Chamber and committees

I want to build on that. The culture sector is very diverse. You all represent fairly substantial institutions and organisations within the culture landscape. Does the Scottish Government engage with you directly? Do you have access to the thinking that is being done within Government about what the increased funding that has been committed to will look like? It seems to me that there is a worry about whether it will end up being spent on culture activity or on the other costs that culture organisations have. A few minutes ago, someone—it might have been Anne Lyden—mentioned net zero. Whatever proportion of the £100 million goes to museums and galleries could very easily be swallowed up by decarbonising your buildings. To what extent do you have a sense that the Government is thinking about how that funding should represent an addition to your culture activity, rather than be used for other costs?

I am saying that only because all local taxation is devolved and we do not have that constraint on national tax.

An amount of money will be allocated in the coming budget, but you are also looking for a plan for the five years ahead. You want to have a sense of what the longer-term plan is for the course of increased funding. Is that right?

Rather than going round the table again, I will direct this question, which is about broadening or diversifying local sources of funding, to Susan Deighan, who has spoken the most about the local level. The Parliament has legislated to give local authorities the power to generate revenue through the introduction of a visitor levy—the City of Edinburgh Council has been the first mover on that, but I hope that it will not be the last. That might be particularly relevant for parts of the culture sector that do not have core funding. Some music venues are making the case for something similar through a stadium levy. How much further could we go? Are there opportunities not only to create a different way of using central Government funding but to introduce more local powers, so that revenue can be generated and put to use according to local priorities?

Good morning. A few of you have talked about this already, but it seems to me that we are using the term “commissioner” to mean very different things. There are those that carry out significant functions on an on-going basis; it is clear that the Scottish Information Commissioner, for example, needs to be a public body with serious resources, and most people would think it inappropriate for that to be part of Government. In other areas, however, what a commissioner does might be a piece of policy work that would happen within Government anyway, and it is all about carrying that out separately, perhaps beyond the Scottish Government, and bringing in the wider public sector.

As Jackson Carlaw has described on a couple of occasions, there is the slightly more amorphous space of advocacy, in which a call for a commissioner lands in much the same way as calls for other kinds of interventions to elevate the status of an issue. That seems an entirely legitimate thing for people to advocate for; indeed, it is consistent with the notion that we had 25 years ago that this would be a Parliament that shares power with the people, whether through citizens assemblies, which have been tried a few times, or the older idea of a civic forum, which was not brilliant but was abolished instead of being improved. There are various ways for that sort of thing to happen, and the creation of commissioners is a legitimate way of filling that space.

However, if the worry is that commissioners are proliferating and costing too much, I wonder whether, instead of closing them down, we should give them their space, but in a lighter-touch way. It would be like the difference between, say, an ambassador and an honorary consul. At the moment, the corporate body gives committees resources to appoint committee advisers on particular issues. Is there not space for something with a bit more status?

Such a person could be the Parliament’s adviser on a particular issue, who could perform some of the advocacy role and help to bring in marginalised voices, without the need for a public body in its own right. They would undertake that role and have a degree of status with Parliament directly. That would avoid the need to create a big range of new public bodies that need constant resourcing. The corporate body might even decide to cap the amount of money that was provided in each session of Parliament for appointing such people, and we could start each new session with a clean slate. Would that be one way of giving legitimate space to the very reasonable argument for a connection with civic society and a role for advocacy, but without all the baggage?

I have no relevant interests to declare.

Thank you. That was easy.

We will keep under surveillance the engagement that people have with the awareness-raising campaign—a great deal of it is online, so we can monitor the levels of engagement and exposure—and, as we move into the temporary measures, we will also monitor the use of the adjudication protections.

I do not think that it would be reasonable to say that there is a final, set-in-stone decision on how much awareness raising should take place. We have committed to the spend to ensure that there is an awareness-raising campaign as we move out of the temporary rent cap and into the slightly longer-term but still temporary rent adjudication changes. Any such change will increase the level of complexity that people are dealing with and increase some confusion. As a regional MSP, I am aware that my inbox contains correspondence from tenants and landlords who do not know what their rights are as we approach the end of the period.

We need to make sure that we continue to engage with tenants and landlords and provide that information both through direct channels and through working with a range of organisations and advice agencies at a local level. One of the organisations that I visited recently when I launched the campaign was Citizens Advice Scotland, which has a critical role to play as a trusted voice in the local community. Similar organisations the length and breadth of the country will play a really powerful role, too.

This is a hugely important question that we have been conscious of all through the process. It was very clear that the rent cap had to be temporary; that is the nature of emergency legislation, and I think that that was well understood across Parliament and by external stakeholders when we passed the act itself. Having the ability to modify an existing mechanism—that is, the rent adjudication mechanism—offered the clearest opportunity for an off-ramp from the temporary rent cap, if I can put it that way.

However, it does place the onus on tenants to challenge, and we need them to be aware that, even as we move out of the emergency legislation, Scotland has the strongest package of tenants’ rights and protections of any part of the United Kingdom. We are seeing on-going debates down south over whether no-fault evictions will eventually be banned or whether the proposals will be changed before they are put to the vote, but that is something that we already did a number of years ago.

The grounds on which evictions can be pursued are very clearly and explicitly laid out, and the level of protection that tenants have is very strong. We need to remind not only tenants but landlords of those rights and responsibilities, which is why the awareness-raising campaign is so important and why we will continue to engage with the organisations that provide advice. MSPs, MPs, councillors and other elected representatives can play a really important role in disseminating that information to concerned constituents, ensuring that community organisations that they are in touch with have access to that information and pointing people to online tools such as the rent calculator.

We have worked with colleagues to understand what they expect in terms of the burdens on them of processing rent adjudication requests. The process has not been taking place in the normal way during the period when the emergency legislation has applied, but it will resume now, regardless of whether we are applying an altered adjudication process. However, I would take a little bit of persuading that the numbers are going to be markedly different purely on the ground that we are adding that third comparator.

You might have heard from constituents who are concerned about the rent increase notices that some landlords have issued prematurely, ahead of the rent cap ending—I certainly have. At the moment, we can reassure them that the rent cap is still in place and that those rent increase notices still need to comply with it, but clearly a number of rent increase notices will begin to be issued when the rent cap ends, regardless of whether we take forward the power on a modified adjudication framework with the third comparator figure. It is really important that we have that third comparator figure, but, regardless of whether we use that power, there will obviously be a resumption of rent adjudication requests, and rent service Scotland and the First-tier Tribunal will need to be ready to deal with that. We will, therefore, continue to engage with them to understand how that is playing out in practice. As I said to Mark Griffin, there is a shared desire to ensure that requests are dealt with in a timely way.