Meeting of the Parliament 17 June 2015
The Parliament’s consideration of the Community Empowerment (Scotland) Bill has been a long and detailed process and many important points have been raised. I, too, thank the clerks and everybody else who has been involved with it, and the committees.
I have always agreed with the principle of enabling communities to have a greater say in local matters and I welcome provisions to facilitate that. However, I am concerned that there are a number of areas in which the bill may still allow central decisions to take precedence over local priorities, and those worries cannot be passed over. Members will be more than aware that many amendments have been considered. I will not have time to analyse each of them, but I think that it is worth touching on some of the most prescient points that have been raised.
Our central aim has always been to ensure that the bill will genuinely delegate decision making so that members of the public can benefit from local flexibility and autonomy and will not be subject to the whims of the Scottish Government. The extent to which that aim will be realised will come down to two factors. The first is the breadth and strength of directions that are imposed on communities and local authorities from central Government, and the second is the extent to which the procedures contain the necessary safeguards to ensure that any community that wishes to become involved in local decision making has a reasonable chance of doing so.
As a case in point, the interaction between part 1 of the bill, on national outcomes, and part 2, on community planning, raises concerns that local priorities may be overshadowed by national decisions. That is particularly true as each community planning partnership must have regard to guidance that is issued by Scottish ministers. I agree with efforts to encourage community participation in the development of local outcomes improvement plans, but I still think that the Parliament and public officials across Scotland would do well to ensure that local priorities are the driving force.
On a similar note, I wish to focus on the bill’s provisions on allotments, because they have raised concerns about local autonomy. In particular, the provisions that require the Scottish Government’s consent for a local authority to change the use of an allotment site could, if they are used in a certain way, obstruct local decision making for national reasons. That is plainly contrary to the principle of facilitating local empowerment. If power is truly to be devolved from the centre, local authorities should be able to decide for themselves whether changing the use of an allotment site is in the local interest, subject of course to reasonable protections.