Meeting of the Parliament 16 June 2026 [Draft]
I declare that I am a councillor for Highland Council and a volunteer for Lyme Disease UK and the Lyme Resource Centre.
It is no secret that the third sector is very close to my heart. As many members know, I have a long-term illness. When the national health service could not provide the support that I needed, it was the Lyme disease charities that picked up the pieces and signposted me to the help that I needed to get me to where I am today, in this chamber. Sadly, many of those charities no longer exist. I tell this story because the third sector is not some abstract line in a budget. It is about people. It is about the volunteers who pick up the phone when no one else will. It is about the organisations that catch people who have slipped through the net. The third sector employs around 5 per cent of Scotland’s entire workforce. It is an essential part of how our country is run and it is about time that we treated it as such.
That point about employment is important. As I said, the third sector employs around 5 per cent of Scotland’s workforce, but it goes much deeper than that. The third sector is far more likely to employ those who find it difficult to get into work in the first place. Recent estimates are that 27 per cent of those who are employed in the third sector are disabled, compared with just 21 per cent in the public sector, and even less in private companies.
With a turnover of almost £10 billion, the third sector contributes massively to the Scottish economy. To explore one aspect of how the third sector impacts my local area, the Highlands and Islands region has the highest density of social enterprises in Scotland. They include organisations such as New Start Highland, which provides employability training and housing support to those in crisis, and the community-owned distillery in Dingwall, which is using green energy to bring back distilling to the area for the first time in more than 100 years.
In fact, there are more than 1,200 social enterprises in the Highlands and Islands alone, supporting more than 7,000 jobs and generating hundreds of millions of pounds for the economy and the community. In a region such as mine, which suffers from depopulation and rural poverty, those figures are not to be overlooked. The reality is that the money that we invest in the third sector comes back to us and to our community many times over, so we should not be afraid of throwing the full weight of the Scottish Government behind those organisations.
There is nothing in the Government’s motion with which we disagree, which is why the Liberal Democrat amendment seeks to add to the motion by calling for proper long-term multiyear funding that lasts for more than two years and a grant system that provides smaller charities with equal access to Government cash. Importantly, charities need the right and the confidence to be able to criticise the Government publicly without worrying about losing funding or facing repercussions.
Without all that, we simply cannot provide the security and the certainty that those charities need. A quarter of charity staff are on fixed-term contracts, and many have no idea whether they will have a job in the next 12 months. Surely we can do better than that. Yes, the fairer funding scheme is a great step forward, but it falls short of what the sector is asking for. Third sector organisations need a funding model that provides them with true sustainability, proper flexibility and more autonomy in what they can do with their money.
That is why I have lodged the amendment, and I thank the Government and other parties for their support.
I move S7M-00356.3, to insert at end:
“; understands that the third sector employs over 130,000 paid staff in Scotland, providing employment opportunities for those who find it harder to gain work, including disabled people, and often offering flexible working conditions, which has resulted in women making up 64% of the workforce; notes that Scotland's charitable and voluntary sector contributes significantly to the delivery of government policy objectives, yet relies heavily on public donations and fundraising; believes that the sustainability of many charities depends on multi-year funding and appropriate government support; considers that any diversification of funding should assist smaller charities that can find it difficult to participate in public funding rounds, and believes that any charity in receipt of public funding must retain the absolute licence to criticise, as well as to shape, public policy and the actions of government.”
Motions, questions or amendments mentioned by their reference code.