Hansard

On Friday, I spoke to Ian Welsh of the Scottish Allotments and Gardens Society. I committed to consulting on the use of one of the powers that the bill will create with the aim of addressing concerns about size, while allowing flexibility to ensure that those who want differently sized plots also have their needs met. However, that focuses on people who get an allotment for the first time. It is clear that anyone who has a lease or agreement with a local authority under existing legislation will come up against a lot of contract and rental law. We could certainly look at that issue. I do not believe that the changes would lead to there being significant impacts on existing contracts, although councils have the ability to review rents—that applies to any council rental contract.

There is a possibility that we could look at the additional rights that are coming in and examine whether to have transitional arrangements or, indeed, to continue existing arrangements if that approach would be disadvantageous. The bill takes areas that have not been legislated on for, in some cases, 123 years and creates additional rights in relation to allotments in every area that I have looked at, as far as I can tell. However, there is on-going dialogue, and I will continue to speak to the Scottish Allotments and Gardens Society so that we understand each other and can reach an agreement.

After what I have just said, perhaps I should say “last, but not least” as I turn to part 8 of the bill. Part 8 will allow councils to support and encourage businesses in target areas through local business rates relief schemes.

Each part of the bill individually provides new measures; taken together, we hope that they will help to change the culture around community empowerment to make such local approaches routine. We recognise, however, that if all our communities are to be empowered, some will require support. The Local Government and Regeneration Committee was right to highlight that. We want all communities to be able to keep up in the race to take advantage of the new powers.

We will therefore not stand still at stage 2. While we have been considering the evidence to the committee, we have already been discussing and debating with partners and stakeholders how we might improve the bill, which was introduced to Parliament seven months ago. We propose to lodge amendments on appeal procedures for asset transfer requests and the publication of asset registers, but the central change has to be an even greater focus on reducing inequalities.

The bill stands alongside the whole range of existing duties and policies that target inequalities, and we believe that by empowering communities, inequalities are reduced and that, where communities lead their own regeneration and control their own future, they will take the right steps forward. We will, however, lodge amendments to ensure that the national outcomes and approaches to community planning are aligned to the aim of reducing inequalities.

We also intend to require public bodies to make inequality a material concern in decisions on key participation requests and asset transfer mechanisms. We want to see the communities that have been most excluded take their well-deserved seats at the table and those that have been most disempowered take control of their surroundings. The cabinet secretary therefore announced today an extra £5.6 million for the people and communities fund. That will be part of the overall empowering communities pot, which now stands at £19.4 million of support.

With the aim of empowering those communities, we have been particularly impressed by participatory budgeting, where funding decisions are taken directly by the people who are affected. Scottish Government-funded PB training events in recent months have drawn crowds from public bodies and local authorities, and we have received a great deal of interest in our offer to new PB projects. We know of about two dozen that have taken place in the past decade, including the well-established annual Leith decides project, which will go ahead this weekend. Together with the cabinet secretary, I have consulted the participatory budgeting working group and I am considering options, including legislative ones, to ensure that the agenda moves forward.

Participatory budgeting is a relatively new form of community engagement, but public bodies have been doing—or have known how to do—community engagement well for many years. The national standards for community engagement have been the basis for that, and I intend to use them as the foundation of the guidance on community participation that will go to community planning partnerships under the new statutory guidance powers.

CPPs must be the forum where high-level decisions are taken for entire authority areas, but there is much to commend the taking of similar partnership approaches more locally, where grass-roots community groups in all their diversity can more easily input directly.