Seòmar agus comataidhean

I have a more general question for you. The committee went on a wonderful visit to North Ayrshire on Monday, and one of the questions that we put to some of the organisations there, which are on the ground and delivering community wealth building with projects that are benefiting people, was about how we measure the success of community wealth building. People in the room talked about building connections, crisis support, quality of life and other opportunities. Some of my concern is about how we measure that in the bill. In the proposed statement, ministers must set out how they intend to

“reduce economic wealth inequality”,

which is fine—I do not have a problem with that—and

“support economic growth”.

I am worried that “economic growth” will be explicitly interpreted to mean an increase in gross domestic product at the expense of all of the other lovely things that we know are so important, such as opportunity, crisis support and quality of life. Is economic growth the right way to measure the success of the bill, or are there better ways to do that?

I will dive into a bit more detail about what Daniel Johnson has discussed. Looking to the big picture, I am glad to see that there is a plan to transition a fossil fuel refinery to projects such as recycling and using the fuels of the future.

One challenge with plastic recycling is simply the ability to make money from it—to make it financially viable. Producing plastics as a by-product of fossil fuels is ridiculously cheap, which is why plastics are so ubiquitous. However, recycling them is expensive.

To build on what Daniel Johnson said, to make recycled plastics economically viable, there would have to be regulatory change. That would mean having measures such as taxes on plastic, which are of course not within the remit of the Scottish Government, or, as the minister alluded to, extended producer responsibility for packaging, which would make producers of plastic packaging pay a fee that could later be used towards recycling it. The deposit return scheme is one such measure. However, there would have to be other regulatory changes, such as introducing a required percentage of recycled plastics in plastic goods, because, if left to its own choice, the market will always go for new plastics as they are much cheaper than recycled ones. What appetite is there for such regulatory change? What discussion has the minister had with the UK Government on the foundational regulations that would be needed to make business plans in that area viable?

I thank the witnesses for coming in today. I have a quick question for Jane Martin and then more general questions. We heard last week from Neil McInroy about the intention of the bill to pivot how we support businesses. Is Scottish Enterprise ready to pivot to supporting co-operative social enterprises and employee-owned businesses? Is that part of your plan?

The 2024 act does a lot of that.

Thank you.

Who needs to be in the room to ensure that the bill captures the learning from your experience of community wealth building? We have heard that the finance pillar is one of the more challenging pillars of community wealth building, so who needs to be in the room to help to tackle that? How important is the influence of partners who own land or significant assets, for example? Should private business be in the room? Who needs to be around the table for that to be successful?

But it will only do that with packaging—plastics, of course, are used ubiquitously. I will leave that one there.

My final question, cabinet secretary, is on another difficult conversation that needs to be had about biofuels, which, as you know, will require increased timber production. We already have difficult conversations with the agriculture sector about land being taken out of agriculture for things like reforestation and, in this case, commercial forestry. The aviation industry wants to convert to biofuels. That is a great idea, except that there is not enough land on planet earth to grow enough timber to keep the aviation industry at its current size. How much of Scotland’s land are we talking about putting under commercial forestry for this? Is there an understanding of the scale of the land that would be required to feed Grangemouth that timber?

My final question is on the relevant and specified bodies lists, which I have a few issues with, but I wondered about your thoughts. One of my issues is that some of the bodies on the specified public bodies list have vast tracts of land and other assets, but other bodies do not, so they are wildly unequal in terms of what they can bring to the table for community wealth building.

What are your thoughts on that and on whether all the right organisations are included? I notice that although regional colleges are on the relevant bodies list, local colleges, community councils and other organisations such as health boards are not. Are the enterprise agencies in the right place on the list? Do you have any thoughts about the lists?

My second question is more about local authorities. In the survey that was conducted among local authorities and the community wealth building practitioners network, only eight of Scotland’s 32 local authorities said that they were already leading on a community wealth building strategy and action plan. That is a quarter. What is the status of our local authorities in terms of their knowledge, ability, willingness and resources to make progress here?

That is useful. I want to delve a bit further into that point and some of the points that Councillor Forson made about how community wealth building partnerships might be made effective and cross the implementation gap, rather than just adding another layer.

Do you want to add anything about the accountability, governance and structure of the partnerships and how to make them effective?