 Good morning, and welcome everyone to the fifth meeting of the Local Government and Communities Committee in 2018. Can I remind everyone present to turn off mobile phones on his meeting papers that are provided in a digital format? Tablets may be used by members during the meeting. We have had one apology for today's meeting. Unfortunately, Kenneth Gibson, the MSP, is unable to come along, but I am delighted to say that David Torrance's MSP is here as a substitute member in his place. David, because you have not been to this committee before as a member, you have to declare any relevant interests, as you will be appropriate to put on the record at this point before we move to agenda item 1. So I am going to give you the opportunity to do that now. Thank you, convener, and I have nothing to declare. Well, that was brief, thank you. We will now move to agenda item 1, and the committee will take evidence on the Electoral Commission's report on the Scottish Council elections 2017. I welcome Dame Susan Bruce, the commissioner, and Daniel Head and Sarah Mackie, singing officer of the Electoral Commission Scotland. I welcome all three of you for coming along, and I ask the commissioner to make a short opening statement. Thank you very much, and thanks for the opportunity to give evidence today. The report on the local council elections last year was published, and I am pleased to be able to report that the elections were well run and commanded high levels of vote confidence and satisfaction. That, we think, is down to the hard work of the returning officers, electoral registration officers and the Electoral Management Board, who at that time also faced the additional challenge of planning the unexpectedly run general election immediately afterwards. I think that the ability to deliver council elections successfully, as they did, and to increase the engagement of voters demonstrates the strength of the electoral community in Scotland, and by that I also include the parties and the policy makers in that group, so strength in depth in understanding what the election meant. We were pleased to be able to report that turnout had risen by over 7 per cent since 2012 to 46.9 per cent, which was the best turnout since 1977. However, at 46.9 per cent, that is still less than half of those eligible to vote, so there is still work to do there in engaging the electorate and encouraging their participation. Although the general picture was positive and you will have seen in the report, we have made a series of recommendations to make improvements to the running of the polls and to better support the participation of voters and candidates during the election. Just a couple of other issues, you will be aware that the Scottish Government has now published its consultation on electoral reform, and we are very much engaged in that and are working on our response at this time. Finally, I just wanted to note the fact that Scotland Act 2016 makes the commission accountable to the Scottish Parliament for our work on Scottish parliamentary elections, as we already are for council elections. I just wanted to put on record that we value that accountability to the Parliament and look forward to working closely with you. I might open up with some general questions and then we will move to members for some more detailed questioning. In terms of turnout, is there a general trend that following the Scottish independence referendum, is it the referendum bounce or are there other factors going on? If it is a referendum bounce, irrespective of people's use in the constitution, that might subside again. What are your thoughts on whether this is a gradual realignment of turnout to increased levels? Is it still pretty low in some places? Is it a false hope that this is a general trajectory that will continue? The Scottish referendum saw record levels of turnout, and what was really encouraging was the engagement of 16 and 17-year-olds in their participation in that particular referendum. We have been at pains to point out to ourselves and to our colleagues in the Electoral Registration Office and the AMB and so on. Work with them is to not take that for granted. Particularly now, we have seen quite a long space between electoral events, so we are going to have to work hard to make sure that information is made available and that there is plenty of engagement with the public in general. It has been the fact that older voters tend to, once they have started voting, they tend to continue to vote. What we have been trying to do with colleagues, particularly in the Electoral Registration Office, is to capture the interests of people who have never registered before, to encourage them to register to understand the value of their vote and to continue with the awareness-raising campaigns. Andy, have you got anything to add to that? In a sense, we are not about turnout. We think that it is not really anything to do with us. Voters vote if they think that it is important enough, and that is why you get 85 per cent in independence referendums and you get less and lower T elections, as academics would call them. We were higher than England and Wales at the UK Parliamentary in 2015, but we were lower in 2017, which was only a month after the council elections, which was the highest in 77 as a standalone council election. What we are really interested in is making sure that people are engaged and understand how to register and can fill in the ballot papers. I think that there are a number of issues at the council election that you will want to raise with us about how to vote and how to vote correctly. It is a nice lead-on, because that is the line of question that I wanted to follow. I remember when the Electoral Commission for Scotland has given evidence to the committee before, and we quite rightly should go through various groups in society and protect characteristics and how they are engaging with the system. We will do all that. We really should do that, but I remember having a theme saying that the biggest inequality that seems to appear in voter turnout figures and spoil paper figures is by geographic location and by poverty and deprivation. For example, Canal Ward in Glasgow is in my constituency of Mary Helen Springburn, had the highest, I think, spoiled papers across Scotland. Previously, I do not think that the Electoral Commission was aware that those things were going on, but there is a recommendation now to say that, where we know, there is evidence that there are significant long-term trends for more spoiled papers by percentage in areas for work to begin a year before the next election—two years, three years, more information on the day of the election, more officers. What would that look like? There is a recommendation for the Government to look at in terms of how we manage that. With my ward, Canal Ward, should we expect to see a huge information education campaign two years before the next council election? Should we be getting extra money for our schools, for doing the educational, for the third sector, for hard-to-reach groups? What would that look like in practice? When you look at a North Isles ward in Orkney at 0.47 per cent, spoiled papers in my ward of Canal of 5.67 per cent, that is a huge differential and a huge inequality. Particularly a mile away from Canal, in one of that, there was a hillhead or something like that, you had less than 1 per cent, so it is two places cheap by jowl with such a disparate discrepancy. One of the things that we looked at is that there are a few issues going on with the number of spoiled ballots, so we did some analysis of it and looked at things like educational attainment, social renting, private renting, and different issues like that. The one that came out that correlated with it was deprivation and non-employment, but none of the others did. That is clearly an issue. However, we also found that you were much more likely to have spoiled ballots in wards where parties were standing multiple candidates, and the biggest cause of the spoiled ballots was where people have voted XXX, so they have looked for their party that they like and they have seen that they have got three candidates and they have just put an X by all three. That is obviously a big issue as well. We also found that the longer the ballot paper, the more names on the ballot paper, the higher the risk of it being rejected. We have made a recommendation that, having done that analysis, we can predict where we are likely to have higher rates of spoiled ballots, so that is very much about information in the polling station, also looking at the postal voting packs in those wards and trying to see if we can make it more clear. It is also about working schools and through the local media. The thing with our campaigns is that we found out that if you start the information campaigns too far out from the election, people turn off. There is an optimum time about six weeks before, so I think what you would look at is put more resources into those six weeks than have the same resource spread out over a year. I think that would be the way we would go, but we have recommended that returning officers identify which wards are at risk. We did find that you might have a ward with deprivation, but if there were not multiple candidates standing from a party, they would not get the same high rates. You will only know when nominations close how many the full risk of rejected ballots. You want to boost turnout, but turnout is everyone's responsibility. Is there a double whammy for some deprived communities where they are getting significantly increased percentages of spoiled ballot papers and significantly lower levels of turnout to begin with? Should a correlation be done by identifying wards where you have high spoil papers and low turnout to see that there is even more support there? I mean, when you have places where people do not turn out, so you are looking at places like Shettleston, and I was at the Glasgow count and I saw on the amount of double Xs that were appearing on the Shettleston ballot papers and being discounted. When you have managed to get people to turn out, there are few people and then they have had what I think was four percent in Shettleston. That is very disappointing, and we would agree that you need to target those wards particularly. So more information, well-trained, confident information officers within the polling stations, just as a courtesy saying to people, just a wee reminder, it's numbers here, it's one, two, three, no Xs please, just that wee courtesy reminder, the human touch at the point just before the cast devote. That's resource intensive, but is that the kind of thing at the end of a six weeks process? That's the sort of thing we're looking at. I mean, to be fair to the returning officers, they do do this training currently, although when you talk to deputy return officers and return officers, some of them are concerned about the actual employment of the training on the day and the consistency of the message, and I think they've taken it away, and the electoral management board will make sure in 2022 that they prosecute the policy in terms of doing all of this. I think there's also an element for the parties to be more consistent about their messaging, about how you fill in the ballot paper, which we've worked with all the parties over the years. Some of them do it better than others. I think there's also an element of, you certainly see this in by-elections, as we call it, the three in the three box, where you get a number three, which isn't counted as a valid vote, whereas an X would be if it's only one X. Just a casual remark, I'm third on the ballot paper, or just put an X, it'll be fine because it'll count it. It'll count it if it's one X, but it'll not if someone else says and vote for me, and then you get the thought processes of the voter, and you suddenly get two Xs. I think that we've all got to be very careful about how we consistently deliver the correct message of how you fill in the ballot paper. Okay, final question for myself before some other members come in. I mentioned this line of questioning briefly because others may want to come to it in more detail. I'm certainly a strong supporter. I think that it's unarguable to say that we should be going to some form of randomised ballot papers, and I see that as a Bob Doris, who does quite well out of an alphabetised system. Parties do quite well as well because it allows them to really take a lot more control over how they do voter management strategies and the like, and try to maximise the amount of candidates. However, if we move to randomised ballot papers proportionate prints based on the various combinations of candidates on the paper, that could confuse voters even more as they try to seek out their preferred candidate from their preferred party. I would support randomised ballot papers to put fairness into the system for all candidates. Is there a negative to that in terms of potential spoil papers and just confusing the electorate? I think that when you've read our report, we recognise that there seems to be an alphabetic discrimination occurring. It's impact varies between the parties. The SNP's 78 per cent of cases where you stood more than two candidates, the first candidate to the oddvark, got the vote rather than Zebedee or whatever you want to call them. That varies in such. There are solutions to all of this. There's Z, Z to A, there's rotation, there's discrimination by lot, I suppose. Our concern is the low of unintended consequence and how that impacts on the voter because we're obviously all about the voter. Our argument is that we should test it. If we are going to change the ballot paper and we're not really aware of anything where a voter gets something in a list that isn't alphabetic, we don't know. It may be a solution, it may not. I think there's also, if you look at, if you leave it as the status quo, there's also an argument which says, and we held a conference to engage people on the consultation with Glasgow University a couple of weeks back, and people were articulating things like, actually, you could leave it as it was, but you could do better vote management strategies by the parties to ensure that you say where you want one, two for Zebedee and Oddvark or two, one and whatever. There's many ways, but what we're saying is, whatever we do, we need to test it first. It's worth pointing out that, if I recall, the predecessor committee of the committee that I now share did an inquiry into this as well, and they recommended that some pilot initiative should take place at elections, and it's something this committee hasn't particularly looked at yet and we might want to give consideration to, but we should note that the predecessor committee did recommend that. Is that something you'd be supportive of? Pick half a dozen council wards and pilot it if that was possible. You would probably have to do that in 2022, because the effect occurs where you've got more than one candidate from the same party, and since 2007 I think from men we've only had two double vacancies on the same day, on the same ballot paper, so if you were going to do it in a by-election, you're basically waiting for the councillor boss to go off the cliff sort of thing to get like that. It really, so I used to work in local government, so I used to go on councillor visits and such. I think it's probably easier to do to test where we've tested ballot papers before, and you get people to fill in a range of ballot papers and then talk to them, interview them over a long period of time, or do focus groups on it, so you can actually try and figure out what you're seeing and the reasons for it. So we've actually got the perfect opportunity now, haven't we, with 2022? Lots of opportunities to do some market research to trial some ballot papers and controlled circumstances, and then potentially have a go-live pilot in 2022, that's absolute. I should point out that some of the other members were councillors, were previously councillors, that could have been on that bus that you referred to, Mr O'Neill, so good luck with the light of questioning that you get in relation to that, but thank you for that. We'll move to Jenny Gilruth next. Thank you, convener, and just to clarify, I was never a councillor. In your report, one of your recommendations is a consideration of how to engage young people who will reach the age of electoral majority, i.e. turn 16 before 2021 in the next four years. You also talk about working with educational partners in order to do that, in terms of supporting political literacy in schools. I know that, in 2014, you did similar work. What is going to be different this time, and will you look to work with EROs in terms of voter registration more specifically? Yes, I think. We do need to look at ways across the board that we can work. Actually, we were just having a discussion about this yesterday, in fact. If you focus efforts on, say, modern studies courses, you get young people who are not necessarily following that course through schools, so they might be excluded from that type of education. Engaging across the board with directors of education, with local authorities, with youth groups, with organisations like Young Scot to raise awareness of that will be incredibly helpful. I do not know how and do you want to? Sorry. What we have done for the last two years, so proceeding the Scottish Parliament election and the local government election, is we have worked with all of the local authorities in Scotland and the directors of education and the chief execs of the councils to get schools signed up to do what we called a ready to vote event. This year, we did it on 1 March. We have pretty much named and shamed local authorities by putting a table on the website that showed how many schools were signed up and then you had that kind of domino effect as more and more signed up those that were not there became a bit embarrassed and signed up. That worked very well. We got over 80 per cent of secondary schools in Scotland taking part in that and doing something with the young people who would be eligible to vote at the forthcoming election. What we did find, it was very hard to carve time out of the school year because they were approaching exams at that point in time. It was difficult to get some schools to give up that time and you can understand if it is the young people's exam success that is in jeopardy. You can understand that. What we are looking at in the next few years is rather than having them do an event, is looking at developing resources that could be used in school. We are thinking potentially as part of citizenship might be or personal and social education might fit across the board and then all young people would do it. We are getting in March meeting a group of academics with an interest in this area who have been developing resources so we are going to meet them in March and also be talking to Education Scotland to see if we can get something so it becomes a routine part of a young person's development in school that they have. On that point actually, I was not a councillor but I was a modern studies teacher so I know that until the end of S3 there should be a level of political education that every child experience is irrelevant of whether they take modern studies. 80 per cent of schools signed up to your ready-to-vote programme. What about that 20 per cent? You talked about naming and shaming them as it were. Going back to 2012, I know that there was a social studies impact report that Education Scotland carried out that said that 20 per cent of schools in Scotland do not teach modern studies. Is there a connect then between the schools that do not teach the subject and also have not signed up to your ready-to-vote campaign? Are they just not engaging? Is it cultural? What is going on there? That is possible but what we have not done has gone through the list of schools that have not signed up and seen what they have got modern studies. We launched it in Govan High School two years ago before the Scottish Parliament elections and it was the modern studies class that kind of worked as peer educators and went out and delivered the sessions with the other young people. I think that when the teachers signed up there was a high level of modern studies teachers among the names that we saw so there possibly is a link with that. That is something because what we want to do is maybe talk to the modern studies association as well about how we can get this into schools and embed it into the political literacy in schools. We will look at what is happening in the schools without modern studies. Do you think that the Government needs to look again at how schools are actually delivering the curriculum? My concern, certainly, as a modern studies teacher, was that there were certain parts of the country—I think that Angus is one of them—that were just not delivering modern studies for whatever reason and that they could not provide evidence at the time to Education Scotland of how it was being delivered in the curriculum elsewhere. The argument was always put that, although we might not deliver modern studies, the children can experience these experiences and outcomes within that curriculum area because they might be getting taught history or geography or somebody else will deliver it to them, but they could not provide any substantive evidence to that effect. Is that the kind of work that you might do with the Government in the future or with Education Scotland to track and monitor what skills are actually delivering to ensure that all kids across Scotland get a consistent delivery in terms of political literacy education? I think that the Education Scotland would clearly have a lead role in that. I think that, as the Electoral Commission, our role would be in providing as much evidence as we could to them to link young people's engagement and understanding of electoral matters, but we would not take a role in influencing how much time was spent on the curriculum in that. I think that that is very much in the ballpark of Education Scotland. We could certainly be a resource there and provide the evidence to support any work going forward. I think that the main thing is, and if you tie up that with the previous question about the rejection rates in certain constituencies, we would need to try and give as much information as possible to ensure that people, whatever age they were in those areas, had the best possible chance of participating. If we can get as much useful information to young people before they start voting and get them into the habit of voting, they are more likely to stay in the habit of voting. It is a really important thing to look at. On a positive note, what we did find was the 16, 17-year-olds that we surveyed after the election said that they were much more likely to report finding it easy to access information about how to register and how to vote than the 18 to 25-year-olds. Getting that information to them in school and recognising that there are more schools that we need to reach seems to be having a positive effect. Just as a final point on that, have you done any supplementary work with regard to how effective pupil councils are and how that impacts on engagement later in life? I know from my constituency that I have been going around and looking at pupil councils. Some of them are more effective than others. Some of them have a real voice in that school, and I think that that impacts on whether they engage in the political process later in life. Is that something that the commission has looked at? It is not something that we have looked at in any depth, but I think that it is very interesting. Certainly, I have had experience in West Lothian. There was a very dedicated community education worker there who was very determined to increase young people's political engagement. He used to oversee all of the pupil council elections in the school, and he would go in and he would get the elections team involved and they would run them as proper elections. The young people had to sign up on to the electoral register for them. I think the really positive thing was that it was properly run election, and it had a proper output as in elected representatives. A lot of people go down the mock election route. I think that the pupil council thing, for me, feels like a much more educational thing about the whole democratic space. You said in opening, Susan Bruce, that when people start to vote, they tend to continue to vote. Is there good evidence for that, or is that just anecdotal? The evidence that we have in terms of voter turnout whether there are high areas of turnout, there tends to be an older population who have started to vote and have continued to vote. What we have found out is that people who have never registered, and they may be in their 30s or 40s, they are the most difficult ones to get into the habit of voting. The impact going back to the first question of the referendum, the increase in the number of people who joined the register at that time who had never been on the register, and some of them were in their, quite a large number of them were in their 30s and 40s. The hope would be that those individuals would continue to join continuous voters, having experienced it once, realised that they could do it, they could understand it, it was accessible to them. I think that there is a range of messages that we have to get out in relation to that. I would defer to Andy and Sarah for the historic evidence on that. Obviously, there are limited countries where 16-year-olds are entitled to vote, but there has been some evidence from, I think that it is Austria that has shown that there is an effect on, if they turn out at 16, they will continue to turn out. However, I can check that and I am happy to supply that to the clerks. That is useful. Coming back to the question about schools, you indicated the example from West Lothian where someone was running an election for pupil councils. I am a great fan of pupil councils and when I meet school children, I always ask them about pupil councils and turn some of their questions about democracy back to them. I get a range of reactions. It is not strictly within your remit, but do you see that there would be benefit in exploring how we could make pupil councils more mandatory? For example, you do oversee the rules and procedures regarding elections. If pupil councils were something that you chose to adopt as something where you would happily have a role in, would you embrace that? I think that we would partly be getting into somebody else's territory because we are not educationalists. That is where we have worked with people who are experts in education to deliver that. I do not want us to exceed our remit. However, off the top of my head, I could imagine that it would be somewhere where, if PACs were put together for people about how to run a student council election, that was something that we would happily help to support. That is the kind of thing that I am thinking of, just to be clear. Even if they choose not to have one or choose not to run it, at least they can see what kind of good practices and can see the benefits in an educational sense of people participating in a process that is more structured and formal. I suppose that in the sense that why we got involved in all of this was because of 16, 17-year-olds, obviously. However, our role in providing the educational tool kits for 16, 17-year-olds and teachers and such was to bring everyone together and hold the ring and bring our expertise to their world, but it is really the educationalist world that they run and are asked. Obviously, throughout Scotland, councils run educations and also run elections. Highland voices have done things for a number of years. The councils in Aberdeensia, the elections team and the ERO have worked with the schools on several occasions to produce mock elections. There are examples of councils already working in their own particular way, which we have helped to advise, but it is really down to them to do what they want, because we do not have a formal role in the curriculum. Moving on to diversity, you raised that. Do you have a role in improving the diversity of candidates in elections? Yes, in the sense that, for instance, the Access to Elected Office fund, which is a great success, has certainly—the people who access the fund—15 of them actually got elected. It has been seen to produce a discernible change. Where we came in was how we advised government when they were formulating the legislation to make sure that all of the work that they wanted to do did not fall foul of the regulatory regime for candidates. That was our role in that. We also had a public awareness role in the sense of making sure that people knew about it, so we were all at your various party conferences and trying to ensure that people knew about it. We worked with Inclusion Scotland, who organised it, to try to make people aware of it. Our role in the sense is really to make sure that whatever the policy makers want in government trying to put through legislation actually works in practice. Okay, that's fine. What role does the commission have, and if it doesn't, who does have this role in ensuring that people with protected characteristics under the equality act can register and vote on the same basis as everybody else? Sorry, my answer is that. Well, we have a role because we advise government. It would be the government to ensure—well, it's the Parliament because they make the law, but the government because they propose the law in that sense to ensure that such people can vote and register. Okay, and is there any work beyond—I mean, the access to elected office fund has been useful, but in terms of other protected characteristics, what initiatives have been taken to improve registration and turnout and candidacy amongst people with other protected characteristics? Yes. Within the law that is set to protect individuals with protected characteristics, we would also work with the AMB and the returning officers in training of people who work end-to-end in the electoral system, electoral registration officers, polling clerks and so on and so forth. Although the delivery, if you like, the delivery end of that is the responsibility of returning officers and registration officers, we work with them to ensure that any guidance that we put out meets the terms of the legislation to make sure that awareness is raised, so that people who are delivering those rules at the front end don't have tunnel vision, they need to think laterally about being open-minded, see how people might need assistance, make sure that people aren't being excluded. As Andy said, within the law that is set by Parliament, our guidance fits within that. Training, awareness raising, all the general things to make sure that people understand that it's their democracy. Our role is to make it as accessible as possible, to make sure that the rules and regulations and the guidelines that we're responsible for don't prevent people from having proper access and fair access. In our public awareness work, we kind of look at our audiences as, well, I should start with, actually, we do significant amount of research to find out who isn't registered and who is registered, and we can identify groups within that. We know to be particularly under-registered and we can target work towards them. So, for example, if you are young and you are in private rented accommodation, you are much less likely to be registered than if you're older and you're in your own house and those kind of things. There are certain minority ethnic groups who are more likely to be under-registered than others, so we can target appropriately and we share all that research and we make sure that the electoral registration officers are aware of that research so that they can be looking locally and saying, actually, where are these groups, where do we need to target our effort? When we do our public awareness, we split these groups into what we call the incidentals, which are the people who are kind of interested in politics, probably will want to take part. They just haven't quite got around to taking action to get themselves registered. They're the people we target with are advertising, things like that, because you catch them at the right moment, you remind them, especially now that you can register online, it's very efficient. But then we have our other groups, which are the people who actually are disengaged from politics, who aren't going to register because why would they register if they're never going to vote? No public awareness campaign, no 30-second advert is going to change that attitude, so what we do there is we work in partnership with other organisations who are already trusted and in contact with them. For example, we've worked a lot with Shelter over the years to get information to homeless people or people in insecure accommodation. An example from Northern Ireland was that one of our team in Northern Ireland worked with a local LGBT group to go around the clubs and pose in the LGBT community to get information about registration and voting. They also worked in partnership with a travelling group. These are all things that we are open to doing and looking at how we can get those messages out and work with those groups. The other thing to mention, I think that you'll be talking about this after we've left, so I won't go on too much, is the anonymous registration, the expansion of the anonymous registration, we've supported to make it as easy as possible for, it's not just women, for anybody at risk of violence. We're going to be working with women's aid and with police and social workers to make sure that we can get guidance out across Scotland to make it more effective. Okay, thank you. Okay, if it's a supplementary on that specific point, absolutely, but Monica will be making a quick patient to come in on that point. Yeah, okay. It was just, you mentioned homeless people and you said you worked with Shelter. I'm just wondering how easy it is for homeless people to register to vote when they haven't got permanent address. It's, I think, a declaration of local connection. So if you are, say, you're a rough sleeper, you can register in respect of the park bench that you sleep underneath and you can nominate an address to pick up all your electoral communications. It could be the local rough sleepers hostel that you name, and they will correspond and your ballot, your poll card will come to there and your, you know, postal ballot paper. I think, you know, there is an argument if you're a rough sleeper, you probably have other things on your mind and voting might not always be top of them, but we make sure that, you know, working through Shelter and other organisations that people are at least aware that they have an option. Have you done any work on how successful that is, that approach? I think we don't have, because the numbers are collated nationally, I don't think, for declarations of local connections, and they could be for different reasons as well because it also might be that you're in a mental health hospital and you can register with a declaration of local connection to there as well. But I can look and see if there is any research on how many people use them. Thank you. Thank you. Okay. Thank you. I'm Monica Lennon. Thanks, convener. Good morning. Following on from Andy Wightman's questions about people with protected characteristics, your report from November last year on elections for everyone, expedences of people with disabilities, which looked at the June 2017 UK parliamentary election. The report highlights problems that voters with a disability have when they vote, but, more so, the report highlights that people with disabilities don't always know about their voting rights. Why is that? Why do people not know that they have a vote? I think that that's associated with the general issue of people not engaging with their right to vote. Our awareness campaigns, which we support, which are run largely at local level by returning officers, go out to reach the hard to reach, as it were. They apply to the general electorate, but also seek to target people who may not know that they can exercise their right to vote. We are looking to do more work with organisations that work with people with particular disabilities, such as RNIB, so that we can understand as the electoral commission the barriers that people are facing. We can help with the voter awareness and the preparation that we do to put measures in place to assist those people to come forward and vote. There are facilities—we were just talking yesterday—about the readers that are present at polling places to help people with site impairment to cast their vote, for example. The extent to which people know that those are there, do they know that they're there, do they know that they're there in every polling place? What's the extent to which polling presiding officers promote that information on the day? Right from the day that people go to vote, right back to the point at which they decide or wonder whether they're eligible or not, there's a train of work that needs to be done there to raise awareness across groups that support people with particular needs of a specific type, right through to the more generic kind of awareness raising. We know from the turnout figures that I mentioned at the outset that more than 50 per cent of people still don't cast their vote, so there is a big issue about getting people to engage, making sure that they understand that it is their right to vote. They have enough information to know that they'll be supported when they go. The point that was raised earlier on about information officers is that, when a single transferable vote was first introduced, there were information officers in only polling places. Maybe that's something that we should encourage people to think about doing again, because people were nervous about that system. It is the fear of the unknown that sometimes stops people going in, stepping over the door, either to register or to cast their vote. We need to work with everybody across the electoral community, returning officers, electoral management board, registration officers and, of course, political parties themselves to get as much information out as possible, to make sure that people feel that they can exercise the right that is theirs to exercise. There has been a particular issue with adults with learning disabilities. We've done a lot of work over the years with Enable Scotland to reach out and to make sure that they're aware that they have a right to vote, because often we've found, particularly with adults with learning disabilities, that one of the barriers they have is their carers, who say, well, you shouldn't be voting, and we're not going to support you to go down to the polling station. It's kind of reaching out and saying, actually, everybody has a right to vote, whether you choose to exercise that right or not. What we would do is always encourage everybody to be registered and anybody they care for to register them, because even with cases such as dementia, there's been experiences where care homes have not registered people who are living there, and they say, oh, they've got dementia, but people with dementia have good days and bad days, and polling day may be a good day. We say, register everybody and that gives them the option if they can exercise it. Enable Scotland made a submission to the committee back in 2016. I was quite struck by how low turnout was. It said to the committee that not enough people with a learning disability vote on average is about 30 per cent turnout, but it also said that around 70 per cent, seven out of 10 people with learning disabilities do want to vote, but they find it quite difficult. You've mentioned the role of carers and support workers and how they need to support people, but how could that work be taken forward? Is there anything that you can update on? That's about working, like I said, with organisations like Enable and others across Scotland to make sure, what we do is make sure they have the information they need to pass out amongst their, you know, if they're a care organisation, so they can make sure that that's passed out through the carers that they employ. We also make sure that we provide information in EasyRead, and that's something particularly we'll work with Enable Scotland on this year, and then they ran workshops with these EasyRead packs to explain how to vote, and we're always open to working with as many organisations as possible to get that information out. Those figures that Enable provided, they were back in 2016, so do you have any updated figures? Is that monitored? Enable Scotland may have, because, like I said, they run a big campaign each time, so they may survey themselves, but we can check that. Aside from Enable having their own data in terms of people with protected characteristics, is that data collected nationally at all? In terms of turning it to vote, it can't be because of the secrecy of the ballots. The difficulty with asking people whether they voted was that they were always overclaim, so we'll have maybe turned out a 46.9% in election, but when we survey people, 70% claim that they turned out. We know that they didn't, so that is difficult. I think that the issue with those services is that you wouldn't get enough of the people with protected characteristics potentially in the sample to be statistically relevant, but what I would have to do is talk to our research team, because they're the experts in this, and just ask them what kind of potential there is within the service that they do to track this information. From the point of view of how do we know that we're making progress, how is that tracked, and obviously I appreciate the secrecy of the voting process, but there could be other ways to capture that information. One of your recommendations has been on extending emergency proxy to people who have unforeseen caring responsibilities or there could have been a bereavement in the family and so on. My understanding is that the Scottish Government hasn't taken forward those recommendations as yet. Are you able to give an update or any kind of insight into that? My understanding is that they're still thinking about it, they're reviewing it, the consultation is on-going, we support it, you can practically do it, it's about testing, you've got to decide who can do what when, but really it's a question you'd have to ask the Scottish Government rather than ourselves. Is that part of the Government's consultation at the moment? Will you talk about proxy? Is it being reviewed out with the consultation? Certainly in our response we'll be raising a number of issues that are currently in the consultation, so we'll certainly raise it with them again. Are there other recommendations that you've made that are not in the consultation? Yes, for instance our recommendations of a regulation of council elections, the candidate regulation, which we made in 2012, it isn't specifically talked about in the consultation but we obviously have on-going dialogue with Scottish Government officials all the time and it is our understanding that they're looking at bringing in council elections into the kind of same level of regulation as exists for council elections in England and Wales. You would be aware of the various law commissions across the UK published a report on consolidating and modernising electoral law in general. The Scottish Government, Joe Fitzpatrick of the Minister, who you'll speak to soon I think, has made commitments to try and bring in many of the recommendations in that report to Scottish Parliament elections and Scottish council elections. In a sense, I know, because we're talking to them about it, they're looking at trying to consolidate the electoral rules for Scottish Parliament and council elections, so there are other things that are around the electoral world, which perhaps may not be in this, but that doesn't mean they're lost. Can I just ask about why the secrecy of the ballot, sort of this sounds like a silly question, but bear with me, the secrecy of the ballot stops us getting data on who voted, because it's not a secret whether someone voted or not. It's public available information because political parties use something called marked up registers, so there's more than anecdotal evidence to prove that voting's a habit, because if political parties collect the data in an appropriate way, they can work out whether someone's voted. If someone's voted in a UK election, they've probably voted in a Scottish election, and accounts by good, if they've voted in a European election, they've probably voted in all the elections, and you can actually work out pretty reasonably who's likely to vote or not to vote, so it's not a secret whether someone has voted, it's a secret how they've voted, and we've got attainers who are becoming 16, 17 years old, so we know when they appear in the electoral register. Some of that stuff couldn't, in theory, be tracked through and data analysis done to work out, so we know who every 16, 17-year-old is who had the opportunity to vote, because they all sit in electoral registers. There's then marked up registers, which tells you whether they did or didn't vote, so we've got the data. Why can't we do the analysis of it? I don't understand why the secrecy of the ballot stops is having analysis of how many actually voted. It's not about how many, I think we were talking very specifically about disabled people, I think, at that time, so it's just, you know, we can't, we could identify 16, 17, but we couldn't identify who was disabled, who had a mental health condition, is... So you would have to do a huge, kind of, anonymous survey at the point in which they become a tenors and all that, kind of thing. So have we done the data for 16, 17-year-olds then? Have we done that analysis? Do we know how many voted then? We know how many have claimed to have voted, but we haven't gone through the marked registers, but we boosted the sample when we did the survey, public opinion surveys after the election. We boosted the sample of 16, 17-year-olds so we could get a sort of representative, and 51% of them claimed to have voted at the election. Like you say, people do tend to go over claim, and it was, I think, comparable with the 18-25 for the claim turn out. So would it just be overly bureaucratic and burdensome to do that exercise and work out exactly how many voted? I mean, a problem with marked registers is they generally are paper, and they're dispersed through the 32 return officers. You'd have to collect them up. There's no one portal where all the registers are there, so it's not easily analysable. I mean, you know who's voted, but you don't know what type of person that is, what the age, if they have disabilities or whatever, it's just to name. The only people who collect it consistently, in my understanding, is the parties because you use it in your campaigning software systems. I mean, it would cost a lot in terms of money and resources to do that. I'm not to say we should do it. It's just a frustration that would be good to have the data to analyse and work out what isn't been effective, so I would just be curious. I wouldn't explore that in a line of questioning any further. Alexander Stewart. We've touched on the role of the political parties in trying to educate the electorate on the SDV system. I think that most political parties probably spend more time with the postal voter to try to educate them than they maybe do with those that turn up on the day. Have you looked at any evidence across other countries that may have a party toolkit that's used to try and manage to see what they do and how they get a support mechanism? We haven't done any formal work. I mean, some parties, vote management strategies, certainly some parties struggled with it in 2012, and I think they think they got it better in 2017. If you look at, there are very, very few instances of countries using SDV. I think if you ask an academic, they would say the best start, the best vote management strategies take place in Northern Ireland. If you've ever been to Northern Ireland, you'll see A boards outside polling stations, which say vote 1, 2, 3 in somewhere else in the constituency, it'll be 3, 2, 1 or whatever, and that's consistent. Now, that is, they've had SDV for over 40 years, they're used to it, there is a particular set of political circumstances in Northern Ireland, which may impact on that. What we looked at was some of the, and this is why we talk about the parties reviewing their strategies. We looked at leaflets, which we all get, some of it was very, very good, and some of it, I know how SDV works, I kind of knew what it meant, whether or not the ordinary voter did, perhaps not. So, that is where we're thinking in terms of we've only used SDV for what, 10, 11 years, which effectively means three goals unless you've had a by-election over that period of time. So, it's not embedded in everyone knows how to vote under first past the post, SDV is slightly different and you see that with double Xs and threes and three boxes and all this sort of stuff. So, it's certainly, I think we're still all on the learning curve and we've all got a part of the job to try and improve how to vote. I think a point which Sarah made earlier, a lot of this is worth doing nearer the time of the polling rather than a long time before because, frankly, people aren't interested until it's front of mind. The knowledge base and the training that goes into the polling staff themselves, I know that's progressed some distance in the short space of 11 years that we've had, but there are still some barriers that we find in and, as you said, you've identified certain constituencies and certain wards that are much more susceptible and you may have to have a different focus on how you manage that polling station, how you manage that situation to ensure that people do feel much more comfortable because there is no doubt confusion. I think that the opportune or the fortunate situation of Scotland is that we have the Electoral Management Board, which the rest of UK doesn't have. I think because we're aware that there are certain multi-member wards where if you get a number of nominations you can then throw a resource at that. The Electoral Management Board can coordinate amongst the 32 so that it's not forgotten about. Before we came into existence there were lots of things which people wanted to improve about elections but they forgot because they went off to do their day job within the council that we came along. I think that the EMB helps that in a much more operational role because we're much more performing standards and regulatory. As long as we don't forget that next time around we can ensure that certain areas have the right number of information officers in, delivering the right number of bits of information. We've got past experience of pop-ups which explained how to vote and such, but in the end of the day it's down to the Presiding Officer and the poll clock and once the deputy return officer and the return officer has sent them out and trained them, it's about delivery. Now we have people going around checking on how it's happening on the day but you really are relying on the people you've got in the church hall or wherever. On your own public awareness campaigns you've talked about a 30 second or a 90 second advert. In that space of time the message you want to try and get out to try and educate is very limited in the timescale that you have. How do you see that developing for the next election? How do you think about processing that information in that short space of time? I think that Sarah-Laid is much more detailed. Our TV tends to be much more registration or flagging to the information leaflet that we've sent to all households, which doesn't happen in other parts of the United Kingdom but because of the different electoral systems as we do that but also we're moving much more away from paper to online stuff and this is Sarah's world so I'm going to be quiet. One of the things that we did this year which worked really well with our younger audience was an animation of an STV account that we used on social media because one of the things about understanding about filling your ballot paper correctly is if you understand what's going to happen to your ballot paper afterwards. Now in 2007 when STV was first introduced we actually tested out information that would explain about transfers and things like that what we found with the general population particularly older population when we tested it was that they were saying this is too complicated I'm not voting and so actually so in our main message we went back to actually it's not this is really simple it's one two three and so on but the the animations that we did on STV for the younger voters worked really well because what we found was the younger voters didn't pick up the leaflet that we sent to every household that tended to be to be read by the older voter but the younger voter was much more likely to see the animation and I think the answer is is there's no one size fits all because the other thing we we you know there are people who do not have that as I think citizens advice have announced this morning that people still have no access to the internet in certain communities and groups and so you know we can't kind of go down that fully digital route but we just we have to use all of the different of mediums that are available to us. Okay well time's almost upon us so we'll close this particular agenda item shortly but just before that is there anything else that you'd like to just put on the record any observations comments before we before we move on? Just like well just like thank you for the opportunity of coming to to discuss our report and just just to note that the the electoral community in Scotland as I mentioned earlier the RO's EROs you know the parties themselves the commission I think we do have an opportunity in Scotland to talk together often we speak to the political parties panel we've got an advisory group in Scotland and we have an opportunity to send out work up and send out consistent messages about raising awareness and the integrity of the poll and so on and so forth and I think that has helped us to get to this place none of us are complacent about that though and we need to keep just keep going particularly on voter engagement and awareness elements but I'm grateful to you for the opportunity to come and speak about the report and we welcome yourself and your team come along to to give evidence on it as well I think on behalf of the committee we should point out that we know our specific duties in relation to local government elections but where our committee is called the local government communities committee and all communities have to engage with elections irrespective of the tier of government and elections so we don't want to see mission drift but what we do want to see is make sure our communities are best served by the elections and the election process and we will no doubt discuss the committee how we can give some added value and some positive constructive scrutiny to that going forward not just in the run-up to the 2022 local government elections but our likely election process is more general as a committee so thank you very much for helping us to get the grips with some of that and we now move to agenda item 2 thank you very much but we have to suspend my apologies we'll suspend briefly before we move to agenda item 2 thank you very much cheers okay welcome back when we move to agenda item 2 which is a piece of subordinate legislation and the committee will take evidence on the draft affirmative statute instrument entitled representation of the people's Scotland amendments regulations 2018 and in doing so can I welcome Joe Fitzpatrick minister for parliamentary business, Roddy Angus elections policy advisor and Rebecca White team leader elections Scottish Government. The instrument was laid under the affirmative procedure which means the Parliament must approve the instrument before the provisions can come into force. Following this evidence session the committee will be invited at the next agenda item to consider a motion to approve the instrument and can I now invite the minister Joe Fitzpatrick to make a short opening statement minister. Thanks very much and good morning and thanks for this opportunity to set out the Government's position on the regulations before you today. Their main purpose is to make registering to vote anonymously at devolved elections in Scotland easier. They'll also strengthen the integrity of the electoral register and improve the registration system for electors. As you know, while the Scottish Parliament now has responsibility for local and Scottish Parliament elections the UK Government remains responsible for UK Parliament elections in Scotland. That means that electoral registration in Scotland is a shared responsibility. Due to this joint responsibility similar changes are also being proposed for UK parliamentary elections in Scotland. In fact, to understand the UK Government's regulations will be debated in the comments this afternoon. Anonymous registration was first introduced in 2006 and is designed to protect those whose safety would be at risk if their names and addresses appeared on the electoral register. When applying an applicant must provide evidence that demonstrates that their safety would be at risk. The evidence that is accepted is set out in legislation as a live court order, injunction or interdict from a prescribed list or a sign statement certifying that the applicant's safety is at risk, known as an attestation. An attestation can only be made by professions listed in the legislation as qualifying officers such as a police superintendent or a director of social services. The regulations before you proposed to expand the list of who can attest applications. They would also add additional court orders that can be used as evidence to support the application. The two orders that are being added, domestic violence protection orders and female gentle mutilation orders, are not orders that are issued by Scottish courts, however they are included so that those orders can still be used to support an anonymous registration applicant if someone subsequently moves to Scotland. Similar domestic abuse interdicts under Scottish legislation were added to the list of relevant court orders by the representation of the People's Scotland description of electoral registers and amendments regulations 2013. Further changes are likely to be brought forward as we implement the domestic abuse Scotland bill past last week and in the light of our on-going consultation, in particular the detailed policy paper on anonymous electoral registration. On that point, I urge anyone with a particular interest in anonymous voting to share their knowledge with us and help to shape future changes. The consultation on electoral reform and the detailed paper on anonymous electoral registration can be accessed on the Government's website at www.gov.scott and it closes on 12 March. The other changes in the regulations aim to improve the electoral registration process for voters and make it easier and more effective for electoral registration officers to administer. Those changes add statements to the registration application form to alert the applicant that they may have to provide evidence of their nationality and that a failure to provide a previous address may delay their application. In addition, we are proposing to allow registration officers to use information from additional sources to support a decision to remove a deceased elector from the electoral register. That will reduce the need for a registration officer to contact a deceased elector's relatives and help to avoid unnecessary distress to relatives. The final proposed changes streamline and simplify the correspondence that electoral registration officers are required to send to electors. Those changes are designed to reduce the cost of the registration system and provide greater discretion to electoral registration officers to tailor their approach based on the needs of electors. I hope that you will agree with me that the regulations will make it easier to register anonymously and will improve the registration process both for the public and administrators. I hope that that is a useful summary and I am happy to answer any questions. Thank you very much minister. I do not think that it is lost on the committee the timing of this affirmative instrument given the domestic abuse Scotland bill passed last week, or indeed even the debate yesterday afternoon in relation to 100 years of gaining the franchise for some women in society and the struggles around that. It is certainly timely and important. I will move on to questions for anyone who might be watching this, who is not used to parliamentary processes. This is a question and answer session at agenda item 2, where your officials can take part in that and there is a formal debate at agenda item 3. In my experience, things tend to blend into one, so just for anyone watching just to be aware of that so they understand the processes we have. Is there any questions for the minister on his team, Mr Feitling? What prompted those changes? Where did the idea for making those changes come from? We were already planning to introduce changes around anonymous registration in our consultation, which is on-going, and there is a detailed paper. Parallel to that, the UK Government prior to us having powers had consulted on making those particular changes. Given that it is a shared responsibility, I felt that it was important that we make those changes now. That is not to say that we will not make further changes and I think that it is very likely that that is why we have a continuing consultation. However, if we are not making those changes now then someone would potentially have to register separately to be on the anonymous register for Scottish and local government elections and Westminster elections. That is very much about doing what is best for the voter. The UK Government is very supportive of that. It has not from the UK parliamentary elections point of view that it has not raised any particular issues. That is a shared agenda item. I will go back to my colleagues in the UK Government and other Administrations across the UK if there are ideas that come out of our consultation. Clearly, it would be better for anyone who needs to be anonymously registered that one anonymous registration covers all elections in Scotland. That would be the approach that we would take to try to make sure that if we want to make further changes here that they are replicated in the UK Parliament in the future to make sure that if someone is registered in Scotland on the anonymous registration, that covers the Westminster Parliament elections as well. That is for any changes to the qualifications for that following your consultation. However, in terms of that particular regulation, the UK Government has not had any problems with any of that. I mean, I know that it only had 12 responses to its consultation. I think that that is probably because these are pragmatic and sensible things to do. I think that there is pretty well universal agreement, so we are working together on this. Okay, thank you. I have a brief question from me. I am just wondering how the Government will work with the Electoral Commission to make sure that people are aware of their rights, particularly of survivors of gender-based violence and how the role of women's aid in other refugees and how people will get the right information. We have heard in a previous session that awareness of people's rights is often a barrier. I think that that is a really good point, which is why I would really encourage anyone who has particular knowledge around those matters to do the whole consultation, but specifically the detailed policy paper on anonymous registration to get involved in that, because we really want to hear what more we can do. Clearly, having the right to do something is one thing, but knowing that you have that right is equally as important. We will work not just with the Electoral Commission, but with groups such as Women's Aid and other groups. Just a question about charging for GPs. We assume that only a minority of GPs will charge for their services, and it will be in the range of £30 to £63. Is there a way to stop that? I think that the number of GPs who are likely to be asked are slim, but I hope that a GP who had that experience of the individual would realise that that was not an appropriate charge. Is there a way for us to ensure that they do not do that, because it does not seem right? I think that the only way that it would be able to be done would be as part of the GP's contract. We need to monitor that, and if going forward we see that there is a problem, it does not feel right, which is why you are asking the questions. I hope that most GPs would be of the same view. Can I ask in relation to the relevant professional officer who can give the attestation to say that the person is at risk? The rank of police officer has been made to be a much more localised police officer, just for those who are out there who may report domestic violence and abuse to the police, but then, for whatever reason, vulnerabilities, it has never progressed to prosecution and conviction. That information, that intelligence that police officers have, can be used to complete that form without ever having had to have secured a court conviction. That is true. Rodi, do you want to go a bit more deeply on that? Even if the police have not convicted, if they have got circumstantial evidence at a point towards somebody being at risk of abuse, they can sign an attestation. If they feel that it is best for the individual, that individual needs their identity and location kept secret because they are at risk of abuse, they can sign the attestation. There does not have to have been a court conviction to enable them to do that. I think that that is a really important message to make sure that everyone understands. I certainly know from individual case work in my constituency that that is a really important thing to know. I suspect that that would be the answer. I just wanted to get that put on the record at the moment. Can I just ask one final question? Is the grant anonymity so that the address does not feature on the register? Is that for all elections? Is it for one year? Is it for five years? What is the management around that? At the moment, the way that the system works is that you only have to apply for once and that would put you on the anonymous register both for the UK Parliament and the local government elections. That is why we are making the changes in both the Scottish Parliament and our colleagues down south are doing it in the UK Parliament to keep that the same. Otherwise, you would be in a situation and you would have to apply twice, there would be different rules. At the moment, an anonymous application only lasts for one year and you have to reapply annually. The reason for that is that you can only remain anonymous as long as there is a risk to you of abuse. If that risk has diminished and is no longer relevant, your name and address would then go back on the register. That would obviously be something that the individual, if they felt at risk, could carry on either through the attestation route or court orders if they thought it was necessary. Is that something that we could explore a little bit further? I am just typothicating that there is a vulnerable individual who wishes to exercise their right to vote. There have been really challenging circumstances to get that attestation. It lasts for one year. Are they going to be pre-warmed by an official that their name will go public again? Do you think that that could be traumatised? My understanding is that, before the year runs out, they get a letter from the Electoral Returning Officer warning them that their anonymous registration is about to run out, so that is a reminder. That is one of the things that we can look at going forward, as to whether the consultation is to whether there is a better way of doing that, to make that more seamless for the person who has registered for anonymous registration. On that, Rebecca, in terms of the detail consultation. Our consultation includes some additional suggestions on extending the anonymous registration scheme further. I think that the time limit of the expiry date of an attestation and anonymous registration would be one area where responses from those who work in the sector will have an interest, and it would be very welcome. There are things that we could look at in terms of whether that 12-month sell-by-date on it is the most appropriate thing in all circumstances. Obviously, there is the detailed paper, and we are working with a number of the groups who have particular interests in this area to try and get any further changes that we decide to make in Scotland as appropriate as possible. I think that that is helpful, not for the purposes of this instrument, which is very clear of what it does, but that on-going consultation would be something that the Government would have to return to. I think that Graham Simpson wants to come in at this point. If someone who is anonymous gets a letter reminding them that they need to renew that, do they have to go through the same process all over again, or do they just have to return the letter ticking a box? It is the same process again. Basically, they have to prove that there is a continuing need for the anonymity. I think that you are highlighting an area where we can clearly potentially make further changes here to improve further, but today's order is about making sure that we have a system in place that provides the best possible protection for the individuals. Rather than having other members make some other questions on that, there are other observations that I would like to make, but technically we are supposed to have a debate after the questioning, because I will just hold and sit tight until we get to the formal debate part. Are there any other questions to the minister and his team? Do you have the opportunity to put one or two remarks on the record when we get to the debate? I think that it is to reinforce the point and question that Jenny Gilruth made, because if it is going to be an annual recurring event, if your GP is the most accessible person, that becomes a recurring charge. I think that that would certainly be keen for that to be looked into perhaps with the Cabinet Secretary for Health, because that would be a significant barrier to people. Do you have any other questions? I think that this is a particularly helpful question and answer session. I feel that what we are actually doing in the debate that we come to in a second—hopefully a short debate, but a debate that we come to in a second—may actually help to inform some of the Government's thinking around that future working consultation that is on-going. So we will now move to agenda item 3, which is still subordinate legislation. For this item, the committee will formally consider motion S5M-10205 calling for the committee to recommend approval of the draft representation of the People's Scotland Amendment regulations 2018. Only the minister and members may speak in this debate, so unfortunately their officials cannot take part in this. Can the minister invite the minister to speak and to move motion S5M-10205? Obviously, to formally move the motion, I thank the committee for their questions. I think that, as always, they are helpful and will help us in any future changes that we decide to make. The committee will notice that a number of the areas that you have previously looked at are now appearing in our consultation as things that we are looking to see how we can take forward. I will give it a few observations and then bring my colleagues in if they want to add at this point. I think that we were right to explore the length of the time period that anonymity would last for. I think that it is only fair to make some observations around when you get towards the end of that year what would happen if the person does not respond to the letter. I am not always very good at responding to letters that come in through my letter box in the house, let alone something that I might be wanting to block out of my mind because of pain, turmoil, stress and traumatisation. What happens if the person does not reply to the letter? Does the returning officer or does the letter officer? I am asking to answer that question, but there are some careful thoughts going forward about the transition between if it is not to be extended beyond one year what that transition looks like and unintended consequences if vulnerable individuals do not reply or do not engage with that. Certainly that annual need to reapply. Anyone who has looked at post-traumatic stress disorders will know that re-traumatisation can be very, very real. The health and emotional needs of the individual has to be quite clearly taken and taken out when looking at arrangements around that, but I am conscious that that is not what we are here to approve today. What we are here to approve today is a good, solid thing that we should all sign up to, but we should put some of those observations on the record for the consultation that is on going. I do not know if any of my colleagues want to add anything to that during what is a formal debate opportunity. There has been no-one else wanting to come in on that. Can I invite the minister to sum up and to respond to the debate? Again, thank you very much for your feedback, particularly the point about what happens after 12 months. We have a note of that and we will make sure that that features strongly when we get feedback from organisations that have particular interests and registration officers about whether there are changes that we can make in the future there. Thank you very much for the questions. Thank you to you and your officials. We now move to the vote. The question is that motion S5M-10205, the name of the minister for parliamentary business to be approved. Are we agreed? We are agreed. The committee will report on the outcome of this instrument shortly, so that is an administration exercise and I have to inform on the record that we will do that. Thank you very much for coming along. It will suspend briefly before we move to agenda item 4. Thank you minister and thank you to your officials. We now move to agenda item 4, which is the planning Scotland bill. Members will report back on their community engagement events as part of the planning Scotland bill. Our consultation, our call for evidence, has recently closed but we are continuing community outreach to get as many views as possible in relation to that. I am going to invite some of our committee members who were out and about talking to communities over the past few days to report back formally to the committee. Can we go to Andy Wightman first? Andy, can you tell us about your visit? Yes, so myself and Jane Williams-Clark to the committee and Alan Raifish from parliamentary research went to Isle of Skye. We met 13 people on Monday evening, five community councillors and seven representatives from community groups. First of all, I want to thank them for coming in a rural area at Skye. They have to travel some distance to get there, so it was a very useful meeting and I am very grateful to them for committing to the time and sharing their perspectives on the planning system. We had a fairly wide-ranging discussion and I suppose that I just want to highlight four themes that we got as a broad consensus at the end were critical. The first is on the question of the proposed local place plans and there were concerns among representatives there about resourcing of those plans, about whether there would be templates and formats that could be used about training. For people who would be expected to draw those up, that would be either community councils or community bodies as recognised under the community empowerment act and most of those people will be volunteers and not be used to participating at this level in the planning system. I think that there was a broad consensus that, if local place plans are to be meaningful and if the time required and asked of volunteers is to be given, their status should be reasonably strong. I think that there was a broad concern that local planning authorities should have more than simply regard to those local place plans. There was a broad welcome for the concept if they were well resourced and if they were to become a meaningful part of the planning system. That is a fair summary of where people were at. Another point was around delivery. It is important to point out in the context that we went to a rural area. In a rural area like Skye, a lot of people are not so much concerned about controlling or inhibiting development, as can be the case in urban areas. They want stuff to happen. They want housing for people in relatively isolated and small communities. Their frustrations were more around the fact that we can have a local development plan, but it is not implemented. For example, land is made available where the landowner wants it rather than where the plan says. There are broader contextual issues around crofting, tenure and so on. However, there was a concern around the ability to do a good plan but then to get it implemented. That is in relation to getting hold of the land and doing the stuff that people have agreed that they want to do. That was a concern. On the question of third party right of appeal, it is fair to say that there were mixed views on that. There was not a great deal of enthusiasm for it. There was not a great deal of opposition. That probably reflected the fact that those representatives were coming from groups who wanted stuff to happen. That was their principal concern. I will not go any further than that. That is probably the dominant themes that we teased out towards the end of our meeting. We took a full note of what was said and a draft of that will be sent to participants for their comment and, as I understand, will be publishing a note of the meeting as a whole. Finally, thanks again to everyone who turned out. I think that it was a very useful initiative as part of our scrutiny of the bill. Thank you very much. Andy, can we turn to Monica Lennon next, please? Thanks. I was part of the delegation to Motherwell, which was not exactly a tour for me. It was just 10 minutes along the road, but it was a really good turnout. The discussion with the chief planner, John McNair, from the Scottish Government warmed people up and got people thinking about what the purpose of the bill is and what it could achieve. It is fair to say that there was a varying degree of knowledge about the bill and about the planning process in the room. We had a mixture of people there, not all from community councils, but the experience of community councils was coming across quite strongly. What was consistent from all the speakers who took part was that they wanted to have influence, to be part of decision making and to see the importance of planning, not just in the immediate term, but decisions around individual applications or the direction of travel in a development plan that can shape their community for some time to come. There were people there who had experience of applications such as incinerators that do not really respect a community council boundary. There were people there from right across Lanarkshire who have been working together across local authority boundaries, so that was an interesting dynamic. On local place plans, because that is something that the chief planner talked about and explained and took some questions on. On the one hand, people felt that sounded quite positive. It was bringing some additionality, but people were not really sure how that would fit with the development plans. People understood that we have a plan-led system and understood the desire to keep the integrity of the plan-led system, but they were not sure if the development plan is working well why you would need to come in and try to change that. The chief planner talked about that. That might be an indication that the plan, which, as we know, would move to a 10-year cycle rather than a 5-year cycle, is a need of a refresh, but people were wondering if a number of local place plans would come forward. How would that be managed? Who is the community where you do not have a community council? Who could initiate that and bring that forward? As Andy has touched on, how is that resourced and ultimately what weight is attached to that? It is not formally adopted as part of the development plan, but nonetheless people were interested. They were asking how it fits with community empowerment and locality plans. It felt like there was another layer of planning that perhaps was not required. The chief planner had talked about the performance of planning and about how we can speed up the process and have more people involved. However, there was a feeling that there were not many measures to look at outcomes and quality of place. There was a lot to talk about the quality of housing, but people were meaning but just the quality of their environment more generally. On the issue of appeals and equalising the appeal process, again, there were probably mixed views on that. The point that the Government had made about that they wanted to improve the system at the beginning. People were familiar with the pre-application consultation process and the jargon around front loading. However, people were given examples of going along to those meetings in a community centre on a Saturday morning and feeling that they had given input and ideas and feedback. However, when a formal application came in, that was not really reflected. Again, they felt that, although they were taking part, they were not really an equal partner at that stage. There was a bit of frustration that, if you have a plan-led system and the developer is trying to get something that is contrary to the plan, should they have the opportunity to appeal that when the community does not have that appeal option. Again, it is not something that is covered in the bill, but it is something that people clearly want to talk about. Again, people recognise that the planning system is very enabling. It is a very pro-development system. It is not an anti-development system that we have. In some of the constraints of getting house's bill and getting infrastructure in place, people in our group did not really feel that that was the fault of the planning system as a barrier per se. They were talking about other issues in terms of finance and infrastructure, not being able to get to your GP and the local schools at capacity. They felt that there were other barriers in terms of infrastructure and amenities that made it difficult to make development viable. That was stopping the house builders from going forward rather than a lack of planning consent or encouragement in the planning process. It was a really, really good exercise. Obviously, there was a lot more covered and Graham and I were in different groups, so perhaps Graham would want to add to that. Very much to the same themes, a good mix of people around my table from community councils, community groups, somebody from Lanarkshire Deaf Club, and there was a chap representing one of the ethnic minority groups, and somebody from Motherwell FC Trust as well. It was a quite good mix. The same themes really concern about the lack of community engagement and how, in their eyes, the bill does not improve that. That concerns over the local place plans, as Monica says, people fearing that—again, Andy made the point—people fearing that those place plans would not really have enough teeth. If people go to all the trouble of preparing one and a council only has to have regard to it, it can then put it on the shelf and pretty much ignore it. It was a concern over that. A strong concern in my group around third party rights of appeal, people wanting it, not concern about it, people wanting it, a very strong feeling that the current system is weighted one way. That probably reflects the experiences of the people on my table. There was also a concern around the simplified development zones and a worry from the participants that I spoke to that this could give a carte blanche to developers. That could be a good thing or a bad thing, but there was certainly a concern around that. I think that those are the three themes that I picked up on. Simplified development zones were raised in people who felt a little bit surprised that that would give a roll-back planning control. The other point that I did not mention—I do not think that I gave it—was just around resources. People were feeling that it was not just about the workload that the planners have. They were recognising that there is pressure in local government on the input from the roads department, environmental protection and so on. There was just a sense that in those areas there has been a reduction in the number of local offices that you can visit, because there is only one office now for South Lanarkshire and North Lanarkshire. There was just a feeling that it was a bit harder to get information. There was a bit of discussion about planning fees. Is the system properly resourced? Should the planning fees be higher, but there was no settled view on that? Thank you to members for that. I had the privilege to go to Stonehaven and attend a meeting at Mackey academy, 12 attendees from the community, predominantly from community councils, but there were also reps from development trusts in the third sector. I think that it was one local business person there as well, all given their views. Thanks to the parliamentary team who attended and resourced that, but also to members of the bill's team who were meant to be there at the start, just to give a brief overview of the legislation, but it stayed for the whole two hours-plus event, so thank you to them for doing that. Most of all, of course, thank you to the attendees from across that whole area who came along to give their views. I will try to summarise the different strands that other members have done in relation to their thoughts. We can start off with a discussion on local place plans, but it is fair to say concerns and opportunities, and that is two sides of the same coin. For example, keen to know what we mean by a community in the first place for a local place plan. How do we define the community? Will that community be really representative when they do their consultation? Will all parts of the community be engaged with it? One person gave the example. He could consult with 25 per cent of the entire community, but he could also all be over 45 when he was engaged with younger people in the community. So how do you make sure that when you are doing your community consultation to develop local place plans that you are actually leading and shaping that on behalf of the community? Not a barrier, but certainly a danger and a concern that some people have. I think that we have heard another theme coming up about once a local place plan has been developed, how will the local authority take account or give regard to that in a meaningful way? In other words, I think that people would realise that they did not expect the council to say that this local place plan is now our local development plan, but there should be some connection between the local place plan and the council's development plan to show how one has impacted and helped shape the other. That is a reasonable thing to put on the record, which then brought us to local development plans more generally. There was a feeling that perhaps local authorities do not cover themselves and glory at the moment in how they consult and engage with communities in relation to local development plans. If we are going to lock in a local development plan over a longer period of time now for 10 years, I am keen to make sure that the communities are properly and actively engaged in some of that, not just the local place plans but the development plan as well. There was a brief chat about how community planning would fit in that process as well. There was also a general theme when we asked what it went from the planning process to transparency, which was a word that came up quite a lot, not always defining exactly where you want the transparency, but transparency more generally is a theme within the planning and development process. A couple of people were interested in how delegated powers, i.e. planning approval by officials, would or would not be used and whether or not that would potentially alienate that democratic link between councillors voting in a planning committee and communities in that accountability. There was some talk about that. There was also some talk about just planning applications more generally, of course welcoming the kind of front-loading of consultation and the pre-consultation, but actually asking the question, well, what does that look like? Will it be meaningful or will it be a tick box exercise? Who decides whether that has been meaningful or whether it has been a tick box exercise? What would that look like? Who monitors performance around that was mentioned as well. Simplified planning zones did come up. By the terminology, I think that there was concern that does that mean that developers can just pitch up and do it the like? When that was teased out a little bit more, it was perhaps more about, well, simplified planning zones as long as the community has an input into shaping as to where they might be and what they might look like and what the purpose would be. So that, yes, maybe simplified planning zones, but concerns. It shouldn't just be a green light for development, it should be more about the community, the local authority and developers if you like co-producing what that might look like rather than a developer-led process. Finally, some general chat about section 75 moneys, planning gain moneys, how well they are or aren't used at present. Some discussion, particularly from one individual about the infrastructure levy, where the power to take, the power to have the level be within the bill and some nervousness around whether that would be overly burdensome on developers. But it's fair to say that other people would say that we do need the infrastructure for sustainable development, but it's just to give a balanced view of what we heard because not all 13 people in that room are necessarily going to agree with each other. Neither should they agree with each other, but I think that that probably teased out most of the themes. I'd just like to say again thank you for everyone who took the time to not just attend the meeting that I held, but actually meetings across the country that all the members attended and consulted with. Before we move on from this particular agenda item, would any other member like to make any brief comments at this point? I stress brief, but not all members were able to attend those visits, so it's just the opportunity. Would anyone else like to put something on the record, Andy? Sorry, yes, thank you. Just to supplement what I said following other members, there are two other issues that were raised that will come out in our summer, but I think that were quite important. One was where the representatives in the local access panel and she was very, very clear about improvements that need to be made in the planning system around access for disabled people. It's a quite powerful test to me about the difficulties. The other is around the simplified development zones. We have two people there who basically had been working up schemes for affordable housing at the north and the south end of the sky. Housing associations, local people on board, tenants, land, money—all sorted. However, when it went through the formal planning procedure, objections from statutory consultees and problems. In those circumstances, the idea of simplified development zones appeared—it was just an initial because people were obviously new to this—and it appeared quite an attractive option because they saw it as a means by which a lot of those stuff could get sorted out up front. As soon as it was agreed, they were free to do what they wanted to do. It was potentially quite an interesting vehicle in those circumstances. They also saw it as an example. The council would insist on a standard—design standards—of street lighting, which are appropriate for urban areas, but they don't want them. They like dark skies and there's the dark light effect. They just don't want them. Road standards are roads. They don't need tarmac roads. Gravel is perfectly sufficient. Those things were all frustrations for them. They saw that as a mechanism for overcoming. Very interesting. That is now on the record, even though there will be a formal note produced of each of the meetings. That probably disposes of what we want to put on the record in relation to agenda item 4. Thank you to members for participating in that. We now move to agenda item 5, which has previously been agreed and will take in private. We now move into private session. Y Llywodraeth Cymru.