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MSP report

Lothian Green MSP report – October 2021

Lorna Slater’s report to Lothian branches of the Scottish Greens for October 2021.

This is a report to you, my Party colleagues, highlighting some of my work as an MSP in recent weeks. To keep up from day-to-day you can follow my social media pages, as well as the Party website.

Lorna Slater profile photoOn Twitter: @lornaslater

On Facebook: @LornaSlaterMSP

On the Party website: My Greens.scot page

It was great to see so many of you at our party conference this month. It was a really nice and invigorating conference, and it felt so good to be able to do it in person.

It was our first since the cooperation agreement and it was my privilege and pleasure to be the first Green Minister to address a party conference anywhere in the UK. It was an excellent weekend that highlighted the best of our party and the major changes that we are making in the years ahead.

It has been a busy time in parliament, with lots of things needing to be done before we went into recess. In terms of issues with a particular impact on Lothian, Patrick announced the fantastic new measures that we are introducing to ensure warmer and greener homes, including an investment of at least £1.8 billion to support this work.

On a similar note, the Scottish Parliament’s Local Government, Housing and Planning Committee has opened an online survey about proposals to regulate short-term lets, which I would encourage you all to take part in. The survey, which closes on October 29th, can be found here.

In the days ahead I will be meeting with the Minister for Culture, Europe and International Development, Jenny Gilruth, to discuss how we can improve the accessibility and nature of Holyrood Park.

The meeting follows meetings with constituents, car-free campaigners and our fantastic Edinburgh councillors who have been pushing for improvements to be made. My team and I have put together a proposal which we look forward to discussing with the Minister.

My team has also been very busy with a lot of casework coming in, with some particularly complicated cases relating to travel visas, care homes and mesh implants. I would like to thank our councillors again for the support that they have given.

In my Ministerial capacity I have announced a review into incineration, which will report back in the months ahead.

Looking ahead to COP 26, there will be events taking place all across the country. I will be doing as much as I can in a party capacity, but there are also a lot of commitments that I will have as a Minister. One thing I am looking forward to is meeting Green colleagues from across the world, who I am looking forward to welcoming to Scotland.

Once COP has passed we will be starting budget negotiations for the year ahead. It will be the first budget with Greens in government and my colleagues and I will be doing everything we can to ensure that Green values are at its heart.