Scottish Forum of Community Councils Newsletter Issue 1

Welcome to the first issue of the Scottish Forum of Community Councils newsletter!
We are excited to launch this newsletter as a way to connect with Community Councils across Scotland and share information about the work that we are doing.
We hope to build the Scottish Forum to be the national umbrella body for Community Councils in Scotland and represent its 1,200 Community Councils, made up of volunteers who are passionate about making a difference in their communities.
Our mission is to support Community Councils to be effective advocates for their communities and to provide them with the resources they need to succeed.
In this newsletter, we will be sharing news about the Scottish Forum as well as articles about Community Councils, information from organisations that can help Community Councils and important issues affecting communities across Scotland.
We hope you will find this newsletter informative and useful. If you have any questions or suggestions, please do not hesitate to contact us.

Next Steps for the Scottish Forum
The proposal to form a Scottish Forum of Community Councils has received an overwhelmingly positive response and so we are now taking the following initial steps to move it forward:

▪Formed a Short Life Steering Group to get things off the ground.

▪Investigating sources of funding.

▪ Reaching out to Community Councils that have not yet engaged to build support.

▪Working towards holding another online Scottish Conference in early autumn.

The Steering Group have drafted a Terms of Reference for the Scottish Forum.
An Engagement Report has been produced to analyse the figures for engagement from the Scottish Conference and identify which Local Authorities need to be engaged with more effectively.

Join the Scottish Forum of Community Councils
Community Councils are invited to officially Join the Scottish Forum. Once we can demonstrate that a majority of Community Councils have signed up, we will be in a much stronger position to secure funding to take the Scottish Forum forward. We would be grateful if you could discuss this at your next meeting and decide if your Community Council would like to be involved.

Author: Graeme Ogston, BBC

Faced with the “nightmare” of losing its local bus service, residents of a Perthshire village decided to take over the route themselves.

The 55 Glenfarg to Kinross service was axed earlier this year after its operators Earnside Coaches retired.

But thanks to a group of volunteers and the recruitment of three full-time drivers, the service is back and proving more popular than ever.

It now runs an hourly daily service six days a week, starting at 07:10.

Glenfarg Community Transport Group said the 55 service now enjoys about 300 passenger journeys per week, an increase of 200 on last year.

Group chairman Drew Smart said: “Behind those 300 journeys every week, there are 300 stories.

“It’s a great bus to be on, the banter, the number of problems we solve or try to solve.

“It’s not about buses, it’s really about people.”

Drew said running the service themselves gives the route a flexibility it did not have in the past.

He said: “We’ve got a few people, because of mobility issues, we don’t expect them to come to the bus stop, we’ll come into the village and pick them up at the door.

“When we get into Kinross we’ll drop them at the door of where they’re going.

“The drivers are brilliant, they go well above and beyond.”

One of the passengers, Kareen Macgregor, agrees.

She said: “I don’t drive so it was a nightmare before. We needed the service. It’s great, everybody loves it.”

David Keith, one of the full-time drivers, said the passenger numbers have “blown expectations out of the water.”

He said: “We have our regulars, but we see more and more people coming on who have never used the service before.

“I love coming into my work and meeting the people, numerous people in the village say it’s transformed their lives.”

The buses run from 07:10 until about 18:00, with the first service connecting to the Ember bus at Kinross Park and Ride.

Fellow driver Geoff Christie said: “People from the village that work in Edinburgh, Dundee or Perth, they can get to their work by 09:00.

“We’ve listened to the villagers and we’ve put that service on.

“Kinross is also really bad for taxis, so we’re providing another service that get people backward and forward – it’s provided a social element to a small village.”

Funding for the service comes largely from Perth and Kinross Council, with additional backers including the Smarter Choices Smarter Places charity fund.

Douglas Fraser, treasurer community bus group: “We also liaised with Glasgow Community Transport who have been a big help to us as well.

“It is a daunting prospect, but if you’ve got a group of people who are dedicated and can see the benefit in the long run, it’s well worth doing.”

In addition to the 55 service, 15 volunteer drivers operate the community bus that takes local people to social events and outings.

Douglas said: “That’s huge, given we only started nine months ago. We’ve got a lot of enthusiastic people.”

Drew Smart said the group now had ambitions to expand its service.

He said: “We do a really good service down to Kinross, and we could really benefit in the village from having a similar service to Perth.

“The Perth service during the day is very limited, we could make life a lot easier for people by extending the service in the opposite direction.”

A Perth and Kinross Council spokesperson said: “We are pleased that by supporting Glenfarg Community Transport Group, it has empowered them to operate community-led public transport solutions in their area.

“The success, to date, of their Service 55 and other public transport offers, has highlighted the vital role that Community Transport fulfils in delivering a sustainable transport alternative to the car.”

Author: CCN

A short film about CCN (The Coastal Communities Network) and the work that we do to support community-led action in Scotland to safeguard and restore our coastal and marine environments. 

The footage for this film was filmed by Graham Richardson (gnrichardson.co.uk) at our CCN annual gathering in May 023.

Author: George Monbiot, The Guardian

Economic power seldom needs to discipline those who might challenge it. Most of the time, they do it to themselves. However extreme the ideologies promoted by corporations and oligarchs, organisational life falls broadly into line. The media, political parties, even pressure groups, accept the basic premises, preposterous as they may be, of whatever variety of capitalism currently dominates.

But occasionally, someone needs to be slapped into line. This is what happened last week, when one of the world’s biggest conservation groups, the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, apologised for calling the prime minister, Rishi Sunak, and his secretaries of state, Michael Gove and Thérèse Coffey, to account for abandoning their environmental commitments. These ministers, it had claimed, were liars. Tory MPs and the billionaire press had gone berserk, demanding, among other measures, that the Charity Commission strike out the RSPB’s charitable status. The commission, always a compliant instrument of power, said it was considering the issue. The RSPB promised in future to campaign in a “polite and considered manner”.

Never mind that, like other big conservation groups, it has spent the past 50 years being so polite and considered that, in this nation of nature lovers, wildlife is in freefall. The size and potential power of these organisations bears no relation to their willingness to speak out against the industries and governments trashing the living world. Its original posts last week were a rare exception.

But the story of the apology is even more revealing of power dynamics in this country than it first appears. It seems that the RSPB apologised so quickly partly because one of its own trustees, Ben Caldecott, publicly attacked its statements about the three ministers. The RSPB’s denunciation of government lies, he thundered, “are simply not an appropriate contribution to our public discourse …. As a trustee I have raised this issue urgently with the CEO and Chair”.

Who is Ben Caldecott? Among other roles, he is a senior fellow at Policy Exchange. Policy Exchange calls itself a thinktank. I see it as a dark money lobby group, and one of the most deadly anti-environmental organisations in the UK. For instance, it published a report titled Extremism Rebellion, claiming that nonviolent environmental campaigners and campaigns could stray into terrorism, and calling for new laws to curtail them. Its proposals were adopted by the government in the draconian Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022. Investigative journalists later discovered that Policy Exchange had previously been funded by the energy interests ExxonMobil, Drax, Energy UK and E.On.

Guess who proposed the change in the law to which the RSPB was objecting, namely the government’s abandonment of the “nutrient neutrality” rules, which seek to prevent new housing developments from pouring even more shit into our rivers? Policy Exchange. As the former minister Jacob Rees-Mogg remarked, “where Policy Exchange leads, governments have often followed”. This lobby group is rated by the transparency campaign Who Funds You? as among the most opaque in the UK: it refuses to say where its money comes from.

Before he became a senior fellow at Policy Exchange, Caldecott was the junktank’s research director for environmental issues. Who was the founding chair of the group? Michael Gove, one of the three ministers the RSPB was challenging. Who was the first head of its “Black and Minority Ethnic Research Unit”? Rishi Sunak. So the real question, to my mind, is not whether the RSPB was right or wrong to call out government lies (it was evidently right); it is what on earth such a person is doing on the charity’s board.

The RSPB tells me it has “a thorough and transparent process for the recruitment of each of its trusteesincluding a final members vote … As a group, our trustees need an appropriate mix of skills to engage with the enormous range of work undertaken by the RSPB, and encompass a diverse range of backgrounds.”

Its willingness to invite a senior member of this lobby group on to its board contrasts sharply with the robust defence against the junktanks mounted by the National Trust. Last year, a highly conservative group called Restore Trust sought to get its candidates elected to the trust’s governing council. The current director of Restore Trust, Zewditu Gebreyohanes, previously worked at Policy Exchange. Its founding director, Neil Record, was chair of another dark money lobby group, the Institute of Economic Affairs. He was exposed as a major donor to climate denial group the Global Warming Policy Foundation. Both these groups seek to keep their funding sources secret. Restore Trust, ironically in view of its name, also relies on hidden donors.

Unfortunately, the National Trust’s successful defence of its principles was a rarity. Large organisations (characteristically more timid than small ones) bend over backwards to appease established power. The most effective means of demonstrating their loyalty is to invite the brokers of this power into their inner sanctum. The junktanks are the intermediaries between oligarchic and corporate capital and public policy. Their role is to make the outrageous demands of economic power look like common sense; to conflate what is good for billionaires with what is good for everyone else. As if to show they pose no real threat to power, “independent” institutions roll out the red carpet for them.

This, I think, is why the BBC continues, in defiance of its own editorial guidelines, to grant dark money junktanks, such as Policy Exchange, the Institute of Economic Affairs, the Centre for Policy Studies, the Adam Smith Institute and the Taxpayers’ Alliance, daily platforms without obliging them to say on whose behalf they are lobbying. Even when some of these groups had boasted about being the authors of Liz Truss’s catastrophic economic policies, they were invited on the BBC not to defend themselves but to speak as if they were independent and objective commentators on someone else’s disaster.

In 1944, the Office of Strategic Services, a US intelligence agency, issued an underground guide for workers living in the Axis powers. It was called the Simple Sabotage Field Manual. It explained how to undermine an organisation from within. Among its recommendations was “Advocate ‘caution’. Be ‘reasonable’ and urge [others] to be ‘reasonable’”. It’s sound advice. By being cautious, reasonable, polite and considered, our major advocacy groups might avoid political trouble. But they fatally sabotage their own objectives. Always and everywhere, the real danger comes not from speaking out and offending power, but from falling into line.

Author: John Ross, Press and Journal

A charity has won an eight-year battle to take over part of Scottish Government-owned Knocknagael Farm near Inverness.

Knocknagael Ltd aims to create a community garden, orchard and allotments on the 20-acre site, as well as areas for walking and recreation.

The group also wants to protect the land against future housing developments.

The initiative dates from 2015 when the Smiddy Field and adjacent land were declared surplus to requirements for the bull stud farm and later earmarked for housing.

Community asset transfer bid

A community movement began to save the fields and in 2021, Knocknagael Ltd submitted a community asset transfer bid for the Smiddy Field under the Community Empowerment Act.

This allows groups to request to take over land or buildings they feel they could make better use of.

The request was turned down as the government said land previously identified as surplus was now integral to the farm management plans.

An appeal was lodged and a hearing was held in March.

Now in a “landmark” decision, the government has accepted an independent panel’s recommendation to overturn the refusal, subject to conditions.

Maria de la Torre said it has been a long road to success

The panel concluded that Knocknagael had met the tests under the community empowerment legislation.

It said it is clear the project would have community benefits and said the evidence provided was realistic, measured and well considered.

The report supported the continued operation of the bull stud scheme.

A review of farming operations at Knocknagael and the Crofting Cattle Improvement Scheme will now be undertaken to ensure this can be achieved.

The charity developed its proposals with help from a Scottish Land Fund grant and anticipate moving soon towards buying the field.

Documents submitted to the hearing said the land was currently valued for agricultural use at £162,960, but more than £2 million for residential use.

Transformative project

Knocknagael Ltd chair Dr Maria de la Torre said it would provide a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to take forward a “transformative project” she said would generate £3.25m over its first five years.

“After almost eight years, we are over the moon with the news of the ministerial decision ordering the transfer of the Smiddy Field to the community to progress.

“We cannot believe we have finally reached the point where we are able to move.

“This has been a long road with hours of volunteer time dedicated to the project.

“While we still have much to do, it feels like a momentous milestone in the journey.”

The community group wants to create a green hub at the government-owned Knocknagael Farm near Inverness

Local MP Drew Hendry MP said the decision is fantastic news.

“It is a recognition of the determination, drive and vision of the neighbourhood volunteers who make up the Knocknagael company.”

He said the group deserves praise for getting to this stage.

He also thanked Tom Arthur, the minister for community wealth and public
finance, for “listening to local people, seeing what an opportunity this is, and acting to allow this”.

He added: “I know that building an even stronger sense of community through this green hub project at Knocknagael is at the heart of the plans.

“There is a lot of work still to be done but this is a great start.”

Balancing need for homes and green space

Green MSP Ariane Burgess said the decision is testament to the tenacity and commitment of the volunteers.

She said as one of Europe’s fastest-growing cities, it’s vital that Inverness balances the need to create homes with the needs of communities to access green space.

“Knocknagael’s plans to develop the Smiddy Field site into a community green hub are exactly what Inverness needs as volume housebuilders seek to free up more land to expand the urban sprawl.

“This decision demonstrates the possibilities offered by the Scottish Government’s new planning framework that prioritises tackling our climate and nature emergencies and acknowledges the need to provide more local food growing spaces in cities.”

The green hub plan has public support says Knocknageal Ltd

Ailsa Raeburn, chair of Community Land Scotland, also said it is “marvellous news for local people in Inverness”.

She said: “Securing this land will help them take forward projects of real value and interest to the local community.

“The fact, however, it has taken eight long years and huge amounts of unpaid volunteer time, demonstrate why changes are needed to the law to make the process easier.

“The Land Reform Bill provides this opportunity and we would urge the government to make sure this happens.”

The benefits of green space

The charity was supported at the hearing by a number of groups who said the use of green space could help improve mental health and combat social isolation.

It could also provide an area to help people, including children at nearby schools, to learn more about growing food.

But Ian Carmichael, head of agriculture development at the government’s rural payments and inspections division, told the hearing the site was an integral part of the farm.

He said giving up the land would mean additional costs in managing the farm and potentially an increase in the cost of bull hire.

A Scottish Government spokesman said: “The transfer once completed will enable Knocknagael Ltd to progress plans for the Smiddy Field and their work with the wider community will bring benefits to the local area.”

Author: Stuart Mills, University of Leeds

It’s been 15 years since a particular concept of behavioural science went mainstream. “Nudge theory”, the notion that our behaviour can be successfully influenced through “soft” interventions, has subsequently appealed to plenty of people seeking to change the way we live.

The 2008 book which set out the idea – Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth and Happiness – sold more than 2 million copies. But its influence went way beyond sales figures.

The authors – behavioural economist Richard Thaler and law professor Cass Sunstein – inspired powerful politicians, including former US president Barack Obama and former UK prime minister David Cameron to set up government teams with the specific remit of incorporating nudge theory into public policy.

These “nudge units” became widespread, with recent research suggesting there are now over 200 of them around the world. But while teams of policymakers appear happy to have been taking their “nudge-pills”, making small changes to our decision-making processes, the success of those carefully designed nudges is by no means universally agreed.

Back in 2008 though, whether or not nudges actually worked was rarely discussed. The book was packed with peer-reviewed studies, and set out an idea that was broad enough for many readers to relate to. It felt intuitive.

Instead, criticism of nudging at the time typically focused on concerns that government nudges undermined individual freedom. The worry was that if nudges could lead to major changes in personal decision-making and be used to influence citizen behaviour, then this created the risk of illegitimate state overreach – maybe even totalitarianism.

These days, while some questions remain about individual freedom, they are not as prominent. One reason appears to be a general acceptance that some government influence on citizens and the decisions they make is surely inevitable. But there is also the fact that a large amount of evidence questions whether nudges actually work at all.

After 15 years, plenty of nudge studies can now be assessed to get a better sense of whether this seemingly revolutionary idea really delivers. Behavioural economists undertake this assessment using an approach called “meta-analysis”, which combines multiple studies to get the most reliable data. Last year, one major meta-analysis reported finding no evidence of nudges working.

This was a big deal. And although the study had its own critics, who say it does not properly account for context, the analysis also supported previous evidence of publication bias, suggesting researchers have been cherry picking the “good” nudge studies to publish for years.

Nudge theory has also been undermined elsewhere by doubts raised around the usefulness of findings in behavioural science and psychology, as well as high-profile scandals involving allegations of data fabrication.

Pushing back against nudging

Critics of nudge theory have two key arguments. One is the notion that nudges have small (if any) effects on our behaviour, and are therefore ineffective policy tools.

Their second point is that nudge-based acts are open to being used by vested interests to distract policymakers and the public from actually effective solutions – that they put the emphasis on slight changes from individuals instead of more meaningful and effective systemic change.

For instance, nudges that encourage households to reduce their energy consumption may be considered a good idea. But what if this nudge also reduces the political will to pursue more effective (and expensive) policies, such as retrofitting homes or dramatically investing in sources of sustainable energy?

Even supporters of nudge theory have conceded that nudges may have overpromised in the past. A recent behavioural science “manifesto” argues that behavioural economists should “be humble” about limits of nudge theory. And in a 2021 updated edition of their famous book, Thaler and Sunstein – who never anticipated the phenomenal reach they achieved – argue that nudges are always part of the solution, but rarely the solution itself.

In the political sphere though, nudge theory will probably continue to prosper, as a way of gaining political capital from cheap solutions to difficult problems. For instance, the nudge of automatically enrolling UK workers into pension schemes (they have the right to opt out) has substantially increased the number of people saving for retirement, an ambition of both Labour and Conservative governments.

This policy uses a common type of nudge known as a “default option”, which relies on people’s tendency to accept the status quo. Before automatic enrolment, employers were still obliged to provide a pension scheme, but employees had to request access to it.

But even when nudged in this soft, almost passive way, people probably aren’t saving enough – mainly because they can’t afford to. Fundamental pension reform or a radical change to wealth distribution is politically challenging and expensive, whereas nudging workers into passive enrolment is not.

Nudges are also less controversial to the electorate than a new ban or mandate. A gentle push towards more environmentally friendly behaviour is likely to provoke less backlash among voters than a government ordering people to change the way they do things.

In this sense then, nudges remain useful political tools. They are cheap, and they neither ban nor mandate. And if they don’t work, it takes a while for voters to notice.

So perhaps nudges do not even need to work to continue to have a role in modern society, because politicians will always demand a tool like them for their political ends. It is an argument that could nudge nudging along for at least another 15 years.

Author: Jamie Mann, The Ferret

Just two communities have applied to take neglected land into public ownership since the Scottish Government launched the initiative more than five years ago, The Ferret has found.

Since 2018, communities have been able to bid for the compulsory purchase of land that is abandoned, neglected or detrimental to the local environment or area, meaning that ministers can force owners to sell, even if they have no plans to do so.

Local communities can apply for the right to buy neglected land and property including greenspaces, woodlands, retail and industrial units, churches, halls, lochs, bridges, canals and foreshores.

However, just two groups have attempted to do so, and neither were successful, according to official data. Community ownership campaigners said the initiative set “too high a bar” for applicants to get past. An overhaul is needed to make it work for communities, they argued.

To support land reform and help local communities to own and manage local land, right to buy legislation was introduced in Scotland in 2003. Local groups can apply to register an interest to buy land when it comes up for sale.

The right for communities to compulsorily purchase neglected land – subject to approval by ministers – was introduced in April 2018, but has attracted just three right to buy bids from two groups.

The Helensburgh Community Woodlands Group (HCWG) is one of the two applicants. In 2019, it made a case under the land reform act to acquire two woodlands in the west end of Helensburgh.

Andy Donald, a chartered engineer who joined the group in 2015, told The Ferret how the bid stemmed back to 2004, when a group of local residents formed HCWG to try and stop a landowner from turning woodlands at Cumberland Avenue and Castle Wood into housing.

After failing to get planning permission, the owner allegedly let the woods become overgrown by invasive species, felled trees without authorisation and neglected drainage ditches, which would flood nearby gardens and closes during heavy rain, HCWG claimed.

After the owners declined the group’s offer to buy the land, HCWG applied to ministers to force a right to compulsory purchase – a task that was not easy.

To demonstrate support, to group had to raise around £3,500 – later reimbursed by the government – to ballot some 2,000 homes, and repeatedly knock doors to ask locals to cast their vote. Their efforts paid off when the vote was overwhelmingly in favour.

It spent months working on 80-page applications for each woodland, alongside other documents. But “the biggest difficulty” was producing an accurate map of the area.

It took months for Registers of Scotland to review the map, which found that a narrow path and old fence at the end of a block of adjoining flats had been incorrectly included. Ministers classified the area as two land holdings – invalidating the application – and rejected the bid.

“You can imagine how we felt at the time,” said Donald. “It was a hell of a lot of work for it to be thrown out on a technicality that could have been easily addressed.” The application for Cumberland Avenue was also rejected by ministers, “but the decision was very difficult for us to interpret and accept,” he added.

Since buying the woodland, HCGW have, among other things, addressed the drainage ditches to stop nearby flooding, and begun removing invasive species.

Since buying the woodland, HCGW have, among other things, begun removing invasive species.

They have also made plans – and funding applications – to create a pond in collaboration with the local primary school, and an all-abilities path through the woods.

HCGW is now evolving from a group of campaigners, to a collection of community land managers. “The main challenge is that effectively as a group we’re taking ownership of land and we’re taking public money to buy it,” added Donald.

“So you really do feel obliged not just as a group but as individuals to stay the course. You’ve just got to be brave enough to do it.”

Barriers to right to buy

In addition to the right to buy neglected land, in April 2020, communities gained the right to bid to force the sale of land to further sustainable development. Just one local group has applied to do so – unsuccessfully – although a renewed bid is pending.

Community Land Scotland, which recently called on ministers to match land reform rhetoric with bolder action, slammed both initiatives.

“Fundamentally both the community right to buy abandoned, neglected and detrimental land and the right to buy for the furtherance of sustainable development are too high a bar for communities to get through,” said a spokesperson.

Right to buy is “a complex process that is made more challenging by the lack of land market regulation and a lack of land ownership transparency,” a spokesperson argued.

The group has proposed ways to help simplify the process for communities in its response to a consultation for the Scottish Government’s forthcoming land reform bill.

“The economic and social benefits of community ownership are undisputed, and communities are very interested in tackling difficult sites like those which this legislation applies to,” they added. “Finding ways of supporting more communities to buy land and buildings that are important to them is critical if we want a fairer society in Scotland.”

In 2022, campaigners told The Ferret that red tape, incomplete data and difficulties tracking down absentee landlords were barriers to the right to buy land in urban areas.

The process can be arduous, take many years, and cost thousands in legal fees, they said, and called for a process that is more straightforward and transparent, and less expensive and legally challenging.

Linda Gillespie, programme manager for the Community Ownership Support Service (COSS), said right to buy schemes “look fine on paper but in practice just aren’t practical or realistic for most communities to take advantage of.”

“The bar has been set too high for most communities to reach with loopholes for landowners who have allowed the land to fall into disuse and become a blight for the communities that have to live with it,” she added.

“It’s even harder for urban communities to make the case that land should be released in order to ‘further sustainable development’. Basically, the community right to buy framework needs an overhaul if it is going to be useful for urban communities.”

Labour MSP Mercedes Villalba argued that “Scotland’s archaic land ownership arrangements are unregulated, unfair and in need of radical overhaul”. 

“The path to community ownership must be simplified to address the stark inequality across the country and stop the super-rich hoarding land that should be run by community representatives and co-operatives for the benefit of everyone,” she said.

“My proposed Land Justice Bill introduces meaningful and transparent regulation to stop communities being kept in the dark over transfers of land in their area. 

“It also closes loopholes in the current right to buy legislation by allowing a public interest test on all holdings over 500 hectares – not just land proven to be ‘neglected’ – which would address any concerns communities have that vast swathes of land is not being held in the public interest.”

The Scottish Government said it provides support to community groups in their bids, can appoint and pay for a ballotter to gauge community support, pay to have the land valued, and help local groups through the right to buy process.

It said it encourages “any groups considering right to buy to contact the Community Land Team, who can provide guidance and help throughout the process.”

A government spokesperson added: “Our new Land Reform Bill aims to improve transparency of land ownership, help ensure large scale land holdings deliver in the public interest, and empower communities by providing more opportunities to own land and have more say in how land in their area is used.

“We are already investing in community land ownership via the Scottish Land Fund, which we recently increased to £11m per year.

Author: Kathie Griffiths, Oban Times

More than 12 businesses are on a waiting list for new units in Tobermory.

To help meet the big demand, a community project supporting business on the island has just secured up to £250,000 from Highlands and Islands Enterprise (HIE).

Mull and Iona Community Trust (MICT) is leading the £999.908 project, which is also being supported by the Scottish Government Regeneration Capital Grants Fund, administered by Argyll and Bute Council.

The funding means they can now  build four new units, each 90 square metres, and two new 100 square metre fenced compounds in the Nonhebel Park Estate for businesses wanting to expand, or for new start-up enterprises.

The park’s first phase was completed in 2020, with six business units, eight lock up units, fenced compounds and 20 self-storage units. Despite delays caused by the pandemic, all of this was fully occupied by March 2022, supporting 20 local businesses and 49 jobs.

Moray Finch, general manager of MICT said: “We now have the resources in place to build on the massive success of the first phase of Nonhebel Park, which achieved 100 per cent occupancy within two years of opening, despite the opening coinciding with the first lockdowns of the pandemic. We are confident that the effect of this support will further strengthen the sustainability of our community on Mull.”

And Morag Goodfellow, HIE’s area manager for Argyll and the Islands, added: “This is a great project by MICT that will enable local businesses to grow, support year-round local employment, and strengthen community resilience in a rural island location.”

Author: Zoe Halliday

Community Energy Scotland (CES) has expressed their deep disappointment today at the UK Government’s announcement of the new Community Energy Fund. The fund, which is only available in England, was announced by the Government as an alternative to allowing amendments to the Energy Bill that would have allowed community energy schemes across the UK to sell their clean, renewable power to local people – and provide a guaranteed price for their electricity. 

Following CES’s initial support for the amendments, as well as providing extensive input on what this fund should look like if they were not to go through, Community Energy Scotland have expressed their surprise and frustration both at the amendments being dropped and that the announced fund excludes Scotland, and have issued a call on the UK Government to rethink this decision.  

Community Energy Scotland calls on the UK government to commit to the inclusion of local energy trading through the Review of Electricity Markets Arrangements (REMA) and to commit a portion of the Community Energy Fund to the devolved nations in order to ensure that communities all across the UK can take advantage of the huge opportunities in energy and decarbonisation.  

Responding to the announcement, Community Energy Scotland’s CEO Zoë Holliday said;  

“The argument from the UK Government that this fund replaces the inclusion of the community energy amendments in the Energy Bill doesn’t hold up.  

“The proposed amendments in the Energy Bill would have had a positive impact for community energy groups across the UK, so it does not make any sense that any fund that is being launched instead of the amendments (or to act as a bridge until such time as regulations are improved for the better) applies only to England. 

“The potential for community renewable energy to benefit local economies is continuing to be blocked by unfair regulations; local communities are prevented from selling energy that they produce to local people and in turn tackling fuel poverty; increasing local resilience; and investing locally in communities. The impact of the Community Energy Fund will be trivial compared to the opportunities that communities could have had if these amendments went through.  

“While we appreciate and commend the Scottish Government’s consistent support for the CARES programme, any new additional funding in lieu of a UK wide change on legislation should be available to community groups across the UK, including our over 400 members in Scotland, either by allowing communities in Wales and Scotland to apply to the new Community Energy Fund or by allocating a certain proportion of this additional new money to be allocated to the devolved nations to distribute via their existing programmes.” 

Author: Severin Carrell , Guardian

Land reform campaigners have challenged claims that Scotland has to rely on multimillionaires spending up to £2bn on new forests and peatlands to rescue the country from the climate crisis.

An analysis by Community Land Scotland accuses NatureScot, the conservation agency, of using crude and unsubstantiated figures to call for a big increase in private funding to reforest the Highlands and uplands.

NatureScot and the Scottish Greens minister Lorna Slater announced in March that they had signed a deal with private financiers to leverage up to £2bn in loans over the next decade to help fund an expansion in new forestry and peatland restoration.

They argued that investment could plant 185,000 hectares (457,000 acres) of woodland to store about 28m tonnes of CO2 over the next 30 years – a figure equivalent to half Scotland’s annual CO2 emissions.

To the alarm of conservation groups and land reformers, the deal will involve a small private bank in Edinburgh and two investment firms, Palladium and Lombard Odier, which hope to profit from their loans by selling carbon credits based on the carbon sequestrated by the new woodlands and restored peatland.

The private bank, Hampden, said it was unlikely to reveal the identities of its clients who invest in these funds. The memorandum of understanding it signed with NatureScot has detailed clauses requiring secrecy on the projects’ finances.

NatureScot officials are adamant these investments will be carefully designed, in collaboration with local people, in consultation with the land reform agency the Scottish Land Commission, and in strict accordance with a charter on “high integrity” carbon investments released by the Scottish government.

Brendan Turvey, NatureScot’s low carbon manager, said the scale of the challenge to fund the peatland and woodland restoration was so great it was akin to “a national emergency”.

“We’ve no option but to embrace new financial models to meet these targets. There’s not enough public money, full stop, to deliver all the things we need to do to get to net zero,” he said. “We need to act now if these are to help us get to net zero by 2045.”

One study estimated the cost of restoring all Scotland’s damaged peatlands, which release carbon as they dry out and degrade, was between £3bn and £4bn over the next 10 years. NatureScot had only been given £250m to do so. Scotland was also far off hitting a target to plant 20,000 hectares of new woodland every year.

“We have not moved at the pace we need to move at: as the reality of climate change has become more obvious, we’re now trying to pick up the pace,” Turvey said.

The analysis for Community Land Scotland by Jon Hollingdale, a forestry consultant, said in reality it would reinforce Scotland’s highly unequal land ownership patterns and enrich existing land owners, while undermining the case for better use of subsidies and taxation to fund nature restoration.

Ailsa Raeburn, the chair of Community Land Scotland, said private finance may have a role to play but said it was essential “we understand any upsides and the downsides to utilising large scale private finance and, in an unregulated environment, we guard against a rush to monetise Scotland’s natural assets which risks leaving its people and communities behind”.

NatureScot’s green finance figures are based on estimates published in October 2021 by the Green Finance Institute (GFI), a London-based thinktank, that the UK faces a “green finance gap” of between £44bn and £97bn on all nature investments over the next decade, if it intends to reach net zero by 2050.

The GFI report said that was the gap between how much the UK’s central and devolved governments plan to spend on forestry, peatland restoration and rewilding, compared with the amount actually needed to reach their forestry and peatland restoration targets. The central estimate, it said, was a finance gap of £56bn for the UK as a whole.

For Scotland, that gap was estimated by GFI to be about £20bn – a figure cited repeatedly by NatureScot and Slater in their official announcements, and since embraced by landowners’ organisations.

The agency said in March its pilot projects would focus on a proposed collaborative reforestation project in the Scottish Borders known as the Wild Heart expansion project, beginning in spring 2023, and an as yet unspecified project to restore remnants of the Atlantic rainforest on Scotland’s west coast. Turvey said those projects would test whether this finance model was viable.

NatureScot had to correct the memorandum of understanding after wrongly claiming the Scottish Land Commission, which is an independent body, was on the oversight board. And its timetables are already slipping. There is no agreement yet between NatureScot and the Wild Heart project to leverage the £200m to £300m in private financing the agency said is available for spending there.

Hollingdale said the figures used by GFI and NatureScot to justify that £20bn and the £2bn private finance target were based on a series of faulty assumptions. He said GFI’s estimates wrongly included the cost of buying the land needed to plant forests and resuscitate degraded peatlands.

Most of those would be carried out by existing landowners, he said. If investors bought land specifically for carbon sequestration, that land would be a financial asset, not a cost. He estimated that if buying the land was taken out of the equation, the actual finance gap for woodland would be roughly 30% of the figure given by GFI – a gap which could be met by government subsidies.

NatureScot’s statement in March that the £2bn investment would store 28m tonnes of carbon were also deeply flawed, according to Hollingdale. To reach that figure within 30 years would require a large amount of planting in the next few years, because broadleaf trees take decades to store CO2 in significant amounts.

Rhian-Mari Thomas, GFI’s chief executive, said its 2021 report was the first attempt to quantify the finance gap, using “best estimates”. She added: “We naturally welcome third-party efforts to build on the data and contribute to this important body of work.”