Official Report 705KB pdf
Item 2 is an oral evidence session as part of our inquiry into the delivery of regeneration in Scotland. We have two panels of witnesses today. The first panel is here to discuss the role of European Union and lottery funding in regeneration. I welcome Eric Samuel, senior policy and learning manager with the Big Lottery Fund; Colin McLean, head of the Heritage Lottery Fund Scotland; and David Souter, team leader with the European structural funds programme delivery team at the Scottish Government. Gentlemen, would you like to make brief opening remarks?
Yes. In a sense, the Heritage Lottery Fund does what it says on the tin: we are primarily a heritage organisation, although our objective is to make a lasting—that is an important word—difference for heritage and for people, both individuals and communities. We are not a regeneration agency per se, although we firmly believe that, as we said in our written submission, a great number of our projects have a great deal of impact on communities and towns and spaces around Scotland.
We write to MSPs to tell you what awards have been made in your constituencies, but I never take it for granted that you know what the Big Lottery Fund does, so I will quickly describe that. We are a United Kingdom organisation, with offices in all four countries of the UK. I am based in the Scotland office in Glasgow. We still do some UK-wide work, but most of our work in Scotland is Scotland focused, as we carry out policy directions that are given to us by Scottish ministers. Twenty-eight pence from each lottery pound goes to good causes, and Big receives 40 per cent of that amount. We are therefore the largest lottery distributor in the UK and Scotland.
The Scottish Government is the managing authority for both the European regional development fund and the European social fund in Scotland. We deliver them through two separate programmes: one in the Highlands and Islands and one in the lowlands and uplands. The regeneration focus is largely on the lowlands and uplands programme, for which we have delivered around £84 million of grant against £200 million of expenditure through our urban regeneration programme.
Thank you very much. I will start by asking Mr Samuel and Mr McLean a question. We have had evidence from a number of community groups, not only during this inquiry but in the course of other work that the committee has done, that quite often lottery funding is available for capital works but the groups then find it difficult to cope with on-going revenue costs. Can you comment on that and perhaps give the committee an indication of how you can tackle that in the future? It is all very well having nice new buildings, whether brand new or refurbished, but if you do not have the money to run them after you have established them, that creates even more difficulties and frustration.
In the case of the HLF, that is fair criticism. We are a project funder and so our funding is for capital projects or time-limited activities projects. From all our projects, we expect clear people benefits, which might be training programmes or apprenticeships through our skills programme. All our projects are required to meet our criteria, which suggest that people need to be involved and have a say in what is happening to their heritage in their place, and that people should participate in activities around the projects to build a legacy. However, we do not provide long-term core funding and we have never seen that as our remit. Therefore, that is a perfectly fair criticism.
You say that you do not provide long-term funding, but I wonder about the benefit of spending a lot of money on refurbishing a building or other structure only for that not to be used because there is not enough revenue. Although it is great to save our heritage, it seems a bit daft to put in a huge amount of capital only for a building to go to waste again.
If some of the projects that we funded went to waste, I would completely agree with you, but I am comfortable in saying that, of the more than 3,000 projects that we have funded in Scotland, not a single one has gone to waste. When we assess projects, we are keen to ensure that there is a plan for long-term sustainability. That plan might be about involving volunteers in the long term, having a source of revenue funding from other places or receiving funding from us to cover some of the start-up costs through, for example, new education programmes. For that reason, thus far, none of our buildings projects has failed.
Most of the money that the Big Lottery Fund gives out is revenue funding, whereas capital funding is probably a fairly small element, although it is a major programme. The growing community assets programme, which I look after, is about enabling communities to take over assets. We stress that we want communities eventually to operate those assets on their own and to make them financially viable and sustainable.
To follow on from the convener’s points, we have received evidence on joint projects between, say, a local authority and volunteers. The evidence from the volunteers was that, because they do not have continuing resources to enable them to use the facility, they find themselves excluded. The reason why those projects are sustainable and do not fail is that the local authority—or whoever the other partner is—picks up the cost. However, that is at the expense of the volunteers, who cannot use the facility because they do not have enough resources to pay for that.
In fact, we have just introduced a new programme called exactly that—transitional funding—to help our past grant recipients to look again at their business model and how they run their organisations, so that they can get support to rethink what they do with the resources that are available. That programme has just been launched and I do not think that we have made an award under it yet. However, it is in response to the exact situation that you describe and I hope that through it we can find a way to help the organisations that you mention.
We also had a programme called survive and thrive, which was put in place not just to help growing community asset projects but projects from other investment areas, to help them through this difficult financial climate.
Will you be making that public knowledge—are you doing a promotion about that?
We promote all our programmes.
Good morning. For the record, I should declare that I chair a local organisation that is in receipt of several funding strands from the Big Lottery Fund.
The growing community assets programme is quite clear: it is about communities owning assets. We do sometimes face the problem that public bodies do not want to release those assets to community groups. We are not saying that ownership is the be all and end all, or that there is anything wrong with leasing. However, we know from our experience, for example, of operating the Scottish land fund—the lottery funding from 2001 to 2006—the transformational effects that happen when communities take over assets. That is why we are very strict in saying that growing community assets is totally about community ownership. We sometimes receive pleas that we should consider leasing. To be honest, though, our clients tell us that they do not want that. They want overall control of those assets. Therefore we go to great lengths to ensure that the asset is passed to a community group, which is then responsible for that asset and for taking it forward.
I assume that you mean that the community owns and controls the building.
Correct.
In the past, the Big Lottery Fund gave grants for refurbishment or new build if a 25-year lease was obtained.
We never did that.
That is good, because it gives clarification. A popular misconception is that the Big Lottery Fund would give grant funding for community assets if there was a 25-year lease.
We tend to be criticised because we will not do that.
There is still the issue of ownership and control. That ties into Mr Pentland’s question about other agencies and local authority departments stepping in to assist and in effect to bale out some community organisations to allow them to continue to own and control those buildings.
We are quite clear that it is about community ownership and that the community group should own the asset. That said, if the local authority or any other public body decides to hire some of the rooms or facilities in the asset in order to provide a service, it gives a degree of comfort because the project will get the running costs. We would positively welcome outside agencies buying services from such assets to give them a chance of becoming financially sustainable.
Although I agree entirely with Eric Samuel’s general point, I think that there can be some exceptions. For example, with Maryhill burgh halls in Glasgow, although the community trust ultimately took ownership of the project, we would have been completely happy for Glasgow City Council, which owned the building, to grant a very long lease, as that would have provided some security not only for the building—the heritage asset—but, as we have heard, for the trust, as it would not have had that ownership headache to worry about.
What is your definition of a long lease?
Twenty-five years. We have had some 99-year leases.
Going back to a previous question, I wonder whether the panel can define the term “community” for me. I know that Mr McLean referred to people, but it would be good to get more clarification on that. After all, there are so many definitions of community; we have a community planning process, for example, and there are all these moves to put communities at the heart of the policy.
We do not try to define “community” in that way. For us, a community is a group of people with a tangible or intangible asset from their past that they want to talk to us about doing something with. It does not matter to us whether that group is a local authority, an established trust or a new body; in fact, we have introduced a new range of start-up grants aimed at bodies that are not yet constituted and which do not know quite what to do with the asset in which they are interested. I hope that our definition of community is very inclusive, not exclusive; in our view, it is the group of people who are interested in doing something with this or that tangible or intangible asset.
The quotation that John Wilson highlighted comes from our response to the question,
Mr Souter, can you comment from a European funding perspective?
With European funding, we do not define the term “community”. In fact, we tend to engage with public agencies, mainly because the audit burden that accompanies such funding is heavy and long standing, and the only way in which we can deliver on that and offer some reassurance to the Commission is by engaging through public bodies.
I want, fairly concisely, to extract some numbers, in so far as we might be able to get them. In doing so, I start by making a distinction between projects and responsibilities. A project has a beginning, a middle and an end, and the end is the most important part. A responsibility is something that has no defined end. It may end up having an end, but that is a different thing. My questions are asked in that context.
Our average percentage grant is about 50 per cent, so we have levered in roughly the same amount again. We have spent approximately £600 million in Scotland, so that is £1.2 billion in total. That percentage is climbing, for obvious reasons. The lottery is one of the few major sources of funding around, certainly in heritage. There are few heritage projects proceeding now in which we are not involved, and our percentage intervention rates are climbing. In virtually all our programmes, we can now offer up to 90 per cent and, in some of the smaller ones, we can offer 100 per cent. Does that help you?
Yes, that is a helpful answer to the first of my set of questions. Does Eric Samuel also want to say something?
It depends on which programme investment area is on offer. We can offer up to 100 per cent, but our committee tends to look for some contribution—whether that is a financial contribution or a contribution in kind—particularly where growing community assets is concerned. When we are talking about a community, we like to see some contribution from somewhere in that community to show commitment to the project.
I come to the second of my three strands of questions. What kind of measurable benefit do you expect for every pound that you deploy?
We do not run an analysis like that. We are looking for outcomes from our investment—we think of it as investment—such as the heritage being better managed and people better understanding their heritage, taking more interest in it, taking better care of it in future, enjoying it more and knowing more about it. We do not run a financial model that says that a pound of this has to produce a pound of that.
How, then, do you assess the range of opportunities that you have for spending money and decide which come top of the pile and which will fall below the cut? What is the metric, if it is not a financial metric? In saying that, I am not suggesting that it should be a financial metric.
We now have 15 grant programmes. They are all managed individually, and there is competition at the moment in every one of those. Let us take, for example, heritage grants. Yesterday, I was in London presenting some projects for parks to our board. The competition, as ever, is stiff. There are always more projects than we have resources to support, and our board decided some time ago that, as long as we have managed the applicant’s request during the assessment process so that we think that it is realistic—which does not mean, “What’s the least we can give them?” but, “What is the amount needed to realise the project?”—we will take a decision based on that amount, so someone would not ask for £2 million and receive £1 million from us. We then assess the projects against the outcome framework for that programme, asking whether the heritage will be better managed, and so on—some of the things that I mentioned earlier—and projects compete against one another on that basis. We do not use an arithmetical scoring system.
Is it fair to say that a key part of your decision making is looking at the ability of the sponsors of the project and their responsibility to deliver? In other words, there is no point in supporting a project that cannot convince you that it is going to work.
Yes, I think that that is fair comment.
Let me move on to my final numerical question, if we can get it. For every pound, or unit of benefit—whatever the metric might be—that you expect from projects, how much do you actually get? In other words, I expect to see some failure, because if there is no failure in the system, we are not being ambitious enough and taking enough risks. I just wonder where you see the balance lie.
In our new outcomes framework—for example, under heritage grants, which cover all the standard heritage projects that you will be familiar with, which in our case are those that request more than £100,000—we do not expect our applicants to meet all our outcomes. They pick the outcomes that they think are most suitable to their programme. We think that that is a much healthier way to operate.
So the ad hoc definition comes from the project sponsor.
It comes from the applicant.
It comes from the applicant. Where does the post hoc assessment come from?
All through a project’s management, we will work closely with the applicant, making sure that all the invoices are correct—that is the lowest common denominator. At a much more realistic level, we do a great deal of hand holding. We might provide the grantee with a mentor—a project manager to help them to run their project. Projects are difficult to run and we have a lot of experience in doing that. We provide a great deal of support for our recipients.
You make a very interesting point. Years ago, a boss in my department said that if we do not fund some failures, we have failed, because it is all about trying new stuff. I would imagine that Colin McLean thinks the same. We are so tightly controlled by our financial regulations and by audit nowadays that we have to be very careful about what we put money into, so we operate a risk-based approach.
Is the point not that when something fails, you will be judged on when you catch the failure and respond to it, rather than on whether you have failed? Is that not the proper test?
We try to make sure that we do not fund failure to start with, but inevitably some things will fail. As Colin McLean said, we are exactly the same. We try to help our grant holders through that journey.
Are you saying that your absolute focus is to look at a project and say, “This is one that has some defined percentage of potential for failing,” and you will not choose to fund a portfolio of projects with bigger risk? Many of those bigger-risk projects may be ones that deliver bigger benefit.
Again, it varies from programme to programme and investment area to investment area, but generally our assessment process is to try to make sure that we fund successful projects. We owe that to the projects themselves, if nothing else.
Thank you. I have a list of names: Margaret Mitchell, Stuart McMillan, Anne McTaggart and then John Pentland again.
Good morning, gentlemen. I will probe a little more on outcomes and how you assess projects. I want you to bear in mind a comment in written evidence from one of the people whom we will hear from later, which stated:
I am happy to say something about evaluation. We expect all our projects to do some self-evaluation and we ask the applicant at the beginning to work with us to define how they will evaluate their own success. We do not very often pay for expensive post-project evaluation exercises, so I think that that criticism probably would not work for us.
Mr Souter has been quite quiet.
We have a fairly rigorous evaluation process before we agree funding, which involves peer review of any project to ensure that it stacks up. In terms of the impact on local communities, a lot of our investments tend to be quite long term and involve transport, and it is only when other things happen that their impact can truly be evaluated. We can evaluate whether we have met most of the programme indicators that we signed up to, but we cannot really measure whether that has had an impact on the local community within the time period.
You talk about ensuring that a project stacks up. What do you look for?
If it is a capital project, we look for surety that there will be revenue funding behind it and that it will not face difficulties. We tend to look for business space, and to ensure that there is a market for it in the area that will provide the revenue funding. If it is a revenue project, we look for an exit strategy from the European funding and we want to know whether other funding has been identified to take the project forward.
I presume that that would be for the benefit of the local community.
Absolutely—although structural funds tend to be delivered through the large public agencies. We tend to look at how the community planning partnerships have engaged with communities, because that is not something in which we have a role to play.
Do you consult the community on what it thinks about how funds have been used?
That is part of the evaluation of the overall programme. When we develop individual projects, it is the role of the agency that has strategic responsibility for the area and for the policy area to bring forward projects that meet the criteria.
You will forgive me for saying that that is exactly the kind of top-down approach that we have just heard has caused the failure of regeneration in many areas.
I fully agree. It is one of the failures of the current programme that, at the moment, we are requiring people to bring in projects rather than giving more security of funding over a longer period so that organisations can deliver a more strategic, bottom-up approach and engage with communities. We tie up a lot of the community groups and community planning partnerships in bidding rounds and pulling projects together instead of focusing them on delivering outcomes. We need to try to fix that for the new programme period. It is a fault with the current programme.
When an organisation comes along or you have a bid in front of you, what is to prevent your going out and talking to the local community?
I suppose that there is nothing to prevent that. I could say that it is resources or that it is not really our role, but there is nothing to prevent our going out and talking to a community group to evaluate a project.
My question, too, is on funding and agency involvement. What is the current grant funding level for a project? When I worked for a project that received European funding, match funding of 55 per cent had to be found. Is that still the case? It is very difficult for communities to find that level of funding. For a major infrastructure regeneration project, that could be a couple of million pounds.
There are two different intervention rates. The figure tends to average out at about 40 per cent in the Lowlands and uplands, but it can go up to 70 per cent in the Highlands and Islands, simply because the programme is different.
Raising the funding is one thing, but ensuring that you have the right project at the very beginning by engaging with the community would be a marked improvement. I recommend that you consider that.
We evaluate at various levels. We expect projects to self-evaluate, and we will include money in the grant that we give to them to pay the costs of that, but we also provide them with support from a contractor to learn how to evaluate, because we think that it is important for projects to know whether they are succeeding and to have evidence with which they can prove that the project has been successful when it comes to looking for future funding and making a case for it.
How much is done at the front end before the allocation of funding in talking to the community and teasing out whether it thinks that a project will have value?
We leave the applicants to make that case to us. We question them on that and look for community consultation; for example, what events they have held, and when—whether they were held recently or whether something that was carried out years ago is being relied on. We want up-to-date information about applicants talking to their communities about whether they want to see the project go forward.
Would it involve their having held public meetings?
The applicants could have held a public meeting, carried out a consultation exercise or done anything that can prove that they have the support of the community. We will not support anything through GCA that does not have the support of the local community. We know from evaluating that there is no point in putting money into something that is not supported by the local community.
What can the local community be?
As I said in response to an earlier question, we let the community define itself. We are more interested in hearing about the people who live in the community. GCA is not there to fund communities of interest; it is there to fund communities. We want to see the people who live in the community supporting the projects.
Good morning, gentlemen. My first question is to Mr Souter. Can you provide some information, please, on the level of European funds that have been invested in regeneration over the past five years and how much it is intended will be invested in each of the next five years?
I can give figures for this programme period. We have delivered £84 million in grants in 13 local authority areas that are targeted under our urban regeneration priority, and that has unlocked expenditure of about £200 million.
At last week’s meeting, I raised the point that, when it comes to regeneration, there will not be a one-size-fits-all strategy for Scotland as a whole, given the country’s demographics and the differences between urban and rural communities. That said, when we consider that the various funding arrangements that are in place include the ERDF, the European social fund, the rural development programme and the maritime and fisheries programme, do you think that there are too many types of funding opportunity? Is the landscape too crowded?
Within the European funding streams, there is a big push from the Commission to get more effective outcomes across all four funds. The proposals that are out for consultation would see us draw together the ERDF, the ESF, the maritime funding and the rural funding into three thematic Scottish funds. The idea is that that would hide the wiring for project sponsors. If a project sponsor comes forward with a good idea, it should not matter whether the funding comes from a maritime fund, a rural fund, the ESF or the ERDF; it should just be funded as a good idea.
Would the other witnesses like to add to that?
Are you referring to your earlier question about figures, or would you like me to comment on everything that you asked about?
I would like you to comment on all of it, but the second question in particular.
Okay. The first question is not easy to answer, because we fund in rounds. For example, we spent £160 million in the first round of what we call investing in communities, which ran from 2006 until 2010. Our current funding round runs from 2010 until 2015. Over that period, we have an indicative budget of £242.5 million, but I probably cannot specify how much of it is for regeneration because of the variety of the programmes. Some of the programmes, such as the growing community assets programme, are very much aimed at that, but a lot of the programmes are revenue programmes that may do some regeneration, although that is not their point.
I am sorry to butt in, but I would like to pose one quick question. Have you seen an uplift in the funds that are available to the Big Lottery Fund since the Olympic games finished?
I am not sure what link you are making there, but we have certainly seen an uplift because of increased ticket sales. The other problem that we face is that our budgets can fluctuate according to a number of factors, one of which is ticket sales.
I will give you a range of figures. In the past five years, we have committed £105 million to heritage projects in Scotland. On a generous estimate, we would say that because there are people benefits from all of them, they have all had some impact on regeneration. If we take the tightest definition, through our specific town centre regeneration programme—the townscape heritage initiative—we have committed roughly £15 million in that period. That is the range, and the true figure will lie somewhere in between.
Thank you. I have a final question for Mr Souter and then one for Mr Samuel.
In general terms, when programmes are measured against the outcomes that we signed up to at the start, we are content that we have delivered.
My final question—
Before we leave you, Mr Souter, I have a question. You said that you could probably have dealt with some of the funding streams a little better. Do some of the difficulties that sometimes exist result from having overcomplicated programmes and policies?
The programmes are certainly overcomplicated. How we have separated out the different European funding strands in our current programme does not give us the best result. Being more joined up and more strategic about those strands would give us better results.
What do you mean by being more strategic? What do you suggest?
That is about joining up the strands at a higher level. We spend a lot of time and a lot of money on administering the different funding streams from Europe on agriculture, fisheries, the ESF and the European regional development fund. We spend a lot of resource on delivering them.
Are those audit and compliance regulations laid down by Europe or has someone here decided to put that burden on us?
It is very easy for managing authorities to always blame the Commission. Options were available to us earlier in the programme period for simplified cost methodologies that would have removed an awful lot of the audit problems that were faced. However, the appetite to make those changes was not there at the start of the programme.
You mention “simplified cost methodologies”—not only do the folk out there get annoyed by such phrases, but we get somewhat frustrated by them too.
Sorry.
Are you saying that, at the beginning of the programmes, somebody decided to overcomplicate the administration, the audit and the compliance of the funds?
No. I will define a simplified cost: it is a unit cost for an outcome—for example, if somebody trains 1,000 plumbers, we will pay them X amount for every one of those plumbers.
So because we have done it one way, we will continue doing it that way—is that it?
The issue is more that that is how projects have been funded up to now and it was unreasonable to move the goalposts midway through the programme period. However, we will have to use all the options on the simplified cost and the unit cost to deliver the programmes in the future, because we simply cannot continue with the full cost recovery approach, with all the bus tickets and all the receipts.
I might seek further clarification later on some of your points. I am sorry for having interrupted Stuart McMillan, but it was important to get that point clear.
Mr Samuel, the answer to question 6 in your submission touches on the state aid regulations. Will you explain your concerns about them, please?
The issue seems to be arising more and more nowadays. In our case, it stems from when we try to get projects to think about how they will become financially viable towards the end of their grant, as I explained earlier. One obvious way in which they can do that is by engaging in fairly low-level, low-key trading activity. However, the word “trading” triggers all sorts of problems as far as state aid is concerned. It can also cause us problems when funding also comes from another organisation. We might take one view of state aid and another funder could take an opposite view of state aid—that happens and creates problems. It has been a particular issue for the Scottish land fund as far as forestry projects are concerned. In fact, I will go to a meeting about that after this meeting.
Have you spoken to similar organisations in other EU member states about the issue?
No, we have not spoken to organisations in other EU member states, but we are obviously in contact with other Scottish organisations and, as we are a UK organisation, we look at the matter across the board in the UK.
Have you raised your concerns with representatives in the European Parliament and with the relevant EU commissioner?
No, we have not, although we could probably do that. My personal opinion—I am not saying that this is the Big Lottery Fund’s opinion—is that it might be better if the matter was taken forward at a level higher than the Big Lottery Fund.
Stewart Stevenson has a brief supplementary question.
My question is on a slightly different subject, convener.
In that case, I will add Mr Stevenson to the end of my list.
My question, which is for Mr Samuel, is on the our place programme, which the Big Lottery Fund’s submission mentions. That programme appears to be excellent and it appears to meet the needs of communities as they have been expressed to us. Is the intention to roll it out across Scotland? It currently operates in only five areas.
That is a very new approach for us. We think that the programme has been successful, but we want time to assess that. Having said that, we are sufficiently confident in it that, although we will not roll it out across Scotland, we will do the same thing again in seven other neighbourhoods.
As I was aware of who was going to be on the panel, I did a search to see how lottery funds are helping towards regeneration in my constituency, Motherwell and Wishaw. Anyone who knows Motherwell and Wishaw will be well aware that the area has significant regeneration needs. I was a wee bit alarmed to find out that, although there was funding historically, there has recently been a lack of spending in the area, particularly from the Heritage Lottery Fund. My question is about the criteria. Do you target funding at areas that are in most need?
Yes. In each five-year planning period, we choose a small number of local authority areas, which we call development priorities. They are chosen according to two factors. The main one is spend, measured on a per capita basis. The other one is a deprivation measure. At the moment, our three priority areas are Dumfries and Galloway, West Lothian and West Dunbartonshire. I do not think that your area has ever been so low on our league table that it has been in the reckoning for being a development priority area, so there must be other areas of Scotland where we have been spending less.
I, too, looked at the figures for your constituency. The Garrion People’s Housing Co-operative got about £850,000 from us for a GCA project. I looked at the projects that I thought would be tied in with regeneration. Your area has probably done pretty well as far as GCA is concerned. There could always be more, but GCA depends a lot on the assets that are available in the community and what the community wants to proceed with.
It is good to see that Eric Samuel does his research, too.
It does not always work, but I try.
You referred to the Garrion People’s Housing Co-operative. We raised a question earlier about how a community finds itself in a situation because it does not have a business plan, and there is every chance that support could be removed.
Because we prioritise our priority areas against two measures—one is low spend and the other is deprivation—we focus our efforts on deprived communities. Our spend in those areas tends to start from a low point, and we put in as much effort as we can to raise that.
In the past, the explanation for low allocations has been that the number of applications was too low. What are you doing to address that?
Our development team is working in the areas concerned to encourage people to think about heritage and to bring applications to us. As I mentioned earlier, we now have a suite of programmes, some of which are aimed precisely at community groups that are struggling to develop ideas. We have start-up grants, transition funding and the our heritage programme, which can deliver projects with funds of up to £100,000 from us. We have a range of small, medium-sized and large programmes that we think meet everyone’s needs. They have been designed in response to comments that we have received.
My questions are for all three members of the panel. What funding bids have been made on an annual basis or in the funding rounds for the Big Lottery Fund? How far have they exceeded the money that has been available from each of the organisations?
Averaged across all our programmes, the success rate, if we might call it that, has been in recent years approximately 50 per cent—we have received twice as many bids by value as we have the resources to support them.
I am sorry, convener, but I obviously did not do my research thoroughly enough. I cannot give those figures now, but I will supply them to the committee.
The European social fund and the European regional development fund are 100 per cent targeted on regeneration areas for certain priorities. All the funding from the European social fund has been absorbed, and we are sitting at about 90 per cent commitment for the ERDF programme. Last week, we launched a call for new ERDF bids; we expect that to be significantly oversubscribed.
I understand that all three sets of funds will be heavily oversubscribed. Local authorities are establishing a number of arm’s-length organisations. They have indicated that they will make bids to the Big Lottery Fund, the Heritage Lottery Fund and other funds to supplement the regeneration of existing facilities. How do you view bids, particularly those made by arm’s-length organisations for mainstream public services that were delivered previously by a local authority?
The biggest risk probably comes from the sports and leisure arms that have been set up, which will probably be eligible to apply to us for funding. However, as far as the Big Lottery Fund is concerned, sportscotland funds sports so, fortunately—if that is the right expression to use—it is highly unlikely that we would have a programme that such bodies could apply to. They could come to the growing community assets programme for funding, but sports facilities have not been a high priority for that investment area.
In the culture and heritage world, arm’s-length bodies are common—virtually every authority has one or is in the process of establishing one. They are most certainly eligible to apply to us. Every local authority can also apply, but that makes no difference to the eligibility status of arm’s-length organisations as far as we are concerned.
I can think of no reason why arm’s-length organisations would be ineligible. However, in looking at the organisations that have been set up, I see no fit with current or future programmes. That might change as the trend develops, but the activity in which they are engaged would not be eligible for ERDF or ESF funding.
I asked those questions to compare what are in effect public bodies with local communities. There is major competition for funding streams and particularly for Big Lottery funding. The issue is how organisations make a like-for-like comparison between funding of a genuinely community-led project and funding of other projects.
I said at the start that we have various investment areas and programmes. To echo what Colin McLean said, the Big Lottery Fund can fund the public sector and the private sector as long as the grants that we give are earmarked and we keep careful control so that the money does not go into profits.
We support heritage projects. Our single largest grant in Scotland, which was £21.5 million, was to provide the new Riverside museum in Glasgow. That asset is owned and was built by Glasgow City Council. The project was managed and run by Glasgow Life—a separate, arm’s-length organisation that has some community representation on it. I do not think that another project has involved such a range of community consultation on the shape of the project and the opportunity for the local community to tell its stories through the project. That has been a good model for involving the community in a major capital project whose total cost was £80-something million. The community had a serious hand in influencing its content.
I call Stewart Stevenson.
My question is sort of a concluding one, convener. I do not know whether I am last.
No, you are not.
I think that the witnesses can answer my questions quite briefly. In the light of what we have heard, I will probe a bit the governance of your organisations and particularly the role of non-executives and board members. What is emerging, quite reasonably, is that the assessment is judgment based and relates to outcomes. Therefore, you must have the right people with the right experience and understanding to get the quality of judgment.
We have three tiers of decision makers. On applications for up to £100,000, I am the decision maker. The committee for Scotland decides on requests for up to £2 million. It is open to anyone to apply to be on the committee and a diverse range of interests is represented, although there tends to be a heritage component in virtually every committee member. We have one or two people who have been involved in planning and regeneration; someone who has been involved in tourism; someone who ran an urban regeneration company; and people who are familiar with our natural heritage—that tends to be the background. The decision making for requests for more than £2 million is done by our board of trustees, who are appointed by the Prime Minister. They have a range of interests in business and heritage.
My question was about not who the people are but whether you are content that you are getting the support that you need. I am inviting you not to criticise incumbents but to look ahead to the future.
We are content. In the small world in which we operate in Scotland, it is quite difficult to recruit committee members, but we have never had fewer applications than we have had places, so there is always a process of choice. We have good representation. As officers, we are happy that we have good support from our non-execs.
Likewise, our Scotland committee members are ministerial appointments, so the question might be better put to the Scottish ministers. Are they happy with the people who apply? Some of our committee members leave office each year, so there is a turnover, and I understand that we have a good application rate for the vacancies. Speaking personally, I think that the committee has a good geographic spread that involves people from throughout Scotland, and other demographics are pretty well covered.
John Pentland wants to ask a question.
Is this the last question, convener?
No.
It is not the last question. Do you have a position on the increase in the price of a lottery ticket from £1 to £2?
That is a bit of an unfair question.
My thinking behind that has two aspects. First, could that increase have an impact on the future of regeneration? Secondly, Colin McLean said that 28p of every £1 goes to good causes. If the ticket price is increased to £2, will that become 56p?
My answer to your first question is that I do not have a view on that—that is the answer that you would expect from me. We are told that Camelot expects the price increase to raise additional revenue. That is the end of our statement on the matter.
Does Mr Samuel have anything to add?
No. I do not think that I can add anything.
I have a final question. Mr McLean mentioned townscape heritage initiatives, on which quite a lot of money has been spent in various parts of the country. Do you look at the practicalities of the changes that are made? I am thinking particularly about changes to utilities or a lack of change to utilities, which might mean that we invest quite a lot of money in an area but see no real improvement in utilities. That might lead quite quickly to the area being dug up again, which causes a lot of grief after the investment has been made.
By “utilities” do you mean the services that run beneath roads?
I mean gas, electricity and water.
Sadly, that is beyond my control. Our townscape heritage initiatives are all in designated conservation areas. Through its planning powers, the local authority can impose a number of constraints on how utility companies can behave, but we all know that that is far from perfect. It is a source of frustration for all of us if we invest in a conservation area—in our case, to improve its appearance and heritage—and then see it damaged by the utilities. However, I am afraid that that is outwith my control.
Should you discuss that before funding is allocated? I hate to see good money being spent on something that, to be frank, gets damaged quite quickly.
The areas first need to be designated conservation areas, and we are keen to encourage local authorities to use what in my time as a planner were called their article 4 powers to restrict permitted development. However, some of the utility companies’ activities are beyond the planning controls. Other than through our discussing such matters with the local authorities and ensuring that they exercise the controls that they have, I feel that what you ask about is a little beyond us.
I will offer an observation. The Scottish road works commissioner—I do not remember whether that is her exact title—has just levied her maximum possible fine of some £50,000 in relation to inappropriate digging up. There is a structure in Scotland through which to seek to control such works. It is quite widely admired internationally, although it is capable of improvement.
Regeneration is obviously a long-term process in many cases. Can we hear about your long-term strategies and how you intend to improve on what you are doing?
I mentioned that part of our strategy for the next programme period is to try to align the rural funding, the fisheries funding, the ESF and the ERDF. As I said, regeneration is not a specific thematic objective of the new programme, but a lot of activities in the programme could meet the wider definition of regeneration.
How will communities be involved in that long-term strategy? Groups tell us all the time that funding can be sporadic and that there can be a short-term outlook. Another frustration of mine is that we give money to something only to see it fail quite quickly, before it has had the opportunity to become self-sustaining.
If we can get the funds aligned correctly, one advantage will be an ability to give a long-term assurance that funding will be available for three or four years, with a review built in at that stage. Ideally, the programmes that we start with on day 1 will develop but not necessarily change over the period and we will be able to give partners that longer-term security.
You are being very optimistic if you think that that is happening. I urge you to look at the committee’s report on public service reform and see what we think about community planning partnerships.
As I have indicated, the current funding round will end in 2015. Before we launch a funding round, we always conduct a huge consultation exercise. In the previous one, which took place in 2010, our clients—or, if you like, our customers—told us that they wanted more consistency and, as you have suggested, they did not want us to chop and change the money that is available and what it is used for.
My response has two parts; the first relates to the Heritage Lottery Fund and the second goes a little wider than that.
Thank you very much for your evidence. I suspend for five minutes to allow a changeover of witnesses.
We move on to our second panel of witnesses, to discuss the role of community groups and the third sector in regeneration. I welcome Rory Dutton, development officer for the north with the Development Trusts Association Scotland; Angus Hardie, chief executive of the Scottish Community Alliance; Stuart Hashagen, senior community development adviser with the Scottish Community Development Centre and the community health exchange; and Andy Milne, chief executive of SURF-Scotland’s Independent Regeneration Network. Gentlemen, you are very welcome. Would you like to make any opening remarks?
I shall say a few words about the Scottish Community Development Centre. We have been established for about 20 years in two different organisational forms. We are here to promote and support community development across Scotland, and we see that as involving advising on policy areas, practice development and working directly with communities up and down Scotland.
The Development Trusts Association Scotland, as the committee is probably aware, is the independent charitable membership body for community development trusts across Scotland. We have about 200 member development trusts. We are run by volunteers from our member development trusts and we have been around for about 10 years. Our role is very much to support community anchor organisations and to help them establish and develop projects and, in the long term, become more financially and organisationally sustainable. We also deliver a contract for the Scottish Government on asset transfer from local authorities to community groups.
Thank you for the opportunity to be here today and to speak. I have taken the liberty of circulating a bit of material, because there is a lot to be said about regeneration and I want to be brief.
Any points that I would like to make at this stage are contained in the written evidence that I submitted, so I am happy to leave it there and take questions from the committee.
I will begin the questions. You heard some of the earlier questioning on funding and how some community groups find it difficult to deal with on-going revenue funding. They get the capital from one source or another, but the revenue funding often is not there. In your experience from the many roles that you undertake, is that situation normal or unusual? How can we help people to come up with business plans to ensure that the original investment can be sustained? Are we doing enough to ensure that we are capacity building, so that folks who take on voluntary roles, which can be a great burden, can do so with confidence and the necessary advice?
The short answer is yes, it is an issue for community organisations to maintain the revenue to keep the services that they offer going. As we have heard, most of the funding programmes are short term and time limited. Given that most situations in disadvantaged communities are not going to go away overnight, the community organisations that deal with those situations would do much better if they had a longer-term and continued funding stream, provided that they are doing the kind of work that is important in communities, such as alleviating poverty, addressing disadvantage and improving health. Because funding criteria change, because funding is unpredictable—often a lot of staff time is spent on applying for funding, rather than delivering services—and, as was mentioned earlier, because funding bodies like to invest in new ideas that may carry some risk, community organisations have to be innovative to achieve funding. There are many barriers to achieving the situation that, for most communities, would be ideal—namely, a longer-term stream of funding that they could use in the best possible way.
Do you think that those difficulties act as a demotivator for some who want to get involved in their community?
I am not sure. I think that most people get involved because they are angry or concerned about a local community issue, so that is the driver. When they get to the point at which they need funding to achieve the outcomes that they want, they discover the challenges. Most people get fired up to meet those challenges, but nevertheless there comes a point at which people might feel that they are never going to get funding and so they might lose motivation and energy.
Absolutely. Also, the issue is not just about revenue funding; it is about funding to create and establish the community vehicles that will take forward regeneration. In the more disadvantaged areas, where community anchor organisations or groups are not established, we find that more than just revenue funding is needed. Support and funding are needed to get those organisations up and running in the first place.
One thing that we have found as we have gone around the country, not only for this inquiry, is that a bit of seedcorn money can sometimes make a huge difference and that what is required is not a huge amount of resource, whether money or people, but a kick-start.
For the programme to which I referred, all the hoops are largely handled by the intermediary, which is Highlands and Islands Enterprise, and community groups simply employ development officers. The groups do not have the degree of administration that is involved in applying directly for LEADER funding, because an intermediary applies on their behalf. However, there is a big demand on community groups that are involved in LEADER-funded projects. The biggest issue with LEADER is to do with cash flow, because groups have to spend money and then seek reimbursement. That is a huge issue for organisations that have no capital reserves or regular incoming cash flow.
Rather than being overreliant on intermediaries, would it not be best to get rid of some of the hoops and declutter the processes that folk have to go through?
Yes, absolutely. We hope that the people and communities fund will provide core funding for community anchor organisations. In some local areas, community benefit funds come from things such as wind farms, and organisations can get funding for development officers. The problem is that a lot of the funding is for only one, two or three years. Regeneration is a long-term process that requires an organisation continually to develop and build on successive initiatives. There must be that continuum, which all the different funding programmes must key into.
Rory Dutton’s point about sustainability and sustained effort is important. If we look at the SURF awards booklet and at what has been allocated over the years, we can see that a lot of it is for the Highlands and Islands area. SURF is concerned with not only urban areas but the whole of Scotland. I would say that one reason for those successes is the sustained and settled approach that Highlands and Islands Enterprise has delivered in its area by connecting up people, place, economy, transport, technology and regeneration in a way that does not seem to have been possible in the denser urban setting in Scotland in which programmes, regimes and branding turn over every three or four years. I suggest that that is simply a reflection of the greater political temperature in the centre of Scotland as opposed to the more rural Highlands and Islands area. However, the issue of sustainability is key.
It is interesting that you used the term “regime”, Mr Milne. Do you use that terminology because you believe that too much is being done from the top down rather than from the bottom up?
Actually, to a degree, I think that not enough is being done from the top down. If we consider the right-hand column in my “Regeneration and Degeneration” paper, we see that the Scottish Government probably does not think enough about how its decisions on procurement, infrastructure and service targeting are most effectively engaged in so that they will benefit the communities that are in greatest need.
I think that we will come back to that issue in greater depth.
The absence of revenue support is the issue that we hear about most from communities, I think. We heard from the earlier panel of funders that a view just seems to have invaded the funders’ world that revenue is much harder to come by.
One thing that a lot of other folk have talked about is education and investment in education in deprived communities. Should we be looking at that much more than is currently the case?
Do you mean in terms of mainstream education?
Yes.
I used to work in schools, and my experience of education, just over Arthur’s Seat in Craigmillar, was that the schools got a fair amount of the additional resources that were available from the council. However, the issue was more complex than what was going on in the school, and the project that I was working with was trying to make links between the home and the school and to raise the value of education within the home.
Was that the community schools formula?
Actually, it was a precursor of that. It was called the instep project, but it melded into the new community schools idea. The thing that surprised me when I was working in the schools, given that Craigmillar is one of the areas that had a lot of regeneration focus, was that the schools largely saw themselves as outwith that discussion on regeneration. It was a strange disconnect, because although that was the biggest physical and financial resource going into those communities, it did not seem to blend with the other money that was going in in the name of regeneration, capacity building or whatever. I always thought that that was anomalous.
That is an interesting but not unsurprising point.
Although it is a subject of some controversy, particularly in secondary schools, the curriculum for excellence regime is opening up interesting avenues in terms of how young people think about themselves as citizens and about their participation and creativity, and I see some hope in that.
I will take a question from Margaret Mitchell. We have been mentioning education and she is about to see some teachers.
It is not a related point, gentlemen. I thank you all for your submissions. My question is a general one. The committee has received evidence of successful individual community projects but, despite that, the statistics show that there is not a general improvement in deprived areas. From reading your submissions, I know that you all have ideas and suggestions about that, so I would like to go along the panel and find out why you think the situation is as it is and what can be done about it.
I absolutely agree that there are many examples of successful community initiatives. In fact, it is probably true to say that the wider world does not necessarily know how much has happened in many communities. There is probably a lack of public relations, marketing and communication of the positive gains that have been made, and that is an issue.
You mention that
Absolutely. I mentioned the national standards for community engagement, which the then Scottish Executive commissioned. That was specifically to address the requirement in the Local Government in Scotland Act 2003 that local authorities should engage with community groups in setting up community planning. We came up with an interesting and agreed definition of community engagement, which meant that there should be a debate between public bodies and communities about what the needs, issues and opportunities are. Plans should then be set to achieve change through partnership between the various bodies.
Community-led regeneration is a long-term process that, in my view, has barely begun. There are patches of fantastic success where there have been particularly determined groups. However, there are swathes of areas where there are no such groups and nothing is happening because there is no focus or vehicle.
I think that your suggestion of establishing a knowledge and skills exchange fund addresses that.
Absolutely. It is great to have the young folk involved in community-led development within the groups and projects. A lot of our members have youth-oriented initiatives, but the best way in which to inspire people, to give them a bit of self-belief that they can do it too and to see what is possible—in other words, education in the broadest sense—is for them to go and see how other groups have done things. There are leading lights in various areas. We had funding for that, and we are continually endeavouring to get more funding to cover the costs of groups going out to see how others have done things. That is about education and spreading the belief that things can be done. It is about spreading knowledge of what can be done. It is really transformational when people go on the groups.
That is an excellent idea.
Picking up on Rory Dutton’s point, I note that, unless we consider and address the underlying issues of inequality and poverty—if we move simply to support communities that come forward to take on community projects and assets and developments—we will end up increasing the level of inequality rather than decreasing it. Some of the largest, most successful community-owned asset management programmes in Scotland happen in areas where there are already substantial levels of resources, networks and connections among people who do not fall within the deepest Scottish index of multiple deprivation—SIMD—statistics. There is a job to be done there.
In general, we welcome the removal of ring-fenced funding to give local authorities more autonomy, but the downside has been that, because local authority budgets have been under pressure, the previously ring-fenced £148 million community regeneration fund has
It certainly is, and I believe that it has been validated in the committee’s recent excellent report on how community planning partnerships are or are not working with regard to community capacity building and community engagement.
Before Margaret Mitchell turns to Angus Hardie, I want to play devil’s advocate on ring fencing. As you will know, I was the chair of a social inclusion partnership for many a year. In my opinion, that ring-fenced money often funded things that should have been funded from mainstream budgets; if you like, it was used as a cash cow to prop up the local authority, which was not doing certain things in an area. Is one of the dangers of ring fencing money that it allows various public bodies to withdraw further from providing mainstream services in particular areas?
The short answer is yes. Having worked on a project in Wester Hailes under a social inclusion partnership—or what morphed into the community planning partnership—I can say that you are absolutely right. The original new life for urban Scotland partnership, which at the time was situated in Wester Hailes, identified five specific goals for outcomes from the partnership activity that was based on that ring-fenced funding—which, I should say to Angus Hardie, was largely urban aid funding. Three of those goals—about community safety, local facilities and housing and environment—were achievable within the bounds of Wester Hailes from a reasonable investment, but the other two, which were about income distribution and unemployment levels, were not achievable because they depended on factors outwith that geographical area.
I am sorry, Margaret, but I needed to clarify that issue.
Can Angus Hardie answer the original question?
I am sorry—the trouble with being last is that I forget the question.
It was about the fact that, although there have been a lot of successful individual community-led regeneration projects, they have not improved the statistics more generally in deprived areas.
There have been a lot of very good community-led projects, but I sense that they have squeezed through the gaps and have maybe come about because of happenstance or serendipity rather than as a result of a considered strategic direction from either Government or local government.
The people and communities fund, which has been mentioned, is a good example of what you are talking about. Although it aims to encourage community-led regeneration, the Government still said, “Here are the criteria. Here is what we want you to do with this.”
That is right. It is perhaps because of the pressures that result from the demands that have been made on the fund, but the picture that emerges from an analysis of where the cash has gone is slightly confusing, given that the fund is supposed to support community anchor organisations. Most of the money has gone to housing associations, and not all of them are locally based housing associations. I cannot understand how the largest social landlord in Europe qualifies as a locally led organisation. I also cannot understand how one of Edinburgh’s finest cathedrals qualifies as an anchor organisation.
I will follow up on Angus Hardie’s last point about where the resources have gone and whether they have gone to the right communities and the right organisations in those communities.
If we go back to the new life for urban Scotland initiative, I think that the answer is that they were not. Recently, I was out in Wester Hailes for a rather sad event, as the council was going to demolish the main community hub that was developed at that time. It was really the last symbolic act of those days of investment in Wester Hailes, which ran into something like £125 million. Where is the benefit of all that investment?
I am at risk of disagreeing with Angus on this.
That is allowed, you know.
Oh, good—I will go ahead on that basis. I am not sure that investing £125 million over that period of time and over that geography is anything like a sufficient amount to deal with the challenges that people in those communities were facing and the changes that have taken place since.
The money that has gone in historically has clearly not worked, because we have ended up with the problems being as bad as before. If the previous approach had been effective, we would not be having this discussion, to an extent. If we are into the business of disagreeing, I would probably take issue with a few things that Andy Milne said. We have not seen the potential of community-led development, because we are only scratching the surface. It is a long-term, cumulative effect; something happens and we build on that. It is not a question of having an initiative that is there and then gone.
I will make two points. The first is that regeneration is about poverty, at the end of the day. We are in a situation where the poorest communities have at least a triple whammy, and possibly a quadruple whammy. First, income to families through the welfare benefits system is reducing. Secondly, as we have mentioned, local government is also having to reduce budgets, and I suspect that it is cutting back disproportionately in the communities that most require those services—the poorer communities. Thirdly, local government also has to cut back on its funding to community and voluntary organisations, which also work in the more disadvantaged areas, and that is a further issue. On the other side of the equation, poor people spend more to manage their lives. At the meeting that I was at last night, we talked about the activities of payday loan companies. In many cases, money that goes into those communities goes straight out of the door again, so there is a worsening problem of poverty and disadvantage in the worst areas.
John Wilson must be brief with his question, because a lot of folk still want in and we are well through our time. Let us have a brief question and brief answers, please.
I will try to be brief. I want to address the issue of economic development. Andy Milne referred to the SURF awards brochure that he gave us as part of his evidence, which says that a number of the organisations receiving awards were in the Highlands and Islands. How much is that down to the different approach to social and community regeneration that Highlands and Islands Enterprise has, compared with that of the largest economic regeneration agency in Scotland, Scottish Enterprise? Should Scottish Enterprise have more focus on economic regeneration in deprived communities and on the community asset transfer debate, as has happened in the Highlands and Islands?
Do not feel obliged to answer. Let us have Mr Dutton first, followed by anyone else who wants to respond.
Absolutely. I work in the north and I see a lot of this. The artificial separation of enterprise development from social and community development is not helpful. Where it has succeeded in the Highlands, it is because the development of confidence among the people in the community is considered part and parcel of getting more business and economic activity to come along.
The point is well made. The physical and political space in the Highlands and Islands for people to consider the options for land ownership and energy generation is far greater than it is in the dense urban centres. I would go so far as to suggest that the psychology of deprived communities in dense urban areas is such that they have no conception of the possibility of owning land and assets in the way that people in the Highlands and Islands do.
There is a contrast between the holistic approach in the Highlands and Islands, which takes in not only socioeconomic but cultural development and support, and the rest of Scotland. It seems that, in the rest of Scotland, we need to have hypothecated arrangements to deal with the amounts of money, perhaps because they are so great, and things do not join up at a local level. For some reason, they manage to do it in the Highlands, perhaps because of scale, and we see the results.
My question has been answered fairly well, but I have another question for Mr Dutton in light of the conversation that has just taken place. Does he have any experience of the difficulties that communities face in obtaining publicly owned assets?
Absolutely. We are charged with running the community ownership support service, which focuses on local authority asset transfers to community groups. As I said in my opening comments, there is a dearth of such transfers in the more deprived areas. Much of that is down to the fact that the groups and the confidence to take such initiatives forward do not exist in such areas. They do not have the infrastructure—the groups—or the skills to do it, and they do not have the belief that they could do it.
I want to go back to the start of our conversation—that is, to the issues of people and capacity—because I think that we have got very process-bound in the past half hour. I wonder what “capacity” means. Let me test with you my own definition: capacity is accounted for when an individual’s abilities, experience and ability to develop are matched to the task that they are going to undertake. Is that a fair definition?
Absolutely—on both an individual and a community level. Just as an individual needs to have confidence, skills and ability, within a community the infrastructure, links, organisations and confidence—that sense of identity—are needed, too, so that both the community and the individuals within it have capacity.
Let me take that further. In communities with relatively little capacity, in terms of both individuals and organisations, if there is a mismatch between individuals and their tasks, you can improve the individuals or shrink the tasks. To what extent is work being undertaken in communities that are particularly disadvantaged in terms of capacity to help them find tasks that are small enough, so that individuals can build belief in themselves, have a few successes and therefore move on to tasks that are bigger? It might be as simple as an individual in a community getting one dog waste bin on a lamp post. Once one person has achieved that sort of success, they feel that they can make a difference. To what extent are we helping people with low capacity find tasks that will help them build to a position where their capacity grows?
My first response to that is to say that it is not up to the rest of us to find tasks that communities should take part in. Community development is based on people having the opportunity to think about what future situation they would like to have in their community and what parts of that they can achieve themselves. The capacity-building process is really about saying, “Well, if people have the ability to take that forward, that’s fine; if they haven’t, where can they get support to achieve that?”
It is not just communities, but individuals as well.
Yes—individuals and communities. However, we are talking about community regeneration, so I think that we need to be aware of what community capacity entails.
I want to pick up on something that you just said. Are you suggesting that decision makers are outside communities, rather than inside them?
At the point at which a community wants to do something, decision makers are outside communities. Community planning should work so that decision makers are actively within the communities where those things are going on, but it rarely happens in that way. If we are talking about community-led projects and developments, those start within communities, and when they get to a certain point it becomes important to engage with decision makers, policy makers and funders to make them happen.
So the decision makers outside the community are those who stop communities doing things?
Not necessarily.
I am sorry—I am just putting propositions, as a challenge.
Change has to come from somewhere. The intention with the social inclusion partnerships was to create a structure in which community needs and issues could be raised by the community. Various public bodies were involved in social inclusion partnership bodies, and there was an administrative system to bring things together. Plans were drawn up, and that took things forward. I am not suggesting that all social inclusion partnerships have worked perfectly, but with that partnership approach the structure was not bad.
I will come in and play devil’s advocate again. You said that social inclusion partnerships were among the best fora for bringing all those folks together. That is not my experience, and it is not the experience of many others who have been involved in social inclusion partnerships. Would it be fair to say that, in many areas, many partners did not take part?
I said that they did not all work properly. However, where it was the intention that partners should come together, I am not sure that any other structure did the same thing in the same way on a local basis.
Would it be fair to say that, in certain places, partners hijacked the entire thing in order to drive the main projects in their line of work, rather than doing anything else to benefit the community?
Yes. Within the partnership, power relationships played out, and the voice with the most power probably got its way most of the time.
I am sorry to lead you down this line, but would you say that, where decision makers lived in the communities, which was often the case, people on the social inclusion partnerships saw less of the other partners, because they did not want the hassle of having those decision makers at the table?
That could well be the case.
I will pick up on a point that Mr Stevenson made. We often talk about quick wins being really good. In the early stages of a community group, it is possible to get some quick wins from relatively small projects, to gain confidence and so on. However, at the communities day that we held in April at the Parliament, in the chamber, the main message was that people should not limit their ambitions.
And gumption.
The underlying premise of your question is absolutely correct. People begin their involvement in communities from the most simple participatory levels—going to community barbecues, quizzes and galas. Those are the sorts of things that I used to be a bit disrespectful of, frankly, but I began to realise that they were the lifeblood of the community process, by which people came to know one other as they came together to discuss issues, building up a bit of networking and confidence as they did so. They then found themselves as directors of housing associations, land and development trusts and so on. It is a progressive process, which we have not sufficiently invested in over the years so as to build the capacity that is required now to deliver the community-led regeneration that is highlighted in the national Government strategy.
I agree with everything that has been said on what is understood by the term “capacity”. I understand—perhaps this is the point that Stewart Stevenson was making—the reluctance to put in paid staff who might move faster than the pace of the community. The reality is that all the other agencies that a community must deal with if it is developing and regenerating its area have armies of paid staff, so the community needs to be tooled up to be able to sit at the table with those organisations. That builds capacity and levels the playing field to a certain extent.
My question is for Mr Hardie. About half an hour ago, you spoke about the £125 million that was spent in Wester Hailes and the community hub building that was knocked down. Are you suggesting that in the past some regeneration activities were too focused on the short term rather than the medium or long term?
We never really knew what the timeframe was—it was perhaps 10 years or so, which seems like eternity to a community worker, so there was no need to worry about the end point. However, that was our biggest mistake. We should have captured some of the £125 million and invested it in an asset that would generate a long-term income stream and allow us to continue some of the services that were developed over the period. That happened before all the talk about community ownership of assets became the norm. It might seem crazy, but that was the reality.
I was interested that you said “we” with regard to community workers developing an asset. What about the community?
I was working for and employed by the community as a key adviser, so I was speaking collectively. The community would have had to buy the assets. In fact, we set up an organisation with that aim in mind, but it did not deliver that. It is interesting how such things can be diverted.
Do you want to respond to the question, Mr Milne?
What was the question?
I asked about the short-term approach.
You are right about the focus on the short term. My mind was diverted because I was thinking about what Angus Hardie said about Wester Hailes and the issues about assets and ownership.
On that point, I have a question about the URCs. Some of them were set up in 2006, and some before that. Do you think that some of them were actually set up to fail?
No. I think that some existing initiatives that were already in place were badged as URCs; that certainly happened. SURF was involved in facilitating the discussion process, and originally the Scottish Government’s thinking was that there would ultimately be between 15 and 19 URCs across Scotland. The first three that were set up, in 2004, were badged as pathfinder URCs. We were to learn from them and there were to be learning networks around them. The second three that came along after the publication of “People and Place: Regeneration Policy Statement” in 2006 were largely the result of political pressure and some signalling of a need to respond in particular areas.
When the URCs were set up, do you think that in some areas there was an underestimation of the costs of the remediation of the land and other assets that were given, before anything could be developed?
Yes, I think that that has certainly been the case, but that is not in itself surprising. It is not surprising that a developer might enter a particular venture and then find that there is some hidden difficulty in delivering the outcome. However, the greatest difficulty was that all the URCs were predicated on the previous model of rising land values and rising property values, and on its being possible out of that to secure the longer-term assets for the community that Angus Hardie talked about. The 2008 debt-led banking crash that ruined that model ruined URCs’ business plans. They were left scrabbling—I am sorry, but that is too pejorative; they were left to prioritise what they could actually achieve in that changed economic landscape.
One other area that has not been touched on at all today is the impact of tourism and leisure on regeneration. In smaller communities in some areas of the country, the introduction of a small boating club or marina can facilitate regeneration. Do you have any comments about tourism and leisure?
Those are key elements in the mix. We have members who have pontoons and moorings, visitor centres, campsites—you name it; they are all part of the mix. In fact, our conference in September will kick off with a fringe meeting on community tourism, which is seen as an increasingly important aspect of regenerating an area, by encouraging visitors not just to come into but to buy into to the community, to find out more about it and feel part of it. When they are in the area, we want visitors to make the maximum economic impact by using local suppliers, businesses and products. I agree that tourism is increasingly important.
One of the things that I have found today is that there is a hankering for the past, and I do not think that the past is necessarily as rosy as has been described in some of what has been said. I want to hear what you think needs to be done in the future to ensure that community groups and the third sector have their say in regeneration matters.
My short answer is that, as I said earlier about social development, I would like to see more people being assigned to neighbourhood development work who could go into communities to work with people and link them up. As Andy Milne said, people begin their involvement through barbecues and that sort of thing, but we need people who can organise those to get people together. We have got to where we have got to, but if we do not invest some support into building communities from the bottom up, as the phrase goes, we will not get beyond this point without replacing that community energy and activity in the most disadvantaged communities.
Fundamentally, we are looking for a reorientation of effort, if you like, so we are talking about providing core funding that allows community initiatives to be established and grow. We need a culture change whereby the public sector takes the lead from the agenda that is set by the community about what needs to be done. In the fullness of time, we should find that the agenda is set by increasingly strong and sustainable community groups, which should be given effective support from the agencies around them to make projects happen.
My three colleagues have all made an excellent case for community-led regeneration and support for community organisations, so I will not repeat what they have said.
I concur with Andy Milne that, in some respects, the resources that are currently being made available to regeneration are chicken-feed compared with large procurement budgets and infrastructure spend. If we could bend some of that into making regeneration a mainstream activity—rather than the fringe activity that it seems to be at the moment—that would transform things.
I am sure that we will look at state aid in some depth, as we have done previously. Quite frankly, I think that the issue is often risk averseness rather than anything else, but that is an aside.