Chamber and committees

I am specifically concerned about wall-mounted charging and what that now presents. If I live in a block of flats and have an electric car, can I attach a charger to that building without there having been proper pre-planning?

Does anyone else have a comment on that capacity building?

Maybe I will ask the question in a more straightforward way. Are your officials looking at that data, in order to publish it, so that we are acutely aware of the impact of these policies coming to an end?

There are so many people who want to ensure that they have an input into the process, and that it does not have unintended consequences when it is rolled out, so I think that that would be helpful.

We have heard about attitudes and culture, and I have written down a few comments from panel members who said that those things have not changed. Ellen Wright has spoken about things feeling like a tick-box exercise; Lionel Most mentioned feeling left out; and David Watson touched on communities being dictated to.

I want to explore whether the Community Empowerment (Scotland) Act 2015 has helped to change the culture. Police Scotland seems to have been given the green light for its role in engaging with the community. I am not sure whether that has delivered any change. Have constructive changes been made to how public bodies engage? Is Police Scotland the only example of constructive engagement, or are there others?

Thanks. I have taken away some of the points that Ellen Wright made about area partnerships and the fact that you all know each other, and I note that Louise Robb mentioned that some of the success has been around the way in which human relationships have driven what is going on. With regard to who is not at the table in those discussions, Lionel Most mentioned that the third sector sometimes does not have the capacity to engage as much as it should. Are there any views on who has not been able to become part of the process?

I agree with Willie Coffey on that. There is a need for guidance to be quite specific, and for all councils to follow that. I met RNIB representatives last week on a separate issue, and we discussed the use of ropes, for example, to create those areas. There is no real guidance or clarification on what that should look like. That is one of the key barriers that blind and visually impaired people often raise, so it is important that we ensure that the guidance is specific if the measure goes ahead.

If David Watson and Louise Robb do not want to come in on that point, I will expand the discussion to something that all the witnesses have touched on in various ways, which is the pandemic and the emergency response to it. I have been interested in other work that the committee has done that looked at that period, which seemed to show that some barriers had been taken away in terms of public services, which, perhaps due to their risk-averse nature, had not been allowing communities to do what they wanted and to take responsibility. Do you think that those have now disappeared? What worked to enable you to do that? Louise Robb, you mentioned that you literally all got around the table to see what you could do.

Is the Scottish Government looking at information to assess what impact the emergency legislation has had and at what rate people could potentially leave the private rental sector? If so, when is that likely to be published?

If we look at different schemes across the world, we see that there has been a cut-off point or cliff edge where landlords have left the market. The legislation prevents rent increases, but it does not necessarily prevent people from deciding that, when they can, they will withdraw private rented properties from the market. I am not clear whether the Scottish Government has any role in preventing that from happening and whether the data is actively being looked at and provided to different local authorities, which could end up facing the consequences of more people declaring themselves as homeless.

Ahead of that, perhaps we could ask the minister, as we are asking them to attend, whether they could provide the guidance so that we can look specifically at what is going to be rolled out. As with short-term lets, guidance can be misinterpreted, so it would be helpful for us to look at that before we question the minister.