Chamber and committees

I am glad to see that the Scottish Government has begun to recognise that a new approach to governing is taking shape across the United Kingdom and that our new Prime Minister is leading the charge towards a fairer, more prosperous and more democratic Britain. I was very proud to be in the room when he gave his recent speech at conference.

A Scottish Government that acts collaboratively will find that it can build partnerships for mutual flourishing across our shared isles, and yet I must be honest that I am disappointed that, once again, the Government has opted for the simplistic shopping list method of negotiation. Rather than setting out a coherent, systems-thinking vision for the future of Scotland, recognising the complex trade-offs that we face in public policy, it has made what feels more like a prickly, sanctimonious and haughty set of demands.

That is a fair observation. David Linden and I are both former members of the House of Commons, and I agree that the system here is better than the public bill committee system in Westminster.

The only question before us today is whether we keep powers tightly to ourselves or let them flow outwards to the people of Scotland. Therein lie the seeds of good growth in every postcode of this country, which the Prime Minister mentioned. Nobody can pretend that this is a fringe preoccupation. In March, the previous Scottish Government and COSLA jointly published “Democracy Matters: A Route Map to Reform”, which argued that decisions about public services should sit as close as possible to citizens and told us that implementation would be a matter for the next Administration. Colleagues, that Administration is this one.

The previous Parliament incorporated the European Charter of Local Self-Government into Scots law. The charter states:

“Public responsibilities shall generally be exercised, in preference, by those authorities which are closest to the citizen.”

The principle is agreed and settled, the charter is law and the route map is written. What is missing is the political willpower to realise it.

The scars of austerity during the 2010s have left communities feeling threadbare and unheard across the country. Too often, measures that should have empowered them, such as community asset transfers, have become a way of handing volunteers the liabilities for running the local community centre. What could be opportunities for empowerment become cuts by indirect means.

The Government’s route map concedes that point. It acknowledges that the reduction in community learning and development teams now limits the hands-on support that councils can provide. Without investment in that infrastructure, the communities with the fewest assets will be the least able to take on new powers. We need to do better in that regard.

I share Ross Greer’s impatience on this issue. Does he recognise that the tax base is one thing, but there are more entrepreneurial ways for the state to raise revenue, such as by dealing with the egregious extraction of rents from the bus system or looking at how we can municipalise energy locally? Those are ways in which we can build public finances without necessarily needing to involve tax.

I congratulate Liam McArthur for securing the debate. I was pleased to sign the motion.

Loganair, which is based at Glasgow airport, provides a vital lifeline service to our island and remote communities across Scotland, but we must fundamentally question the long-term sustainability of its current ownership model. Right now, we have a system that socialises the risk through millions of pounds in public service obligation subsidies and the air discount scheme, while keeping the physical assets and strategic control entirely in private hands.

If we are going to treat regional aviation as the critical national infrastructure that it is, the state must take a more active role. At the very least, as the airline requires significant capital investment to decarbonise its fleet in the coming years, the Scottish Government should be looking at how we stop handing out blank cheques. We should demand an equity share in exchange for subsidy, securing a golden share in the airline and perhaps a seat on the board to give the public more of a say over the major network cuts or changes, in order to protect those routes from the volatility of a purely private market.

We should also be more ambitious than simply managing decline. Perhaps we could look beyond that to the principles of public franchising that are so desperately needed, as we know, to fix our municipal bus networks. Perhaps that could also apply to our skies.

Transport Scotland could have the power to specify routes, cap fares and mandate seamlessly integrated ticketing across air, rail and bus services. Furthermore, reflecting on Mr McArthur’s expedition with his son, Tom, to Canada, we have no direct Scotland-based or UK-based airline connecting Scotland across the great circle route of the north Atlantic to Canada and the United States. We are entirely dependent on Icelandair, Canadian Airlines and American Airlines. There is something to consider there. We need to consider how we could explore developing direct connectivity.

I know Norwegian Airlines tried to test it in Scotland in 2017 and pulled out with the Covid pandemic, but could we do more? Take the Icelandair model and the stopover scheme that it has pioneered. It has driven traffic into the country with the free seven-day stopover initiative. With a share in the airline, perhaps we could look at developing point-to-point routes, feeding our regional communities as the tourism opportunity emerges, such as the member for Argyll and Bute, Jenni Minto, mentioned.

If we could do that directly with an airline that has transatlantic connectivity from Glasgow, feeding directly into regional route transfers, perhaps that would open up more of the country to America and Canada. We are currently dependent on foreign airlines to do that, because British Airways as the flag carrier and Aer Lingus focus on Heathrow and Dublin, so we do not get the benefit of flows through Scotland. That goes to Dublin, Heathrow and Keflavik. Perhaps even a code share initially with Icelandair could be an opportunity. We know that the Faroe Islands state-owned airline, Atlantic Airlines, has that initiative, so perhaps we could consider that opportunity in the first instance as a lower-risk opportunity.

We need to consider a broader strategy for how we subsidise these airline routes that is not simply dependent on the purely state-funded loss-making routes. How do we develop an entrepreneurial strategy that drives connectivity internationally for Scotland, particularly across the transatlantic routes, which is the most lucrative air corridor in the world? We are right at the heart of it, but we miss out, because everything is flying over our heads. How do we look more broadly at an entrepreneurial proposition?

Does Jack Middleton, as a working-age person like me, at least agree that the state pension outstripping average earnings is fundamentally unsustainable in the long run?

Will the member take an intervention?

Does Ms Gilruth agree that one thing that Scotland has a disproportionate amount of, relative to its population, is land? Land cannot be offshored, and it is a ready-made opportunity for us to explore growing the tax base with a land value tax.

There is an interesting point about succession planning for small businesses, and asking whether we could do more to promote employee ownership in the long run. If a family has started a business and is looking to retire, are there ways for us to incentivise a transition to selling it to the employees instead of to, say, private equity, effectively offshoring ownership in the business, which happens all too often in Scotland?

Will the member take an intervention?

Does Alex Kerr accept that the logical conclusion of not getting rid of the triple lock would be, at some point, 100 per cent of public expenditure being spent on the state pension? That would be the inevitable ratchet effect. Does he also accept that the Barnett consequentials that will flow to Scotland as a result of investment in a national care service could lead to the introduction of a similarly enhanced scheme in Scotland, if the Government chooses to do that?