Chamber and committees

I am interested in seeing how your work develops with Trading Standards Scotland, which does invaluable but probably unsung work. Some of the advocacy issues will be important because of the broad impact on consumers. Does the consumer network for Scotland bring together areas that you might see in the devolved sector and also in the reserved sector? When are you next likely to meet with the network? What are its priorities? Are they the same as yours, or is the network steering you in a different way?

How do you reconcile what may be competing tensions between the delivery of net zero, which is an imperative for all the organisations that you have talked about, and the immediate impact on consumers? Has your organisation thought through how to position itself in that regard? Your drive to help with advocacy for individual consumers may work against the wider issue of trying to make sure that we can deliver on net zero.

With the convener’s indulgence, I will pick up one point first with regard to energy and the cost of living. The Net Zero, Energy and Transport Committee’s energy price inquiry last year identified that people were having to pay for the privilege of having prepayment meters taken away. As an organisation, has Consumer Scotland been able to have an impact on that?

Other members will go into specific issues, but I will focus on the range of your work and how you do it. Are there any practical examples of collaboration with other consumer organisations in the work that you have planned? You touched on some areas, but can you tell us of any organisations? It might be helpful for us to get a sense of which organisations you work with.

The issue was that if someone no longer wants a prepayment meter, they have to pay to get it removed.

Does anyone else want to contribute on the recommendations in our report that you welcome but think might be more challenging for you?

I will stay with the issue of connectivity and the point about who organises that, and who should organise it. There seems to be a bit of pass the parcel among individual local authorities, regional transport partnerships and possibly Transport Scotland, although I am not even sure whether it has a role in that—you can tell me otherwise.

My constituency in West Lothian is semi-rural, but a lot of cars could be taken off the road there if there was better connectivity in relation to towns and park and ride. For example, we can see what is happening with Fife into Edinburgh. There is so much focus on the cities, but in this region, we also have East Lothian, Midlothian and West Lothian.

There seems to be a bit of a disconnect, and that really needs co-ordination. What is happening to try to change that? Is there something that can be done with regional transport partnerships to give them real targets for what they need to do? Who are they accountable to, and how can we get the co-ordination that Councillor Macgregor talked about?

David Hammond, from an officer’s point of view, are skills and capacity in financial investment being built up within local authorities?

That leads on to my next question, which is about local franchises—which I assume could include community transport—and the issue of how to support them, and the bus partnership fund. What is your understanding of the interrelationship between those in making the step change that we need? Five hundred million pounds is a lot of money to go into supporting local authority bus services—either local franchises or community-owned buses—but how do we lever it in? It seems that, at the moment, most councils are just doing their scoping exercises on that.

What do you think will happen, or what do you want to happen, to ensure that local franchises can not only exist, but are funded? Can the bus partnership fund do that?

Thank you very much for joining us today.

Clearly respecting the independence of local authorities, the committee’s role was to bring together suggestions that would be helpful for both the Scottish Government and councils. One of the clear points that came out is that it is not going to be all about public sector funding and that we are also going to have to leverage in private sector funding. However, the scale of that is enormous.

For smaller local authorities such as Dumfries and Galloway Council, even your offer for the big infrastructure issues and housing and transport might not collectively be big enough to be attractive for financial investment. The Scottish National Investment Bank will not be able to work directly with you until it has approvals from a number of the market authorities.

What steps have taken place recently to mobilise that? How plugged in are you with the green finance task force in order to make sure that you will be well placed to access the private sector funding that will need to be invested—which we know will be billions—but through a sensible and place-based approach?