Chamber and committees

Thank you. It is very interesting to get those perspectives from you all. The subject of my questions will be picked up by Paul McLennan.

If you heard most of the question, please just go ahead.

I am sorry, but we have lost Debbie Herron’s audio. She probably cannot hear me, either.

Mark Griffin, who is joining us virtually, will ask the next question.

How confident are you that councils will receive multiyear settlements from the Scottish Government from now on?

That was the last of our questions. I thank Alison Evison and Simon Cameron for joining us this morning; it has been good to hear COSLA’s perspective. Before we conclude the meeting, if there is anything else that you want to make sure that we hear or that you want to underscore, you have a moment to do so.

We can put those questions in a letter.

I do not know whether the witnesses can hear me, but we have come to the end of our time. We have a few more questions, and some of you might have missed out on answering because of the technology, so we will put those questions in a letter to you and you can respond to that. You can also use it as an opportunity to let the committee know anything else that we might not have been able to cover this morning.

Thank you very much for being with us. It was good to hear a range of perspectives from an urban context to a rural and island context, and how some of the issues are the same. It has been good to get a sense of how the local governance review is going.

I will suspend the meeting to allow for a change of witnesses and a wee break.

We will continue our consideration of the Scottish Government’s local governance review by taking evidence from representatives of the Convention of Scottish Local Authorities, who are joining us virtually. I welcome Councillor Alison Evison, the president, and Simon Cameron, the chief officer of the employers team. We will move straight to questions. If you wish to respond or contribute to the discussion and we have not called you to speak, you can put an R in the chat box. Some of my committee colleagues are joining us virtually, too.

I will get us started. I am interested in getting an update on the progress of the governance review since May’s elections. The committee has previously heard from COSLA about the principles that it would like to shape the new fiscal framework, but can you now describe how that would work in practice?

Hang on a minute, Alison—your volume is quite low at our end. Let us try again.

Thank you.