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I am happy to move the motions. There is not much more to say, other than my key opening remarks that we believe, following the review, that now is the time to continue with the policy and to uprate the minimum unit price to 65p. I commend both sets of regulations to the committee and hope that it will support them.

I move,

That the Health, Social Care and Sport Committee recommends that the Alcohol (Minimum Pricing) (Scotland) Act 2012 (Continuation) Order 2024 [draft] be approved.

That the Health, Social Care and Sport Committee recommends that the Alcohol (Minimum Price per Unit) (Scotland) Amendment Order 2024 [draft] be approved.

That timeline runs over 17 or 18 years—which is a lot of time. In that time, there have been a lot of interventions, and a lot of work has been done to reduce drug and alcohol-related deaths and hospital admissions. We took the decision to continue to implement minimum unit pricing, because we saw the benefit not just in the short term but in the long term. That is why I am committed to continuing the policy and uprating MUP; we can see the definite change that is happening.

Have we been doing this long enough to understand that change at a population level? Probably not. That is why the reviews, the work and the modelling that are being done are incredibly important. Yes, we are talking estimates—but they can be only estimates, because it is a bit more difficult to disentangle health outcomes, particularly with regard to people who do not factor into the death statistics but who factor into the reduction in hazardous and harmful drinking. That is why the modelling and the analysis are being done in the way that they are, and it will also help us understand how we move forward. We want to uprate precisely because the differential has increased and we want to make sure that it increases again.

The director of public health in north-east England says that this policy works, and we can see that it works. We have made the comparison between Scotland and the north-east of England, and its recommendation is minimum unit pricing for England and Wales. That is an important point.

The genesis of the community asset transfer process was about assets such as community centres, libraries and so on. It is now moving into a new sphere, part of which is heritage buildings in communities. The Trinity church in Larkhall is a perfect example of that and of a community getting together, holding consultations and deciding what it wants to do with an asset. A few weeks ago, I met Caroline Clark from the National Lottery Heritage Fund. We discussed many such issues and how her organisation aligns its funding and grant-making opportunities for communities.

In some ways, when a property is not in the care of a Government body, it can attract more support. If a property is transferred to a charitable trust or another constituted organisation such as a residents organisation, avenues open up for additional grant funding that does not come through Government bodies. Caroline Clark and Alex Paterson talked about how aligning some of that funding will support people. It is not just about money, however; it is also about the expertise that people need in order to maintain the buildings.

It is one thing to take on a straightforward community centre, but it is another thing to take on, for example, Trinity church in Larkhall, given the stonemasonry and stained-glass window issues there. That takes real expertise. We have been talking about how we use the expertise that is currently in all our bodies to support communities to do such work. Caroline Clark has talked about grant funding being attached to securing expertise—it would not be conditional, but would be about giving people opportunities to access experts in such fields.

On that point, when I met Historic Churches Scotland a few weeks ago, it talked specifically about the expertise in its organisation and how it can engage community groups and charitable trusts in its work so that they can take on buildings and maintain and sustain them using those heritage skills.

It is not flawed. There are current challenges, and challenges on the horizon, in relation to the impact of climate on all our buildings. I explained the situation with Tantallon castle, including the wear on the building and the sea wall and the previous bad repairs, and I take account of that.

I agree with Alex Paterson that preservation is in the DNA of everything that we are doing. It is all about how we maintain, sustain and preserve our cultural heritage for future generations in a sustainable way. That will be different for the different materials that buildings are made from.

I will pick up Neil Bibby’s point about how important skills are for preserving our cultural heritage and taking forward those challenges to resolution. In the past 50 years or so, we have used many different materials in building. We built our cultural heritage from the ground; people built using the things that were around them in their communities. We can go back to ideas around how those buildings and landscapes were created, and we can use traditional ways to preserve them.

We also use innovation. I mentioned the fact that drone footage is used to get to places where it has been difficult to get to, but that is not the be-all and end-all. In some ways, it is not the best way to get a pair of eyes and a pair of hands on crumbling rock or whatever. Preservation is also an issue there.

Keeping buildings wind and watertight is one thing, but creating opportunities in which they can be drivers of change for future generations is another. One example of that is the Burrell Collection in Glasgow, which is in a new building and an old building. The older building was much more solid than the newer building, and challenges came with that. A new hybrid building was created, which the collection is now in. Most of the glass is energy-conserving glass. Not only were the curators excited to show me all the exhibitions—I have been to the Burrell quite a few times; it is one of my favourite places—but it was great to hear from them about how they did that work. They took me up on the roof to see the big array of photovoltaic panels, which, along with the energy-conserving glass, have drastically reduced the museum’s energy bills.

It is not just about making sure that the fabric of the building is wind and watertight and that the building is sustainable for the future; it is about taking opportunities to reduce costs and, therefore, the carbon impact on the environment, and using new technologies to do that. The Burrell won an award for that work, and it has become a bit of an exemplar for other cultural heritage buildings. It can share that experience, and is doing so as we speak.

You cannot just put things in isolation in that sense; they are all connected in different ways. Not only does the Burrell Collection now have a building that will be sustained for many years in the future, but it has also dramatically reduced its energy bills, when energy is probably the biggest cost impact for any of our cultural heritage buildings.

I agree that participation is incredibly important. You will know that the strategy was developed over the summer of 2022, and that participation was at the heart of it. It was developed by Historic Environment Scotland, but the Scottish Government, the Built Environment Forum Scotland and many other organisations and people with an interest were also involved.

There was a public consultation at that point, and HES published its “We Asked, You Said, We Did” report, which was a way of conveying to the people who engaged with the consultation process how important their ideas were. In that process, the point was raised about people not knowing what was on their doorstep and getting to know what was on their doorstep.

In my response to the deputy convener, I talked about my intention to work closely with local authorities. Many of the properties that HES looks after are also looked after by local authorities. For instance, Chatelherault country park in my constituency is incredibly well looked after by South Lanarkshire Council. That is one example, but members will all have examples from their constituencies of the partnership between local government and HES and therefore the Scottish Government, which is incredibly important.

One thing that I wanted to do when I came into my current role was to reinvigorate the culture conveners forum. We have done that, and the forum has now met. We decided immediately that we needed to have an event to look at how we work together and the value of culture in all of our lives. That will be called a culture value summit, which is a straightforward name for it, and it will happen in the new year. That is very important.

I am interested in the local authority historic environment group that Alexander Stewart mentioned. I have not heard of that and it has not been mentioned by any of the culture conveners—I think that I met them all in that meeting just a few weeks ago. However, I will pick up the point and see where that group got to.

In big cities such as Edinburgh or Glasgow, the historic environment is everywhere. In fact, most of the authorities in those places work in buildings that are part of the historic environment, because the city chambers are important buildings. However, that comes with challenges when there are issues with the buildings and local authorities are involved in their clean-up and restoration.

That partnership is important to me. I want to strengthen and grow it, but I want to work together much more dynamically to tackle the challenges that are coming down the road and we can do that only in partnership. There is no way that being separate from local government on the issue would deal with those challenges.

I will take away the issue about the local historic environment group and speak to Councillor Maureen Chalmers, with whom I work closely, as she is the chair of the community wellbeing board.

I know that that issue is close to your heart, convener, and to the hearts of many members, not just of the committee but across the chamber.

I gave a bit of an update when I answered Roz McCall’s question yesterday. Seventy buildings were impacted by high-level masonry issues. At this stage, 53 have now opened or partially opened. Historic Environment Scotland confirmed to me that it expects all the inspections and work to be finished by March next year, which is ever closer as we move swiftly through this year.

You asked about analysis. HES constantly analyses and reviews the issue. It has considered different ways to speed up inspection processes and complete more detailed inspections—and, therefore, get more detailed work done. That includes using technology.

I visited Tantallon castle in the summer when it reopened to the public and was shown some of the damage that climate change is doing there. HES has used drones to identify issues that have come up, but getting a person up there has been much more fruitful because, sometimes, the drone does not tell you everything that you can find out by getting human eyes and hands on what it looks and feels like. HES has been doing a lot of that. All the different sites have different needs and issues. HES has been working closely with us and all the sites to identify those issues as quickly as possible, find the remedies to fix them as quickly as possible and get them opened to the public safely.

That work is continuing and HES updates its website constantly with the latest inspection data. I would be happy to give you and the committee that link in order to access that information as it is updated. It is updated quite swiftly, so keeping on top of it all through communications with me is one way, but the other way is the update to the public through its website.

I would always welcome and agree to such an opportunity, but the announcements that we have heard in the past few days on the new immigration measures that the UK Government wants to take will make that process much more difficult. The earnings threshold is a barrier on its own, but the UK Government has just said that it will scrap its list of areas in which there are skills gaps. Therefore, encouraging people from other parts of the world to come to Scotland to work on our amazing assets has just become much harder.

Much of the work that has been done at some of those sites has been done with local communities. It is about asking what people want to see from a historic site and what access they would like. It is about enabling them to understand why access is or is not safe, and asking them how they view the site.

When I was at Tantallon castle, there were many members of the public there. Some—like me—had climbed up to the parapet to get a view of the damage that can be seen coming in off the sea. Many of those people said that it was a great place to visit. It is interesting that I have found that tourists have known a bit more about local sites than local people have. There is educational work to do on what is on people’s doorsteps and how important it is.

During the pandemic, such sites became really important for people. Their daily walk was to those sites. It was about getting to know what is in their community. That is really important.

In my opening remarks, I spoke about participation, how we work with local communities to inform them about what is happening with inspections, how we are reopening sites and making them safe, and how people can use them in a safe way.

For fear of speaking for my other colleagues in Government and because of the rough budget situation that we are going through right now, I will not answer that question, because I do not think that I can answer for other portfolios.

When I came into the job, part of my role was to mainstream culture across the whole of Government. Mainstreaming was one of the roles that I had when I had the equalities and human rights portfolio, and now I see some of my own work coming back to me from other portfolios, which is always a good thing.

Mainstreaming across many parts of Government is not just desirable—it is necessary. From the point of view of net zero, for example, I found that we had to engage with the heat in buildings regulations, which could be a bit dry for most people, because that led straight back to the example that I used of the Burrell Collection and how it has managed to turn around its fortunes. That is one example.

I want opportunities to formalise cross-Government work and I want to include local government. That is why the work with the wellbeing board in the Convention of Scottish Local Authorities is incredibly important. Across the national performance framework, the wellbeing economy work is also of huge interest to me. I do not think that we can have a wellbeing economy without culture being one of its structural mainstays. Their having the opportunity be involved in and experience the imaginative input of something that we deem to be a cultural asset is incredibly important to people’s wellbeing. We saw that during the pandemic, when people found interesting and innovative ways of doing their daily walks, for example. That links wellbeing straight into health and health outcomes.

Many of the sites that I have visited have had lots of incidental things going on for their local communities. For example, one site that I visited recently has an older people’s rambling group. I asked people what they get from that, and they said that it keeps them mobile, maintains good mental health, maintains social connection and reduces social isolation and loneliness. You can see right there how mainstreaming is incredibly important in everything that we do across the whole of Government.

Mainstreaming also makes implementation important. Jim Fairlie will be interested in this example of mainstreaming. When stakeholders raised concerns about rural and agricultural policy areas, we worked closely with them on the draft Agriculture and Rural Communities (Scotland) Bill. Those conversations led to the inclusion of the historic environment in the bill; it would probably never have been included otherwise. Mr Fairlie will know from his background how important cultural heritage is and how farmers are growing or allowing grazing around sites. That engagement enabled us to work on the bill and to preserve historic and cultural assets through it. That is an example of how mainstreaming is important in the day-to-day work of creating new legislation and regulation.

That is one aspect. For me, another aspect is health and wellbeing. We cannot work without having mental health colleagues, wellbeing colleagues from Mr Gray’s team and colleagues from the health team working with us, because that can be transformational for people’s lives.

There is not enough time.