Chamber and committees

I commend the cabinet secretary for his uplift of more than £140 million in spending on ferry services on top of the £60 million allocation to Ferguson Marine. I am sure that the Turkish shipyard that has been awarded the latest CalMac Ferries contract for the Islay class ferries will be incredibly thankful for his generosity. Indeed, the GMB trade union has calculated that every pound of capital spending on a shipbuilding project in a Scottish shipyard generates an extra 35p in the local economy for wage and supplier payments. I will press the cabinet secretary. Does he think that the capital spending that he has allocated is value for money for the Scottish taxpayer and Scottish economic growth, or are the real winners the people of Turkey?

Does the member agree that it is perhaps all too easy for public bodies to simply put up the boards on windows and abandon public buildings, thus leaving them to become completely dilapidated, and thereby destroying the value that they might have to the public purse?

I recognise the excellent work that BCDC is doing with the Government to build capacity. However, funds such as the regeneration capital grant fund simply reject or award, and that should be improved. There should be help for organisations so that they can be successful in the future, rather than the application simply being thrown back at them.

The Labour group and I commend the spirit of community empowerment and ownership endeavours in Scotland. It was Labour that established community land ownership in Scotland, so we welcome, in principle, all steps to empower communities to take greater control over their destinies under the principle of subsidiarity.

However, we have to look at the context in which the Community Empowerment (Scotland) Act 2015 exists. We have seen increasing retrenchment of local government. In Glasgow, £1 has been cut from every £10 that was available to the city in the past decade, which has placed significant distress on delivery of local services.

Assets are increasingly being transferred in a distressed manner. Rather than being transferred in a productive or constructive way, the approach is almost akin to a fire sale. That major issue has characterised disposal of assets. As the Conservative spokesperson highlighted, only 5 per cent of community asset transfers are taking place in urban areas, and even those are increasingly taking place in distressed situations.

An example in Glasgow is the Govanhill baths project, which has been going on for many years. The building was closed by Glasgow City Council more than 20 years ago. The community occupied the building in protest, but many years later it successfully won funding through the regeneration capital grant fund and the Heritage Lottery Fund to begin the process of restoring that community asset after a long-running battle with the council.

Even now, as the community is, ostensibly, succeeding in delivering the regeneration programme—I bought an engraved tile to help the community’s fundraising for the swimming pool—construction inflation has run away from the project to such an extent that it will now be difficult to deliver the regeneration outcomes that were originally envisaged. That puts in jeopardy the grant funding that supported the community asset transfer in the first place. I say to the minister that we are in a vicious cycle: we are transferring the assets, but delivering the intended outcomes is really difficult. Not only are councils seeing retrenchment of services, but the capacity of communities to rise to the challenge of taking on assets is frustrated not just by the paucity of available grant funding, but by the inflationary pressures that are being faced. Those are difficulties.

One of the first things that motivated me to get involved in politics was watching the on-going destruction and dilapidation of historic properties in Springburn, where I grew up. Every day, I saw the Springburn public halls—the once-proud centre of Springburn—lying boarded up and falling apart. I hoped that, one day, someone would come along and fix that building. Increasingly, I realised that the council was never going to do that—in fact, it wanted to knock the building down. Ten years ago, almost to the day—27 December 2012—the council demolished the building overnight, with no discussion with the community and no constructive attempt to find a solution that would save the building.

Bob Doris has made a very astute point. There is so much risk aversion in local government when it comes to community asset transfers that transfers’ full potential cannot be reached. That is reflected in the Glasgow Caledonian University report.

The intended disposal of Springburn public halls was to a private property developer. Because of the 2008 credit crunch, that fell through. The next step was to clear the site in order to dispose of a clean site to a housing association. That B-listed property, which was a source of great pride and esteem in the community, was destroyed.

Only in the wake of that trauma, and the real and palpable disgust that was felt in Springburn, did we feel a stimulus for people to get involved. There was a realisation that the council was not going to be a white knight; it would not ride to our rescue, so we needed to form our own organisations.

That gave birth to the Springburn Winter Gardens Trust—of which Bob Doris will be aware—the Spirit of Springburn, and a rich tapestry of other organisations in Springburn. Increasingly, however, we are frustrated by lack of financial capacity. Only recently, the Springburn Winter Gardens Trust has been frustrated in its attempts to get UK Government levelling-up funding. It was also passed over by Glasgow City Council without any real explanation, and it was rejected from the Scottish Government’s regeneration capital grant fund.

I can see how demoralising it is for communities that are already at a low ebb and which lack capacity to be constantly hit in the face when they try to be constructive and proactive. The minister has to reflect on the fact that there is only so much frustration that people can take before they just give up. There needs to be more pastoral support and more functional support for communities when it comes to administration—helping to write bids and so on.

That is where the 2015 act is deficient, and why our amendment tries to address the issues. More resource is needed in order that we can to look at things such as conservation deficits and availability of grant funding that does not just create a “ferrets in a sack” approach, whereby people scrabble for funding. Most people will lose out and only a minority will win those funds in any given year, in a situation of increasing vulnerability.

In that regard, there are a number of deficiencies in how the 2015 act is currently managed. We need to go further to resource asset transfers, especially in urban areas where the greatest issues and need are, when it comes to deprivation.

I hope that the minister will address those points as the debate progresses.

I move amendment S6M-07247.2, to leave out from “welcomes” to end and insert:

“fully supports measures to empower communities and devolve power away from the Scottish Parliament, and considers that part 5 of the Community Empowerment (Scotland) Act 2015 was a positive step, allowing local groups to take ownership of assets for the benefit of their community; believes that pushing power into the hands of local people is a key part of unlocking the potential that exists across the whole country; recognises that, in communities across Scotland, there are positive examples of local groups taking control of assets and helping their area to flourish; regrets that communities still face significant barriers in exercising the rights given to them under the Community Empowerment (Scotland) Act 2015; believes that there is still much to be done to ensure that communities across Scotland are given the resources and support they need to benefit from the Act, and calls on the Scottish Government to take all necessary steps to remove remaining barriers and push more power into the hands of communities.”

The member makes an astute point about the issue of clawback clauses and lease arrangements, which can have a vicious effect—they can militate against qualifying for grants, which then frustrates the very delivery of the project that groups are trying to achieve.

I thank the member—he is being very generous indeed.

The member makes a very important point about planning appeals, particularly as they can be used to ride roughshod over local opinion. Does he think that a measure that could be considered is to give a right to make a final appeal to a committee of the Parliament, instead of that taking place in a bureaucracy at St Andrew’s house?

It has been an interesting and certainly insightful debate. I thank all members for the really interesting points that they have made. We have developed a clear understanding of where the act has done positive things but also of where we need to do much more to reinforce its intended outcomes for our communities across Scotland. That is in the spirit of the amendment that Labour has put forward.

I thank the member for Uddingston and Bellshill for offering two interesting examples—one that seems to be running very well in the old library building, but also one that has faced difficulties in going through a much more convoluted process. I have certainly seen that at first hand. I should declare an interest as a trustee of the Beatroute Arts centre in Barmulloch, which has recently acquired from Glasgow City Council the old building that it operates out of. The arts centre has been having a similarly difficult time in resolving the legal aspects of that.

Alexander Stewart mentioned the difficulty of dealing with the complex legal arrangements, which can often take a long time, cost a lot of money and exhaust a lot of good will among people who are usually doing the work pro bono and do not necessarily have the resilience that everyone needs to see through the process. We need to look carefully at what we are asking communities to do, because often people can lose the will to live trying to get these things sorted out. All power to Viewpark Gardens Trust for persevering, and all credit to Beatroute Arts in Barmulloch as well, for seeing that through and successfully achieving an outcome. Let us hope that we can make the process slicker in future as we learn more about how to do it.

We also need to support our local authorities to deliver those outcomes more efficiently. That issue has been reflected on throughout the debate. The member for East Lothian mentioned that capacity, funding and support are critical. We cannot simply divest assets and then say in the next funding round that those organisations have lost the budget for the coming year and they have to make staff redundant and close their building. We need to make sure that we are not simply passing on to third parties the brutal reality of cuts in local authorities. We need to ensure that the process is properly reinforced with the financial security that will ensure resilience.

There have been references from across the piece to another issue. The member for Argyll and Bute mentioned that the Education (Scotland) Act 1872 led to buildings with some of the most amazing architecture being developed in our municipal authorities. More than 100 1872 school board schools were developed in Glasgow. Unfortunately, between 1919 when powers were handed to the Glasgow corporation and 2010, 60 of those schools were demolished. Today in Glasgow, about 15 of them are derelict. They are examples of amazing architectural artefacts; we can never build these things again.

However, in many cases, communities that are desperate to get in there and take over those buildings are frustrated. Although the will and desire are there in our communities, and the hope and pride—because people do not want to see such buildings blighting their local communities—they may not be equipped with the skill sets to do things such as quantity surveying, dealing with legal documents to convey property or settling complex legal arrangements with councils.

Those issues are focused in poorer districts in particular. If members will forgive me for being parochial in respect of Glasgow, I point out that 44 per cent of buildings in Glasgow that are currently at risk are in the areas with the highest levels of deprivation in the city, while only 7 per cent are in areas that are ranked as having the lowest levels of deprivation. That in itself tells a story. The areas of greatest need are often the places where communities have the least capacity. There is no lawyer or quantity surveyor living in the street, and people may not have the time or the energy—after dealing with the cost of living crisis, feeding the kids and so on—to get together, go to board meetings and do all that work pro bono.

We need to look at that issue carefully, and I hope that the minister will reflect on it in his closing remarks, because it can be really demoralising for community groups. Mr Doris made the point in his interventions, and other members, such as Ariane Burgess and my colleague Paul O’Kane from West Scotland, made it too. Communities face really difficult problems: they have done all the work and built up something that they think is important and which has a lot of community support, and then they go for funding and are given a cursory response that says, “Bad luck, it wasn’t up to scratch—see you next time.”

That needs to stop. We need to say, “Okay, you didn’t meet the criteria, so maybe you need to do more on community outreach or on building partnerships locally.” The Government needs to provide resource—perhaps in the form of some sort of mentor or case worker—to work with the community to get the bid to the level of rigour required. There might clearly be potential, and a desire in a community to do something, but there may be professional deficiencies that need addressed. We need to work with communities on that, rather than simply cast them out.

The Government needs to do more with communities to make that work. I highlight Springburn as an example. I should declare an interest, as the chair of the Springburn Winter Gardens Trust. We have been working tirelessly for 10 years to get the A-listed building there—Scotland’s largest glass house—fixed up. At every occasion, we take two steps forward and one step back; it can feel like a war of attrition to try to save such amazing assets for our communities.

I am sure that there is good will among members on all sides of the chamber to see such attempts work, but we need to understand that the Government must do more to work with communities to get them to a place where they can be successful. Even I, as a member of the Scottish Parliament and a former member of Parliament, feel frustrated about it, so goodness knows what other community activists feel like when they have these constant hurdles to overcome.

We all want the delivery of the intentions of the 2015 act to be improved. I hope that, in that spirit, we can go forward and deliver a better public policy for this country.

To ask the Scottish Government what impact industrial action by public sector workers will have on the delivery of its Covid recovery strategy. (S6O-01683)

I commend the Government for finally stepping in on the industrial action that was proposed by nurses in Scotland. That could and should have been done sooner, but it is better late than never.

The cabinet secretary will know that nurses are not the only public sector workers who are set to take industrial action if their pay demands are not met. Will he today commit the Government to showing the same respect to other vital public sector workers, including hard-working teachers, who are in dire straits due to the cost of living crisis and desperately need a pay increase that is greater than what is currently on offer?