Meeting of the Parliament 10 February 2026 [Draft]
I will speak to amendment 1 and the other amendments in my name in this group.
The purpose of amendments 1 and 5 is to challenge the outsourcing of public services, especially by local anchor institutions. A founding principle of community wealth building is to stop leakage and to build greater local and community self-sufficiency. That is why we should be encouraging in-sourcing, not outsourcing, of public services.
We have seen some good examples of it in the national health service, where, over the past year, bank nursing/agency spend has been driven down by local health boards, and, over the past few years, facilities and staff at hospitals such as Cumnock community hospital have been brought in-house, and, in Lanarkshire, Serco has been removed from Wishaw general hospital. Other examples can be seen in the Scottish Prison Service, where HMP Kilmarnock has been brought in-house, and Serco has been removed; and on the railways, where Abellio and—again—Serco are now gone, and ScotRail and the Caledonian Sleeper service are run in-house.
A recent Scottish Trades Union Congress-commissioned report into outsourcing pointed out that the outsourcing of social care and, in particular, soft facilities management means that women are much more likely to be outsourced than men. Paragraph 9.3 of that STUC report addresses the five pillars of community wealth building. It says:
“Each of these elements”
of community wealth building
“is undermined by the outsourcing of public services. Smaller economic delivery units are most likely to re-spend money earned from providing services at a local level; the smallest economic unit of delivery is directly employed staff, and the shortest supply chain is direct provision.”
Amendments 2 and 6 ask the Scottish Parliament to use this bill to promote and encourage more democratic forms of ownership and control in financial services, including the encouragement of municipal banks, of mutual banks and building societies and of credit unions. That should be recognised as part of the mosaic of community wealth building, in both the community wealth building ministerial statement and in local community wealth building action plans. That was a feature of the Economy and Fair Work Committee’s stage 1 report, and finance is one of the key pillars of community wealth building.
I move amendment 1.