Meeting of the Parliament (Hybrid) 25 May 2022
If we were being frank and honest, and if we went around the chamber and asked every member what they meant by “community wealth building”, we would probably find a lot of very different answers. If we went outside the chamber to the street, we might find that people did not know what we were talking about at all. Perhaps the biggest challenge is to establish a consensus and a common understanding, because without that, we cannot make community wealth building successful.
However, let us be clear: in the coming years, we face huge economic challenges. We have still not understood the full costs of Covid, let alone begun to address recovery. We are in the midst of a cost of living emergency, as many Scots face spiralling costs for their heating and travel and to feed themselves.
Before those new unexpected challenges, we have the challenge of meeting our climate change targets, which creates an imperative to overhaul our economy. That need is urgent and—to be frank—it is not clear to me that either the investment or the plans are in place to enable us to meet our 2030 targets.
We need big ideas, and community wealth building could be one of those ideas. I make it clear that, beyond the challenges that I have set out, there are communities up and down Scotland that have never recovered from the loss of once-proud industries such as steel, shipbuilding, mining and manufacturing. We need answers that can address both the most recent issues and those enduring ones, which we in Scotland know only too well. We need big and bold ideas to rebuild and remake our economy. Community wealth building can and should be at the heart of that change, but we need greater clarity from the Scottish Government on its intentions and on the resources that it will bring to bear.
As I said in my intervention on the minister, there were seven mentions of community wealth building in the economic transformation plan, but there was very little clarity on what is meant by that. That clarity is what we need if we are going to make progress. I listened carefully to the minister’s speech, but we heard no detail about how community wealth building will proceed, what it means in a Scottish context as opposed to broader examples and what the first steps will truly be.