Hansard

As the bill progresses, there will be lots of opportunities to discuss and debate such points.

I am a councillor in Fife Council—I should have declared an interest at the start of my speech—so I have a soft sense of what local government needs to do to be successful.

I welcome the funding announcement that the cabinet secretary made. The sum of £1.7 million is significant and will go a long way towards supporting the buildings and the developments that she referred to in her speech.

The issue of dilapidated buildings is one that I am well aware of, as it is a big issue in Fife and I get a lot of correspondence about it with regard to Dunfermline town centre, the industrial heritage in Kirkcaldy, the Wemyss caves and so on. The need to find funds to address the issues around those buildings and facilities is a pressing one for local government.

I welcome the Government’s focus on the promotion of a strategy for our historic environment. However, at the same time, its definition of historic environment is a bit too vague. It seems to include anything and everything that is deemed to be historically relevant. Although that might seem to encapsulate the spirit of heritage, when it comes to implementing a strategy and giving public bodies the responsibility for doing so, we must be careful that broad, vague definitions do not lead to broad, vague actions.

I was, therefore, pleased to hear the cabinet secretary summarise the strategy in the words, “investigate and record”, “care for and protect” and “share and celebrate”. I hope that we get the chance to discuss in more detail what those words might mean in practice and what actions will be taken to make those aims happen.

Another concern—I know that I am raising concerns, but I should emphasise the fact that I like the strategy—is that the strategy focuses too much on historic environments being something static that is to do with the past and must be preserved. We have heard today that that is not how those facilities are perceived in local communities. As SNH highlighted in its response, our landscape changes and we need to manage our historic environment in that context. Further, in parallel with managing heritage within a changing cultural and physical landscape, we must also keep investigating our historic sites, so I am pleased to see that that is in the strategy.

History is not an event that happened long ago; it is a process that stretches into the past and beyond us into the future. I was taken by a line in the poem that the cabinet secretary quoted at the beginning of her speech:

“Me in place and the place in me”.

That is exactly what these places mean to people.

I can think of no better example of the way in which a strategy on the historic environment should work than Lochore meadows country park, near Crosshill in my constituency. The park used to be a mining landscape: it had burning bings, and mining cottages and mines were at the heart of the community. The then Fife Regional Council had a vision to reclaim the landscape and make it into a place that would be loved and treasured by local people. I do not know whether any members have been there but if they were to go, they would see that although it is currently enjoyed as a place for leisure activity and learning, it also has layers of history enriching its fields, forests and waters.

At Lochore meadows nowadays, children can play in an adventure playground above an old pit near the ruins of a castle. People can access the history of the park—as well as its present physical reality—through the careful conservation of physical remnants around the park and by the presence of an education centre on site. They can support the local economy by spending money there—by buying food and gifts. There is a concern locally that the ability to spend money should be grown, and that the potential for people to stay overnight and spend time in Lochore and Crosshill should be developed.

People working to maintain and innovate at Lochore meadows understand the importance of constantly investigating and exploring the landscape. That is why I am delighted that the Living Lomonds Landscape Partnership, which includes Fife Council, has recently been awarded lottery funding to work with local communities to carry out conservation projects and community archaeology programmes as well as a number of cultural and community-based activities. Those projects will not only involve the local community but train its members and provide a wide range of volunteering and, I hope, employment opportunities.

That emphasis on community ownership, sense of place and being part of the historic process leads me to something else that I would like to point out about the strategy. While the strategy mentions the importance of access, I am not convinced that it goes far enough. Accessing our historic environment supports education, local economies, tourism, town centres and our sense of nationhood but it is also about something much more profound and meaningful. Beyond the superficial, accessing our historic environment is about enriching, empowering and regenerating communities throughout Scotland and breaking down barriers to participation in the long term. As colleagues have mentioned, the Scottish household survey found that those living in more deprived communities in Scotland are the least likely to take part in cultural activity.

Given the agreement about the role that a sense of place and history have to play in the outlook and elevation of people, as individuals and as communities, I would have liked the Scottish Government to have had a much sharper approach to our historic environments being accessible, inclusive, living, breathing, community power generators.

Scottish Labour welcomes the strategy. We would now like to see clear priorities and actions, along with the development of an evidence base to inform decision making and help to monitor progress. We look forward to participating in the discussion and debate on the specifics of the bill as it progresses.

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