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Adrian Watson, I would like you to address the same issues, but also to touch on funding. Is there scope for central funding to support local organisations and communities to do some of the visioning work that Craig McLaren talked about? Is there also scope to provide, if not a centralised resource, somewhere where communities and local authorities could at least access the skills and knowledge that they need? You mentioned that there is a lack of skills in Aberdeen City Council because people are retiring. Will you say a little bit more about that?

Good morning, and thank you for your comments so far. I want to dig a bit deeper on issues such as master planning and local development plans, which were discussed earlier.

Craig McLaren talked about town centres needing to be places where people want to be. That needs to apply to a range of people: to go back to one of Michelle Thomson’s points, all people need to feel safe. What do you think about the value of local development plans? How important should they be? How do we link the different master planning and visioning exercises? How do we feed those into development plans in a robust way that means that developers cannot override them and things cannot be changed on what often appears to be a whim?

It is crucial in this whole process that we ensure that we are listening to the right people rather than taking a majoritarianism approach, so that we develop places where everyone wants to be, not just the people with loud voices, those who have resources or those who have access to having their voices heard.

Do you have any other comments on enhancing community engagement through local development planning? I refer to the front loading of the process, as well as its implementation.

I thank everyone for coming, especially the people in the gallery. I also thank everyone who contributed to the work of the committee in drafting the stage 1 report, which we discussed in the chamber a few weeks ago.

On behalf of the Scottish Greens, I, like others, really welcome the bill. It is a whole-hearted welcome, but one that is tinged with sadness. I wish that the bill had come years ago and that it covered the whole of the United Kingdom, not Scotland only. I hope that other legislatures in the UK will follow suit.

I agree with comments that others have made around the importance of standing in solidarity with trade unions and with workers who are on strike and who are seeking to improve conditions for themselves and for those who come after them. The bill allows us not only to express that solidarity but to take stock of where things have gone wrong in the past. In itself, the pardon is very important.

I thank the cabinet secretary for the work that he has put into the amendments that we are discussing. As a committee, we have pushed him into lodging some of those amendments and that shows that it has been a positive, constructive discussion. I thank him for that. I am more than happy to support the amendments in the cabinet secretary’s name.

I thank Pam Duncan-Glancy for the comments that she made in relation to her amendments. I hope that over the next few weeks we can talk about how we incorporate the spirit of what she is trying to achieve in those amendments at stage 3. However, this morning, I will support the amendments in the name of the cabinet secretary.

Can I bring in Stuart Mackinnon on that question, and on the question about infrastructure? What are your members telling you about what is or is not there?

Good morning, panel, and thank you for being here. I just want to follow on from Colin Beattie’s questions about skills and training by looking at that issue with regard to retail businesses themselves. Peter Mowforth and Carolyn Currie have both talked about the lack of skills in that respect, but I also note that, according to the digital economy business survey, only 50 per cent of businesses seem to have any interest in training their own teams. What do we need to do to shift that? Linked to that, is one of the barriers or one of the things slowing everything down a lack of adequate access on our high streets to the digital infrastructure that businesses and wholesale providers need? Perhaps Carolyn Currie can respond first.

You said that 7 per cent of the support that Business Gateway offered last year through the digital boost programme was to the retail sector. Can you tell us a bit more about that and about the challenges that the retail sector brought to you as you supported it? I have a couple of follow-up questions, but I will start with that one.

From what we heard in the earlier discussion, there seems to be a gap between the huge range of support that you provide and the support that retail businesses seek, whether they are bricks-based only or bricks-and-clicks based. Does Business Gateway have any future plans to reach out to retail and other town centre businesses more directly to enable them to access the support that you provide? Should we be aware of any geographical areas that you have identified as places where no support is sought at all?

Good morning to the panel, and thank you for joining us. I have a couple of questions, but I will first follow up on Jamie Halcro Johnston’s questions. All the witnesses have talked about the need to diversify and not just focus on certain individual elements of retail, and the expectation that that will happen. We have talked about hospitality and entertainment, and culture and leisure can also pull people into town centres and keep them there.

I want to ask Martin Newman about the barriers to diversifying. What are the blockages—the things that are preventing people from using the bricks that they have in a range of different ways?

Thank you very much.