Chamber and committees

I can bring in colleagues to talk about the detail, but there is a significant uplift in the funding for the affordable housing supply programme. Of course, it is part of the overall £4.9 billion of investment over the next four years. With housing in particular, it was important to give certainty beyond a one-year figure.

You have pointed towards a significant uplift for this particular year, convener, but it continues over the four years. I should say that £4.1 billion of that is public money, while the other £800 million will be private investment levered in to grow the pot for delivering the target of 110,000 affordable homes by 2032.

I will ask Richard McCallum to confirm that this is FT and capital funding.

The whole point of having a draft plan is to hear views then reflect that feedback, particularly where there is consensus on issues.

The Scottish Government regularly meets the Convention of Scottish Local Authorities to discuss net zero issues. COSLA is a member of the climate change plan advisory group, which has contributed to the development of the draft plan. There is that direct and fundamental connection to the draft plan that is in front of you.

As you know, local authorities are independent of the Scottish Government, but the draft plan outlines the direction of travel across seven sectors of the economy that ministers consider to be necessary to reduce our emissions and contribute to delivering net zero, particularly by reducing emissions from heating buildings. Transport and waste are particularly relevant to local authorities and their responsibilities.

We consider the information in the draft plan to be particularly relevant and useful to local authorities in deciding how they will contribute to the delivery of Scotland’s climate change plan and achieving net zero.

We are also working with local authorities to take forward the climate delivery framework, which aims to enhance collaboration between local and national Governments to effectively address climate change and achieve net zero targets by 2045.

Relevant work under that framework includes the improvement of data and climate-informed decision making through the roll-out of the Scottish Climate Intelligence Service and the development of an overview of the various net zero commitments and targets that have been set by individual local authorities. We are also working with COSLA to deliver workshops for local authorities to discuss the draft plan.

I hope that all that will help to clarify expectations. That does not mean that all 32 local authorities will do the same thing and focus on the same thing. Urban local authorities will perhaps have a different focus from rural local authorities, which is absolutely fine. Some of the areas that I have described will help them to define what they are going to focus on delivering, and there are tools to make that happen.

The honest answer is that, like everything else, 32 local authorities do not all move at the same pace. Whatever the area of delivery, there are always some that are further advanced than others. For example, heat networks in Glasgow are quite far down the road in respect of the financing, the models and how to test and make that happen, whereas other local authorities have not progressed so much. Part of that might be the size of Glasgow and the capacity that its local authority has compared with smaller local authorities. However, the sharing of information is important, so that, once something has been done, it does not have to be reinvented 32 times and there can be learning from that.

There are opportunities for collaboration between local authorities. That will be important in thinking about district heating systems and technology. Things are being done that could be delivered across more than one local authority area. That is the way forward.

Some of the very small local authorities may need further support on how they can contribute. The support that I have referred to—there is also other support—can help those smaller local authorities to define what they are going to do and how to do it. It is fair to reflect on that.

I will ask Gareth Fenney or Phil Raines to take that question.

That is a fair challenge, and we must continue to work to get out of siloed funding. It is quite difficult to do that, because of the way in which budgets work, but we absolutely should do it, and there are great examples of place-based funding approaches. Granton, which I have mentioned, is a good example of various parts of government and various funding streams being brought to bear in a locality in a way that can be more impactful than the sum of its parts. It is looking at land, housing, transport, renewables and even artworks. We are bringing together a huge number of different parts of government to focus on a place that will be really important for growth, for housing and for the Edinburgh city region.

We can build on that good example and take a place-based approach more generally to ensuring that our funding goes further and is more impactful. We can get better at doing that, if I am perfectly honest.

I suspect that those discussions are getting picked up in the framework and in the workshops. My colleagues can speak to the detail of that. [Interruption.]

There are economies of scale with regard to price. Obviously, there are grants, as you have said, but the price of electricity is a major issue, and we have been pressing the UK Government on pegging electricity to gas and on the need for a renewable electricity price differential. The benefits to Scotland from that would be immense. I can reassure you that we regularly raise the issue with the UK Government, and there has to be movement on it.

If you look at the UK Government’s overall ambitions, you might say that it is probably not facing in a hugely different direction from us. Certainly the rhetoric is there, but there has to be movement, given the many things that would flow from the approach, which is viable—I am thinking of the cost-effectiveness argument, tackling the fuel poverty issues and so on. There has to be movement; I guess that you just have to remain optimistic.

We will come back to you on that specific question.

That is a fair question. As you pointed out, local development plans are currently being prepared by planning authorities, and they have to take NPF4 into account. In recognition of the competing demands and the fact that some local authority planning departments are quite small, the planning hub has been developed with an explicit priority focus on renewables and housing to enable additional support to be given to local planning authorities that might struggle, particularly with large and complex applications.

10:30

There is also something for local authorities to reflect on around whether planning is ripe for looking at in relation to shared service agreements. There is a lot of competition among local authority planning departments around recruiting staff—they quite often end up taking an experienced member of staff from somewhere else, and so it goes on. There is scope for looking at how planning departments might operate on a more regional basis or share resources, rather than all of them competing for the same things from a limited pool.

Work is also being done to train more planners in recognition of the importance of the profession’s expertise and the need for a pipeline of people coming through. We can write to the committee with some detail on that. The planning hub was born out of the recognition that capacity and expertise are sometimes challenging issues.