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Economy and Fair Work Committee 18 May 2022

18 May 2022 · S6 · Economy and Fair Work Committee

Item of business

Town Centres and Retail

Martin Avila Watch on SPTV

If it is okay, I will speak first about the idea of pitfalls. There can be a suggestion of false equivalence between community-run enterprises and general business enterprises. Anyone who has started a new or small business or who has tried to scale up a business knows that that is very difficult and takes time. That is part of the journey. I do not think that any community land owner or development trust has ever gone bust, and no community-owned pub has ever shut. The survival rates for community-owned retail far outstrip those for purely commercial retail. We sometimes ask socially focused organisations and enterprises to hold themselves to a standard that no one could meet, and we ask them to deal, with a bit of sticky-back plastic, with the most wicked problems involving market and state failure, while making us all feel good about ourselves at the same time. You asked about the opportunities for community wealth building. I sit on the steering group for the proposed legislation. I would not say that it is scepticism, but I do not believe that legislation alone can change everything. Sometimes, legislation on its own cannot change anything. I do not think that legislation is where the opportunities lie. The opportunities—for community wealth building, principally—lie in how we bring such principles into practice as well as policy. The most recent programme for government is the first place where we have seen the social impact of economic development being considered in the same place as everything else. Previously, programmes for government took the approach that economic decisions are dealt with in one place, where all the big boys and girls come and talk about the important stuff, and all the nice community stuff is dealt with in another place. We often hear people saying, “That’s a great community project” or “That’s great community building”, which can be a little bit pejorative. It is like when someone says, “She’s a great female architect,” and you have to say, “No—she’s a great architect,” and everything else flows from that point. Where are the opportunities? What we are seeing is that an opportunity is being afforded to us by the fact that socially focused and economically focused organisations are recognising for the first time that we cannot focus solely on development of the value that is created by economic capital, but must instead think about natural capital, social capital and economic capital in similar terms. We have an opportunity to drive civic innovation by creating a civil society in Scotland that controls and develops economic assets of real value, for social purposes. I think that there is also an opportunity for colleagues at the table today to show political leadership. The idea that economic decisions and social decisions have ramifications is something that can unite colleagues from across the parties. We are not seeing a false division between economic enterprise and state intervention; what we are seeing is an opportunity to start to build a fundamentally different model in which communities, community organisations and socially focused organisations play a stronger role not only in the civic governance of their communities, but in the local economy. Colleagues across the chamber will be able to find points of consensus that might not have been possible before. An opportunity is afforded to Scotland to build capacity in development trusts, community organisations and communities by supporting them to own, control, develop and get value from economic assets of real importance. At the moment, a lot of the community asset transfer process is around transferring economic liabilities, such as with sports centres that never worked even with central Government funding, and buildings that have suffered from lack of investment. However, through the work of Community Land Scotland, the Development Trusts Association Scotland and registered social landlords, we have examples of socially focused, commercially driven organisations that control real economic assets and have been responsible for important economic developments in their communities. That represents the real opportunity that is afforded to Scotland and colleagues across the sector at the moment.

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Economy and Fair Work Committee 18 May 2022

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