Chamber and committees

Apologies. I would love to give way.

We have won the right to be heard here. Now we need to win the future of the glasshouse. The council must embrace the opportunities of municipal enterprise and partner with the community to unlock the building’s potential while retaining the ultimate responsibility for its ownership and the operation of its core public spaces.

Keep the glasshouse publicly owned, publicly controlled and publicly accessible. Anything less is a betrayal of Glasgow’s municipal socialist heritage and its people.

17:29

I will give way, if I may.

As we draw the debate to a close, I want to reflect on a shared frustration that we have heard from members across the chamber about the industrial opportunities that Scotland has already let slip through our fingers. I am reminded, with the economic history that has been relayed today, of one of the great pivotal moments in our nation’s economic history: the point in 1979 when the SNP voted with the Conservatives to bring down the Labour Government and fundamentally change the trajectory of Britain’s North Sea oil and gas future.

It is important to remember that that was at a point when the British National Oil Corporation, the UK’s state company in the North Sea, was destined for privatisation in 1982. If we had not had that moment in history, we would still have had the UK equivalent of Statoil or Equinor today. That is one of the great what-ifs of our economic history, in my view.

When we look at the massive build-out of onshore and offshore wind, we see a stark failure of industrial strategy. We should look back to the 1980s as well, for a tantalising glimpse of what we lost. It was a Glasgow engineering firm, James Howden & Co, that pioneered some of the world’s first commercial wind turbines, successfully exporting them, from Orkney to the wind farms of California. We had the head start, the engineering brilliance and the manufacturing capacity, yet a lack of sustained Government backing saw that early advantage squandered. The industry drifted across the North Sea to Denmark during the 1990s, although the recent announcement by Vestas to construct a nacelle factory in Leith earlier this year is massive for the country, and most welcome.

Today, despite possessing a massive share of Europe’s wind potential, we have too often imported the technology and exported the economic benefits. We leased our natural resources but wholly missed the industrial prize. As we look to the next frontier of our energy future, we cannot afford to repeat that mistake.

As we have heard from across the chamber, energy is the lifeblood of modern society, from the power driving heavy manufacturing to the electricity that boils our kettles. However, amid global market turmoil, we must recognise that we in this Parliament are not powerless. Far too often, we focus on multilateral gridlock across the UK or Europe while we fail to unleash the powers that are held by central and local government right here in Scotland. The UK Labour Government has put Scotland at the heart of its energy strategy, committing billions of pounds in investment, launching GB Energy and upgrading our grid.

The member may be familiar with project management constraints. It is important to note that it takes time to develop such massive projects. At least the company has been launched, unlike the state energy company that the Scottish Government committed to launch, which never materialised. Let us see how that develops. I hope that the member will fully support the scaling up of GB Energy and the unleashing of the opportunities. To realise that vision, the Scottish Government needs to step up. It must speed up planning, work constructively with trade unions and industry, invest in skills and ensure that communities can share in our natural wealth.

To see what is possible when we match natural resources with industrial strategy, we should look to our own proud history in Scotland and in my city of Glasgow. It was in Glasgow that James Watt developed a separate condenser and where we turbocharged the first industrial revolution. Decades later, engineers such as John Elder revolutionised marine propulsion in Scotland, for the first time in human history unifying shipbuilding and engine building, at the Fairfield works in Govan.

However, Glasgow not only innovated in private enterprise but led the world in municipal utilities. When private companies struggled to deliver at scale in the late 19th century, public initiatives stepped in. Under the guidance of figures such as Lord Kelvin, the Glasgow Corporation took municipal control of electricity, establishing public generating stations. What could have remained a luxury for private shareholders became a public utility, owned and used by all Glaswegians.

As we transition to net zero, once again, Glasgow has everything to give and everything to gain. Today, local companies such as Star Refrigeration and Malin Group are developing groundbreaking large river-source heat pumps. A prime example of that is the B-Neatpump, a pioneering barge-based heat pump. For years, extracting clean heat from rivers was hindered by the scarcity and high cost of prime riverside land. The B-Neatpump solves that ingeniously by floating the heat pump and abstraction equipment directly on the river, providing a modular solution to district heating. Supported by Scottish Enterprise, the concept is already being demonstrated on the River Clyde in Clydebank. Unlike the wind turbine roll-out, that economic prize can be kept in Scotland. The floating technology could be deployed in dozens of cities, allowing urban centres to harness the ambient heat right on our doorsteps.

Deindustrialisation scarred our urban communities through the 1980s. However, municipal energy generation offers a path to reindustrialise our country. In order to manufacture those barges here, our deep maritime heritage, sustained by skilled shipbuilders on the Clyde, provides the exact workforce needed to construct the new infrastructure. By establishing local municipal energy companies—as the SNP Scottish Government has often committed to doing—and expanding district heat networks, we can cut bills, create high-skilled jobs, reduce emissions and return the profits directly to local communities. It is one of the best examples of community wealth building in action that I can think of.

I urge members to support the Labour amendment and work together to achieve the greener, municipal and highly industrialised energy future that we all need.

I thank Holly Bruce, the member for Glasgow Southside, for lodging this members’ business debate motion. I was pleased to second it, because we are united not just in the defence of that public building but in defence of a principle that was foundational to the creation of the modern city of Glasgow: our great civic assets and our places of beauty, learning and wellbeing belong to the public, and Glasgow City Council has a fundamental duty to be their ultimate guardian on behalf of the public.

Queen’s park glasshouse is not just another greenhouse; it is a vital piece of our social and architectural history. Constructed in 1895 by the renowned Partick-based horticultural builder Simpson & Farmer, it has stood for generations as a civic sanctuary in the south side of the city.

When the Victorian city fathers commissioned such structures, they were driven by high-minded ideals. In an era when Glasgow was the workshop of the world, shrouded in industrial smog and soot, municipal glasshouses were constructed as cathedrals of light and nature. They were rooted in the philosophy of rational recreation and the civic gospel: the belief that the working class deserved access to clean air, botanical education and moral uplift. They were designed to provide a democratic space of beauty and tranquillity, free at the point of use, to improve the physical and mental health of the public.

Those laudable ideals are just as relevant today. The Queen’s park glasshouse currently provides immeasurable benefits to the community, and its future potential as a hub for growing, learning, biodiversity, climate action and wellbeing is enormous. The local campaigners here in the gallery who have rallied to save the glasshouse have fought a magnificent campaign, and they have won the right to be heard in the national legislature.

Glasgow City Council has finally committed to consultation, a feasibility study, capital funding bids and community engagement. We welcome those commitments, but as the campaigners have rightly stated, those processes must not become a bureaucratic smokescreen to avoid the central question, which is, who will ultimately be responsible for the glasshouse in the future?

I know all too well the perilous journey of saving such a structure. The Queen’s park glasshouse shares a profound connection with another of Glasgow’s great lost civic treasures, the Springburn winter gardens, which was built by the exact same firm, Simpson & Farmer, just five years later in 1900. The Springburn winter gardens was once the jewel of the north of Glasgow, built with the same soaring ambition. When I first became involved in the campaign to save the Springburn winter gardens back in 2013, the building had lain derelict for three decades—its spectacular ironwork was rusting, its glass was long gone, surrounded by Heras fencing and municipal apathy.

For 13 years alongside the dedicated group of local trustees, we fought to pull that building back from the brink. We tirelessly lobbied, we scraped together funding for emergency works to keep it standing and we fought a seemingly endless battle against a culture of managed decline. I am incredibly proud of what we have achieved in a major breakthrough in that campaign this year, securing a viable funded path forward to restore the ruined building.

However, it should not require 13 years of exhausting, relentless campaigning by volunteers in their spare time to save a category A-listed publicly owned asset from collapsing altogether. People who have been involved in the struggle to save the nearby Govanhill baths over the past quarter of a century will know exactly what I mean.

Community trusts and local collaborations are wonderful. Indeed, they are essential for community wellbeing, but we cannot allow local authorities to use community empowerment as a euphemism for municipal abdication of responsibility. Handing over the keys of complex heritage-listed and capital-intensive glasshouses entirely to underresourced volunteer groups is often setting them up to fail. That does not mean, however, that the council must rigidly operate every square inch of the site alone. We must look to the future through a lens of collaboration and modern municipal enterprise.

There is immense opportunity here to be flexible and innovative. We can and should collaborate with social enterprises, charities and local organisations to diversify the utilisation of the wider glasshouse complex. Whether that involves partnering to run a community cafe, leasing ancillary spaces for urban agriculture projects, running a botanical gin distillery or collaborating with educational groups, such partnerships can generate vital revenue and breathe dynamic new life into buildings if appropriately planned and designed with the community.

However, that flexibility must be built on an unshakeable foundation: the fundamental principle of public ownership and control. The core public spaces of the magnificent glasshouse, which are open to the public today thanks to the campaign, must remain publicly operated, publicly managed and free to access. The council must be the ultimate guarantor of the building’s future.

We must also acknowledge that the vulnerability of the Queen’s park glasshouse and the wider erosion of our parks funding is not happening in a vacuum. It is a direct symptom of the disproportionate austerity inflicted on Glasgow City Council by the Scottish Government. Over the past decade, Glasgow’s budget has been slashed by more than 10 per cent—literally decimated. When the Government sets roughly 80 per cent of the local authority’s funding, it leaves the council with an impossible dilemma.

We cannot allow our Victorian civic inheritance to become the collateral damage of those cuts. We need only to look to the east end and the devastating closure of the People’s Palace winter gardens in 2018 to see the cost of inaction. That closure robbed the people of the east end and Glasgow as a whole of another civic historic glasshouse, leaving it to languish while the council struggled to find the funding to keep it going.

We cannot allow the south side to suffer the same fate by stealth. We are witnessing the gradual erosion of the civic infrastructure that led the poet John Betjeman to famously describe Glasgow as

“the greatest Victorian city in the world”.

Today, too often, we see these civic assets treated merely as liabilities on a spreadsheet rather than the engines of community wealth that they were meant to be.

The conclusion here is straightforward.

I welcome the minister to his post and thank him for giving way. An interesting example nearby might be the Queen’s park arena. The original arena was destroyed by a fire in 1996, but the community councils around the area took control of the site and developed a new public asset, which is managed by a community interest, not-for-profit company called Inhouse Event Productions. That shows that there can be ways to activate a venue and make it self-sustaining while retaining some degree of public control and ownership of it. Of course, there is a balance to be carefully struck between keeping it in the council and shirking responsibility altogether.

I welcome the Scottish Government’s commitment to improving our high streets. The minister will know the importance of place-based improvements to local economies and wellbeing. I was also encouraged by the Prime Minister’s announcement that the United Kingdom Government is committed to introducing clear design standards for high street shopfronts.

In Glasgow, there is a good example of how that can be achieved. I have seen that in Saracen Street in Possilpark, where shopfronts were upgraded to their traditional shopfront standards due to Scottish Government funding, which I campaigned for with the local business improvement district. A similar scheme has been implemented in Govan, which has led to increased footfall, making the community feel safer for everyone. Will the minister commit to introducing similar design standards at a national level, learning the lessons from Possilpark and Govan, so that other high streets can benefit in the same way?

I am sure that the cabinet secretary agrees that Scotland cannot cut its way out of its current fiscal challenges and that, instead, it must invest its way out of them. That is why mention of the Clyde metro project in the programme for government was welcome. It is a project that will transform connectivity across the greater Glasgow city region and drive the economic growth that we all want to see.

An infrastructure project of that scale needs relentless momentum to get out of development hell. Can the cabinet secretary confirm that the development of the Clyde metro case for investment remains on track to meet its early 2027 deadline? Can the cabinet secretary outline what capital support the Government will provide for the project over the course of the session, so that we can see construction start by the end of the decade?

The cabinet secretary makes an important point about those sectors driving growth, but one of the big challenges for Scotland relates to the firms that are based in Scotland. He mentioned that there was a high rate of start-up growth, but one of Scotland’s big challenges is the number of firms that do not grow and then are bought over by overseas conglomerates. There is a real challenge of retaining a mass of firms in Scotland.

I take Mr Doris’s point made about inward investment, particularly foreign direct investment. However, does he recognise that there is no critique of the nature of that investment? For example, the takeover by a foreign company of a Scottish company is classed as foreign direct investment.