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Under the next agenda item, the committee has the opportunity to take further evidence to inform its consideration of the regulations that give effect to Boundaries Scotland’s recommendations relating to six local authority areas. This week, the committee will hear from Boundaries Scotland on its recommendations. I warmly welcome, from Boundaries Scotland, Ronnie Hinds, who is the chair; Ailsa Henderson, who is the deputy chair; and Colin Wilson, who is the review manager for the Scottish boundary commissions secretariat.

I acknowledge Boundaries Scotland’s good work in making its recommendations. It was good to read about it and to see the criteria that were used. I am very aware that Boundaries Scotland is a fairly small unit of people, so you did a good job. You had to work with the criteria, and that has led to different responses, depending on the local authority that we have talked to. We will get into that this morning.

I invite Elena Witham to ask the first questions.

We are discussing a very important topic, on which a few others want to come in. We will go to Kim Fellows first.

We will have to go over our time a little bit. I know that we have one more theme to explore, but I want to indulge myself with a supplementary on the climate emergency issue.

The committee has been talking about how we might work with other committees, and I have started a conversation about agricultural support payments, which will have to be reviewed at some point. In a conversation with me, someone pointed out that local government could play a role in that respect. What if we directed 5 per cent of the agricultural support payment budget towards local government to fund, say, farmers markets or even glasshouses where we could start growing things locally on quite a large scale? I am curious to hear what Paul O’Brien has to say about that, and it would be great if perhaps one other witness could offer another view or say something in support. What do you think of the idea of agricultural support payments going to local government?

In respect of item 3, I declare that I am a Highland and Islands MSP.

Thank you for that, Ronnie. We have given a lot of attention to Highland; I will give a little bit more attention to Argyll and Bute. You have probably already touched on this issue but I will ask the question. I believe that one of the proposed wards for Argyll and Bute Council is Mull, Coll and Tiree. The proposal is for a three-member ward, and because there is a larger population on Mull, all the councillors might end up being from there. However, there is no direct ferry service—there is no way to get to Coll and Tiree directly—so people would have to go through Oban to get back out to those islands. There is concern about that. I think that there was something in the criteria about a link within the wards.

Yes.

Thank you—that is great.

We move on to theme 5, which is a focus on outcomes, benchmarking and the Christie report. I invite Willie Coffey, who joins us virtually, to lead on that theme.

We will move to a different theme, because of time constraints. We could spend a whole day with you all and really learn a lot, but we do not have a day, we have 90 minutes.

First, I will tell you what our themes are, so that you have a sense of what is coming. We will move on to budgets and funding, which will be followed by community empowerment and local democracy. We will then ask about community wealth building, which will be followed by outcomes and benchmarking, which is connected to the Christie report. The next theme will be climate emergency and green recovery, and the final theme is councillor demographics. That is the journey that we want to go on, so we have a lot of areas to cover.

I ask Meghan Gallacher to lead off on budgets and funding.

We move to theme 3, in which we will explore community empowerment and local democracy. One of the key findings of the previous Local Government and Communities Committee was that people want to have more say and influence over how services and amenities are provided in their local areas and that community empowerment goes hand in hand with community wellbeing. Dave Watson, a former member of Unison Scotland, argued that

“the governance of public services in Scotland is one of the most centralised in Europe”.

Therefore, what specific mechanisms and policies should we include in the upcoming local democracy bill, which will devolve some control to communities?

Yes, it is important that we start to track indicators of what is happening for communities.

We will now move on to the theme of climate emergency and green recovery—which is why I am saying that it is important to track the indicators. It is also important to shift power to a much more local level. I think that we will be considering the need for adaptation and communities will be best placed to do that work. They know what they need, what procurement they need and what they must put in place for resilience as things start to change rapidly at much more microclimate levels.

I will now bring in my colleague Paul McLennan with some questions to introduce that theme.