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Meeting of the Parliament 19 January 2012

19 Jan 2012 · S4 · Meeting of the Parliament

Item of business

Agenda for Cities

Smith, Drew Lab Glasgow Watch on SPTV

Scottish Labour welcomes the debate and the publication of the strategy for cities, which can help to shape the Scottish Government’s cities policy and provide a framework for strategic collaboration between city authorities.

Since the abolition of the cities growth fund, to which the Labour amendment refers, there has been a complaint from Scotland’s cities that the Government does not always understand the challenges and opportunities that our cities present. Our cities are the powerhouse of Scotland’s economy. As the cabinet secretary said, they are our major population centres and 86 per cent of us live within an hour’s drive of a city. Our cities are home to many of our most important cultural and intellectual institutions, and they are our major transport hubs. In the modern economy, we must harness the potential of such advantages to ensure prosperity through innovation and growth. We need design and planning, not accident and by-product.

We are not seeking to pitch one part of the country against another or to put undue emphasis on the urban over the rural. Rather, we acknowledge that the success of Glasgow, Edinburgh, Aberdeen, Dundee, Inverness and Stirling can not only improve the wellbeing of the people who live and work in those cities but drive forward the prosperity of the city regions and the whole of Scotland.

We debated cities strategy briefly in the opening days of this parliamentary session, in the context of a wider debate about the cabinet secretary’s portfolio priorities. During the debate, the cabinet secretary talked about bringing forward a stand-alone debate on cities strategy as soon as possible, and it appears that today is the first opportunity that she has had to do that, as she said.

During the debate on the cabinet secretary’s portfolio priorities, I expressed hope that the Parliament would be an active partner with the cabinet secretary in developing her new area of work as cities minister. It is slightly unfortunate that our first chance in that regard comes after the strategy has been published rather than beforehand, which would have enabled us to inform the strategy. Members of all parties could have contributed usefully to an earlier debate. However, we can make a useful contribution at this stage, too, and I accept the cabinet secretary’s comments about the collaborative approach that she wants to take in the spirit in which I am sure she made them.

Scottish Labour particularly welcomes a number of aspects of the cities strategy. I am pleased that it will continue to be led by the cities themselves. Given the work that SCDI did on the six cities review, I welcome its continued involvement and its role as chair of the leadership group. The cities minister’s role should be as an enabler and occasional fixer in times when a lack of joined-up government means that the priorities and problems that the cities might encounter are not understood.

This is the first debate on cities in this session, but previous Governments were not silent on this area of policy. Labour’s cities growth fund, which the Scottish National Party scrapped, provided £173 million between 2003 and 2008.

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Meeting of the Parliament 19 January 2012

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