Chamber and committees

Good morning. A couple of you have touched on the challenges of climate and net zero, but I want to focus on the issue a little more.

Obviously, we face hugely significant challenges around older buildings, newer buildings or, indeed, investment in replacements. Anne Lyden, you might want to talk a little bit about the Granton project, which has still not been given construction funding, unless there has been a change since you raised that issue in your submission.

The argument that is put around multiyear funding is relevant to pretty much every aspect of this topic, and capital investment, in particular, is difficult even to plan for in the absence of that long-term certainty. The lack of a capital funding stream specifically from Creative Scotland has been flagged up.

Can you tell us a little bit about how your organisations, or the wider sector, can even begin to grapple with the challenges of climate and sustainability in the absence of that long-term certainty? What kind of delivery model would be effective in giving you the ability to do that, particularly in light of the argument that the National Galleries submission makes that delaying decisions on projects such as the Granton one increases costs?

You would expect me, as a Green politician, to be a big fan of things such as Passivhaus building projects that will massively reduce carbon emissions and energy costs. However, reducing energy costs is also a good business choice for the long term. Such projects require capital investment, but as well as reducing carbon emissions, they will save money, particularly for energy-hungry buildings.

You have made the case that the Granton project is a multi-disciplinary and cross-portfolio project, as it meets health, education, culture and climate objectives. However, I think that a lot of committees would reflect on the difficulty, in good times and bad economically, of getting joined-up decision making for projects that will deliver multiple objectives for the Government, and that that can be a barrier to getting projects over the line. Has that been a major issue?

Do you think that the sector more broadly—beyond the areas where it is just a person with a mic—could tolerate the idea of some conditionality around public funding to drive up the use of circular economy approaches, so that they become the norm?

I think I feel a local visit in Glasgow coming on.

I will put my final question on this theme to Tony Lankester, because it is perhaps more relevant to the Edinburgh festival fringe and to other aspects of performance arts.

There are challenges around the approach of productions to the circular economy and to achieving sustainability by reusing resources. Many productions have a bad track record of repeatedly buying new and throwing away. Whether it is stage or screen, a great many productions in the sector could do a great deal better with regard to embedding circular economy approaches.

I recently met ReSet Scenery, which is doing its best to try to get people throughout the sector to reuse materials. However, that kind of activity is going on at a low level. Is there any element of conditionality on culture funding, as there is in some other sectors of the economy, whereby, if the Government is going to support something, it sets environmental standards and conditions and drives those up over time, so that something like the circular economy becomes the norm rather than the exception?

Can the other witnesses add anything about how your organisations and the sector are dealing with the net zero challenge, or what needs to change to enable you to do it better?

Will the member give way?

I recognise the context for this debate. The UK still receives a small number of refugees compared with many other countries. Seventy-two per cent of refugees live in countries that neighbour their country of origin. The UK hosts only about 1 per cent of the world’s refugees, and the truth is that they make a huge contribution to this country, economically and socially.

As for the numbers, asylum applications peaked in 2002 at around 84,000 a year. In 2024, the number was around 84,000 in the year. So far, the figures for 2025 show a slight increase, but there are still significantly fewer than many other European countries receive, and the current peak is similar to previous high points. That is nothing to be surprised at, given the growth in conflict and economic or climate stress around the world.

Most claims are legitimate. The claimants are found to deserve and need the right to stay here and, as others have mentioned, the backlog is entirely the result of deliberate choices by successive Governments.

As for housing, what broke the UK’s housing system is the long-term decline in socially rented housing and its replacement by a rapacious, exploitative private rented sector. Asylum seekers are not to blame for the lack of investment in affordable housing. They are not to blame for landlords hiking rents or for the pressure on our public services. Those things are the result of choices made by successive UK Governments.

The UK Government’s explicit hostile environment policy began in around 2012, and anti-immigrant and racist sentiment peaked with Brexit. Even at that stage, what we are seeing now might have seemed unthinkable: openly racist, ethno-nationalist ideology is being mainstreamed. Members of Parliament are openly discussing mass deportation and questioning whether black and brown people can ever be considered British or English; the UK’s shadow justice secretary is quite content to be photographed in the company of a founder member of Combat 18, a neo-Nazi terror group; and a man who proudly showed the world a Nazi salute is now not only using the social media platform that he bought to tolerate explicit far-right racist and conspiracy content, but actively paying people to generate that content.

Despite years, even decades, of evidence from countries right around the world, the political parties that claim the centre ground in UK politics are doing nothing to challenge the profoundly dishonest, racist grifters of the far right. Instead, they are signalling to the electorate that the priorities of people such as Farage and Robinson are the right ones.

Aping the far right is obviously wrong in principle; also, it will never work. Those people already have wall-to-wall media coverage for their hateful agenda, and the current UK Government risks giving them the political power to demolish our human rights and to treat immigrants and asylum seekers as subhuman, all while slashing public services even more severely and handing what is left of the economy to the super-rich. We need to be clear eyed about the dire threat that has resulted from UK Government after UK Government dancing to the far right’s tune and allowing both traditional and social media to become propaganda machines for extremism.

There is still reason for optimism. Even after decades of anti-asylum propaganda, in every community we can find people giving their time, energy and resources to support asylum seekers and to show that the instinct to reach out and help those who need it is a basic part of human nature. It is strong. We need Governments and politicians who share that instinct, who will express it and who will explicitly challenge and oppose the racism of the far right.

Does the minister also recall the way in which a community in another part of Glasgow, Kenmure Street, rose up in opposition to the violence of the Home Office heavies and protected their asylum-seeking neighbours? Does she share my pride in that kind of concern about the immigration issues in our society?

I will come in with a supplementary on that area, and in particular on the idea of a shift towards a prevention approach.

I take the point that you are describing PBMA for individual programmes, or how health boards or other parts of the NHS make their decisions about their budgets. However, it seems to me that that is not the bit that is missing in making a shift towards prevention. What is missing is a health impact analysis of the policy and spending on housing, education, criminal justice and all the other areas that are completely outside the processes that health boards or other parts of the NHS go through. Why are we thinking about it as a process that is internal to the NHS, when really the health determinants are everywhere else?