Chamber and committees

Exactly.

Those are all good ideas, if you can find the landlord. Can anything be done to improve registration of landlords so that they can be located?

It sounds a bit like wishful thinking to say that the market will resolve the matter. We might come back to you on that in our report, minister.

The costs of developing shops and the units above them, particularly for housing—the retrofit costs and the costs of improving accessibility—are prohibitive for private enterprise. There is a desire to have more people living in town centres, particularly older people and single-person households, to address the social mix. What can the Scottish Government do to incentivise social landlords to take on such properties and to provide good-quality mixed tenure in our town centres? What are you doing differently to make that work?

We will also be interested to hear about funding but, for the moment, I will pass back to the convener.

Craig Iles, to you have anything to add to what Bill Lindsay said?

Good morning—it is still morning. National planning framework 4 encourages town centre living, including the reuse of vacant upper floors of commercial property and redevelopment of redundant retail units. Your answers to this question will have to be quite brief, but how have your authorities worked to support the redevelopment of such properties for housing? Is there anything that the Scottish Government can do to support that redevelopment? It would be helpful if you could give us a sense of how much of your high street, for example, has vacant upper properties. We are very conscious of the issue from our Dumfries visit. I ask Bill Lindsay to give a reply to that first.

So it is funding and policy that are needed.

Craig Iles, do you have anything on that from South Ayrshire?

That is very helpful. Thank you very much.

Steve Rogers, is the support that is needed more community development and not just access to planning officers and so on?