Meeting of the Parliament 14 May 2019
I thank the Scottish Government for bringing the topic to debate this afternoon. The Greens are happy to support the motion, and we support the place principle, although we do not support the assumptions that underpin the proposed outcome of inclusive and sustainable growth. However, I will leave that to one side for the moment.
We are rather sceptical about the vague nature of the agreement that has been struck between the Scottish Government and COSLA. Although it is no doubt worthy, it merely appears to request that the bodies responsible for delivering services and managing assets work together to enable outcomes, which is a proposition that I thought had been agreed years ago.
The motion talks about local decision making, but there is little possibility of that when there is no real local government in Scotland, compared to other countries, such as Finland, which has a similar population to Scotland, and which has 330 municipalities with real power for communities to shape the place they live in, including substantial fiscal powers to raise the finance to pay for the things that the community wishes to do.
As the McIntosh report said way back in 1999:
“It could be said that Scotland today simply does not have a system of local government in the sense in which many other countries still do. The 32 councils now existing are, in effect, what in other countries are called county councils or provinces.”
COSLA itself observed in 2013:
“Scotland is one of the most centralised countries in Europe. It is no coincidence that our European neighbours are often more successful at improving outcomes, and have much greater turn out at elections.”
I concede that, in recent years, we have seen a policy shift in community engagement across Scotland, thanks to the Community Empowerment (Scotland) Act 2015, and to the Christie commission on the future delivery of public services that preceded the act. However, as Alex Rowley pointed out, it talked about preventative spend and a lot of work remains to be done on financing and accounting for preventative spend. I have seen many projects in my region that have not secured on-going funding, despite having proven that they have managed to save other agencies substantial sums of money.
I see no real prospect of this so-called place principle having the kind of impact that is envisaged in the motion. We need a completely new approach to local governance and we await with interest the outcome of the minister’s deliberations on that. Tentative steps, such as participatory budgeting and local place plans, while welcome, are timid in comparison to the kind of powers that exist at the local level in any normal European country. That is why we need, for example, to return control of local taxation to local councils, and to reverse the centralisation that was undertaken by the UK Tory Government over non-domestic rates and by the Scottish National Party Government over council tax.
Planning has already been mentioned. The Parliament has been scrutinising the Planning (Scotland) Bill and we will return to it next month. MSPs from all parties have been lodging amendments, all of which are designed to improve the places in which we live and work. It is evident that MSPs from all parties appear to agree that we need to strengthen the powers and responsibilities of communities. However, it remains the case that the planning system still appears to be massively dominated by powerful private interests and that genuine public-led development and planning is as remote a prospect as it has been for many decades.
The Greens were elected to this Parliament on a manifesto to revitalise local democracy. By adopting the place principle, we are moving in the right direction.