 Good morning, and welcome to the ninth meeting of 2022 of the Economy and Fair Work Committee. Our first item of business is a decision to take item 3 and consideration of evidence heard in relation to town centres at future meetings in private. Is that agreed? Our next item of business is the first formal session on our inquiry into Scotland's town centres and retail. This is the committee's second inquiry. We will consider the current condition of Scotland's town centres, particularly after Covid-19. We are interested in looking at new realities for Scottish retail, focusing on e-commerce activity and innovative ways to keep town centres alive. We are interested in looking at what is driving this change and how we can support communities to regenerate their town centres. The committee heard an informal and engagement event last week, and when we engage with stakeholders across Scotland to hear their views, setting the scene for this inquiry. The first formal session this morning, I am going to welcome Professor Lee Sparks, who is deputy principal and professor of retail studies at University of Stirling. Good morning. As always, members and witnesses should keep questions and answers as concise as possible, and I invite Professor Sparks to make a short opening statement. Good morning. Thank you, convener. As you said, I am Lee Sparks. I am professor of retail studies and deputy principal at the University of Stirling. I am also chair of Scotland's Towns Partnership. In 2012-13, I was a member of the national review of town centres, the Fraser review, which relates to the town centre action plan, town centre first and then the place principle. More recently, I chaired the review into the town centre action plan, the report of which was published in February 2021 as a new future for Scotland's town centres. In 2021, I was also a member of the social renewal advisory board of the ministerial group, using the recently published retail strategy for Scotland. I asked to make a short opening statement of the session in order to cover off a few elements that I believe are important for context and to point to places where written and other contributions are available on some of the points that I will make. I have eight points, and what I am about to say is also being posted to my blog in the next few minutes. Firstly, I do not want to inflict academic writing on you, so the best way to get a sense of my research and thoughts is via my blog, sterlingretail.com, and also in the new future for Scotland's town centres report. I would encourage searching the former for discussions and presentations about town centres and changing retail patterns. The latter is a relatively succinct summary of the issues and possible policy directions. I would make one fundamental distinction for the committee. Town centres and high streets are not interchangeable terms. The latter is the commercial retail subset of the former, focusing on town centres and retail alone runs some risks in that direction. Secondly, the outcomes that we see in town centres are the interactions of complex changes over decades. We spent at least 50 years damaging our town centres. The pandemic accelerated and exacerbated some trends, but those trends themselves are long-standing. They will not be reversed without concerted effort over a number of years, and that effort needs to start with us all agreeing to stop doing harm to our town centres. That is a big ask, covering both new and existing decentralised development. The recent discussion in my blog about issues in sterling is a good example of some of the topics. Thirdly, over this extended period, we have seen a capital flight from many town centres, not only in retailing, as developments on greenfield sites, focused on a car-based economy, have been privileged. Such developments are inherently simpler, easier and cheaper to build and operate, being less complex than working in the existing multi-use built locations and producing a higher return on investment. Houses, schools, cinemas, football grounds, offices, retail and so on have all left towns, as we have built a disaggregated, decentralised car-focused economy and increased disparities in society. Fourthly, retail itself has altered over this period, most recently through the twin tracks of rapid and sustained increased penetration of online shopping and the rediscovery of convenience in its many guises. We now have too many shops in the wrong locations, often run and owned by those without local interests at heart. Fifthly, the development of the Town Centre Action Plan in Scotland, followed by Town Centre First, the Place Principle and the Place-Based Investment programme, often amplified and encouraged by Scotland's town's partnership and its partners and members, has positioned Scotland ahead of many countries tackling those long-standing issues. The change in context, as in the climate emergency, community empowerment and community wealth building, Brexit and the pandemic and their impacts on supply chains, has shown the need to go further and faster. The issues of towns and town centres are complex, deep, long-standing and require substantive policy development and concerted action by all. Sixthly, a new future for Scotland's towns, with its vision, towns and town centres for the wellbeing of people, planet and the economy. Towns are for everyone and everyone has a role to play in making their own town and town centre successful. Proposed strengthening Scotland's approach in three areas. A, policy strengthening in the planning area, including a moratorium on out-of-town and decentralised development, combined with a stronger statutory support for Town Centre First enforcement, not only related to retail. That is being proposed to a considerable extent in the draft national planning framework 4. B, the use of fiscal levers, where possible, as some are currently reserved, to ensure that the privileging of decentralised development and operations has ended. C, focus development or policy on getting people to live, work and play in town centres, e.g. on housing, climate green space that is a cult of environment and life, entrepreneurial economic development and digital competency among others. Seventh, taking those three areas, we have a focus for activity to allow towns to flourish. We should be resistant to the siren voices asking simplistically for town centres to mimic out-of-town development with free car parking or lower charges. Businesses in other town centres need help, but that has to be achieved by balancing other costs across the changed economic landscape and not just in retail. Non-domestic rates require reform and simply cutting them in town centres will not work nor provide councils with the finances that they require. Governments have to recognise the changed fiscal base that the internet and online activities have produced and their impacts on the property tax base. The need to respond to the climate emergency requires joined up in sophisticated actions across a range of sectors and activities and also means tackling existing developments and behaviours that are harming town centres and the planet. Finally, there is a lack of alignment within national and local governments and the wider public sector. The province's public sector economy is massive and has the potential to drive town centre change harder and faster, but it needs to get its own house in order to do so. If all public investment and money follow the town centre first principle and the place principle, then private capital would soon shift direction and through levers can be moved in that direction at the same time. There are a lot of emerging policies, examples planning, housing economy, retail climate and they are in danger of tripping each other up because we are not aligning and harnessing their combined power. This is a real opportunity to have a sustained and major impact at the local level and for local communities. In summary, towns are socially, culturally, economically inclusive. Environmentally, they are the most sustainable development form of place. The Scottish town is a distinctive feature of our country adapted for our needs. Towns are unique places each with their own assets and opportunities. We need leadership and direction to harness their local potential however we have neglected them for too long and now need to refocus our energy policy and development on them. We have a sound base but need to do more to meet the challenges that we face. Towns are the potential solution to many of our issues but we need to get more people, more economic and social diversity, more local ownership and more pride back into them. This requires us to be bold and rigorous in our approach to development of all forms. Our towns say much about who we are as individuals and as a country. They need to reflect more clearly our aspirations and ambitions. There is no reason why, with the collective will, we cannot achieve their renaissance. Thank you for that. Thank you very much Professor Sparks. You have identified lots of issues at the committee's interest and I am sure that there will be questions that will pick up on aspects of what you have said. Just to say at the start that, although there is a town centre and retail inquiry, I think that the committee is aware of the difference between the two and we are reaching out to get views from a wide range across society and everyone who is interested in the future of their town centre just to make sure that we have a rounded report. First of all, you have outlined some of the work that you have been involved in. I think that the most recent was the publication of a new future for Scotland's town centres, which was about a year ago, which you said was a review of the town centre action plan. There are three areas that the report makes of three big recommendations. It is only a year, and it has been a very difficult year in terms of the pandemic and everything else that has been happening, but could you update the committee on whether there is any progress or what status this document has? You have talked about the complexity of the issues, but are there areas in which you think that there could be some immediate or quicker actions that could be taken to ease some of the difficulties and to make some progress in town centres? In terms of where we are after the report of the new futures came out last February 2021, there was an initial response from COSLA and from the Scottish Government, which welcomed the report. Over that period, there has been a wide range of consultations and road show events, primarily run by Scotland's town's partnership. I have not been involved particularly in the detail of those. There is now, my understanding, a agreed position from COSLA and the Scottish Government on a town centre action plan 2, which is my shorthand for the title of it. I believe that that is going through final discussions with COSLA and the Scottish Government at the moment with the aim of hoping to produce that relatively quickly. Clearly local elections may or may not play some role in the timescale around that, so I am unsure of the exact timings around the elements that we have. In terms of the second part of your question, I think that thinking of that as quick wins is perhaps a little difficult because of the long-standing complex nature of town centres to start with and the way in which we have been damaging it for a long period of time. There are sustained things, so it is fighting on all fronts, rather than thinking of a very quick win. However, getting money back into town centres, getting people having confidence in town centres, getting local authorities to take pride in management of their town centres are key elements around it. Those are probably where things can happen on the local end. We see that through some of the bids that we have on the ground. For example, some of the places are doing great things locally, and it is getting more of that happening in the immediate area. However, we have to tackle the big things. The big things from me are getting planning right, stopping doing bad decisions that damage us and looking at the behaviours and the patterns that we have of existing developments, because those are the things that will really make the change. You had outlined in the introduction all the different work streams that are happening and the different plans that are in place. What do you think that the committee inquiry should focus on that would bring additional knowledge and proposals to the table? Where do you think that the areas that we could bring in value to this discussion on? The final point that I ended on, which was about aligning the various elements, if I look at the retail strategy, for example, from last week, and I look at that, that has to be read across into a range of other policies around Scottish Government and a range of other elements that are going on. I think that it is aligning those and making sure that they do not fall over each other becomes a really important thing, clearing that landscape away so that it is very clear what a direction is. The retail strategy and the industry leadership group that comes out of that is now tasked with looking at just work, looking at community wealth, but they look at those areas. What does that actually mean in terms of how we think about aspects of transport, how we think about our out-of-town developments, how we think of those sorts of things around our town centres? I just worry that there are so many moving parts at the moment that they will conflict with each other. I think that mapping that landscape and clearing out that vision would be really helpful. One thing that the committee in its preparation for this evidence-taking has struggled with is to identify a successful town centre regeneration, which we can look at as an example. Some towns are being mentioned, such as North Berwick in Peoples. However, from my personal point of view, I see them less as a successful regeneration than perhaps a slightly wealthier area that can sustain the mixed town centre that might be more attractive. Can you point us to any successful town centre regeneration? Sorry, I was just making sure that I covered off both of the points. Can I start in a slightly different place? Every town is different. All towns are unique. All towns have their own assets and their own populations. As such, I often worry about an approach that says that that is a great place. Copy that. That is where we get to with some of the regeneration elements that we have. I therefore have to think about what is the local community, what do they require, what are the assets that they can build on that are physical and people assets, and how do we actually see what that means in particular? That gets us away from what you rightly identified as all of our examples tend to be that that is a nice place and a more affluent place. Looking at those examples, I do not think that it helps us too much because the lessons from those are not great in learning. The lessons have to come from the position and the place itself and the people in the place itself. I always try and resist saying, go and look at X or this is a good example because all of the places are different and they need to build their own different dimensions to their development. I also worry slightly about regeneration as a particular term. It is us doing something to a community in many cases, as opposed to the community, and the place that is actually building from the ground up and saying, what have we actually got you and what do we need you for? What is our place like? What are our assets in our place? I think that if we can get that right, that is much more helpful in seeing it across a range of different towns and a range of different outcomes as a consequence of that. I worry that regeneration and here's a great example is a bit too top down. I think that the term regeneration certainly in my mind isn't picked down in so far as you cannot have a successful regeneration project in my mind without the community being fully engaged and without all the different elements being brought together, but we're talking here about trying to identify what we should be doing to regenerate those town centres. If there are examples that we can look at, it's really very helpful. Now, each community is different, but there must be places where regeneration has taken place and where it has been relatively successful, and it's been extremely difficult to identify those. I was just going to add for Professor Sparks' information that the committee have commissioned a piece of work to look at international and maybe European examples of where there's been successful regeneration of town centres and we're awaiting that. That of course was a second question that I was going to ask you was in relation to pointing out any successful examples elsewhere, particularly south of the border or in Europe. I understand that, Delamire, I'm aware of the work that is being carried out. I think that we have to be very careful again on the international dimension because of some of the context. It's interesting that we focus on what can we do to regenerate the place. If you go back to the new future for town centres, what we're arguing in that is that you have to look at that much wider context because that's setting the context for what happens. If it is cheaper, easier to build, develop out of town, other people to go and get to out of town developments and to carry on doing that, they'll carry on doing it, so we need to balance the whole elements of seeing town centre on its own. Therefore, that as the example, I don't think really helps us in that way. When we look to Europe, I think we need to look at the way in which they've protected their town centres rather more, the way in which out of town development has been much more constrained, where they don't build housing in the way that we build housing in the Greenfield sites, where they do put rather more into town centres in terms of how they develop housing and different types of housing in town centres. That, I think, is the lessons that we should start taking from international comparisons, the way in which they structure the entire ecosystem, not just the retail component or not just the regeneration bit of it, because it sits in that much wider context that we've got. We need to think of both of those elements together. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I seem to be taking from what you're saying is that, virtually, we have to reinvent regeneration for each community, for each town. There's no template, there's no example that we can look at that would be helpful to us in developing a policy on that. Yeah, this is what I'll try to argue against myself, I suspect. I think examples are rather examples. Exemplars might be a better word, but where we start looking at international comparisons, when we start looking at some of the way in which the Netherlands or Scandinavian countries do active travel, do where people live and how that fits together. I think that there are exemplars of the type of things that we might want to aspire towards, and I think that that is a useful exercise to do. I think that that allows us to talk about those contexts. In terms of what happens in each individual place, I absolutely would state that our towns are different, unique places, and we have to have the community and the community understanding what those assets are and what they can do and what they need and require. If we try to put that and impose that, this is the model from over here that works in that place. I think that that is imposing regeneration, and I do think that we've been doing that in some places over some time. I'm going to make some progress if there's time, I can bring you back at the end. Gordon MacDonald to be followed by Colin Smyth. Thanks, convener, and morning, Professor Sparks. I wanted to ask you about empty properties. In your opening remarks, you said that there were too many shops. Given that we've got a whole range of empty properties in our towns and cities, from small independent units to large department stores, how do we tackle the blight of vacant and derelict buildings in our towns and villages? We do have a large number of vacant properties. We need to understand what state they are in and where they are owned. We need a better information base about them, and that has to be done at the local area. In terms of what we do with them, we have too many properties that are in the wrong locations in the sense of how things have changed at the moment, and therefore it's looking at the reuse. In X, I don't think that this type of property will do Y, so it is again about the local council and the local community understanding that. However, on the periphery of town centres where those high streets have shrunk, there are opportunities there to bring those back into different uses, whether that's residential use or whether that's other types of uses. For the big units in town centres, we need to think what we can concentrate on. Maybe there's some asset purchases that can be made by authorities and by others. Maybe we can turn those into much more community interests and social interests elements. We need business incubators in a variety of different ways. It's about thinking what life we can bring back into those properties and where. There's no easy answer to do this, and that will solve that particular problem, because it will be on that local position. However, I think that it's a multiple of use. We look very much at vacancy rates in terms of retail, because it's very easy to calculate those vacancy rates. I think that there's somewhat misleading in some parts, but you can alter vacancy rates in a number of ways, partly by putting businesses into those businesses but also by taking those businesses out of that sector. I think that we need to think through how we want to shape our towns and how we want to shape our places. In some cases, if you look, you might be in a position where you might want to take some buildings out and put pocket parks in. You might want to put green space in. It depends on what that vision for that town centre is and how those empty properties fit into that vision. That will require some asset transfer clearly, but we have to recognise the shape and function of how consumers change and how we live our lives as a change in a variety of ways. That requires the built infrastructure to change, but that's not to say that we can't put assets in there that will drive people into those places. I think that the more different types of uses we can get into a town centre, the better. You touched upon start-ups. We heard the evidence last week about start-up street in Renfrewshire. How much demand is there from new emerging retailers or specialist retailers for commercial units? I don't have a good data source to give you the number, anecdotally, from looking around the places that I'm saying. I've seen quite a lot of independent retailers open up businesses. When you think what we've lived through over the last couple of years, that's really quite interesting. I think that as multiple retailers have moved out and pulled out of many of our city centres and town centres and have reduced their property portfolio, that is providing an opportunity for independent retailers to step in in a variety of different trades. From the visual side, I'm sensing that there is that demand for those businesses. There's a sub-demand of that for smaller-scale start-up test units, so small spaces bringing individual up, or whether there's a different sort of space that's needed that brings them on in a pipeline to that fixed unit at some point. That's an interesting question. I don't think that we've got really good evidence about that, but at the minute, the sense that there's some national figures, UK figures out from local data company about the independent start-ups being at the highest level for a number of years, I think that we are seeing that coming through. I think that reflects the withdrawal of some large retailers in some sectors, but I think that it also reflects a consumer change around local convenience authenticity that has come out partly through the pandemic. Finally, one other thing, I wouldn't also just talk about retail start-ups, because there are other types of start-ups. In Stirling, we've got code base, the demand in code base is very large, we're looking for a second side around code base, and that will spin off people in the town centre. That adds the footfall on retail and cafes and others come on the back of that. I think that there's that whole ecosystem that we looked at, not just purely retail. You also touched upon the fact that we need to look at the state that some of these buildings are in that are lying vacant. What are the barriers for that being brought into use? Is it the fact that it's part of an investment portfolio that is not high on people's horizons or is it a case of taxation problems, whether it's VAT on renovations but not on new builds? What is it that we should be looking at in relation to encouraging people to bring buildings back into use? The property owners themselves? If we look at that macro part that you started with and clearly in the new futures report, one of the things that many others have pointed to the same thing is that it is harder and more expensive to do work in town centres that are in out-of-town development. VAT, on the point that you made, is part of that. If we want to value town centres, how do we take the fiscal levers to get the behaviours that we want? I think that that point really needs to be emphasised. In terms of the buildings and the property owners, I think that it really is about focusing on who they are. In some cases, that's quite difficult to find out and local authorities struggle to get that, so how do you get them engaged? How do you actually get them to have some sense of ownership within that local community? How do you actually make them do that? I think that it is about saying what is the value and asset of this building for this particular place and town? What can we do with this and how can we help? Property owners, in most cases, do want to have buildings that are functioning, and are becoming more profitable for them. The more we can get the whole town centre working together, the more that becomes a benefit to them as much as it does to the town centre as a whole. That's not true in every case, but I think that it is true generally. There's also an issue about some of the historic buildings and some, therefore, about how we can get—I'm forever walking around town centres looking upwards, looking at all the vacant space. We got up there and wondering why can't we use that? I'm not a housing expert in that way, so how do we actually get more of that back into use in a variety of ways? I think that that is a really big question, which, if you could crack that, I think would help us enormously. Just on the point of property owners and getting them engaged, I'm conscious that if a home is left empty for more than 12 months, the council can charge double the rate of council tax. Would it force property owners to engage with empty properties if something similar was brought in for non-domestic rates? I think that if you're a property owner and you're going to be threatened in this climate and in any others, with a rather higher cost base, it probably does help to concentrate the mind. Colin Smyth, you're followed by Maggie Chapman. Thank you very much, convener, and good morning, Professor. Can I look at two twin threats that are facing the town centres? First of all, the challenge of online shopping and how we can support town centres that are faced with the fact that somebody can sit in their city at 10 o'clock at night and click their phone a couple of times and have whatever they want delivered to their house the next morning. Why do they need to go into the town centre? How do we deliver more of a level playing field for those businesses that locate in their town centres when they're faced with that onslaught from online shopping? I'll leave it at that and I'll come to the second threat about the town in a second. The first thing to say is that we're not going to reinvent the internet, so we're going to have to live with and adjust to online retailing and online business. It's not just retailing. The penetration of online retailing has been growing since the late 1990s. It has been a relentless and steady graph. There's a great graph out of the UK Government that shows this. It's been accelerated dramatically in the pandemic and is now above pre-pandemic trends. People find it convenient, they find it beneficial to them and therefore I don't see that reversing in the short term and I don't think that people want that to reverse in the short term. That gives a couple of questions out of that. The first one is, is that a fair playing field? Are we actually seeing physical properties and online retailing in the same way that we should be? An answer to that is we're not and we see that through some of the non-domestic rates. We see that through some of the taxation elements, particularly on the larger companies such as Amazon would be a reasonable example of that. We need to recognise that the business model has changed and therefore how should we react? If we continue down the path of doing nothing, then the property tax will end up being higher and higher, people will move more out of property and more on to launch. That process will continue and that will destroy the property tax base, which is the point that I made earlier. We need to think about how that fits together. The second thing is how do we then harness what consumers are liking? If we think about what consumers are liking, there are two elements going on. One is that they are liking that sense of convenience and ability to do things and they are in control of it in many ways. How can we do that for a town centre? It is about making sure that independent businesses, smaller businesses, are online and can deliver—some of that might be by local delivery or by hyper local delivery possibly—that we actually build that together into place-based systems so that we have a virtual high streets would be a shorthand for that. How do we make that so that the place becomes focused as well? We build up that sort of brand for the place about what is on offer. The reason that I say that is for the second part. Over the pandemic, consumers began to explore local areas and they realised that the offer in many local businesses and the local area was something that they had really appreciated. Our convenience stores did a fabulous job through the pandemic, as did some of the local opportunities. There is a real sense of people valuing the local, valuing something different and valuing that experience. We are seeing that growing. It is that combination of taking the bits of the internet that we can use that people really like and then taking the place as the element that people value because they value that experience and focusing on trying to mix those two together as best we can in all of those places. That is something that we can do and can do quite reasonably, but I would not want to leave aside that bigger issue around the macro taxation of some of the multinational companies. Is it therefore the type of retail that we support differently? You are suggesting that there are probably products that a town centre will never compete with online, but you think that we are suggesting that it is about changing the retail offer or enhancing what online companies cannot compete with in the town centres? What do most people value out of internet retailing? They are valuing that sense of convenience and valuing that functionality. A lot of the shopping that we get out of internet retailing is functional shopping. What can town centres offer if we get town centres right as a consequence? They can offer something that is distinctive and different and unique and they can offer much more of an experience around it in town centres and in the businesses that are in that town centre. People identify with places. They do not identify necessarily with individual retailers in the same way. Therefore, if we build that place up, for the businesses that are in that place, how many of them have actually got good internet offers? How many of them are doing that right in the local area? How many are selling the right distinctive area? Running a small shop is a tough job. You are competing in all sorts of ways with very big companies who really know what they are doing. How do you take that point of distinction? How do we get them to use the skills and use the technologies that we now have to build that offer and collaborate to build that better offer and that sense of distinctive in this place? That is what the internet and its functionality does not quite offer. I suppose that the other big threat is obviously out-of-town developments as well. In the previous life, I was a councillor in Dumfries, covering the town centre. I still have the scars of trying to pursue a town centre first approach. An example was a big retailer in the town centre that wanted a development in an out-of-town area. The council dug their heels in and said, no, that retailer pulled out of the town. There was capacity in the town centre, but it was all cost cheaper to build a square box in an out-of-town development, and the dug their heels in pulled out. The council got a kick in, if I am being honest, from residents that the retailer had left because the council tried to protect the town centres. It seems to me that the town centre first approach is a good idea, but it is just not delivering. I know that there is an element of closing the band door after the horse is boated because there are so many out-of-town developments. How do you strengthen that town centre first at a time where the public does quite light out-of-town developments? How do you do when it is not as much that retailer developing out-of-town? It is the fact that you can get those products in a great big 24-hour supermarket that you used to get in your high street, and you cannot build that big 24-hour supermarket in your town centres as much. There are options, but not as many options, so it is not almost that you can say in the town centre first approach that a supermarket is going to say that there is not a site in the town centre for us. We are going out of town, but that is where you can buy your pots and pans, your clothes and everything else. How do you strengthen that town centre first approach? There are a lot of things in that question, so I will have a go at trying to unpick some of them, if I may. I recognise the example that you mentioned. I mentioned in my introductory remarks about Stirling and the crookbridge development at Stirling that is going on at the moment. That is, to some extent, a similar example. I think that we have to get serious that out-of-town development has had a cheap ride, and consumers like it, partly because of its convenience, partly because of its cheapness and partly because of the way it operates. We have to recognise that, if we are serious about climate emergency and serious about changing elements and serious about town centres, we need to look at out-of-town retailing, and we need to say that they need to pay a price for what they are doing. That is the bigger part of what we have said in a new future for Scotland's towns. We can strengthen, on a more of a statutory basis, town centre first. We should be putting in a moratorium on out-of-town developments, not just retail, but you can start with retailing. That should be run through NPF4, through the draft that is going through Parliament at the moment. Those would strengthen those particular elements, but we need to get councils to keep the line and say what they are going to do and live the talk. We have councils who are saying that we are very much committed to tackling the climate emergency and then giving an out-of-town development three miles out of the town centre for a large retail supermarket. In the example that I am thinking of, my local example, the way in which they developed and built the site is by putting elements of it together such that the site could never be built in a town centre. If you have not put those elements together, every one of those is already in a separate site in a town centre, so there are people playing the system and gaining the system. We also have to get away from doing things such as retail impact assessments, which are based on a methodology from 2007, which is now way out of date for what we are doing. It asks the wrong questions. It asks questions about what is the catchment area. I think that we should be much more concerned about what percentage of the population cannot get to those developments because they do not have access. The public transport is rubbish and there is not ability to walk or to cycle to the many of the active trial of elements there, and they do not have car access. As I said, we are socially disadvantaged by a lot of people because of the ways that we have done all those things. We need a structural change, but fundamentally, there is a sharp answer to your question. We need the planning regulation and the planning authorities to stick to the lines that we are developing and have developed about out-of-town developments and saying that we should not be having them, or that we are going to have them. They need to pay the full cost of doing what they are doing. That involves the AT question from before. It involves some of the issues around non-domestic rates, and it involves some of the things about the people who are attracted to it by carbon developments, which we need to start trying to reduce in all sorts of ways. Can I just touch on a bottom-up approach that each town is different and there is not going to be a solution from the council or the Government? How do you enable that bottom-up approach to happen? The convener is looking at me and asking me to ask a very short question, and I have asked her a question that it could probably give a very long answer to, but I will just leave that there. I am just interested in how you enable that bottom-up approach. Given your introductory remarks about Dumfries, I would say that you can have a look at mid-steeble quarter and have a look at what they have been doing mid-steeble quarter and ask them about the barriers. Why did it take so long? And what could they have done differently? Therefore, how does that possibly give us a clue to what we have to do? We have a visit planned to Dumfries, so we will make sure that we ask those questions. I will move to Maggie Chapman, then I will bring in Michelle Thomson, and then Fiona Hyslhan. Thanks very much, Claire. Good morning, Professor Sparks. Thank you for your comments so far this morning. This is really a follow-on from Colin Smyth's questions around planning and community engagement and bottom-up community participation. In your open remarks and in your answer to Colin, you talked about the policy strengthening in planning that is needed moratorium on out-of-town developments, but you also have spoken about the need for alignment across all the different actions, delivery plans, development plans, strategies and the understanding of the place principle at its heart. I am interested in, beyond the moratorium that you have talked about, how can we use MPF4 to deliver some of that alignment for us? In the new futures report this morning, you spoke about transport systems and the need to shift away from the car, green spaces, town centres as much more than just high streets. What are the areas of planning reform that are needed if we are looking at a focus on either resilience or recovery, but also on liveable town centres, where communities feel that they can stay, live, learn, grow, play or all of those things? MPF4, if you look at the local place plans and the various plans that are in there, all of that will work if we get community engagement. That needs to come from the ground up. I think that there is a bit of a deficit there at the moment. In many cases it is consultation but in the very limited sense. Some of the things that we would expect councils to do and communities to do often do not happen. We heard quite a lot of that in the social renewal advisory board about groups that were marginalised and the seldom heard voices and lived experiences were simply ignored as a consequence. We need to make sure that, when we are thinking about how we are developing the plans in that community, that is absolutely built in from the start. That becomes the driver for much of what happens in the local area. Planning often says that the moratorium is a good example of a top-down element in one sense of national policy, but what we do in the local area will actually really make the difference in the local communities. I think that we have to start with that. I think that there is an opportunity through what is happening in the draft MPF to get that right and to emphasise the community engagement and all the community empowerment stuff that we have developed over the last 15 years or so. It is not going to be easy because I think that there is a bit of a deficit and a distance there at the moment. There is a lot of work to be done at that local area, but taking things like getting communities to understand their area through play standard tools through some of those sort of actions and getting different groups, whether they are younger, whether they are older, whether they are disability groups, very much engaged in how they see the town becomes really quite important. I have now forgotten the second body of question. I apologise. No, that is okay. I suppose that it was the focus on other reforms, planning reforms, and I suppose that it is linked to planning powers around resilience, recovery and livability of our town centres. As I said in answer to one of the other questions, livability is a good example. I am not a housing expert, and therefore the detail of how we can bring some of those spaces back is beyond my knowledge. Given that we can see it elsewhere in other countries, as I said earlier, I do not think that it should be beyond our whip to actually understand that and actually cut through that. I think that the concept that we have not talked about so far this morning, about 20-minute neighbourhoods, is very important in terms of those planning elements and how we then take those living experiences, which are very difficult to them, and then think about the 20-minute neighbourhoods. How do we get people to live, to work, possibly, to have those functions in those locations? How do we build that density, but gentle density and quality of life density within that? That is where planning has a bit of work to do, but there may be exemplars from elsewhere in terms of the 20-minute neighbourhoods that we can look at. I am aware that we will need to be careful in thinking about the principles of that. The 20-minute neighbourhood works quite nicely in urban areas, but when you apply that to a rural area or an island area, it becomes more difficult. It is the principles of livability and quality of life and assets where people need them at particular times. That becomes the principles that we should be engaged in those 20-minute elements. That is where we need to put quite a lot of focus. Michelle Thomson, who will be followed by Fiona Hyslop. Good morning. Thank you for all your contributions so far. It has been very interesting. You said earlier that international comparisons are useful. I would like to get a bit more thought from you in terms of what parallels you see with what the Scottish Government is able to do, given that we understand that there are limitations in fiscal levers. That is one question. The second question about that is, what are the differences that we see in terms of how change is undertaken? You have touched on some of the challenges that we have here, local engagement and so on, but I am interested in your knowledge of what has happened elsewhere in those two key areas. I am not sure that I have enough detailed knowledge to do justice to the questions. If we take examples from international situations, we need to understand that context, as I tried to argue previously. That context has been built up over a considerable amount of time in the way that those societies and elements work. Therefore, I am quite interested in some of the Scandinavian elements, particularly around the transport part of it, about how they actually integrate the transport bits. I think that that is a learning and a parallel that I think we could benefit from in reasonably straightforward. I see in the ambitions that we have in Scotland that that would be a relatively easy thing to say. How do we actually do that? I see some of that happening at the local level at the moment. I think that change in many of those countries is more participative. I think that it is more built from the ground up. I think that there is more of a sense of local ownership. I put that in inverted commas of the place and the pride of the place. I just fear at the minute that, whilst I can criticise all the things that have gone on that have damaged our town centres, we have also had a bit of neglect from the people who are running our town centres in the sense of councils if they run town centres in that way and how they manage them. The vision for many of our town centres has not necessarily been there. If we look at places elsewhere, there is a much clearer identity for that place and a sense of place. I think that we have lost that a little bit in the way that we have elsewhere over the past 20 or 30 years. I do not think that those are great answers to your questions, but I hope that you get a sense of what I am trying to grasp there. All the way through this, you are highlighting the complexity. Given your opening remarks for 50 years, we have been getting this position. I suppose that the challenge for all those committee things is to make a difference. I am accepting that it will take the time to make a difference, given that you highlight a lack of engagement and experience. If it was you and we were able to do something fairly radical, how long will it take us? What expectations should we be setting? The one thing that we should not be setting is that we can do something and expect an answer in two years' time. Having said that, if we look at some places that I will make in the first steps and are doing things, I think that we are seeing places that are growing and having that sense of growth. If we were able to do the radical things that we would quite like to do, I think that you could see quite a big shift within a decade. That is the sort of minimum timescale that we are talking about. If we think about some of the broader patterns, whether it is climate emergency—I was in 2014—and those elements, that is the sort of big timescales that we have to think about. I know that that is not often a comfortable answer for politicians, but we will work on a very different timescale for all those reasons. However, I think that that is where we have to be realistic. We have spent 50 years disaggregating, decentralising all those things and putting stuff back together again, as we all know, is rather more difficult than breaking it apart in the first place. Once it is clear to go back to one of the earlier questions, once it becomes clear that we are serious and that we are not going to allow those things to carry on harming places, the momentum shifts and it will shift more quickly than we think. I am particularly interested in how we might view our approach to this inquiry and whether we take that deficit model of towns that are a problem to be solved, or are towns a solution for modern living? Your perspective is that towns are unique and every town has a story. What is the role of culture, events, tourism and leisure in the identity aspect that you have just talked about or the experience of town centres? One of the things that Scotland's Towns Partnership and our partners have fought against is that we try desperately—we may not succeed every time—of focusing on that deficit element. We have built a tool to look at places, so understanding Scotland's places, the USP. One of the things that we were desperate not to do, because basically it is to set a data on all the towns across Scotland, was to allow comparisons across towns. What you get into, if you are not careful, is the pejorative descriptors—worse town in Scotland, or worse town in so on and so on. In England, you get Grimsby gets it or Harlequin gets it or someone gets it. It does no one any good. Towns are an asset. They are the solution to many of the things that we need to do in Scotland, and we have real strengths in them. They are just rather hidden at the moment, so I am very much around the solution part rather than the deficit model, and I will fight against having that bad descriptors of places or post-industrial wasteland. It really does not help anyone living there who helps us to do things around them. Cultural belts, tours and leisure are absolutely vital. If we think about town centres, they are about experience. If we can bring those experiences into town centres, whether that is the cultural events, whether it is theatre, whether it is cinema, whether it is other cultural events—museums, art galleries—and building up those assets, which tell a story about a place. Whether we think about events—just sitting in sterling and thinking about the writing event Bloody Scotland and the people who come in as part of that and the energy that comes around that—it brings an exposure to a particular place. If we think about the things—I will use an example here about Paisley and the City of Culture—of their bid for that and all the energy that came out of that and what they are now doing around that, and what that means for the high street and what that means that they can put in with other assets—building on what they have got—all of those are absolutely vital. Our towns, in many cases, have historic assets, not always. We need to use those in better ways. We need to tell that story of places. It will vary from place to place, but all of those are absolutely required. Most towns have that. It is not obvious in some towns, but, when you start picking under it, there are some great stories and great assets in those forms that we have. My second question now is in relation to what we are currently seeing in our high streets. I represent Westlothian. It is one of the youngest constituencies in Scotland. We have a lot of hairdressers, beauty salons, etc. The people of Westlothian want to look good, but I also get complaints from some constituents that that is all that we have, but that is an experience. That is part of a leisure experience. It is bringing people on to the high street who can buy other things. How should we look at that dimension? It is very real in many towns in Scotland. What it points to is a word that I used in the old name Remarks, which is about diversity. I recognise that in different towns across Scotland. It is a reaction to a dominance of a particular type of development in a place. We have seen it with charity shops, we have seen it with bookmakers, and we are fully aware that we see it with hairdressers, though no personal experience, obviously. I think that we just need to think about that. I will go back to another question. How do we free up some of the use classes that we have? How do we free up how we change some of those uses? What do we allow between things? Is there something about too many elements or a bad thing in a small location? If we can build variety, that takes care of itself to some degree, and you are right. People use those facilities, use those businesses, and they are often going to other businesses on the high street or in the town centre at the same time. That drives the football. We just need more of those, but more diversity of them, not more of the same. I am just thinking through how we can try to create the conditions for that. Good morning, and I am very interested in Professor Sparts. I am conscious of time, but I have three kinds of questions all in different areas. If I could start with my highlands and islands region, there are lots of communities that are very reliant on tourism and the tourist market visiting. That is not always of great benefit or the same benefit to local residents in terms of what the facilities are available for them. Can I ask how important the balance between providing that balance between visitors to a town centre from maybe far in a field, but also local residents and residents in the commutable or easily visible area, such as those that might go in for shopping and other facilities? That is a very real problem clearly in parts of Scotland and also other parts of the UK as well. It is important that, if what you have pointed to there are three categories of consumers, you have pointed to the local residents, the slightly wider afield residents and then the visitors to it. The word that you used is the most important word in that, which is what is the balance. However, if we do not have the facilities for local residents for the things that they need for the year-round experience, then I think that you will not get the latter ones necessarily either. I see them in a sort of priority. We want to attract the spend-in, but it is that balance. However, if we have not got that local community sense to start with, we have lost something, and that then eventually degrades the visitor experience. My second question, which links a little bit into that, talked about the role of the public sector in this session. I suppose that I would like it to be the more direct role of the public sector in terms of presence in our town centres. It might well be council outreach points or the police, or meeting rooms, town halls, or public toilets, which of course can be a bit… How important is the presence of public sector bodies and organisations within town centres to provide that base, as it were, of local community visitation requirements? I think that there are a couple of dimensions to that. One is that sense of these are assets, and they therefore do attract different people for different reasons at different times. There is a range of reasons in what you are example there. That is important because if we stick them in inaccessible places, then how does that fit with our ideas around 20 million neighbours? How does that fit with making life easier for people to use in town centres? Town centres provide that environmental sustainability environment in the broadest sense, so it becomes much more socially inclusive, so we need those elements there. However, I think that there is a second element as well. That is around a statement of evidence. We have taken a lot of those things away, and councils have hidden themselves, moved away, and not just councils. I will take all of the elements. What does that say if you are a resident of that place? If those assets are not visible, it says that they have not got confidence in your town centre, so why should I have confidence in my town centre? There is a sense of presence in developing that asset as a sense of local pride as a council, whether it is a community hub, whether it is a workspace, whether it is shared spaces in new ways. We have to think about councils and all of us having to work with. However, that sense of something that is part of the community is that the public sector is making that investment as well. I think that it is really important, symbolically, as well as physically, for the visitor side of it. In some places in the Highlands, we have seen even some of the public sector areas moved out of town, which obviously has an impact. My last question was something that came up last week in the round table session that we did. There are a number of successful bid projects across Scotland, and some perhaps less successful. However, one of the concerns raised was that in those communities that perhaps are not big enough or unable to form a bid, a lot falls on volunteers. A lot of those volunteers are already business people, who you rightly pointed out are already very busy themselves. They have to operate amongst timescales that can be difficult to work with in a complicated form-filling sector to access public funds and support. How can we better support those smaller communities who are looking to improve their town centres, improve their retail offering, provide better local infrastructure? How can we ensure that they are better supported if they cannot, for example, afford a development offer or somebody to take on it as a full-time role? In terms of the bid model, there are, as you rightly say, some successful examples, and there are others that have been done. I think that there is an issue around scale, particularly in some of the ones that we have had, and recognising that it might be that we have to have some sort of concept around a super bid. We have scale towns that are actually put together in the sense of a bid, and we manage them in those ways. There may be opportunities there. Development trust in the smaller places and development trust model in Scotland is really quite successful, so we have to really be example. It does not get away from some of your volunteer elements to it. One of the things in the new futures for Scotland town centres was that we need to think where we are looking at community assets. We need to think that there is often a feeling of being able to buy a building and what we then do. It is the same with a bid in one sense. The bid committee gets all the stuff up, it gets it running, it gets it through the ballot, it wins the ballot and now it has got to do the work, but you have had four years of trying to get it into your exhausted. There is something about the revenue streams around that and making sure that when we invest at different levels, it is not just the capital investment that we are thinking about. How do we get that on to a sustainable basis to start with and then it will take off or it will not take off, hopefully more of them will. That becomes important and that may help with some of the experience and some of the business side of it because we need those people to volunteer and we need those skills as part of it. As you rightly say, if they are doing it always on top of their day job and it is the only thing and they are getting all the pressure, it is not really that sustainable, so we need to build that sustainability part of it. It is just very interesting what you say because there are a number of, as Fiona Hyslop was talking about, the cultural aspects where perhaps the desire for the local community is to take on an aspect but it is that long term making it work financially. Can I just ask a brief question? Jamie referred to the roundtables that we had last week and it is simply not unexpected. We did hear a lot of comments about business rates and requests for reform of business rates. You might be aware that Fraser of Allander published a recent report into the small business bonus scheme. Do you have any reflections or comments on the role that business rates play in some of the challenges and how we might resolve some of the frustrations that we hear from the sector? I think that in terms of non-domestic rates we have a system that primarily started out in 16 something and we are still trying to run it in a changed economy and changed setting and I do not think that that is long term sustainable. The two elements that we have seen recently, the Barclay review really was anybody could look at and was constrained in terms of the things that have happened subsequently both the pandemic and also declaration of climate emergency in elements. I think that we need to rethink the non-domestic rates from the ground up and we need to ask a question about non-domestic rates in terms of if we are serious about climate emergency and serious about town centres, how should the non-domestic rate system be structured so that we support those ambitions at the minute it clearly is not? That is a fundamentally big question and we cannot wait for Barclay to work through for the next few years. We really ought to be looking at that seriously now and the challenge of online came into that as well and the challenge about itself. The Fraser of Allander report on the small business bonus scheme, I saw the headlines but I have not had a chance to read it and therefore it would be unfair of me to comment on it in detail at the minute. At the point that I took from the bit that I did see in the headlines and what businesses tell me, small businesses do value it, how much it is a real difference is an interesting question and how much of it could be targeted better and perhaps better focused around particular types of businesses in particular parts of town centres. That is another question that we will have to come to, but non-domestic rates as they currently are are an issue. Thank you. I am now going to invite Alasdair Barnett to ask a question and that should be the final question in the session. Thank you very much, convener. Just a couple of questions, one that is a very general one and one that is very specific. It has been fascinating hearing from you this morning. You have clearly been at the centre of the subject for a considerable time and in the room with government for some of that. You say that there needs to be substantive policy development. How hopeful are you of actually seeing this and if it was to happen shortly, how long before we could actually see improvements? I will come to my second question after that. How hopeful am I? I am originally Welsh, so I have a strong stew of pessimism in me just to start with, but I am hopeful. I think that there has been a recognition, accelerated by the pandemic, that place is really very important to people. It is part of their identity, it is part of the identity of a country as well and it is that identity pride feeling. All of the assets and all the things that we have talked about I think is there. I am therefore hopeful because I think that more people are recognising that what we have got currently isn't fair. It is socially divisive, it is economically divisive and we have got all of those issues and there is a better way of doing lots of things we are doing and therefore I do feel that we are at a point now that we can make real change and real progress on that. How long will that take? I tried to answer that earlier. It is not easy because we are putting together something that we have spent half a century breaking apart, so I do not underestimate the challenge, but I have the privilege of working in the university and therefore I am surrounded a lot of the time by very young people with their aspirations and desires and a very different outlook on life and what they want to see. I am encouraged by what they want and the drive and energy that they are bringing to things as a consequence of that and the way that they want to change the world for a better place. I do think that we can make it happen and perhaps quicker than I think of sometimes in my more darkly Welsh moments. Thank you for that. I am sure that we will all share hope for the future on that. The second question is very specific. We talked about empty properties. We heard at our session last week of specific issues where you have flats above shops with both of them being empty. Obviously, you then have a conflation of different issues affecting both, which maybe doubles or exponentially increases the failure of occupancy in those places. Have you seen much of that elsewhere? As we were talking about Aberdeach at the time last week, are you aware of that and do you have any specific solutions for that kind of problem? The answer to the latter part is that I do not have any good solutions. It is not an area of real expertise for me, so it is difficult to come up with anything and say, do this and that will solve the problem. It has been a problem for quite a long time. I am old enough to remember a campaign in the 1980s about living over the shop. It has been around for a while and we do not seem to have cracked it. Going back to a very early question from the convener, someone could cut through this and devise what we need to do. I think that it would be a real benefit because we have to get more people to live it back in our town centres in a variety of different types for a whole series of reasons. The wasted space we have is really bad. Do I recognise what you have said? Yes, I do. I think that in terms of empty space above higher levels, I see it a lot in many of our town centres where the shops are occupied, but I fully recognise that you will find places where all that is, when the shops and the residents are above and not. It is an area where, if we can get it right, there is a really big win there. However, I do not have a good solution for you, I am afraid. That brings us to the end of the evidence session. Professor Sparks, you have shared many areas of expertise with us this morning, and we appreciate the time that you have given us. That concludes the public part of the meeting, and we now move into private session.