Chamber and committees

It is an important challenge, and one that we must respond to robustly. That is the backdrop that I will now come on to.

In the debate, we keep talking about the just transition, but where is it? Yes, we must move to a green economy at a rapid rate, but sadly we are not seeing the renewable energy jobs appear at the pace that is necessary to drive a true green industrial revolution. It is all well and good to prepare the ground for the skills, but if there is not the demand from new sectors to pull in that labour, we are simply on a hiding to nothing.

It will not surprise the Parliament that I think that there has been precisely no just transition for workers and communities. In this country we like to talk a good game, but the actions of the Government simply do not live up to the rhetoric. In fact, we have surrendered sovereignty over these matters to faceless men, in boardrooms far from Scotland, who determine the key investment decisions over the sector. We have been found wanting, as a branch plant economy in the sector.

In 2010, the Scottish Government’s low carbon strategy predicted that there would be 130,000 low carbon and renewable energy jobs in the country by 2020, with 28,000 direct jobs in the offshore wind sector alone. The reality is that there are 23,000 direct jobs in the entire low carbon and renewable energy economy. Are we going to say that that is good enough, when we face such pressure? Is it any wonder that workers in the oil and gas industry have no faith whatsoever in the Government when it says that jobs will be available to them when the extraction of oil and gas inevitably comes to an end?

The mess that has been made of the opportunity to develop Scotland’s manufacturing base on the back of our transition to a green economy is no longer even contested by the Government. The facts speak for themselves, and they are embarrassing. We see it in every single offshore wind development.

For SSE Renewables and Total’s £5.7 billion Seagreen project off the coast of Angus, how many of the 114 turbine jackets were manufactured in Scotland? None. Each and every one of them was offshored to China and the United Arab Emirates, only to be transported back to Scotland on diesel-burning barges. For the Neart na Gaoithe wind farm off the coast of Fife, the 54 complex Siemens Gamesa turbines will be manufactured abroad. The Harland and Wolff yards in Methil, which are merely 10 miles away from the development, will manufacture just 15 per cent of the steel jacket foundations.

That is not good enough. I could not be more supportive of the calls that have been made today, but we need to match them with a demand to ramp up the offshore renewable energy sectors so that they can pull that workforce into them. The Scottish Government needs to get a grip on that, and it needs to provide certainty to workers in the oil and gas sector that it will address those barriers to entry.

A standardised offshore training passport would do just that. We also need to place obligations on industry bodies, such as OPITO, to step up to the challenge. We need to enable those workers to begin the skills transition that needs to happen if we are to meet our climate ambitions and ensure that there is a just transition.

I strongly urge the minister to commit to that agenda and to the demands that my colleagues have made today, if the Government is in any way serious about ensuring that workers are protected during our inevitable transition to a new green economy. I am afraid that the rhetoric will just not do any more. Those workers have been strung along for far—

—that the proposed venue closures come as a result of Covid is disingenuous at best. Will the Scottish Government please get a grip on the situation, provide local authorities with the funding that they need and stop taking Glaswegians for fools?

To ask the Scottish Government whether it will respond to the calls being made by trade unions and activist groups and allocate an additional £17 million in funding this year to support the local authority services currently managed by Glasgow Life. (S6O-00244)

Of course, the pandemic has had an impact, but let us look at the preparedness of the situation as the pandemic hit. Over the past decade as a whole, Glasgow Life’s block grant from Glasgow City Council has been cut by 8 per cent, while the Scottish Government has cut Glasgow City Council’s budget by over 10 per cent. Clearly there are interdependencies. For the leader of Glasgow City Council, Susan Aitken, to continue to claim—

To ask the Scottish Government what action it will take to resolve the on-going pay dispute between ScotRail and railway workers, in light of the announcement of strike action during COP26.

As Mr Sarwar mentioned, one third of Scots do not have a driving licence and a quarter of Scots do not have a passport. Given that those are integral to logging into the app, is there a potential digital exclusion issue with its design? Will the First Minister agree that that indicates design immaturity in the app and take steps to address that potential flaw in the system?

I welcome the hint that there might well be a revised offer, but I say with respect to the minister that I tend to trust the integrity of workers and their trade union representatives to tell the truth on such matters. I commend the Government’s effort to respond, but it is trying to shut the stable door after the horse has bolted.

The situation should never have been allowed to deteriorate to this point. For more than 18 months, the Government has steadfastly refused to engage meaningfully with the pay dispute. Workers’ morale is at an all-time low, and they have been left with no option but to vote for strike action. It is not a bolt from the blue or a malicious act; it is the result of sustained unacceptable behaviour by the employer.

We face the prospect of Scotland being an international laughing stock if COP26 delegates cannot use public transport because of Abellio’s intransigence and the Government’s seeming indifference. What will be the next steps if the revised pay offer that is under discussion is refused by the trade unions? Will the minister make it clear to Abellio that the lockouts—they are indisputably lockouts—are totally unacceptable? Will he instruct Abellio to halt the practice before the situation escalates any further?

I refer to my registered interest as a member of Unite the union. In the past couple of days, 20 ScotRail employees in depots across the country have been sent home—in effect locked out of their workplaces—for refusing to operate machinery that they do not have the necessary accreditation or training to operate. That comes against the backdrop of the on-going pay dispute, which the minister referred to.

As a result, Unite trade union members have overwhelmingly backed strike action in October and November, including dates during COP26. That means that three days of strike action will take place on Scotland’s railways during the most important climate conference in history. Does the minister endorse Abellio’s decision to send home those workers and use anti-trade-union tactics, which fly in the face of the Scottish Government’s Fair Work Convention, simply for exercising their right to withdraw their labour?

I am delighted to take part in this members’ business debate to emphasise the importance of community wealth building. It is as important in urban areas as it is in rural areas, because the exploitation that is experienced is common to both.

Across our country, we see widening inequality and increasing poverty among working-class communities, and an astronomical rise in the levels of wealth being hoarded by the super-rich. Against that backdrop, the premise of community wealth building is more important than ever before. It is a concept that brings a people-centred approach to local economic development, redirecting wealth back into local economies and putting control back in the hands of local people.

We know that it works. We can look at communities such as North Ayrshire, where the council’s Labour administration, led by Joe Cullinane, puts the model of community wealth building at the heart of everything that the local authority does. That approach means that more social housing is built, publicly owned energy generating facilities are developed and democratic ownership models are prioritised—all to the benefit of the community.

That is in stark contrast to what we have seen across Scotland in recent years. Local authorities have been faced with significant financial distress as their budgets have been disproportionately cut, and they seek an easy capital receipt with land disposals.

We know that, of the hundreds of millions of pounds of public land that the Scottish Government and Scottish public authorities have disposed of in recent years, at least 12 per cent has been purchased by one volume house builder, CALA Homes. A good example is the former Boroughmuir high school, in Edinburgh. It was sold for £14.5 million in 2015, and it has recently been redeveloped as more than 100 luxury apartments. CALA Homes advises prospective buyers that, at more than £800,000 per property, they will get a handsome return on their investment. Why was that return on investment not achieved by the community? Instead, it is achieved by anonymous landlords and land holders from all over the world. No one knows who those people are, but they are siphoning our communities’ wealth away from the city of Edinburgh, and that example is replicated across Scotland.

There is an alternative. North Ayrshire is one example, and Preston is yet another. Glasgow could benefit from such a model. Where Preston is reopening libraries and building new ones, Glasgow is closing its libraries because it is facing severe financial problems. At one time, Glasgow led the world in municipal socialism. As a city authority, it owned its tramways, its electric and telephone systems and its entire structure of public transport, and it was the biggest social landlord in the world apart from Hong Kong. However, over the past 30 years, all that social infrastructure has been rapidly dismantled and sold to private interests, where it does not serve the people, and where the profits are extracted.

The Scottish Government has indicated that it is exploring the idea of rolling out a nationwide community wealth building strategy. I would welcome that, but I place on record that it must be done not as a mere sticking plaster to mask the continued local authority budget cuts that are handed down from this place. Those cuts are compounded all the more by the insulting greenwashing that we see in Glasgow in the run-up to the 26th United Nations climate change conference of the parties—COP26—with myriad corporate interests sponsoring pathetic interventions in the city’s built environment while there is broad decline and decay in its urban infrastructure as a result of decades of disproportionate budget cuts.

If we are to adopt the community wealth building model, that must be done alongside the creation of an industrial strategy that puts people and communities at its heart. I encourage the Scottish Government to revisit its proposed compulsory sale order policy, which it quietly dispensed with in the previous session of Parliament. There is an urgent requirement to bring that sort of power back to the forefront of our agenda to ensure that community wealth building is put back in the hands of communities. We must do that in order to take action in communities that have long been blighted by deindustrialisation and the disinvestment caused by budget cuts. I truly hope that the Government embraces the opportunities that community wealth building brings, and does not squander such opportunities as it has done so often in the past.

The minister mentioned the forthcoming bill on land reform. Will it include provision for compulsory sale orders and reform of compulsory purchase powers as recommended by the Scottish Law Commission’s report on the matter?