Chamber and committees

The cabinet secretary highlights the importance of access to culture through education and tuition. Sometimes it is important that that happens through the curriculum and in school settings, but community settings and charitable organisations are also important, particularly for working-class kids, who can often find formal educational settings intimidating. Will the cabinet secretary consider the example of Beatroute Arts, in the north of Glasgow, of which I am a trustee, and its excellent, innovative work to break down barriers, allowing working-class kids to access creative expression and music tuition?

The SPCB will surely recognise that, although MSPs remain the legal employers of staff, many issues that affect our staff are outwith members’ direct control, whether that is contract terms and conditions, security, facilities or access. If the corporate body recognises that reality, it should put in place mechanisms to engage staff trade unions directly on such matters.

The GMB Westminster branch—I note my entry in the register of members’ interests as a member of the GMB—is in the final stages of concluding a memorandum of understanding with the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority at the House of Commons to cover those matters and to formalise engagement for Westminster staff that it represents.

Will the corporate body look at following that example to improve direct engagement with staff trade unions? Will it instruct the senior executive team at the Parliament to engage with the GMB branch and develop a formal mechanism of engagement and negotiation?

During my recent visits to Providence and Cincinnati, I saw how those American cities empower individuals directly by distributing rapid fentanyl and nitazene test strips at scale, alongside naloxone. With the hyper-toxic supply of synthetic opioids driving our death toll, people need the means to test drugs before they consume them. Although I welcome that Glasgow’s drug checking service will open next month, albeit too late to solve some of the problems in the city, it cannot match the scale of personal test strips. Will the minister commit to making them fully and widely available across Scotland?

I thank the minister for his kind words. I am sure that he will agree that many of our heritage crafts are now critically endangered because public bodies are not buying enough locally. Following the devastating collapse of Ballantine Castings in Bo’ness last year—its historic moulds, which go back 200 years, face being scrapped altogether—Scotland’s last architectural iron foundry, Laing’s of Lochgelly, wants to purchase it, but the foundry’s survival is threatened by a lack of consistent public sector contracts for civic ironwork. We see the exact same failure in the stone industry, with local suppliers at Tradstocks bypassed for imported materials for the Glasgow avenues project and George Square renovation.

If we want to keep these skills alive and allow businesses such as those to take on apprentices, we must change how we spend public money. Will the minister help me and Laing’s to save the Ballantine moulds and agree to progress reforms to public procurement so that social value weightings are prioritised to protect Scotland’s traditional trades?

To ask the Scottish Government what support it is providing to endangered and critically endangered heritage crafts. (S7O-00273)

Trade unions in Glasgow are rightly rising up against the proposal that will go to the integration joint board tomorrow, which threatens to gut welfare rights and anti-poverty services by cutting the workforce by more than half to plug a deficit that has been driven by years of disproportionate Government underfunding of Glasgow. Asking ASSIST staff and social care workers to share the burden by delivering double the service for the same wage is an unacceptable shift of austerity on to the front line. Will the cabinet secretary intervene to alleviate the disproportionate pressure on Glasgow and guarantee the funding that is needed to secure fair pay and safe workloads?

Mr Kerr made an interesting point about minorities pushing this agenda. Brexit is an interesting example, because it was achieved by the Conservatives with 36 per cent of the vote, as he observed. My understanding is that the Scottish National Party got 38 per cent of the vote at the recent election. If you combine the vote share for the Greens and the SNP, that is around 41 per cent. Surely, if there were a settled majority of more than 50 per cent—around 60 per cent—then the conversation would change. Is that not something that he would agree with?

Does the cabinet secretary accept that the fundamental issue is that we do not have competitive shipbuilding finance in Scotland, which hampers any shipyard in Scotland in winning commercial work? Does he agree that we should be exploring section 45 of the Subsidy Control Act 2022 and its national security provision, and will he write to UK defence ministers on that issue? Has the Pemamek panel line been ordered yet, because that is a critical piece of machinery with a long lead time for installation?

We have not had clarity from the Government on the detail of what it is proposing. We need clarity on exactly what it is proposing in the guidance and on its scope. We have precedent for this in Scotland. A century ago, Britain’s electricity supply was a fragmented parochial mess, much like our current approach to hyperscale data centre planning. It took a Glaswegian industrialist, Lord Weir, to sort that out, through the creation of the national grid. He did not rely on piecemeal decisions but delivered a synchronised national system. After the second world war, it was a pioneering Secretary of State for Scotland, Tom Johnston, who led the creation of the North of Scotland Hydro-Electric Board to realise the vision of power from the glens, refusing to leave rural electrification to private speculation. That sort of unified civic-minded planning is what we need today.

Scotland has great strengths in data science and energy, but a codified coherent industrial development plan is urgently required so that we can maximise the economic benefit, in terms of both jobs and wages, as AI centres develop, as well as have community benefit from economic returns. We have the opportunity to build the industrial architecture of the future, but it must be done by national design, and not by private speculation, so I urge members to support the Labour amendment.

I move amendment S7M-01177.3, to insert at end:

“believes that Scotland has great strengths in data science and energy, and as such, a clear industrial strategy is required to maximise the economic benefits of AI data centre developments, including jobs and wages; calls on the Scottish Government to bring forward a clear definition of what constitutes a hyperscale data centre and to issue national planning guidance, alongside robust environmental standards and assessments, to inform national and local decision-making on current and potential hyperscale data centre planning applications; notes that such guidance must provide clarity on spatial, community and social impacts of any such developments and that decisions must be based on community consent; agrees that consideration must be given to implementing community benefit schemes and adjusting the non-domestic rates regime or other tax measures to ensure that economic benefits are accrued by communities in which such data centres are sited; calls on the Scottish Government to report back to Parliament on the development of national planning guidance by the end of the current calendar year and to publish this guidance in full within 12 months, and believes that no decisions on planning or consenting in relation to such applications should be made until this has been completed.”

15:29

I welcome the opportunity to contribute on the critical issue that is being debated. When we talk about the cloud and the digital economy, there is a tendency to treat them as something that is ethereal or abstracted from our daily lives, but the reality is that they are inherently physical. Data centres are vast engineering undertakings. As economic enablers, they underpin everything from the national health service to our world-leading university research, as well as the day-to-day operation of Scottish businesses. They are increasingly important national infrastructure.

The UK sovereign AI fund’s £100 million rapid AI research and development procurement competition is a welcome initiative for founders to take on four national challenges: a national health service with more time for patient care; defence that keeps Britain safe; computing power to underpin British AI sovereignty; and ideas that keep our country cyber resilient.

However, in Scotland, today, we are leaving the architectural and industrial footprint of the 21st century entirely to private interests. In Scotland, the Government’s failure to urgently and proactively engage with the economic potential and risks of data centre development means that council planning authorities’ decisions on private sector planning applications are ad hoc and not led by good national guidance. We are allowing our industrial landscape and our grid capacity to be dictated by speculative private landlordism, with an inherently discretionary and reactive planning system. That is a profound abdication of strategic responsibility by the Government, and that is not a new problem. Three years ago, I asked the Government what its policy was on data centres, and it described the current picture as 10 data centres. We now have 15 in Scotland, with 23 proposed, so we need to rapidly catch up with the planning infrastructure to underpin it all.

My colleagues in the UK Government grasped the scale of this industrial transition, and Darren Jones MP rightly articulated that we must move from a legacy bureaucratic state to a modern digital state, leveraging this technology to upgrade our industrial base, secure better jobs—freed from tedious time-consuming tasks—and transform public services. Similarly, the Minister for Artificial Intelligence has underscored that domestic data centre capacity is a matter of national sovereignty and economic resilience. We cannot simply leave the physical engines of our future economy to overseas control.

However, to deliver on that, we must face the stark engineering realities. Data centres are major consumers of power and water. To understand the scale of what we are dealing with, running at its full terawatt hours, the proposed Cato data centre would consume nearly 8 per cent of all electricity generated in Scotland in 2024. Plans for new data centres should balance our future data needs, energy sufficiency, environmental impact, economic potential and job creation. Would the minister require current proposals to be retrospectively subject to environmental impact assessments?

Instead of developer-led chaos, we need coherent national infrastructure planning. Energy firm RWE recently highlighted the necessity of co-locating data centres at existing power station sites to bypass grid bottlenecks, reduce constraint payments to renewable generators and ease transmission congestion. That is exactly the sort of spatial and industrial master planning that the Government must lead on. It is obvious to me that the locations for the first wave of new data centre developments in Scotland are staring us in the face: our established coastal and thermal power station sites at Hunterston, Torness, Cockenzie, Longannet and Chapelcross. Those locations already possess the industrial profile required: high-voltage grid connections, abundant ambient cooling water along the coastline, flat brownfield industrial land sited well away from residential amenities, and communities with an existing established heritage in the energy industry.