Chamber and committees

I should just point out that you do not have to operate your microphones yourselves—we will do that for you. It is one less thing to think about.

I take it from those responses that, in general, you are all tremendously supportive of the vision, but there are concerns about what comes in behind to support it, and that some of the things that we have come up against in previous years, such as Covid, have prevented us from rolling it out. It is good to hear that the vision still stands, but I hear the views about the importance of how we make it happen and the need to give it a bit of a review.

I call Pam Gosal.

I highly recommend that you look into Midsteeple Quarter in Dumfries, where there is incredible community-led work that is strongly supported by Dumfries and Galloway Council. It is a tremendous example of community work on town centre living. They do detective work to find the people who own the properties, then buy them at a price that is, interestingly, usefully low for the community.

Maureen Chalmers, do you want to come in?

Is there something that we can do about the complexity of ownership? Could the Scottish Government do something to help people to understand who owns property, or to find that out more quickly?

Does anybody want to come in on that? There must be some good progress.

Thanks for going into the issue in that level of detail. That helps us to understand it better.

Budgets have been mentioned, which Mark Griffin wants to ask about.

I think that we have started talking about that now. Thanks so much for bringing that up.

I will go back online and bring in Stephanie Callaghan with another question.

Does anybody have any thoughts about that?

Jane, you have touched on that quite a bit already, to some degree, but please come on in.

Does anyone else want to come in on the issue of a joined-up approach?