Meeting of the Parliament 10 February 2026 [Draft]
For the first time since I became an MSP, my husband came to me and said, “Is this thing on TikTok about you?” He was referring to a video from someone outside Scotland, who had identified our bill as being a groundbreaking world first. Likewise, a former colleague who currently works for the Belgian Government in Brussels contacted me and said, “Community wealth building. Is that you? Are you involved in that? It looks very exciting.” That was a really interesting perspective, given how underwhelmed members of the Economy and Fair Work Committee were when the bill was brought to us. It is interesting that we appear to be at the start of doing something intentional that is thought to be remarkable by other people, even though, as I said, committee members were not overwhelmed with excitement when we first saw the bill.
The bill does only two things: it makes Government ministers of the day provide a statement about community wealth building and it forces local authorities and other named public bodies to get around the table and do likewise for their regions. The bill does not do anything about compulsory sales orders or compulsory purchase orders. It does not do anything to complete the land register. It does not do anything in relation to the common land and assets registers. It does not do anything in relation to procurement reform directly, although, indirectly, thanks to some amendments from Daniel Johnson, it requires the Government to consider that issue.
Therefore, there is unfinished business. The bill is just the start. We can say what we intend the bill to do, but we now have to do the work to make that happen.
I was really pleased with the stage 2 amendments. Various Opposition members proposed various approaches to improved reporting, metrics and targets. That is so important because, if we are not measuring, how can we judge progress?
Community wealth building is not just a warm and fuzzy concept that is nice to have; it is very serious. It is about restructuring the economy and providing transformative change, so that everybody has a stake in how well Scotland is doing. It is about addressing the disconnect that people feel when they see the very wealthy continuing to get richer while they struggle to afford to pay their energy bills or to travel somewhere nice for their kids to experience nature. There is a disconnect when, although people hear that, apparently, the economy is doing well, they do not feel that they are doing well. Community wealth building is about rejoining things by ensuring that everyone has a stake in the economy, so that, when the country does well, every individual also does well and gets what they need from our economy.
More work is still needed to transform how we think about co-operatives, social enterprises and other alternative business models. In too many cases, the Scottish Government and its enterprise agencies think about only small and worthy businesses when they think about co-operatives, but there is no reason why co-operatives and employee-owned businesses cannot be enormous, ambitious, competitive, highly productive and very innovative. Enterprise agencies should prioritise such businesses, because we know that the additional benefits that they bring to communities are absolutely worth it.
Therefore, there should be a clear instruction to our enterprise agencies to prioritise such businesses, put back together Co-operative Development Scotland and get in-house expertise so that, when any person or small group comes to Business Gateway or one of the enterprise agencies and says, “I want to start a business to do X,” they are given the option to become a co-operative or to adopt a social or other employee-owned business model. That will allow us to lock in the benefits of community wealth building.