Meeting of the Parliament 22 January 2019
Thank you, Presiding Officer.
I appreciate the intervention from the cabinet secretary, but he stresses again the frustration at local level. We heard earlier that there was close working between the Scottish and UK Governments, but every time that we ask a UK Government minister a question about the timetable and the level of investment by both Governments, we get a different answer from the one that we get from Scottish Government ministers. The people of the Borderlands and Ayrshire want a clear timetable and, most important, the funding to be put in place. At the moment, those regions are being left behind the rest of Scotland.
I hope that the minister will also tell us—he can do so now or later, if I get more time—where discussions are on the future of the Falkirk deal, the Argyll and Bute deal and, potentially, an islands deal. What does the Government view as a realistic timescale to deliver those deals? Those deals—as with the city region deals that cover the Glasgow city region, the Aberdeen city region, Inverness and Highland, Stirling and Clackmannanshire, Edinburgh and south-east Scotland, and the Tay cities—have the potential to unlock economic growth. However, only if those deals are made comprehensive across all of Scotland and focused on the real needs of communities will growth be truly inclusive. Therefore, we support the Government’s call for a clear timetable to show when we will get 100 per cent coverage.
As new deals are developed, we must be clear how growth deals fit with the wider policy landscape to ensure cohesion in strategy and the clear allocation of functions. Last year, the Local Government and Communities Committee report “City Regions: Deal or No Deal” warned:
“At present, there are too many overlapping and competing initiatives”.
The committee also raised concerns about accountability and openness within the current deals, which risk undermining the aims and ethos of those deals if they are not properly tackled. Devolving decision making to a regional level is beneficial only if the new process is transparent and genuinely responsive to the communities involved. Put simply, we cannot allow deals to be done in secret behind closed doors.
Many of the areas that are covered by deals include some of our most deprived communities. Those communities must be involved in developing the deals to properly identify their needs and their priorities. The process needs to be more open and democratic so that communities have faith in both the process and, ultimately, the funding choices that are made in the final deals.
Growth deals must be in addition to, not instead of, existing funding streams; that is crucial. We cannot simply use deals to distract from declining Government investment elsewhere, particularly in local government. They are not there to plug gaps and they cannot be a substitute for consistent, strategically allocated national funding. Projects that are not adopted by growth deals also need to be delivered, yet just last week we heard that the £224 million investment that was announced by the Scottish Government alongside the Aberdeen city region deal for rail infrastructure in Aberdeen appears to be being sidelined.
Audit Scotland’s upcoming report on city region and growth deals will consider a number of those challenges, including clarity around the deals, their governance and the accountability processes. I look forward to reading the report when it is published in autumn this year and I hope that its recommendations will help to guide work to strengthen city region and growth deals.
The most crucial aspect of any deal is ensuring that the projects that have been agreed are actually delivered. At the heart of Scotland’s first city region deal—the Glasgow city region deal—is the Glasgow airport access project, which aims to link the city by rail to the airport. The airport serves around 10 million passengers but, to our shame, it is the largest airport in the UK that is not served by rail.
A rail link is badly needed. A report for Transport Scotland last year showed that traffic levels on the M8, which leads to the airport, between junctions 22 and 29 had increased by 22 per cent from 2011 to 2017. At the time of the report, Stuart Patrick, the chief executive of Glasgow Chamber of Commerce, said:
“The solution can’t be the re-allocation of road space or more roads. Rail is the most obvious route forward.”
It is a solution that is long overdue. The first feasibility studies into a rail link were published in the 1990s.