Chamber and committees

That is useful.

I will move on to city region deals. A number of those deals were worked out seven or eight years ago, but the world is quite different now. The climate emergency is getting more severe, and the targets that are in place for 2030 are very stretching—you alluded to that in your opening remarks, Councillor Macgregor. Are those regional deals still fit for purpose? Do they and individual projects need to be looked at again? For example, Sheriffhall might not meet a carbon test now, or maybe it would. Who is looking at that? Who is doing that analysis and assessment?

There is a lot of good practice. We heard about quite a lot of that during the inquiry.

I am interested in the work on local heat and energy efficiency strategies. Are councils actively considering becoming energy generators, with municipally owned energy companies, or are the strategies all about co-ordinating local opportunities?

I have a thought on the back of that. Has there been any discussion about how the CIS works with the Scottish Government’s national public energy agency? The energy agency is being set up right now, and there is an opportunity to align on that.

It would be interesting to know whether there will come a point when there will be an ambitious conclusion to that. I reflect on the first inquiry that the Scottish Parliament ever did into climate change, in 2005. That inquiry recommended that ministers should bring forward a workable system of road user charging by 2015, which was 10 years on from the inquiry. Nothing happened, and we are now years on from 2015.

Are you saying that, within the next year, there will be a clear view from COSLA about new fiscal levers that can be used, and there will be a clear ask of Government about where those could be extended?

That is good to hear.

Finally, I want to ask you about community and third sector partnerships. I suppose that the third sector would say that the deal that you are striking with the Scottish Government needs to be replicated with councils in developing new partnerships. In response to the inquiry, the Government has announced additional funding for climate hubs in order to scale up the ambition of what our third sector can achieve in communities and make a huge difference. What is your approach? Is there a commitment from local authorities to work with those climate hubs? Where do you see the third sector in that?

I will turn to fiscal levers and the discussion within COSLA about potentially adopting new fiscal levers to bring in finance. I am interested in which areas are being discussed. In transport, demand management is an obvious issue, but other potential issues include waste and land management. It would be interesting to know where COSLA is at on those issues.

Is how we define culture and the creative sector an issue? Creative Stirling is a very creative organisation that works in the cultural space and the regeneration space, but its physical space is an abandoned high street department store. It does not occupy a traditional cultural venue and it works in a very unsiloed way to meet its various objectives, although it would probably go to Creative Scotland for funding. Is there a fuzziness in how the creative sector operates, how it accesses opportunities and spaces and, therefore, how it is planned?

Do you mean that that whole area—civic space, green space and interconnected spaces between communities—is about creative design?

The question that comes out of that is what culture can do for planning and place making. The final question that I have been pondering concerns the local place plan process. From the way that you describe it, it seems that, at its heart, it is quite co-creative. In so, where are creative and cultural organisations in that? We look to planners and planning departments—which are underfunded, perhaps—to deliver the process, but is there a role for creative organisations in supporting planning charrettes and accessing and enabling the voices of young people and other disadvantaged groups in the process? Are there examples of a creative sector or creative groups in communities working with planners to assist in the local place plan process and help to create the vision? That feels like quite an exciting opportunity.