Chamber and committees

You have mentioned the long-term plan for towns, and the seven towns that were chosen, a number of times. Can you say a little more about how the seven towns were chosen?

When will we be able to make a judgment as to whether the UK, and some of those communities, have been levelled up?

It all seems very complex. Clearly you, the councils and the Scottish Government all have staff doing quite a lot of work on this, with you analysing the figures, councils putting in bids in the competitive process and so on. In retrospect, do you think that having so many funds with so many factors has been the best way of allocating the money? You could have just said, “Well, based on SIMD or whatever, we will top up the housing budget across the UK”, and that would have been pretty welcome in most council areas and would have saved all the analysis and the applications. Would that not have been better?

Mr Gove, the term “levelling up” suggests to me that areas that or people who are poorer or further down the scale—or however they are described—should be pulled up nearer the areas or people at the top. That is a real emphasis on need. However, from some of the answers that you have given to Ms Smith and others, there seems to be the idea of a geographic spread of the money that goes out. I wonder whether those two things are compatible. Some people would have expected all the money to go to really needy areas and no money to go to Aberdeenshire, despite the fact that Aberdeenshire might have some pockets of deprivation. How do you square those things?

Is it too early to say whether any of that has been successful? I realise that a lot of the money is still to be spent.

I wonder whether the amounts of money involved will make a significant difference. Glasgow is not the biggest city in the UK, but it is fairly large. We got £13 million to upgrade a set of dilapidated stables in quite a wealthy part of the city, and the £15 million for Drumchapel is very welcome. That is £28 million. You have already mentioned the investment zone, too. Those investments are only scratching the surface in Glasgow, however. Would the amounts not need to be a lot higher to make a real impact?

I wanted to touch on one other area. Some of the councils that we spoke to talked about the need for more flexibility on, say, timescales, with East Lothian, for example, saying that it would be good to have a five-year funding model to allow it to plan ahead. On another note, Renfrewshire and Aberdeenshire both said that numeracy was not really a priority for them and that they would have liked to have used the money for literacy or something else. Is there enough flexibility in the schemes?

Thank you.

Inflation could end up higher than we are hoping. For example, it could end up higher if all the shipping has to go around South Africa instead of through the Suez canal.

That is fine—that gives me a feel for it.

So, there appears to be a problem with the open-plan aspect for MSP staff, in that they can all hear one another when they are having discussions. That is a downside of the open-plan system.