Chamber and committees

I thank the cabinet secretary and the Minister for Transport for having met me to discuss the issue. Does she recognise that the policy would cost less than £400,000 a year? In terms of impact versus cost, the initiative would be extremely good. If there is such a hold-up, will the cabinet secretary give an indication of the timescale that we could face before the initiative is introduced? A lot of people in our community face destitution, which is a serious hardship, on a day-to-day basis.

To ask the Scottish Government what steps it is taking to address the reported increase in levels of violence and antisocial behaviour in Glasgow city centre. (S6O-01020)

This week, I met Niven Rennie and Will Linden from the Scottish Violence Reduction Unit to discuss the on-going problems in the city centre of Glasgow. They were clear that the situation is complex, as described by the minister, but that the main driver of antisocial behaviour is children from across the central belt who have nothing to do in their local communities due to the closure of vital community centres and youth projects.

What analysis has the Government conducted to establish how many of those vital community assets have been closed due to continued local authority budget cuts? The Government has placed an emphasis on providing local authorities with Covid recovery grants. How much of that money is going to reopening those vital community assets? Finally, what work is the minister undertaking in conjunction with Police Scotland and Glasgow City Council to explore the possibility of establishing an OnSide youth zone in Glasgow? Those youth zones have been incredibly successful at reducing violence and antisocial behaviour in 18 English cities.

I absolutely accept that that is the intent of the fund, but I dispute the efficacy in meeting its intention. When we see those metrics, they do not give us great hope for optimism.

This is the first time since the Victorian age that life expectancy has fallen in this country. Food bank use is rising, too. The worst part is that each of those economic ailments is a symptom of political choices. A political choice has been made to reduce the value of the shared prosperity fund to 40 per cent less than the EU structural funds, and that will compound the misery that families face in Scotland.

I turn my attention to the Labour amendment, which references the funding cuts that Scotland’s local authorities have experienced. We know that those have been disproportionate and that the Scottish Government has hammered local authority budgets during the past decade.

Every year, councils across Scotland are forced to make cuts as their budgets are slashed disproportionately. It is the Scottish Government’s centralising instinct and approach to economic sustainability, and its tacit acceptance of Tory laissez-faire economics, that sees Scotland’s productivity lag drastically behind the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. This year is no different, with £250 million of cuts imposed, which is on top of a cumulative total of £6 billion during the past decade.

It has been interesting to listen to the debate, as much for what was not said, as for what was said. Diving into the technical detail of the administration of the fund is not what the people of Scotland need right now, in the midst of three intersecting crises—the cost of living, climate and productivity. We need to take bold, strategic and imaginative steps to address each of those crises. They are interdependent, and we need to get them right first time, because we cannot afford to wait.

The arguments that have played out today about the technical details of how inflation and exchange rates are calculated and used to uprate, and how that determines the extent of shortfalls, miss the point most spectacularly.

We agree with the Government and we agree with the Treasury Committee. In fact, the broad consensus is that, notwithstanding the technical arguments, the shared prosperity fund does not address the scale of the challenge. The Conservatives cannot dispute that and it must be addressed. Although we agree with the broad intention of the fund, it will not deliver the stated outcomes. That is worse than just admitting that it will not deliver. We need to get a grip of the issue.

The role of structural funds is to support our communities, and fighting over which centralised administration should administer them wastes energy and serves nobody. The funds must be delivered

“as close to communities as possible”,

as asserted in the Labour amendment, which is a positive enhancement to the Government motion.

It is vital that the Tory Government reassesses the amount that it is making available, in line with calls from devolved Administrations in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. It is an opportunity to build on and vastly improve what was available through the European Union, rather than to have cut resources and managed decline.

That is true in Scotland, too, because, cumulatively, we have seen £6 billion cut from local government over the past decade. I noted the points that various members made about that during the debate. For example, Maurice Golden talked about Dundee cutting off its nose to spite its face, as it is not applying for funding because of who is administering it. I find that to be egregious misconduct in public office, frankly.

My Glasgow colleague John Mason mentioned what I understood to be, in economic geography, the core-periphery model and the nature of economies of agglomeration. The point made was that, somehow, London’s growth will affect and be to the detriment of Scotland. I am not quite sure how one addresses that, unless the member is proposing immigration and capital controls, which I am sure would be problematic to say the least. We have to build with the grain of where great global cities are going, which is where Glasgow’s opportunities lie.

However, the cuts to Glasgow City Council over the past 10 years have been disastrous. We see that tangibly in the member’s constituency. The People’s Palace, which is a great international icon, is lying derelict, with its glasshouse falling apart as a result of the city’s parks budget being cut by 70 per cent in the past decade, because non-ring-fenced funding for the council has been cut by more than £1 billion. Now, the only option for the council is to apply to the UK Government levelling up fund to get money to repair the glasshouse.

The system is broken and there needs to be more humility from all parties about how we fix the fundamental failure of local government since the settlement in 1996. That issue has not been brought out in today’s debate at all, which is a great pity.

When we look at the economic geography of Glasgow, we see that it has a high level of gross value added but that it has relatively low household incomes. However, the neighbouring local authorities have quite low levels of gross value added but high household incomes, because people are coming into Glasgow, earning money and retreating to the suburbs, where they pay no tax towards the city region, its economic growth or for its public amenities.

The inequality of economic geography is as much of a problem in Glasgow as it is in London. We need to assess that dispassionately and with greater rigour when we are looking to solve the problem of inequality in Scotland. I am afraid that the approaches that the Conservative UK Government and the Scottish Government are taking will not solve that—and that is certainly the case on the basis of the engagement in the debate.

I agree with the point about tax havens and the extraction of wealth, but that is happening in Scotland as much as it happens anywhere else, when we look at land ownership and rent extraction by private owners of our country’s natural treasury. We need to fundamentally address that. I say that partly in response to John Mason’s question about where we raise revenue from. We need to get to grips with that. My colleague Richard Leonard made that point; the state has hitherto poorly managed state aid and allocations, and the Institute for Fiscal Studies agrees with that. We need a much more fundamental debate about state aid effectively functioning as a means of crowding in wealth to our communities and building investment and prosperity, rather than it being a function of transferring wealth from the state to private capital, which is usually foreign owned. That is an extraction of profits, with the assets physically retreating, as we saw with silicon glen. It is largely a story of failure in Scotland.

Mr Leonard spoke about Ravenscraig and Linwood. I agree that those were opportunities that were destroyed in a vicious orgy of economic vandalism by the Conservative Government 30 years ago. We still need to learn lessons from that today. Recently—in the past three years—there was a long campaign in the north of Glasgow to save the Caley railway works. The experience of that campaign showed me that laissez-faire economics is very much de rigueur at both St Andrew’s house and in Whitehall. The ping-pong between both Governments abrogating responsibility was, frankly, a disgrace. The upshot is that we have 163 years of railway engineering lying rusting on Springburn Road, when the Scottish Government could have bought the works and utilised the site as a national centre of engineering excellence.

Those are just a handful of examples of how funds are not being well utilised and directed.

That is why we need a fundamentally new approach, as the Labour amendment to the motion suggests.

I know that Mr Mason asserts that this Government operates within a fixed budget envelope, but it has extensive revenue-generating powers that it has not innovated in the slightest because it is intellectually incurious about that. Therefore, the Government’s revenues are constrained by a lack of innovation on the revenue-generating side. I would suggest investigating options; annual ground rents would be one particular opportunity, and the former MSP Andy Wightman offers some interesting views on that. I would direct Mr Mason toward revenue rather than simply managing decline on an ever more constrained budgetary envelope.

We know that the cuts have been disproportionate. It is independently verified that, although the Scottish Government’s budget goes up in real terms, local authorities continue to feel real-terms constraints, and that is having a disproportionately difficult effect on our communities. Although we know that that is happening, we still have concerns about the UK Government’s approach to providing funding directly to local authorities and bypassing the Scottish Government entirely. There are concerns at all levels.

The Tories might not like it, but we have had a devolution settlement since 1999 for a reason. As we have found out in recent months and years, they are quite happy to disregard the devolution settlement whenever it suits them. Breaking the Sewel convention and legislating despite repeated refusals by this Parliament to agree to legislative consent motions is the most obvious and egregious example of their disdain for devolution.

We agree that the funds should be administered as close to communities as possible—the principle of subsidiarity. Ideally, we would like local authorities to be involved heavily in decisions about allocation of the funding, but we are clear that, if that is to happen, it cannot be used to mask further cuts to local authority budgets in the long run.

I will close on the issue of co-operation, as it is of fundamental importance. Who administers the fund might be important to us, but all that the majority of people of Scotland are concerned with is whether their communities are being adequately served and whether public investments are efficiently targeted.

There are undoubtedly differences of opinion between the Scottish and British Governments, but we need them to work collaboratively on this matter. A situation in which the two Governments argue incessantly about the process of administration rather than focus on the delivery of funds will be utterly intolerable and tedious. Let us be clear: communities across Scotland will also suffer as a result. Therefore, we need clarity on the delivery mechanisms for the funds.

As Citizens Advice Scotland points out, because of the current local and regional geography for implementing the funds, voluntary organisations with a national footprint will struggle to access funding and deliver the economies of scale and scope and social impact that are needed for transformative change in poverty and equality outcomes.

Ultimately, we all want the same thing, as the Conservative front bench spokesperson said: to improve the lives of people across Scotland and to use the funds to alleviate the hardship that millions of families face this year and for years to come, by improving living standards. It could not be more important that we get this right. Although Labour’s criticism of the Scottish and UK Governments is well documented, and both are guilty of power grabs at their respective levels, we will work constructively to ensure that the funds are impactful and achieve the outcomes that we all want to see.

I move amendment S6M-04159.2, in the name of Daniel Johnson, to leave out from “further believes” to end and insert

“recognises the importance of joint working between the Scottish and UK governments in order to achieve the common goal of strengthening Scotland’s communities; notes the benefits of previous EU funding, but also the concerns with the transparency in how it was administered and awarded in Scotland; further notes that cuts to the structural funding equivalent by the UK Government coincide with cuts to local government budgets by the SNP administration in cooperation with the Scottish Green Party to the detriment of communities across Scotland, and calls for the replacement for EU funding to fully match what has been available in the past and be administered as close to communities as possible.”

It was around two months ago when we discussed the UK shared prosperity fund in the chamber, and I am delighted that the Government has chosen to give more time to consider the implications of the fund for Scotland’s economy.

A substantial number of questions remain unanswered on record as to what would replace the structural funds, including whether the replacement would be as comprehensive as the previous EU funds and the extent to which Scotland would benefit from the new shared prosperity fund.

Over the past five years, we have been assured on numerous occasions that the UK fund would at least match the level of EU funds that it is replacing. Indeed, I remember that the Conservative amendment in the debate in March stated just that. I note that that has been dropped from today’s Conservative amendment, and I wonder whether that is a tacit admission of what we all now know to be a matter of fact: the UK shared prosperity fund is worth less to Scotland’s economy than the European structural and investment funds that it purports to replace.

It does not surprise me that the Conservatives are unwilling to admit that its replacement fund is miserly in comparison with EU funds. I am not the only person asserting that. As we have heard already, the Scottish Government believes it to be significantly less than EU structural funds. The Welsh Government agrees, as do the Northern Ireland Executive and the Northern Powerhouse Partnership. In fact, the Westminster Treasury Committee, which is chaired by a Conservative member—a former Treasury minister—stated that the shared prosperity fund is 40 per cent less than the EU funds that it is replacing and questioned why one of the centrepieces of the UK Government’s levelling up ambitions was to be reduced to such an extent.

We completely agree with the Scottish Government motion when it states that the UK Government should

“immediately increase the value of the fund to at least the level provided”

by the EU structural and investment funds.

We are in the middle of a cost of living crisis, a climate crisis and a productivity crisis. We have had more than a decade of austerity, and communities across the country are truly struggling as Britain undergoes the sharpest fall in living standards in my lifetime. People are struggling to put food on the table and to find money to feed their electricity meters. Families are generally struggling to make ends meet. I despair at the hardship that millions of families are facing across the country. We see gross inequalities in our communities every day in our inboxes and in our constituency surgeries.

One in four children is living in poverty, and almost a quarter of all households are living in fuel poverty, which is a figure that is rising exponentially by the day.

It is a pleasure to speak in the debate, and I thank my colleague Katy Clark for lodging the motion. However, I have been disappointed by the paucity of analysis, particularly from members on the Government benches, of what is a critical issue for Scotland’s general prosperity and wellbeing.

CalMac has essentially been in some form of public ownership since 1948, when the railway companies were nationalised. It took its current corporate form in 1990. There has long been a settled recognition that ferry services are a lifeline for Scotland’s island communities and that the best way to future proof and operate them is to ensure that they are publicly controlled and not subject to market forces. However, to meet the requirements of a European Union guideline on state aid to maritime transport, Caledonian MacBrayne was split into two separate companies in 2006. Caledonian Maritime Assets Ltd—CMAL—retained ownership of CalMac vessels and infrastructure, including harbours, while CalMac Ferries Ltd submitted tenders every so often to be the ferry operator. The fundamental bone of contention is that it is clear that that neoliberal experiment in corporate Chinese walls has utterly failed, just as it failed with regard to rail franchising. That failure is most spectacularly evident when we look at the procurement of vessels 801 and 802, which represents a tragedy for Scotland’s industrial base and ends any possibility of that model being seen as a success.

For far too long, vital lifeline services in Scotland have declined under this form of quasi-privatisation and absurd market simulation. Look at ScotRail under Abellio: services cut, prices rising and a constant battle of attrition between unions and management, as well as buck-passing among Network Rail, privatised rolling stock operating companies and train operating companies. The same failed model plays out in relation to the ferry system and it needs to end.

Look at bus services in Glasgow: routes and services cut due to a lack of profitability, drivers demoralised and leaving in droves due to poor pay and conditions and, ultimately, a dramatically reduced service for commuters. It is a common story of failure.

We cannot let Scotland’s ferry services continue on the same path and that is why they must remain in public control, fundamentally, and be fully reintegrated under one team—one owner of assets, one operator and, indeed, arguably, one shipbuilder. The expiry of the ferry contract structure in October 2024 gives us an opportunity to make that happen and today we seek an assurance from the Government that it will happen.

We need a conversation about why it is beneficial for the ferry service to be publicly owned—I think that there is general agreement across the chamber on that matter. Public ownership would provide a solid, stable foundation for management that improves standards, increases investment and harnesses the power of the state to provide for Scotland’s economy and common prosperity. If we use that model, we must reinforce it with a national shipbuilding strategy that focuses on the workforce, on a stable pipeline of work and on developing Scotland’s shipbuilding assets. As I have said before—Katy Clark also mentioned this earlier—there are 33 vessels in the CalMac fleet, each of them with a 25-year lifespan on average. That is a drum beat of one vessel every nine months for our Scottish shipbuilding industry. Why are we not ensuring that Scottish yards have that guaranteed permanent shipbuilding programme that would secure jobs and give shipyards the confidence to invest in the process, which would create a virtuous cycle, rather than drip feeding a free market feast-and-famine order cycle of the sort that has plagued Scotland’s industrial base for so long?

We need to change that landscape and have an assured long-term shipbuilding strategy. Babcock has just delivered a world-class new shipbuilding facility in Rosyth because it has an assured naval programme. We should be doing the same thing on the commercial side. Inchgreen dry dock is an example of an asset that should be in public hands but is instead being hoarded by its owners, Peel Ports, for no reason other than to give its Cammel Laird shipyard on the Mersey a competitive advantage. CalMac vessels are sailing south to Merseyside for refits while Clyde dry docks from Govan to Greenock lie derelict.

Ambition is what is needed from this Government for Scotland’s ferry services, not quasi-privatisation and weird market simulations that have not worked and have introduced chaos.

Ultimately, we need to ask ourselves what the purpose of our ferries is. They are not a commercial business; they are there to provide a fundamental public service. It is not good enough for the Government to attempt to wash its hands of the fundamental structural problem that it has created and left the taxpayer liable for. Scotland’s island communities, seafarers and shipbuilders deserve much better.

The minister’s update is certainly welcome, and it is clear that there is good will across the chamber towards Ukrainians who are seeking refuge in Scotland. In March, when the minister appeared before the Constitution, Europe, External Affairs and Culture Committee, he indicated that the Government was supportive of the idea of providing free concessionary travel to Ukrainian refugees and other asylum seekers. Will he provide an update on when we might see the Government’s work on that policy to date? Will he meet me and other members who are concerned with the matter to discuss how we can work together to take those plans forward?