Chamber and committees

Henry Simmons would like to come in, and he wanted to come in on the previous question as well, so if he could pull those together, that would be great.

Good morning and welcome to the 30th meeting in 2022 of the Local Government, Housing and Planning Committee. I ask all members and witnesses to ensure that their devices are on silent and that all notifications are turned off during the meeting.

The first item on our agenda is to decide whether to take items 4 and 5 in private. Do members agree to do so?

Members indicated agreement.

Will that be linked into the biodiversity strategy and the natural environment bill? Will there be a cross-connection there?

It is good to know that that is happening. It seems to be a critical tool.

I again remind everyone that it would be good if we could keep our questions and answers succinct. I also reiterate to members that they should direct their questions to one person to start with, and I remind witnesses that they can put an R in the chat function when they have something additional to share.

That concludes our questions. I really appreciate all of you coming in to allow us to hear what you have to say about NPF4 and the work that you have been doing. It has been a useful session, and I look forward to the next steps in the process.

I will suspend the meeting for five minutes before we move on to our next item of business.

Thank you, minister. You covered a range of things in your statement. I want to begin by focusing on how evidence and feedback on the revised draft will be used. During last week’s session, the planning stakeholders suggested several possible improvements to NPF4. How will those and other stakeholder suggestions be taken on board before NPF4 is formally adopted?

Secondly, can you commit to further engagement when NPF4 is in place to improve areas that do not work as intended, perhaps through a chief planner’s letter?

That brings us to the end of our questions. Thank you so much for keeping the answers short. Stephanie, I noticed that you were cut off when you were saying something that might be important to convey. If you would put that in writing, I would welcome it.

Thank you for joining us this morning. It has been useful for the committee to hear from all of you and to hear the various perspectives.

I suspend the meeting for five minutes to allow for a change of witnesses.

The third item on our agenda is to continue our scrutiny of the National Care Service (Scotland) Bill. We have two panels of witnesses representing people who receive social care. For our first panel, we are joined online by Mike Burns, who is representing the Granite Care Consortium but is also the chief executive officer of the mental health charity Penumbra; Sophie Lawson, policy and participation manager at Glasgow Disability Alliance; Stephanie Fraser, chief executive of Cerebral Palsy Scotland; and Andy Miller, strategic lead for participation and practice at the Scottish Commission for People with Learning Disabilities.

I welcome our witnesses. If they indicate when they wish to respond to a particular question by putting the letter R in the chat box, I will make sure that we bring them in. We have only an hour for this panel, so I remind members to, where possible, address their questions to particular witnesses. Of course, I will potentially go against that request when I begin my questions.

I will begin by focusing on the challenges facing care delivery. I am interested in your perspectives on the main problems with the way in which social care is delivered currently. Do you agree that there is a postcode lottery in care delivery in Scotland? I will start with Stephanie Fraser and then open that up to others.

We have quite a few questions to get through. I ask colleagues to direct their question to somebody initially, and witnesses should put an R in the chat function if they have something to add. I definitely want to hear from everybody, but if we keep going around everyone for all the questions, we will run over time quite considerably.