Chamber and committees

At last Friday’s state of the city economy conference in Glasgow, the First Minister promised that the Government would introduce enabling legislation in the next parliamentary session to allow regional partnerships to seek legal status, unlock new powers and design delivery models tailored to local priorities. With further details yet to be provided, that seems to be one of the biggest changes to government in Scotland since the creation of the Parliament, finally filling the strategic gap that has been present in Scotland since the abolition of the regional councils in 1996.

Does the Scottish Government plan to facilitate a greater level of democratic mandate for this new city-region tier of governance, or are we going to end up with a feeble version of England’s combined authority system, with some executive powers but none of the democratic accountability?

It is important to note that it covers a swathe of greater Glasgow, including Rutherglen.

My earliest memory of Cumbernauld is of going to the town centre and seeing its megastructure—that was fascinating to a young kid. Built in 1963, it was one of the world’s first megastructures and was set alongside the coherent plan for the town. As a young boy, I watched “Gregory’s Girl”, the 1981 Bill Forsyth film, which captured the spirit of optimism around Cumbernauld—a young town with young people and a lot of aspiration. It certainly contrasted with the older inner city of Glasgow.

It is important to recognise that, although there was a lot of optimism—with new industries and new housing—there were consequences, too. A report published around 10 years ago by the Glasgow Centre for Population Health, “History, politics and vulnerability: explaining excess mortality in Scotland and Glasgow”, highlighted the poor coherence of urban planning decisions through the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. A democratic deficit and a lack of ability to control decisions are among the reasons why there is a particularly high premature death rate among Glaswegians. Chik Collins, who authored the report, observed that the effect of the new towns—inadvertently, admittedly—was to

“steer economic investment away from Glasgow, and to ‘redeploy’ population out of the city”.

New investments and industry were diverted to peripheral estates and new towns.

It is important to take stock of the story of greater Glasgow and its evolution over the past half century or so. We need to think about economies of agglomeration. It is interesting that there is a new agenda for city regions and for how we can improve transport links, spatial integration and economic justice across city regions. We can take stock of that. Cumbernauld was a visionary project and it has had great success, but we should be aware that it left behind communities in the wider region, particularly in inner-city Glasgow, where the old, the very poor and the almost unemployable were, according to the report, left behind. That accentuated and concentrated deprivation and poverty to an extent that is unknown elsewhere in the UK. We need to consider the lessons of the transient foreign direct investments through silicon glen and the dispersal of population from Glasgow. How do we rebuild a city region that can be truly world leading again?

I commend Cumbernauld on reaching its big milestone of 70 years—here’s to the next 70. It is part of a greater Glasgow city region that can really punch above its weight, with all parts of it succeeding.

We have had a decade-long decline. I was interested in Dr Gulhane’s observation that 2,000 people are currently trapped in our acute hospitals, at great expense to the public, although they do not need to be there for any clinical reason and cannot be discharged only because of a lack of social care capacity. He also noted that, over the past decade, the number of social care beds has been reduced by 2,100. Registered social care places have been reduced by almost the exact same amount as the number of people who are stuck in our acute hospitals. If I were the Cabinet Secretary for Health and Social Care, I would have those two numbers stuck up on the wall in my office in St Andrew’s house and would be asking my officials every day, “Why are you not driving that number down into balance? Why is that not happening with the pace and urgency that it needs to?”

As Carol Mochan said, it is because of a lack of leadership. It is much easier to simply point to recruitment agencies overseas and say that we cannot hire enough people from overseas. This system and model imports people from overseas to work in the social care sector, cruelly promising them a better life in this country but then not paying them the same as Scotland-based workers and burning them out through low pay and poor working conditions. As soon as they get the opportunity, they move out of the sector into retail unless they are, in effect, trapped by their visa conditions.

There has already—rightly—been a crackdown by the UK Government on exploitative rogue care providers, which has released around 40,000 posts in the UK for new visa sponsorships. Why is the Scottish Government not going further to absorb those 40,000 people in the system who are looking for new sponsors? There are around 650 in Scotland alone. It is not a matter of loading more people in; it is a matter of absorbing the people who are currently looking for visa sponsorships in the UK and bringing in more of the people who are applying for social care courses. I am sure that the minister will start to see that a systemic approach is needed here. It is simply not good enough to stand and point the finger elsewhere.

We are talking about 18 years of government. Surely some responsibility needs to be taken on board. Instead of creating an economic model of solidarity in which structural gaps in funding are addressed, a wage of £15 an hour is the norm and working conditions are improved, the Scottish Government hopes that there will always be a steady stream of people who are desperate to come in, to depress wages further. We should be training people here, in Scotland, and employing them under improved conditions, which is what Labour aims to do with the Employment Rights Bill.

There has also been an evisceration of local care. As members across the chamber will know, health and social care partnerships are lumbering under huge cuts. Every year, a depressing litany of services are unnecessarily and painfully curtailed or cut altogether because of the £0.5 billion gap in funding for local provision. That is causing all sorts of disastrous situations—for example, with the Scottish Huntington’s Association, which is an amazing charity that Glasgow city’s health and social care partnership is planning to defund from the start of next year.

We are seeing cuts coming quickly and regularly as a result of those funding gaps, which means that demand is piling up in our A and E departments. A couple of weeks ago, I met an A and E nurse at Glasgow Royal infirmary who had just come off shift. She said that there are already beds piling up in the corridors and that, just across the road from where she stays, there is a care home that cannot admit new patients because of a lack of communication with the social work department in Glasgow as a result of cuts. Again, there is system breakdown. The care homes cannot admit, the hospitals cannot discharge and staff are burning out. It is introducing more cost to the system, and the solution somehow appears to be just to import more labour into the system to exploit—

It is shameful that the Government has used that framing in its amendment, and it should be rejected by the Parliament. We can do so much better than that as a country.

We have spent this afternoon discussing a system that is in crisis, but there is precious little in the way of a systemic approach from the Government. During the past near two decades of the Government’s rule, there has been increasing fragmentation, a system characterised by low pay and, indeed, a complete failure of political leadership, which has led to a social care system—if it can even be called that; it is a social care structure—that is harming some of Scotland’s most vulnerable people, who are reliant on it. That is a national scandal that affects almost every household in Scotland.

All the while, our hard-pressed social care staff struggle heroically to keep up a vital public service, despite low wages and poor working conditions. The minister was certainly right to praise unpaid and paid carers in the sector, but it is cold comfort when the system that exploits them and does not advance their interests is being defended by the minister.

The minister will know that the Employment Rights Bill, which is going through the UK Parliament just now, will result in a massive uplift in the rights and the bargaining power of care workers across the system. It will improve rights to sick pay and drive up wages. The cabinet secretary may also want to consider that he has been talking a lot about sponsored care workers in the system, but they are on £12.82 an hour or £25,000 per annum, whichever is higher. The minimum wage for adult social care workers in Scotland is £12.60 an hour. I do not know how the cabinet secretary can stand there and justify paying overseas workers almost £500 more than staff who are domiciled in Scotland are paid, or how he can echo calls from exploitative capitalist employers so that they can rinse more out of the system. That is utterly shameful.

We might also want to consider what the cabinet secretary is doing to advance the training pipeline for people who are seeking employment in the sector. Glasgow Kelvin College, in my region, said that there were 1,200 applicants for 300 places in the care system, so people are being denied the chance to get into the sector. Only one in four people who want to get into the sector are getting that chance.

We have heard time and again in the debate that this problem has nothing to do with the Scottish Government—that it is a hapless bystander or a well-meaning administrator and that the malevolent force is somehow outside Scotland.

Will the cabinet secretary take an intervention?

On collaboration and co-operation, the cabinet secretary might be aware of my constituent six-year-old Brie McCann, who is urgently waiting for a transfer to Great Ormond Street hospital for a heart transplant. Is he aware of that case, and is he doing something to expedite it? It is a matter of hours that we are talking about, which is why the issue is so urgent.

I volunteered as a member of the medal ceremonies team for 2014. It was a fantastic experience, and the city was buzzing. The opportunity to recapture that feeling next year is really exciting. As someone who called for Glasgow to host the games as early as July 2023, when Australia pulled out, I am pleased that the Scottish Government eventually got behind the idea.

The key item that has been announced today is the £150,000 funding for Scotland house, which is a great idea. The Corinthian is a fantastic venue, and a very successful one, but I was curious about why it was chosen when there are other venues in Glasgow city centre, such as the Centre for Contemporary Arts, which is a charitable organisation that has been through difficulties recently and could perhaps have benefited more from that investment. Perhaps it is worth considering what could be done to support charities in that respect.

Last month, Phil Batty, the chief executive officer of Glasgow 2026, told me that the transport issue is still a big problem and raised the issue of what was done in 2014 on concessionary travel for ticket holders and people with accreditation. The Government does not seem keen to support that approach again, but could it be looked at? That would be an important incentive for people to use public transport for the games next year.

I appreciate the opportunity to speak on this group of amendments. Although these are unexpected circumstances, they enable me to bring to light a long-running issue that I have been dealing with in Glasgow over the past 18 months or so. Glasgow City Council’s removal of the previous exemption from non-domestic rates for vacant listed buildings has generally been a positive thing for the city in creating incentives for building owners to utilise vacant floor space and to bring listed buildings that were derelict back into productive use. We have seen a flurry of planning applications going through the council in relation to that. The issue has been a long-running one in Glasgow, where there is enough empty floor space in the city centre to fill the Empire State building in New York.

However, a number of complications have arisen, and the council has said that what has happened was unforeseen. It is said that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. It is important for all levels of government to be aware of such issues as they arise and to adjust accordingly to ensure that the public good is maintained as best it can be.

An issue has arisen in circumstances in which, for example, a building preservation trust or a charity has acquired a listed building that is vacant or derelict and that would require a lot of investment to bring it back into productive use. It might be the case that the organisation has secured grant funding, but, unfortunately, in undertaking the restoration programme, the grant funding has fallen short of the cost of the renovation, so the project has stalled. The organisation is then levied with building rates for a property that it cannot occupy or generate revenue from, which threatens its viability as a going concern. That is exactly what has happened to the Govanhill Baths Building Preservation Trust. I am sure that we all agree that it would be absurd to see the whole thing unravelling after all that effort.

The same thing is happening with commercial property. For example, Stephen Lewis of HFD Property Group, who has been looking at a listed property in the city centre with a view to renovating it to bring it back into productive use, has said that he did not know that he was going to be charged business rates for several years, when it will take a year to get planning consent and another two years to renovate the building. He did not programme that into his business plan when he was looking to renovate that building.

Mr Lewis says that it is absurd that, with, say, the old Clydesdale Bank building on St Vincent Place, if he converted it into a hotel, the hotel could move in and not have to pay rates for a year, even though it would not need that exemption, because it would be generating revenue. The incentives are all in the wrong place.

I hope that the minister can see that there are scenarios in which the current arrangements do not work well. As a result, the market for listed buildings in Glasgow has frozen. There is no desire from people to buy those buildings.

I met a guy who was looking to buy the old Tusk nightclub and the Waverley tea room in Shawlands. He was really enthusiastic when I first met him. He told me that the price had just been reduced massively and that it could be a real bargain for him. I informed him that the reason why the owner had reduced the price was that they were getting charged for business rates on the empty building. I could see his face drop, and he said, “I can’t afford to take the hit on business rates for two or three years until I get planning consent and renovate it”. His interest suddenly ebbed away and that building still sits there derelict—it is a blight on the public realm and an underutilised economic asset.

My amendments are probing amendments to illustrate to the Government some of the unintended consequences of the removal of the exemption, as devolved to local authorities. We have seen some local authorities do it—Glasgow City Council being one of the most notable ones. Although the approach has been generally beneficial, it has caused problems. I hope that the Government is alive to those problems and that we can work collaboratively with the Convention of Scottish Local Authorities and local authorities to address them.

I know that Glasgow is considering a recommended solution. The proposal, which comes from the built heritage commission for Glasgow, is that empty property relief be granted for listed buildings at 100 per cent for a period of up to two years from the date of acquisition, on condition of demonstrating real development progress. That would include design progress—for example, appointing a design team, commissioning design work and incurring and paying design team fees—and a programme that can be linked to Royal Institute of British Architects stages of development; planning progress, including a pre-application discussion with the planning authority or an application for planning consent, with planning queries being addressed timeously; and construction progress, including showing that tenders are under way and that contractors are appointed.

Those criteria would be set to avoid an owner giving the appearance of developing a project without there being any real action towards getting on site. It would avoid bad-faith acting from speculators or land bankers. It is also important to note that, once construction is under way, the reliefs would be granted for premises that are under construction. There would be a long stop date of two years, with agreed milestones if insufficient progress had been made. That would create really powerful incentives for owners to bring the buildings to market and to get renovations under way.

More detailed criteria could be involved; for example, if a charitable organisation is trying to restore a building but its grant funding falls short, it would be crazy for the Government to fund it through grants on the one hand but tax those away with rates on the other. That would undermine the purpose of a charity trying to save a listed building that might provide great community benefits.

I mentioned the example of Govanhill baths and some of the city centre projects that have been stalled or frustrated by the rates issue. There is also Flemington house in Springburn. Marcus Dean, who did up the Abbey Mill business centre in Paisley, took the building on when Glasgow Kelvin College left it about 15 years ago. About a third of the building was turned into a business centre and various organisations were located in it. Two thirds of the floor space was still unused, because it was very expensive to deal with the asbestos, the electrics and so on. Marcus Dean said that he was making decent enough money from rental income on the building to wash its face, but then he got suddenly hammered with a rates bill for all the empty floor space. That sank the business model overnight, and he had to evict the entire building. Set designers, studio people, artists and charities were all kicked out, because he can claim a year’s temporary exemption for a fully empty building. That permutation is crazy. It has resulted in a stupid outcome for Springburn, it has undermined the local economy and a lot of small businesses and organisations are really stressed by it.

Marcus Dean is faced with the dilemma of what to do with the empty building. The only thing that he can do is convert it into student flats, because it is single aspect. He cannot create dual aspects in the building because of the listed building constraints. In that scenario, it is obvious that he should be able to work with the local authority, which would realise that he is trying to do the right thing and is keeping the building wind and watertight and is maintaining it to a baseline level. The council would see that the building has been used and that the owner is aiming to build towards full restoration, and would therefore give him some leeway.

Currently, the system is purely binary—it is on or off; the owner either gets hammered with full rates or they do not. There needs to be a lot more slack in the system and a lot more attentiveness to the permutations and to the difficulties and complexities with listed buildings. That is what my amendments are all about. I am trying to signal to the Government that there are practical issues with how the removal of the exemption has been implemented in the past couple of years, particularly in Glasgow.

Glasgow City Council is making an effort to work through this, and we need that to be standard best practice across Scotland. That should involve working with COSLA. I hope that the Government can take a convening role in trying to make that work sooner rather than later, because we are seeing a lot of projects in the here and now that are being strained and damaged by it. The Springburn example is just the latest example of the issue. It is very frustrating to act as a glorified estate agent for charities, trying to find new accommodation for them. Let us try to avoid the problem at source.

I move amendment 1.