Chamber and committees

You are absolutely right. It is down to individuals in local authorities, community groups and organisations across Scotland, including development trusts and other bodies that are doing great work and have a real focus on this. Some of the committee’s witnesses have done a lot of the thinking behind the theory and have learned from international examples. Those individuals are the folks who drive this.

I suppose that we are saying that we have that approach in part, as you rightly identify, but we do not have it to the extent that we could or should have across the whole country. It is about whether the bill gives the impetus to make the issue one that people need to take more seriously, which will then force them to learn from others about best practice.

That is an interesting question. As I mentioned in my opening remarks, there are huge linkages with the wider public service reform agenda, the work on community empowerment, the democracy matters work, the work that we are doing on single authority models and the work to strengthen community planning partnerships. There are a lot of linkages.

The place plans sit within a very formal structure for how local development plans are put together. Communities do not think in silos; for example, they will want to do something because it has a place, economic, social or other benefit. They might want more houses—or they might not; they might want more economic activity and economic development. It is all joined up. One thing that I am keen to explore further over the coming weeks is the relationship between this work and the work that we are doing on community planning partnerships, including how integrated this work should be with the work of those partnerships, for which there is an existing structure.

You are absolutely right. It is down to individuals in local authorities, community groups and organisations across Scotland, including development trusts and other bodies that are doing great work and have a real focus on this. Some of the committee’s witnesses have done a lot of the thinking behind the theory and have learned from international examples. Those individuals are the folks who drive this.

I suppose that we are saying that we have that approach in part, as you rightly identify, but we do not have it to the extent that we could or should have across the whole country. It is about whether the bill gives the impetus to make the issue one that people need to take more seriously, which will then force them to learn from others about best practice.

That is an interesting question. As I mentioned in my opening remarks, there are huge linkages with the wider public service reform agenda, the work on community empowerment, the democracy matters work, the work that we are doing on single authority models and the work to strengthen community planning partnerships. There are a lot of linkages.

The place plans sit within a very formal structure for how local development plans are put together. Communities do not think in silos; for example, they will want to do something because it has a place, economic, social or other benefit. They might want more houses—or they might not; they might want more economic activity and economic development. It is all joined up. One thing that I am keen to explore further over the coming weeks is the relationship between this work and the work that we are doing on community planning partnerships, including how integrated this work should be with the work of those partnerships, for which there is an existing structure.

Yes. It goes back to my earlier point about how we define communities.

Yes. Everything should lift, because everyone will see what the requirements are and what best practice is, and people will go through the process of pulling their action plans together and consulting locally and more widely. Of course, it is not the case that everybody will be at the same level, and there will still be things that we need to make progress on, but we will be further down the road and moving in the right direction.

I am certainly very keen to bring forward what we can as early as we can. It would be helpful for everyone if the committee could let us reflect on a structure for the guidance.

I shall ask the lawyer for the technical definition of “due regard”—you are a lawyer. [Laughter.]

To my mind, it means that public bodies would have to take the guidance into account and ensure that they have addressed the issues that it contained. The point of having guidance is that it would force public bodies to go through the process of thinking about the issues, such as what they are doing, how they can contribute to the agenda, where their spend goes, and how they can maximise that spend in the right places.

The national performance framework includes a range of economic measures. You can look at what we are doing in relation to job creation and the value of those jobs. We already have procurement measures in place in existing legislation, and we measure and report on that annually. You can also measure business creation through the number of business start-ups in a community. A range of economic measures are already in place. GDP growth is one of those, but it is by no means the only measure. At a macro level, it will be very hard to know how much of an impact the bill has had, compared with the range of economic and other measures that are in place. At a local level, local authorities—they already do this—will look at what is important in their local economy. That may differ from economy to economy, depending on their priorities.