Meeting of the Parliament 03 February 2015
I am pleased to speak in this debate on behalf of my colleagues in the Local Government and Regeneration Committee. I thank the current and past members of the committee for the work that they have undertaken, not only in scrutinising the bill but on the wider topic of community empowerment. The committee has been examining community empowerment in one form or another for the past three years. I will elaborate on that later.
I extend my thanks to all the witnesses who provided written and oral evidence to the committee as well as to the hundreds of people from all over Scotland who took part in various community engagement events with us. Thanks are also due to all the people who helped to facilitate the committee’s various fact-finding visits across Scotland over the past three years. They proved to be invaluable preparation for our scrutiny of the bill.
I thank our colleagues in the Delegated Powers and Law Reform Committee and the Finance Committee for their scrutiny of the bill and, in particular, I thank the Rural Affairs, Climate Change and Environment Committee, under the convenership of Rob Gibson, for its consideration of part 4, on the community right to buy. I know that that work proved to be a big ask for a committee with a very full programme of work, but my colleagues and I greatly appreciated the knowledge and expertise that its members brought to the examination of the community right to buy. We have accepted its recommendations to us in full. I am sure that members of that committee will say more about that during the debate.
I thank the former Minister for Local Government and Planning, Derek Mackay, and all the Scottish Government officials who have worked to bring the legislation to fruition. I hope that we can work in tandem with the current minister to ensure that we make the bill the best that it possibly can be.
Ernest Hemingway once said:
“The best way to find out if you can trust somebody is to trust them.”
That piece of advice neatly sums up the core philosophy at the heart of the Community Empowerment (Scotland) Bill. At first glance, it may be difficult to see a unifying theme to the bill, as it seems to cover so many different areas, but, in truth, trust is the unifying theme at the heart of it: trust that communities all over Scotland know what is best for them and have the desire and ability to help to bring their ambitions to reality; trust that, despite all the challenges that our public services have faced and will continue to face, they can work together to empower communities and deliver the outcomes that they need; trust that communities can make better use of public assets such as buildings or land than local authorities or the wider public sector can; and trust that CPP partners will help to facilitate public trust by being able to work in partnership with communities.
The bill is not about imposing a framework or compelling various public bodies to undertake various actions that we wish them to undertake; rather, it is about providing communities across Scotland with the tools that they need to take decisions for themselves and about trusting them to use those tools wisely. In short, it is about putting the power in community empowerment.