Meeting of the Parliament (Hybrid) 25 May 2022
I will proceed. Unlike the main spokesperson for the Conservatives, I want to address the motion.
We need leadership and partnership. The community wealth building model involves local authorities and their community planning partners ensuring that collective investment decisions focus on how local economies can be helped to grow and flourish. However, there must be a process of genuine partnership, rather than a repackaging of a centralised command and control model by councils or Government. It must be locally and community led.
Risk must be shared equitably, so we need to think differently about risk. Last week, the chief executive of Community Enterprise in Scotland, Martin Avila, told the Economy and Fair Work Committee:
“Some of the previous Scottish Government rental guarantee schemes were there for developers to be able to take risks in order to develop new housing stock, but they were not necessarily open to community owners. We were therefore telling the private sector that its risk would be underwritten by the state, because the rental income guarantee scheme guaranteed that it would receive an income, but that was not open to socially focused organisations. Often, as a state, we say that we understand that private enterprise is risky, so we will incentivise and de-risk it, and it will get to privatise the value that is captured. However, when it comes to community organisations that want to socialise the economic value that they create, we say that we are really not sure that they can carry their plan out without failing. We have to end that false equivalence”.—[Official Report, Economy and Fair Work Committee, 18 May 2022; c 11.]
On funding, we need to be warned about place funding that is spread thinly across individual projects that councils already wanted to support, rather than being focused on generating growth, leveraging partner and private funding, and building a local customer base.
As far as challenges are concerned, anchor projects in district heating and energy, including local solar generation and electric vehicle charging, are being developed, and local energy companies are an example of asset building as the way forward. However, the issue comes back to what is statutory and what is not, and what the capacity and capability of local councils are to resource projects with people and expertise.
Town centres matter, but each and every one is different, and leadership and skills might be found in various places. If the Government has explicitly said that business improvement districts need to be consulted on place-based funding and there is evidence that they have not been, the minister should be concerned.
When Parliament discussed our immediate recovery from the early part of the pandemic in the summer of 2020, I said that we needed not just evolution, but a revolution, in our economic thinking. The part that community wealth building is playing in the wellbeing economy drive is a revolution that is happening in plain sight, but is not often heralded as such.
Therefore, I hope that this afternoon’s debate can act as a clarion call to herald that new era for Scotland. The difference is that the Scottish Government and the Scottish National Party trust the people of Scotland. We trust our communities, we put faith in them and we respect them by driving forward the community wealth building agenda. I emphasise to Mr Rennie that that agenda respects the communities of our country.
15:38