Chamber and committees

Does that not speak to the wider fiscal challenge? Taking into public control equity stakes in corporations that generate money for the public good grows the revenue base of the Scottish Government.

To address my earlier point about firms, does the cabinet secretary not regret that the Scottish Government did not do more to preserve the independence of Wood Group as an independently headquartered large Scottish company?

[Made a request to intervene.]

I second the amendment in the name of my friend the member for Edinburgh Southern.

We have heard an interesting debate today about headline growth and, more interestingly, about some of the holistic things that we need to do to achieve fair economic growth of the kind that builds up local economies, joins education with industry and embeds fair work to weather climate change. Too often, we pass legislation on issues such as land reform or community wealth building, or we hear high-minded rhetoric in this legislature, only to watch radical ideas being watered down into administrative burdens for cash-strapped councils.

Bus franchising, which was mentioned by Patrick Harvie, is an obvious example. Glasgow has taken far too long over it and is lagging way behind other British cities. The introduction of the fare cap, although welcome, simply doubles down on corporate subsidy instead of taking public control in the truest sense. We need to speed up.

I thank my friend Ms Clark, a member for West Scotland, for lodging the motion, which I was happy to sign. I welcome firefighters from across the country to the public gallery.

The recent decisions by the Scottish Fire and Rescue Service board represent some of the most profound front-line cuts to my city of Glasgow in decades, under the guise of a service delivery review. Glasgow is being subjected to a managed decline of its essential emergency infrastructure. The closure of Yorkhill fire station in the west end removes a strategically vital asset. The station covers complex residential profiles, major universities and the Scottish Event Campus, as well as river safety along the north bank of the River Clyde. Indeed, when the station was opened in 1971 it was originally known as West Marine fire station.

On the south bank of the river, in Govan, a community with a proud industrial heritage, where I worked at the shipyard, the permanent removal of the second appliance strips away vital resilience in an area with the country’s largest hospital and heavy industry. For Springburn, a community already suffering from systemic underinvestment, losing a dedicated full-time appliance is another blow and is very worrying for public safety.

The Fire Brigades Union has been crystal clear on the matter. Removing the appliances from three stations across the city of Glasgow will increase response times, reduce city-wide resilience and leave Glaswegians less safe—and it is happening in the wake of one of the most disastrous fires in the history of the city, at Union Street earlier this year. We are repeatedly told by the cabinet secretary and the service board that there is no capital budget available to maintain or modernise the facilities, yet they are sitting on prime urban real estate across Glasgow. As we have seen with the proposed redevelopment of Cowcaddens fire station, the concept should be expanded to other sites in urban locations. The member for Edinburgh North Eastern and Leith raised an important example in Edinburgh about what could be done with the real estate there.

Instead of retreating and abandoning these municipal buildings, we should be showing real financial imagination by adopting a mixed-use model. By utilising air rights and building high-density residential flats directly above modernised appliance bays, we can capture local land value to cross-subsidise our emergency services. That co-location approach is already well developed in major North American cities, and it would allow us to rebuild standalone 1980s facilities such as that at Springburn, alongside the adjacent ambulance station, as well as retaining vital urban sites such as Yorkhill, without draining the capital budget. That would turn our fire stations into dual-purpose assets that actively tackle the housing emergency amid a major shortage of sites.

We should consider broadening our horizon more generally in what we can use a modern fire station for, in the interests of wider public safety and health. Across the United States, in places such as Providence, which I visited over the summer, fire stations have pioneered the safe stations model, transforming 24-hour civic buildings into immediate, non-judgmental access points for individuals seeking recovery from addiction.

In a city such as Glasgow, which is currently fighting a devastating drug deaths crisis, our fire stations could be repurposed as holistic community safety hubs, offering low-barrier harm reduction and addiction pathway support alongside operational firefighting, rather than just being boarded up or scaled back. We could also utilise new technologies such as drones, which would dramatically improve incident command and situational awareness, as well as considering how to improve water and river safety at sites near major rivers such as the River Clyde.

We cannot accept an estate strategy that hollows out our city, nor can we allow a lack of imagination to mean a further dismantling of front-line resilience. I urge the cabinet secretary to intervene and halt those damaging cuts, and to direct the fire service to explore innovative new ways of developing its estates with new funding, using air rights and expanding community health roles across the fire brigade estate.

18:44

That is a good point, which speaks to Mark Ruskell’s point about a virtuous cycle. If we can extend public control of the fare box in Strathclyde, that will supercharge our ability to run subsidised services where routes are not profitable or to increase the frequency of bus services. The Centre for Cities has said that, if Glasgow could catch up with other European cities of equivalent size, the entire Scottish economy would be around 4 per cent bigger, so there is a huge prize to be won if we can get it right.

That is particularly crucial because, as the Government knows, we are facing a £2.6 billion resource deficit and a £2.1 billion capital deficit by 2030. Attempting to manage that fiscal gap through consolidation alone risks repeating the destructive mistakes made during the austerity that we saw from 2012 onwards.

To grow revenue, we must acknowledge the fundamental role that large domestically anchored firms play in our economy. Major corporate headquarters drive regional supply chains and research and development, and they build our tax base. Our macroeconomic output is undermined and eroded without them. The Scottish Government’s figures from just last month expose the vulnerability of our economy. Only a fifth of Scottish businesses export at all. Because we rely so heavily on a shrinking pool of large firms to carry that burden, the loss of domestic corporate leadership is catastrophic. It is exactly why our manufacturing exports have collapsed by 15 per cent in real terms since 2018. That is the cost of losing half of the headquarters of the major independent publicly listed companies in Scotland over the past 30 years. Titans such as Scottish Power, Scottish & Newcastle and Christian Salvesen have been hollowed out by foreign takeovers, yet that barely features in the public debate.

Without those domestic anchors, Scotland operates increasingly like an extractive enterprise for foreign multinationals. In 2021, the gap between our gross domestic product and our gross national income revealed that £36.5 billion was extracted from our economy to overseas shareholders. International capital is too often favoured over domestic public value, as we regularly see through the uncritical citation of foreign direct investment statistics such as those referred to by the member for Paisley and the member for Glasgow Kelvin and Maryhill.

We need only look at our shipbuilding heritage, which was mentioned earlier, to see the historical cost of a lack of joined-up industrial planning in Scotland. In the 1980s, a senior civil servant warned the chairman of the state-owned British Shipbuilders Corporation that Margaret Thatcher wanted to get rid of shipbuilding. In 1988, that crusade culminated in Kenneth Clarke, the Minister for Trade and Industry at the time, deciding over dinner to turn off state support for the shipbuilding industry, prompting the chairman to turn up at a colleague’s door, asking for a bottle of whisky to toast the fact that it was all over. As one yard director noted at the time, just as British Shipbuilders was becoming effective, it was terminated.

Today, other European countries—principally France, Germany and Italy—dominate an industry in Europe that is worth €92 billion and employs more than 350,000 people. Today, Reform’s leader peddled that same hands-off dogma, and there was not much detail from the cabinet secretary about what the Scottish Government would do to improve industrial planning.

When the Wood Group, our Scottish engineering champion, was recently faced with a foreign takeover, the Scottish minister sat on her hands and did nothing about it. This paralysis is most absurdly demonstrated by CMAL handing half a billion pounds in taxpayer-funded shipbuilding contracts to shipyards in Turkey and Poland. As my colleague the member for Na h-Eileanan an Iar mentioned, the recent procurement for MV Lord of the Isles excluded British shipyards from bidding at all.

We must look at what other countries are doing and benchmark our approach against, and contrast it with, Spain’s tax-leasing regime, which leverages accelerated depreciation to provide a 20 per cent subsidy for domestic shipyards. While our Government treats procurement as an isolated transaction, nations such as Spain are using state-backed finance to guarantee domestic work. We should be using the Scottish National Investment Bank to derisk projects for our own shipyards, not exporting capital and importing finished ships.

Where the Scottish Government intervenes, it is often half baked and disastrously misjudged. As we heard from the member for Fife North East, in 2015, ministers brokered the sale of the Dalzell steelworks in Motherwell to Sanjeev Gupta, with an unpaid £7 million loan for an aluminium wheel factory in the Highlands that never materialised. Dalzell is paralysed by cash shortages and is unable to roll 34,000 tonnes of steel plate for the new Royal Fleet Auxiliary ships that are being built in Belfast. Instead of propping up these dodgy magnates and letting them hold these key assets hostage, we could be aggressively backing a green steel plant there with an electric arc furnace to feed our shipyards and our offshore wind sector. Perhaps the reform of compulsory purchase orders and compulsory sale orders that the member for Carrick, Cumnock and Doon Valley mentioned could be deployed in favour of our industries as well as our high streets.

We must reclaim our industrial and municipal ambition. In Glasgow, which is a city that is built on world-class engineering and bold municipal enterprise, we know that true economic strength is generated locally and retained publicly. We need an industrial strategy that backs our domestic engineering base, leverages public procurement for local supply chains and ensures that our infrastructure serves the public good.

We cannot settle for a branch plant economy. We must build Scotland’s economy in a way that retains its wealth for the communities who generate it.

The wilful fire raising at a tenement renovation in Possilpark on Sunday was not only a disgraceful attack on my community and on a property that had finally secured much-needed investment after 20 years of dereliction but a result of months of malicious online lies in social media that were intended to whip up community tensions. Will the First Minister assure Parliament that not only the perpetrators but those who recklessly incited that crime and those who now celebrate the destruction of social housing for local families will face investigation and prosecution where the evidence exists?

It has been great to see so many campaigners from Better Buses for Strathclyde in the Parliament today. The message went out loud and clear to the cabinet secretary that we cannot afford to wait until 2031, at the earliest, for bus franchising in Strathclyde. That point is critical when it comes to all the issues relating to ticketing and getting public control of the fare box. If we do that, it will unlock opportunities around concessionary fares, tap in/tap out technology and contactless ticketing across rail, subway and bus. Will the cabinet secretary undertake to accelerate the effort behind that work, so that we are not waiting until 2031 and can get it done more quickly?

In July, the Glasgow School of Art published its latest business case, which confirmed a gap in excess of £200 million in the funding to save Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s masterpiece. The school’s leadership has stated that a project of such scale is beyond its institutional capacity. The Royal Incorporation of Architects in Scotland and the Royal Institute of British Architects have now backed my long-standing call for the state to step in.

After eight years of limbo, will the Government now treat the Mack as the national project that it is and, as the French Government did with Notre-Dame, lead the establishment of a special-purpose vehicle with world-class project management expertise and step up to underwrite the full and faithful reinstatement of Glasgow’s and Scotland’s most globally significant architectural achievement?

As a member of the Delegated Powers and Law Reform Committee, I welcome the news on the proposed legislation, which is very welcome. Indeed, it is something that has been long hoped for.

Does the minister share my concern about the fact that the former Cape Marinite factory in Springburn has been in a state of chronic dereliction and abandonment for 12 years, with the result that the young people who frequently trespass on the site expose themselves to a legacy of asbestos contamination? Will she commit to working with me and Glasgow City Council to resolve the long-term dereliction of that huge industrial facility in Springburn with a view to the site undergoing some sort of regeneration?