Diolch i으면on, Joining the 13th meeting of the 2022 economy and fair work committee. A sadlyum mwneud ffewr iличноiblego G from Colin Smith and Fiona HislUP will build joining us later after another committee commitment this morning. Our first item of business continues our evidence-gathering for is Towncentre and Retail inquiry. The broad theme for today is keeping town centres alive and focusing on Town centre living and property stock. We welcome our panel, Chief Executive, Surf Scotland Regeneration Forum, Stephen Lewis, vice-chair of the Scottish Property Federation, Craig McLaren, director of the Royal Town Planning Institute in Scotland, and Adrian Watson, chair of the Association of Town and City Management. Thank you all for joining us. As always, if members and witnesses can keep their answers and questions concise, that would be helpful. If each witness recognises that they won't be invited to answer every question, but you will all get a chance to contribute at some time during the session. I'm going to invite Michelle Thompson to ask the first question. Good morning, everybody. Thank you for attending this morning and thank you all for also for the submissions that you've made that I think give extra pause for thought for the committee. Perhaps that talks to the heart of the issue as I see it in the complexity of what we're trying to do, where we have multiple stakeholders, we have financial challenges, we have historical precedent and so on. I noticed in the SPF submission that you correctly talked about the need for a clear vision of what a resilient town centre is, and you do distinguish between town and city. Obviously, you talked about Glasgow and Edinburgh a lot, but I'd like from each of the panellists arguably to frame out what your vision is for a resilient town centre. Perhaps adding some colour and flavour to that, not just what this is but what does it look like but what does it feel like? What does it feel like for the disparate range of groups of people that might use it being mindful that we need to take cognisance of disabilities, blindness and so on. We've previously had comments about women in retail not feeling safe in town centres and so on. Perhaps I'm asking you that deliberately given that it's a panel of all men, so forgive me that. Perhaps if you could set out what you think it looks like because I'm sure that the session is then going to lead on to the problems to get to that vision and I'll let other people pick that up. Stephen, would you like to go first since I've quoted from your submission? Good morning, everyone. Thanks for the opportunity to be here. I think that the first question is actually what is the purpose of a town or city centre because ultimately it doesn't matter what we want it to be, it's what is it and how we can shape it. It's ultimately about a mix of uses that bring people together, whether that's for work, whether that's for play, whether that's for leisure and ultimately whether that's to stay. If you take the residential element first, we need more people in our town centres and that should be across all ages, all types of housing, whether that's student, whether that's rent, whether that's mid-market, across the board, affordable and a mix of tenures. By bringing people back into city centres with my residential point of view, that will support the other uses, whether it's retail or leisure and the other reasons why people come into towns and centres. We need to get our offices back because that's our daytime use effectively, so by increasing both of those and stopping the decline that we've seen to date, by doing that, that will create a vibrant town centre. It will be a catalyst for people to be in the centre and for them to use the amenities and services that town centres bring. The SPF is responsible for the right to differentiate between towns and cities because they are very different in their output. If we look at the change in the office environment and a move in the reduction to office use and perhaps a move although we're not seeing it yet from large city centre officers and demand reducing to a more hub and spoke, then there's a real opportunity for town centres, but to do that, they need a vibrant office stock that meets the needs of more local people using active travel to get there. Again, active travel is a large part of that vision. We need to get people to what's the reason to get into the town and our centre and how do they do that and how do they do that sustainably. All of that can come just rather nicely in a 20-minute neighbourhood, which is again in our submission and articulates what a town and city should be. I think that one of the challenges there is the differing definitions on 20-minute neighbourhood. A 20-minute neighbourhood in Edinburgh is perhaps different from Glasgow, which is different from Aberdeen and even down to the definition of a 20-minute neighbourhood if you travel by bike. In 20 minutes, you'll travel three to four times as much if you walk, so there's a real need, as we said, to understand what it is that we're trying to aim for, but a city and a town are a collection of people using a collection of uses and we need to give them the reason to come back. Craig, would you like to come in at this point? I agree with a lot of what's already been said. For me, our town and our city centres have to be places where people want to be, places where people enjoy, places where there's a vibrancy to them, places where people want to spend that time in. The attractiveness side of the safety and the accessibility aspects of it are incredibly important. Accessibility is the accessibility to the town or the city centre, but also within it, active travel, as has been said, is really, really important in trying to allow people to wander around the town or the city centre. I think that the experiential aspects of town and city centres is really, really, quite important. I live in the south side of Glasgow and quite often walk into the city centre, just to walk into the city centre and wander around. It's not necessarily going to do shopping or to do some form of transactional thing. It's about the quality of the buzz and the excitement of the place. For me, the key thing is about attractiveness. It's about accessibility and it's about creating those places which people feel as if they want to spend time in. Right. Ewan, would you like to come in now? There's not much to disagree with. I've heard my fellow panellists say, I suppose, that the additional thing that I would add is affordability, because obviously in some town centres affordability is a major issue, both in accommodation and in terms of access to food. We have food deserts where people who live in certain parts of some cities may find it difficult to access food at a reasonable cost. That would be an additional element that you will want to think about. Surf hosts the 20-minute neighbourhood practitioner network. We have, over the past year, been investigating what the 20-minute neighbourhood is. As Stephen says, there are various descriptions of that and I think that that's been widely debated within the Parliament around NPF4. It's obviously an on-going issue. It is an urban concept that I would strongly support, but a 20-minute neighbourhood is something that has been a Scottish planning policy since the Scottish Executive published SPP 1 in 2002, having mixed-use neighbourhoods that are walkable, affordable, where everyone feels comfortable and welcome. We've yet to see those policies being fully implemented in city centres. Some of the issues raised in previous sessions around safety are associated with poverty issues. They are things that are not dealt with directly by the physical environment, but they are dealt with directly by how we support people who are experiencing poverty, deprivation and some of the things that are associated with that. Just this week, I had a meeting with somebody from the University of Glasgow who is meshing data around 20-minute neighbourhoods. Excuse me. What's interesting about that is that they have looked at the fact that 70 per cent of urban Scotland falls within a 20-minute neighbourhood description in terms of physical assets that are there and transport and frequent transport. If you look at that around areas of deprivation, 100 per cent of areas of multiple deprivation comply with some form of description of 20-minute neighbourhoods in terms of physical assets and accessibility. What that doesn't measure is caring maintenance. Craig talked about the attractiveness. The caring maintenance of our building, individual buildings and our public realm, by a range of stakeholders from the public sector and the private sector, are key to making somewhere attractive. That's one of the major areas that we are falling down in a lot of parts of towns and cities within Scotland. Thank you for that additional insight. I suspect that one of my colleagues might want to pick up on that because it's an interesting thread. Adrian, do you have anything else to add to what's being covered so far? Being last, I'm tempted to say all the above. That's okay. A little bit more. It was mentioned experiential. It needs to be inclusive, it needs to be accessible, and it needs to be safe, too. I think that we also need to have the cultural hubs within the towns and cities as well. There's much there already. This isn't all pessimism. There's some really good stuff there to work on. That includes our cultural sector. We understand that we're going through a very difficult transition and we move. I think that it was also alluded to as well. The challenge just now for our staple diet, which is the office sector, day-to-day, isn't there. We need that macro-national level support to try and encourage that back in safely so that the cities can and the towns can thrive in Scotland and beyond. Retail will change. We understand that hospitality needs to be there, and it's that mixed use that's driven through whether it's town or city master plans, but it's a vehicle of delivery as well because we need to see it. That's why we're here today. Thank you for that. I think that you've given us a lot of what and how is going to be the challenge, so thank you, convener. I'd like to, Michelle has said the what and the how. The job of the committee is to understand the situation but also to come forward with proposals and ideas that we think could help ease some of the pressures that are being faced. In both the submissions from the Property Federation and the Royal Town Planning Institute, you talk about the National Planning Premium 4 and about the planning act, and I think that both of you refer to master plan consent areas. I don't know if everybody wants me to say a bit about what changes are on the horizon, so a few of the things you've identified are things that are, you know, I think about other things. You talk about the town centre first principle, how do we enforce that, things that are already in place, but how do we strengthen those and what is coming through that will be helpful for the committee, and then what you think is missing, what is anything that could be done additionally? Then we'll come to Craig first. Thanks, happy to answer that. I'll start with the national planning framework. As you may know, it's a draft at the moment, and it's just finished the consultation in the parliamentary scrutiny. I think that the draft included a number of really useful and interesting things that should help town centres, including a presumption against out-of-center development, and a sequential approach to try and make sure that you put your development within the centre first, if there's no particular site there, you have to move it out sequentially, out further out. I think that that's been very useful. It talks a lot about the 20-minute neighbourhood principle, which we've heard about already. I think that the important thing about 20-minute neighbourhoods, to bear in mind, is that it's a 20-minute walk for your daily need. It's not for every single need that you have, so that's in some ways easier to do, but we need to put that forward at how we make sure that our town centres work on that principle as well. The national planning framework, again, alludes to the town centre first principle, which we must have had now for, I imagine, seven or eight years, maybe even more than that. One of the issues that I have with the town centre first principle is that I don't know if it's working, because I don't know if anybody is collecting any data on it whatsoever. Dosley, the committee has seen that it's not working, and there have been out-of-town developments taking place. I'm not commenting on Stirling Council's decision, but Stirling is a recent example where approval has been given. It looks like it's expressed in the submission that there's no force or enforcement of it, or that there's no clear understanding of what enforcement means. I think that what we've been saying for some time is that there will be a bit more transparency about how it's applied, as to how local authorities are making those decisions and why they've made those decisions. You could probably do that through looking at council reports, but I think that there's a need for a national review to see how it's being used or if it has been used at all. A rigor attached to it as well is that we're talking a little bit operationalising the town centre first principle, so that there are steps and things that you have to go through to show that you've made that decision-based evidence through asking particular questions of yourself. I think that there's something about trying to make it a stronger principle. There's also something called the police standard that the Scottish Government has, which is a similar idea. It's a great idea in terms of bringing different people from different levels of government together to try to see how all the different programmes, funding, streams and financial streams have together to see how it fits a place. Again, it's a principle, and I think that there's something again about trying to see how we can operationalise it and make sure that there's some rigor attached to making those decisions as well. The other thing about the national planning framework is that it's strong, particularly on low-carbon and zero-carbon, and trying to articulate town centres within that context, which hasn't always been the case, so I think that that's been really useful, and I think that the contribution that town centres can make to that are really useful. The ambitions for town centres in the national planning framework, in my mind, are good. The issue, or two particular issues that we have with taking forward the national planning framework, could help to embed how we approach our town centres. The first is that the wording of some of the policies in the national planning framework are probably a bit woolly, and we need something that is much more robust. When I talk to communities, when I talk to heads of planning, when I talk to developers, the thing that they always say to me that they want from the planning system is certainty and predictability. If we have policies that give that certainty and predictability, I think that that would be really, really useful. I'm not quite sure we're there yet, and we've made that in our submission to the Scottish Government. The second thing is that if we get the right policy framework, that's all well and good, but we need to deliver it. One of the things that we have as an issue from a planning perspective is that planners tend to plan and provide division, but the delivery is reliant upon other people to do it. That can be the private sector or it can be the public sector. The public sector has a role to play in facilitating development through infrastructure provision and through making sites ready for de-risking. That's not quite there yet. The national planning framework is very much a vision document. We've always been saying that there should be a link to a capital investment programme, which allows for the vision of the national planning framework to be delivered through particular funding programmes through the Scottish Government. It works in Ireland. Is that what Ireland did? I think that one of the people did it. I was in Dublin yesterday to help my job at a cover island for the institute. I was talking to the chief planner there, and the link with the funding is particularly useful because it allows, as I say, that vision to be backed up by infrastructure or capital funding from the state, so that works really well. I think that that would really benefit town centres if we could have approached that. It seems a simple concept. I'm sure that it's probably more difficult to put in place, but I think that we shouldn't shy away from it. I think that that would add a quite transformational change to how we could reinvigorate our town centres. Steven, do you want to come in and could you maybe talk about the master plan consent areas, which I think was part of the planning act, but I don't think that we've been introduced in any areas yet. Is that correct? I was going to touch on that and also the local development plan framework. I think that we need to recognise that, under NPA 4, although it's to be welcomed, there's an evidence-based approach, but it's front-loading that local development plan process. I think that there's an extra 60. Dave will keep me right in these things. Additional duty is given to planners, and there's a real resource question for that. I'll pick on something that Adrian mentioned earlier about vehicle of delivery. It's fine having a framework, and it's exactly what Craig has talked about, but it needs to be delivered. For that to be delivered on the ground, the upfront part of that, as Craig has said, is done by the planners. There's a real resource question, both predominantly in the quantity but also the quality in terms of diverse and the range of planning stuff that we need. There's a real issue there. The predictability bit is also correct if you look at NPF and sustainability, which is a huge target. Michelle talked about the complexity in delivering sustainability, which is a massive issue. It's more complex than before, and there's more resource required. Just now, we could have a position where every single local authority has a different sustainability measure under NPA 4, which, in terms of certainty for developers and the ability to have a consistency of approach, we need to resolve, and it's something that SPF is looking at through our discussions with the heads of planning Scotland. We're doing it more locally in Glasgow, for instance, with a very proactive discussion with the heads of planning, with the development community and SPF on how we can work together to set some of those targets and try to keep them consistent across Scotland. Speed of delivery is a big question. Assuming that the planners can be resource, we have to get planning decisions moved out quickly in order for the projects to be delivered afterwards, whether it's infrastructure-based or proper-based. Adrian, would you like to comment on those issues? What do you see as an organisation as being positive on the horizon and what more needs to be done? It's the recognition and the challenge of delivering and moving forward now through the planning framework. I haven't really got much more to add in that regard, because it's been well covered. It was just that delivery aspect and seeing it through the relevant issues. I think that it was one of the submissions that was talked about, and I think that Stephen mentioned capacity within planning departments. He did want to talk about the retirel rate for planners and the shortage level of planners. Is that… It's an issue across the country as well. We certainly experienced up in the northeast the challenge around about planning and having that opportunity to progress it, all the stuff that we need to. I'm speaking locally, but it's been a real challenge. We need that support and moving things forward. Euan, do you want to comment on this area in terms of the national planning framework but also the planning act and what needs to be done to make these a reality? I'm very happy to comment on that. I suppose that going back to your first question of why the MPS town centre first principle hasn't been fully operationalised. I started planning. I love planning. It's a fascinating area. I'm not a planning practitioner like Craig here. The planning system is discretionary, so it's a case of balancing competing interests. The reason that the town centre first principle isn't operationalised is that you've already heard evidence of your offer done out of town centre proposal that gives 150 new jobs, and that takes one of the boxes for the planning system, the provision of employment, but it leaves something a whole in your town centre. I think that Graham Simpson talked about it in the chamber in response to MPF for reading the planning policies. They're all things to all people. There's always a get-out clause, so yes, you should do something, you should do town centre first. However, if you don't maybe mitigate against some of the downsides to doing greenfield sites. In my experience over the past 15 to 20 years that I've been working around the planning system, landowners are very patient, and I'm sure that you're more aware of parts of land that have been known for a very long time. Knowing that the landowner has a very long term intent to do something on it that the planning system currently doesn't allow, but to meet national housing targets, eventually a local authority will comply and allow that site to be developed. It may not be the best site in terms of the planning system, but it delivers homes, and there is no getting away from the fact that we need homes. However, it undermines the town centre, first principle, because brownfield sites are maybe more difficult to develop within a city centre or within a town centre. I would say that the discretionary nature of the planning system, the flexibility, allows some good and imaginative things to happen sometimes, but it also, to me, is intrinsic to undermining some of the policies. I think that a lot of the feedback on MPF4 is that we need a clear hierarchy of things that are not flexible for local authorities to negotiate on. I suppose that, without agreeing to the detail, the Stirling example is one where they will have no doubt seen the fact that there is an employment opportunity here, even though it undermines other aspects of planning policy. I'm going to bring in Gordon MacDonald to be followed by Alexander Burnett. Thank you very much, convener. I want to ask about the empty properties that lie in our town centres in many of them are long-term vacant 10, 20 years, etc. The Federation of Small Businesses in their evidence said that the commercial property market isn't working, and one of the pieces of evidence that they highlighted was that the price of occupying empty units is not falling. So, why is this, and what do we need to change, and probably, Stephen, you'd be the best person to come with me first? Thanks. I'm not sure I necessarily agree that there are instances where there's long-term vacancy. If you look at the average vacancy, it certainly wouldn't be anywhere near those levels. I think that we need to dispel the myth that landlords sit on vacant property waiting for the pot of gold at the end of a rainbow when you consider the extensive costs that a landlord has to bear in vacant property, whether that's vacant rates, which is a significant issue. It's an invariably a 90 per cent occupancy tax even when it's unoccupied. You have insurance to pay, which is only going one way. You have utilities to pay. You have a renewable utility bill where the provider was looking to charge us £300 a day standing charges because a unit was vacant, £300 a day standing charges, so because they're not getting their consumption through, they have increased the standing charges. The suggestion that there's a desire to hold on long-term when you have zero income and you have that burden of cost isn't all the right. But except there are a few instances where there are vacant landlords or absentee landlords who, in some cases, may not even know they hold it and it's lying in a vehicle or whatever. I think that we have to be very nervous about either compulsory purchase orders or compulsory sale orders, which have been discussed down south. I think that the principle of those are understood, but it's probably the same way that generally CPOs are not used. The test has to remain high. There will be instances where it's correct to do that, but the bar has to still be high. It addresses some of the issues that we're raising in our evidence, especially in town centres, but it's an issue in city centres. We've seen this come through a report that's riding down on behalf of the Glasgow city centre task force, funded by the Scottish Government, on fragmented ownership, often being a problem not just vacant, but the fact that you have multiple ownership on a small block. It's very different to Buchanan Street or Buchanan Galleries or St Enock centre, where there's a single ownership of scale where they can repurpose that retail centre because they have the full ownership, they have a financial reserve to do that and they can repurpose it. It's much more difficult to do that along Suckey Hall Street or whatever with fragmented ownership. What's the direction of travel of rent levels? Is commercial rent levels having year-in-year increases or year-in-year decreases? Where are we on average across Scotland with rent levels? Secondly, you're quite rightly highlighted that there are holding costs for vacant properties, but what proportion of vacant properties have an existing commercial lease and where the former tenant has vacated them but is still responsible for the lease? There's multiple parts there. There is clearly a distinct two-tier market. In vibrant city centres and town centres, the market operates and rents are charged because there is a demand, so the supply and demand balance works and where that happens then rents invariably increase. We have to remember again that a lot of the property in the UK and Scotland is owned by pension funds and you have a rent review and increases in rents because that's how the market performs and how it's funded and that's what funds the majority of people's pensions. I don't think that rent increases by their very nature are bad and where the market is performing correctly, that's right, but the other part of that is where the supply and demand balance isn't there, where there's a significantly less demand but more supply then rents are falling. The demand for office space generally accelerated through the pandemic is down about 15 to 20 per cent, but you have to look at that 15 to 20 per cent. It's demand for high-quality space and the sustained retail is up, but demand for lower-quality space is significantly down, so whilst it may be 20 per cent the average across the grade B lower-quality space, it can be 40 or 50 per cent. Those are the assets that we're going to have to repurpose and there's some opportunities there. I'm sure we'll go into those opportunities around at the residential others and again there's some planning policies mixed in all of that as well, but again I'll go back to the point that I made. It makes no sense for a landlord to hold a property vacant. If you think that you can squeeze another 5 per cent or 10 per cent out of the rent, you will ameliorate that in the first couple of months of vacancy given the holding costs. We did visit Dumfries and there was a number of properties that had been lying empty for upwards of 20 years and we're going to Hamilton next week and I believe it's a similar situation. There will absolutely be an instance of that, but I think that the question you asked is what percentage is vacant. In Edinburgh just now, offices are more my expertise than retail. There is zero grade A availability of offices in Edinburgh and I'm sure that the retail numbers in terms of percentages, the guys make up an idea, are generally across the board relatively low. It's the poorer quality stock in the less favourable locations or the wrong size of stores. Retail's changed. We don't need debonyms in the large House of Fraser department store if the requirement for those are changing, which is why we're seeing the changes that are being referenced on Buchan's Street and others, so there are transitions. The way that people shop is changed, the experience they want to change, so the type of retail unit they want, the volume they want, the height they want it to be much more experiential, which is what the rest of the panel has talked on, and there's a need to transition that space. Adrian, do you want to comment on the amount of empty properties that are in the town centres that your members represent and what impact it's having? It's a real challenge, which you can imagine. The conference has obviously been knocked in that sense and it's just symptomatic of where we are, this difficult transition that others have alluded to, not helped by the pandemic. It's been liberally quoted that that has only accelerated the pace of the decline. It's not just down to Covid. Let's be clear, for many years we've moved away from that traditional Woolworth's, that large departmental store, freeing up a lot of space in the city. Many of us came with towns and city master plans with the view that we could move people and consolidate office sectors in towns and cities to fill that space. Of course, Covid has changed that as well. To an extent, we need to look at the model and repurpose in moving forward with that, that office space may well change for hybrid models and all that goes with it. The expectation that we could fill it, it seemed sensible at the time, with office accommodation as perhaps just not there. We look at other strands, such as that city living that you will find in bringing people in. That's not without a challenge either, but we need to keep going in that regard. There is still new entrants coming on to the high street. It's not all negative, but it's that challenge. It needs to find a market. It needs to be profitable, of course, and it needs support. How do we bring long-term and abandoned buildings back into use? Through surface experience, the surf awards have been running for almost 25 years, and looking quickly back through some of them, Town Centre Living is something that they offer examples of, and it's the conversion of everything from police stations to churches to church halls. All those buildings have come back into use as housing, particularly from a surf perspective. It's been of particularness that there is affordable housing. There is either a housing association or a council housing chapel park school in Forfers, which is a good example of Town Centre School. There is long-term community interest in it just off the high street, but that being turned into council housing has obviously had a good impact on the Town Centre, so having that works there in a settlement of that scale. Bringing residential use back to Town Centre is desirable, but it's challenging because of the lack of care of maintenance that may exist within the settlement and the lack of green space in Town Centre. Do you want children to live in those places? Is it safe for the children to go and play easily in a Town Centre location? It might not be an ideal family location, but there is still a demand and need for housing in those locations. Residential use is one on our office doorstep in terms of the changing use of retail in a deprived area, but a lot of money has come into it. One of surf award winners in 2013 was Plantation Productions, which has taken over four shop fronts and provides a creative approach to intergenerational learning, inclusion, giving people digital skills, employability skills, sunny govern the local radio station runs out of there, kids go there to learn how to rap, but it's bringing people together, it's addressing social isolation. Some of the retail units in that area have turned into a really good community and public function, so that's one use, there's a dentist, so there's a series of functions that exist there, but we also have a cafe that sits within the Pearson's Institute. It's on a peppercorn rent because the people can't afford to pay for a lattice that other parts of our cities maybe want to buy, so it's on a very, very low rent so that it is affordable for people to go there to meet each other and have a bacon, buttery and a cup of tea, but that is basically something subsidised by the local authority that owns the building, so it takes a series of people stakeholders to make decisions to support our community's use of those spaces. You touched upon the properties that have been made into residential use, I think that you said police stations, church halls etc. Have you any good examples of commercial property being brought back into residential use? I suppose that the mid-seekle is doing good work in Dumfries but you've already been there, so some examples I've had. There's nobody there yet. I think that it's at an early stage around having commercial... The design of commercial properties with deep floor plans can mitigate against them being easily used for residential purposes. Without being flippant, if you think of where the First Minister's residence is, those buildings were built as houses in Charlotte Square. They have functioned as houses, hotels, hospitals, printing houses. They have been... They are a fantastic example of long-life loose fit, but in the 20th century we have begun building buildings that are very specific to their nature and retail with very deep floor plans with no access to light and mitigate against them being used in ways that would be appealing for residential uses. St James Centre has been referred to, which is a mixed-use project, albeit affordable housing put elsewhere, not put in St James Centre. There is residential there, but in the long term would the retail units be able to turn into something else? Would they be residential? No, they couldn't be residential because of the layout. There could be other uses, there could be printing houses. The desirability for commercial to always go to residential isn't necessary because we maybe want to become a circular economy that is being productive and re-using the assets that we already have in our home. There are other uses for them, which may be put upon us as we become a less consumptive economy because of, as we address climate change, and we are re-using some of the small things that we have and having somewhere to take them. There are other uses that they could be put to. Craig, in your evidence you highlighted that there might be a need for a general town centre use class. How do we bring that in? We get that mixed-use, but we don't get over provision of one particular type, whether it is charity shops, betting shops or whatever it happens to be. From a planning perspective, there is probably a growing recognition that we need to reduce the designated frontages for retail to provide that flexibility. Particularly at the edges, as Stephen said, the lower quality of the edges is probably where we can have much more flexibility, so we can do that. The town centre use class was proposed in the original town centre review. We think that it is worth looking at, but we need to be very, very careful with it. Use classes are designated uses in places that have a certain impact. The impact is important. We need to try and see how that can be made to work flexibly, but at the same time, make sure that the impacts that are coming from that do not affect communities. Particularly if we want to get more people living in town and city centres as well. One thing that we do not want, to be honest with you, is the approach that has been taken in England, where the use class order has been amended, so there is permitted development that you can change from office to residential. Although that sounds good on the face of it, it does not work particularly well. The quality of the housing that comes out is generally fairly poor, going by what has happened in England. It also means that you have the very control over the ability to get section 75 agreement, which brings in money that you can then invest in community, particularly for affordable housing. We do not want to do that. A general use class order has some attraction in some way, but we need to handle it very carefully, because it could give us some unwanted repercussions. Thank you. Alexander Burnett, followed by Colin Beattie. Thank you, convener. I have two relatively specific questions. I will ask them both together. The first question is for Stephen, the property federation that was trailed in the media yesterday. Yesterday, views on improving compulsory purchase orders, and I believe that the Queen's speech included something on that as well, reply in England. I will give you the opportunity to explain for the record why accepting that the bar should be high, why councils are not using them effectively or at all. My second question is for Craig, which I will ask now just to give you a moment to think about it. We have a number of issues over split-use buildings. You have just been touching on the issues of converting or you have some inappropriate residential. I know that you have mostly been talking about large urban areas and those kinds of shopping centres, but in my constituency and my area we have a lot of flats over shops and barriers on one that are often impacting the other to the detriment of both. I wonder if you could share some solutions for this kind of situation. I touched on that a bit before. It is understanding why we are needing to CPO. What is the scheme? Ultimately, there has to be a scheme and there has to be a rationale for that. It cannot be that the building has been vacant and therefore we are going to CPO. That has been suggested down south at a compulsory sale order. I think that there is a resource question. It goes back to the point where the available needs are promoted by local authorities. I am pretty sure that the Scottish Enterprise has not enacted its CPO powers or used CPOs. It is not just the resource, and because of the existing high bar, to go through a CPO process, you have to attempt to voluntarily acquire it. You have to go through that process first. It is also the quantum. There could be 20 units in a block that are required to be CPOed. Again, there is a resource question on how much financial resource the local authority has in order to complete all those CPOs. As I said earlier, there will be instances where CPO is correct, and it is right to do that, but we need to watch your own flip to the other side. It is seen as a panacea for all the ills. Once it is CPOed, you still need to then deliver a scheme thereafter. I will mention the report that has been completed by Rhydon and commissioned by the Glasgow city centre task force, which is the property repurposing strategy. That looks specifically at a number of the issues that have been raised today in terms of how we convert that office stock above retail and to potential residential in some of the opportunities that are there, but also the challenges that are in planning policy. I will go back to the quality point that Craig mentioned earlier. Those are not deep planning areas. Again, as you said, those were invariably houses originally when they were built and then were converted to offices or other uses. They are ripe for reconversion back to residential, but in some cases, due to their listing and their configuration, they do not meet current housing planning standards. Part of the outputs of the Rhydon report is a need to look at, and again, holistically over Scotland, how we can amend those planning policies to deliver the right quality of houses with those conversions, because, as it stands just now, they do not tick the box to meet the full planning policy. That is a role for the planning authorities to come up with routes. In fact, that report is looking at actions, because we are very much about the vehicle for delivery and the actions as opposed to the report that looks at the issue and gives some ideas on how we can resolve that, and whether that is a role for the SFT or others to look at holistically across Scotland. There is a suggestion there for a project office and some resource to look at how we can repurpose those areas, which are equally bliting high streets and towns as they are in city centres. That is certainly not a real opportunity to get more residential back into the city centre, not for the full class and not for the full gambit, given the lack of public space and green space, but it could certainly meet a challenge. That report is due to be submitted to the city centre task force within the next couple of weeks, and then we will be available to the committee. I would recommend that to you. Thank you. Just to expand on your answer around the resource being constrained on the CPO, is that a resource in enacting it, with the lawyers and things to track down the owner and then enact a process to purchase it, or is it a resource that is needed to pay for the actual building itself? You can solve the former with financial resource and you can outsource the legal stuff that is predominantly the second. It is a question best posed to local authorities who have CPO powers and why they are not using them. Our view is, again, that both the bar is high, but the resource to do it meaningfully invariably means CPO in large areas. I guess that my own experience is through the Clyde Gateway project in Glasgow, where it was using CPO powers, although it did the majority of its acquisitions voluntarily, which is exactly the process for a CPO. You start your voluntary acquisition and, in a lot of cases, you can be successful through that process without the spectre of a CPO. CPOs are invariably challenged. It happened through the Commonwealth Games, where a number of sites were purchased voluntarily, ultimately with the spectre of a CPO, where they could not be voluntarily required. It is a question best addressed to local authorities, but I would counter that or suggest that financial resource is one of the main issues. I hope that Stephen has given you some thoughts on it. From my perspective, I do not think that planning is the main problem with housing-over-shops. There are perhaps some things that need to do when looking at listed building consent and conservation area consent and getting that balance. I have seen some interesting approaches to that through some of the conservation area neural schemes and the Townscape Heritage Initiative, which has done that, and places that are doing some interesting things there as well. I know that there have been some local authorities who are taking this really quite seriously and appointed officers to specifically see how we could put living over the shop as a priority. Police like Perth have done some good work on that. They tend to be a bit sporadic rather than embedded, which is perhaps the issue. From the planning perspective, the draft national planning framework, which I mentioned earlier on, talks about how local authorities have to identify gaps in supply for housing, particularly in town centres and for flats. I hope that, at the start of a process, we can make sure that that has been addressed and put to the forefront of decision-making planning. The key issue in many ways is resources. I know that we keep hacking back to that. There is a resource element for planners to process planning applications. We have heard from several people here, but we have been on record several times saying that we have lost about a third of the planning staff in planning departments since 2009, with a 42 per cent reduction in budgets. Even stuff like planning fees only cover 66 per cent of the costs of processing the fee, although there are some new changes that might be able to reduce that. I really need to reinvest in the planning service to make that happen. To make it happen proactively, not just in reactive and processing a planning application, I have mentioned the conservation area renewal schemes, proactive master planning approaches to try to make things happen. That gives us the opportunity to bring people together at the start of the process to develop that vision and to work out where the resources are coming from and what role people have to play in delivering that. I think that that is really, really quite important. The other thing for me is looking at the funds that we have for housing. The Scottish Government has control over social housing through housing association grant or whatever. There might be some way in which that can be used a bit more creatively to try and make sure that we get houses above shops and flats above shops as well. It is not really used for that just now, it is used for the more traditional housing scheme, so to speak, but there might be some ways in which we can perhaps look at that as a funding source or a resourcing to try and make sure that we make that work. Thank you very much. No further questions can be now just from our members to my register of interests regarding property. Okay, thank you. Colin Beattie to be followed by Maggie Chapman. Thank you, convener. I've got a question to ask you, but I'd like you to consider it in the context of a larger question. One thing that I've been concerned about is sustainability. Across Scotland we've seen many, many projects, many of whom are excellent and, as standalone projects, benefit the community and contribute. However, as far as I'm aware, I've not yet seen an overall regeneration project taking in a whole town. Typically such a regeneration project would probably take place in not the more affluent areas, which can already support their towns and villages, but in ones that perhaps have residents who have less disposable income. My concern is that money goes into a regeneration project. It's going to be a big bucks even for a relatively moderate town or village. That money is obtained, it goes in, the regeneration takes place. What next? Is it sustainable then? Does it need constant funding from the council, from the Government or whatever? Now, when we went to the midstiple quarter and also input from South Scotland Enterprise and Highlands and Islands Enterprise, they were talking about the need for financial incentives for repurposing buildings and unused long-term vacant and so on. Do you agree with that approach? What kind of incentives would they be? How could they work? How can they contribute to us creating a sustainable development, a sustainable solution, because that's what we need for our towns and village centres? Ewan, can I maybe ask you to pick that one up? Yes, so one of the surfer awards is for most improved place. Fraserborough, Irvine, Campbelltown are all settlements that have been awarded for being the most improved place. They are all places that have been regenerated over long periods, 10 to 15 years. As an aside, I would say that they have all been led by individuals in that regeneration over the long term, people who live and work in that place, which is an important aspect of it. But you're right, there are large sums of money goes to these places for something shiny and new. What there tends not to be public funding for, so for the regeneration cattle grant fund is one means of accessing funding, and I suppose that's where the current £325 million that is referred to that will be spent over this Parliament through regeneration and place-based funding. It tends to go to capital projects, which is the beginning of something and the start of something. It doesn't guarantee that there is a long-term sustainable outcome, which is affected by wider issues within the economy. Covid coming in has had an impact on a wide number of organisations that thought they had sustainable futures. What may make some of those areas more sustainable is whether or not the local economy is extractive or if it's invested locally. We're at the beginning of looking at community wealth building, which is making sure that business practices and the money remain within a settlement. However, as has been referred to, some of the places that we experience dereliction or decay or even a hot economy are funded by pension funds, which are extractive. Probably a lot of us in the room are beneficiaries of that extractive economy through the increase in rents. However, a move to a more co-operatively led, social enterprise-led economy may mean that the level of profit is not as high in running those businesses, and that can mean that they may have better long-term sustainability. However, the complaint among most community-led organisations is that there is always money there for a capital big project, but there isn't there for the long-term running of the operations that inhabit them. I refer to plantation productions, which is a great community-led project, doing great things for community and government. However, their funding is on a year or three-year cycle, and it's always under threat. It comes through Creative Scotland, and no doubt, and they're thankful for that money, and no doubt some of it will come from the local authority as well. However, that is always under threat, and for them to have longevity and security and confidence for the staff, there needs to be more longer-term commitment to funding those sorts of activities, certainly within areas of deprivation. Stephen, do you think that in areas of deprivation and areas where residents have a less disposable income, that long-term there has to be a subsidy to continue with the regeneration to make it sustainable into the future? I don't. I think that an example I'd give you is probably Clyde Gateway and Glasgow, which is an excellent example of that, where there is a long-term vision, and they have long-term funding. It's clearly an area of deprivation, whether it's got the wild sorts of Glasgow, the east end of Glasgow and parts of South Lanarkshire, and they have taken that holistic approach not just to the creation of infrastructure, so they've provided offices to create jobs. They've created residential across a mix of tenures, but they've looked at training and job opportunities, so they've tackled the reasons for the social deprivation health issues as well. They've done that, particularly through capital funding, but because they've got a long-term funding support from Scottish Government and partners, they've taken that long-term view, and my understanding is an element. If I've ever been there, where capital receipts for a successful project, offices or residential, it's then recycled into the Clyde Gateway funding, which allows them to take a much longer-term view. Over time, that's capacity building. That will create the infrastructure, the jobs, the residential infrastructure. You talked specifically about sustainability. I'm at Clyde Gateway. We've been pioneering a substantial district heating network, where that will provide low-cost, high-quality heat and a very sustainable way across the network across the area, which can invariably only be done with substantial amounts of funding and that long-term vision. The test will be at the end of its 25-year period, and just how sustainable that is. I hope that we don't go back to, if we remember, gearing Glasgow, which was 25, 30 years old now. I was a boy then, I can't really remember it. Effectively, Clyde Gateway is nearly the second version of that, but there are absolutely examples out there where that works, and it doesn't have to be continued to be funded in the longer term. I do think that, on that point that you raised in terms of financial incentives, the rates of burden is substantial. We also need to look at the costs to repurpose, and we've talked at the SPF about looking at the rates on refurbishment and whether there can be an incentive where that's not new money going in, but it's using the tax burden to facilitate what is invariably expensive properties to refurb. I've got our submission. Craig, what's your view on incentives? Who should be paying them? Are they necessary? When I'm coming from a planning perspective, that long-term approach is really important, as Steven Neune has said. For me, that shows the absolute necessity of having a plan. That shouldn't be done just ad hoc, and that allows you to build in that thinking. I think that some of the examples of where we've seen some good practices when we've had very early engagement amongst all the different stakeholders and communities and funders to try and establish what that vision for that place will be in 20-25 years. I'm from there developing a route map, sort of backcasting almost, to see who plays what role, who provides what level of resource when and how they can all make that work and create a dialogue and a conversation through that as you develop that place. I think it would make that really important and really useful. We've seen that with some of the Shirent models that we've introduced in Scotland over a number of years, and that hopefully reduces friction at a later date. It won't get rid of it totally, but it will hopefully reduce some friction. For me, that's the important thing about that, which can help to facilitate that, or firstly the idea of infrastructure first, where you use infrastructure to almost de-risk sites to make them attractive, to make them much more viable, and you do that creatively, perhaps putting it into more disadvantaged areas to make them more of an attractive investment. I mentioned the place principle earlier. I think that that could be a really interesting way if it's applied and operationalised of trying to make sure that you don't just get the initial capital funding for something to happen, but different community planning partners come together to think about the maintenance needs, the on-going costs of delivering things as well on that place-based approach. Eun mentioned Irvine earlier, and I was part of the soft judging panel that year that was awarded. That seemed a really interesting way. They were trying to bring together all the different departments under funding and resources to try to make that work for that particular place, so I think that that's really interesting. Another thing that's a little bit of an aside, but I think that it's maybe important to push in here as well, is from a planning perspective, is about how you measure the success. In planning just now, planning officers are under pressure to deliver decisions on planning applications very quickly, and I can understand that. Should that be the key measure of what success in planning is, I don't think so. You should be thinking more about the outcomes that are achieved on the ground. We've done some work with the Scottish Government and across the UK and Ireland looking to see if we can introduce a new performance management system for planning authorities, which is based on outcomes rather than inputs and outputs. I think that that would go some way to helping to change the mindset about how we treat our places in over the longer term. Edwin, can I maybe ask you a slightly different question, but still within this area? There seems to be a general acceptance that there's an oversupply of commercial property in most of our towns and villages. Does that mean that we're going to have to focus on repurposing some of these commercial premises? We've talked about the difficulties of repurposing back into residential, although I personally have seen in various towns and villages where that's been done quite successfully, but certainly the scale of it may be quite substantial. Some of the places that you want to do that may not have an appetite for people to either purchase or rent back into a town or village centre. That's probably unproven at this point. What do you think? What kind of incentives should be in place to facilitate that happening? First of all, we need to get the buy-in of the communities, just going back to the last point as well, and having that governance when we are looking at longer term strategies for moving that forward. In terms of incentives, you're right, we need to repurpose. We all understand that in the towns and villages and the cities. Moving towards whether that is residential mixed-use office that we incentivise. In some respects, it's business rates as well, which hasn't been mentioned if I can. There is a challenge around that. It feels punitive. We understand that we can only work with the money that we have in the envelope, but are there opportunities to revisit that and move beyond what Barclay has suggested? We speak of its sales tax, and I think others have alluded to that in their reports as well. The digital tax and opportunities to lessen the fiscal burden on some of those developments in the city centre that will allow us to make that transition across, if that makes sense as well. The changes that are coming in 2023, what are the additional changes that you would want to see on that? I understand that there is a challenge in business rates and respect all that has been said previously about it, but we would go beyond business rates as well. We think that to level up for bricks and mortar with the digital. We speak about that transition. People's shopping habits have changed and they have moved towards more online. We feel that perhaps some levelling up there in terms of taxation that may be able to support longer term taking some of the burden off, people who are playing business rates within the bricks and mortar industries would certainly help there. I know that it's not easy. I have read some of the background to that about the digital taxes. There will be challenges around that, but something needs to be done to offset some of the business rate charges that we find ourselves with in our towns and cities across the country. That is the number one issue that I am getting through the association and, certainly locally, in Aberdeen. Maggie Chapman will be followed by Jamie Halcro Johnston. Thank you very much, Ken. Good morning to the panel. Thank you for your contribution so far. I want to take us back to dig a little bit deeper into the discussion that we started earlier around master planning, local development plans and those kinds of issues. Craig, you talked about town centres and city centres needing to be places where people want to be. Obviously, it needs to be a range of people. All people need to feel safe to come back to one of Michelle's earlier points. I am interested in what you think about the value of local development plans, how important they can be or they should be, how we make the links between the different master planning exercises, visioning exercises that happen and how we feed those into local development plans in a way that is robust and a way that developers and others cannot override or things cannot be changed at a whim or what appears to be at a whim sometimes. Crucially, in all of this, we make sure that we are listening to the right people and that we do not have a majoritarianism approach. We are developing places where everybody wants to be, not just those with loud voices or resources or access to having their voices heard. I will start with Craig and then I will come to others. I probably touched on an element of this earlier on. We have been saying that the planning system has to be much more front-loaded and proactive. You would think that that is an obvious thing, because it is about planning, it is about the future. To be honest, the system is now rather reactive and dependent upon developers coming up with ideas rather than planning authorities. We want to change that. Having a much more front-loaded system, whereas I said earlier on that we have discussion and debate at the start of the process. One of the problems that we have with the planning system is that the main way that people engage with the system is to tell us what they do not want, the objective of the planning application. We need to flip that and make it about what they do want and to create opportunities for people to have that discussion. I mentioned that there is one tool that you can use to have that workshopping element at the start of a process to establish division. That is something that you need to look at. It sounds simple, but you need to think about not just the opportunities, but the constraints, such as money, policy context and many other things, such as the site specifics. Having that facilitated discussion about what you can try and get to as a vision is really important. That has to be as inclusive as possible and make that work. As I said earlier on from there, once you have a vision, you can always build a route map to see what the different steps you take to get there. From a community perspective, there is a real opportunity for that to happen through local place plans, which are a new thing in the 2019 planning act, which are essentially a bit like on communities to develop visions for their communities themselves. We are very supportive of that. We do think that there is a need for some of that to be supported and facilitated by planners to provide that context. I talked about that earlier. That can be used in town centres and housing estates, so we think that there is some real opportunity there. The big issue that we have with that is that there is no funding attached to it as yet. Those things can be quite intensive and quite expensive, so we are keen to see how we can fund that. From a planning profession perspective, I do not want those great ideas to be stymied just because of the resourcing thing. It puts the planning system and planning into disrepute in some ways. We need to try and invest in it to allow communities to have that key role in doing that. That is one aspect of things that we can take forward. You mentioned local development plans. That front-loaded process is a really important way to do that. However, what local development plans need is a strong national policy context. I mentioned earlier the need for robust and definitive policies in the national planning framework, which allow for much more predictability in terms of decision making. A strong national planning framework will do that. That is particularly important because the 2019 planning act also brought in a provision that the national planning framework will now become part of every local development plan. The policies in there will become part of the local development plan. That strong, robust policy gives a clear indication as to what decisions should be made. Backing to planners to make those decisions, because sometimes decisions are quite difficult. Backing, if it goes to appeal, has to be there to make that work. I wonder if I could bring you in on the same kind of issues, but I will also touch on the funding issue. Do you think that there is scope for consideration of a central funding to support local organisations and communities to do some of the visioning work that Craig was talking about? There is also not a centralised resource, but at least somewhere where there are the skills and the knowledge available that communities, including local authorities, can access. You mentioned the issue with Aberdeen City Council and the lack of skills because people are retiring. I wonder if you could say a little bit more about that. I certainly think that that would be welcomed, the support nationally to the local, because it is a very real challenge in that sense. Of course, financial support would certainly help. Do you have any other comments around enhancing the community engagement with local development planning, the front-loading of it, as well as the implementation of it? It has always been a challenge in getting communities to engage in that regard, and it is about that communication and putting it at the centre and moving forward through the towns and cities regeneration programmes. It has been challenging. Okay. Thanks, Adrienne. Ewan, if I can come to you on the same kind of issues. There are local development plans, local outcome improvement plans, community planning partnerships, local place plans, communities do community action plans. There are a whole level of plans that seem to exist. I spoke to one local authority in a settlement that they had on a charrette about four years ago. Since then, they have consulted the community 17 more times. In other evidence that has been given to various committees, there is the issue of over consultation. There is a lot of information being gathered, but is it being gathered consistently? We gathered it for separate plans, for separate bits of local government to deliver on. There are health plans, there are young people plans, there are education plans. Again, one local authority that we have been speaking to within the planning department, within economic development and planning, they are looking at how they bring all those plans together around each settlement where there is a high school and getting all the parts of the local authority to talk to each other around the place. Coming back to the place principle, which Craig referred to, rather than us having silos within the local authority that have their own engagement agendas. We need staff to do that. We need people on the ground. The one thing that there has been an absolute catastrophic troughing around is community development workers. We need people paid within a community. We can rely on volunteers, but if we rely on volunteers, it is people who have the time, people who do not have two jobs, caring responsibility for their children and for their aging parents, as well as their health barriers. We need people who live and work in the community who are paid to gather information from the community all the time so that we do not have to do a consultation with a workshop where 40 people will turn up. It may be exclusive, because there will be some people who do not come to that consultation, but people who live and work in that community and are based in the community cafe know what the community needs are. That can be continually transmitted to the local authority when they need certain aspects of information. We do community consultation around all those agendas so that different parts of the local authority can extract the information that they need to deliver the part of the legal responsibilities that they have within a local authority. It is not all about planning. Planning fascinates me because it is the one arena where a person can meet the governance of their local authority and challenge something. It is seen as a court and it is their opportunity to say something, but it is a very tiny part of what the local authority delivers. It is beginning to happen that breaking down that silo working within local authorities is on a local authority by local authority basis, but it needs resource. As with 20-minute neighbourhoods and community wealth building, there may be short-term higher costs to delivering those things that are good for communities, but the long-term benefits are the preventative measures so that we do not end up with communities that are disengaged or with people who have long-term ill health, but there may be higher upfront costs to that, so that investment needs to come from somewhere. Stephen, do you have anything that you would like to add? It is worth pointing out that developers in the property industry welcome local development plans, and it goes back to the point that Greg and others have said that it is about certainty. Ultimately, we are a vessel. We effectively provide, we supply what is demanded, and ultimately that is our function. If there are areas of demand that are not being supplied, we need to understand that, and the market will adjust. Covid has only a few issues where Covid has helped, but it has moved to online consultation. There is a very robust public consultation process for planning applications, and I think that the online process has helped. I think that we would like to see that continue because that will open up not to all, but it will help for some who cannot attend in person or whatever the case may be. Glasgow has done a pretty impressive job through its kind of your neighbourhood process, and it has got eight district regeneration frameworks, which we are heavily consulted on through multiple formats across the eight districts in Glasgow to create those district regeneration frameworks. I think that, as well as the community and we have talked with planning officers, we should also address that there are some skill challenges on planning committees as well, where those on planning committees perhaps do not have the range of skills and expertise that perhaps they should have. Jamie Halcro Johnston, to be followed by Fiona Hyslop. Thank you very much, Shara. I am just waiting for the unmute button to be hit. Good morning to the panellists. I had a question. A number of the areas that I was looking at have been covered, but I wanted to ask about the infrastructure side and what we are going to need going forward. We have talked and I think that we all accept that high streets and town centres are going to change over the next decade or so to respond to changing times, fewer offices and perhaps more accommodation and so on. My question is to Adrian First and then to Craig. What from an infrastructure side do you think we need to see improved? One area could be broadband if we are seeing more hubs or more people living in our town centres. We have talked about active travel, but there are various travel or transport issues in town centres and how we make sure that our town centres remain accessible for everyone, including things such as electric parking and charging, whether we need to be considering that and any other issues around the infrastructure side that you think could be important. Certainly from our perspective, we are making that transition to more environmentally friendly areas, pedestrianisation and green space. That is important, but the cities, towns and villages still need to be accessible, particularly in the form of the cities. The challenge is around about that. Is that connectivity, in respect of the 20-minute neighbourhoods, but the city of the larger conurbations still need people to come in potentially from the region as well and find their way in? Again, through the likes of the master plans where there is a vehicle for delivery, we have all partners sitting there upstream and discussing the challenges and opportunities that we get round that table and look at how we repurpose our towns and cities across the country. For us, it is about accessibility. It has been welcomed by the public transport, the free buses for the younger and the very old. There are moves by some local authorities as well to extend that potentially, to others to make it more accessible and inclusive for those from more disadvantaged backgrounds in our communities, to get into the city centres and town centres across the country. That is to be welcomed as well. We speak about the mixed use of the office space. Again, we understand that people need to get into the offices, but it is finding that balance of meeting our green targets and all that goes with that. It is generally a challenge, but I keep stressing that it is through a master plan and getting partners at a strategic level round that table in the local community to have those discussions and work it through. You will never find consensus on all those issues, or often you will not. However, if you have meaningful communication, as has been pointed out earlier, and we get that sense of what is needed, then we can work together towards that. Can I ask, again, just before Craig comes in and maybe he can answer this as well? One of the things that has been raised a couple of times at the Outlaw visits and in other areas, perhaps anecdotally, has been that in some areas there has been an over-podestrialisation of town centres. In some examples, there is not necessarily widespread, but how do you create that balance? How do you make sure that somebody who has practice limited mobility can get to where they need to? Also, when you have pedestrian areas, they are still accessible for people. For businesses, one of the things that we saw, sure that we all see whenever we are in town centres that have large pedestrian areas, is cars and other vehicles still accessing them, whether they are meant to or not, or fans and the like? Perhaps if we could have answered that first one too, that would be about pedestrianisation, and then maybe move on to the second part of the question. What I would say from my home city will not be criticised for being over-podestronised, and that is Aberdeen. There is a very real challenge there, cultural, as much as all that goes with the economy, and we are working through some of that, but we are working through that in partnership, not in isolation, and it needs that with the disability groups and all aspects of our community to be very much to the fore in these conversations and around the table to reassure that it is still accessible. For instance, in Aberdeen, we are talking about a 300-metre skelp of road. It happens to be our main thoroughfare, and people still feel they have the divine right to drive the horse and cart up that road, as they have done for centuries before. We need to change that mindset, but we need to understand all aspects back to the initial points that we made about being accessible, inclusive and all that goes with that. We involve everyone around that discussion and find our way through a coherent plan to deliver pedestrianisation, not just for the sake of it, but we are looking at football, we are looking at vacancy rates in the city. We are up to 20 per cent in our main thoroughfare. That is unheard of in a fairly affluent city in relative terms. That is the scale of a challenge. We are not immune to it, so we need to change. People tell us, when you sit down and have that rational discussion, that we need greener areas—many of our sectors in the office—to attract people in back into the city, and that is needed more than ever to get the office sector back in. Having those conversations, we want to feel healthier, we want to feel that we can walk about Aberdeen as the case is here, that the cultural hub is there. There is a lot there in terms of the infrastructure already, but we need to build on that. It is trying to find a measured approach to it, still allowing public transport to get into those areas and cars where it is needed for the moment as we transition through. We understand that, but to find that balance is not easy. I said at the start of the session that we asked what we wanted our town centres to be, was that they had to be places where people wanted to be. For me, we need to make our town city centres as people-centred as possible and should be people over everything else as much as we possibly can. That relies, as Adrienne said, on a large investment in active and sustainable travel. I do not just mean cycling there. Sometimes walking gets overlooked as part of that, and the ability to wander around streets, as I said earlier, is a sticky streets concept where people want to hang around and stay in places rather than just walk right through them using the slur affairs and make them places where people want to spend time and to help animate the street and make them more attractive for people is really important. That relies on accessibility. I think that there is lessons to be learned from places like Vienna, Blue Vienna and even Copenhagen, where the central areas are pedestrianised, but around the edges there are different access points for different other modes of transport as well, where particularly recently in Copenhagen the priority given to cycle lanes, which are separate from pedestrian areas, is really, really quite important as well, bringing added safety to things as well. I think that that is really important. The other key thing in this is safety. That is feeling safe and being safe in terms of the mix of different groups of people and different modes of transport as well. That is where I think segregation and splitting things up can work much more effectively than perhaps we have just now. Generally, it all boils down to trying to make these places attractive. The investment in our public realm is really, really important to that. I think that there are many of the schemings that we have seen in Scotland and across Europe and the world where we have invested in quality public realm and within pedestrianised streets. The difference is phenomenal. I am old enough to remember when we can in the street how buses are running down and I look at it now. It is a totally different place in a Saturday afternoon. There are now pubs and restaurants out in the middle of the street. There are buskers. There is a totally different atmosphere now. That is the type of thing. I am not saying that it is perfect, but I think that we have to try and aspire to try and make these places where people want to spend time as simple as that. I apologise for being late. My other committee, I was questioning the UK minister on the energy crisis. The members have discussed international cases and they have looked at the importance of good design in town regeneration. You referred to some of that already. We have heard about clinicalty in Ireland. They even have their own town architect and a prominent and influential position. There are obviously resource implications. I am very struck by what I have heard. Towns are about people and they are not about buildings. Therefore, who facilitates that common vision, which we are hearing again and again as a seam. Local authorities have the planning, design and development capacity. They need to do that. It would be controversial. One of the submissions that we have heard is that we probably need to have a hierarchy of towns that we work through, because not everybody will be able to do all of that at all of the town. Some of what we have heard has been about cities, about Aberdeen and Glasgow in some of the references. However, for towns, how do we do that? Where is the capacity needed? That is central national support for some planning aspects. However, if a lot of the planning aspects I know, because my hometown has a really good local community plan for what it wants, I suspect and I know that planning authorities quite often have to react because they cannot be proactive as Craig was saying. What do we need to crack this to make it work? What we want to do is to make recommendations to get changed. I will first come to Ewan Leitch and then I will come to Clyde McLaren, but to indicate the others if you want to come in on this. Thank you very much. The example that you have given of the mythical, the fact that we are interested in local place plans, which would become adopted as part of a local development plan, might be a future for the community plan that Linethgow came up with, so that it then becomes embedded within the local authority policy, which means that it will have to be delivered. However, that is not without its problems, because the local authority has to decide what elements of a local place plan it adopts into the local development plan, and it may not adopt everything that the community wants. We are going back to a city, but I think that it has parallels for towns. The Glasgow Place commissioner, his draft recommendations were in the Glasgow Council's committee papers last month, and it was looking at putting planners and designers into communities, embedding them in communities. That is fundamentally their recommendation to work with communities to help the communities meet their aspirations for their place. That could happen across settlements of all sizes, working with the communities and having people who are dedicated to working with the community, not just in the regulatory aspect, but within the planning system, but actually to support the communities, understand how to engage and navigate the system, but that would need resourced. I have previously, with a nod to your previous role, suggested that we have expertise within some national agencies who have a place-based focus but work centrally. To me, this is national money—I am talking about Scotland and Nature Scott—who have specific expertise that local authorities need to access. Those national organisations are dispersed across the country so that they are closer to the places that decision-making is made could be very helpful. They could also provide direct access to support some of those communities. Again, there would be an additional cost to that, but it is certainly from a Government perspective that the costs that they have control of and are seen to be supportive of local authorities and places. However, it comes down to where decisions are made. One of the major issues around the 20-minute neighbourhood is how people in rural Scotland feel about it. Frankly, it is often contentious because they do not see themselves as neighbourhoods in 20 minutes is impossible to live in rural Scotland. However, the remoteness of decision-making from them, so if you live on RACI and a planned decision is made in Inverness, they will say that the planner in Inverness does not understand how we live our daily life within RACI. It is the proximity of that decision-making that is important. Having presence from local authority and both living and working in the places to me would go a long way to make a difference to what the outcomes would then be. I have heard the points and I understand the need for more planners in terms of the school capacity. I take that as a red. What do you think that we need to bring that together? What would you like to see as resource in the school base from national agencies that can be drawn upon? What does that mean for local communities? Do we need to have that kind of hierarchy or even just prioritising which towns it is happening at and really embed and then move on to the next one, etc? Do we have a longer time frame? In your evidence, we mentioned this hierarchy of towns. We have met that more in terms of different circumstances rather than priority. We need to prioritise resources at some stage, so there is some way that we need to look at that. The key to that is perhaps putting place at the centre of decision making. We have some infrastructure on a community level where that can happen. I have mentioned local place plans and you have mentioned local place plans as well as a real opportunity if they get the resources that they require. We have local development plans that do that. For me, it is probably more important to get that embedded at a corporate level in local authorities. I spoke recently with a leadership team in a local authority and they were really interested in that, which was really heartening. With things such as the place principle, the place standard, the Town Centre First principle, there is a growing recognition that we need to try to take a place-based approach and move away from programmatic, financially driven funding streams and things like that to something that is much more about how all those things hit the place on the ground. That requires the strong policy context that I have mentioned earlier from a national level but also at that corporate level as well. It requires the resources that we have mentioned as well. The other opportunity that I have seen is almost having a place champion within each local authority who can make sure that any decisions that they make in terms of investment or policy or even their estate management is taken into account in that place-based way. One of the things that was introduced in the 2019 planning act was statutory chief planning officers in each local authority. The provision for that is very light just now. It just says that each authority should have one and that guidance will be published on what their role should be and what the expertise they should hold. The Scottish Government will have to produce that sometime soon. I am wondering if that is an opportunity to embed that place-based approach by making the chief planning officer the key person who can play that role and that challenge in the champion role, which would help to embed this in thinking. Can we ask Craig to ask architects and designers as opposed to planners how we best get that connection in a proactive way? What needs to be done professionally or indeed organisationally? I think that we are doing a lot just now. I think that we are hopefully moving away from a dim and distant past where architects, aided planners and planners, aided architects. I think that we have now tried to work much more collaborative professionally at the professional body level. We have talked a lot with the Royal Incorporation of Architects and other built environment professions as well. I think that we all realise that we all have roles to play, but we have different roles to play and different skills and attributes to bring and the strength is where we actually make them complement one another. I think that there is some stuff there that we can make work. Architects and Design Scotland have a role to play in this as well, in bringing together the different groups and showing and perhaps shining a light on examples of where this has been made to work to best effect. We are getting there with that. I think that collaboration seems to be the name of the game. These days people realise that you cannot fight one another, you need to work together. If you are going to have that impact that you want, you know that the gift is not in your own profession or you know it as an individual or your organisation generally requires other people to be engaged in that. I think that that is a mindset that is certainly coming to the fore. Stephen, I saw you nodding there, so if you want to comment about how we actually make this happen, what do you think needs to be done? I think that there are two things that want resource, which I will come back to in a second, but I think that it is happening in places such as the SPF, which is whoever I have sent today. We have an active network and meetings throughout Scotland with local authorities at planning level, economic development level, and we bring our membership of our developers, investors, architects, planners, whatever around the table. We are in Edinburgh tomorrow night with Paul Ormson and a number of people for our dinner session about how we work more collaboratively together in Glasgow. As an example, we have the Glasgow Development Forum, which is chaired by the chamber, attended by senior people from the council and Marie level, which is the development community across that core of people working proactively and collaboratively with the council on how we work better. We have a session in two weeks' time asked for by the head of planning there on how they want to improve their communication with the development industry, so there are examples of that happening. It comes back to Craig's point. It is about collaboration. Again, you can see that it is happening at cities and there might be a scale. How does that happen in our small towns Scotland, which is predominantly the coverage across? The point that you were talking about earlier on is the resource, the local authority. Again, we have talked a lot about planning. We need to talk about economic development in its wider sense. Planning should be led from economic development and then there is a whole social piece, which is clearly part of economic development. If you look at people like Alistair Morrison at Renfrewshire Council, a bigger but smaller town is in there, who is doing a fantastic job at trying to reverse Paisley's decline and some other small towns and really driving that, but Craig talked about a champion. We really need people—we have got in the big towns like city design managers, Brian, professors and others—we need that same resource at town level. It might not have to be one person in each town. We may have to be more realistic and look at it slightly wider because the resource will get dispersed on that basis, but we need people. It is people who make things happen. We can develop as many bits of paper as we want in strategies and policies and various bits, but it will be people who implement it and that will come down to resource. Again, through the SPF, we have said consistently that we have no developers in the development community who have no problem playing for planning. We just want a good service that is consistent and delivers. I am not sure that I necessarily always agree that the planning fees that we pay are commensurate with the level of service that we get—certainly in major applications, but that is a resource question. It is not again clear that I am not providing the quality—again, it is the quantity that is as good as making enough resource on planning to do that. The industry is happy to pay for it where the service is delivered. We have to be realistic because there needs to be more resource across the board in planning, but we need those campaigns to champion economic development, engage them with the community so that we can deliver what everybody wants. Thank you, and Paisley, particularly the culture investment, has been there? I have been at Paisley University for a long time, so it is a place dear to our heart, but it is a good example of an individual driving that. With the support of his colleagues—I have talked about a champion—there is a good example of one. Avery, I do not know whether you have any comment on that. I will bow to my planning gurus to my left. Can I just ask a couple of closing questions? You have mentioned economic development, and I am wondering if witnesses, I will become to you in, if you have experience of working with the enterprise agencies to support regeneration. I think that we are due to maybe have them as part of the inquiry soon. Are there other national agencies that support the regeneration needs? We have communities in Scotland, but they came to an end in 2008. Do the enterprise agencies play that national role? Yes, and soci and high both operate well with communities. What about the areas that do not have soci and high? We have heard that. There is an absence there. One of the issues that places have and non-city places in towns have is the competitive nature of the regeneration game. We can identify places that need help. You can do a community plan to tell you that you need something. You then have to competitively bid for the money. If we were to prioritise where need is, not a hierarchy of where is most important or where is nicest. Where is the need in Scotland? Some of your constituents might miss out on that, because they are doing quite well, but other places have a need. I am bringing both the enterprise agencies, the Scottish Government, the city deals, etc. To identify, this is a place that has a need. Let's consult with the community and the community, I mean everybody, the business side of it as well, to then say, okay, so we can all bring us some of money to spend in this place to address the various issues, not just the physical issues, but the social issues of that place as well, because very often we tend to focus on physical change, whether or not that's urban realm or improving buildings, but if you go to any other regeneration areas—I'm familiar with Craig Miller—it's been regenerated three times. I can even see the third element of that regeneration beginning to look tired, because it's got lack of care and maintenance. There are underlying issues around our approach to regeneration and how we fund it long-term that aren't being addressed. We still have areas of poverty. I've recently been looking at our research on the spend of conservation regeneration schemes and timescale peritogenesis, which I'm deeply supportive of, but areas that have deprivation issues remain deprived. It looks a bit nicer, but the deprivation issues remain a problem there. We need to make sure that when we are looking at public spend, it goes to the places that have the greatest need and the people have the greatest need, and that it's tied into other elements of it around employability, around educational attainment. The one thing that we haven't touched on this morning, which I think is underlying many of the barriers to improving Scotland's places consistently, is land value. Where the market's hot, you pay a lot of money for a site, you're paying for the land, so the building that you have on the site that exists has carbon inherent to it. It should be reused, but you need an excellent number of units out of that site, so you really have to build something new or you have to expand it greatly. Land value is something that the Scottish Land Commission has been looking at. They've talked about land value tax and it gets punted around because it's a difficult one and everyone's a bit nervous about it, as is evidenced by Stephen's facial expression. However, land value and very low land value becomes a problem when you look at the maintenance costs of some of the, particularly in the west of Scotland, when we have existing building stock that needs maintenance, but it is on paper worthless. It has high environmental value and it may also have very high social value and community value, but because we are funded, we approach our economic development from a very financial perspective. We don't take those into account. I think that addressing land value underlies so many of the issues that we look around regeneration and development and coming into our town centres are the same things that you see happening there and within city centres. Thank you. That's got a big issue to bring in at the end, but it's fine. It's something that we can reflect on. I did ask about master plans earlier. Stephen and Craig's submissions describe master plan consent areas. Craig's submission says that it's been used for housing development, but maybe it should be used for town centres. It comes to the planning act. Can you just explain a wee bit more about that? Master plan consent area is essentially front load planning permission. It tries to provide a master plan, which allows you to agree some of the principles in advance around how to go through the more detailed elements of the planning system. There have been a number of pilots mainly in housing schemes across different parts of Scotland. They seem to be relatively successful. There's no resource attached to them, but what it does do is it probably helps to focus the mind from all the different players involved in that particular site as to what they need to do to make it a success, what infrastructure providers should do, what local authorities should do through its different consenting processes. We wondered if there could be situations in which that could be applied to a town centre setting. It doesn't just have to be with a residential centre. The four-runner to master plan consenting areas were called simplified planning zones, which are a titline of a light because it just makes some planning not something that you need to do. One of the pilots was done in a commercial aid in Hillington. It reduced some of the burdens upon it. It set out some of the things that it had to do and some of the things that it couldn't do. It's gone back to the idea that I've mentioned several times today about being much more proactive and front-loaded in how you agree what can and can't be done, which means that the more detailed stuff at the end doesn't have to be done or less of it has to be done. It could be a model that could be used in a town centre setting. It's something that we just thought would be worth raising. Okay, thank you. I thank all witnesses this morning for the time that you've given us. That's been very much appreciated. I will now briefly suspend the meeting while we allow witnesses to leave. Our next item of business this morning is consideration of petition PE1676 on the Land Registration Act 2012, referred to the committee under rule 15.6 of standing orders. This is a continued petition from the previous session lodged by Tony Rosser in 2017. As outlined in members' papers, this petition seeks a review of the land registration, Scotland Act 2012, focusing on two issues. The relationship between the statutory cadastral map, showing the legal boundaries to registered land and property maintained by Registers of Scotland, and the ordinance survey map on which the cadastral map is based. What supporting materials should be required when submitting an individual application for registration of land and property. The petition was previously considered in session 5 by the Public Audit and Post Legislative Scrutiny Committee. Our committee did seek an update from the Minister for Public Finance, Planning and Community Wealth on the Scottish Government's petition on the issues raised in the Scottish Government's position on the petition. We did so in December. I refer members to the minister's response included as an annex to the paper. The minister confirms that the Scottish Government's position has not changed since the petition was previously considered. Ahead of today's meeting, Mr Rosser submitted some additional information in response to the minister's update, which has been circulated to members. I thank Mr Rosser for taking the time to make this submission and I appreciate his reasons for bringing the petition forward. I will now invite members to give any comments on how you think the committee should approach the petition. I would like to say at the beginning that I have to declare an interest in that I have a dispute currently on boundaries with the Registers of Scotland. I think that looking at the letter from Tom Arthur, in the period since the petition was considered, which is early 2018, Registers of Scotland are confirmed, and I am quoting from the letter here, that no errors relating to parties being incorrectly classed as deceased have been encountered. There seems to be only one example of that, which is from Mr Rosser's solicitor. It seems to be a rather one-party issue, if you like. My suggestion would be that we do not continue with the petition. The question is about the post-legislative scrutiny of the legislation. I am not sure that the committee needs to complete the post-legislative scrutiny of the Land Registration Act 2012, however. I should declare an interest because, as indicated when we had the register in, I have a constituency case. People do get constituency cases, and they are very severe for people when they do happen. I think that the issue is what happens when there are errors and the process in that, and how many complaints are received when there are errors. I wonder now that we have a commitment for regular updates from the register that the issue is about what happens when errors are communicated to them and how they are dealt with, would be something that we would want to pursue, particularly on how complaints are dealt with, because we cannot ignore that all of us's constituency MSPs get concerns. It is about the title of their house, and it is very fundamental, but that is different than looking at the post-legislative scrutiny of the Act 2012 act itself. To pick up on a couple of comments, I feel that the committee has dealt favourably and is committed to regular updates with the registers of Scotland. I agree with what Fiona Hyslund said about the serious of those issues if they should occur and the impact that they have on people, but that is different to wholesale problems that are happening at scale, which does not seem to be the situation in this case. I am in favour of closing the petition, but I am also strongly in favour that we keep the focus on the regular attendance of the registers of Scotland to this committee. I do not think that I have any other comments. It is a decision of the committee to close the petition. I recognise the difficult situation that Mr Rosser has experienced. I know the disappointment and frustration that can be from petitioners when a petition is closed without the resolution that they seek, but I assure Mr Rosser that the committee takes its role in scrutinising the keeper seriously. As others have said, we have given a commitment to regular updates and regular witness sessions with the keeper. The issues and concerns that he has raised are something that we will keep on our agenda when we speak to the keeper in future. I now close the meeting and move into private session.