Chamber and committees

Those are very useful points.

I move to a question around place, which I will direct to Ken Gibb and Ailsa Raeburn. As we have started to hear, many communities in the Highlands and Islands have suffered historical underfunding and forced depopulation, which left them fragile and with declining populations. It is crucial that we support those communities and create ones where people feel ownership.

With that point in mind, and with the emphasis on the importance of place in the Scottish Government’s “Housing to 2040” policy document, is there anything that the Scottish Government and its partners need to do to ensure that new affordable homes are developed in sustainable places where people want to live and—I would say—developed in a sustainable way?

Ailsa, would you like to come in on that question?

We move to the next theme, which is progress on delivering affordable homes and balancing priorities. We have quite a few questions to get through, but some of them will be directed to specific witnesses.

Do you want to ask question 11?

We move on to our third theme, which is the scope for different ways of financing and delivering affordable homes and prioritising resources when capital funding is under pressure.

Thanks for pointing us to the fact that things are done differently in other parts of the world.

That concludes our questions. Thank you for speaking to us this morning. I have certainly picked up quite a few things to think about.

I am sorry—I see that Gary Fairley wants to come in on that final question.

Thank you for that. I think that we will come to licensing in a bit more detail next.

I thank the minister and her team for being here to provide evidence. A 2019 poll found that 77 per cent of the Scottish public felt that legislation to protect wild animals from hunting with dogs needed to be strengthened, and much of the evidence that the committee has received backs that up. Police Scotland, Lord Bonomy and Chief Superintendent Mike Flynn of the SSPCA have all talked about the challenges of convicting and proving offences under the existing Protection of Wild Mammals (Scotland) Act 2002.

Do you believe that the bill will fully resolve those difficulties or is there scope for amendments to further clarify and define the offences to ensure that, as you previously stated,

“chasing and killing a mammal with a dog, for sport or otherwise, has no place in modern Scotland”?

Thank you.