Chamber and committees

Just out of curiosity, do you have an understanding of why the delay was put into the legislation?

Thanks, Karen. It is great to get your perspective and hear about your innovations with regard to community growing spaces, but from what everyone is saying it seems that it is in our cities that tensions are arising, because there is not so much growing space.

Maria de la Torre has sort of pre-empted my second question, which is about the support and facilitation being provided by the Scottish Government and local authorities, but perhaps I can pick up the same theme with Karen Birch and Ian Welsh. What can the Scottish Government and the local authorities do to better support allotments and, indeed, community growing spaces? Karen, do you want to come in on that?

Thank you. Rosanne, would you like to come in?

The issue of skilling up people is a theme that has been coming through clearly.

Ian Welsh, do you have any thoughts on how local authorities and the Scottish Government can be better facilitators?

No.

We might start with Rosanne Woods—I feel that I have heard a lot from her about volunteering.

I think that Ian Welsh also wants to answer that question. Ian, I hope that we can hear you.

Yes.

I thank you both for those contributions; they were really helpful.

I want to pick up on funding. I am interested to hear whether community growing projects and allotments associations have access to grants and other forms of funding. We want to know who the big funders are—perhaps so that we can apply for funding ourselves—and what role the Scottish Government has in that funding. That question is for Karen Birch first, after which I will see who else wants to pick it up.

In a way, your group is what Ian Welsh was referring to when he talked about groups of people coming together to do the community empowerment work. I can see that, even so, you have still had to jump over a lot of hurdles in the years that you have been working on the issue.

Rosanne—do you want to say anything about the funding for your project?

Good morning, and welcome to the 19th meeting in 2022 of the Local Government, Housing and Planning Committee. I ask members and witnesses to ensure that their mobile phones are on silent and that all other notifications are turned off during the meeting.

The first item on our agenda is consideration of a decision on taking in private items 3 and 4. Are we agreed to take those items in private?

Members indicated agreement.