The Official Report is a written record of public meetings of the Parliament and committees.
All Official Reports of meetings in the Debating Chamber of the Scottish Parliament.
All Official Reports of public meetings of committees.
Displaying 789 contributions
Standards, Procedures and Public Appointments Committee
Meeting date: 5 October 2023
Alasdair Allan
I cannot see anything that is relevant, but I refer to my entry in the register of members’ interests.
Standards, Procedures and Public Appointments Committee
Meeting date: 5 October 2023
Alasdair Allan
I echo what the convener said about the group being welcome. You mentioned that Parliament-to-Parliament contact might be established. Is that part of the remit that you would like the group to develop? If so, how?
Rural Affairs and Islands Committee
Meeting date: 27 September 2023
Alasdair Allan
I will return to a familiar theme. You will be aware that, in my constituency, the population drop has been 5.5 per cent between the past two censuses. In some communities in my constituency, the population has halved since the 1960s. What I am driving at is that I am very conscious that, through your programme and the work on which you co-operate with other departments, a lot is happening on the housing front to tackle depopulation but there is an elephant in the room, which is that housing is disappearing in the islands at a rate that no Government could possibly make up for by building social housing. In some places, housing is disappearing into Airbnb or second homes, or it is simply being bought up by wealthy people to the extent that, in some communities, nobody local can possibly compete. Valuable as all the activities that we are talking about are, how can they be married up with some attempt in the most fragile communities to deal with the problem of the vanishing housing stock?
Rural Affairs and Islands Committee
Meeting date: 27 September 2023
Alasdair Allan
All those projects are valuable and have an important impact. As you say, relocating 25 families to Uist is very important for that island. I suppose that I am looking at the other end of the pipeline. Will there come a time when it will be necessary to make some of those projects more effective in order to ensure that the housing market is not completely unregulated and that there is not a situation whereby there are no houses available to live in?
Rural Affairs and Islands Committee
Meeting date: 27 September 2023
Alasdair Allan
The Scottish Government faces a pretty impossible task of trying to second guess what the UK Government might be doing on the matter. We do not appear to have much information from the UK Government about what will happen beyond 2025. Is one of the things that you are having to second guess whether the UK Government will choose to Barnettise agricultural support, which would be difficult, given the different agriculture profiles in Scotland and England?
Rural Affairs and Islands Committee
Meeting date: 27 September 2023
Alasdair Allan
When you are offering advice or speaking to the farmers and crofters of Scotland, do you have to second guess the likelihood of whether the UK Government might invoke the UK Internal Market Act 2020 in some of that? Do you have to second guess the extent to which the UK Government will be tolerant of difference? I am thinking, for instance, of the continuation of direct payments in Scotland or the continuation of less favoured area support scheme payments in Scotland. Is that something on the horizon that you have to anticipate—whether the UK Government will take a benign or other attitude towards difference when it comes to UKIMA?
Rural Affairs and Islands Committee
Meeting date: 27 September 2023
Alasdair Allan
That is great. Thank you.
Rural Affairs and Islands Committee
Meeting date: 27 September 2023
Alasdair Allan
On the final point that you raised, how will you manage to achieve that? How do you co-ordinate the spending in the islands programme with that wider spending? A subject that I never stop speaking about and will not stop speaking about is housing, because there are acute housing needs in many areas. How do those two areas of budgeting activity tally?
Rural Affairs and Islands Committee
Meeting date: 27 September 2023
Alasdair Allan
You mentioned childcare. Through this project, and in other areas of its activity, the Government is putting a lot of effort into childcare. I have one comment, which I am sure is not unique to my constituency. In huge swathes of that constituency, there is not one childminder available for anyone in the community at all. I know that I keep going on about that, but some of that is related to demographics and to the fact that there is no housing that people who might want to do that job can live in. Is it likely that policy will focus on some of the demographic problems that have an impact on childcare?
Rural Affairs and Islands Committee
Meeting date: 20 September 2023
Alasdair Allan
I want to ask a wee bit more about the question of duplication in the code. Do sections 2 to 4 of the bill place any new legal obligations on buyers and sellers? I think that Gilly Mendes Ferreira touched on that. Are we dealing with something that is purely advisory or will people have new obligations as a result of it?