As I mentioned already, the Scottish Enterprise is meeting again with the company in a couple of days' time. That ends the topical questions. The next item of business is a debate on the local government and regeneration committee's inquiry into the delivery of regeneration Scotland. Members who wish to take part in this debate should press the request button now. Before I call Kevin Stewart to open the debate, I note that Sarah Boyack for the Labour party, who is opening for the debate, is not in the chamber. This is something that the Presiding Officer's deplor we expect members to be here. I call Kevin Stewart to open the debate on behalf of the local government and regeneration committee. Mr Stewart, you have about 14 minutes. It gives me great pleasure to open this debate on behalf of the local government and regeneration committee. The debate follows upon our year-long inquiry into the best practice and limitations of the delivery of regeneration in Scotland. This was a detailed and thorough inquiry that resulted in a unanimous cross-party report setting out some 55 specific recommendations and also coming to numerous conclusions. Our inquiry had a focus on regeneration involving the community and looked closely at progress since the publication in 2011 of the Government's regeneration strategy. To set the scene, I quote from the foreword to the report, for most of the last 60 to 70 years, the concept of regeneration was often identified in most people's minds as relating just to the physical development or redevelopment of the communities in which they lived. That development could be as small as the development of a local play area for children in a given community to as large as the construction of whole new towns in the post-war development years in the 50s and 60s. Today, public policy on regeneration is interlinked with issues such as economic development, health inequalities, social integration and educational development, as much as it is with the construction of new houses, schools and roads. We see regeneration as a vision delivered through a focus of effort and strategic approach across all public policy areas. First and foremost, regeneration is about reducing poverty, decline in inequality of opportunity and areas of disadvantage. It is about improving outcomes for communities. That theme runs throughout our report. I must thank those who have supported us, the clerks, Spice and, especially, our adviser, Professor Ian Wall of Herriot-Watt University, who performed a sterling job not at least in chiving up responses from across the country. We received many responses and spoke to a large number of people from across Scotland, and I thank them all. We are extremely grateful for the people's input. The report provides some historical basis. It may be the first report of a parliamentary committee that is referred to the work of the Romans. David Lloyd George, who promised a country fit for heroes to grow up in, covered the Wall Street crash, mentioned Sir Winston Churchill and the demolition of slum tenements in Glasgow. It discusses the various 20th century initiatives ranging right across the postwar years, including gear, urban development corporations, new towns, enterprise zones, new life for urban Scotland, social inclusion partnerships and the enterprise agencies. They are culminating now in the main focus being on the work of community planning partnerships across Scotland. Despite all the well-intentioned schemes and initiatives that have told the people and communities what to do, regeneration is fundamentally about reducing poverty, inequality and long-term decline. We were clear that the old top-down model requires to change. We visited local communities across Scotland and we saw and heard about the difference that involving people can make. We make a number of recommendations on how the community can and should be supported and empowered. I am certain that every member of the Parliament wants to see sustainable long-term achievements, and we could not be clearer in our report that they are best achieved working with the community. There is a strong linkage here with what we expect to see in the community empowerment bill when it is introduced shortly. That bill can be a catalyst for a change in attitudes, a change from the view that local people are merely consumers of services to one that sees them as an active partner involved in design and delivery. A way to help local authorities to change their view of themselves from being mere service providers to principally being service enablers. That bill is vital in many ways, and we must, as a Parliament, ensure that we get its provisions right so that it meets aspirations. Our report was written to examine the Government's strategy and add value to it. However, we do not see regeneration as a strategy per se, but rather as a vision to be delivered through focused effort and strategic approach across all areas of public policy. Our report included a range of suggestions that were considered and should be progressed and sought to highlight actions that could be taken, as well as seeking comment and response on a range of ideas that emerged from our work. The successful delivery of the strategy is dependent on the implementation of the Christie commission principles and effective public sector reform at all levels. It requires better partnership and joined up working, but, fundamentally, that must take place alongside greater community participation in service, design and delivery. As a committee, we understood the strategy such as a vision, but we saw precious little evidence of the vision being embedded at either a national or more worryingly at a local level. In particular, we were not convinced that strategic co-ordination to embed the vision across Government policy and guidance has been established. Perhaps the minister will give us some reassurances in her speech on this aspect. Of even greater concern is the absence of a general oversight and co-ordination function for regeneration efforts across Scotland. Nobody appears to be responsible for ensuring best practice is shared or impact measured across the country. We suggested that a leadership function should be provided to CPPs by the national community planning group, but their Government response, while accepting those needs, suggests that our views are misplaced. I will be extremely interested in hearing the minister's view of who is to provide leadership in this area, how impacts are to be measured and perhaps what the role single outcome agreements may play in this regard. I will give way to Mr Stevenson. Mr Stevenson, it is very easy to agree with everything that the member is saying. Does the member agree that it is important that we are ambitious enough that some of the initiatives actually do not work and that we learn of things not to do and that we should send a strong signal that, while we want everything to exceed ambition and we want the lessons of failure when they occur to be disseminated as well as the lessons of success? I agree completely and utterly with Mr Stevenson. Sometimes we are too risk averse in various sectors of implementation of policy and strategy. I think that he is wise in what he has to say, and I hope that we can change that. One of the key questions that we faced was how much money is spent on regeneration in Scotland by the public sector. We thought that it was vital to understand activity and to measure progress at the level in which it was available. We discovered a veritable Aladdin's cave of schemes to support regeneration, and while we accept that, by mainstreaming an activity, we make identifying specific spend difficult, if not impossible, we did expect to be able to identify the level of funding directly available. Sadly, despite our best efforts, we were unable to achieve that and we invited the Government to assist us in mapping the resources available, principally to allow stakeholders to understand the sources available to them. Unfortunately, that seems impossible to produce. Time and time again, we heard from organisations and community representatives of funding difficulties. Those fall into two parts, the difficulty and competition to obtain initial grant or award. Secondly, once funding is received, the need to devote significant resources to obtain repeat funding. The latter is particularly concerning because it has the effect of focusing significant amounts of energy on seeking to maintain that funding, drawing effort away from the focus on delivery of the purposes of which the original funding was provided. To that end, we recommend that the resources that the Government allocates directly to regeneration be provided for a longer term. Regrettably, that recommendation has not been accepted, and I hope that that will be reconsidered so that we can drive forward preventative, sustainable spending approaches. I am conscious that my speech can thus far be viewed as somewhat negative. I have been reflecting on that and I can assure the chamber that there are many positive aspects to the inquiry, not least the enthusiasm, drive and determination to improve local areas that we encountered on our visits. I will provide some examples shortly, but on the potential negativity charge can I suggest that it is almost inevitable when discussing a report with 50-plus recommendations for improvement that some negativity can creep in. The undoubted highlights of the inquiry were our visits. In total, we made six direct inquiries as we were anxious to engage with people on the ground. Often, we split the committee so that we could cover as much ground as we possibly could in various locations. Boy did the clerks love us for the organisation involved in that, and again I thank them for their sterling efforts. We started by visiting Cumbernauld, several people counselled against a January visit, but the weather was kind and the community turned out in force. Indeed, in such numbers, we held an additional evening session to meet them all. That was no indoor visit. We traped across fields, up hills, over fences and were treated to a magnificent display of mountain bike riding by the local school children using a regeneration facility. We left Cumbernauld thoroughly satisfied and convinced of the benefits of people power. I thank Mr Stevenson for a shot of his wellies that day. We went on to Mabo in Ayrshire and saw what was being achieved by the local community there. We followed that with a public meeting in Ayr. Part of the committee then visited Glasgow and met several groups, including the wonderfully named Tee in the pot. At the same time, the remainder of the committee were in Aberdeen during the seat and back his area and hearing about all of their achievements. I have to say that achievements have largely been funded by private donations and contributions that the community worked hard to get. Some of us visited Dundee and saw the regeneration in the Whipfield area. We heard about community budgeting. To return briefly to negativity, we heard how jealous other communities were of the work that was going on there and those community budgets. We were impressed as were our colleagues who visited Fergusley Park. There, they saw much good work being led by the local community. We also visited Dalmarnock and toured around the various projects and sites that Clyde Gateway is responsible for. That tour was impressive, as was the work that Clyde Gateway is doing. Inevitably, the officials there were at pains to explain all their good work and the level of engagement that they had with the community. Of course, we were a bit cynical about that until we, Jimmy from the local area, turned up at one of our community breakfast events in Edinburgh a few months later. Not only did he agree with the version that we had heard about improvements to the community, if anything, he went further in praising the effect of the regeneration work in the east end of Glasgow and the close collaboration that was occurring with the community there. Mention of our breakfast events reminds me of a range of characters who attended and spoke freely to us. We are indeed indebted to a large number of individuals who gave of their time to help others. We were heartened to see that there is a thriving community spirit right across Scotland. Given encouragement, support, the right tools and a small amount of money, they can and are delivering significant and lasting benefits for their communities. It is fair to say, as a committee, that we were convinced that regeneration works best when it is done by ordinary people.  Turning now to the reply from the Scottish Government for which I thank the minister, although I am bound to note that it is not as comprehensive as we might have wished. While it refers to most of the recommendations that apply to the Government, in a number of cases it does not. Given that, I think that the best way to proceed is for us to write to the minister highlighting those areas where we believe that elaboration is necessary, and I will ask the committee, my committee colleagues, to agree the terms of such a response in the coming weeks. Presiding Officer, I end with the overall conclusion of the committee. Regeneration must involve the people in the communities from design to delivery. Our evidence shows that regeneration can only be truly and long-lastingly effective if done by people. We are clear that all partners are not placing enough emphasis on true community participation, particularly in the design stage. We must place the community at the heart of decision making and involvement throughout. Thank you very much, Presiding Officer. Many thanks. I now call on Margaret Burgess, Minister around 10 minutes, and there is time for interventions if you wish. I would also take this opportunity to thank Kevin Stewart and the members of the committee for the significant amount of time and effort that they have expended on their evidence gathering. I welcome many of the key recommendations of the committee's report. The changing financial landscape has meant that we, as a Government, needed to take a new approach to regeneration and that our policies needed to evolve if they were to make a real impact that could be sustained over time. In response to those challenges, in December 2011, the Scottish Government launched achieving a sustainable future the regeneration strategy. Now, two years on, it is good to have the committee's assessment of progress drawing on the very extensive evidence that it has gathered. The work of the committee supports our view that people no longer think of regeneration simply in terms of physical redevelopment. As the committee says, many stakeholders and communities across Scotland share our clear understanding that physical, social and economic considerations are integral to and interdependent with the policy of regeneration. That is one of the key changes that we set out in our strategy. It is reassuring to hear that it has been put into practice in a wide range of local initiatives being delivered across Scotland. Rightly, the committee deliberately focused on the community-led angle of regeneration. I welcome that as it is at the very heart of the Scottish Government's regeneration strategy. I am pleased to see that the evidence gathered by the committee supports our approach. There was a sense from all stakeholders that the strategy has rightly placed a new focus upon community participation and ownership. There was broad agreement that regeneration can only be sustainable and effective if done by people rather than done to people. While we recognise that it is for communities to take that forward, we know too that such activity can only succeed with the help of a variety of partner organisations. Those organisations take their lead from government and regeneration. Although not always badged at such, it is at the heart of government policy. The Government economic strategy recognises the important role that regeneration plays in contributing to Scotland's economic performance. As the committee notes, regeneration outcomes are not unique to regeneration policy alone. Regeneration outcomes can be achieved through mainstream budgets such as health, education and justice. The Scottish Government remains committed to pursuing a transformative cross-sector programme of public service reform to improve outcomes for people and tackle the inequalities that persist in society. Although the strategic lead on the agenda must come from the Scottish Government, local delivery is vital to tackle this advantage and achieve outcomes that are required in Scotland's communities. We have always believed that local authorities and community planning partnerships are in the best position to co-ordinate economic development and regeneration activity, as they are the ones that understand local needs. That is why more than £140 million of funds from the former Farer Scotland fund was transferred to local authorities through the local government settlement. The Scottish Government welcomes the committee's support for our holistic approach to regeneration. Although we have directed significant funding to local authorities, we have retained some central funding that allows us to make moneys available to our most disadvantaged areas to support a range of physical, economic and social activities. We have invested more than £270 million in regeneration activity since 2007 and 2008, offering a range of funding, including dedicated funding to community groups through our People and Communities Fund. The People and Communities grant fund is helping to establish and enable existing community groups such as housing associations to do that. Interest in the fund has surpassed our expectations, so we have found a new and innovative way of augmenting this budget with moneys released from a charitable bond. 136 projects already approved represent a commitment of more than £16 million by 2015. The project supported range from training, upskilling, volunteering and employability advice to funding for community facilities and diversion activities for young people. I noted that Kevin Stewart talked about visiting a number of projects. I have also been fortunate enough to have the opportunity to visit a number of projects. In February, I enjoyed a visit to Twecker community action to see an employability project that is providing on-the-job training, volunteering and a school placement programme for local residents. I met a number of trainees there. Ross McDermott is hoping for a career in horticulture when he completes his SVQ. He told me just how much he and the other trainees appreciated the opportunity to get vital work experience in a job that they really enjoyed doing, and, importantly, this is locally. Hopefully, with application, all the trainees will be able to move on to permanent jobs in the local community. Like Kevin Stewart, it is about regenerating communities, getting people into work and preventing poverty. Not every community is mature enough to take advantage of funding from the people and communities grant fund. Some communities need help to grow and flourish. Through the strengthening communities programme, the Scottish Government will provide direct investment to our community anchors to help them to build capacity and to be in a stronger position to respond to the needs of their communities. I launched the strengthening communities programme at the Glenborg neighbourhood life centre in North Lanarkshire. The organisation delivers a wide range of services to the local community, healthy eating initiatives, youth services, adult learning, a community cafe and services for older people. The positive benefits of such activities are achieved by local people working together to deliver change within their communities. We are investing in projects such as one in North Lanarkshire and others like it, helping communities to take ownership of a local asset. By taking ownership of the asset as the Glenvoid neighbourhood life centre, it will now be in a position to develop new social enterprise opportunities, improve the services that are offered to local people and even take ownership of the local post office to ensure that the vital service is maintained in the community. Kevin Stewart Thank you, Presiding Officer. The minister has outlined all of that good work. I wonder if the minister could tell us how we can ensure that that good practice, that expertise among communities can be exported right across Scotland so that communities that are at this moment disempowered can be empowered. Margaret Burgess That, Presiding Officer, is the purpose of strengthening the community's fund. It is to take that good practice and share it in communities that are not yet ready or are able to access that at this time, and it is to ensure that they get that support, that leg-up to get them in the same position as other communities. Very often, in the past, we found that it was the same organisations and communities that were managing to access the bulk of the funding. We are very clear that we want to spread it across Scotland, and we will certainly engage with the local government regeneration committee on that, but it is our clear aim that all communities in Scotland can access the funding and can help to grow and develop their community. The programme is a collaborative programme that the strengthening communities fund. We have engaged Highlands and Islands Enterprise Development Trust Association Scotland, the Carnegie Trust and the Scottish Community Development Centre to maximise the type of community anchors that we will support, which comes way to what Kevin Stewart was asking. I am pleased to say that, with our investment, around 150 community organisations will be supported through the strengthening communities programme. Just as the committee made clear that a holistic approach is best for regeneration activity, we realised that positive outcomes can still be achieved through physical regeneration projects. Through the regeneration capital grant fund, we are supporting 22 successful capital projects, which have a focus on community engagement and will drive greater community participation. The committee stressed the need for focused funding, and the fund primarily supports areas that are suffering high levels of deprivation and disadvantage. We are continuing to support the urban regeneration companies such as Riverside, Inverclyde and Irvine Bay, which are doing a lot of good work in some of our most disadvantaged communities. I can confirm the announcement by the First Minister this morning of additional funds for Clyde Gateway URC. Part of that funding will support the purchase and renovation of the Aspire building in Rutherglen by the Health and Happy Community Development Trust, enabling service provision and delivery tailored to the needs and, importantly, the desires of the local community. It will accelerate works that will contribute also to the Commonwealth Games legacy. That is just one example of how we will put more power in the hands of communities and allow them to influence important decisions that matter to them. I also welcome the support from the committee for community planning and the work of community planning partnerships. They deal with the complex interlinked issues that face individuals and communities involving economic development, health inequalities, social integration and educational development. Such issues require local solutions to address the differing needs, priorities and circumstances of those communities. We need community planning partnerships to provide the shared leadership that drives the pace of partnership working locally. That is, after all, the mechanism that we have for improving local outcomes for people and communities. There are numerous examples of CPPs demonstrating a strong, evidence-based understanding of place and people. In co-winning in North Ayrshire, the Peniburn Regeneration youth development enterprise community hub, with the help of a wide range of partners, has refurbished a disused public house to open a new multi-purpose community hub, providing services for all age groups. Those are just some of the examples of good practice, but in their own they are not enough. The challenges for community planning to be truly effective across the board in improving outcomes and reducing inequalities. The Scottish Government is committed to strengthening community planning further and is doing so in a number of ways. The forthcoming community empowerment Scotland bill will introduce a new strategy duties on CPPs and public sector bodies to improve outcomes for local communities. As a Government, we will continue to work with stakeholders and with the local government and regeneration committee to ensure that the aim of improving and creating sustainable communities continue, but we need to work together to do that. I began serving on the local government and regeneration committee in the middle of its evidence gathering on regeneration Scotland. I am pleased to have largely followed this report through the parliamentary process. At first, the scale of the inquiry and the breadth of different issues that it covered was daunting for someone who is not only new to the committee, but also to being an MSP. However, it is clear that so many of the issues that have cropped up go beyond regeneration and touch on other areas of our work, especially things such as flexibility in local government and community empowerment. Bearing that in mind, I think that the lessons learned have the potential to positively affect not only a regeneration but a far wider policy area. One of the first such lessons became apparent during our visit to Whiteford in Dundee the very day I joined the committee. As the report makes clear, regeneration has existed as a concept for a very long time. In recent years, all Governments have invested time and money into regeneration policy in a bid to reverse real and lasting deprivation and decline. However, whilst this investment was undoubtedly well intentioned, I think that we must accept that it has not always been successful. Indeed, there have been some total failures. This is because investment in itself will not deliver long-term improvements or reverse the long-term decline. Of course, funding is needed, and in recent years there has not been the same resources as there has been previous. We all know that. All of which means that when funding does become available, we should spend it wisely and monitor it closely to ensure that it is being fully utilised. There are plenty of examples of regeneration projects throughout Scotland that have delivered meaningful change and that could be considered genuine success stories. I would like to highlight one or two aspects that have struck me. First, they were not all large-scale. The likes of Blue Sea Consulting argued in their written submission that there are small projects with a fixed level of funding, and clear short-term objectives were often very successful, and the role of these sorts of projects should not be overlooked when considering our regeneration strategy. We need to move beyond the idea of regeneration being a completion of one large-scale infrastructure project after another. I feel that this is particularly the case when you consider how many of these large-scale projects often fail to see completion or suffer huge delays for a variety of reasons. I was also struck by the submission of Park Craig Miller, who had pursued a piecemeal approach to regeneration. As a starting point, he had worked hard to establish what the existing needs and demands were in Craig Miller. Far too many regeneration projects are tempted to generate both the supply and the demand. It is almost like the Kevin Costner syndrome—build it and they will come. As I raised in committee in relation to building retail units, often they were built despite there being long-established shops nearby and there being no evidence of a demand for more, hoping that this in turn would bring custom and greater investment. Years later, those shops are still lying empty. They are often built because developers see it as an easy way of making money through shop rents, which means that there is little thought to a mix of shop type. For instance, you often get a high concentration of charity shops and betting shops. According to this approach to regeneration, it is simplistic and I am afraid that it rarely succeeds. The strength of a phased approach is that it meets the existing needs within a community and it can adapt to future developments. That is at the heart of the regeneration issue. It can take any number of forms and any scale, but community engagement is a must. As our committee report makes clear, the extent to which communities are involved with the decision making process varies markedly between communities and even between different projects, depending on who is delivering them. There seems to be some denial about this fact, but it was clear and consistent message from the various community groups that we heard from and that it was the perception that they were being excluded. In particular, the famous the CPPs have been exposed in this regard and we must have some action on ensuring that local communities are meaningfully involved and move beyond male consultations, which are merely tick boxing exercises. As my convener stated, it is the people that matter. When you consider what regeneration means in its broadest sense, that a core group must be engaged in local businesses and entrepreneurs. Again, there are success stories with the projects that identify the needs of businesses or barriers to their growth and help them to overcome them. Having local businesses attracting employment and investment into an area means that success is also shared locally and the key to sustainable development and reversing long-term decay. As the likes of Scottish Enterprise suggested in its evidence, investment is at its most effective when it is pump priming locally-based economic development. However, our report also highlights that there are some barriers to community engagement that must be overcome. Though I hate the policy-wonk phase, there is undoubtedly a need for capacity building within communities when it comes to encouraging participation in the design of running of services. They must be able to articulate their own priorities and affect the system, far too often the role that certain bodies or small groups of individuals are assuming, that role on a behalf of a community that is not sustainable. Not only because those groups do not always reflect totally what is in the best interests of the areas that they serve, but because communities must be able to hold to account those who are making decisions and distributing resources on their behalf. Presiding Officer, there is already a number of regeneration success stories out there. We must learn the lessons of this report and put the community, the heart of our future strategy and reconcile ourselves with the various forms of regeneration that it will bring. Thank you very much and I now call on Sarah Boyack, six minutes or so. Thank you very much Presiding Officer. I first of all want to thank the committee members and the many many community groups who gave evidence to this committee inquiry, because I think that it is an inquiry that reads well and I particularly want to welcome the publication of the committee's report in the form that is actually accessible, I suspect, to anyone who gave evidence to the committee report. I think that that is to be welcomed because this has to be a conversation that continues beyond the committee's report and it has to continue in our communities and part of this process of our debate should be used to empower the communities that we will be talking about this afternoon. I think that the headline statement that to deliver a lasting change and successful regeneration we need to make sure that communities are involved every step of the way is absolutely correct. Communities need to be empowered and supported in the long term if we are to tackle and reduce poverty and to create new opportunities for people in some of our most disadvantaged areas. I think that the committee report feels like it has taken time to talk to local communities and I do think that that strengthens the recommendations in the report. From somebody who was not on the committee on the strategy and policy issues, the key finding that comes across is that regeneration must be part of the overall vision of what the Scottish Government does. It cannot be an add-on and that the principles of the Christie commission need to run right across government departments. The fact that the new People and Communities Fund ran out within three months and was massively oversubscribed demonstrates that more support is needed if this agenda is actually going to be implemented and implemented successfully. The recommendations, particularly on revenue funding by the committee, are absolutely crucial. Many of us in the chamber will know of community groups that struggle from year to year. The fact that they are in a disadvantaged area regularly means that they do not have a private sector to fall on, that they do not have other groups that can put money in. The issue about long-term funding and support from the public sector is absolutely crucial, not just in terms of funding. I mentioned the seat and back-haze project. With a little bit of public money, it managed to pull in quite a lot of private investment to deal with environmental issues and create a new play areas and green spaces in that area. The best practice that it has garnered is to be exported elsewhere. I do not think that it is impossible for any community, disadvantaged or not, not to be able to go out there if they have got the initial backup, so it is not always money, it is expertise, and I think that we need to export that expertise from one place to another. Sarah Boyack, I will give you the time back for the intervention. Thanks very much, because it was more than the average intervention. The point that I am making is to support the recommendations in your own report, convener, which talks about the need for sustained long-term funding. It is difficult to get the community capacity building in some of our most disadvantaged communities without a key group, without a core group that is a champion of that local community that is there to deliver in the long run. I thought that that was one of the best recommendations that you identified. On partnership working, the committee identified some important benefits in the form of staffs to comment from local councils to community groups. That strike a chord with me, because the relationship is very often one of a client relationship where the community group applies for money to the council, but it is not necessarily getting some of the capacity building that it really needs. I think that experience of joint work, better partnership working gives councils better understanding and knowledge and the value of the work that is being done by community groups, and hopefully better insight as to how they might be supported in the future, how it might shape other council policies. It is also very useful for community groups themselves to get a better handle on how councils work and what they might be more empowered to ask for in terms of future support and investment that other communities might be better equipped to ask for. I think that the particular recommendations about housing associations strike a chord with me as well. It certainly matches my experience locally, where organisations such as Castle Rock, Edinburgh and Dunedin Canmore do more than act strictly as landlords. They act much more as key players in regeneration in the community and the projects that they support benefit them in the long run in terms of social landlords, but they crucially benefit their tenants and they give them more support, more opportunities for employment and I think more confidence in the areas. I think that the points made about access for community use in terms of buildings is also an important finding. I would go beyond the point that is made about schools, which I think are important, but I think that there is also an issue about better access to buildings and joint use of buildings. I think that for many community groups it is not viable to support and to be able to pay for a building on their own. They actually need to be networking with other groups, and that is why community centres and joint projects need to come together. In that context, the community empowerment bill is important potentially in providing new opportunities for communities to be able to get access both to land and buildings and to use them in the community interest. The point that Kevin Stewart intervened on about sharing best practice is crucial, and I think that it needs not just to be between community groups themselves, I think that it also needs to be fed back into the wider public sector, because all organisations need to be able to learn from what works best. It is also much more likely to give them a shared sense of purpose and an understanding of what is going to work more effectively in the long term in terms of regeneration of communities. The point that the committee made about capacity building not just within community groups but also the issue of mainstreaming regeneration across public sector organisations was a crucial finding. The points about European funding, I think that we could do with more response from the minister in her concluding remarks. I am aware of projects that have not been able to go ahead or have been disrupted by the questions about whether they are being too small or there is an issue about state aids. In terms of scale, if we are going to get a successful regeneration, it does need to be bottomed up and it does mean that small community groups are as important and do need to be supported. That potentially means bringing together projects so that they do not miss out in European funding simply because they are small projects. I think that that is a problem of government funding that often looks for the big winners and forgets the importance of a network of community-based and bottom-up organisations. In terms of state aids, I think that we could do with better advice from the Scottish Government about how not to fall foul of state aids. I was at a seminar this morning where I was speaking about fuel poverty and community renewables and I know from reading some of the best practice in some of the English local authorities about the problems that have been experienced in terms of energy production and the extent to which state aids have been used against them. I can see it in some of the projects that I have seen in Scotland. I think that better advice and guidance about how to overcome those barriers and how not to fall foul of state aids would be very important. In other European countries, they have managed to power ahead with community projects and regeneration projects on renewables that have not fallen foul of exactly the same regulations. I think that there was a very striking phrase in the committee report to the effect that communities do not yet feel involved in regeneration. It is seen as something that is done to them. I hope that that is an aspiration to change that that will be shared across the chamber today. We need clear leadership from the Scottish Government, a much clearer strategy from the Scottish Government and a much more joined-up approach, which links regeneration with a commitment to tackle poverty, which needs to be at the heart of the Scottish Government's response to the report. The committee's recommendation to make a lot of sense is that the challenge will be implementing it. If I can finish on one point about transparency, there are a number of points in the committee's conclusions about the need for more transparency about the funds available for communities but also about how funds are spent and a key recommendation that the allocation of public expenditure should be reviewed to divert more of it to disadvantaged areas. We need to know that that is happening. Unless we have greater transparency, it is simply not possible to track what is happening, where and what its success is. I hope that, in today's debate, we are able to focus on what more can be done to deliver the regeneration that needs to be put in place in our communities. That requires long-term commitment, both in terms of aspiration and vision, but it also needs long-term investment, and it needs to have anti-poverty measures at the core of that strategy, and it needs to be right across Government. I now turn to the open debate. At this stage of the debate, I can give members up to seven minutes. Stuart McMillan, to be followed by Alex Rowley. Thank you very much. As a member of the local government regeneration committee, I want to add my name to those of the convener. In his comments, there are on-regarding the huge level of assistance that we received undertaking this inquiry. I personally found that this inquiry hugely interesting and extremely informative, and I thought that our approach from the regeneration activities of the past to the present will certainly be advantageous to any leader of the report that is going forward. The number of community representatives that we spoke to, whether it was in the Parliament or going outside of the Parliament, added hugely to our findings and recommendations. Clearly, there is no one-size-fits-all strategy to regeneration, and the various models have been and will need to be deployed going forward. The inquiry was wide-ranging, as we have already heard. Certainly, one of the areas that we looked at—not that we did not focus on, but we certainly looked at it—was the role of the urban regeneration companies. Certainly, as we know, there are six URCs in Scotland that were established in 2006 following the recommendations that were made in the City's Review of 2002 to lead the physical, economic, social and community regeneration of some of the most deprived areas in the country. URCs are formal partnerships of key representatives from the public and the private sectors that operate at arms length from the partner organisations. There are some differences in the set-up and the aims of the URCs, with two of them aimed at community regeneration. That is Rapplach and Craig Miller, with one community and economic regeneration. That is Clyde Gateway, and three, mainly, at the economic regeneration. That is Riverside-Inverclyde, Clydebank Rebuild and Urban Bay Regeneration Company. However, in general, the committee was disappointed that the response of some of the URCs was inflexible when they were enabled to run the original ambitious plans that were established. I accept that, as did the committee, that the economic conditions certainly played a part in that role. However, that cannot be used as a sole reason for the inflexibility. I personally agree with the Scottish Government in its response to a report where it states that the URCs have made a difference to their communities and are continuing to do so. I have seen many positive differences that have been made, but, as we say in paragraph 309 of our report, it states that we received evidence that demonstrated that different degrees of success, but no evidence that the original objectives were being achieved, nor that the social and economic needs were being met. Paragraph 443 of our report focused on our considerations of Riverside-Inverclyde, where we stated that it was clear to us that governance, lax and arrangements would benefit from improvement. Furthermore, those funding Riverside-Inverclyde were not scrutinising adequately its targets and work, and we were reassured when told that the action was being taken in this regard. We acknowledge that a number of the URCs have community representation on their boards, but we believe that more can be done by the URCs to embed the community in their decision-making structures in improving the accountability of such large public investment. One of the recommendations from the report, paragraph 483, was that the Scottish Government reviews at URCs progressed to date, including their governance arrangements and reviews that the aims of the URCs in light of the economic climate to ensure that they are appropriately placed to deliver on their objectives, and the review should re-establish a strategy in funding appropriate for the tasks in the current economic climate to ensure full benefit from the public investment. I note in response to the committee from the Scottish Government that it feels that this would be inappropriate to undertake that, but I certainly would ask the Scottish Government to reconsider the position, as it certainly did not appear that all URCs have enough local input to ensure that local aims and needs are actually being met by them. That brings me to the next issue and that I would like to touch upon. That is the issue of the community involvement, which I have heard a bit already. I certainly believe that, to have the best chance of any success, community involvement is absolutely imperative in any regeneration project. It is clear that all partners are not yet placing enough emphasis on true community participation and their approaches to regeneration, or are doing so too late in the decision-making process. We have heard the same messages as we have been through the public services reform inquiry in our committee. On page 3 of our report, we state that, for regeneration to be truly community led, particularly when it is being delivered by mainstream budgets of local authorities and other partners, communities need to be able to actively contribute to the decision-making process of public services at an early stage. That will mean providing resources to encourage communities to get involved and to equip them with the skills, the knowledge and the confidence to be active participants in the process. Furthermore, on page 5 of our report, the committee states that community capacity building is a concept that is yet to be mainstreamed through the delivery of public policy. We can go on. Paragraph 471 indicates that there is still a huge job to be done. As we state, the message at community level is that they do not feel truly part of the decision-making process and that regeneration is being done to them. Communities must be given the opportunities and crucially feel fully involved in all aspects of regeneration activity from the initial ideas, the identification of priorities and projects through to the implementation and completion. They must feel that they have a voice when it is at and it is also listened to at all times. In summary, the regeneration is about people themselves. It is absolutely about the people themselves. The best people to take decisions about the local area are the people who actually live and work in that local area, wherever it is. Nobody else knows as much about their priorities and their challenges. Nobody else cares as much about them about getting those decisions right. That is certainly why we need to have strong community involvement at any decision-making process or organisation dealing with regeneration. The whole inquiry that our committee went through absolutely was fascinating, but at the same time it highlighted a number of issues whereby, generally, communities do not feel as if they are involved in what is happening in the area. I know that the piece of work that we have undertaken will help the country going forward. I am delighted to be a member of that committee producing that piece of work. Many thanks. I now call on Alex Rowley to be followed by Mark McDonald. Thank you, Presiding Officer. I would also congratulate Kevin Stewart and the committee for the report that they have brought forward. I think that it makes a very useful contribution to the on-done discussion about community renewal and community regeneration. If I could draw the minister's attention very quickly to some of the work that is going on by the Carnegie UK Trust, because one area of regeneration is obviously town centre regeneration and I saw the boots kindly sent a brief on that to members. The Carnegie UK Trust launched a test town—that is what we called the project last year—up in Delfinland. There is some interesting results of that and I have now rolled that out currently right now across the UK. There are some interesting results there, but certainly one of the issues that came up there was the levels of rent that was being charged for some of the properties within town centres, and that was certainly a major barrier for new opportunities for people to try out new businesses. In terms of the wider report, I am certainly a big supporter of moving forward in terms of community planning. That is something that is moving at pace as well. The committee took evidence last week—the week before—for the chief executives of local authorities and the chief executive of the five council set out how they were progressing with community planning both at strategic level but also the local community plans that were being established at a much more area-based level, and we have heard evidence come elsewhere. That is an important development at different stages, at different local authorities across Scotland, but it is an important development that will engage the local communities and ensure that local communities are engaged in setting out what the priorities are at the local area. I certainly welcome that and think that that is an important development. It is about getting joined up policies, strategy and government at the local level, agreeing to set priorities and being able to move them forward. That is something that the Scottish Government fails to do in terms of the paper itself, in terms of looking at how it has joined up government from the Scottish Government. I welcome the recognition that regeneration is not just about physical regeneration—it has got to be about social and economic regeneration. I remember—I am old enough to remember—some 30 years ago in areas in my own constituency where there were areas that were qualified at that time for the old urban aid programmes because the levels of deprivation and poverty were in those communities. If we go into those communities today, we would not recognise them in terms of the physical regeneration that is taking place, but if we then look at the socioeconomic stats for those areas, very little has changed over that 30-year period. That is why we need to focus on the economic regeneration if we are serious about tackling poverty and inequality across Scotland. It has got to be about jobs. I have said time and time again that, throughout history, people never march for benefits or for higher benefits, people march for jobs. The answer to getting people out of poverty is giving them the ability to be able to earn a decent wage, earn a living and be able to look after themselves and their families. If we are going to do that, we need to tackle the skills agenda. We need to be looking at a much more radical approach to education. In those areas of deprivation, there is a general view for the educationalists that those schools, for example, will perform at a lower level than schools in other areas where they have a much more wealthier background and a much better local economy in which they are living in. That has never been something that I believe we should accept, but that needs bold Government policy that says that we will have a redistribution of resources and we will focus more resources into those areas of deprivation and focus on those areas where it makes a difference. That means, through the early years, through primary schools and secondary schools, that it is better to link up with the colleges so that young people have the opportunities to gain the skills and the educational opportunities that will set them up for the rest of their life and be able to access employment. That is just not happening at this present time. When I talk about joined-up Government policy, if you take, for example, the Fife area, since 2007, there has been a 54 per cent reduction in the number of students attending five colleges. The numbers that were registered to attend who had no formal qualifications has fallen by a stagger in 73 per cent. If we are serious about tackling inequality deprivation and regenerating those communities that suffer from that most, then we need to invest in further and higher education. What we actually need to see is a national strategy right across Scotland for numerous literacy and IT skills, the three skills for life that people actually need if they are going to progress and get jobs in life. It is those types areas and those types of investments that I believe we need to see going in. A joined-up strategy targets resources that is absolutely clear what it is trying to achieve, is clear on the outcomes that it is trying to achieve and is bold enough to say that there has to be a redistribution of money. I have drawn attention to a policy that the Scottish Government introduced recently, which was the free school meals. Everybody does not have a problem with the idea that you could have free school meals and give everybody free school meals, but in my constituency, at one topside of my constituency, which is the second highest-level deprivation in five, over 50 per cent of the children in one of the schools were already qualifying for free school meals based on the deprivation figures. At the bottomside of my constituency, which was a more wealthy area of my constituency, one per cent were qualifying based on the deprivation figures and based on poverty figures. The reality is that if we have finite resources, if we do not have enough resources, if we are serious about tackling poverty, inequality and regenerating our communities, then we need to be bold enough to target the resources at those communities. That is where this Government is failing at present. I was not a member of the committee during the evidence-taking and the compilation of the report itself. I was on the committee in time to attend the launch of the report and the launch events that one took place in Aberdeen, which was the one that I attended. Unfortunately, it happened to coincide with the day that the Scottish Government and UK Government meetings were being held in Aberdeen as well, so perhaps it did not end up quite as far up the news agenda as the committee might have hoped it to. I think that the key message that has been emphasised throughout the speeches thus far is that in order for regeneration to be a success, the community needs to be in the driving seat of the process, not a passenger in the process. I think that that is the overriding message that has come through. During my time as a councillor in Aberdeen, I spent time as the vice-chair of the Housing and Environment Committee and had specific responsibility for the council's regeneration policies during that period. A lot of work was being undertaken to ensure that communities were the ones leading in the regeneration in the area rather than it being an officer-led process, which had often been the view that communities had held that regeneration was something that was done to them, not with them. That comes through in the report that there has been success in some areas, but there is a lot of work that needs to be done to try and get some of the bureaucrats in our local governments to let go a little bit of the powers and to hand some of them down to communities. I think that the forthcoming community empowerment bill will hopefully help with some of that process. The other thing that was struck with me when I was dealing with regeneration at a local level and now still to this day is that regeneration is something that has to be everybody's business. All too often, regeneration is viewed as being solely the preserve of whether it is the minister or the council convener or the council officials who have initial responsibility for regeneration, and there is maybe not the same emphasis and priority attached to it in other departments and other portfolios. I hope that that is something that is starting to ebb away. It was certainly something that was striking when I was dealing with the issues that people did not necessarily see the links that can be fostered between, for example, education and regeneration. The links were not always initially apparent. In terms of the funding aspect that Sarah Boyack highlighted, and I echo the point that Kevin Stewart made, I agree that there needs to be funding provided to groups, to organisations in order to allow them to advance proposals forward. I think that even from my experience locally, in bringing forward, for example, regeneration of play facilities, there is an opportunity there to bring in private sector funding. Most private companies—if the member will allow me to just develop the point and I will come back to her—are looking for ways to spend their corporate social responsibility budgets within local communities. I think that there is an opportunity for that to be linked to some of the regeneration work that is on-going. What we need is somebody to bridge that gap between the communities and the private sector. Often, I think that that is a role that the local authority could be much more proactive in playing, particularly through, for example, their economic development departments, who, again, if it was the case that regeneration was viewed as everybody's responsibility, would have a role in the process. I said to Ms Boyack that I would give way to her, and I will do so now. The point that I was making was that it is not just that whether money is available or not, it is the crucial point about revenue funding for local groups, so that there is a local group that can demand and have a local campaign and can keep going while it can draw in money from other organisations. It was about the fact that there needs to be some kind of public sector funding to keep the groups in place, not about there not being any scope for getting private sector investment in any area at all. I accept that point. The question that comes in from that, and it is more complicated than saying that it applies across all groups, is whether you have groups that require on-going revenue funding to support their work or whether you have groups who do not require revenue funding to support them in terms of having their meetings and having their discussions. At the point at which they want to take plans from the point at which they have been discussed to the point at which they are implemented, there is then revenue funding available for them to apply to rather than there being necessarily revenue funding given to them throughout. I want to come on to discuss a particular local concern that I have around regeneration and where I think that there is work that needs to be done to make sure that the community at the centre, and that is around the community of Middelfield in my constituency, which is a regeneration community within Aberdeen. Middelfield is going to be significantly affected by the infrastructure improvements that will take place at the Hadigan Roundabout. There will be demolition work of a number of properties. There will also be a triangle of land that is left, which at the moment would contain a large amount of housing, but would be bounded on three sides by major roads. At the time when I was in the council administration, the clear direction of policy was that this land would be cleared of housing, that people would be rehoused. Housing would be cleared because we did not want people essentially living in what would be an island surrounded by the roads and that the funding that was released from the sale of that land for commercial use would then be reinvested in regeneration for the wider Middelfield community that would remain following the works that had been undertaken. At the moment, there is a question mark over whether that will still remain to be the case. There has been a watering down of that commitment over the recent years. There has now been an acceptance from the City Council to follow the plans and the timescales that the Scottish Government has put in place. What we find through and what I have found in my discussions with the community is that they still feel that they are caught in the middle of the process rather than in the driving seat of the process. What I would encourage the local authority to do is to get involved with the community, work up a plan with the community for how that process will go forward, what the council's plans are for that land, what the community would like to see and arrive at some sort of strategy that will give some certainty to the people of Middelfield. I want to mention one final element of work that is going on in my constituency, Presiding Officer, and that is the organisation SHMU, the Station House Media Unit, which offers a range of opportunities for people in the regeneration communities in my constituency. It offers a positive transition employability scheme that takes young people through a 12-week placement where they learn a range of different employability skills and media skills, and it then tries to help to place them into work. However, it also offers media output by regeneration communities for regeneration communities. I think that that is important as well, because for many of those communities they do not feel that there is a voice out there that is speaking for them or to them. SHMU offers them that opportunity both through their radio output and also through local magazines that highlight the work that is on-going in those areas. I think that there is a lot of important work that is going on out there in our communities which needs to be supported. I hope that the work that is being done by the committee in terms of the report can help to act as a bridge between the regeneration strategy that the Scottish Government has in place and the forthcoming community empowerment bill, because I think that the links are quite clearly there, and it is important that we ensure that all the work leads towards the same conclusion. Thank you Presiding Officer. I welcome the debate this afternoon, and I welcome the inquiry, detailed and thorough, as Mr Stewart indicated it was. I do not think that anything nowhere in the long term is as important as the activity of regenerating our communities, re-galvanising our neighbourhoods and handing real local community power back to local people. That is why, Presiding Officer, I believe that regeneration of our local government and those communities is not about physical redevelopment, but about, as the report says, it is about people on the ground. That will probably mean, Presiding Officer, swooping away some of the myriad of centralised support and government agencies in the long term, and then looking in the medium to the long term as to what we define what we mean by local government, its restructuring and its structures. It will mean what we have come to accept as local government has to change and how we change and reinvigorate it, particularly to rid the scarch of deprived and disadvantaged communities and achieve a fairer local society. We have to accept risk, and that means further devolution and real community empowerment with attendant appropriate support of central, although not always central funding in the short term as we make the changes that will allow action to be taken and will restore pride of citizens in the communities in their local government. Presiding Officer, our challenges and our opportunities, I believe, lie primarily in four recognisable areas. One is demographics, the other vision and outcomes, the third is leadership and organisation, and four is directed investment and funding, not least in housing. The committee rightly focused on those in many other areas, but I suggest that there requires to be the underlining of its recommended interventions in the transition to real local democratic power and responsibility. On demographics, let's look at the projected percentage change in population over the next 25 years by council area. I make no apologies for using South Ayrshire as an example. Over that period of 25 years, South Ayrshire will face a projected reduction of 2.4 per cent in population across all ages. Glasgow, on the other hand, shows a 15.1 per cent increase. In children aged not to 15 years over that same period, South Ayrshire has a 6.7 per cent reduction, while Edinburgh, for example, has an increase of 27 per cent. The same trend applies to working age and pensionable age demographics. The reduction of improving the lives of people through their regeneration of their communities, the creation of sustainable environmental and economic development, will require, I believe, discriminatory proposals and funding in the short term based on those demographic projections. Secondly, community-led regeneration, people-led regeneration, requires vision. One, a vision that embraces the will and the skill of the people in the communities that secures the required training to fill the skill gaps in those communities, just as the element of acceptable risk marries those skills to the local and, indeed, we should be afraid of private investment. That is why I welcome the community empowerment bill, but as it develops it has to be prepared to be changed to allow communities to push the boundaries of people investment and ownership as we find experience allows. The third sector, the care sector, social enterprises, the voluntary sector and co-operators and, indeed, collectors are all integral and important ingredients to successful renewal and regeneration, independent and co-dependent. Presiding officer, the delivery, the outcomes of a locally based regeneration strategy will depend on strong local and community based leadership. A leadership of broad experience that will embrace local needs, the vision of which I talked, strategy and the community's aspirations, a leadership that will understand and accept that investment, outsourcing, partnerships, accountability will be there to meet the community's anticipated outcomes and ensure that they are achieved. That is why, as I say, the community empowerment bill and the public procurement bill are of the essence as a foundation as we go forward. Properly directed funds and investment are key with a community oversight and, I believe, a necessary audit of how funds are spent. We have the ridiculous situation last year, for example, in South Asia, which loaned £4 million to Birmingham City Council at a rate of interest, which was half of standard bank rate. That would not happen had there been proper community oversight. Regeneration requires leadership that secures focused local investment and that provides a social financial return. I do not denigrate the many funding regimes that are currently available to communities. I would like to see them streamlined. It is safe to say that we need to consider the cost of administration in distributing those funds to communities and getting them to the front line as quickly as we possibly can. The committee's demand for a review of the few URCs is that their governance that aims in funding is laudable and, indeed, is very, very urgent. In air, we have air renaissance, which has been in existence for several years with considerable central government spending and funding, and yet there is no discernible change in achievement. Government funds, even short-term funds, should be directed to investment and operational opportunities and outcomes. They are not just there for a cosmetic makeover as to what we think might be happening underneath. The committee recommendations of the Government response are laudable, but I seek that, in the motto of air, we near forget the people. Let us dispense with as much of the overarching bureaucracy and centralisation of local government regeneration needs and let us trust in the people and their communities. Many will succeed, some will fail, but that should not be an inhibitor to setting our communities and our people free. I congratulate the committee on its work and report. From the health committee perspective, we recognise the importance of building community capacity and powerlessness. All of the tackling issues, there is no doubt, can improve the health and wellbeing of our country, and maybe there will be an opportunity for those committees to share some of that work and even take some of that work on. I was interested in the other aspects of it, because the regeneration game is one that has been played and ever-clied for many years. Somebody mentioned 60, but it feels longer than that. It went through its various phases. The private sector remembered and withdrew suddenly, and at the heart of some of the failings there that we have not got the relationships right. There will be constant change in industry, particularly when employing mass numbers of people, but there will be no notification, no planning, no run-down, no strategy at the beginning. Communities such as Gareth and Port Glasgow are left with that challenge. Of course, those times were better times. The private sector led that, because house building was all the way, they could sell house building. The private sector rushed away out of Gareth and Port Glasgow in the heart of the community and started building in other surrounding areas. Building up new communities and exaggerating the decline and deprivation that was in the central areas, leaving the brownfield sites for many, many years. That happened then. The well-meaning Governments of all descriptions came along and said that we need to replace some of those jobs with other jobs. They replaced one over-dependency on the shipbuilding jobs for an over-dependency on electronics jobs, and the cycle then begins again. We have been there and we have done it, and we saw the well-meaning Governments coming along with quick fixes. We saw the successes, such as green-up processes, two-thirds of the Royal Bank's RBSs and UK mortgages. That was something that came from innovation, but there was too much that was not followed through. Some of that influence was brought about by the Urban Regeneration Company many, many years later. There have been regeneration companies that have tried to embass—whether they did or be a debate—some of the mistakes that have been made in the past, referred to by Stuart Stevens earlier. They tried to get away from the quick fixes. They tried to establish secure funding over a long period of time. They tried to engage local authorities. They tried to engage the private sector. All of those ambitions were there for it, but how can it survive when, 10 years into the project, we have pulled funding? We are making judgments. We are comparing Inverclyde with the decline in population and all its past problems with growth in Inverness. How can we take regeneration seriously and the objectives of the Scottish Government who understand regeneration to be the holistic process of reversing economic, physical and social decline of places where market forces alone will not suffice? A Scotland where our most disadvantaged communities are supported, where all places are sustainable and promote well-being. If you believe that and accept, as John Swinney and other Government ministers here believe, that we are more vulnerable to recession and decline, why is it that the funding has been pulled from the urban regeneration company? Why is it that our local college has face cuts? Why is it that our housing budget has face cuts? We need to get serious about regeneration. Physical reconstruction does matter check. It matters to those who voted in great numbers to get investment in the housing sector and transform their lives and where they live in Inverclyde. All of those things were happening and we are delivering. It is a different matter to say when we examine that where the outcome is good or where the outcome is bad, but what we should not have done is withdraw completely. That is what has happened. We are in a situation in which we believed that we were eventually winning the regeneration game, only to find now that we are losers. However, apart from that gripe, I think that the report is a serious piece of work. It raises issues that need to be raised. We need to do it better. Empowering our communities through regeneration is the only way forward, but we must be consistent. We must, as Stuart Stevenson says, test it. We must learn from our mistakes, but accept clearly that in any project of regeneration there will be success and failure. Our ambition should be for success for communities like Inverclyde. I congratulate my former colleagues on the committee for the excellent report that they have produced. The convener's forward defines regeneration, saying that it is aiming at reducing poverty, inequality and decline, with a clear focus on people in the most disadvantaged communities. It is hard to disagree with a single word there, but I think that there is something missing from that, and that is that, in the long run, we have to make those communities self-sustaining. If they continue to depend on outside support, then regeneration is a non-ended task. I want to take a rather iconoclistic view of this debate, which is a bit different from colleagues around the chamber. It is not that I have disagreed with what I have heard. Indeed, the genuine passion that Duncan Neill has just contributed is exactly the sort of thing that we should be hearing. He has got perhaps a little closer to this than almost anybody else. One of the visits that we made as a committee, which has been referred to, was to Kevin Stewart's constituency where we visited the Seton bankies. Now, what was inspiring about that visit was that the excellent things that were going on in that community were nothing whatsoever with any centrally brought regeneration activity. There were grassroots changes. There were inspiring people in that community who were so disconnected from any of the organisations that were involved in regeneration that nobody had ever told them that what they were doing could not be done, so they just got on and did it. Of course, they succeeded. We must not use with people like that the very word regeneration, because it is not their word. The moment you use a word, a big long word with multiple syllables that people are not familiar with, what you are saying is that this is somebody else's responsibility, not your responsibility. We have got to use language that means something to the people who are going to make the difference, the bankies, enthusiasts. Someone else's word moves it away. Let me just pick an example from a entirely another area, Cip Cano, who won a gold medal at the Olympics in 1968 in Mexico City in the 1500 metres and in 1972 in Munich in the 3000 metres staple chest. He won a gold medal at the Commonwealth Games in Edinburgh in 1970. He grew up in a rural part of Kenya. His parents died when he was a youngster. When he first rose to his feet to take his first steps, nobody knew he was going to be a world champion. Nobody told him that it was difficult. He did not know how difficult it would be. He just got on and did it. He was not surrounded by people saying, do not worry, son, it is our responsibility. We will take it away. I think that the Seaton bankies are exactly the same as Cip Cano. Sarah Boyack said that she wanted a more greatly joined-up approach. No, we want the opposite of that. We do not want a joined-up approach, because a joined-up approach means waiting for someone else. If we do it ourselves in a granular way, then we will succeed or fail in small steps. Those little grains can join together and build their successes from the community upwards. The joined-up approach is the enemy of effective community regeneration. Of course, I am exaggerating for effect, as you all perfectly well know, but I think that we have to look at this a little bit different. I want to see space for happenstance, for accidental success. I want to see small scale, where no failure cripples the person who failed, where he encourages them to go and find a new solution, where that scale grows. I will, if you are brief. John Mason. I agree with a lot of what he says. Would he accept that there are some issues, though, such as big areas of contaminated ground that have to be done top-down? Of course there are. Is there a role for the top? Yes, but only at the command of the bottom. That is the point. It is not that there is not space for the big things, it is who says the big things get done. Fred P. Brooks in his wonderful book on project management, The Mythical Man Month, talks about the non-commutativity of time and effort. It is garbage, is it not? You cannot understand a word. What it boils down to is that if you have a hole to dig, and it takes six hours for a man to dig the hole, it means that if you put six men in the job, it will not get done in one hour, because they have to co-operate and co-operate, and it is overhead. One person doing the job often will be far more effectively than a team. He poses a second question. How do you make a late project later? His answer is that you add staff. When you add staff, the staff on the project have to train the new staff and stop doing the job that they are supposed to be doing. The corollary is that you take away the people who are causing you the problem and slowing you down and let the little bear handful get on with it. That is the recipe for community action. Colleagues, the whole business of community regeneration is not new, very far from it. Hippodamas 2,500 years ago, the Greek was the inventor of town planning, a regeneration of a different system. Aras Totol criticised him and said that his ideas were loopy. In Scotland, Sir Patrick Giddas came up with terrific ideas. His mother, of course, was Janet Stevenson, so he was bound to be a good guy, and he was actually a sociologist. He was not an engineer, he was not an economist, he was a person who looked at people. If we do not look at people, we are not going to succeed. We must not take those people out of their area of success. The Peter principle is that people get promoted until they are promoted to a senior enough position where they are no longer capable of being promoted. In other words, they are no longer capable of doing the job into which they are being promoted. We are going to leave people in communities where they can make a real difference. In conclusion, I am delighted to advise Mr Stewart that my willies have survived their visit to Cumbinald and continued to prosper and are available to other members if required. We politicians are often guilty of saying think big. I am here to say think small, indeed think very small. Enormous capacity is out there. We just have not allowed the space to do so. Our communities and our people in them, there is one word that they must never, ever hear. Of course, it is particularly relevant this year, and that word is no. Thank you very much. I now call George Adam to be followed by Anne McTaggart. Thank you, Presiding Officer. One of my colleagues just said follow that. I do not think I will. I will try and do what I am good at myself. I may mention the town up easily at one point during the report because I welcome this report and all the hard work that the committee obviously did during this. My time with dealing with things like regeneration is correct. When we use words like regeneration, we are actually taking it away from the very people who want to just get the job done. It is just a case of getting the sleeves up and doing the hard work as well. That was a valid point that we made. When I first got involved, it was as a councillor in Remshire Council, and one of the things that we noticed with the community planning partnership programme was that when you had the engagement with a lot of the groups, you actually seen all their good ideas and what they wanted. I found that extremely, and that gave me the reason for what we wanted to do and what we wanted to provide. One of the first things that we did was ensure that an administration in Remshire Council was to create the local area committee structure where there was voting for community groups to make a decision what we did with the Paisley common good fund and various other funds that were available to those groups so that they had a say in it. Instead of what had happened in the past, where in a darkened council room, councillors decided what they were actually going to do with the money, I think that that was more open. It was a better way forward, and I found it a lot better as well because it made sure that I was actually, as a convener of that group, making sure that the public were getting what they wanted and things were successful. Some of the things that we did was we made sure that we got investment of £220,000 in tennis courts from Tennis Scotland in the south end of Paisley. People thought that I was daft and that I was not going to get the money, but I got the money because we thought big and we decided to get it in that small area of Paisley. We also looked at getting things like an outdoor gym, which I went by the other day and it was extremely successful. The whole idea was to make sure that you had intergenerational movement and people not sitting there walking down the park being scared of younger people and older people. Everybody was there together and that worked. Those were all things that came from the public and the local authority went on with it. One of the on-going issues that we constantly heard and I heard during my time as a councillor on the scrutiny board when we looked at various funding streams that we could do for projects was that there was an on-going report about building capacity in areas such as mine and in constituencies such as mine for larger projects. A lot of good smaller projects are going on, but the larger life-changing projects are more difficult because people shy away from it because they do not believe that they have the capacity to push forward with that. I do not think that that is true because it is just a case of thinking positively and thinking differently. Ensuring that you give those people the opportunity, those groups, use every single bit of passion that they have for their local town and their local area to good effect. One of the things that I can say was that the Paisley Development Trust came to me regarding the wanting to get a building in the area so that it could be one of the older buildings that was empty. At that time, the Russell Institute was being left by the NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde, and I said, why do not we go for that building? Why do not we go towards two years later working with the local authority and other partners? That building is, and the Scottish Government, that building is going to be back being used again in the town. That is a case of that came from that group. That came from the bottom-up. They wanted to do something, but they engaged with the local politicians. Local politicians worked together of various party colour, and we managed to deliver something there. That shows us the difference that we can make when we all focus and start to work together. However, during the investigation, the committee obviously went to the centre of the universe during their deliberations and were in Paisley. While they were in Paisley, they spoke to community activists from Fergusley Park and went to the home of the famous Paisley St Myrn. St Myrn is a perfect example of a community anchor organisation, because the report mentions that as well. With some of the work that they have done over the years, and I think that they mentioned it to the committee when they were there, was that they have worked with the local authority and various other local businesses to deliver the St Myrn street stuff, which, as I have mentioned it before, they go out into areas where there have been problems with young people, and they engage with them, play street football, there is a youth gym, there is a gym in the blast, there is all these things, and it has brought down youth disorder in some areas by 25 per cent. The report mentions in page 66 that, when they went to St Myrn, they said how they use an open door policy, they open the clubs, they make the clubs, you know, lots of football clubs talk about being a community club, but St Myrn actually opened the door to the public because they know that that is the future for them and they are a community asset. The only problem with some of the things that they are doing is that it is a basket of funding measures and it is done on a yearly basis. When I was talking, Mark McDonald said earlier on that people end up thinking that regeneration is something that the council does or something that the Government does. I think that he is right when you say that it is bigger than that because St Myrn chairman, Stuart Gilmer, said jokingly to the chief executive of Remshire Council, why do not you second some of your social workers to St Myrn and I will help you with some of the problems that you have? That might sound like a silly idea initially, but it is valid because, when you look at the other projects that I have done, they have the credibility and they are not looked upon by the members of the public as the enemy effectively. They can engage with them. It is the same people who are doing the job, but they are coming in not as the council to discuss from an enforcement point of view, they are coming there as someone who is there to help you. They have the credibility and engagement. One of the things that we looked at working with other organisations, I was on Mr McNeill's health and sport committee for all of two meetings, and they were talking about sports hubs. They talked about the European model, how we could actually do all the clubs played multiple sports and everybody went into their professional clubs area and it made such a difference to the area. I had discussions with Kelburn Hockey Club, our local hockey team, St Myrn FC, Remshire Council, Remshire Leisure Trust, UWS and the West College of Scotland, and we engaged with Remshire in the third sector interface and the Scottish Government ministers. We talked about how we could make that happen in Paisley and how we could take that idea. When we discussed the national lottery in an area like Fergusley, where St Myrn Park is, we were in an area of multiple deprivation. Like Mr Stevenson said, someone who is born in Fergusley does not grow up believing that they live in an area of multiple deprivation, they live in Fergusley and they just want to get on with their life. We want to make sure that they can get that access. The idea that we had with that idea was to eventually get to a stage that they could get the access to education. It is not about elite football stars, it is about using that capital spend, that regeneration and trying to make a difference in areas like Fergusley Park. That is the project that we are currently working on now. All were shot, Presiding Officer, is the money, but we are looking for about a four or five year programme with the national lottery. That can make a difference in a place like Fergusley Park. As Mr Stevenson quite rightly said, the report says that it is about galvanising and getting the support from your local community, giving them what they want and ensuring that they can make a difference in their lives. In my role as a member of the local government and regeneration committee, I have had the opportunity to examine the evidence of current limitations to the delivery of regeneration across Scotland. I have also been presented with examples of how public and private bodies are working together to achieve regeneration in a way that reflects the aspirations of the communities that they serve. I am satisfied that the committee began its investigations with a focus on what regeneration means to those tasked with delivering it. The idea that it seeks to reverse poverty, deprivation and long-term decline reflects well on those who have presented evidence to the committee and it reassures me that there is a broad consensus between the stakeholders on what regeneration should actually be aiming to achieve. However, the committee also found that regeneration is not considered achievable without genuine community involvement and that the process takes a significant amount of time. Stakeholders remain concerned that the communities feel that they are excluded from decision making by public bodies and that too often local people are not invited to take part in local projects or initiatives until they are near to their conclusion. That has been identified as a cause of poor relations between community groups and public bodies and is responsible for an on-going perception of tokenism. It is clear that regeneration efforts need to be community led in order to be successful, yet communities still do not feel that they are playing a strong enough role in the process. That imbalance needs to be fully addressed before significant progress can be made in reversing the long-term decline of some of our town centres and the significant levels of deprivation that is faced by too many people in Scotland today. Another issue that continues to affect the success of local regeneration efforts is the allocation of funding. Evidence presented to the committee suggested that funding for regeneration projects is patchy, with the communities and the local stakeholders unsure how to apply for the resources that they need. The application process to secure funding should be well advertised, transparent and consistent, and I believe that a focus on longer-term funding models would benefit disadvantaged areas the most. That would enable local projects to rely on a steady stream of support that can be invested in the local community based on its changing needs and circumstances. However, it is undeniable that the significant cuts to local authority funding is having a profound effect on regeneration efforts right across Scotland. Local government is tasked with maintaining its existing levels of service provision on a reduced budget, whilst introducing new commitments in a number of areas. That is simply unsustainable, and it is inevitable that regeneration projects will suffer as a consequence. Local government is a key partner in the delivery of regeneration to local communities, and it is clear that much more could be achieved for local people if existing council services received adequate levels of support. In my role as a member of the local government regeneration committee, I have found that the process of gathering evidence to be helpful in determining where our efforts should be focused has become clear that we need to strengthen the role of the communities in the design and delivery of services and learn from the experiences of those who have worked with public bodies to bring regeneration projects to their own local areas. I also believe that funding should be more readily available for those groups that understand the nature of their communities and the means by which local issues can be addressed. I am confident that that approach will result in successful regeneration projects that have the ability to reverse the long-term decline and tackle trends of deprivation right across the country. John Mason, to be followed by Gordon MacDonald. Thank you, Presiding Officer. I very much welcome this report and the opportunity to speak in this debate, although I was not on the committee. There is clearly a need for regeneration in a number of parts of Scotland, and we should welcome the good work that is going on. Particularly, I am pleased that there is joint working in many cases with European funds, and although the European Union may not be perfect, we should certainly do all that we can to benefit from it. I am also glad that the Government has emphasised housing, which is not the only means of physical regeneration but which certainly is one of the most important factors. I think that the importance of anchor organisations is a key point, and that is referred to in the report in paragraphs 232 to 236. One of the disadvantages for some of our less well-off communities is the lack of access to professional expertise. That has sometimes meant that applications for lottery funding are more successful in the better off areas. The report refers to housing associations in this regard as anchor organisations, and I totally agree that they can be key anchor organisations, combining local involvement and professional expertise. I take the point that Glasgow housing association made that we probably want to be flexible in how we define anchor organisations. It is also worth mentioning, perhaps here in passing, that both Glasgow City Council and GHA have a tendency to be very big and at times remote from their communities. If we are looking at subsidiarity and pushing power down, that certainly needs to be below Glasgow City Council and below Glasgow housing association level in Glasgow's case. I do want later to mention some of the challenges that we face. However, I think that we can also be very positive about a lot of the work that has been going on, especially in my experience in the east end of Glasgow. The Commonwealth Games has provided a tremendous focus for regeneration in general, but Clyde Gateway itself is distinct from that, and we have seen huge improvements through its work. Just getting contaminated land cleared up is tremendously important, although it does not always have the glamour or immediate above-ground impact of a new building or a new bridge. However, around about Bridgendon Cross, there have been massive changes in recent years. Firstly, the cross itself has benefited from public realm works. Secondly, right on the cross is the Olympia building, which has been virtually rebuilt, with just a very minimal part of it kept, albeit the best part. One of the key things in that building is the library on the ground floor, which is now much more visible and attractive than where the previous library was, which was very much tucked up along a narrow road. That is key if we want to improve access to IT for the general population as well as to obviously books in libraries. I think that libraries are hugely important, and we need to get them into buildings where people can see them, use them and be comfortable around them. To be fair to Glasgow life, which is the culture and leisure wing of Glasgow City Council, that has been happening around the city, and has certainly happened in Bridgendon itself. Another development very close to Bridgendon Cross is the Eastgate office development, which is within walking distance of the cross. That is now the home of community safety Glasgow. It used to be based in the city centre, and sometimes we can have an assumption that such large offices and headquarters buildings should be in the city centre. However, if we are serious about spreading investment and jobs around our cities, then we need to look at possible office relocations away from the city centre into some of the more challenging areas. Fourthly, the relocations obviously need links to public transport, and Bridgendon Cross has a station right at its heart. The station was already used fairly well before it was upgraded, but the upgrading means that it is an easy route now for new workers coming into the area to work in offices in the area, only a very few minutes on the train from Glasgow city centre. Obviously, I very much welcome today's announcement and which the minister repeated about the extra funding that I think is especially going into walking and cycle routes in that whole area, because, quite frankly, for those who know the whole area between Shawfield and South Lanarkshire, coming into the east end of Glasgow, there were large areas there that nobody ever went to, nobody ever crossed, nobody ever visited, and in particular the Cunninghavard loop just in South Lanarkshire was an example of that. Finally, perhaps on a slightly lighter note, among the new office developments, there are opportunities for smaller businesses to take up offices, and on the ground floors of those, often there are shops. One of those recently, which opened as a new shop, was, in fact, an underwear shop, and the health secretary, in fact, was there at the opening. However, despite this slightly lighter angle, there is a more serious to this particular local business, because it is catering for folk with colostomies and similar conditions who now have the opportunity to get underwear, which is attractive, but also appropriate to their particular conditions. As I said, there are challenges in all of this, and the report is realistic, I think, about these. One that has been touched on by a number of speakers already has been the question of community involvement, and I note the emphasis in the report on community involvement, and that is obviously very welcome. However, it can be a problem if there is less of a sense of community, as I think there is in many of our areas. My experience is that fewer people are attending community councils, tenants associations, churches and other community organisations. Sometimes we have seen the case where one or two people are either appointed, or they are self-appointed, but the question is whether they really represent the wider community. I saw that that came up at page 149 on the committee's visit to Glasgow. There is also a related challenge that, if a community is so rundown that there are relatively few people left in it—and an example of that would be Dalmarnock in my constituency—we are needing and planning for a lot more people to move into the area, but that raises the question as to whether the existing community will be swamped by what is hoped to happen or planned to happen in the future.  If we are trying to turn a whole area around, do we spend just enough to make it acceptable, or do we go over and beyond that and spend extra in order, hopefully, to have a bigger impact? That is tricky, and residents have questioned that in the Clyde Gateway area. For example, was £11 million too much to spend on a little-used railway station at Dalmarnock, or will it give a big boost to the area? Boundary issues are another point that I mentioned in passing the problem that we have some people within a boundary who get a lot of money thrown at them just outside the boundary and get no money whatsoever. Overall, I am very enthusiastic about regeneration in the east end of Glasgow. The public sector correctly takes the lead, but we need the private sector to follow. The local government and regeneration committee are to be congratulated for producing the report Delivery of Regeneration in Scotland. As the report acknowledges the key to any regeneration project must be community involvement, that is agencies working with local people to deliver a shared vision for any regeneration project. Community led regeneration, I believe, is the key to the success of any project, and I agree with Kevin Stewart when he said in his opening remarks that people must be at the heart of the decision making. The Scottish Government and local authorities have the ability to physically transform an area, but it is only when members of the community come together to tackle their social problems can an effective solution be found. Back in the 1990s, the Broomehouse area of my constituency was known as Little Bosnia as a result of the antisocial behaviour that was rife in the area at the time. The Scottish index and multiple deprivation rated it then as the worst 5 per cent for employment, health and housing, and the worst 2 per cent for education, skills and training. Local residents decided they had had enough, and a number of charities were established to tackle some of the root problems associated with the area. What we now know as the Broomehouse centre was established in 1989 with the purpose of advancement of education, health and the provision of the recreation facilities with the objective of improving the conditions of life for local people, including those in need by reason of age, ill health, disability or financial hardship. The Broomehouse health strategy group was established in 1993 with the aim of promoting healthy lifestyles within the local community by providing access to good quality low-cost healthy produce and raising awareness of health issues in the local community. The big project was formed in 2002 to provide support for children and young people aged 5 to 16 to develop and reinforce young people's skills, confidence and self-image by providing a range of activities using the schools gym hall, astroturf and activity rooms by adopting a preventative approach that has overcome issues of territorialism and healed divisions between groups of young people. The project recognises, respects and encourages the initiatives of young people, allowing them to be heard and express their views, but it also challenges young people to understand the consequences of their actions and attitudes. In 2005, the Broomehouse empowerment project inspired the regeneration of the open space at Broomehouse Grove with a new multi-use games area, play equipment, fencing and landscaping. The new ballcourt and play area gave youngsters somewhere to congregate and play sports in a safe environment. Thanks to investment by the Scottish Government, the previous Scottish Executive and the Council, there are now new schools in housing in Broomehouse. The latest housing development Auckland's in Broomehouse Crescent has sold 40 per cent of the housing available for sale before the show home opens this summer, with many of the people purchasing the homes being second or third generation families returning to the area. Over the years, the various groups operating in Broomehouse have rebuilt the community spirit in the area, and that was reflected recently in the mural project instigated by the Broomehouse health strategy group. The Broomehouse market area was one of the few places that still reflected the vandalism of the past. The problem was that it was in private ownership with the landlord having limited resources to tackle the problem, and the council reluctant to invest limited resources in shops that were privately owned. The Broomehouse health strategy group took it upon themselves with agreement of the owner to brighten up the area. They applied for a grant and with free paint from a well-known paint company under their international community campaign, Let's Colour, transformed the market area. Ideas for the decoration of the shop fronts and the walls of the market came from the ideas of local school children, youngsters attending workshops running at the big project summer programme, and sessions at the young carers project. Those drawings and ideas became large-scale vibrant mural works painted by a large group of volunteers, and nearly two years later, there has been little in the way of vandalism. Another success has been the big projects choir that put Broomehouse on the map when they signed the opening of the Olympic Games and at the reception to present Sir Chris Hoy with the freedom of the city of Edinburgh. Then there is the fruit and veg shop operated by the strategy group that has recently been refurbished as it gets ready to celebrate its 10th birthday. All of these initiatives have helped turn Broomehouse around, and although it still has some of the problems associated with other inner city areas, it no longer deserves the little Bosnia tag that it once had. Finally, Presiding Officer, I agree with Stuart Stevenson that we must give communities the ability and support to regenerate their own area. Many of the organisations that I have mentioned work within small budgets, but have big impacts on their community. Many thanks. Is it now Colin Richard Baker to be followed by Richard Lyle, seven minutes or thereby even a generous seven minutes? Thank you very much Presiding Officer. During my brief tenure as a member of the local government and regeneration committee, perhaps mercifully brief for the other members, I took part in latter stages of this inquiry into the delivery of regeneration in Scotland. I am happy to say that I very much enjoyed my short time on the committee and found this inquiry to be not only very interesting, but also very important as well, because, as other members have said, we spend a great deal of time in our Parliament talking about what policies should be introduced for communities, but somewhat less time on how we can ensure that those affected by policy and legislation in which we can play their part in ensuring that it does in reality meet their needs. Throughout this inquiry, the emphasis was on listening to groups, to communities and to individuals to hear their views on regeneration policy and how they should be involved in shaping the places where they live and the opportunities that they should have in the future. Of course, the committee itself engaged with local people to hear their views and saw the impact or sometimes the lack of impact of regeneration policy on the ground. I was pleased to attend the committee's visit in Dundee and the launch of the report in Aberdeen. I might not say what a refreshing change it was to take part in two committee events in the north-east, which might not be entirely unrelated to the waiting north-east contingent on the committee, and that was very welcome. I hope that ministers will play close attention to the recommendations that the committee has made on community engagement as they take forward the community empowerment bill. I am sure that the report will play an important role as we seek to ensure that the bill, in its final form, is best equipped to meet the need of genuinely creating more empowered communities. The role, membership and transparency of the CPPs, which have been referred to a number of times this afternoon, will be an important path for that debate, because it is clear that, at this moment in time, too many communities feel disempowered and disengaged from the decisions that affect them. That is perhaps why too few people take part in their community councils, as Mr Mason referred to earlier. If they felt more empowered, they felt more listened to and should they be more ready to be involved. This is a big challenge not just for community planning partnerships but for government, both national and local level. This report supports the general thrusts of the aims of the draft community empowerment bill, but it states that the committee is unclear about how the governance and accountability arrangements of CPPs will work in practice and how the partners will hold each other to account. That is something that will be required to be addressed during the consideration of the bill. The convener rightly highlighted a number of areas that the committee worked hard on to illustrate in our report and which still require a substantial response from the Government. I hope that the convener is successful and that the committee is successful in obtaining that response and that engagement from ministers during the passage and consideration of the bill. We also heard about the difficulty that local authorities and regeneration companies have had in delivering regeneration strategies and reducing inequality in what is a very difficult political and economic environment. We could debate at some length why that environment is so difficult and Duncan McNeill highlighted some of the issues that he has seen in his contribution earlier. However, the key concern for me in the course of this inquiry was to look at what strategies have been put in place, in particular by regeneration companies, and to examine what had worked, what had not, and from that to explore what lessons should be learnt for the future. In this, I found that the inquiry was a very instructive process. It was evident that a number of the plans on which the urban regeneration companies had embarked were predicated on economic growth and growth in the housing market in particular, which simply did not occur. Although, of course, it is easy to look back with hindsight now as we do, what this experience shows us is that such plans for regeneration, whether they be put forward by the URCs, councils or others, must in future be more readily adaptable to changing economic circumstances. It is also fair to say that, within the experience of the URCs, our examples, too, of best practice should be encouraged and shared. That is why it is welcome that the committee has decided to revisit the work of the URCs towards the end of this year, because I hope that it will see evidence there of the urban regeneration companies taking on board some of the committee's valuable conclusions. However, of course, this is only being one aspect of the committee's inquiry. I think that one of the impressive things about this report, which Cameron Buchanan referred to in his contribution, is indeed its scope, making recommendations to the Scottish Government on the importance of a wide number of areas of implementing the principles of the Christie commission to councils on the role of community officers and very practical proposals, for example, on the better use of community assets, which a number of members referred to this afternoon, and also highlighting the need for effective use of Scottish Government and European funding streams, which are essential, because we have to realise that there is still a lack of private sector funding for these important initiatives, and the role that must be played not just by Government and councils but by other public sector agencies and housing associations as well. I think that here I essentially depart from Stuart Stevenson's rather more laissez-faire approach. The history of community regeneration is laid out in some detail in the committee's report, and that history shows that these are not issues that are easy to address or resolve or don't take action from Government at every level. What it shows is that non-intervention is not a recipe for success, but indeed to make progress on regeneration far from completing the job and to make progress on community empowerment, this takes a focused effort over many years by many people, efforts that can all too easily be derailed. That is why I am pleased that the committee has already indicated that it has desired to revisit these issues in the future. I do not think that Mr Stevenson was saying that there should be non-intervention, but there needs to be the right intervention, and that also needs to have community input to a huge degree. Some of the failures of the past, I would suggest, are down to the fact that local people were not listened to. I think that we are beginning to get that right, but there is still scope for more listening. I wonder if Mr Baker would agree with that in his last minute. I certainly would, Mr Stevenson. I will stand to be corrected on that. I hope that I have not been uncharitable in my interpretation of what he said. Of course, I very much agree what Mr Stewart has said about involving local people in crucial decisions. If ministers in Parliament ensure that communities play a greater role in the future in determining the strategies and policies that affect them and the regeneration of their communities, I can only give this important work a greater chance of success in the future, and that is why I commend the report to ministers and to Parliament. I am not a member of the committee. The report sets out a vision of Scotland where our most disadvantaged communities will be supported. I am sure that the report intends to respond to the challenges faced by disadvantaged communities to help to create a Scotland where all places are sustainable and where people want to live, work and invest. In order to implement the vision successfully, regeneration must be approached in a holistic manner by addressing the economic, physical and social needs of our communities. Those elements cannot be tackled individually. Each one of them is connected and vital to the success of the strategy. Further to that, the delivery of regeneration relies on a wide-ranging support outcomes being achieved. Those are in no way unique to this policy and crossover into other Government policies, including but not limited to economic development, planning, public health and housing. Those outcomes apply to every community in Scotland not just to those who are disadvantaged. In light of that, there is a need for a co-ordinated approach across the public, private and third sectors. Alongside the community-led action, in order to achieve those outcomes in vulnerable communities, a concentrated effort is needed across Government and all mainstream services to deliver the required results, and so successfully and sustainable communities should therefore be at the heart of delivery of services at national and local level. It is my experience from a previous project in Belsaltown centre that, in my opinion, a number of key elements need to be in place to deliver successful regeneration, so that it puts communities first, effectively involves local residents in the regeneration process and empowering communities, incorporates a holistic process to make connections between a physical, social and economic dimension of the strategy, and adopts a long-term vision that focuses on the safety and quality of places. The strategy applies to all Scotland's communities, however some of our communities will need additional support in order to become economically, physically and socially sustainable. Most often, this extra help will be required in places in need of physical renewal and which underperform economically. Due to that, the nature and the scale of regeneration interventions will be different in different areas, and the type of intervention will vary depending on local circumstances. The interventions will vary from large-scale development focused on economic opportunity to more localised activity intended to address the community's needs by tackling ingrained issues. Whilst being aware of where extra support is needed, it is important that our focus is on the assets that our communities have and not the deficits of the area. Those assets may be economic, physical and social and should be used to deliver sustainable positive change. It is important, as it generally recognises, that applying a label to a community such as deprived or disadvantaged can have a negative and stigmatising effect, and so by focusing on the positive aspects of our communities it will help to overcome the perceived stigma. We should always ask ourselves what makes this area good. What are the opportunities rather than using it as a problem area? Focusing on regeneration plays a key role in ensuring that our communities are resilient and tackle deprivation and staves off decline in the community. That in turn will reduce the need for regeneration in the future and help to support sustainable economic growth for the whole of Scotland. Investment in regeneration will see a knock-on effect of associated budgets such as health, crime and other social issues. A higher proportion of those budgets are generally spent in disadvantaged areas as they deal with the effects of deprivation across a wide range of negative outcomes. By tackling those negative outcomes, we should see a reduction in spending on mainstream budgets. As previously said by Mr Stevenson in the debate, lessons should be learned from previous regeneration work. Yes, think small. The regeneration in a town centre that I was involved in took five years and hindsight is a wonderful thing. As a previous chair of the Belsal industry area partnership, the council promoted a major regeneration project in Belsal. We incorporated new pavements at town centre, which we thought we would be proud of, a one-way system in the town centre with customer parking labis in the town. That was to encourage shoppers back to the town of Belsal, but that also caused problems when the people wrongly parked all day in designated areas. With hindsight, we should have reversed the one-way system that many people did, but there are many comments that I could make further in regards to that. What I would say is that a full consideration of any work should be undertaken to address any future problems. Gordon MacDonald spoke of area regeneration. My best regeneration project and a previous council award that I represented in Belsal was in the dual scheme in the 1990s. Those were bison-type houses, damp prefab-housed flats, which, at the end of the day, we had five blocks demolished.  I ensured that the land was sold to private and also for social rented housing and council housing. Now that whole area in the dual scheme and my former ward in Orbison has been totally transformed from flat roofed, back-and-front doors and reclad flats into an area, we can improve areas if we take the time to do so. That is why I think that this is an excellent report and I compliment the committee and all the members of that committee on the work that was done. We move to closing speeches. Thank you very much, Deputy Presiding Officer. There is an often-used quote that says of empathy, that you should never criticise a man until you have walked a mile in his shoes. Today, we have learned something, that Kevin Stewart has already walked a mile in Stewart Stevenson's wellies and that Stewart Stevenson has informed us that this privilege, no opportunity, is available to any other member of the Parliament who may wish to become indeed. Is the member aware that it is also said, of course, that once you have walked a mile in someone else's shoes, the odds are that he has not kept up with you and you get to keep them? I would attempt to ask if you got your willies back. If I move on, it was also the nature of this debate. It was introduced at some length by Kevin Stewart, in which he told us that he goes as far back in this report as talking about the Romans. Will not to be outdone once again Stewart Stevenson managed during the course of the debate to take us back into Greek times and talk about things that happened two and a half thousand years ago, although I presume that he did not know the gentleman personally. The nature of this report is extremely important for Parliament. As it was set out by Kevin Stewart in the opening paragraph, which he quoted, for most of the last 60 or 70 years, the concept of regeneration was often identified in most people's minds as relating to just the physical development or redevelopment of communities in which people lived. That is a mistake that we have made and made time again. There are many during the course of this debate who have pointed out the fact that some of our actions simply do not work. What we need to do is ensure that we concede this failure and make sure that we do not make the mistake again. In fact, there was brief mention of the post-war slum clearance programme in Glasgow, and as we all know, a vital job was done when many of the substandard houses and tenements were removed but were replaced by houses that then became undesirable in a relatively short period of time. The consequence of which was that those failed communities found themselves being redeveloped once again in a little over a generation. The fact that we have learned from those mistakes and the regeneration projects that are going on in Glasgow today demonstrate how it can be done much more effectively is, in my view, a way of proving that we can learn from our mistakes. Looking at the report, there are some aspects of it that do not tell us anything new. We know that the best regeneration projects are led by the communities themselves. Communities who have been empowered by organisations such as local authorities and housing associations to decide the best direction for their neighbourhood. Regeneration is an excellent opportunity to engage with hard-to-reach residents and ensure that they have a voice. It is also vital that regeneration brings with it training opportunities and employment opportunities, especially in areas of high deprivation. There is much that the private sector can bring to the table when it comes to regeneration. I would have said that anyway, but I am delighted to have heard people around the chamber also raise this issue. I am keen to ensure that we do not miss the opportunities that exist to bring private investment, whether at a small scale or on a large scale, to redevelopment projects. There is so much that can be used to achieve the kind of sustainable development that we need. Mark McDonald pointed out that the development often needs to be led from the bottom up. He said that communities need to be in the driving seat. I suggest, however, that councils need to put their shoulder to the wheel, not their foot on the brake. For that reason, I think that local authorities, however much they have achieved, need to continue to look to their responsibilities to ensure that they are doing all that they can to ensure that those objectives are achieved. We need homes, community facilities and accessible services. If we are going to achieve that across the redeveloped communities, we need to do that in such a way as to make it effective. For that reason, the report goes into some of the more difficult areas of what we need to achieve and how we need to achieve those objectives. I think that the proposal by Stuart Stevenson that we should allow an almost entrepreneurial approach to coming up with new ideas was a breath of fresh air. It is not the focus that this debate will take as being central, but nevertheless it indicates that there are people all around this Parliament who believe that supporting ideas from the community are the way to achieve our fundamental objectives. As I come to a conclusion, it has to be said that for many communities regeneration is a threat. Quite often, when regeneration projects are put in place, individuals do feel that it may threaten them in some way. We need to make those programmes successful so that they become attractive to those who can benefit from them. I think that the unity that we have had around this chamber today in being positive about what can be achieved will go some way to achieving that long-term objective. However, as we move forward, we need to understand that the challenges remain strong, that there is, sadly, an inertia that exists in many areas of civic Scotland that resists change and tends to drag its feet. We need to make sure that what is stated in this report not only leads on to achievements but does so on a shorter timescale as possible. We cannot allow our foot-dragging tendencies to deny us the opportunity to achieve those objectives with the opportunities that we have in front of us. I congratulate the convener of the committee on having worked through this enormous piece of work that is reflected in the size of the report that she has provided. In doing so, I feel that, unusually in my experience, being a member of the welfare reform committee, on this occasion, we genuinely cannot have unanimous support for this report and we can move forward and make it reality. I want to start by saying that this has been a really good debate because it has enabled members from across the chamber and across the country to share their experiences in working with local communities and maybe standing back and thinking about the last couple of decades or indeed slightly longer in terms of what has worked and what has not worked. I think that that has been very useful for our discussion this afternoon. It is important to highlight that there are successes that have taken place, but it is also important to focus on what needs to change. That is where the committee's report was useful as a prompt to us and particularly to the Scottish Government to think about what needs to change. There are clearly lessons to be learned for the future and I think that the report is good in identifying areas where change needs to take place. I thought in my closing remarks that I would think about some of the funding issues that the committee has raised in terms of its conclusions but also try to relate that to what members have said in the chamber. I think that everybody accepts that the funding landscape for local community groups is incredibly complex and it can be unclear. An obvious conclusion from today would be to think about what more practical support could be given to local groups to assist them to negotiate their way through the landscape so that, where there is money available, they do not miss out on it just because they cannot fill in a 50-page report. That issue about support for local communities, whether it is to bid for local government, Scottish Government, European funding or lottery funding, would be a practical outcome from today's debate to think about how that might be done better. The better balance to secure funding for community-led regeneration is a theme that has run throughout everybody's contribution, whether it is supporting money coming in through CSR from the private sector or that long-term support through different aspects of public sector and a range of organisations putting investment in. I think that quite a few members talked about the need to review the allocation of funding to make sure that we direct it effectively to disadvantaged areas. I think that Anne McTaggart was quite right to highlight the tough climate that local government currently finds itself in, with huge pressures on its funding, not just the council tax freeze but demographic change. I would take a brief intervention from John Wilson. Sarah Boyack commented on the funding that was available to local authorities prior to 2008, and we still have a problem with regeneration in many areas in many communities throughout Scotland. What happened to that funding? A point after 2008, I think that the member knows what happened after 2008, which is that we have seen a much tighter control over local government finance at a point at which costs are rising. That was precisely the point that Anne McTaggart was making. There is huge pressure because of the demographic change taking place. It was mentioned, I think, by Chick Brody that Edinburgh is facing a 27 per cent rise in its population. That is huge implications for investment in affordable housing, which we are already short of. I think that the points that were made by Gordon MacDonald were absolutely spot on to focus on an area that has had that long-term social deprivation, but through sustained investment, through very active communities with a range of different groups, there has been progress that has been made. The point about funding at the local government level is absolutely crucial. I think that Anne McTaggart was right to warn us that some of t