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Thank you for joining us this morning. I will come to Jeremy Gorelick first. One of the challenges seems to be that the amount of due diligence and financial readiness required for an investment of £1 million involves the same effort as that needed for a package of £100 million. There seems to be a gap between the propositions at a local level and the desirability for investors, and one of the potential jobs of Government is to facilitate that.

The First Minister of Scotland will be chairing a proposed investor group, which will marshal the investors. I declare an interest because I launched it in 2020, but we have a green investment portfolio, which is currently worth £1 billion and involves 10 projects, with the promise of an increase to £3 billion. Those are the investable propositions. Earlier, you talked about some of the projects being at the concept or feasibility stage, and the need for an agreed mechanism so that there is almost an authority to invest because they have hit certain benchmarks to make them investable. Scotland is a country of 5 million people and has a devolved Administration. Could the role of national Government be to help local authorities to get to that stage of investability?

That would be helpful. We are constrained in the amount that the Scottish Government can borrow, but there might be possibilities if we are creative about how we look at things with regard to local authorities.

In relation to the local authority role, I have a question for Emma Harvey. My colleague will go into some of the skills that are required, but we need something almost like a regulatory standard to achieve investability. There is a difference between a project and the process. What policies and mechanisms can be put in place so that local authorities can achieve that standardisation to help scale up the level of investment opportunities for them?

On the testing, we have had a great deal of focus on a place-based solution to net zero and it was interesting that you were talking about the role of local authorities not just on the demand and supply side but on the enabling side. On the private sector side—home ownership, for example, and green mortgages—local authorities may not see that they have a key role in helping to promote that in a place-based, street-by-street process. Is that something that you mean when you talk about local authorities enabling and leading on the information sharing?

Those are all good ideas, if you can find the landlord. Can anything be done to improve registration of landlords so that they can be located?

It sounds a bit like wishful thinking to say that the market will resolve the matter. We might come back to you on that in our report, minister.

The costs of developing shops and the units above them, particularly for housing—the retrofit costs and the costs of improving accessibility—are prohibitive for private enterprise. There is a desire to have more people living in town centres, particularly older people and single-person households, to address the social mix. What can the Scottish Government do to incentivise social landlords to take on such properties and to provide good-quality mixed tenure in our town centres? What are you doing differently to make that work?

We will also be interested to hear about funding but, for the moment, I will pass back to the convener.

There is a particular issue with how we incentivise funding for town centre housing development. The city centre task force’s report made nine specific proposals for housing in city centres. Those were far more detailed than the proposals in the TCAP2. The housing aspects of the Scottish Government’s town centre report seemed to be light compared to those in the city centre task force’s report.

Your responsibilities relate to planning, public finance and community wealth. The Cabinet Secretary for Social Justice, Housing and Local Government is the lead on housing. However, there does not seem to be a strong a read-across for incentivising town centre housing development from your plans to the city centre plans. Is there anything that we can do to ensure the financial incentives that will be absolutely necessary to establish town centre housing development? Can you try to ensure that there is a more joined-up approach so that you mobilise the housing investment that is clearly available for city centres, which you also need to get into town centre development?

I will cover property development. It is clear that absentee landlords are a real problem in the development of town centres. Many of them live internationally or are based overseas, if they can be found. Recovery and engagement are very difficult. The status quo is not working in tackling the problem of absentee landlords. What is the Government doing and what can it do to improve that situation so that we can develop properties that are owned by absentee landlords?

NPF4 and the planning framework are critical for a variety of reasons, but they do not come with an enormous funding pot, as far as I am aware. How can we mobilise the resources that are available in the housing budget for town centre living? We know that it is more costly to build in town centres than it is to build on greenfield sites, so we will have to find some kind of incentives.

Exactly.