Chamber and committees

Glasgow’s night bus network has contracted continuously in recent years, from a seven-day service down to operating only on Friday and Saturday nights. Late-running buses are regularly cancelled due to poor fleet maintenance, and even when workers manage to finish their shifts early to catch the last bus, cancellations mean that they often find themselves stranded without an appropriate and affordable way home. Can the minister confirm that the franchising frameworks proposed in the better buses legislation will ensure that high standards of fleet maintenance and availability are explicitly included in the specifications for potential franchisees, with penalties for cancellations?

In April this year, the European Charter of Local Self-Government (Incorporation) (Scotland) Act 2026 became law, following a long-standing campaign by the former member of the Scottish Parliament, Andy Wightman. Article 4 of the charter states:

“Local authorities shall be consulted, insofar as possible, in due time and in an appropriate way in the planning and decision-making processes for all matters which concern them directly.”

However, despite being openly discussed by the Government, the large-scale proposals could rapidly reshape all aspects of local government. There is no open consultation for councils or parliamentarians to actively debate and discuss the wide-ranging proposals. How does the Scottish Government plan to fully consult with local authorities and the Convention of Scottish Local Authorities so that they are active partners, not merely the subject of public sector reform?

To ask the Scottish Government how it plans to embed the principle of subsidiarity into its proposed public sector reform. (S7O-00363)

I agree that the process for scrutiny of the budget here is poor, and there could be more integration of the civil service in determining how we look at options for budgets in this Parliament.

I think that there is a very open attitude to a change in tactic on the approach to that, which would deliver a more efficient public service. However, the same goes for local government, because many councils find it very difficult to reconcile quickly the budget decisions that are made here, so let us join up the whole chain to deliver a more effective fiscal position.

Mr Hoy made an interesting point about Ms Hagmann’s speech, because I was concerned about the apparent endorsement of full fiscal autonomy. We need to recognise that that would entail a £14.3 billion reduction in public expenditure in Scotland, which would be disastrous, frankly.

We are certainly open to such innovations.

Let us reflect on the Prime Minister’s speech. He said that we need to stop paying for failure and to start investing in the success of our people and unlocking the talents and potential of our society. That is what we need to do. Often, people are stressed and struggling, so if we integrate the benefits system—as Ms Bruce said—let us make it more automatic so that benefits are triggered without people having to navigate a complex bureaucracy, and let us make it effective in delivering good outcomes for our communities.

I am sure that most members know my support for better regional governance and for combined mayoral authorities for Scotland’s major city regions, but our amendment does not ask members to settle that argument today. Regardless of the exact framework, I appeal directly to the Government to stop treating strong local government as a rival to Holyrood instead of a supporting partner. My home city of Glasgow ranks 35th out of the UK’s 63 largest cities and towns by productivity, despite being the fourth largest by population. The Centre for Cities estimates, conservatively, that Glasgow’s economy underperforms by £7.3 billion every year.

Public transport across the region is divided among Strathclyde Partnership for Transport, eight local authorities, the Scottish Government through Transport Scotland and private operators, yet the modelling shows that simply aligning timetables, frequencies and fares could put 300,000 more people within 30 minutes of Glasgow’s urban core. It is not about building a new railway or bridge, but making one set of decisions at the scale at which people live and work. That is the difference—the economics of agglomeration—that regional democracy could make for Scotland.

The last railway to be entirely built in the Glasgow suburban area was built as long ago as 2005, when the Maryhill line was extended by 1.6km from Maryhill to Anniesland to link the northern suburbs to the north Clyde line. That is a paltry investment for a city the size of Glasgow.

Those problems of disempowerment are not only in Scotland’s great metropolitan city of Glasgow. The Highland Council area is roughly the size of Belgium, and the needs of Skye and those of the Inverness suburbs must compete against one another. For many islanders, local democracy is not local at all and power for the people of Skye sits largely away in Inverness and Holyrood. A true two-tier local democracy under the Scottish Parliament, as in most of Europe, would allow politics to be handled at local, regional and national levels. Instead, we live in a country where councils are so weak that rules about parking are decided in Holyrood and are so large that even their limited power is far from those on the ground.

We must address the real issue: the Scottish Government has become worryingly anti-politics and overly technocratic. The First Minister told us that his one rule for local government reform is, “No more politicians”; we in the chamber need to recognise that that is not a healthy attitude. Aristotle observed that man by nature is a political animal; participation in politics is not to be treated with disdain. As progressive politicians, we should want more people to be involved in our democracy at all levels. In fact, politics has already been practised across our communities, largely unnoticed: it is there when the chair of a small charity tries to keep quarrelsome trustees on board, when a community-based housing association tries to improve the living standards for their community and when the organisers of a food pantry are trying to build a co-operative commonwealth. We need to empower those people and, because we are a proud democracy, bring them properly into our democratic processes so that accountability to the electorate and transparency in decision making become the hallmark of how we do things here in Scotland.

This Parliament was founded on the conviction that decisions are better made closer to the people they affect. That argument does not end at the door of this Parliament. Please vote in favour of the amendment by my friend the member for Edinburgh Southern. We know that Scotland can be run better. We want to see that happen and, crucially, with collaboration and creativity, we can build the better nation that we all want to see.

16:39

I agree—it was a failure on our part not to participate more constructively in the budget process.

I thought the member made a very thoughtful contribution to today’s debate, unlike some of his colleagues.

Fundamentally, these are matters for intergovernmental talks, and yet they are again consuming valuable parliamentary time. The October recess is almost upon us, and yet, since the election, not a single piece of legislation has gone through the Parliament. We have to recognise that we are a legislature, not a debating society.

Let me be clear about what the amendment in the name of my friend the member for Edinburgh Southern asks for. Too much of the debate has been about Scotland’s relationship with the rest of the UK in a constitutional sense, but we need to remember that we are here to transform and reform Scotland, across all aspects of Government. Local government, planning, transport and skills are overwhelmingly matters that this Parliament already controls.

I recognise that that compounds the fiscal challenge that the Government is facing, because it is haemorrhaging money into meeting emergency homelessness accommodation costs, but it is not investing in new housing stock and turning tenancies into a revenue stream for the public sector.

Does Mr Offord accept the fundamental principle that the biggest determinant of trade intensity is geographical proximity, and that putting in place barriers to that trading activity is detrimental to our economy?

Does the member recognise that certain functionalities of taxation in Scotland could be improved? For example, non-domestic rates are a really blunt instrument. In some instances, people who are trying to invest to renovate a building are penalised for doing that, which blocks growth and progress. Can we look at how to tailor certain taxes to achieve better outcomes?