Author: Patrick Collinson, Guardian

While reporting on the recent court case where controversial landlord Fergus Wilson defended (but lost) his right to refuse to let to Indians and Pakistanis, I learned something about how he’s now making money. He is now far from being Britain’s biggest buy-to-let landlord. He’s down to 350 homes, from a peak of 1,000. And what’s he doing with the cash made from sales? Buying agricultural land close to Kent’s biggest towns. One plot he bought for £45,000 is now worth, he boasted, £3m with development permission. And therein lies the reason why we have a housing crisis.

As long ago as 1909, Winston Churchill, then promoting Lloyd George’s “people’s budget” and its controversial measures to tax land, told an audience in Edinburgh that the landowner “sits still and does nothing” while reaping vast gains from land improvements by the municipality, such as roads, railways, power from generators and water from reservoirs far away. “Every one of those improvements is effected by the labour and the cost of other people … To not one of those improvements does the land monopolist contribute, and yet by every one of them the value of his land is sensibly enhanced … he contributes nothing even to the process from which his own enrichment is derived.”

When Britain’s post-war housebuilding boom began, it was based on cheap land. As a timely new book, The Land Question by Daniel Bentley of thinktank Civitas, sets out, the 1947 Town and Country Planning Act under Clement Attlee’s government allowed local authorities to acquire land for development at “existing use value”. There was no premium because it was earmarked for development. The New Towns Act 1946 was similar, giving public corporation powers to compulsorily purchase land at current-use value. The unserviced land cost component for homes in Harlow and Milton Keynes was just 1% of housing costs at the time. Today, the price of land can easily be half the cost of buying a home: £439,999 is the cost of land with planning permission for one terraced home in a less salubrious part of London such as Peckham.

What happened? Landowners rebelled and Harold Macmillan’s Conservative government introduced the 1961 Land Compensation Act. Henceforth, landowners were to be paid the value of the land, including any “hope value”, when developed. Today a hectare of land is worth 100 times more when used for housing rather than farming. Yet when a bureaucratic pen grants permission, all the value goes to the landowner, not the public. Bentley says landowners pocketed £9bn in profit from land they sold for new housing in 2014-15. For each new home built that year, £60,000 went as profit to the landowner. Major infrastructure projects such as Crossrail 2 and the Bakerloo tube line extension are estimated to cost the public purse £36bn. Landowners, meanwhile, will pocket £87bn from increased land values nearby.

In the Netherlands, the only sizeable country in Europe more densely populated than England, the Expropriation Act allows local authorities to buy land at current-use value. They prepare it for development, use part for social housing and sell the rest for commercial use, often at a large profit.

Think of it. Councils take all the financial uplift from planning permission, using potentially huge profits from land sales to build social housing almost at no cost to the public purse. Developers focus on making profits from building high-quality homes, not from hoarding plots. Land speculation is killed off almost overnight.

Instead, the chancellor will tell us in this week’s budget that the solution is billions more for help to buy. All that does is raise property prices and landowner profits. If only Philip Hammond could be more like Churchill.

Author: Emily Badger, New York Times

Most theories for the great crime decline that swept across nearly every major American city over the last 25 years have focused on the would-be criminals.

Their lives changed in many ways starting in the 1990s: Strict new policing tactics kept closer watch on them. Mass incarceration locked them up in growing numbers. The crack epidemic that ensnared many began to recede. Even the more unorthodox theories — around the rise of abortion, the reduction in lead or the spread of A.D.H.D. medication — have argued that larger shifts in society altered the behavior (and existence) of potential criminals.

But none of these explanations have paid much attention to the communities where violence plummeted the most. New research suggests that people there were working hard, with little credit, to address the problem themselves.

Local nonprofit groups that responded to the violence by cleaning streets, building playgrounds, mentoring children and employing young men had a real effect on the crime rate. That’s what Patrick Sharkey, a sociologist at New York University, argues in a new study and a forthcoming book. Mr. Sharkey doesn’t contend that community groups alone drove the national decline in crime, but rather that their impact is a major missing piece.

“This was a part that has been completely overlooked and ignored in national debates over the crime drop,” he said. “But I think it’s fundamental to what happened.”

Between the early 1990s and 2015, the homicide rate in America fell by half. Rates of robbery, assault and theft tumbled in tandem. In New York, Washington and San Diego, murders dropped by more than 75 percent. Although violence has increased over the last two years in some cities, including Chicago and Baltimore, even those places remain safer than they were 25 years ago. And crime has continued to fall in other cities, most notably New York, where shootings are at a record low.

This long-term trend has fundamentally altered city life. It has transformed fear-inducing parks and subways into vibrant public spaces. It has lured wealthier whites back into cities. It has raised the life expectancies of black men. And even in an age of widening urban inequality, it has meant that the daily lives of the most disadvantaged are less dangerous now than they were a generation ago. These poor neighborhoods, Mr. Sharkey has found, have been the greatest beneficiaries of this tectonic change in safety.

The same communities were participating in another big shift that started in the 1990s: The number of nonprofits began to rise sharply across the country, particularly those addressing neighborhood and youth development.

Mr. Sharkey and the doctoral students Gerard Torrats-Espinosa and Delaram Takyar used data from the National Center for Charitable Statistics to track the rise of nonprofits in 264 cities across more than 20 years. Nonprofits were more likely to form in the communities with the gravest problems. But they also sprang up for reasons that had little to do with local crime trends, such as an expansion in philanthropic funding. A spike in nonprofits addressing subjects like the arts and medical research occurred in this same era.

Comparing the growth of other kinds of nonprofits, the researchers believe they were able to identify the causal effect of these community groups: Every 10 additional organizations in a city with 100,000 residents, they estimate, led to a 9 percent drop in the murder rate and a 6 percent drop in violent crime.

In a criminology field that has produced some eyebrow-raising ideas, this one is actually not so surprising. That national finding echoes local studies of some individual programs, like one run by the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society that converts abandoned lots into green spaces and that has been linked in Philadelphia to reduced gun violence.

The research also affirms some of the tenets of community policing: that neighborhoods are vital to policing themselves, and that they can address the complex roots of violence in ways that fall beyond traditional police work.

“It’s absolutely consistent with what I would argue is probably the prevalent theory of policing among the major cities today,” Richard Myers, the executive director of the Major Cities Chiefs Association, said of the new research.

Local organizations also say Mr. Sharkey’s results validate what they have already witnessed.

“Any time people’s basic needs are met, violence goes down — that’s not new,” said Noreen McClendon, who directs the nonprofit Concerned Citizens of South Central Los Angeles.

The group, led by Ms. McClendon’s mother for many years, was formed in the 1980s to fight a proposed waste incinerator in the neighborhood. It evolved in the 1990s to address many of the neighborhood’s other challenges. The group created dozens of block clubs to care for individual streets. It cleaned alleys and repaired potholes, and hired local ex-offenders to do that work. It established a credit union, sponsored a jazz festival and developed hundreds of units of affordable housing.

During a time of major disinvestment in cities, and severe cuts in federal support for urban programs, residents of the neighborhood believed no one else was coming to help. “Nobody,” Ms. McClendon said. And if the group had not done this work itself? “There would have been a lot more death,” she said, “between violence amongst people, violence from police brutality, just drugs.”

Many similar groups did not explicitly think of what they were doing as violence prevention. But in creating playgrounds, they enabled parents to better monitor their children. In connecting neighbors, they improved the capacity of residents to control their streets. In forming after-school programs, they offered alternatives to crime.

In the East Lake neighborhood of Atlanta, the crime rate in the mid 1990s was 18 times the national average. The drug market in the neighborhood was estimated to be doing $35 million in business a year. There hadn’t been a new building permit issued in the neighborhood in nearly three decades, a sign of how little anyone had invested in the community other than to buy drugs there.

Then the newly formed East Lake Foundation developed new mixed-income housing to replace a decaying public housing project. It started a golf program for neighborhood children on a nearby but long-deteriorating golf course. The foundation eventually opened a charter school, where the first class of seniors had a 100 percent graduation rate in May.

“We knew we wanted to see violence and crime go down in the community,” said Carol Naughton, who led the foundation for years and today is the president of a national group, Purpose Built Communities, that is trying to teach East Lake’s model in other cities. “But we’ve never had a crime-prevention program.”

Today violent crime in East Lake is down 90 percent from 1995. But Ms. Naughton is momentarily perplexed by the question of whether she believes groups like hers have gotten enough credit for contributing to that outcome.

“We’re not part of the crime-reduction world, or the public safety world, in the same way that we’re part of the health and education and housing world,” she said. “It never occurred to us that we’re not getting the credit, because we don’t even know that world is out there.”

The lesson in that response, and in Mr. Sharkey’s work — that effective crime prevention doesn’t necessarily look like stop-and-frisk, or hot-spot policing, or mass incarceration — is particularly relevant today as cities rethink policing.

“A lot of these communities were in despair because they needed resources,” said Robert Sampson, a sociologist at Harvard who has studied Chicago neighborhoods damaged by violence. “And what did they get? Well, they mainly got crime control. They got increases in incarceration.”

Those tactics may have contributed to the decline in crime as well. But they’ve come with costs that have become clearer over time, in antagonizing communities and disrupting families.

Mr. Sharkey is pointing to one possible solution with less evident downsides. And he’s suggesting that communities can effectively take on the very roles that the police say have strained them as they’ve increasingly been asked to perform jobs they weren’t trained for, as guidance counselors or marriage therapists or substance-abuse experts.

“They are taking that burden away from the police that probably never should have been there, but by default has kind of landed there,” said Mr. Myers of the chiefs association, who is also a former longtime police chief himself, in Michigan, Virginia, Colorado and elsewhere.

As Mr. Sharkey publishes his findings, crime rates are now diverging after a generation in which violence fell reliably year after year nearly everywhere. It’s not clear yet whether the great crime decline he writes about will continue. But he argues that it’s time for a new model of violence prevention, one that relies more heavily on the kind of work that these community groups have been quietly doing than on the aggressive police tactics and tough sentencing that the Trump administration now advocates.

“The model that we’ve relied on to control violence for a long time has broken down,” Mr. Sharkey said. If communities want police to step back, he is pointing to some of the people who can step in. “This gives us a model. It gives us another set of actors who can play a larger role.”

Author: COSS

The Planning Journey: 10 Junctions A Town Planners Perspective

Author: Christopher Cardona, Program Officer, Philanthropy

Has the time come for participatory grant making?

At the Ford Foundation, we know that having genuine connection or access to the lived experience of the people we seek to serve is key to the success of our decisions, impact, and legitimacy. That’s why we have long supported efforts to improve philanthropic practice—in our own organization and the broader field—with a special emphasis on making it more equitable and inclusive.

In this time of dramatic change, people are becoming distrustful of established institutions, including foundations, and are demanding greater accountability and transparency. Across sectors, elite-driven, top-down decision-making is increasingly viewed with suspicion, if not outright hostility. Foundations that are unwilling to examine their decision-making practices risk being seen as part of the problem, rather than as the problem-solvers they were established to be.

Read the paper: Participatory Grant Making: Has its Time Come?

Auspiciously, a growing number of foundations around the world are experimenting with new approaches to philanthropy—approaches focused on engaging people from outside their institutions in everything from setting priorities and developing strategies to sitting on foundations’ boards or advisory committees. Some foundations are also partnering with these stakeholders to make grant decisions.

So what exactly are these foundations doing, and why is it important? What can we learn from them? To answer those questions, the foundation commissioned Cynthia Gibson, a long-time student and practitioner of participatory approaches—including one of the first national participatory grant making initiatives by the Case Foundation—to study their efforts. Case’s effort was noteworthy because most participatory programs are place-based and local, which raises an interesting question: Has the time come for a broad swath of foundations, including national foundations like Ford, to take on participatory approaches, including grant making?

This paper shows that it’s a question well-worth asking. It also contributes to a burgeoning discussion in the field: The National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy recently hosted a webinar on participatory grant making, and GrantCraft will release a guide on the subject in 2018. We’re hopeful this paper can help move that discussion toward action.

Author: Luca Calafati , CLES

From Barcelona to Cleveland, from Paris to Belo Horizonte, cities are increasingly questioning the growth machine urbanism of the past 30 years. This new municipalist movement is not about adding social and environmental concerns to a traditional urban agenda; this is a political and economic change of model.  A model that seeks to redress the failings of liberal economics, by building a more economically and socially just alternative.

In June 2017 the new municipalist movement gathered in Barcelona – a city at the forefront of progressive urban policy – for Fearless Cities, the first international municipalist summit.  Community organisations, city-mayors, councillors and citizens from six continents met to discuss the potential of cities to ‘spur democratic transformation across the world’. The dense three day programme included sessions ranging from remunicipalisation to developing feminist economies, through to bringing radical democracy into the city council.

The conceptual cornerstone of new municipalism is a reinvigorated notion of the commons. The commons have been traditionally associated to a fairly limited set of fixed physical resources like pastures, irrigation systems and fishing zones and consequently kept out of the urban policy discourse for many years. Instead, the new municipalist movement draws on an expanded notion of the commons, as proposed by Harvard legal scholar Yochai Benkler, economic theorist Michel Bauwens and organisations like Commons Transition or the European Commons Assembly.

In this new account, the commons are not specific physical resources, but a way of managing resources of all kinds.  As such, a school, a large enterprise or a waterfront, are conceived as collective properties of communities, which should be controlled by the community and from which the community as a whole should benefit.

The heart of the new municipal agenda across Europe and beyond is about schemes that reintroduce, promote and deepen a community-oriented management of resources. It is a plural agenda, not fixed to one big policy or idea, but one that allows for diversity and coexistence to flourish. Some of the key initiatives and policies of this new agenda include:

•             Establishing ‘collaboration pacts’ and collaborative economy incubators, as in Bologna or Ghent.

•             Development of cooperatives, social enterprises and grounded SME, as done in Barcelona, Cleveland (USA), Jackson (USA) and Preston.

•             Remunicipalisation of public services – including energy provision, water provision and social services – as largely practiced in France, Austria, Germany and Norway.

•             Promotion of self-managed social centres, as in Naples.

•             Community land-trusts to counter gentrification, as in Leeds and Oakland (USA).

An economic and political change of model

Two crucial elements distinguish new municipalism from other approaches to urban development.

1.            A new conception of the local state

The first element is a new conception of the local state. The new municipalist movement conceives the local state as a facilitating institution that empowers, coordinates and up-scales social innovation from community organisation and social enterprises. This conception of the local state – which some now label ‘partner state’ –  is rooted in the acknowledgment that communities can be very effective in self-provisioning cultural/social activities and employment. So, rather than the local state providing local communities with services, new municipalism is about creating the conditions for community organisation to operate and grow.

However, new municipalism is not a process of hollowing out the local state. New municipalism is also about the local state as a municipal enterprise. As such, there is a retained appreciation that foundational goods and services – such as electricity, water provision, public transport and formal schooling – are out of reach for community organisation because of their scale. Therefore, the state should ensure that these goods and services are fairly priced and accessible to all citizens.

2.            A bold rethinking of local economic development

The second key element of new municipalism is a bold rethinking of local economic development. In the new municipal vision, local economic development should be about building an economy that is plural, fair and democratic. Municipalist economic policy breaks with the orthodoxy of corporate investments, large-scale property redevelopments, and mega events. Instead, it focuses on growing public and social economies, i.e. economies that have fairer wages, higher workers’ control and more environmental/social responsibility. This is about building in local wealth through the actual functioning of the economy, not as after-the-fact redistribution.

Conclusion

Faced with ongoing economic, social and environmental problems and crises, it is time to be bold and accelerate innovative ideas.  As the UK remains in the thralls of Brexit, the time is ripe for the local government community to pick up on the new wave of ideas.  CLES continues to advance this new municipalist agenda.  The alternative is here, we now need to amplify and accelerate it.

Luca Calafati is an international intern at the Centre for Local Economic Strategies (CLES) and a PHD candidate at the University of Milano-Biccocca. Neil McInroy is the Chief Executive of CLES.

Author: Steve Wyler, New Start

One Friday afternoon, about fifteen years ago, I had a visit from a Japanese professor. There was nothing particularly unusual about that. I was working for the Development Trusts Association, the forerunner of Locality, and we had frequent visits from Japanese academics, sometimes coach loads at a time. We used to tell them about our member organisations, community businesses across the country doing amazing things, and they would listen politely, thank us profusely, and we would never hear from them again.

On this occasion, I was more than a little impatient. It had been a long week and it was nearly six o’clock and I just wanted to go home. So I told this professor, whose name I learned was Yasuo Nishiyama, that I would be happy to talk to him but I would like to learn something from him as well. ‘You seem a little stressed,’ was his reply, ’allow me to give you a Japanese thumb massage. That should relax you’. It did. ‘Now,’ he went on, ‘find me the biggest piece of paper you have in your office, and a felt tip pen.’

Then he started to sketch out on a sheet on A3 paper a mind-map populated by development trusts and social enterprises and university settlements and housing association and garden cities and model villages and co-operatives, interspersed with names of people like Octavia Hill and Henry George and Ebenezer Howard and Robert Owen. Faster and faster he wrote, until the whole sheet of paper was covered, everything crazily connected with lines and arrows and intersecting circles. ‘There,’ he said and smiled at me, ‘My gift to you. Your history.’

A few days later, I was in a meeting with a group of people who were setting up the Social Enterprise Coalition, which is now Social Enterprise UK. The discussion turned to the term ‘social enterprise’ and where it came from.

‘I think I was the first person to use the term,’ said someone, rather smugly, ‘back in 1992.’ ‘Actually, it must have been me,’ said another, ‘I came up with the words in 1987’. And so it went on, right round the table, everyone claiming to be the inventor of social enterprise. I wonder how far it really goes back, I thought, thinking about Yasuo Nishiyama’s mind map.

Years later I discovered an article about leadership in social enterprises, which included the sentence: ‘should one wish to destroy a social enterprise, it could not be done more effectually than by aiding it in the appointment of a leader unfit for the office.’ How true, I thought. The article was published on March 15th 1877.

Does our history matter? Yes I think it does. The strength and endurance of the community business movement is not simply about breadth and scale in the here and now. We also have depth and scale in the past. With support from Power to Change, I have been able to explore the early origins of community business in the medieval guilds, in seventeenth century radicalism, in friendly societies and early co-operatives. I have seen how, generation after generation, people have turned to community business. Whether in response to the social evils of Victorian industrialisation, the poverty of the Great Depression, or the failures of modern capitalism and the welfare state. This, it seems to me, is a big story, but one which has been too often forgotten.

Or rather, it is a collection of many stories: Margaret Woodhouse and the Moravians in Pudsey in the 1760s; the Union Mill societies and the first community share issues in the 1790s; Josiah Warren and the first time bank in the 1820s; Robert Owen’s National Equitable Labour Exchange in the 1830s; Feargus O’Connor and the Chartists in the 1840s; the Brynmawr Experiment in the 1930s; John Pearce and the flowering of community business in Scotland in the 1980s; the first community pubs, also in the 1980s. And so on.

And what happens if we forget the stories of our past, the struggles and the hopes of those who have gone before us, the disappointments as well as the triumphs? Then, I believe, our capacity to learn and to inspire, to build our collective story and therefore to grow a movement, capable of inspiring social change, is inevitably diminished.

And we allow other, less hopeful stories to dominate our minds. As Ben Okri said ‘A people are as healthy and confident as the stories they tell themselves. Sick storytellers can make nations sick. Without stories we would go mad. Life would lose its moorings or orientation… Stories can conquer fear, you know. They can make the heart larger.’

And that in the end is the gift of our history. It can make the heart larger, and in doing so, I believe it can give us the confidence to imagine and to act, and perhaps to shape a more hopeful future.

•             Read more and order your copy of the book here.

Author: The Economist

The evolution of Preston into the poster child of Corbynomics started years before Mr Corbyn was elected Labour’s leader, says Matthew Brown, who sits in the council’s cabinet and has spearheaded the programme. In 2011 a £700m redevelopment of the city centre collapsed after the economic downturn. So the council turned to other tactics to generate local investment.

First, it set about persuading local public institutions—colleges, the police, a housing association, the university—to consider spending more of their combined £1bn budget locally, as “anchor institutions”. Local suppliers were given advice on how to pitch for tenders that may have seemed out of reach. The Centre for Local Economic Strategies, a Manchester-based think-tank, audited the spending of six such institutions last month and found that they spent 18% of their most recent year’s budget in Preston, compared with 5% in 2013. In cash terms, this meant an extra £75m being spent in the city—around £530 per citizen. The share of their spending in Lancashire doubled from 39% to 79%. It required no extra money nor new legislation. “It’s about collaboration,” says Mr Brown. “You have to be clever in austerity.”

Preston’s anchor institutions feature in a 48-page pamphlet commissioned by Mr McDonnell on “alternative models of ownership”. Brexit, the report suggests, is a chance to rewrite procurement rules and force the public sector to buy some goods and services locally, which is banned by EU law. Labour’s manifesto also promised to use the government’s £200bn in procurement spending as a weapon to enforce social goals. Suppliers would have to maintain a pay ratio of under 20:1 between their highest- and lowest-paid employees, for example. Other wonks think Labour should go further. Joe Guinan of Democracy Collaborative, an organisation that has overseen a similar model to Preston in Cleveland, Ohio, has said the National Health Service could be “the mother of all anchoring institutions”.

Not all are so impressed. Getting institutions to buy locally amounts to municipal protectionism, with money that was once spent elsewhere in Britain spent locally, points out Colin Talbot, a public-policy expert at Cambridge University. “There is no value being added,” he says. An overly confined economy may reduce economies of scale and exacerbate the effects of any downturn. If the Park Hotel goes under, it may hit Preston’s pensioners, too.

Still, the Preston model is “a practical example of ‘taking back control’,” argues Tom Kibasi of IPPR, another think-tank. Like every district in Lancashire, Preston voted to leave the EU. Part of the feeling of lack of control stemmed from a lack of local ownership, argues Mr Brown. The council is trying to correct this. Last month it launched a not-for-profit energy firm, similar to those that Labour’s manifesto promised. It is cajoling the city’s anchor institutions to provide capital for a regional investment bank, much like the ones that Mr Corbyn has proposed.

The council has also encouraged local firms to consider becoming co-operatives—which are owned and controlled by their workers—and lobbied its anchor institutions to deal more with co-ops. Nationally, Labour wants to double the size of the co-operative sector, for instance by giving workers a “right to own” if a firm’s owners sell up. In a speech last week Mr Corbyn asked why Uber, the ride-hailing app, could not be replaced by a co-op. Labour’s obsession with them is window-dressing, believes Mr Talbot. “They do not want to appear to be ‘commanding heights’,” with their plan to nationalise utilities such as gas and electricity, “so they are talking about trendy co-op things as well,” he says.

For all the praise that Labour’s leaders heap on Preston, Mr Corbyn’s team bristles if the city is described as a crucible of Corbynism. Preston offers radicalism on a shoestring, with its council’s annual spending on services cut by a third since 2010, to £20m. A Corbyn government, they insist, would loosen funding constraints and let local authorities go further. But even if Mr Corbyn never reaches Downing Street, Corbynomics will thrive in one corner of Lancashire. “You can begin to democratise the economy, even with a Tory government,” says Mr Brown.

This article appeared in the Britain section of the print edition under the headline “Jeremy Corbyn’s model town”

Author: Crown Estates Scotland

Crown Estate Scotland has committed to launch a new scheme that will enable local authorities, development trusts and other bodies to apply to manage assets in their local area.

The business, which manages land and property including seabed, foreshore, rural estates and more, has appointed Argyll-based Sarah Brown to help us develop new ways of giving local communities more control over decisions regarding Crown Estate Scotland assets. The aim is to trial different models and assess which ones work best in delivering financial, social and environmental benefits.

Sarah will lead on establishing a set of criteria so that organisations can apply to manage assets locally and will also ensure there is a robust process in place to gauge the success of projects that go ahead. A key part of Sarah’s role will be consulting with coastal and rural community representatives and other organisations and individuals who may be impacted.

The commitment to trial local management is in the business’s three-year corporate plan, launched this week, and updates and further information will soon be available at www.crownestatescotland.com

Ronnie Quinn, Chief Executive of Crown Estate Scotland, said, “We’ve made a clear commitment to enable local authorities, development trusts and other community bodies to pilot local management of rural, coastal and seabed assets.

 “This is likely to involve different models of local management taking place over the next few years. It’s an exciting way to explore and test how communities can have more say over how Crown land and property is managed – and even before specific projects are given the go ahead, we will make sure that those impacted have a chance to share their views.

“Sarah’s many years’ experience in the marine sector and working closely with coastal and rural communities makes her an ideal choice for leading this work.”

Ms Brown has carried out community engagement with Scotland’s fishing and recreation and tourism sectors, including undertaking the innovative Marine Tourism and Recreation Survey for the Scottish Government. She was strategic advisor to the Coastal Communities Fund in Scotland and most recently the marine plan manager for the Clyde Marine Planning Partnership.

Crown Estate Scotland manages assets on behalf of Scottish Ministers, including agricultural and forestry land, most of the seabed, just under half of the foreshore and some commercial property.

It works with communities, tenants and partners with the aim of innovating with land and property to create prosperity for Scotland and its communities. All revenue profit is returned to the Scottish Government.

Author: Scotsman

A public consultation is to be launched on plans for a national investment bank for Scotland.

First Minister Nicola Sturgeon announced the move at a conference on “inclusive growth” in Glasgow.

The establishment of a Scottish national investment bank was included in Ms Sturgeon’s programme for government, revealed in September.

Views will now be sought from the public on the detail of how the bank can support the Scottish economy.

Tesco Bank chief executive Benny Higgins has been appointed to head up a plan for its implementation.

Ms Sturgeon outlined her strategy to grow Scotland’s economy and tackle inequality at an event in Glasgow.

The conference brought together speakers from international organisations, foreign governments, local authorities and academia to discuss Scotland’s progress in the two areas.

Ms Sturgeon said: “The council of economic advisers identified a national investment bank as an important means of delivering infrastructure development, finance for high-growth businesses and strategic investments in innovation.

“Today, we are launching a consultation on the details of how best the bank can achieve those aims and support Scotland’s economy.

“However, we recognise that inclusive growth is another essential part of our focus on innovation and productivity.

“So, we’ve also announced a range of measures to ensure that as we transform our economy, we leave no-one in our society behind.”

She said these would include a Just Transition Commission – a panel of experts from across society that will advise on how to make the move to a low-carbon economy as equitable as possible.

And Ms Sturgeon said the government would look at ways in which it can support the growth of employee ownership and continue to pursue its “fair work agenda”.

 The Scottish government is examining the possibility of introducing a citizen’s income scheme

She also vowed to press on with plans to explore a citizen’s income scheme for Scotland, while acknowledging it “might turn out not to be feasible”.

A universal basic income offers all adults a non-conditional flat-rate payment. Models have varied, but in some examples any income they earn over this is subject to progressive rates of tax.

Earlier this week, the Scottish Conservatives suggested spending on benefits could have to rise by £12.3bn to cover the costs of such a move – a claim dismissed as “wrong” and “hysterical” by the SNP.

Ms Sturgeon said: “I should stress our work on this is at a very early stage. It might turn out not to be the answer, it might turn out not to be feasible.

“But as work and employment changes as rapidly as it is doing, I think it’s really important that we look and are prepared to be open-minded about the different ways in which we can support individuals to participate fully in the new economy.”

Responding to Ms Sturgeon’s investment bank announcement, Scottish Conservative economy spokesman Dean Lockhart said: “It is simply another desperate attempt by the SNP to distract us from the mess they have made of our economy.

“It is a re-hash of a policy first announced several years ago, and then repeated again when they launched the Scottish Growth Scheme last year.

“Not a single penny has been received by a business under the growth scheme, and Scottish companies will understandably be sceptical about when they can expect to see any benefit from this latest plan.”

Scottish Labour’s economy spokeswoman Jackie Baillie said it had been a Labour manifesto commitment ahead of June’s general election.

She added: “While imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, the SNP appear to have only sketched this out on the back of a fag packet.”

Andy Willox, Scottish policy convener for the Federation of Small Businesses, said: “While there’s much to be applauded in the concept of a national investment bank, it shouldn’t distract from other pressing matters.

“For example, new figures out today show that Scotland’s local roads are in an unacceptably poor condition and will continue to decline.

“Addressing this sort of unglamorous but chronic problem would win the first minister plaudits amongst Scotland’s smaller firms.”

Author: The Constitution Unit, UCL

The Citizens’ Assembly on Brexit reached its climax last month. After two weekends of intense deliberation, the members voted on a range of options for the form they want Brexit to take in relation to trade and immigration. Their conclusions will surprise some, and they deserve detailed attention from politicians and commentators. Assembly Director Alan Renwick summarises these conclusions and reflects on the weekend as a whole. He argues that, while the Brexit debate is often presented in stark binary terms, the Citizens’ Assembly suggests that the British public are capable of much subtler thinking – if only they are given the chance.

In my last post on the Citizens’ Assembly on Brexit, I reported on a hugely successful first weekend of deliberations. In advance, we had, through stratified random selection, recruited a group of Assembly members who reflected the composition of the UK electorate in terms of age, sex, ethnicity, social class, where they lived, and how they voted in last year’s referendum (25 voted Leave, 22 voted Remain, and three did not vote). We had also developed a programme and set of briefing papers that had been vetted by our advisory board, comprising supporters of both sides in the referendum, as well as experts in balanced communication. At the first weekend itself, remarkably, every Assembly member attended. They showed immense dedication, working long hours as they reflected on their own views, discussed ideas with fellow members, listened to experts, and quizzed those experts in depth. The experts presented diverse perspectives, some emphasising the benefits of single market membership or immigration, while others pointed out the costs of high immigration or argued for the advantages of cutting free from the single market and customs union. Our team of professional facilitators from Involve did a superb job of guiding proceedings and keeping the discussions on track.

This time I can report on an equally successful second – and final – weekend. Attendance was again astonishingly high: every member but one (who was ill) returned. Once again, all (and I do mean all) were tremendously focused and limitlessly good humoured. Members naturally did not always share each other’s views, but they listened and spoke respectfully and genuinely. Our facilitation and support teams were again inspirational. It was a privilege to be there.

While the first weekend focused on learning, the second was all about deliberation and decision-making. We began on Friday evening with short talks and Q&A sessions with two prominent politicians: Graham Brady MP, chair of the Conservative backbench 1922 Committee, spoke for leaving the single market and customs union; Labour MP Kate Green advocated the opposite. Thereafter, there were no more external speakers. The weekend was devoted to the Assembly members, who reflected on what they wanted post-Brexit policy-making to achieve and then on which policy options they wanted the government to pursue.