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Willie Coffey will ask questions on local and national leadership.

The next item on our agenda is consideration of two negative instruments. There is no requirement for the committee to make any recommendations on the instruments. Members will note that we wrote to stakeholders to invite views on the Scottish statutory instrument on general permitted development, and a couple of responses are included with the meeting papers.

If members agree to do so, we could write to the Scottish Government to seek further information on how the safeguarding process will work in practice and on whether councils offer clear procedures for raising concerns and complaints, as RNIB Scotland has suggested.

Do members have any comments on the instruments?

That is a good point. Communities in cities deal with many more people and much more complex issues and have to find their way through all of that.

My understanding of a local place plan and of what has come forward recently is that those are to do with the physical planning on the ground—that is, a community would decide the physical aspects—and that that plan feeds into the local development plan in terms of where housing will be and that kind of thing.

The locality plan is more about services, which is why we have the fire service and the police represented on a community planning partnership. It tries to pull in all the different bodies that can respond. Last week, the Scottish Fire and Rescue Service told us about how it works at community level through CPPs to build relationships, as people trust and have respect for the service. It is doing quite a bit of work on heat in homes and things like that. I find that interesting, because it pulls in the preventative aspect. Members of the fire service can get into people’s homes, so they could find out whether someone is living in fuel poverty and what help they would need through Home Energy Scotland and that kind of thing.

We will move on to our last two themes. Miles Briggs will lead the questions on the culture of public bodies and Willie Coffey will come in with questions on local and national leadership.

Let us see whether that is possible.

Those are all good points. We need more clarity, and we want some up-front information.

Those comments were all on the second instrument. Are there any comments on the first instrument?

I see that there are no further comments from members. At the start of the meeting, we agreed to take the next item in private, so I close the public part of the meeting.

I think that it would be helpful, too.

To clarify, would you like to hear from the minister on what is going to be rolled out, or would you like us to bring in organisations such as RNIB Scotland?

Good morning and welcome to the ninth meeting in 2023 of the Local Government, Housing and Planning Committee. I remind members and witnesses to ensure that their devices are on silent, with all notifications turned off during the meeting.

We have apologies from committee member Mark Griffin.

Item 1 is a decision on whether to take item 6 in private. Do members agree to do that?

Members indicated agreement.

Does anyone else have experience of LOIPs or locality plans?