Meeting of the Parliament 10 February 2026 [Draft]
The report that has been referenced by several colleagues, “Developing Scotland’s Economy: Increasing the Role of Inclusive and Democratic Business Models”, was, to cast our minds back to the distant past, a Bute house agreement requirement, and it is an achievement that I am still really proud of.
Moving the recommendations of that report forward—notwithstanding my disagreement with Richard Leonard about tax breaks—will be a substantial step forward in supporting community wealth building in Scotland. I commend the report to the members in the chamber and to the next Scottish Government, because we are now just weeks out from an election and it will be for the next Scottish Government and the next Scottish Parliament to implement the bill as well as the recommendations in the report.
It behoves us all and all our successors to get out to the community groups and stakeholders in our regions and constituencies and get them making noise about this and pester their local authorities to get their community action plan started and see how they fit into it, because this is going to matter to them. We need to make sure that our stakeholders know how to apply for procurement contracts and that community organisations know how to contribute to their local action plans.
I hope that, through the bill, local authorities and public bodies are encouraged to think in an entrepreneurial way about how their assets and resources can be used to prioritise wellbeing and resilience in their areas—how one organisation’s derelict land may be another organisation’s community garden. That is exactly the kind of bringing people around the table that can achieve things even without a substantial input of funding. I hope that the power of the bill will be the facilitative effort that happens when people sit around the table and say, “Here’s what we need,” and “Here’s what we have,” so that we can co-operate to make the best of everything that we have.
I will give members some examples of how the bill might benefit our constituents. It is not just about community shares in renewable energy schemes, although it is partly about that, and it is not just about lovely community gardens and orchards, although of course it is partly about that. It could be about local energy resilience—if local energy generation is in place in a distributed way and the grid gets taken out by a terrible storm, local people would still have heat, electricity and maybe a safe place to retreat to in the case of terrible cold, wind, flooding or fire. That is the kind of community resilience that could be built because of the work on the bill.
Last week, Liz Smith, Maree Todd, Neil Bibby and I attended a hustings where there was a discussion about the challenges of maintaining swimming pools in our communities. Those could be an interesting example of a community asset. If swimming pools were owned by a community, partners in developing community action plans could come together to figure out how they would heat their local pool. Maybe the local whisky distillery or the local data centre would have excess heat that they could use, or maybe one of the public bodies would have land that they could use to install a pool. That is about how we pool our resources—private enterprise, public bodies and local authorities—with volunteers and organisations to make the best of what we have, and it should be making the best of Scotland. I look forward to working on the implementation of the bill in the next session of Parliament.