Chamber and committees

We will move to a different theme, because of time constraints. We could spend a whole day with you all and really learn a lot, but we do not have a day, we have 90 minutes.

First, I will tell you what our themes are, so that you have a sense of what is coming. We will move on to budgets and funding, which will be followed by community empowerment and local democracy. We will then ask about community wealth building, which will be followed by outcomes and benchmarking, which is connected to the Christie report. The next theme will be climate emergency and green recovery, and the final theme is councillor demographics. That is the journey that we want to go on, so we have a lot of areas to cover.

I ask Meghan Gallacher to lead off on budgets and funding.

We move to theme 3, in which we will explore community empowerment and local democracy. One of the key findings of the previous Local Government and Communities Committee was that people want to have more say and influence over how services and amenities are provided in their local areas and that community empowerment goes hand in hand with community wellbeing. Dave Watson, a former member of Unison Scotland, argued that

“the governance of public services in Scotland is one of the most centralised in Europe”.

Therefore, what specific mechanisms and policies should we include in the upcoming local democracy bill, which will devolve some control to communities?

Yes, it is important that we start to track indicators of what is happening for communities.

We will now move on to the theme of climate emergency and green recovery—which is why I am saying that it is important to track the indicators. It is also important to shift power to a much more local level. I think that we will be considering the need for adaptation and communities will be best placed to do that work. They know what they need, what procurement they need and what they must put in place for resilience as things start to change rapidly at much more microclimate levels.

I will now bring in my colleague Paul McLennan with some questions to introduce that theme.

Thank you.

Thank you for that. I will bring in Angus Hardie, as he has put an R in the chat function, after which we will move to Elena Whitham for some more questions in the same area.

Welcome to the fifth meeting of the Local Government, Housing and Planning Committee in session 6. We have received apologies from Mark Griffin.

Given today’s subject matter, I invite members to declare their interests.

Our next item is consideration of whether to take items 4 and 5 in private. Those items will be an opportunity for members to reflect on the evidence that they will hear in the meeting. Do members agree to take items 4 and 5 in private?

Members indicated agreement.

I am a Highlands and Islands MSP and we are talking about five of the local authorities in that region. One of the big issues that people raise with me all the time is repopulation and repeopling. There is a concern about the idea of changing the boundaries. I know that you have flexible restrictions on the criteria that you had to work with, which is what you have been talking about. However, what will happen if we start to move the representation in Highland towards Inverness and pull it away from the areas that we are desperately trying to repopulate and where we are trying to get more people to live? What are your thoughts on that, if you can give them?

The next item is an opportunity for the committee to take further evidence to inform its thinking on what our key priorities should be during this session, with a particular focus on local government and communities. The evidence session will also be an opportunity to raise issues in order to inform the committee’s pre-budget scrutiny. The committee will take evidence in a round-table format.

I begin by warmly welcoming David Allan, who is deputy director of the Scottish Community Development Centre; Paul Bradley, who is the policy and public affairs manager at the Scottish Council for Voluntary Organisations; Kim Fellows, who is commissioning editor at the Local Government Information Unit; Sarah Gadsden, who is the chief executive of the Improvement Service; Angus Hardie, who is the director of the Scottish Community Alliance; and Paul O’Brien, who is the chief executive of the Association for Public Service Excellence.

Before I invite questions from members, I ask that people who are participating remotely press R in the BlueJeans chat function if they wish to respond to a question. The chat function should not be used to write responses to questions, as they will not be recorded.

Different committee members will initiate different themes. Because we have quite a few people on the panel, we will not necessarily be able to ask you all to respond to all the questions, so we will keep an eye on the chat function in order to make sure that you can come in with a response. In some cases, committee members may direct questions to some of you. I hope that that has been clear on how we are going to try to do this hybrid meeting.

I will kick off with a general question that explores the theme of the pandemic and recovery. What are the biggest challenges for local government and communities over the next few years, and what main lessons have been learned from the past 18 months? The clerk will have to guide me as we get the R system sorted out. I would love to hear from Kim Fellows and then Sarah Gadsden.

Thank you. I now invite Paul O’Brien to comment, followed by David Allan.

Paul, you are on mute.