Chamber and committees

Thank you for joining us this morning. I will come to Jeremy Gorelick first. One of the challenges seems to be that the amount of due diligence and financial readiness required for an investment of £1 million involves the same effort as that needed for a package of £100 million. There seems to be a gap between the propositions at a local level and the desirability for investors, and one of the potential jobs of Government is to facilitate that.

The First Minister of Scotland will be chairing a proposed investor group, which will marshal the investors. I declare an interest because I launched it in 2020, but we have a green investment portfolio, which is currently worth £1 billion and involves 10 projects, with the promise of an increase to £3 billion. Those are the investable propositions. Earlier, you talked about some of the projects being at the concept or feasibility stage, and the need for an agreed mechanism so that there is almost an authority to invest because they have hit certain benchmarks to make them investable. Scotland is a country of 5 million people and has a devolved Administration. Could the role of national Government be to help local authorities to get to that stage of investability?

Given that financial regulation is reserved to Westminster, we can encourage mobilisation on a regulation system that will meet net zero. Within Scotland, we can look at standardisation of infrastructure products, in particular. That is really important.

Emma Harvey raised the issue of what standardisation would look like. I invite Jeremy Gorelick to give us an indication of that. If you cannot do that just now, it would be helpful if you could follow up in writing. We need to think about how we get appropriate investments for investors at the right time. I was very taken by your remark that they must be investor ready. Can you tell us a bit more about what you think is required as regards standardisation of an asset?

Thank you very much. I will pass back to the convener.

John Cunningham can perhaps give us a view from the Western Isles on his experience of leveraging private finance into nature-based solutions.

It is an interesting perspective that the city deals are more focused on net zero than they are on the biodiversity crisis and nature solutions. Knowing the Lothian area, as I do, I think that an equivalent of Sustrans for nature would be a way to channel funding. There is public funding, but projects do not necessarily get the private funding that we think is needed. That is the gap.

With regard to use of that mechanism, there has been recently been the islands deal.

Thank you for that. I am conscious of the time, convener, so I will pass back to you.

Thank you. I think that the committee is looking forward to visiting Linlithgow, my home town, which did a community bond on solar panels, although it was on a very small scale.

I will move on to Ben Howarth. Investors are looking at rewards. I suppose that that is about the mechanisms and the financial packages and products that would be helpful to bridge the gap between clear demand for net zero investment and supply of that investment.

You also talked about standardisation, which gives some comfort to investors. What would they be looking for, exactly? You talked about low-level long-term rewards and returns to your investors. What shape would that take and what policies and mechanisms need to be put in place at local authority or Scottish Government level to enable those products to be developed? Are there existing products that you would like to use for investment?

There is a particular issue with how we incentivise funding for town centre housing development. The city centre task force’s report made nine specific proposals for housing in city centres. Those were far more detailed than the proposals in the TCAP2. The housing aspects of the Scottish Government’s town centre report seemed to be light compared to those in the city centre task force’s report.

Your responsibilities relate to planning, public finance and community wealth. The Cabinet Secretary for Social Justice, Housing and Local Government is the lead on housing. However, there does not seem to be a strong a read-across for incentivising town centre housing development from your plans to the city centre plans. Is there anything that we can do to ensure the financial incentives that will be absolutely necessary to establish town centre housing development? Can you try to ensure that there is a more joined-up approach so that you mobilise the housing investment that is clearly available for city centres, which you also need to get into town centre development?

I will cover property development. It is clear that absentee landlords are a real problem in the development of town centres. Many of them live internationally or are based overseas, if they can be found. Recovery and engagement are very difficult. The status quo is not working in tackling the problem of absentee landlords. What is the Government doing and what can it do to improve that situation so that we can develop properties that are owned by absentee landlords?

NPF4 and the planning framework are critical for a variety of reasons, but they do not come with an enormous funding pot, as far as I am aware. How can we mobilise the resources that are available in the housing budget for town centre living? We know that it is more costly to build in town centres than it is to build on greenfield sites, so we will have to find some kind of incentives.