Chamber and committees

I thank Sarah Boyack for securing the debate. We have heard some stirring speeches already.

From what we have heard this evening, it is clear that viruses have no regard for the invention of national barriers; they flow with the current of humanity around the world. That interdependence is one of the great strengths of a civilisation but, as we have seen in the past couple of years, it is also a major vulnerability. To not have a coherent global vaccination strategy is a bit like having your house go on fire but only being interested in putting out the fire in the room that you are in; eventually, the house will be engulfed in flames anyway. Worse still, we are denying our house-mates the tools to fight the fire. We have seen that with the omicron variant, which originated in South Africa, a country with a fully vaccinated rate of only 26 per cent. Omicron has made its way to the UK, resulting in increased restrictions on our lives once again.

People should be in no doubt that, unless we make vaccinating the rest of the world a priority, history will repeat itself with new variants time and again. Just three weeks ago, the UK acquired 114 million doses of Pfizer and Moderna vaccines, and of the more than 450 million doses that it has acquired since the start of the pandemic, the UK has donated just 70 million to the global south. That figure must be increased dramatically.

Given the significant public investment and expenditure that went into funding the development of the vaccines in the first place, surely we, the citizens, should expect better from the manufacturers. As time goes by, barriers to vaccine production at a global scale have been erected by large vaccine manufacturers, and we are all paying the price.

In Africa, one in four health workers are vaccinated, while in developed countries, three in four health workers have received their vaccinations. In the general population, a mere 8 per cent of adults in Africa are vaccinated. The effort to increase equality across the world cannot simply mean donating surplus vaccines from our own stocks, which is a move that simply foists vaccines with short expiry dates on strained healthcare systems that cannot always administer them. There must be a fundamental rethink of the way in which the intellectual property for vaccines operates. Right now, it is undoubtedly in the global public interest to provide access to vaccines and the technologies that are required to produce them in the regions that need them most.

It has been more than a year since the South African and Indian delegations to the World Trade Organization tabled their proposals to temporarily waive the TRIPS intellectual property protections governing Covid-19 vaccines, diagnostics and therapeutics. Seventy-seven per cent of the 6.4 billion vaccine doses so far administered globally have gone to people in high and upper-middle-income countries. However, the proposal remains stalled, despite the support of more than 100 countries. European and UK opposition arising from nebulous concerns about the impact on pharmaceutical innovation has been enough to block the adoption of the waiver. At the very least, as Rachel Thrasher, a researcher at Boston University’s global development policy centre, says,

“if we had taken that step a year ago and started that process a year ago, a lot of countries would be in a better spot. We would be facing a different global landscape.”

A position of lack of control over production capacity amid rampant vaccine nationalism has resulted in only nine Africa countries hitting a World Health Organization benchmark of vaccinating 10 per cent of their populations by the end of September this year. Now we understand that the price that we have to pay to install vaccine production capacity around the world is far smaller than the price that we are all paying now as a result of the omicron variant. That goes to a tension at the heart of our public and private realms—self-interest and the private profit interest versus the public good that benefits all mankind. We are seeing that play out in the UK. Conservative members made much play about the UK vaccine, but the UK Government is about to sell the Vaccine Manufacturing and Innovation Centre in Oxfordshire, which is yet to open, despite the investment of £200 million to ensure that we would have vaccine sovereignty in the UK and control of the distribution and production of vaccines globally.

The French company Valneva, which had invested in a vaccine production facility in Livingston, has now stopped that effort because of the UK’s controversial decision in September to cancel its order for Valneva vaccines. The decision not to continue that investment has been described as a “disaster” and is an example of how we are not even making an effort to build vaccine sovereignty in the UK, never mind to provide justice for the rest of the world.

Will the minister address the issue of the sale of the Vaccines Manufacturing and Innovation Centre in Oxfordshire? The centre was highlighted as a major opportunity to ensure that Government-sponsored vaccine manufacturing capacity would be a vital component of the UK’s preparedness for future pandemics, but it will now be lost. What could be done in Scotland to develop an equivalent capability?

This has been a really interesting debate, describing an issue that has been at the heart of Scottish politics for over a century: the tension in our economy between landlordism and tenants’ rights. That perpetual struggle for power has run for decades, it is at the heart of why the Parliament was established and we need to confront it boldly and with imagination. In that spirit, Scottish Labour welcomes the publication of the draft rental sector strategy. We will seek to drive it forward with encouragement and support, and our amendment proposes to inject some pace. I hope that the minister will meet that in the spirit with which it was intended. It was good to have that insight at the start of the debate.

We have had some very good speeches. We are working against the clock. The pressure on tenants is rising daily and, over the past decade, we have seen rent increases in Edinburgh of 46 per cent and in Glasgow of 41 per cent. We know that the longer any bill takes, the more pressure people are under. As incomes continue to stagnate and people experience continued cost pressures, something has to give. It is often the security and fundamental ability of people to live their lives with a sense of mental wellbeing. As many members have said, we have to act urgently to address the housing crisis in our midst.

We have seen the symptoms of the crisis increasing in the past few years because of the pandemic. Once the temporary ban on evictions was removed, we saw social rental evictions due to arrears increase by 975 per cent—that is explosive growth. We have heard estimates that the total of social and private sector rental arrears has climbed to more than £300 million. That is a major pressure.

As Ms Villalba, who represents North East Scotland said, we cannot wait for the crisis point to address the issue. My colleague from Glasgow, Pauline McNeill, addressed the point about short-term measures that can be implemented, such as protecting renters’ rights under the Coronavirus (Scotland) Act 2020, alongside extending powers to end evictions in circumstances where there are no issues related to anti-social, disruptive or criminal behaviour. It is unreasonable for the community to see people being displaced from their homes and ratcheted out of accommodation, resulting in their homelessness, because of private landlordism. That is not something that society can accept; the cost of homelessness is not priced in. It is not something that the community as a whole should bear for the sake of private profit.

The Scottish Government is proposing rent controls and we welcome those in principle. However, our amendment calls on the Government to move faster and to agree framework legislation in the second year of the parliamentary session. I understand that the minister is prepared to accept our amendment; I welcome that and I hope that we can work constructively to deliver that framework at pace, being mindful of the pressures that renters are under.

We have heard about the extent to which insecure tenancies affect people’s lives. Members who have personal experience of that have offered some pretty stirring testimony. We can also understand that there are other pressures in the discussion on rent controls. We have to understand what we mean by rent controls: rent control already exists, but the control lies with the landlord and not with the tenant. The strategy is an effort to try to redress the balance of control. Control is constant, but the question is, who has that control? That is what rent controls seek to address.

I noted that there was a question about dogmatism. Let us look at the evidence. I know that one of the Conservative members for the Lothians raised that point. Yes, we are dogmatic about ending poverty and income-related issues that push people into homelessness and other distress as a result of housing costs that are completely out of control because of landlordism. We have to address that issue in our society urgently.

We know that it can work because there are practical examples, although some models have been flawed. In Scotland, there were rent controls in Glasgow from 1915 to 1989, which resulted in significant issues in the city. We have learned from that and there are international models that we can benchmark against. I hope that that is what the proposed legislation will seek to achieve.

In New York, for example, there have been rent controls since the 1940s, and they have not resulted in the sort of calamitous effects that were described by Conservative members. There is an issue in San Francisco, where pre-1980 properties are subject to rent controls but those built after 1980 are not, which creates a perversity in the market that causes distortions. That can be addressed; what has been described is a false equivalence. It is not a constant that all rent controls are bad. As ever, the devil is in the detail, and we hope to address all that in the course of considering the legislation. That is why Labour supports it.

We broadly support the principles behind the living rent campaign around democratic accountability, which I think was mentioned by the member for East Lothian, referring in particular to the legacy of the right-to-buy scheme causing distortions in the market. At one point, Scotland had the highest level of social tenancies in the world. In Glasgow, it was second only to Hong Kong worldwide for social rented tenancies. We have seen a massive disruption and change in the marketplace over the past 40 years, which we must address.

Things are out of control and we have heard numerous descriptions from members today about the impact that that has had: the lack of control on tenancies, including from the public rented sector, and rampaging profiteering in the market must be addressed. We hope to work constructively as we proceed in the coming months and years to address that with urgency, boldly and with imagination. Let us redress the power of rent controls from the landlord to the tenant.

It has been a great pleasure to listen to members’ contributions to this extremely important debate. I thank the convener of the Standards, Procedures and Public Appointments Committee in particular for bringing the debate to the chamber. He reflected on the original ideas behind the establishment of the Scottish Parliament and the Constitutional Convention that gave birth to it, as well as on Donald Dewar’s reflections on the idea of quality of debate being essential to the performance of the legislature.

I am minded of the comment by Ron Davies, the former Secretary of State for Wales, who said:

“Devolution is a process. It is not an event”.

We cannot be prisoners to the initial ideas of what the Parliament should be like. Rather, there should be iterations and the institution should be constantly responsive. The debate is necessary in order for us to reflect on how things have been done well over the past 21 years and on how things could be changed and reformed. Members have offered some worthwhile suggestions in that regard.

Maggie Chapman mentioned the tone of debate and the quality of being able to disagree well. We can all reflect on how to do that better in the chamber. Fundamentally, the common themes that came out today were the role of members and the inherent tensions that the job presents. A member of the Scottish Parliament is simultaneously a legislator, a scrutineer of Government in committee and someone who has to undertake the duties of representing the people as a constituency or regional representative in the Parliament, as well as being a community troubleshooter, leader and campaigner. It is quite a hybrid role, and it requires a myriad set of skills. Some people are better at some things than others are, and the role requires a significant level of capacity that often comes at significant personal cost, as we have heard from members.

The Minister for Parliamentary Business made some good points about the huge learning curves that have been required over the past year by the institution as a whole in building, virtually from scratch, an online system for participation and in moving towards a hybrid Parliament. I think that there has been broad consensus that that has been highly effective at opening and improving the performance of the legislature, and that we definitely want to build and improve on that in the future.

It is important to recognise the purpose of the Scottish Parliament in its foundations. That drives at the heart of some of the tensions between the Executive and the legislature and the roles that are performed therein that have been described. Devolution was not just a big-bang event in 1999 in which everything was suddenly devolved from Westminster. In effect, the Scottish Government has existed as a discrete body of power since 1885 and the creation of the Scottish Office. The post of the Secretary of State for Scotland was created in 1926, and the construction of St Andrew’s house on Calton Hill, which was built between 1935 and 1939, was a direct result of that. The evolution of Scotland’s governance needs to be reflected on.

The Parliament’s purpose is not simply to sit here as a forum for ministers to broadcast their views on things; it is very much a vigorous forum for the scrutiny of Government power. That seems to have been somewhat forgotten in the past 20 years.

No problem.

That was a fair point for Neil Gray to make. There is something worth testing there, to check whether we can improve the situation. This is intended to be an iterative process and the beginning of a series of inquiries that will no doubt present some really interesting alternatives for how we do our business.

I will wind up now, even though I have taken so many notes about other members’ contributions—which I do not have time to address, unfortunately. Fundamentally, we must consider the question of power in the Parliament. It is the role of the Parliament to hold the Executive to account, and there are so many more ways in which we can improve that capacity and ability to do so, but in a way that is powerful and that includes people in the process. That is where the great opportunity of the reforms to create a hybrid Parliament has shown great promise, particularly in committees, in involving more people in shaping the debate of the country.

Absolutely. I was struck by the mention by the member for Eastwood of the Dáil and the privileges of its Speaker in being able to hold ministers to account in respect of time limits on responses and the relevance of the contributions. That is well worth further inquiry.

I want to reflect on the nature of the Scottish Parliament as an evolution from the Scottish Grand Committee in the House of Commons. The House of Commons is so constrained by time that the Scottish Grand Committee was not able to effectively perform the duties of a legislature—hence the creation of the Scottish Parliament. However, there are still constraints on the capacity of the legislature to hold Government to account that we have to deal with.

A lot of frustrations about that have been expressed—for example, about the capacity and flexibility to hold the Government to account in topical questions and the time constraints in First Minister’s question time. Perhaps the Government having prior sight of people’s questions gives a degree of intelligence that is not afforded to the Prime Minister at Prime Minister’s question time, for example. There is a sudden-death hit, and the Prime Minister simply has to be very responsive in dealing with that, because he or she does not have any prior knowledge of what will be put forward. There are certain tweaks to the system that can definitely improve the scrutiny of Government.

There are many contributions to the debate to refer to, and I am mindful that I have already eaten up five minutes of my time. I am not sure how much time I have remaining.

On the discussion about the balance with family life, the member for Carrick, Cumnock and Doon Valley made a very important point about life flexibility. Having maternity leave flexibility could be a way of reforming the chamber and improving access. Proxy voting is another alternative. I know that many women members of the Parliaments at Westminster and Holyrood have described the pressures that impinge on their ability to perform their functions and duties as members.

My friend the member for Edinburgh Southern made a point about getting rid of lecterns. Sometimes they can be useful, but I take the point that they can create a psychological gap and block in debates. The importance of iterative debate was brought up, and several members brought up the issue of breaking the control of business managers. Allowing the Presiding Officer’s office to determine who is called to speak in debates could improve their quality.

The role of the member as a parliamentarian first and party hack second should be another focus in trying to foster a greater culture of back-bench interventions and contributions that are not necessarily governed by the whips.

I was contacted this week by Mr Ron Park, whose child was being cared for by his mother when they received advice from NHS 24 to go to Stobhill hospital. Clinicians at NHS 24 thought that Mr Park’s son might have bacterial meningitis—a life-threatening condition. However, Stobhill hospital phoned minutes later, saying that it would not see the family and that, if they wanted medical attention, they should go to the Royal Alexandra hospital in Paisley, which was 30 minutes away by car. Mr Park’s former partner lives in the north-east of Glasgow and cannot drive.

I was deeply alarmed that the family of a child who possibly had a life-threatening meningitis condition would be treated in that manner. What does the First Minister have to say to them?

Sorry. I was pushing my luck.

It has been a real pleasure to listen to the speakers in the debate. It has certainly been an insightful experience. The common theme has been the sheer impact that the pandemic has had on the resilience of local high streets and small local businesses. As my colleague Paul O’Kane from West Scotland highlighted, 20,000 small businesses across Scotland shut up shop during the pandemic. The Federation of Small Businesses described that figure as “catastrophic”, and I think that we can all agree with that. The question now is how Parliament responds to the crisis in our midst.

A broad observation in today’s debate has been of a big shift from local businesses to global multinationals, and we need to seriously address that trend. Although I commend the Government’s motion, it does not go far enough to address the sheer scale of the problem that the country faces.

In many cases, our town centre businesses are the source of middle-class prosperity. They drive local employment, ensure accessibility and create a local economy and an ecosystem that truly benefit local wealth creation. Unfortunately, they are suffering, and Parliament needs to step up.

Extending 50 per cent rates relief would be a welcome immediate measure, and I urge the finance secretary to give it serious consideration in the budget tomorrow. However, we also need a fundamental review of business rates as an efficient tax system. Alternative options such as revenue profit sharing and land value taxation have to be seriously explored by this Parliament, and we need to give that issue full consideration. However, our primary focus must surely be on what we can do to maximise high street occupancy. Too much focus is often placed on how to maintain the value of property and rental rates, at the expense of occupancy. We have seen that approach blight our high streets for too long.

Claire Baker from Mid Scotland and Fife referred to Burntisland as a great high street model. Ariane Burgess from the Highlands and Islands region referred to how we can address the ownership of real estate in our country, which is a major issue. Expanding community and municipal ownership using existing models, such as the housing association model, and using that capacity to buy up more of our commercial real estate assets in town centres, could be a way of driving that wealth back into communities. Ownership of the assets allows us more custody and control over how they are utilised for the public good.

My colleague Colin Smyth from South Scotland mentioned the model of co-operative control that has been used in Dumfries, where expanding that model has realised meaningful and tangible benefits for the community. Surely we have to husband that model and try to expand and scale it up across the country.

Indeed, that is a trend that Scotland once was proud of. In Glasgow alone, there were once eight independent retail co-operative societies, with a quarter of a million members, and 50 or 60 years ago they accounted for 10 per cent of all retail spend. That model was swept away in the intervening decades, and we need to try to rebuild it. Only two independent retail co-operative societies are left in Scotland: the Scottish Midland Co-Operative Society—Scotmid—and the Clydebank Co-operative Society. We can use them as a basis to rebuild that amazing infrastructure that captured wealth and kept it in the community, instead of being siphoned off to whoever knows where around the world by multinational chains. We need to look at that model in a serious way.

As we have heard from Douglas Lumsden from North East Scotland and others, the proper funding of local government is also essential to ensuring that high streets flourish. We have seen really good measures when it comes to the restoration and regeneration of local high streets, which colleagues from across the chamber have mentioned. Frankly, the majority of our high streets are not places where people want to spend their time. They are often bleak, treeless boulevards with austere, steel shutters on them after hours, and that creates a pretty bleak environment where people do not want to be.

By creating a more pleasant and pleasing environment for residents and visitors, we can attract consumers back to our high streets. Let us ditch the shuttered shop fronts, plastic signage and deserted pavements. We should be emphasising that our local high streets are open for business, welcoming and safe, but, sadly, it does not always feel like that is the case.

The heritage shop front improvement schemes in the city of Glasgow have provided a stand-out example of how to address that problem. Schemes are currently on the ground in Govan and Saracen Street in Possilpark, and I was delighted to assist securing funding for the latter project in 2018. Jackie Shearer, the managing partner of the Possilpark Business Improvement District, was last week named the winner of the Scotland Loves Local place leader award. It is a fantastic accolade that recognises what north Glasgow has achieved in the way of building a better urban environment. The focus of that scheme has been on kitting out new shop fronts on its once-traditional Victorian high street. In stripping back all that crud—the horrible plastic signage—amazing heritage features have been uncovered, such as stained glass and hand-painted signs from the Victorian era. That shows that, if we go back to the original idea of what a shop should look like, it becomes a much more attractive environment. People have been stunned by the results that have been achieved with relatively little investment.

We can do practical things at a small and large scale to provide such opportunities, but things such as the heritage shop front grant funding are threatened by local government cuts. There is limited capital availability to continue with such grant schemes. Also, the planning powers do not stipulate that people who set up a new shop have to adhere to planning and design standards for the shop front, so we end up with cluttered and badly planned high streets, which contributes to blight and undesirability.

We need to look at how we can use NPF4 to drive better standards and we need to use good examples from Scotland. Along with a fair funding settlement for local government—Labour has been calling for that for a long time, and COSLA estimates that £1 billion is needed to properly fix local government in Scotland—we need to look at how we design our urban environments to ensure that NPF4 and other planning frameworks are resilient enough to ensure that best practice is captured and expanded nationally.

I welcome the Scotland Loves Local campaign, which has huge merit, but we know that it does not go far enough, given the scale of the damage that has been caused to our high streets, which has been outlined today, and the scale of the dilution of local ownership of businesses in Scotland, which has been ceded to multinational control.

I recognise that. For example, there is a proposal to convert the Cathcart circle to light rail, which would unlock capacity at Glasgow Central station. East Kilbride could be a candidate in the future for light rail conversion, which could increase frequencies and fully unlock the line’s potential. However, we would still need the reliability of dual tracking to do that—even tramways need dual track. Even if the system used light-rail rather than heavy-rail vehicles, the same principle would apply—we need dual tracking to provide the through ways and the reliable service.

It is one thing to model on a computer a frequency of four trains per hour, but we know from the bitter experience of the Borders railway that, in reality, the service is not as reliable as that. As Ross Greer showed in relation to Milngavie, we have a similar constraint on that part of greater Glasgow’s network.

We need the commitment to dual tracking. The risk is not just about the earthworks required in building a dual-track system; it is about the service’s lack of reliability. That will deter people from choosing to take the train when they are hard pressed at 8 o’clock in the morning and thinking about whether they will get to work on time if they miss their connection by two minutes. They would then have to stand at a platform, possibly in winter, for half an hour to wait for the next train, rather than getting a train within seven or eight minutes, as people would in London. At any point in the day across London, it is par for the course to turn up and get a service within a few minutes.

We need such ambition for Scotland’s largest city if we are to unleash the economic potential of the greater Glasgow region. A measly attempt is being made to quietly downgrade the East Kilbride line proposal after the great bombastic statements from the then Cabinet Secretary for Transport, Infrastructure and Connectivity about how it was not up to scratch and dual tracking was needed. That is being done surreptitiously, without true scrutiny and without any clear publication of the justification. Given how difficult it is to get railway upgrades done and to get business cases approved, to quietly downgrade a proposal seems like a double standard.

We need to apply the same level of scrutiny to the justification of the downgrade; the case has not been presented. I ask the minister to please have more ambition for greater Glasgow. This is a one-way bet—let us dual track the East Kilbride line and unlock the greater Glasgow region’s potential.