Seòmar agus comataidhean

The question is, that motion S6M-18057, in the name of Ivan McKee, be approved. Are we agreed?

Motion agreed to.

The committee will report on the outcome of our consideration of the instrument in due course. I invite the committee to delegate responsibility to me, as convener, to approve a draft of the report for publication.

Members indicated agreement.

Thank you, minister, and thank you, Adam. We will suspend briefly to allow you to depart before we welcome our next panel of witnesses.

The commission has listed 11 barriers to transformation. It acknowledges that some of those are external—not within councils’ control—whereas others are internal. What are the most significant external barriers to transformation and how could the forthcoming Scottish budget help to address them?

That is helpful, and the call for multiyear funding is relevant to the topic of the Scottish Government budget. I imagine that, if more people understood that the Scottish Government and our local authorities work to one-year budgets, they would be pretty shocked and amazed at what gets delivered on the back of that. The news that is coming from the United Kingdom Government is welcome. Let us see what happens.

I will move on now. Some of the other barriers might come out in the rest of the conversation this morning. Evelyn Tweed will ask the next questions.

Thank you.

We now move to the theme of budget challenges.

I understand that the benefits of the proposed repeal are likely to be for those involved in the design of developments, those applying for planning permission, planning authorities and the Scottish ministers. That is because procedural and implementation burdens from the parallel operations of section 3F alongside NPF4, the new build heat standard and associated building regulations are resolved by the repeal of section 3F. Its repeal means that focus can be on applying the latest policy and legislation in relation to greenhouse gas emissions. In light of that, if the repeal goes ahead, I am interested to hear what steps architects and designers would be required to take under NPF4 and the new-build heat standard to ensure that their new developments minimise greenhouse gas contributions.

As no other member wants to ask a question, I turn to agenda item 3, which is the formal consideration of motion S6M-18057.

Motion moved,

That the Local Government, Housing and Planning Committee recommends that the Climate Change (Local Development Plan) (Repeals) (Scotland) Order 2025 [draft] be approved.—[Ivan McKee.]

Our next agenda item is evidence taking as part of our scrutiny of the Scottish budget 2026-27. We are joined by Andrew Burns, who is deputy chair of the Accounts Commission; Derek Yule, who is a member of the commission; Blyth Deans, who is an audit director at Audit Scotland; and Martin McLauchlan, who is a senior manager at Audit Scotland. I welcome our witnesses to the meeting. We have around 90 minutes for this discussion. There is no need for witnesses to operate their own microphones. We have agreed that we will direct our questions to Andrew Burns in the first instance, who will distribute them as he thinks appropriate.

I will ask the first question, which is about the commission’s call for transformational change. You said that there is not enough evidence that truly transformational change is taking place, but, last week, one council chief executive told the committee that they had a sense that the use of the word “transformation” was “too loose”. What do you mean when you talk about a transformation? What does a transformed local authority look like? What should local authorities look like in 10 years’ time?

Thanks for asking that question, Mr Coffey—it is important to be clear that there is no duplication.

I note that Andrew Burns said that local authorities do not welcome being audited, but I think that being audited is part of the relationship—it is like two sides of the walnut, in a way. It creates essential feedback loops for councils to keep them on the straight and narrow, as you said, Mr Burns. That relationship is important.

Before I ask about the invest to save fund, I want to come back to the question that Willie Coffey brought up about councils working with communities. The Minister for Public Finance made a statement to the Parliament on the public service reform strategy, during which he talked about a range of things—he simplified a lot of things—and said that the Scottish Government is going to

“unlock the potential of the third sector”.—[Official Report, 19 June 2025; c 56.]

You talked about the challenge around communities feeling that things are being done to them and the importance of councils being more collaborative and engaging with communities in a way that goes beyond consultation. However, the idea of unlocking the potential of the third sector concerns me because it involves the idea of organisations in the sector—which are mostly run by boards of volunteers—picking up quite a lot of things that public services and local authorities can no longer handle. What are your thoughts on that? Should we be concerned that we are pushing things into the third sector and that that is not a space that has a feedback loop?