration is publicity for the land owner. The land owner has a legitimate expectation that they should know what's happening to their land and so on and registration puts them on notice that a community is interested and that's fine. Publicity to a certain extent that could be achieved in another way and the immediate comparison that there was a comparison with France just made by John within Scotland you could look at the part three crofting community right to buy there is no need to register with regard to that because the publicity relates to the fact that the land is under crofting tenure part of the common grazings or certain eligible additional land. Now it's a policy question as to whether or not an owner of rural land should just be on notice that any land that they own could be susceptible to a right of preemption or whatever right that may be. So doing away with registration it would sort of do away with the focal point in terms of getting community mobilised and may do away with some publicity aspects but that's not necessarily in and of itself a bad finger or other models there. Coming back to the late applications point the main the first big bit of litigation about part two was to do with Homehill down the Erdyn Blane where a community basically when they sort of for sale signs realised that this hotel development was suddenly available and they tried to go through the section 39 late application route and that's got bigger hurdles in terms of sustainable development tests and being definitely in the public interest you've had with that. So I will gloss over that but obviously they will they will have told you more than I will and in terms of the third point I was going to make was the five yearly renewal having a sort of from scratch five yearly renewal is probably quite an unnecessary administrative burden a quick do you still want to have a registered interest? Yes I do so assuming the register was to stay it could be a lot simpler and the renewal process would be part of that a fast track system would certainly help. Okay Sarah Jane? Just to echo what John said the driver for the registration should be the community needs the whether the landowner is likely to bring that land on to the market at any time in the future shouldn't be irrelevant but that should be the secondary driver and I think it's the same we've talked about this about rural housing and rural buses and you don't stand in the road if there's no buses coming along but that doesn't mean that there's not a need for that bus to go past and I think it's the same with with registering an interest you're showing your you're indicating as a community that you have a need which you feel will be met by that piece of land and I think that's quite a positive step Malcolm used the phrase the owners on notice I actually think in some cases it's been the first step in dialogue with owners which has often led to asset transfers out with the terms of the act. I agree with Malcolm also that we are going to look at re-registration then there's no reason why it can't be simplified. There's a couple of supplementaries. I understand what's being said but the home hall one that was very interesting in the sense that it was a public area to all intents and purposes that the local people thought it was public and they used it for decades or more why would they ever think they would have to register an interest in something they thought was theirs anyway you know now okay legally it wasn't but you know it caused them problems and the evidence we got last week was that you know these conditions about late application all this it made it virtually impossible for them to to actually get in there and do anything about it so there's there are obviously serious problems and issues can I maybe just look at the the registration convene it was about the good reasons and what's replacing it or you'd rather take supplementaries if they are supplementaries on the bits we've had you could come on to that yeah okay Alec Ferguson and then Graham Day thank you convener I will be as brief as possible but actually because Sarah Jane Lang has just put I think much more eloquently than I would have done some of the point I was going to make which is that I personally I'm inclined to the view that some sort of process is necessary albeit a simplified one I'm very open to that argument particularly when it comes to re-registration but I I do feel that a process of some sort helps to underline both a commitment by the community involved and it's sort of you know strengthen that commitment and also alert the landowner involved or the owner of the possibilities that might exist through a possible right to buy but I wanted to pick up a point that I think was John Hollingdale made I think which I think you used the phrase having gone through the process you then have to hang around and wait for the land to come on the market or words to that effect and forgive me if I put words in your mouth I'd I'd just be interested to know what your answer to that is because it seems to me that if you aren't if you aren't going to hang around and wait for the market the land to come on the market you are talking about an absolute right to buy as opposed to a pre-emptive one and I wonder if you could expand on is that what you're advocating just before you do a supplementary to the supplementary. Thank you, Caveira, because it just very much fits in with Alec Ferguson's point. I think go back to the comment that Malcolm Coombe made where I think you talked about instead of having a five-year full re-registration process that you would simply go back and say do you still have an interest well of course you may be a different entity because I presently have a planning application in my constituency which if it's granted would see a community's housing footprint increased from 100 homes to 300 homes within a four to five-year period so the nature of that community could fundamentally change. Right, so those two points, John. Your point first, Mr Ferguson. I mean, yes, I think firstly we do agree in principle that there should be the kind of absolute right to buy but I suspect we'll talk about those the part 3a bits earlier. I think my concern is more with why it is that communities don't use the part 2 registration process and don't use it as part of proactive planning is that as you say, as it's constructed you have no mechanism to kind of make anything happen once you've achieved your registration so if your landowner suddenly becomes aware that there are community interests and aspirations then I can either say let's go through the process and that's happened with a few of the landowners where the right to buy has worked or they can say well let's come to a negotiated settlement but if they aren't interested then there is nothing you can do and I think the reality of community bodies is that they're set up to do a whole range of things and deliver community aspirations and they'll choose the routes that appear to achieve things for them so a community body isn't going to sit there with existing registrations and nothing happened it'll focus its attention you wouldn't you wouldn't say if we've got five ways to try and achieve some of the things the multiple things that communities want to to do because very few communities come up with a kind of single issue those community bodies go and focus on the things that look achievable you know we know how to do that we can go to the lot we can get a grant we can do whatever the ones that have gone into the registration process and have gone through it tend to be those where there's a kind of single iconic standalone project that is an obvious thing to fix I mean I think that the two lighthouses have gone through the process military bases things where there is a one-off in that particular community and it's there's been enough value for that single site for the community to put the registration in what they haven't done is used it generally speaking to do the kind of run of the mill development processes things that affordable housing allotments so on you either try and achieve them other ways or you give up and say we'll do it when we find you know when the opportunity arises it's actually very difficult with the act of the way it's structured at the moment to place multiple if you if you want affordable housing in your small town there might actually be 20 30 40 gap sites available and you have no idea which one would come up first do you register all of them that's right multiple things so my suggestion in that case is it's much more sensible to have a system where the community that wants affordable housing or allotments or whatever it is is in a position to say we would like to have a right of preemption on any piece of appropriate land that comes up in their community and then pick the first one that comes up and it might well be as a part of that process that one of those landowners steps forward and says actually yeah you know what this bit I've got here would work and and you don't have to go through the process at all and that's so that's my way of trying to do it is broadening the scope of how communities use the act I think if they can do it any bit that fits and obviously that someone has to kind of run the rule over that but essentially any bit that fits would be a much better way than specifying and having to go through the process with each separate landowner and with a very uncertain outcome we'll put that to the urban panel that comes next as well. Simon Fraser first. Yes, I thought I would make a general comment I'm not particularly expertise about part two but as a general comment I was involved professionally in the acquisition of a number of large holdings particularly prior to 2003 I would have to say and I would also have to say that the 2003 act provisions would have assisted not one of them in fact would probably have acted as a major barrier to progress in every single one of them. I can well understand how part two maybe of assistance if you want to acquire the odd surplus lighthouse or something like that but if you wholly state that your whole community live on suddenly comes in the market the current provisions are practically useless we've been able to intervene at the level and the scale and the time required to do so. A community may not realise that their whole estate is going to come in the market their whole personal world is going to come in the market they may have an aspiration to acquire something but when the whole thing comes in the market that's an entirely different ballgame and it's certainly my view that the act as it stands at present would avail them nothing whatsoever. Malcolm Coon. After that rather seismic comment from Simon I'm going to go to matters more in terms of who is you if you do you still have an interest the question would be who is you now to a certain extent that's answered by it's an immortal body that's been set up a company on the big guarantee the office holders might have changed but the you is that company on the big guarantee and in that regard registration focuses who the you is so if you moved away from a situation that you did not have registration you might have different questions as to how to identify the community if they hadn't had that pre-step but the other thing to very quickly mention is in the scheme at present there is provision for overlapping registrations and that has actually come up in an ascent previously so it is possible that there are two use and it's then for Scottish ministers to decide which one to go for so it's a shrewd question who is you but I think it can be answered hopefully if I could make one other quick point in response to Alex Ferguson's point by putting the land over on notice I agree him in terms of I think it can be it can be a good thing to sort of signal a sign but at the same time I am aware of some communities that have been in dialogue and they regard the idea that registering an interest might be seen as inflammatory in terms of if they if they were to register an interest shoot that that would sort of lock the landowner into a process that might not be as good as a consensus driven based approach now that's not to say obviously it's just two things in a dialectic there's one thing that could be a good thing one thing could be a bad thing in terms of the registration process so so I just want to put that counterpoint there that some people do regard the idea that it might sort of change the dynamic of what could have been a consensual negotiation to suddenly make it go a bit more legal if people know there is that on notice so I'm not sure there's an answer to that I'm just mentioning that there's a counterpoint there so Sarah Jane and then Rory possibly a very quick and simple response to Graham's question about changing circumstances I think you just need to ask at point of re-registration have there been material changes and if it's yes you go down one route if it's no you go down another route and I don't think that there'd be any problems in having that sort of dual process for re-registration because you're right Graham you know a material change such as a huge swell within the community which could have different views and different needs does have to be taken into consideration but you could have a dual registration process just to pick up on what Malcolm and I think John said as well I feel like I'm banging on a bit community planning but I think a lot of this is about that where registration has happened and it is viewed as inflammatory is often where there's no community planning process there's no dialogue there's no engagement so it does feel a little bit like you know we want that off you but the reality is there's never been any discussions about what that is what it'd be used for would you actually consider giving us in the first place and it then becomes quite adversarial we had suggested I think in our submission convener that rather than looking at preemption proactivity in the part of landowner I think is something that all of us feel that there's a need for greater proactivity by landowners engaging with the communities we had suggested as well that there might be a requirement for notice from a landowner to an established community body prior to any sale which would mean that you got notice before it went on the market so you wouldn't just know when you drove down the road and saw the estate for sale signs. I feel again that puts the onus very much on the engagement and a positive relationship basis rather than that right of preemption which always feels adversarial. Okay Llorida. Quite a lot of balls in here just now but I'll just make a point just to bear in mind at all times that in a lot of cases we are dealing with volunteers here and it is a huge demand on volunteers and going through this process people get burned out, organisations lose their steam if for example the assets withdrawn from the market at the last minute has a devastating impact on the morale of that community so we are talking about volunteer time and we are talking about you know very precious human resources go into these that can easily be wasted if you like but I go go back to the earlier point about has this bill kind of addressed the main issues and will it result in any sort of transformational change obviously talking later on about the arboral and that's something that could well make a big difference and the other point I would make you know while there has been lots of proposals there for easing the process the other big one would be the abandoned neglected land because that's the right to buy rather than a preemption right now we would like to see an interest of efficient use of community volunteer time if there was a way whether it's done through a more of a planning route or whether it's done through an absolute kind of right to buy you know more on a sustainable development basis than on you know abandoned neglected land then that would be a far more effective use of what is a very scarce and precious resource in these communities to try to make things happen and to move these communities forward we will discuss abandoned and elected quite soon if you can imagine continuing with registration Dave Thomson thank you convener that's all very interesting and it strikes me that a much simplified registration process possibly involving some kind of general registration for a purpose rather than identifying a piece of land I think it was mentioned by John so that a community might have a purpose in terms of creating more general community land or housing land or whatever and they could put in a general interest in any land coming up for you know that they could use for that purpose might be one way forward they could do that early or they could possibly do it once a piece of land does come up you know put what's called late registrations until now I was also interested in the comment about communities being devastated once they go through a process and then land is withdrawn maybe we should be looking at something which says once the land has gone on the market and once the community have shown an interest the land can't be withdrawn so I'd be interested to know if that is something because that would prevent a land owner putting it on the market and then to usurp the community withdrawing it again now around all of that sorry if I'm going on quite a lot here there's a lot of issues in here the good reasons issue has been withdrawn it's not in the the bill in terms of late registrations and as I say I'm not keen on this early late and all that I think we should have registration and and different people be able to come in at different times potentially but the new clauses that are in the bill in terms of late registration we had some evidence from muntial on Scotland saying that you know it's to do with such relevant work as ministers consider reasonable was carried out and just how that would be interpreted I just wonder again what the panel thinks about how easy it would be for a community to prove that they had undertaken earlier work you know because it's got to be done sufficiently in advance so again coming back to this point about why do we need to have early registration why not just have a registration along the lines that I've mentioned a few minutes ago John yeah I mean I think in evidence that was one of the precisely that point but it's very unclear to us what the the phrasing or what the interpretation of such relevant work as the ministers decide says the relevant work was carried out in respect of land with a view to the land being used for purposes that are the same as those proposed to the land if that I guess there isn't interpretation of that that's possible that this precisely that the community has defined that it wants to register land for specific purposes or has identified specific purposes for which it wishes to acquire land and if minister and then once a bit of land comes on the market that fits the specification that would be fit for those purposes if it's understood that ministers then accept that that meets this test then I think we'd be very happy with that but it's not clear to us that it does and I'm not quite sure exactly what the phrasing is on the face of the bill or indeed in the in the kind of guidance behind it that locks that in but that there's certainly a possibility that that might happen but it's not quite clear to us that that's exactly what they were thinking of the you know the bill team were thinking of when they wrote those lines we'll reflect on that for sure um can we move on to another point now I don't think there's any more that we need to say on on this matter no one else wanted to come in there that's fine um Claudia Beamish the meaning of community the complex issue of the meaning of community which has been touched on by yourself john in relation to skeos and it's very much in the air this definition that and I'm not going to go into the detail of the section 34 of the 2003 act which panel members will be familiar with although I'm happy to cover it if we need to do my best anyway it's obviously very important uh looking at this this bill uh to consider in what ways the definition of community can be widened and I'm I'm interested to know what the views of the panel are um uh beyond yourself john and uh on skeos and also last week it was mentioned um by the development um Trust Association Scotland about um Ben the Bencom structure and a question mark over why that was excluded um there's also the issue to cover the the main points and then we can have the the discussion I hope this is useful also issues around whether postcode units are too restrictive and a way to define rural communities if not through postcode uh communities of interests such as arts organisations or um I saw something came into me earlier in the week about um sports organisations as well um such as golf courses um there are charities ethnic groups um so there are definitions in relation to communities of interests that could be considered there are also of course um as was referred to in last week's panel communities of of place um so I'm really just opening that up for member members of the panel to comment on as they see appropriate and that would be very helpful. I just to confirm this we were we were asking why in our submission that if SCIOs are coming on board um why not also community benefits societies particularly given the resurgence and interest in them currently due to the um the way of raising finance through community share issues and we've recently had lottery funding in order to consort him for promoting that in an option so we would I understand that ministerial there may be ministerial regulation which can extend it beyond SCIOs and companies limited by guarantee but we say well why not just include community benefit societies from the outset the other point is indeed do you have to go and specify specific legal structures why not just specify the criteria that any such legal structure must meet rather than having to have the certain specific legal structure and all these criteria which leads again to the complexities as to how prescriptive you want to be about um what your articles of association or your constitution says and therefore how often you have to you have to have another general meeting to change them to keep the the Scottish government happy so I would say we're very welcoming of the broadening of it it's long overdue but why not bring it in in the benefit community benefit societies on the post codes absolutely some of the post code areas in the highlands are very very large and it's very difficult to try and keep the area you want because you'll end up straying into areas where perhaps you don't you don't really want so I'd agree that having the proposal to have a discretion to define them and other ways is very welcome I mean the issue there too some some of the area served by the community body is deemed as my understanding is it's the same as the area for for balloting for a particular community asset but you may for example have a community body with a larger area and that the interest in a community asset is actually quite local but yet all the ballots etc pertain to the whole organisation so there's another issue there perhaps as far as what you mean by community if it's a very effective community anchor organization for example serving a wider area can we have a ballot in a smaller area rather than the whole membership of that wider area that's another area but I'll just very briefly to finally on the issue of community of interest this is a tool for community regeneration and you know it goes back a bit to Sarah-Jane's point about the planning aspect what's best for this area it may well be if it fits within what has been agreed by that the local people has been the priorities for the area and would make a difference to the area maybe the best vehicle is indeed a community of interest as it again the actual body that carries forward that in relation to the sort of the form that an organization needs to take a touch than this in my response to the call for evidence there is another way to do it perhaps in terms of saying whatever organization you are the important thing is the rules that that organization abides by in its constitution and a comparator jurisdiction for this is South Africa with something they've had something called communal property associations they introduced that in the 90s and they have to register their constitution and obviously they wouldn't be able to get that constitution registered wherever that registration process might be I'm afraid to mention registration in the context of the debate today but it would be a repository for these community organizations to see what these rules are and then irrespective of whether you were a ski or a Bencom a community limited by guarantee a company limited by guarantee sorry you would be complying with these rules that the stipulations would be there and you wouldn't be hamstrung by being a company limited by guarantee it might be another way to do it just on that point Sandra Holmes last week suggested that they had a stock constitution which they had in the community land unit or whatever it's called now in h i are you suggesting that we should try to adopt a particular basic constitution that could be off the shelf now I suspect that stock constitution would be a stock constitution for a company limited by guarantee so you'd almost want to carve out the bits of that stock constitution assuming it was a model for further you should carve out the bits that pertain specifically to a company limited by guarantee and leave in the things that relate to the asset the community and and provided that the community was able to form whichever vehicle they chose as most suitable for them which in some cases might even involve someone like a local charity who's got a similar interest coming on board and whether it's the John Muir trust or the RSPB I know these are that's an emotive issue as well but someone someone else who might be because at the moment it's just a community in terms of a postcode unit now i'm not saying we want to sort of open it up in that way but if if the sort of underlying community as a in whatever form it took was able to say we have got these rules we can comply with these rules and these are on record that might be a more flexible form good right Sarah Jane and then Rory I don't have anything to add further to the comments about community body but I wanted to pick up on your community on definition of community and community of geography as opposed to community of interest a community of geography should include a number of communities of interest and when you look at what the community needs are they should be able to weigh up the different communities of interest needs and have a holistic view the problem when you go down the community of interest route is of course each community of interest has a different interest and their sole purpose will be to further the interests of that community and I think that's where you actually start creating lots and lots of tensions within community and again we go back to community planning if everyone has a seat everyone has an equal voice then the sports clubs the environmentalists those with housing needs everything is looked at in the round and I think that's what a community of geography a community of place actually does so so I would support retaining the community of geography as as the community definition for community right to buy. There shouldn't be the community of interest on as as part of the definition for the bill. Yeah I don't think that community of interest should have the same rights of to buy as a community of geography. Thank you just to pick up on Malcolm's point there I would agree this idea of having I mean the legislation needs only to have the criteria that are required to safeguard the if you like the public's investment if you like the public benefit and it will soon rattle up model articles association constitutions we've already got as Hyda's and CW model articles association for community right to buy or not community right to buy we've got model skew constitution as well and no doubt we will have a model skew constitution for community right to buy so we can soon rattle up the model constitutions you don't need that in the regulation what you need in the regulation is the criteria that must be built into these governing documents. Thank you okay John you wanted to see yes I mean certainly another vote for fundamentally looking at the characteristics that you want from a community obviously need a body that's incorporated needs to be open needs to be non-profit distributing and have appropriate sort of wind-up dissolution clauses and so on so those are well understood and there are models available for the different company forms the problem is as soon as the legislation changes all those existing model constitutions then need to go and be re-amended which is an issue that will arise with some of the provisions in in in the bill as presented what I did want to pick up just slightly was on the communities of interest that actually and I'm it's a dangerous thing I'm sitting next to two eminent lawyers who may contradict me but as far as I can see the existing provisions the existing act doesn't actually exclude what I would consider local communities of interest from using the provisions it it clearly rules out the RSPB or you know some sort of national body or the Scottish mountain biking association if there is such thing but it wouldn't rule out and again I have no idea if these organisations exist but you know the Thurso Amateur Dramatic Society could if they wanted you know if they rented their local playhouse from a private landowner were concerned it was going to be sold from underneath could it seems to me register an interest in that they would have to demonstrate that the use of the land was fit with their objectives which I think they would have no trouble doing they'd have to make a case that them taking ownership was compatible with sustainable development but I think you know those of us who write these applications would be quite happy to to write that they would do some theatre drama work with the school and so on it would be a brave person who stepped in and said that you know local cultural development wasn't compatible with sustainable development probably the biggest issue they would find would be that they then if it did come on the market they'd have to have a ballot of the whole town and so there would be a big job of you know as well 8,000 people in Thurso so that's an electorate of six and a half thousand they would need to get a significant number of the people in the town to turn out to vote for them but I don't think that's insurmountable so so I think there is a mechanism for it to happen it just probably hasn't been picked up it would be much more difficult I suspect when you scale that up to the to a bigger urban scale again I don't know if there is such an organisation but the Glasgow Muslim Women's Cultural Centre would have a fairly relatively narrow small proportion of membership if they were expected to ballot the whole of Glasgow then clearly that's not going to work but as far as it sits with kind of relatively local communities of interest it seems that they can go through and some of those registrations that exist are to some extent that I mean in Foris which is a town of almost 10,000 people there is an active or there is a current registration on the football pitch it's not in the name of Foris mechanics which is the football pit the team that plays there it's in the the Mossitt Park Protection Company I think is the name I'm maybe slightly wrong about that but you know it's fundamentally a sports interest with a kind of community development bit stuck on come in housing yes can I just ask comes to the panel about what they see it as appropriate if anything to be on the face of the bill in terms of this sort of definition or should it be in the in the secondary legislation Malcolm my own preference would be for it to be in the primary legislation rather than buried in a regulation that would be my own preference okay shall we move on right I think we should to just a point about issues related to procedures and requirements and we didn't cover the question of mapping when Dave Thompson was talking about some of his questions regarding registration now the mapping question is one which could have been a problem in the 2003 act it was in some cases I wonder if panels want to reflect on that just now members of the panel of any views about the detail of the mapping we you know we're talking about the registration of croft land virtually in the same detail as that for any sales of house plots or whatever just now but does the mapping needs to be of such a precise nature we've seen problems about that in terms of the interpretation with regard to part three of the crofting community right to buy in park any comments from members right first of all Malcolm the maybe the quick comment I'd make would be to do with one bit of litigation which happened I believe in Kakori sheriff court it was King horn community land association against hazel there there was an issue to do with the sort of application process did not quite comply with the the mapping requirements even though in the application form there was a grid reference it wasn't written on the plan or something like that and it didn't quite meet up with the legislation and that ended up with that being bounced and so it's there for it was a case of community go away so that's one of the deleted interests in five so in that regard that does not seem satisfactory to me there were other reasons there were other issues with that litigation it wasn't solely that but it's something to think about so fundamentally you need you assuming registration assuming it's it's it's a good thing to get everything on notice then yes you do need to know what land things relate to but in terms of strict mapping requirements at a time when a community and volunteers are relying on a lot of energy to comply with a lot of different things a degree of relaxation and or discretion might might help Simon Fraser I think we're still talking about part two but the lesson has been learned from part three that it is pretty much impossible to comply in fact the two major applications in the island of lewis park and galson they decided to map only the common grazing element and not the element where all the houses and people and everything else were simply because that would have been utterly impossible even to map the common grazing proved extremely difficult with a requirement to map every fence watercourse ditch goodness those what not and that that was certainly and is I would also encourage to consider Malcolm's point the one of the difficulties that the crafting communities came up against was this the sudden death if you like element of making any mistakes and the inability to rectify mistakes immediately in my own submission there's there's something about how that that could be addressed and I think you certainly want to have the ability to amend the application or to allow the application to be amended in the event of something inadvertently being missed or whatever that would otherwise kill it off okay anyone else on the mapping yes john hollindill I think that the second point about the part three crafting mapping being seen widely is completely over the top and impossible to deliver perfectly the first time round on the scale of those estates on terms of part two it's very noticeable if you look through the documents on the register of community interests that there isn't a sort of standard specification for how these maps are pulled up and they they all look a bit different different base maps are being used they're demarcated in different ways and that's because no one has sort of set down and said this is actually how we want maps presented and this is this is how you would map an area of a thousand hectares and this is how you would map an area of 0.01 and it really is like that I mean I think the smallest area is probably about the size of this committee room someone's gone through the registration process for and not having a standard model means that people are very much in the dark kind of is this going to be good enough is this what they need and even having a sort of standard specification this is what you need to do to satisfy and actually drawn out would be a really helpful step explore that with ministers and due course abandoned and neglected land we're going to move on to that just now and my muscle I think is going to kick off on this one thank you very much I think a common theme amongst all the submissions has been some views on abandoned and neglected land certain submissions I've had a chance to read so far Malcolm described the term as sub optimal I'll just be interested on your reflections on what could be optimal in terms of how this is described whether because holy the holy and mainly abandoned and neglected definition isn't in the 2003 act of crafting right to buy what the motivation is for this in some reflections on the difficulty of defining such land in circumstances which does not penalise owners or tenants or others who might be have different views of how their land might want to might want to operate their land so I'm simply interested in those views to help the committee come to some mind on it so Malcolm for standing um so yes I did say that the word abandoned is suboptimal but I think there's probably there's four key words the holy mainly abandoned neglected and my suboptimal comment was specifically unrelated in relation to the technical meaning of the word abandoned in scots law because when an owner abandoned something that means they are surrendering any right to it now it's most easily visualised in the in the case of a corporial movable object so if I was to discard this jacket after this session and a fit of rage then I would lose title to it and abandon property in that context that under the rules of scots law it would go to the crown now abandoned land is an issue at the moment in terms of there was a there was a fairly well obviously you can't throw away a land in the way you could throw away a movable item and there was a recent case to do with the liquidators of a scotch coal company where they tried to walk away from certain liabilities linked to the land and the the question of sort of whether you can sort of leave that abandoned and with a non-owner or whether the crown would step in and whether via the queens and lord treasures remembrance or it's a difficult one I'm not going to give you a seminar on that just now but the very fact that abandoned might have a technical meaning to scots lawyers in that context to my mind using it in legislation immediately leads to a little bit of ambiguity so whether you need to explain what you mean by abandoned or whether you need to use a different word to abandoned is something that I would ask for careful consideration of because as I say it does have a technical meaning to scots lawyers scots property lawyers so unused underused that I mean these introduce different subjective tests but at least they don't have the ambiguity factor if that makes sense so do I have an optimal word I was careful not to offer one in my own submission you then have the sort of the holy or mainly to look at the the rest of the the discussion the rest of the phrase I suspect the holy is probably easier to identify than the mainly because it seems to me there's a spectrum there with holy being at one side mainly being a little bit less than holy and I'm again you don't want to say it's a chart of lawyers or something like that but you can imagine people having fun with arguments there you can imagine people having fun neglected I it's also an interesting one because if a landowner came in with a view to create some kind of wilderness wildlife haven and plan purposefully to let land go back to its native state or something like has that been neglected if that was his or her conscious choice to do that so as I say it's it's difficult to to to propose an optimal word it's always easier to heckle but in relation to the phraseology I think specifically abandoned I think should be carefully considered the other words need to be talked around I think quite a lot of our comments were written prior to discussions we've now had with Scottish Government about what abandoned and neglected actually may be defined and the fact that they plan I think to suggest that they're included within the primary legislation rather than subordinate legislation like Malcolm we had real concerns about abandonment because originally we thought it was abandonment of ownership and had the same concerns as he did my understanding is that what we're talking about here is abandonment from its original use so if you said you were going to create the lotments and that's still sitting there used as even a wildflower meadow in five years time you've abandoned the original use but have you actually neglected it no because you've actively managed it as a wildflower meadow but what the provisions say are abandoned or neglected not abandoned and neglected so I think there's still a lot of confusion as to the circumstances under which this provision will actually be used I mean when we talked around the table at community empowerment stakeholders we were talking very much about blight sites and I think we were all in agreement that there are blight sites across Scotland which do have to be addressed but those were sites which were derelict which were really having a significant detrimental impact on the environment or the safety of that community and those ones were quite easy to identify but speaking to a farmer recently a small farmer down the borders he runs a tiny wee flock of Jacob sheep on a very large field and if I'm honest just enough to meet his geek requirements now he has been told by his community that they think he neglects the land they would like to see I think they'd like to see it plowed up to the up to the field margins and so they can see that he's actively magic but he is because he runs pedigree Jacob's but in their view they look out and see a kind of scrubby field in a few sheep so I think this is a very very significant issue I do have some concerns that we've not had had time to really go through exactly what this means in detail and as I say I think we talked about the policy memorandum you think you know what you're getting with this and then when you start playing it apart it seems to indicate something entirely different okay any others john holland then we went to parts 3a and the sort of absolute right to buy which we welcome but I think everybody agrees that these are provisions that would be used very very sparingly that they're not there to be used as a run and mill thing they're the backstop and that they're you know one of the ideal is that they are strong enough and credible enough that they facilitate compromise in negotiation and that settlements happen that way rather than actually having to to force sales but in order for that to happen then they do have to be credible and believable that it is in everybody's interest to go to the negotiation process and if they aren't or that there appears to be too much wiggle room then no one's going to take them seriously and it's noticeable part 3 the crofting community right to buy hasn't been a huge success it's fair to say and that sets two tests for communities essentially they have to demonstrate that what they want to do is in the public interest and furtherance of sustainable development and part 3a adds two more one of which is abandoned neglected and beyond that even there's the current ownership being inconsistent with sustainable development which we really struggle to see what sort of evidence you would need to bring to that but even with the abandoned neglected I think abandon is probably the one word that everybody has spoken to has a real issue with in this act because it's very difficult to see how it would work I'm not convinced that the abandoned neglected test is actually really necessary I think most of these things can be dealt with under the sustainable development test so that the nature conservation issue yes I think everybody agrees that non-intervention or very limited intervention in land management for nature conservation purposes is in in appropriate circumstances completely compatible with sustainable development if it isn't you know we need to have a world with SNH because they're certainly working under that under that understanding and so if a landowner genuinely is setting side you know land that's not being managed because he wants it to be wilderness or for nature conservation purposes you would assume you could assess that under a sustainable development test by reference to is it a designated site does he have a any kind of agreement or even dialogue with SNH about the management or non-management of that site and it seems to me it could happen under that sort of test that that we already have and fits with part two and part three and just would the community interest community proposals for this land be in the interest of sustainable development if it's already agreed that sustainable development on this site is non-management because it's or very limited management because it's deep peat or a precious wildflower meadow then the community thing would fall it wouldn't wouldn't actually make any progress at all it would it would stop at that point the other big issue that strikes me with this neglected is in the circumstances where what the community wants and again you're you are not dealing with the majority of private landowners at this stage at parts 3 are you're dealing with a very refractor a very minority element who are entirely refractory won't compromise won't negotiate you've got a circumstance where the community wishes to acquire 100 square meters to extend the village graveyard because the village graveyard is full do they have to demonstrate that the the landowner who owns 10 000 hectares everything around the village is is abandoning neglect in the entirety of that estate in order for them to to get this because this landowner simply refuses to sell a tiny plot of land at any price and it seems to me those are the circumstances that you actually most of most of us will probably say yes it probably is in the interest of sustainable development that this happens it's in certainly interest of the community that this happens but it's very difficult to see how this abandoned and elected could be made to work in any circumstances rory double i think john stone will smith under but basically yes our question is is it really workable and you can see how in an urban context which you're talking about later on you know the neglect would maybe more evident we're struggling really to see how it can possibly be workable in a rural situation and what i was going to suggest john's already suggested if you move the basis on the rural area away from abandoned neglected to the you know where there's compelling rural development benefits from a small perhaps a small area relative to the impact that would have on the the greater land holding of the owner then that would be a far more useful mechanism for a rural area than trying to define neglected or abandoned or anything like that Simon Fraser very briefly i to find difficult to understand how this can be applied to the rural context the test in the crofting community right to bias of course the sustainable development one and this was tested in court and i'm sure that i'm sure the committee will be aware of Lord Gill's judgment there but in essence the community were able to meet the sustainable development test as applied to a very extensive area not to a very small area but to a very extensive area so on the one occasion when it has been tested in court it was able to establish its case was able to be made how you could make that with the additional hurdle of abandonment or neglect i just kind of begin to imagine just to come back on that convener i mean i think we've said before when we've talked about rural issues and land issues that you know we don't always need a one size fits all approach and if we're all in agreement that this works in urban areas but not rural areas perhaps that what we're looking at is is is a different approach in urban and rural for dealing with a specific issue can i just thank you i think that's been very helpful i think you've raised a question even if you haven't actually got the answer to it then that's a useful step forward just in terms of neglect and operation one of the areas that concerns me most greatly is the question of land held by the public or by ministers and others and by a variety of non-departmental bodies and by local authorities and local authorities are bound by best value requirements they have no obligation to maintain buildings but they have an obligation to try and get best value from them as we've seen in some celebrated cases for example in castle towered in in Argyll which is a neglected building cost a lot of money but the council seems to have adopted a dog in the manger attitude towards it but the concept of who owns these buildings and how those buildings might be transferred to community or other ownership without paying a full purchase price to the public purse itself and money circulating within the public realm strikes me as an important one to tackle if we are going to enable more communities to take control it's a difficult one to see where it fits into the current legislation but it will have to be confronted is there any thinking that any of you have about how we might confront it because it does seem to be the biggest barrier for many communities I'm just going to say that we do quite a lot of work with local authorities and asset transfers to communities and we try and present it as a different scale of public ownership going to community rather than being a part of it but the local authorities are probably aware of the 2010 regulation that allows them to dispose of for less than full consideration in the light of the wider value that it brings to the public if you like to the communities and we'd like to see that expanded to the other owners that said increasingly it's become increasingly hard for us to persuade local authorities that that is indeed the way forward and more and more local authorities are looking particularly when the Scottish land fund came back on board looking to getting more like full market consideration for the products but community asset transfer in the Scottish Government's definition is about the transfer from public sector to community sector at less than full market value and we'd like to see that emphasis not being lost because it is starting to become lost even in the wider community asset transfer sort of scene. Sarah-Jane? I have nothing to add, I just want to make the same point as Rory. We're Simon and then Malcolm. The big difficulty with that transfer from government is of course the public finance man, you might understand that that has recently been overhauled, I'm not aware of the details, I'm not sure how far it's gone and Mr Russell is still bears the scars of West Harass and the attempt to pass that across from agriculture to the local community and it seems to me that we could probably do with a bit of something in the primary legislation here because in that instance the public ownership was inimical to sustainable development and yet the community still had to pay full value to get it. The hurdles there were the public finance manual and the ogre of state aid. And if these can somehow be squared with the policy purpose then perhaps that might be a way through, you know, if it were to be coloured in primary legislation. Malcolm and then John. Everything I was planning to say, Simon's just covered, I was going to meet the state aid point. That's good, thank you John. We're very familiar in community woodland association with the operation of national forest land scheme which in some ways mirrors but goes beyond what's available for the community right to buy with communities attempting to acquire from forestry commission and that scheme being a voluntary scheme has been it's been possible to shape it and change it over the eight years of operation to make it more fit for purpose rather than having to worry about primary legislation not allowing you to do things but it has always run up against money issues at the end of it and forestry commission's expectation that full market value would be paid which has become increasingly difficult as forestry land has appreciated in value partly as a consequence of 2008 economic difficulties. So that's a huge issue and we're getting into the other bit of the community empowerment bill but that part of the bill, the asset transfer bit is pretty silent. It's one of their issues with that little bill. It doesn't really explain how land will be valued and will it be a full market value? Will it be a value that takes cognizance of what the community intends to do with the bill? So in other words is there a credit for the additional public benefit which all communities have to demonstrate that they're going to deliver whether they're going through community rights about whatever will that be somehow factored into the price and so there are some big issues there. The other point I wanted to make with respect to the land reform act is that the majority of the acquisitions that have happened using the community right to buy provisions to date have been from public bodies. I think it's nine out of 16. Some of the public and a number of the registrations that are still sitting there waiting to be activated are also on public bodies like Argyll and Bute Council or Murray Council and so on. So this has been Scottish Water and the Northern Lighthouse Board and so on. I'm not sure how many of those will get moved into the asset transfer bit because there's a list, I think it's schedule three of the bill as presented, gives a list of some public bodies that will now be subject to the asset transfer provisions but I imagine some particularly national UK bodies I should say I think will stay within community right to buy and that sort of bit needs to be teased out how the bill will operate with respect to public bodies who goes where and also does the part 3A rules will they also apply to public bodies? That's not clear whether a community can start by attempting an asset transfer process under what's part 5 of the bill and if they're rebuffed by the local authority who says no we aren't neglecting the land that's fine can they then use part 3A it's not clear that there's a kind of mechanism or a transfer process there. Thank you, I might be Dave Thompson then. It's not only the various criteria that have been mentioned already that are going to give difficulty, I'd like the panel's opinion on 97 HD which is that an additional thing is that the applicants have to show that the owner of the land is accurately identified in the application. Do you see any difficulties there because you know trust can be set up and there may well be other methods of hiding who the owner is and does that need to be changed or looked at again? John, as the Land Reform Act stands I think in current community right to buy there is provision for communities to be able to put a registration on land without knowing who the owner is they have to demonstrate that they've made reasonable steps or the minister has to accept that they've made reasonable steps to find out who the owner is but if it's not possible to do so then a registration can stand so I think at the very least there ought to be a similar mechanism in here and of course this strikes against the whole abandonment because somehow if the land's abandoned that suggests that you wouldn't know who the owner was because they've run away so I think there is a sort of fit there it's one of those things I think there's a procedural problem in the way that the Act was constructed in that most of the provisions in part 3a seem to have been kind of borrowed wholesale from part 3 and in that circumstance if you're talking in the crossing community I assume it's taken for granted that you know who the landowner is on across perhaps that's not really the case but it seems to me that they've kind of taken from part 3 and just on across but there it should be an answer in part 2 which is that community needs to demonstrate to the minister satisfaction that they've taken reasonable steps to to demonstrate who it is who the landowner is welcome two points to make certainly when least what John just said if I was an advocate running an argument about whether or not the land was abandoned and I did not know who the landowner was and couldn't find who the landowner was that would be a useful aid to my argument whichever word was used whether it was abandoned or something else I think the point made about finding out who the landowner is has to be set in the context of the current land registration reforms that are going through it at the same time because the 8 of December a few days time that's when the new rules are operational for the land register and you've got a 10-year target for transparency of the land register which should hopefully assist in terms of working out exactly who and what and I also note from the programme for government the idea that it has to be an EU entity might be the owner which was something that the land reform review group had proposed as well so maybe that concern could be mitigated in future years dependent on completion of the land register. I think to echo what Malcolm said there's lots of steps being taken to improve identification of landowners across Scotland. I think like the point that was made before about mapping I really do not think it's fair in communities if their application is thrown out just because they listed the owner as Mr Jay Smith and in fact it's Mrs S Smith and I think that's something that we do have to take into consideration that you should have the ability to rectify it because you have identified the wrong member of the family but you know it's that family. I think if I'm honest having spoken to registers of Scotland about this my understanding is they think this is going to be more of a problem in urban areas than in rural areas. There are issues in rural areas about identification of owners I think we're all aware of that but a lot of the problems a lot of the inquiries they have are what are related to what they called fag ends of land in urban areas where companies have either wound up or are part of a bigger company and no one's sure who currently owns that piece of land and I think that's going to be very very problematic. Rorya Dutton and then I'll just add just you know it again going back to the point that a lot of these communities don't have staff they are volunteers and I can think of one example where it was actually access to our land to a block of forestry and you know ended up going across the transnashly across to Asia trying to find out who on earth owned this land and it you know I think they think they were established in 2009 for this asset transfer it's only happening now for this asset acquisition so we've we've got multiple owners where you've got people living abroad it can be very very challenging to find out who the owners I'm not familiar enough with the detail to know whether this will all be addressed in forthcoming legislation but it can be a major issue identifying the owners Simon Fraser Very briefly I had an experience of successfully in the end acquiring land from a Panamanian trust but that's the kind of problem you can be up against and if they choose not to respond to you there's perhaps nothing you can do whatsoever you can't really prove that they've even heard from you perhaps there might be a a long-stop provision which would enable some form of edictal citation to be made or some notice posted in the land if all else fails that's the sort of thing that you can do in other circumstances Sarah-Jane I think just to pick up on that I mean that yeah there's lots of President's set an arbitrary legislation which is just about you know all reasonable steps and and I see no reason why that can't be inserted into here Okay final section kind of thing about the interpretation of sustainable development and the issue about the double approach of using public interest and furthering the achievement of sustainable development has been built into the plans now and the inclusion of this double requirement for community bodies you know requires you know a careful handling the ministers obviously have to be satisfied if the ownership were to remain in the same hands that it would be you know that these activities might then take place and therefore make it difficult for community bodies to to further the achievement of sustainable development relationship to that land themselves do you think that that's a jeopardy for the way in which this has been laid out just now that community bodies could find themselves caught up by an owner saying well I'm about to make some sustainable development welcome it's an interesting one and I'll refer back to home hill very quickly because in that case I understand that there was a planning permission had been granted and they were able to the landowner was able to say look my my plans are in the public interest because I have got planning permission now of course there is a difference between an individual planning application and the wider setting within the land but yeah you the idea that a counter development might be sustainable I don't think you can you can ever shut that down because someone else might might have a valid sustainable development plan and that's fine I don't think we should be discouraging someone else from putting up that as a counter argument in fact if people are putting up that as a counter argument okay great you've encouraged people there so I so in part it could be a problem but at the other end if it if it was to encourage people to engage with things on the land in a way that they hadn't here before been doing then that could be a good thing I suppose it goes back to what the driver is if the driver is sustainable development in the public interest then who does it is secondary if the driver is sustainable development by a community then that's something entirely different I actually think the provisions in in terms of the the as drafted at the moment where the owner is given a chance to say yeah actually yes you're right I've not done enough of this land I'll bring it back into use for allotments are actually very positive because it means that private owners are given a chance to say yes I'm willing to you know to to look at improving the productive use of my land I think where it will have a real impact is on we've talked before about meanwhile use that yes you may have a 10 year development plan but what are you going to do with that land in the meanwhile and I think it might be sites like that where landowners are quite keen to to think about working with communities for sustainable development in the public interest but certainly there'd be no reason for the transfer of ownership to happen but we're talking about communities probably having an idea perhaps at the need housing whereas the landowner might think that sustainable development means building holiday homes to bring in value to the estate surely the question about what sustainable development is in this case you know as an excuse for not making that land available to the community is something that would be a difficulty for ministers to interpret I suppose convener we go back to the discussions we had about the planning application if the planning department of the local authority cited that there is a need for tourism tourism accommodation and business use on that site and has granted the planning application on that basis then surely the landowner is then delivering the public interest if they've carried out housing land audit and housing needs identified the need for housing and he's not delivering housing on that on that site then that's a different different matter but if you're going to weigh up the need between tourism and business and housing on the same site then that's competing sustainable development uses rather than sustainable development against non-sustate or non-development of a site that's a matter of interpretation I guess rorydutton we say that you know community trust development trust are there to make things happen for their communities and you know the local businesses local lords they are part of that community too and if a laird is prepared to do something that's going to push forward the sustainable development area that's great it means the community doesn't have to do it so it's a sort of a diff it's going back to this agenda about the regeneration of the area or is it a land reform agenda and we take very much the view that it's a regeneration agenda and if the community can do it where the existing landowner doesn't then that's the way it goes but if the existing players can do it then and they can do it effectively then that should that should be welcomed yeah okay John I just you know the context of this is part 3a so it's the minority of recalcitrant refractory land owners rather than the the majority and currently communities will be expected to demonstrate that the current land ownership is actually incompatible with sustainable development which I think is just an impossible test to pass but even in terms of the landowner's own plans I think you have to be aware that landowners will see part 3a applications coming a long way off because the process is that the community must previously have attempted to buy the land and it doesn't actually detail what that means we assume it doesn't mean just sort of ringing them up and saying we'll give you a tenor for it it would have to be a kind of properly valued process and then the community will have had to go through a ballot which has in as presented that's how the process works so the landowner will have quite a window to know this is happening and clearly if it is that minority of recalcitrant landowners there's an opportunity there to invent a scheme kind of out of sin air so I think it's important that ministers have the ability to assess the credibility of the landowner's plans and as you say it may well be that they have very serious sensible plans that either they're getting on with or they're waiting to get the finance together with and so on and those are very good reasons why the community's request doesn't go ahead but also it's important that it's not a mechanism by which a particularly recalcitrant landowner can simply frustrate the community objectives by pulling something off the shelf or having something that actually isn't all that credible. Indeed the complexities of this matter are certainly something which you've been able to explore with us and I thank you very much for that it's very helpful indeed because we're going to be looking at urban context and ECHR issues to follow this but you know when we reflect we may come back to some of you for clarification in any of these points but it's been very helpful thank you to the panel for your evidences now I'm intending to take a break for about five minutes for a comfort break before we start the next session thank you. Agenda item six the community empowerment Scotland bill welcome back to the committee meeting and the evidence session on this bill the second evidence session today is to focus on urban context and ECHR and I welcome to the panel Wendy Reid development manager for development trusts association Scotland John Mundell chief executive and reclied council dr Colleen Rowan a membership and policy officer for the Glasgow and west of Scotland forum of housing associations David Cruickshank executive director lamb hull stables development trust Susan Carr community alliance trust and Professor Alan Miller chair of the Scottish human rights commission welcome to you all we have decided in a range of questions just now we'll no doubt come to you the microphones are handled centrally you don't need to switch them on and off and we want to kick off with some aspects of the structure of the the bill as it's been presented to us Graham Day first of all thank you good morning thank you still this morning I wonder if the panel are satisfied with the extent of the dialogue and consultation on community right to buy that's taking place and whether you believe the extension of community right to buy to urban areas sits appropriately in the context of this bill who wants to start first right Wendy Reid I think from a DTA Scotland perspective we were very happy with the level of consultation there's been numerous opportunities to contribute not just by ourselves but also on members so we have found the process very accessible in terms of whether the extension into urban areas whether this is the right place for that I think as was mentioned by colleagues earlier at the time that this came up there was no obvious other opportunity to address this issue and so in that context it seemed to fit well to allow communities in urban areas the same rights that communities in rural areas had had for numerous years so through a community empowerment perspective it is a thing that is empowering urban communities to the same extent that rural communities already have ability to to take advantage of that that okay anyone else wish to comment on that just now not indeed right to the financial memorandum sorry the policy memorandum alec ferguson venner and good morning to you all it's a sort of scene setting question really and it's one I put to the the previous panel as well and it relates to the policy memorandum last June the convener of the Parliament's local government and regeneration committee wrote to the minister for local government planning looking for some clarification on the policy memorandum and he was quite critical in a way he described the policy memorandum as little more than a superficial overview and there was a bit of correspondence here and there and a bit more detail was provided but my question really is very simple given the fact that the policy memorandum actually devotes less than three pages to the whole of part four of the bill and at one point summarises 20 sections in I think it's seven bullet points I just wonder what your views are on whether the policy memorandum gave you enough content and enough detail to satisfactorily explain the purpose and policy choices and the aims of the bill and I'm particularly taken by a comment from one of the previous panelists which said that you you think you've understood the policies within the memorandum but the more you pick at it the more you try to to drill down into it you suddenly discover it's maybe got a different meaning to the one you thought it had in the first place and I just wondered if anybody had any comment they want to make on that. The Scottish Human Rights Commission has a very limited and modest engagement with this whole area and that's why I've been sitting in for the last session to educate myself and so I've no doubt that others will have much more insight and experience into a lot of these questions on that broader policy setting and landscape I think that the bill and subsequently the debate and the session I was just listening in on early this morning I'm struck how narrowly framed the debate has been and a little bit embarrassed that human rights in the way it's been interpreted has contributed to quite a narrow parameter of debate about land reform and about community empowerment and if I could just make a couple of points and then I'm sure others will have more value to add than I will but if we take the sort of perception of human rights and what relevance it has for your considerations with this bill the extent to which it appears is that and the language I think is very unhelpful and I heard it again this morning and I understand why the language is used about an absolute right to buy and that the European Convention is not understood as actually providing a framework in which the legitimate rights of landowners and the public interest are reconciled and a balance is struck with compensation of need be being provided to a landowner but the right to buy is a qualified right there has to be a competing public interest to override the right to peaceful enjoyment by someone who owns the land and therefore the language of a right to buy an absolute right to buy to me has the sort of polarizes the debate in an unhelpful way and isn't isn't a clear understanding of what the European convention actually contributes in terms of this debate but the bigger frustration I have with the policy framework is that human rights doesn't begin and end at the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg there's a much broader framework of international human rights which are relevant to you and to the Parliament and to the government but are largely invisible. The Scotland Act calls on Scottish ministers to observe and implement international legal obligations. Now one of these and only one is the international covenant on economic, social and cultural rights. This places a duty on Scottish ministers to use the maximum available resources to ensure progressive realisation of the right to housing, employment, food etc, i.e. it sees land as a national asset that is to be used for the progressive realisation of what you might call sustainable development and it's that broader what I would argue is an impetus for land reform that human rights provides rather than an inhibition which is the way in which it's couched now does the landowner have a sort of red card that the European convention can use to stifle any discussion about a different use of the land. That I think is what's missing from the policy framework and the other thing that I find striking is that next year and this will become real for Scotland the year after is that we are going to have at the United Nations level sustainable development goals and national plans will be required to be developed by all member states and that will come down to Scotland in due course so that looking at it in a bigger picture and having a proactive plan for using national asset of land and the resource to achieve sustainable development is really where it's going to be at in two or three years time and it's that broader framework that I think we're not benefiting from that and the debate is suffering and been quite confined and quite narrow subsequently and it may be that the forthcoming legislation on land reform will begin to address that more I would certainly hope so but I think the way in which human rights has been perceived has narrowed the parameters of this debate and somewhat robbed us of the benefit because I think if human rights is more widely seen in that context the realisation would be that it doesn't drive you towards courts and lawyers it drives you in fact to having an environment in which it leads to more constructive dialogue between landowners and communities because they know there is this legal framework there that communities will have a recourse to as a last resort if there's a public interest and the other thing it will do is it will lead to more responsible use of the land whether by existing landowners or by the public and communities if they come to take ownership of the land so I think we're being deprived of the full benefits of an informed human rights framework in which this somewhat narrow narrowly framed bill and debate has taken place. Mike Russell. Alan, I think that's exceptionally interesting but if we are going to move from what is a somewhat archaic and old-fashioned view of individual rights of land ownership into a much more informed and illuminated view of the interrelationship between land, the rights of those who live there and the responsibilities of positive use how do we construct a dialogue that allows us to do that. Legislation can sometimes get in the way of having the type of debates that we're having there but there is a commitment I think at the correct commitment to a series of legislative actions that will take us from here to a better place. What can we put in that allows that process to be more productive, more helpful to everybody involved and have an outcome in which there's a possibility of reconciling the different points of view for positive change in development. That seems to be the human rights challenge to me. You have experience of that type of dialogue elsewhere. How do we establish it? Well I think where you start from is very important and I think the bill and to go back to the question from Alex Ferguson, the policy memorandum has made it very difficult at this stage to embrace that broader view of the positive benefit of seeing human rights and how it plays out in all these dimensions. Insofar as it does play into this somewhat narrow field I think it is in the public interest. I think it is in the sustainable development and how that is interpreted and applied and implemented but it would be shoehorned in. It may be that further legislation to come which perhaps sees a broader picture and a broader canvas would be the more appropriate and I would hope that the starting point of that forthcoming legislation would be broader than where we are. It's like in Ireland if you're asking for directions. How do I get there on your tone while I wouldn't start from where you are now, sir? A very famous book of Irish politics has a title, Phrases Make History Here. It's a remark of the UK ambassador to Ireland during the Second World War. Are you going to be actively involved in saying in the consultation on the land reform legislation that was published yesterday? Are you going to make those points actively to the Scottish Government because it seems to me that they should be made? We will repeat the points that were made to the Scottish Government with this bill. At the very outset we approached the Scottish Government and said that this is far too narrowly framed. If you're talking about community empowerment you really have to understand what the rights are of the community and don't let the debate be polarised with notions of absolute right to buy, which does not exist. The communities cannot be given that. There has to be a public interest in a qualified right, not an absolute right to buy. However, we weren't successful. Whether we're more successful the next time in persuading the Government to have a broader perspective, indications are quite positive that we might get more reception this time. I think that it's correct to say that the land reform review group report in May has made a big difference to the way in which the Government will start to look at this, and I would hope that you would agree. I think that we have moved on over the last year or two very significantly, not just through that, but other bodies now seem to be more interested in the broader canvas than before. I'm quite optimistic that we're going somewhere. Nobody else wants to pick up points that Alec asked there. Just to feed in from our perspective and our thoughts on the policy memorandum, barring the things that have just been said, we were quite comfortable with it. We thought that it set out the policy context quite well in setting it in relation to community empowerment and what was meant by that and what the purposes of the bill were about. We thought that it was quite ambitious. I suppose that our question is whether or not the actual bill enables those policy aspirations to be delivered. Some of that information will come through the statutory guidance and the detail that comes with that as to whether or not the bill will achieve what the policy memorandum claims that it wants to achieve. We were also disappointed that the word renewal had been dropped from the title of the bill because we thought again that set a bit more of a context because from our point of view this is really about trying to contextualise the fact that this is about renewal and regeneration as well as community empowerment. Community empowerment has to be for a purpose and the purpose to us was about renewal and regeneration and the dropping of the term renewal from the title of the bill we felt not necessarily weakened the bill but it didn't necessarily place a context, a useful context on community empowerment and left people saying, well what's all that about? So two points really on that front. In our responses to the previous iterations of the consultation responses on the bill we have made the same point. We think that it's a missed opportunity and that community empowerment and real community regeneration as far as our members are concerned and in their experience in local communities the two go hand in hand and to separate them is a missed opportunity. John Swinney I think that any attempt to try and explain things or contextualise things is a good thing. The brevity probably doesn't help bearing in mind the complexity of the issues that are having to be addressed within the bill itself. One thing that has struck a chord with me through all the discussions and I've been at committee on this two or three times is that we are being asked to consult and liaise with community bodies but obviously that is a restricted number or representation of the population. How are we actually going to communicate with or consult with the wider population and I just wonder if we've actually cracked that not yet. Have we done enough to make people understand? Certainly from my point of view and obviously I work in this type of environment trying to make sure that we liaise with our communities and several communities in the right way. It's very complex the document itself and I'm not quite sure we've managed to simplify things enough so that the normal members of the public who are perhaps not immersed in it the same way as we are have the ability to understand what the Government is trying to achieve. I think that we'll ask some of the specific questions about that very soon but thank you for that. Good morning to everybody. It's just regarding the financial implications of the bill. The financial memorandum said that they didn't think there would be any additional costs for government but it was uncertain about the costs for obviously urban communities and landowners so I would just like to get the views from the panels what costs they think may occur for urban communities and landowners. David? That's a very deep question and I can only answer it with a broad brush response without going into any of the technical details in the bill but the simple fact is that within urban communities where there is significant deprivation there is also significant lack of resource and there is no point in floating the possibility of ownership without resourcing it both from a capital perspective and an ongoing revenue perspective. There is no magic wand that is going to allow for deprived communities to suddenly have not only the confidence and experience to own and manage resource there has to be resource coming into that deprived community or communities to make it feasible and this can be evidence in several different ways. First of all the owners of deprived of land in deprived communities are not necessarily willing to hand over their what they perceive as a potential asset even though it is in reality probably something of a liability without achieving full market value as they perceive it. For instance Glasgow City Council has mortgaged all of its redundant land to Barclays at a given market rate and will not release that land unless it achieves the market value and it gives the reason for doing that is because it has to honour its bond with Barclays. Similarly Scottish Water another example will hold on to land on the basis that it's an important part of its responsibility to deliver water to the whole of Glasgow in this instance and despite the fact that the property in which the former water board worker used to live is increasingly becoming derelict and they have no intention of addressing the issue of ownership and the final point I'd like to make on that and the financial front is that the sources of finance available to community groups that manage to get as far as establishing themselves as credible units will tend to require either outright ownership or at least a minimum of a 20-year lease before any sort of investment will come. I'm talking specifically about the lottery but that's also linked to the government resources coming through the likes of people in communities and other strengthening communities about avenues that are thankfully opening up. So I would suggest that you can't address the issue of ownership without having a resource in the background to make that possible. John Mundell? There are other issues that you gave the example a moment ago about the city of Glasgow and there are other aspects of legislation that councils have to comply with in terms of disposal of land and one of them, the primary one, is basically our duty to ensure best value and of course we will always, if we're disposing of assets, be required to obtain best value and that normally means the market value while we're using district value or whatever to value assets so that's a key issue and I don't think the bill addresses that issue at all. Title restrictions is another issue that we have to deal with and obviously common good which is referred to in the bill as well which is a highly complex area and I think we've actually missed a trick or two with regard to the common good and clarification on what should happen there relative to existing legislation. We'll leave that to Kevin Stewart's committee and we'll just stick to part 4. Mike Russell? Can I, David, just go back to this issue of Glasgow? That's a bit of a revelation to me, I am a new boy in this committee but I do find that very strange. So Glasgow City Council you're telling us has a deal with Barclays which means that if there is land which is redundant it is on bond or promise to Barclays and cannot be accessed by communities unless they pay the full market value. It's not quite as cut and dried there are several steps along the way including the fact that the land will be handed from Glasgow City Council to an alleoc or city properties who in turn will engage a private maintenance management team called Rhydans and you're dealing with a whole string of different pressures. I would also have to stress that speaking as a representative of a community development trust it's not a good idea for me to alienate my potential partners so I'm not going to... Fortunately I have no such qualms. I'm just concerned. John, is that a common arrangement or is that cross local authorities? Not them, we'll wear off and it's certainly one that dare I say it sounds, well create some discomfort at least to the thought of it and I would have to understand it in greater detail. Well inhibition to some of the ambitions within this bill were that to be replicated in any other places. I mean I have enough difficulties with our Gallabuk Council's attitude which I shall come on to later but this is odd. I couldn't possibly comment because I don't know the detail and we've been fair of me to comment elsewhere but we are being charged with the responsibility of trying to be innovative in the way that we deal with assets and deal with the services that we provide so it sounds like an innovative idea to me whether it works out in an appropriate way for this bill I'm not so sure. A non-positive definition of the word? As I said already it's inappropriate for me to comment ideas. Wendy Reid? I can't say that I know all the detail but our understanding of the arrangement was that a number of years ago Glasgow City Council went round and identified a number of underused or unused assets and land and did enter into an agreement. They set up an allio that land and property they identified as being potentially of use in the market and they went into a partnership agreement with a company and they did take out a mortgage against the value of that land and property. The idea being that they got a lump sum upfront and as the allio or the company in Rhydon's that they went into partnership with were able to to maximise the benefits through selling off because they were specialist land agents that the value that they were able to achieve for that would be greater than the value that they received from Barclays in the first place so that there would be profits on both sides. What it means for communities is that any building or land that was identified and has been transferred into city property is unavailable for communities to acquire unless they are able to pay what they perceive as the market value for it because they have to get that back on that property in order to repay the mortgage or the loan that they took out against the whole suite of assets in the first place. There will be nuances to that that we haven't really understood but that's my understanding of the principle of what happened so it's things that were identified a number of years ago. I don't know whether they are still putting new assets into that portfolio or not and I also heard that the whole arrangement was being reviewed so we couldn't say where the current situation sits entirely but it did make it extraordinarily difficult for communities in those areas where there were unused buildings such as schools or whatever that communities had an interest in acquiring. They were told categorically that they would not be available for asset transfer purposes because they sat within city property. Well maybe the news will leak out from this committee that there's a considerable interest in this. Graham Day? Yeah, if I may, just to develop that if it's possible with Wendy Reakes, I understand John Mundell's in a difficult position, doesn't want to comment about other local authorities, but in your experience, Missouri, are there other similar arrangements like this that have been entered into and other local authorities in Scotland? Not that we have come across, to be honest. There may have been different arrangements but nothing like that and nothing that has been quite so explicit about saying these are now out with the control of the council. So what they were basically saying was that Glasgow City Council could not take any decisions on the future of those assets because it was no longer in full full control of those assets. They still owned them technically, we found out, but it was extraordinarily difficult to get to the bottom of it because there were a number of different organisations and companies involved in the arrangement, but from a community perspective what it meant was that they were unable to access any of those and it wasn't obvious to begin with. It was very difficult for a community to find out whether an asset they were interested in was under the management of city property or was under the management of Glasgow City Council. There didn't appear to be an obvious place to go to find that information out, so registers of assets as proposed through the bill would have been incredibly useful to know exactly where ownership of assets sat because although Glasgow City Council technically still owned them, they weren't in control of the disposal of those assets. First of all, I'd like to say that I agree with what Damon was saying about development trusts trying to get on to that first rung. It's incredibly difficult without funding. I work in an area just five minutes along the road from here in Craigmiller and we've got a similar arrangement in respect of who has control of the land. It's been identified as a regeneration area and City Council set up an arms-length company to regenerate that. The original business plan was a profit-led business plan, which was going to generate income to be able to build new houses. The way that it works is that Park, the regeneration company, has first call on an area that is defined by the Craigmiller Urban Design Framework, which is a redline that goes around most of the area that's been either demolished or has been lying empty for a while. That obviously precludes us from being able to access this because they have first call on that land. They don't own it. It's still owned by the City of Edinburgh Council, but any development in there, the land goes to them. At the moment, the way that it works is that the business plan originally set up didn't work. When the property development area crashed, so did the business plan. The reason that we have a development trust now is that Alex Neil, who was a community minister at the time, said that that was potentially one of the only ways that we could influence any decisions for Craigmiller in the future. We've recently taken over, with a lease, the White House, what used to be a notorious pub, but it's now a delightful art deco building that serves really lovely food. It's a social enterprise for us. The whole point of it is that we want to try and develop and find ways of generating our own ability to fund things, but the journey that we had to get to take over that was unbelievable. For a small area like Craigmiller, which has such great need, it was a really difficult journey for us. We had to go through all of the tendering and legals that an ordinary developer, with loads of money, would have to do. I would like to see if there's a way that we could, instead of the communities having the right to buy, because that is such a far-off dream. Unless funding is made available, we'll never have that ability. We can have the aspiration, but we'll never have the ability to buy it. There are loads of opportunities for us to have the right to occupy buildings that are lying empty at the moment and that are contributing to an area in Craigmiller, which is supposedly going to be our new town centre. At the moment, it's mostly a bit of derelict land and some shop fronts that are lying empty. Some of the shop front, quite a sizeable building, is owned by the council and they are hoping that they will be able to let it at an affordable price for developers, but it's not affordable. £90,000 for a community group when it needs a lot of work is unattainable. I suspect that most people won't want to look at it anyway. It's lying there, contributing to the decay and situation that we have in Craigmiller at the moment, that people walk through it and pass it, but they don't actually look at it. It's never open. It looks a disgrace. We could find a use for that, but we couldn't find £90,000 to fund it. It may well be that the discussion about local government taxation and the way in which gap sites and neglected sites are taxed might force some changes, but that's up to another body and not this one. I'm very interested in the Glasgow City Council issue because I think that that's something that could be very instructive. I think that we all would need to know more information about that to understand what the significance of it is. I understand John's inhibition from being critical of fellow local authorities. Although I'm in a different position, I have a lot of sympathy for local authorities because that resonates with other examples of where they are between a rock and a hard place in many cases. If their view is that the determinant decision-making criterion is best value, then it makes it very difficult for them to make decisions that perhaps would serve a broader public purpose of sustainable development or whatever. It's not dissimilar to the procurement regime where, again, local authorities are feeling quite inhibited if they're putting out services that are going to impact on the quality of lives of individuals and communities. If best value is perceived as being what they really are primarily accountable to, then it does frustrate very often what they would otherwise like to do. It does come back to this body, Parliament and to Government, to ensure that local authorities don't feel that they have to enter into agreements, which that may or may not be, but which would not be serving the public interests. Wendy Reid? Just a couple of points coming back to the initial question around financial implications. Before I say that, I just want to come back on the whole issue of best value. It is our understanding that best value is not necessarily about achieving best financial value, that there are other aspects that make up best value and that there are other considerations that can be taken into account. It doesn't have to always, to achieve best value, doesn't always have to mean that you have to get the highest financial return on disposal of an asset. I just wanted to say that, from our point of view, we always understood that that was the case. Whether that's actually taken into account in a lot of cases is another matter. We understand that local authorities, particularly under increasing financial difficulties, so you can see why best value is often seen as the best financial return. In terms of other financial implications of the bill, I think it's partly very hard to tell because it'll all be demand driven, which I'm sure you've heard before. I think from an urban context, one of the questions I suppose we have is at the moment rural communities are able to access the land fund in order to help them acquire assets. Will that land fund now be increased to cover urban areas as well as rural areas? I know that the value of the land fund is going up, but actually are the criteria under which communities are eligible. Is that going to change? The other thing is that there's a difference between financial implications in terms of being able to support enough organisations in terms of providing them with advice and support as opposed to enabling them to acquire resources to actually purchase assets. There's two different things. There's a monetary implication and there's other implications in terms of the funding that goes out. There are things that are already in place and shouldn't change. For instance, the Government is already supporting the Community Ownership Support Service, which is there to support any community organisation that is looking to acquire an asset, whether that be in an urban or rural context. Certain things are already in place until we know how much extra business is going to come out of the changes through the Community Empowerment Bill. It's very difficult to know what other financial implications that will have. Evidence would suggest that the bill might not necessarily lead immediately to massive increases in the assets that are going into community ownership. It's more likely to lay down a marker than it is to lead to significant increases in transfer of property, certainly within the first few years. If I could tease this out about the best value and because it relates to the topic of abandoning derelict land, which we're going to come on to later on, there is some land that is undoubtedly in property, which a council will have paid for. It will have bought for a development or whatever. Therefore, nobody would expect anybody to dispose of that land at a loss to the council. However, there are substantial assets of council zones that they have not paid for, which have been inherited from a variety of reasons and people. There needs to be a definition—I'd be interested to see if we can come towards that definition—of types of land and also the costs to local authorities. There is legislative opportunity for local authorities to dispense of assets, which are not at best value if there is another definition. The community interest is one of those definitions. Have councils the will to do so? I would think that I might not ask John to speak for every council in Scotland, but do local authorities have the will to encourage transfer of assets to communities? How can that be done in terms of things that Susan, for example, is identifying? Assets that are actually wasting assets. The property that you are referring to is costing a local authority money to maintain and to guard and to make sure that it does not deteriorate. Usually, local authorities are failing to do so. Those assets are deteriorating. This is a much more complicated business—I do not want to disagree with Alan because I rarely do so—but it is a much more complicated issue than saying that a council has to do this. Property is often not well looked after. Property has not been purchased. The opportunity for communities to make more of it and to benefit communities and, therefore, the local authority area is great. Do local authorities have the stomach for that, or is it too complex or too difficult? David and Colleen, first and then. Given that the question was to local authorities, my point is a development about the resource available to achieve the overall sustainable development and moving away from the strict definition of value being price. In reality, I am glad that the point of best value is much wider than just money and cash. That is a point that has been well made. However, it is about balance in my mind. We have to make sure that, if we have an asset, for argument's sake, it might be worth £1 million and that it has been acquired by whatever means it may well be through common good or inherited in some way or whatever. It does not really matter, but you will appreciate that elements of the community would challenge a council that is going to release that property for, let's say, £50,000 because it has a significant community benefit. We would have to go through the political decision making process and there would have to be a robust argument for us to do that. Coming on to the point of, do councils have the stomach for that? I can speak for my own council and that is why I am here, as far as I am concerned. Our council absolutely do have the stomach for that. We are heavily involved already working with community groups to help them build capacity, to have the skills available to them and do the hand-holding to help them acquire assets. I think that you made a very important point when you are talking about some assets that are wasting assets or, indeed, assets that I have failed. I do personally have a concern in my role as chief executive of Inverclyde council that quite often in these austere times we are looking to transfer assets that perhaps have failed. Why are they failing? Because the community themselves do not see that it is a huge benefit. There is not the capacity in the community, there is perhaps not the interest. In fact, we had one up in Port Glasgow that was working very well indeed for quite a long time. It was a valuable asset in the community, and the people who were involved in running it either moved on or chose not to continue. Then what happens? It is back to the funder of last resort, back to the council, right what you are going to do about this asset. That asset in essence has been transferred and it was being operated. It is now shut up, the facility has been shut. So, what are we going to do in terms of those types of scenarios? Another important point that has been made—I think that it was David who made it earlier on about the development trusts—is that they play a key role in a community as well. They are very important partners down in Inverclyde, Inverclyde Community Development Trust, big part to play. Again, I have sympathy with the development trusts in trying to get access to cash. We have to take on board the point that David made about the capital cost, the on-going revenue. It is the whole-life cost of that property, and that in itself, plus it is not just the property of the physical assets, it is about supporting the services that are provided within that facility as well. In the current times, it is really difficult to do that balancing act. I am sure that you will appreciate that, where cash is getting tighter and tighter and tighter. That is an important point. Absolutely, without appropriate funds being made, councils do not have them necessarily at the moment. We have heard about the bureaucracy and all the rest of it and the legal processes that we have to go through for procurement, best value. It is just a couple of examples. There is a huge amount, and I employ a team of lawyers. I have to employ a team of lawyers to make sure that I go through that process and that I am reducing the risk for our council, but more importantly for our community to make sure that our council is running in an appropriate way, as my peers do up and down the country. There is a lot in that, and it is very complicated. Thank you, convener. It is just an observation because we are focusing very much on local authorities, which was inevitable after David Cruick's comments. However, I suspect that we could also be talking about the NHS as we see a move away from very old traditional hospital buildings to centralising or building new facilities. They will be in this situation. Perhaps Police Scotland will find themselves in this situation as they close small local police stations. It is not just the local authorities that we are dealing with here. My council's headquarters is in the building that was built in the mid 1800s. I always find it amusing when we are being told to bring all our services together. It was the police headquarters, it was the fire, it is now the fire museum, it was the Strathclyde fire museum, council headquarters, the court, the court for as far as the eaglesome, gubbyn, et cetera. We have moved away from that and picked that up. Now we are trying to bring it all back together again. Obviously, things do go in cycles. That is an important point. Issues such as the integration of health and social care, we did that back in 2010. We have integrated ours anyway. Before, yes, we have still got more to do with the impending legislation, et cetera, the changes that are due. However, we already are looking at jointly procuring GP practices, trying to get rid of the bed blocking, et cetera, within the hospitals locally. We are much more joined up now, which is a positive thing, where we can reduce the property portfolios for each of the agencies involved and make our operations much more efficient through cohabitation within facilities. There is a long, long way to go yet, and that might release some of the cash that we need to try to help communities. David, Colleen and Wendy, on this point, we have got quite a lot of detail of part 4 to deal with just now, so be brief if possible. David? I would like to agree with the observation that there is more to this than local authorities. That is NHS, Scottish Water, a whole range of public agencies that are in the same boat. I am afraid that I am unaware of the questions yet to come, but the one point that I would like to make, which will hopefully come out in further questions, is there are other ways of deploying existing resources that will make it possible for communities to become empowered both economically, environmentally and socially. That is the sustainable development, and the triple bottom line, if you like, is the key to the resolution of some of the issues that are being raised. I will just leave it at that for the time. We will indeed deal with those. Colleen? I would like to return to the Glasgow context. From our member's perspective, it is a mixed picture. Some of our members work very well with Glasgow City Council and have taken over properties in their communities. Similarly, we work a lot with the other third sector organisations in the city. Again, the picture is mixed here. Just to go back to Susan's point about the right to occupy, the Allios sometimes work well with local organisations and, again, sometimes do not work well. We hear stories all the time of the prohibitive leases that organisations have been asked to pay, which they simply cannot, and they have also been asked to take over on-going repairs and general maintenance. Those are all obstacles and barriers. I have just finished by saying that John was talking about community development trust, and we again work closely with it. However, I think that the general community anchors in a community are the kind of mechanism that connects, although that activity, what the council is doing and what communities want, and those community anchors are really key. I think that we have reiterated that in our response. A very quick comment about other public sector assets. The reason why there has been less movement of other public sector assets into community ownership is that, according to the finance manual, those other public sector bodies have to get best financial return, whereas local authorities have a bit of dispensation that they can dispose of assets that are less than market value through the 2010 local government act. That is why communities are very interested in other assets, but it has been easier to negotiate transfers of local authority assets till now because of the flexibility that there is for local authorities to dispose of less than market value or less than best consideration. It would be interesting to see whether there is any review of the public sector finance manual to allow other public sector bodies to have the same flexibility. Jim Hume, back to you. Jim Hume, just to add more or less a comment, I suppose, but I think that we have obviously opened up a can of worms to put it mildly. I think that you said that it was a mixed picture from different public bodies about the interpretation of what best value is, so I am sure that, in our deliberations, we will want to explore further if this is just a Glasgow situation and if, across other local authorities, there is similar. Obviously, how perhaps other local authorities and public bodies are interpreting what is best value, whether it is purely a financial accounting or best value for community. I think that we can probably move on. We can indeed, thank you. Angus MacDonald? Thanks, convener. Just before we do move on, picking up on Colleen's point, I would certainly agree that not all allios benefit the local communities that they are supposed to be representing. If we can stick with the financial memorandum temporarily, if we do see demand on the Scottish land fund budget grow with the extension of community right to buy to Urban Scotland, which public bodies are likely to be most affected? Do you think that those public bodies have the expertise and support to advise urban communities? And also, what costs do you envisage those public bodies having to bear? David? First of all, I would have to refer you to the Development Trust Association Scotland, which is set up specifically to deal with these kind of issues. I am a member, I am also on the board of it, so I will leave Wendy to specify more exactly the role that Development Trust can play in terms of the ability to resource and sustain community initiatives. We are talking about community empowerment and renewal, presumably within the context of land reform. I think that one of the opportunities that is opening up, and this will open another can of worms, is that particularly in deprived communities where people are dependent on benefit and currently administered through DWP, presumably, that there is a way of redeploying that resource where that can serve as a foundation for employment opportunities for people in that community and be built on in such a way that people are not afraid of losing their basic human rights in terms of housing and basic money for food, etc. I think that there is an opportunity in cultivating communities which is about the renewal and the regeneration in using that resource far more positively than it currently is used. I think that this is a really hard one in terms of which public sector bodies. I suppose that looking at experience so far in terms of rural communities that have been utilising the right to buy and acquiring assets through that process or actually even not using the right to buy, is the main difference between the support that rural communities can access and those in urban is actually about the support and extra resource that high can provide to rural communities in the Highlands and Islands area, which urban communities outside of that area struggle to find us a similar avenue of support through. There are various bits and pieces that people would say, well, you could get this and you could get that. They are available to communities all over Scotland and I think in terms of what additional burden there might be or financial requirement that might be to support urban communities is having something that is akin to the level and detail of support that rural communities are able to acquire, particularly around business planning and other aspects through high and the additional finances that high can give to asset acquisition projects that other particularly urban communities are not able to acquire at the minute or access at the minute. Clearly, as we have heard from a number of contributors today, the finance will be an issue. Are you aware of any funding schemes that are currently available to urban communities and what additional support is likely to be required to make the anticipated increase in applications? We could never put figures on it but at the moment all communities are able to access big lottery money if you are looking to acquire an asset. That funding is available now but their programmes are up for review. We do not know whether or not the growing community assets fund will still be the growing community assets fund this time next year. I would be very surprised. I think that we would all be very surprised if there was not. If on-going lottery funds did not contain some strand of funding that enabled communities to acquire and develop and manage assets, who knows what that is going to look like and who knows what sums are going to be available through it? For urban communities in particular, they are not able to access leader funding because that is again for rural. I think that there is less opportunity for urban communities to acquire money specifically around asset acquisition than there is for rural communities. If the Scottish land fund is going to be broadened to enable urban communities to utilise it, that answers part of that question. I am not sure whether that is going to happen or not. There may have been some statement about it and that I am unaware of. I think that there are bits of money sometimes within local authorities that people can acquire but there is nothing specifically for urban communities that rural communities cannot access whereas there is the other way around at the moment. Game shooting rates and so on are being discussed about being reintroduced at the exemption from non-domestic rates. They are looking for a top-up of the land fund from that. It is whether urban communities will be able to apply to the land fund because up until now, it has really been through definition a thing for rural communities, not urban communities. We will check that out with me. Thank you. I suppose the comment that I want to make is really that it is a bit chicken and egg because if you go for a big lottery funding application, you have to have in place a lease of at least 25 years. To negotiate that, you need funding to be able to get lawyers to support you. It is chicken and egg stuff because you cannot just go in, especially communities such as ours in Cregmuller, which is a deprived—we have been in a situation where for years and years people make decisions for us and have done and still are. When it comes to making decisions for yourself, you need to be supported to do that. Quite frankly, the idea of taking on a 25-year lease and the ability to fund that is a bit overwhelming for some communities. They just do not know where to start. Until you give somebody that first step up the ladder, it will be very difficult for people in deprived areas to accept that they have the ability to do that. Quite frankly, I hear all the time that capacity building is not building the capacity, it is releasing it. That is what really needs to happen. It is there, it just is not released. There are too many barriers for people to get passed. Okay. I think that we will move on to the nature of land and so on. Cara Hylton. Thank you, convener. Good morning, panel. My question ties in a bit to what Susan Carr and Wendy Reid have already talked about. I am keen to hear more about how the community right to buy will empower communities in urban areas and make a real difference to people. How will it help community confidence, cohesion and sustainability? When Susan and Wendy talked about the funding challenges that face urban communities, are there any other issues and challenges that particularly affect urban communities? Also, any practical problems, such as the one that we heard in Glasgow, how likely is it that community bodies in urban areas could use the new rights to register interest in land that is already subject to a development proposal, just as a way of blocking any development? I wonder if you would agree that one of the unintended consequences of the bill could be an increase in inequalities between communities. Sorry, it is a bit long. That is all right. Let us go, John. I think that there are significant inequalities within our communities already and there are impoverished areas, which I certainly see as the primary part of my job, is to make sure that we try to balance the skills for people who are most disadvantaged. I think that there are positives within the bill, but I think that technically there are changes that need to be made within the bill to try to help us to achieve that. I have certainly included that in my written submission. I think that these things need to be taken on board. Up in Kilmocombe, which is one of the best-heeled areas that exists in Scotland, is within my council area, it had the capacity released. I take on board the point that has been mentioned and I understand that, but it had the skills within the community already. It was a limited level of intervention that had to be made by the council in that respect. Yes, we went through a whole process and there were power struggles within the community group, that type of thing, until things settled down. However, it is highly successful in an asset that the council had not managed to continue. Investments have been made through a cocktail of funding through a bid process and all the rest of it. That has been highly successful. However, in some other areas, the people who are more disadvantaged and I absolutely recognise that there is a lot of enthusiasm, a lot of pride in those communities as well, but they need the support because the skills do not necessarily exist in that area and there is a greater level of intervention required by councils. Anything within the bill that helps us to tackle that type of issue has to be a positive thing. However, as I have said already, there are a number of technical issues that need to be addressed in my written submission. I would like to see that dealt with. I would like to go back to something that was talked about earlier, which is sustainability. One of the problems that you have with deprived areas is that we are often subject to somebody's great idea of what is going to solve our problems. Those very rarely come from people themselves. We have a long history in Cregmuller of somebody having this brilliant idea. They come along, there is a project set up, it has its lifespan and then the funding is removed. We start all over again. There is the community engagement, which is crucial to this. People in an area like Cregmuller have been consulted to death. They could tell you more about consultation than the Parliament, but very little of what said at the consultation comes into the realisation of what their aspirations are. It nearly always gets twisted. It is like the funding that we can apply. We have to apply for the funding that people have prepared to give us for the activities that they want us to do. I would argue that, if you empower people to come up with their own ideas about what the solutions are, we would have a much better, sustainable future for that community. The problem is that we have a situation in Cregmuller where we have had more than half of the houses demolished, but the prices dropped for house building, so no developer is prepared to go in there. We are now left with a community of almost £25,000. We currently have a community of about £7,000 or £8,000. We went down to £5,000. You are reducing the opportunity for people to have a say on that, because you are almost dismissed as being too small to be able to reflect what the area needs. Those are the people who will be there long after the regeneration process is completed. I feel that there is a need to look at how you can empower people to have a say about what is needed in their area. Quite often, you will be surprised to find that it often concurs with what the local authority wants. It is just a different way of doing it. Yes, they want new housing, yes, they want to have good facilities and they want the quality of life. Nobody wants dogfouling and litter. It is not rocket science. Nobody wants those things. That is what is a consequence. Often that is because of bad design and the fact that they have not listened to the people at the consultation process about what would work in their area. There is an issue around deprived areas in allowing them to have the time that it takes and funding the opportunity for them to take on those things themselves. I feel that I need to come in here and say that our model, our member's model, is community-based housing associations. It is predicated on local people leading and local people making decisions at that micro-neighborhood level about what is needed in their communities. I am certainly not suggesting that CCHAs are a universal panacea or a silver bullet that has solved all the problems. In fact, our communities and mostly our members operate in deprived communities. Health inequalities, socioeconomic inequalities have actually grown between those neighbourhoods and the rest of Scotland. I think that releasing or tapping in to what is already on the ground, our model works. Most of our members are celebrating 40 years this year, some of them 25 years in the peripheral estates. It amazes us that it is not laudied and put out there as a really good example of a resource that is already there in communities, and it could be tapped in. We have just put out a new publication. CCHAs still transform in local communities. We are willing to talk to the council to talk to health with regard to health and social care integration, for example, because it offers opportunities for our members and for local people to be involved in those big decisions and processes as we go forward. In terms of moving the discussion forward, I would like to delve as deeply and as broadly as we can into the meaning of community, which is obviously very complex and difficult, and relates to place and interest. I am not going to go back to section 34 of the 2003 act, because I think that in terms of what the committee would value in hearing from yourselves is your perceptions and your experience and knowledge of where you think this should be going for the community empowerment bill. Some degree in relation to the comments within the context of the bill that has already been made about skills, but also comments about Bencom's, the issues around the definitions geographically about comments in an urban context about post codes and those complexities, and also methods of defining communities of interest such as arts organisations, charities, ethnic groups, and more broadly, for communities. Also, the list is perhaps never ending as one's imagination, but issues have been very challenging around finding land to grow things and allotments and allotments societies. Of course, there are community councils. I am putting all that on the table and asking if you can give any thoughts about whether definitions have to be in relation to specific legal entities or whether there might be other ways of defining communities that would be helpful in taking forward the regeneration and the issues that we have been discussing. Who wants to start? John? Very challenging question or questions. To me, in probably the most simple terms, the meaning of community to me is about the people who live together and the relationships that exist between the people in that community, how they interact, how they live in that area and how they make the environment. They live habitable and pleasant for all that are there. That is my interpretation of it. I cannot remember all the parts of your question, but I would like to comment on your reference to the skeos. One thing in the ball that you are talking about must not have fewer than 20 members. I think that that is particularly restrictive. We have a couple of skeos who are working very well. One has eight and one has 10 members. If we are now going to say that you do not have 20 folk around the table, we know what you are wanting to achieve in this area and we are doing everything that we possibly can, but somebody in an ivory tower has said that you have to have 20 members. We do not have 20 members but we are an active progressive community here and we want to make things happen and we cannot because they are barred from it. That is an issue that needs to be addressed in the ball. Does it have to be as prescriptive as having a minimum of 20 people or 20 members on a skeo? Three actors understand it, but we are looking forward. We have an opportunity to change it. Lots of aspects to your question. From our point of view, we have always looked at community in the same sense that John has, because we have come at this from a community led generation perspective and about people living in a place being proactive together to make positive change to that place. Our definition has always come from a geographical perspective. It is about community of place as opposed to community of interest. I am not able to comment on the community of interest side because that is not something that we have ever really got too involved with. If we are talking about community ownership, the whole thing about having a broad membership from our point of view has always been that whatever structure you put in place for a community led organisation, the democratic control of that organisation is important in terms of being able to say that that organisation is accountable to the wider community through its membership. That is why, from a development trust point of view, we have always advocated that community anchor organisations, whether they are development trusts or not, because not all organisations are development trusts, should have as broad a membership as possible because it is that membership that reflects the views of the wider community to the organisation that acts on their behalf. You can do that in a number of ways. You can do that through a company limited by guarantee. You can do that through a skewer structure. You can also do it through a community benefit society. In all of those structures, you can have the values represented of democratic accountability, of membership, of being voted. The other thing about being community led from our point of view is that the members should have an ability to get elected on to the governing body of the organisation. There is true ownership within the community of that organisation. You can achieve that through a number of different structures. That is why we have always argued that you should not make decisions in the legislation about this structure being better than another structure because there are a number of factors from a community perspective that will influence which structure they think is most appropriate for the things that they want to achieve as that community organisation. For instance, the reason people may want to choose a community benefit society is that they may want to go down the route of raising finance through doing a community share issue. The only way you can do that is if you are set up as a community benefit society. However, the membership of a community benefit society can be as broad as the membership of a company limited by guarantee or a skewer. As long as you have the values built into the structure that you can have, we do not think that the structure should be the limiting factor in any way whatsoever because it has to be about the structure that works best for the things that the community wants to achieve. You suggested last week that there are new structures being invented all the time and that, therefore, there should be more of a broad definition of what the structures should embrace. Do you agree? What you can do is set out the values that you want the structure to adhere to and the principles of how they should operate. You can then see how that translates into a number of different structures. People always ask us what is the development trust, and we say that it is not a physical thing. It is a way of working in a concept that demonstrates a certain set of values and approaches to how you are going to achieve the end result. Communities are often ahead of the curve. The things that they want to do and the aspirations that they have and the creative ways that they are thinking about how they can achieve their aims and objectives are often limited by the legal structures that are available to them. Having a degree of flexibility is really helpful, although my understanding is that that is there in the legislation as proposed because it says, and any other structure that may come along could be added at a later stage. We would not like to see anything that currently exists excluded, but you would also want to have flexibility to add later on. Right. Claudia, John Mundell has to leave us at one o'clock, so I wanted to bring him in on a matter related to— I don't need to come back. I'm just interested to listen to people's views. Well, okay, we'll have Susan and David, and then I want to come on to a question to John particularly. Susan. Going back to your question, it was very complex, but my experience has been that the communities themselves define themselves, for instance, and they evolve. They become almost redundant. For instance, our community development trust came from an organisation that would set up as an umbrella organisation for neighbourhood associations across the Greater Craig Muller area. First of all, we set up neighbourhood associations instead of tenants and residents groups, because we believed that people identify themselves by where they live and not by who owns their house. From that, we decided that we needed to bring those together. We set up an umbrella organisation called the Community Regeneration Forum, which became much more strategic in its approach, and then we discovered when we met with Alex Neil that what we really needed was a community development trust. All of that has evolved over time, and people buying into it takes time as well. When we first spoke about community development trust, people just didn't get it, because it's a new concept. The only way that people can buy into those things is if they succeed. We had to get a few things under our belt before we got to the point where people actually want to join it. We started off with probably 100 people coming up and saying that they wanted to join, but now the memorandum of arts states that every single person living in our defined area is a member, so every single person has an opportunity to have a say on how we are governed. It's something that evolves. Practical answer to the question, how do you define a community? When a big lottery wants you to define yourself as in applying for growing community assets, the only solution that we found was to use the community planning partnership definition, so in our case, Maryhill Kelvin and Canal Community Planning Partnership, because the thing was so nebulous and so many different communities within that interest group that it's very difficult to scientifically define a community, but you have to come up with some answer. That leads to the whole issue of community planning partnerships, which we're not going to go into right now. I can see you saying help, but that in theory, unfortunately not working practice in my view, is a significant area that needs thorough overhauling and fresh input. However, the other point to make is there can be an inherent assumption that community is always a positive thing. It's not necessarily. You get community of drug culture, you get community of fear of asylum seekers, you get community of all kind of territorial negativity in gang level, where young men from one side of the street prepare to kill other people from the other side of the street because they see it as a territorial imperative that they have to make their name by standing up. There are aspects of community that need intervention in my view, and that raises a whole other issue, but that's my toughensworth at this stage. Thanks very much. We're going to come back to a couple of questions on procedures and requirements, but I wanted to touch on abandoned and neglected land definitions before John has to leave us in a very few minutes because it's particularly interesting from a local government perspective. I don't know who's going to lead in this. Is it Dave or Mike? Dave? Good morning, panel. The definition or the lack of a definition of abandoned or neglected land is something that I would appreciate your views on. Also, the fact that, unlike the crofting legislation where the crofters want to purchase land, they just have to show that it's in the public interest and it's for the good of sustainable development, we've got this additional test about abandoned or neglected and issues around that. Then another one on top of that, if the owner of the land were to remain as its owner, that ownership would be inconsistent with furthering the achievement of sustainable development in relation to the land, so you have to show that as well. I just wonder if you agree with me that those tests taken together and we've heard evidence before would make it almost impossible for a community in an urban setting to actually purchase the land that they wished to sustainably develop. Speaking from an area that Craig Miller is very deprived of, we've always been quite frightened by the fact that we have a lot of derelict land there at the moment because there was so much demolition. In terms of the owner, the owner is the local authority and I think because we're based in Edinburgh, it would be nigh on impossible for us to come up with funding that would meet the local authorities requirements for best value, so we're going right back to that situation where it does come down to funding. I don't know about other local authorities, but I think in Edinburgh that there's such a high value, even if it's not as good as it might be at the moment, on land that people won't really sit. We've been really strong in our desire to make sure that none of it is bought and land banked, so in some respects the fact that we have a regeneration company that has that red line has probably prevented that from happening, so it is actually quite important. I think it very much depends on where the land is, on how you would define it, but certainly we can identify buildings and things that are just going to lie there until somebody thinks that there's enough value in the price to change it, but I don't think that in bigger authorities like Edinburgh that we're going to ever be able to aspire to that. John, thank you. This is a very, very difficult issue and we've been spending tens of millions of pounds on regenerating our area, as most councils do anyway, and we have been transforming our area. I'll give you an example. There's one site that is owned by an absent owner who is, I think, from the south of England. In actual fact, he may well, and I might be wrong on this, but my most recent understanding is that he may well have passed on. Under the circumstances, there are all sorts of issues associated with that site. Strategically, from a planning perspective and also from a regeneration perspective, it's a fantastic location, all the rest of it, and it's a site that the council and our partners through community planning believe would be a benefit for the area. However, with all the power, the expertise that we have at our disposal between ourselves and our partners, it's nigh on impossible to move that site on. So that, in actual fact, the site is blocked, and that's for us as a council. I use that as an example in my mind's eye and try to put myself in the shoes of a community group who want to try and access our particular site. You're talking about abandoned or derelict land. Now, obviously, a down-and-over Clyde, south of Clyde, obviously a major shipbuilding area in the past. We have developed a lot of the other side already and we've still got a part to go, but some of that land might look great, but in actual fact, it's heavily contaminated, heavy metals, all sorts of chemicals and pollution within that land, and you're talking about millions, millions to decontaminate these sites and make them developable. So you've got all these abnormal costs on some of these sites as well, so that's a high risk issue. I doubt very much it exists in Susan's example to the same degree where, obviously, came earlier before was predominantly housing, and obviously there's a lot of open space now where the sites have been cleared. But there will still be an element of contamination. These houses, bearing in mind when they were built, could have had asbestos on them and all the rest of it. Again, that being the case, that makes that site the cost of developing these sites so prohibitive. So we have to be very careful in what we're doing and it comes back to the money again. It's proper assessment of the site, options appraisals and coming up with the sources of funds. Who's going to pay? Now, obviously, from our point of view, the land that's owned by us, the land that's owned by Peel Holdings or Clydeport, where we're in partnership with them through our urban regeneration company. From a professional point of view, it's mind-blowing the money that's involved for some of those inter-elect areas. Having said that, it's the absolutely right thing to do to try and develop these brownfield sites in an urban area because they are a blight. There's no doubt about it. They have to be brought into effective use for the community and the urban areas where they exist. Just in case Mike has got a supplementary, perhaps it's for John just so that we don't detain him. It is. I think it's always possible to find reasons not to do things and I do understand the question of contamination and other things like that. But let's take other examples of buildings. The local authorities will hold on a substantial number of buildings, many of which they will attempt to sell. But the state of the market, the nature of the building may create those difficulties. The authority will be spending substantial sums on making those buildings wind and watertight. Often it's not possible to do properly and also making sure they're secure. Where does a balance lie in ensuring buildings that the council does not want, which over a period of time it cannot sell, then those are buildings which communities can utilise for their own purposes? What active work is done on that? Because sometimes it seems to me, and certainly from my own experience locally, that the attitude of the council is the only difference to them and a property developer with a land bank is that they're just not very good at it. And they're leaving this stuff in a bad state constantly getting worse than they've ever done. Bulldozed. Well, in Inverclyde we have replaced every secondary school, so I know other councils are doing the same kind of thing. We've completely rationalised our schools of state over the last seven, eight years. We've still got a way to go in that sense, but nonetheless that then leaves a number of rationalised properties or properties that are no longer in current use. And obviously it's part of the funding model, which is quite complex for our schools, and predominantly Inverclyde has done the majority of that itself through reducing the number of schools, getting better numbers in schools, all that type of thing. But part of that funding model relates to the capital receipts that we're due to get when we first set up our schools of state management plan a way back prior to the recession. And we've actually factored in the values that were available at that time for the sale of these assets. It's no longer available, and we took a conscious decision as a council, at least the members took the decision, obviously, to say, right, we're going to stop selling these assets at the moment until the market gets back up to an appropriate level, but we need that cash for servicing our funding model. It's all part of the business plan for the schools of state. I'm going to come on to the issues. I absolutely agree that there are appropriate types of assets that we could transfer. And the reason I'm saying appropriate types of assets, if they're a burden to the council in terms of keeping them wind and water tight, they're going to be a burden to a community group. And again, who's going to be providing the funding? It comes back to what I've said as well. It's the old drum that we all beat. There's not enough money. And I know it's more, it goes beyond that, but nonetheless, if it's a wasting asset at the moment and it's put in poor condition, and we believed to provide services, we've got to come up with a reduced footprint over our whole estate, in other words, bring it in in size and operate from fewer buildings in a more efficient way, what's left is the most inefficient part. And I have to say, I wouldn't be comfortable if I'm genuinely here to try and help communities and community groups transferring assets that are a burden. I'd rather come up with a way that we can actually perhaps raise ease to the ground, the land that's available, if it's a school, primary school or whatever, an old primary school that's right in the heart of communities anyway. I'd rather find a way of helping that community or group or groups to come up with a new asset potentially, because again, if they're going to exist for 40, 50 years or longer than that, it's appropriate that they too should have modern assets and efficient assets to operate from. There are many circumstances in which communities want to have those assets. They believe they have viable plans for them. They may be assisted by bodies which you cannot get assistance from. For example, in Highlands and Islands, HIE may assist communities to develop and to take forward assets which the council cannot get money for. So in all those circumstances, do you not think that there's an element in which the council might facilitate communities developing their strength and ability to regenerate themselves, rather than simply judging them on the criteria that the council uses? We don't think that you're up to this, so we'll just demolish the building. I think that you perhaps misunderstand what I said earlier on. We are proactively involved with community groups just now. I mentioned the issue of a couple of issues. For example, we are working very closely with officers that go to regular meetings and evenings to try to develop plans and to help people to come up with appropriate funding plans. Down in Verkipp, we're well advanced in building a new facility down there. It's obviously going through the planning stage. There's one or two issues at the moment, but we do that anyway. It's not new if we can get another organisation or Highlands and Islands to cast their net wider. It's called a different thing and it's a different organisation, fair enough, but it comes back down to the funding predominantly, and it will, politically and for people like me, to make sure that we understand that we're here to serve the people out there and to help them to get the right answer. A brief supplementary to that. Thank you before John Lundell was interested in helping us to get a feel for us. Through the evidence that we've taken previously, we look at the issue but not being able to identify who the landowner is. I wonder in an urban context, given your experience as a chief executive of council, if you look at blight sites perhaps in your area, to what extent would there be an issue about identifying who actually owns them, would you feel? Obviously, there's other areas that we're being consulted on in terms of the land register and all the rest of it. I think the philosophy behind that is absolutely bang on the button. I think the aspirations to get that done in a five-year time frame is well over-optimistic, as far as I'm concerned. I think that it will probably take about 10 years. It's not a priority for us at this moment in time, given everything else that we're wrestling with, but it's the absolutely right thing to do. If we come up with the register and we know who owns all the bits of land across the whole of Scotland, that would make life an awful lot easier. I include common good in that area as well, because there are areas where shades of grey are always an amount of time that are legally to wrestle with some of those issues. I also include trying to transfer assets to community groups, which is what we're here to talk about just now. That makes it quite difficult, so that's a great thing to do. Certainly, my professional association soloists believe that that's a good thing to do, but the timing is probably not on our side or the resources aren't available to deal with that at the moment. It should be clearer than right now that the bill wasn't reduced. You would anticipate that there will be substantial issues there about identifying some sites, the ownership of some sites, that people might want to take over. Yes, and obviously through the redevelopment work that we do just now, there's still a recent example where it was Pail Holdings down in the waterfront again. If you'll think back how that was transferred, I think that all that land along right down all the shipbuilding area was transferred for £1. I understand at least that's what some of the members tell me many years ago, and obviously we're paying millions to try and get through partnership to get those sites developed, but one site, we had a boundary fence around one of my operational depots, and we got challenged by Pail Holdings saying, no, that's not where the boundary is, and the amount of money that that costs just to sort out one boundary fence, and we're talking about a couple of metres difference on a site that's an industrialised area, heavily contaminated, that type of thing, that's a lot of cash, and that's a simple example. Anything that can help us simplify that process, or indeed clear the boards and make sure we start afresh and we've got a full detailed register that we know who owns what. It has to be a good thing. You may notice other points that are made in the official report of points when you've left, but thank you very much for your evidence just now. Okay. Apologies after leave. Dave Thomson, detailed procedures and requirements. Yes, convener. It's to do with the registration process really as much as anything and what the panel feel about communities having to register. I mean, in some instances, it might be very clear that there's a bit of land that the community might want, and an early registration would be something that they'd be able to anticipate and deal with, but often pieces of land will suddenly come in the market. We're an example from the home hall people last week where a public area that everybody thought was a public park suddenly had a for sale sign thrown on to it. The sort of place that people would never have thought about registering for community purchase, and lots of the applications are late registrations at the moment. They're almost becoming the norm, and I'd like to get your views as to whether we actually really need any kind of early registration or should communities just be able to register an interest once a building or land or something comes on the market, and also whether the registration should be not in relation to a particular piece of land in a building, but maybe communities should be able to register a general interest for a purpose so that if the community has an idea that they would like to develop, I don't know, housing or a park area or whatever, they could form a group to register an interest in that purpose rather than in specific pieces of land, which may never have come in the market. I'd like to backtrack briefly and bring a case example that bridges into the registering proposal, specifically nine and a quarter of acres in our community, which was previously allotment land, deteriorated in the late 60s into kenneling of Greyhound dogs for the local Greyhound track, further deteriorated into serious anti-social and criminal base for dogs being kept for dog fighting and guarding of class A drugs, and this situation perpetuated for 20 years until it was finally addressed from pressure from the local community council to get agencies like the police and the council and the SSPCA on board to support the move to take back that land. Now the legal reality of that situation is that it is owned by a trust. All of the trustees are dead and they still have legal representatives who are negotiating on their behalf or allegedly on the behalf of a benefactor of the trustees of postal estate, and it's a complete nightmare trying to get to the bottom of the whole situation. There's no recognition of the damage that allowing that land to be a base for anti-social and criminal behaviour has had over the last 20 years, and I would suggest that the idea of people being responsible for the land that they owned and publicly responsible is a completely necessary prerequisite. Secondly, just to say simply that yes to your idea of registering because if a community says we want this there should be a way of them being allowed to make that known and then be supported to achieve it in the face of all the other players that have their own agendas and are usually much more powerfully resourced than the local community group. Wendy, first of all, and then Susan. I think there's a number of issues that you raised there, Dave. The process of registration is quite onerous for community organisations and I can see why. What we found that the land format has done in rural areas is that it has opened communities' eyes to the fact that they have an ability to potentially acquire land. While not much necessarily has been acquired through the land format itself, because it's actually quite difficult to go through the whole process of doing that, what it did was it laid down a marker and said to communities that this is a reasonable aspiration for you to have and you have a right to own land and you have a right to say that as a community you are interested and should be offered the opportunity to acquire land. In order for them to register an interest, as you know, they have to set up in a certain way and gather a certain level of interest from the wider community to say that we support your registration of interest. In a small rural community, gathering that level of interest may not be that difficult. If you think of urban communities where you have thousands of people potentially living within however the community decides to define its community, you could potentially have thousands of people who are often not particularly engaged in democratic processes anyway. There's an issue for us about how a community organisation would go about gathering that first level hurdle that's put in the way, which is 10 per cent of the community needs to demonstrate support. How do they go about doing that? Secondly, once you've got that registration approved you have to re-register five years later and go through the whole process again. It puts people off. However, having to do it does make communities assess what assets they have and why they might want to register interest in land in the first place. It does encourage communities to start being proactive about what type of community they want to live in and the things that they would like to be able to achieve as a result of owning assets. Whether there's time, the issue with the late registration is a timing issue and where things come up unexpectedly it's very difficult for a community if they've not thought about it in advance to go through the process of even gathering the first levels of registration etc etc. I mean two minds about the registration process because I think that the need to register is a prompt for communities to think in a developmental way about their community and how they would like to see it develop in the future and what opportunities they would like to have in order to have an influence over how things develop. However, I think that the process is onerous and the re-registration process is onerous and I think there's something to be said for having an easier process for registering interest if a piece of land comes up for sale that the community had never previously anticipated that it might because there are things that happen that nobody could have predetermined and I think in those situations the way it currently stands it's extraordinarily difficult for communities to do anything about that and it might be the loss of a service it might be you know whatever it is. I'm not sure about getting rid of it altogether but I can see that there would be advantages of that but I think what's been useful about having to register is it has got community organisations to think about why they might want assets and what they might want to do with those things so we want to not lose that prompt if we were to go down the route of not having to re-register interest absolutely absolutely Susan Carr I agree with what Wendy's just said just now and I can give you two examples of something that's happened just in our area down the road when there was a you know the library removed now we'd expressed an interest in renting it we know we couldn't buy it because of the the red line that we you know that's determined as a development area but we wanted to rent it and we had to go through the whole process and actually we lost out for £150 a year because there wasn't anything any consideration taken into why we wanted it we wanted it for a youth zone and another bid £150 more now actually if we could have afforded that £150 more but there was no acknowledgement that actually what we were proposing for that purpose it was something that was advantageous to the whole area that we did the same again with another council-owned building just a bit further along the road and we lost out because of that process I would like to see some way of a community registering its aspiration I suppose for a certain use of a building so that we could ensure that it doesn't just go in the building the two buildings that have been taken over by private tenants are closed for six of the seven days a week so actually you know it's done very little to enhance the quality of life in our area but it's two opportunities that we've missed just because we're not being able to I suppose register that we want it to be used for a certain kind of use okay thank you for that I want to try and move on just now to have the tests that communities have to the hoops that they have to jump through and you've expressed one of these in terms of just trying to rent a property the tests well the inclusion of the double requirement for community bodies to show that they're furthering the achievement of sustainable development and for ministers to be satisfied if ownership were to remain in the same hands that it would be inconsistent with furthering the achievement of sustainable development in relationship to the land these tests are in the proposals at the moment do you think they're fair do you foresee difficulties for communities with this meeting the public interest and the sustainable development tests yep Susan I think that an awful lot of that comes down to interpretation and often I have to say as a community worker that's worked for 25 years in the voluntary sector what we hear about from parliament and from government is often quite exciting because we think yahoo they've listened it's it's going to happen we're going to do that unfortunately or I don't want to sound too critical of the local authority because they do pay my wages but unfortunately what happens is that when it's interpreted by the local authority they somehow seem to fit it into a little box that have immovable sides so there's no flexibility in that so it depends on how the local authority officers have interpreted it and and how much that matches our interpretation of it so I think there is a certain difficulties in each local authority I'm guessing will be different yep that Wendy I would say that it's easier for communities to demonstrate and pass the first test because mostly what they're about is improving their area the areas that they live in you know that very rarely is a community organisation trying to acquire an asset to do something that that people don't think is a good idea or is about improving general quality of life for people I think it's the second that is more difficult because how do you disprove that somebody else is not also trying to achieve the same thing and I think the second test would be a much harder one to to argue than the first it's been described as a killer clause do you think it is yeah yeah anyone with another comment on that just now no okay well duplicate applications this occurs you know the government or whichever body has to look at different proposals from groups one could be very positive one another one could appear to be a very positive one but one might be trying to stymie the other have you had experience of this in the urban situation is it the kind of thing which you think you know will be a complication in the development of these proposals nobody's had experience of that yes Wendy my colleagues are upright in urban area to see whether they have examples of that I think there's you know communities being very very active in their own right often we've tried very hard and I think we've by and large we've succeeded in trying to get some cohesion into what we're trying to do so we've made it very open we've done and local people are involved in decisions and direction that we take but there's often people who just don't like change so sometimes it's difficult for people to buy into this because they've in certainly in the case of our community they've had years and years and years of people telling them now you do this then you do that and this is the money you're going to get and this is how we're going to do it and then you know the next funding round oh no we've changed our minds you're doing this this way it's very difficult for people not to be drawn to how you're going to get the easiest access to funds and that doesn't always mean that you're you're doing what the community wants you know every I've been in a voluntary sector organisation for 25 years and I've done everything from community engagement to employment and health I'm now working in a health grant because we have to fit into what people are prepared to fund as opposed to what we actually want and I think that's the difficulty and often you're driven by targets that are somebody else has defined as well so you end up having to contort yourself into the shape that is going to benefit and what actually happens in my case is we are funded to do A, B and C but then we do X, Y and Z because that's what the community wants but we have to do that bit to be able to do that bit so it's it's it's very difficult for the communities to be able to direct the funding it's the other way around you know it's the tail wagging the dog so should there be sort of specific mechanisms you know for dealing with the different approaches that we've got say there are two applications you know we need to have some means to weigh up one against the other when the funding body of whatever you know but I was going to say there's always I mean that you know you can't avoid competition and you can't legislate for that there's got to be some mechanism by which you judge two applications on the same criteria and work out which you think is going to be in the better public interest than the other and that you know people will always come back and dispute a decision that happens all the time I'm not I don't think we can avoid some of those things happening but I don't think we should use that as an excuse not to do things either because by giving communities the opportunity to register interest to put in an application to acquire assets and land that's something they've not necessarily had been able to do before and it allows them to express their aspirations and I think just that the fact what we've experienced before is that the fact that people are able to do it often things get worked out at community level before it gets beyond that and I don't think there's been very many cases where you've got lots of disputes over over the same thing it may well happen more in urban areas than it has done in rural and then it comes down to it I think a test of what do you think you know if we're if you're talking about achieving sustainable development what does that mean who sets the definition for that and how do those competing applications actually contribute to towards achieving that definition in that particular place for sustainable development do you think everyone should be given copies of the UN international covenant on economic, social and cultural rights and some classes and how to interpret them because it sounds to me as empowering people at a local level with that broader definition with relation to sanitation, food and housing and so on would be very valuable indeed for I've learned from this session the previous sessions I don't think any of the communities need very much encouragement to empower themselves so I think it is those in decision making those in authority that need to be aware more of their duties under these obligations and I think that that would be much more helpful for that greater awareness at the government level and at parliamentary level that some of the experiences and not capacity building but capacity releasing for me that says it all and too often decision makers make decisions with the best of intentions on behalf of those that they're making the decisions for and that has to be turned in its head and you don't need international obligations or treaties to that's just common sense or it should be yeah thank you for that a couple of final comments from Colleen and David yes Colleen first I think probably referring back to community planning partnerships which I think is relevant and that the kind of three levels that policies and strategies operate at on the ground by local people leading the local authority level and obviously the Scottish government level where policies are formulated and for our members and other third sector organisations where it falls down is in the community planning partnership structure because this bears very little relation to what people define as their own communities and there's a mismatch between the kind of geographic interpretation of what the community is and our members very often do things despite what's happened in the community planning partnerships in other cases we do work alongside the cpp for instance in Glasgow the single outcome agreement we're working on the vulnerable people's homelessness and housing need group and there's some good outcomes achieved there but I really think that this is you know I'm it's a well-rehearsed discourse I know that this has been said many times but it really doesn't work I think that's where it falls down a lot of the time well we've been happy enough to take these ideas forward David it's very weird you asked if there were there had been any examples of competing interests for a given site well funnily enough the one example that I could come up with in our community was where a housing association wanted to build residential homes which is what housing associations do and the community wanted facilities for young people and there was no doubt about who the winner was because the housing associations were equipped to to move and deliver this is not a criticism of housing associations by the way but you did ask for an example and there is one no indeed thank you very much we've covered a wide range today and it's fascinating for us to be able to try and get as many practical examples as possible I'd like to thank the panel for all of your inputs if you feel you've any other points you wish to make you're at liberty to write to us afterwards so thank you for answering a wide range of questions um just before we close the meeting our next one on december the 10th the committee will take evidence from the cabinet secretary on the community empowerment scotland bill and consider petition p e 15 19 on saving scotland sales and it's reporting to the finance committee on the draft budget the latter part being taken in private but um we have a wide and varied interest in this community and our interest in urban development has extended the whole scope of this committee considerably but it's been most useful indeed so thank you very much I close the meeting now