Chamber and committees

In respect of item 3, I declare that I am a Highland and Islands MSP.

Thank you for that, Ronnie. We have given a lot of attention to Highland; I will give a little bit more attention to Argyll and Bute. You have probably already touched on this issue but I will ask the question. I believe that one of the proposed wards for Argyll and Bute Council is Mull, Coll and Tiree. The proposal is for a three-member ward, and because there is a larger population on Mull, all the councillors might end up being from there. However, there is no direct ferry service—there is no way to get to Coll and Tiree directly—so people would have to go through Oban to get back out to those islands. There is concern about that. I think that there was something in the criteria about a link within the wards.

Yes.

Thank you—that is great.

We move on to theme 5, which is a focus on outcomes, benchmarking and the Christie report. I invite Willie Coffey, who joins us virtually, to lead on that theme.

We will move to a different theme, because of time constraints. We could spend a whole day with you all and really learn a lot, but we do not have a day, we have 90 minutes.

First, I will tell you what our themes are, so that you have a sense of what is coming. We will move on to budgets and funding, which will be followed by community empowerment and local democracy. We will then ask about community wealth building, which will be followed by outcomes and benchmarking, which is connected to the Christie report. The next theme will be climate emergency and green recovery, and the final theme is councillor demographics. That is the journey that we want to go on, so we have a lot of areas to cover.

I ask Meghan Gallacher to lead off on budgets and funding.

We move to theme 3, in which we will explore community empowerment and local democracy. One of the key findings of the previous Local Government and Communities Committee was that people want to have more say and influence over how services and amenities are provided in their local areas and that community empowerment goes hand in hand with community wellbeing. Dave Watson, a former member of Unison Scotland, argued that

“the governance of public services in Scotland is one of the most centralised in Europe”.

Therefore, what specific mechanisms and policies should we include in the upcoming local democracy bill, which will devolve some control to communities?

Yes, it is important that we start to track indicators of what is happening for communities.

We will now move on to the theme of climate emergency and green recovery—which is why I am saying that it is important to track the indicators. It is also important to shift power to a much more local level. I think that we will be considering the need for adaptation and communities will be best placed to do that work. They know what they need, what procurement they need and what they must put in place for resilience as things start to change rapidly at much more microclimate levels.

I will now bring in my colleague Paul McLennan with some questions to introduce that theme.

Thank you.

Thank you for that. I will bring in Angus Hardie, as he has put an R in the chat function, after which we will move to Elena Whitham for some more questions in the same area.

Welcome to the fifth meeting of the Local Government, Housing and Planning Committee in session 6. We have received apologies from Mark Griffin.

Given today’s subject matter, I invite members to declare their interests.