Chamber and committees

I want to move on to the much-anticipated energy strategy. Will you give us an update on the timing of the publication of the energy strategy and the associated energy just transition plan? What impact has the energy price crisis had on that? What are your views on the UK Government’s announcements on reserved energy matters and on the implications for Scotland’s future economic and energy strategy?

We are coming to the end of our inquiry, so it would be helpful if you could do that quite quickly.

What can and what is the Scottish Government doing to de-risk investments in net zero infrastructure? What barriers are preventing more successful partnerships between councils and private investors? How do you make sure that there are investable opportunities? The criticism that we have is that the propositions are not big enough, so who helps to resolve that situation?

Heat and transport are the big issues that we have to address, but not all heat is in council housing. There is also social housing and private sector housing. How will that be financed and how do we make sure that we have propositions of new finance models to make net zero happen? Is there any role whatsoever for local government in that? Is that what we can expect? Or, in a place-based approach, who will do it? There are big questions around that wider investability and how we leverage in the money. What role do local authorities have and what are you doing to support them? Do they have any responsibility whatsoever for private sector housing in a place-based approach to tackle net zero?

Andrew Burns, what is your view on the leveraging of private finance? Is there a conflict between councils being responsible for their own estate and, at the same time, saying that we need community and/or place-based investments? In that case, the council should also be leveraging private finance for things that are income generating or there is a source of income that is not generated from its own stock.

Stephen, bearing in mind that you identified issues around community bonds—private finance for communities—what is your view on the leveraging of private finance? Unfortunately, the committee had to cancel a visit to Linlithgow, where the council has already used private finance through a solar bond exercise.

You have talked about how to mobilise the workforce and expertise. If the big-ticket items are housing and transport, what can we do about the barriers that you see around private finance? What opportunities exist? Nobody is saying that we will be able to tackle net zero through public funding, even with the best will in the world.

David Hammond, you talked about there being a lot of collaboration already between officials. Do you think that anything else is needed to provide that co-production mechanism? We all agree that everyone needs to be involved—local government, national Government, the private sector and so on—but should that be done on a place basis? Is there a role for city deals? How do we put the approach into practice?

Thank you.

I appreciate that you have been in post for only two months, but our committee is about to produce a report and we are nearing the end of this question session, so it would be helpful to know what that mechanism would look like.

Silke Isbrand, do you want to come in, on the invitation of Councillor Macgregor?

Is there a tension between local government delivering net zero targets for its own estate and responsibilities and taking leadership with regard to a place-based approach? That touches on the issue about industrial emissions, which are not on the public sector side. Would a place-based solution require local authorities to have some sort of remit or responsibility in that area?

Good afternoon. I would like to talk about collaboration and co-ordination. Councillor Macgregor, what do we need to do first to improve collaboration and co-ordination between local government and central Government? In her written evidence, Louise Marix Evans said that there needs to be some kind of framework agreement or mechanism between different levels of government across the UK. Do you agree that that is needed or do you think that there is already sufficient co-ordination and collaboration?