Author: Martin Sime SCVO

BARELY a day goes by without new revelations about the crisis in social care. Across the UK, national and local governments are struggling to cope with growing demand and rising costs at a time of budget cuts and public sector austerity. Something has to give.

Here in Scotland, care is big business. Billions of pounds are spent on adult social care and many thousands of staff are employed by local authorities, charities and private companies to deliver services to people who need help to live as independently as possible. Social care services are a lifeline for many people.

The case for reform is urgent. Each year more people are assessed as needing social care support, at least in part because we are all living longer and our population is ageing. But the debate about what to do for the future has hardly started since crisis management is the order of the day. Finding more money for social care may sound like an answer but raising taxes and charges is unlikely ever to be enough.

Over the next decade our demography and rising life expectancy will outstrip what any government or taxpayers could reasonably offer. Estimates suggest that soon every school leaver would be needed for the care industry. That was before Brexit threatened to reduce the workforce. It’s clear that more of the same won’t do.

A good starting point for the future is that care is personal. It’s what people feel they need that matters most. There is a growing coalition that believes that personalised, person-centred and self-directed are the principles which ought to prevail in the future. The nanny state needs to retreat.

Care is also social. We could build a rather different system from the bottom up which enhances and supports the role friends, relatives and neighbours could play. A stronger society will be better equipped to cope with the future of social care and, one way or another, we will all have to take some responsibility for that. More needs to be done at the prevention end of social care, helping people to stay active and independent for as long as possible.

An entire generation of recently retired people could be encouraged to help with community transport, lunch clubs, care and repair projects, befriending schemes and much else. These need to become the bedrock of our future system rather than the afterthought they are at present.

Of course, some people will still need professional support and formal social care services. Reform is needed elsewhere so these vital services are not jeopardised. A new slimmed-down bureaucracy based on a single assessment formula and aligned with social security would also help.

At the very least it would be fairer and transparent; people who need social care might even understand their rights rather better than at present. The biggest challenge to more self-directed social care is psychological. People will need to be convinced that taking personal responsibility is right and doable for them, their families and their friends.

They will need trusted support and access to information and independent advocacy. Various vested interests will need to be convinced that jobs and budgets cannot be guaranteed. Politicians and regulators will need to recognise that all human interactions involve degrees of risk but enabling people to make judgments for themselves is the right thing to do.

The big message is that helping ourselves and helping each other are two sides of the same coin. We know from pioneering work by people with long-term conditions that self and mutual help really does work.

With modest investment, these community networks reduce demand on formal services, including the NHS. If more people can come together to meet their social care needs in a similar way then everybody wins.

Our public services need to adapt to the demands of a much changed world, including a greater expectation that people want more control over their own lives and more say over what is done for them.

As a country we surely want to live within our means. A more personal and sustainable approach to social care needs to be at the front and centre of that ambition. There is no Plan B.

Author: Scottish Government

World-leading vision for land rights and responsibilities takes shape.

People can have their say on the shape of the future of ownership, management and use of land and buildings in Scotland.

The Scottish Government is today opening a consultation on the Land Rights and Responsibilities Statement, which will underpin a range of Scottish Government strategies related to land rights and responsibilities.

It will support a commitment to build a fairer society in Scotland and promote environmental sustainability, economic prosperity and social justice.

The statement is also likely to have a significant impact on the work of the new Scottish Land Commission which becomes operational in April.

Cabinet Secretary for Land Reform Roseanna Cunningham said:

“The Land and Rights and Responsibilities Statement is a world-leading undertaking, which will be central to the Government’s commitment to long-term land reform.

“Land reform is concerned with both urban and rural communities and impacts on every single person in Scotland.  This consultation will give everyone the opportunity to shape the future of our land to create a fairer and more prosperous nation.

“Our vision is that the ownership, management and use of land and buildings in Scotland should contribute to the collective benefit of the people of Scotland. A fair, inclusive and productive system of land rights and responsibilities should deliver greater public benefits and promote economic, social and cultural rights.

“Moreover, the Statement will be the basis for a strong and consistent vision running through Government policy and the work of the new Scottish Land Commission.”

Further details about the consultation are available online: click here

Author: Greg Russell, The Herald

Extraordinary details have emerged in the story of the young Nazi prisoner of war who left £400,000 in his will to the village of Comrie.

Heinrich Steinmeyer, a former Waffen SS soldier known as Heinz, fell in love with the Perthshire village after friends there sneaked him out through a hole in the fence of the POW camp he was held in and dressed him in a borrowed school uniform to take him to his first cinema show.

Steinmeyer was captured in France when he was 19, and was held in a POW camp at Cultybraggan near Comrie.

Such were the friendships he made as a POW and afterwards that he left his entire estate – worth nearly £400,000 – to the people of the village when he died in 2014. The money has now been released to Comrie Development Trust (CDT) after lengthy negotiations with German legal authorities, and it has launched a consultation on how it should be spent.

Steinmeyer, who lived in Scotland after the war and often visited Comrie, died a fortnight after George Carson, a close friend he had made in the village. Steinmeyer had his ashes scattered in Comrie.

Carson’s son, also George, told The Sunday Herald the German had decided years ago where he wanted his money to go after his death.

“Heinz set up the arrangement for his will in 2008 with the CDT,” said Carson, who also recounted the secretive trip to the cinema. “The story is absolutely true – he didn’t go back to Germany after the war and used to visit my parents and they discussed it many times then.

“They had been blethering to Heinz through the chain-link fence and they decided to sneak him out one Saturday, all dressed in school uniforms, which they thought would be a good disguise.

 “My mum took my uncle’s school uniform up to the camp and they got him out through a hole in the fence. Then they got him dressed in a Morrison’s Academy uniform and they all cycled along the back road from Comrie to Crieff to the cinema.

“Heinz had never seen a moving picture or anything like this before and was absolutely blown away by it. He was from a very poor background in Silesia [now part of Poland] where he was an apprentice butcher before he went into the army.”

Carson dismisses talk of the village accepting “Nazi money”, which he said undermined the kindness shown by Steinmeyer.

“Young Heinrich wasn’t any different from us. He was just conditioned by the environment he lived in, his family and peer group. In the same way our soldiers thought when they put on their uniforms, he thought he was doing the right thing.

“It wasn’t until he came to the camp in Comrie that he appreciated the different aspects of the world and the people in it. It was such a life-changing time for him that his ashes are scattered here and he’s left all his worldly goods to the elderly in the village.”

He added: “Heinz just wanted to say ‘thank you’ to everybody who helped him here – it was an enormous token of kindness.”

Alexander Reid, from CDT, said Steinmeyer’s was an amazing story of personal friendship and appreciation, which would benefit the people of Comrie.

“Throughout his captivity, Heinrich Steinmeyer was very struck by the kindness shown to him Scottish people, which he had not expected,” he said.

“After the war, he visited Comrie and made lasting friendships in the village. He vowed to leave everything he owned for the benefit of older people in the place he wanted to thank.

“Mr Steinmeyer always maintained he was lucky to be captured by the Scots. Part of his will, reads, ‘Herewith, I would like to express my gratitude to the people of Scotland for the kindness and generosity that I have experienced in Scotland during my imprisonment of war and hereafter’.”

Reid said that executing the will and the sale of the German’s property involved a “complex and very lengthy process”, but he added: “However, €457180 – £384,000 – has been transferred to a special Heinrich Steinmeyer Legacy Fund, set up by Comrie Development Trust as a separate account, and to be used exclusively to provide for local developments for older people, suggested by older people.

“Heinrich wanted to express his deep gratitude for the way he was treated as a prisoner and for his time working in Scotland after the war.

“Heinrich’s personal history is an amazing story of friendship and appreciation, and people in Comrie will both honour and benefit from his legacy.”

Author: Scotsman

Campaigners have been making waves with a water-borne protest against plans for a major salmon farm expansion in a pioneering marine conservation area off Arran.

Environmentalists and concerned members of the local community jumped aboard boats and kayaks to demonstrate their opposition to the proposals, which they have branded “short-sighted and unsustainable”. They claim increasing the size of the scheme will pose an unacceptable threat to wild sea life from deadly diseases and parasites, greater use of chemical treatments and a rising tide of fish sewage.

COAST’s Andrew Binnie asks, ‘What is the point of community supported Marine Protected Areas, the Government’s Community Empowerment and proposed Islands Acts if the locals are ignored at the first sign of short-term financial gain? People on Arran and in many other West coast communities want to be at the heart of long-term sustainable and imaginative development. Unsolicited fish farm applications are a distraction. These farms are undermining community aspirations for revived and healthy seas that support a more resilient marine economy’.

The Scottish Salmon Company (SSC), an internationally owned fish farming firm, has applied to the Scottish Environment Protection Agency for permission to increase the scale of its operation in Lamlash Bay. The farm’s open-pen cages are situated within the newly designated South Arran marine protected area (MPA) and close to Scotland’s first ever no take zone – an area where fishing is banned to protect important marine species. The SSC, registered in Norway, operates 40 fish farms around Scotland and accounts for around a fifth of the country’s salmon production.

Now bosses want to increase the depth of cages and up the number of salmon they rear in the bay by 50 per cent.But campaigners have condemned the move, claiming it will contaminate the local marine environment. The protest comes just days after SSC reported a quarterly loss in profits due to “exceptional” numbers of fish deaths and biological challenges. Andrew Binnie, executive director of Community of Arran Seabed Trust, the conservation group behind Lamlash Bay’s no take zone, says locals will do everything in their power to block the plan. “We will pursue all available options to prevent this unwelcome expansion,” he said. The group insists it is “not compatible” with the conservation and restoration of globally important marine features in the MPA, such as maerl beds and seagrass meadows. Stuart Turner, of Lamlash Improvements Association, added: “Our government is jeopardising our natural resources by allowing multinational fish farms to expand within protected areas.”  Barbara L’Anson, from volunteer group Arran Eco Savvy Community, says members will be “disappointed” if official consent is granted. Politicians and campaign groups along Scotland’s west coast have also lent their support to the protest. Scottish Green MSP Ross Greer said: “This application could have dire consequences for the MPA network as a whole and that is why I will be pushing the government to call in this decision so that it can be reviewed and given the attention it deserves.”

The Scottish Government has said it will consider calling in the application to be decided by ministers. A decision is expected in the next few days. A spokesman for SSC said: “We are committed to sustainability and take our environmental responsibilities very seriously. Our focus is long-term sustainable development and we are sensitive to the different environmental conditions specific to each of our sites, working to stringent industry best practice.”

Author: Healthy'n'Happy Development Trust

Yet again our poorest communities are being let down

This proposal from South Lanarkshire Council is undoubtedly wrong on every level. It will result in loss of vital local services to our most vulnerable citizens, to our most deprived communities and will lead to a significant loss of employment and life changing volunteering opportunities for local residents.

The rationale for these proposed cuts to our most deprived communities is fundamentally flawed.

•          It is based on wrong and misleading information.

•          It incorrectly suggests that there will be no impact.

•          It demonstrates a complete lack of understanding of how critical Tackling Poverty funding has been in attracting extra monies into local communities.

•          It shows a complete disregard for a long standing partner organisation.

•          It apparently takes no account of the likely increased costs and burden for social services and the NHS.

Our work helps to save and improve lives. It strives to make our towns and neighbourhoods better places to live and this work is imminently at risk.  We are extremely concerned about what effect these proposals will have on our most vulnerable residents and on our communities, families, neighbours and friends. 

These proposals are risking up to £1.6 million being brought directly into Cambuslang and Rutherglen over the next 2 years.

We will work tirelessly for however long it takes and exhaust all avenues to bring to everyone’s attention just how much damage this could cause to local communities and residents.

The proposals inform Councillors “that these organisations have access to a range of other funding sources and also have healthy balance sheets with a level of reserves that will allow continuation of the service…. representing a 12.1% decrease to their budgeted income” 

This claim of a proposed 12% cut is misleading. It is in fact a cut of 100% Tackling Poverty funding to Healthy n Happy and all of this when we have the shameful situation of poverty rising and poverty bringing families, adults and even children to crisis point every day. It is also misleading to claim that we have any continuation funding. We do not. Over the past few years South Lanarkshire Council have withdrawn £50,000 (100%) of core funding to Healthy n Happy. We took those cuts to our core funding with a dignified and professional silence. We cannot in these circumstances accept the consequences and impact of these recommendations in silence. This is the most serious funding threat we have ever experienced, in a time where supporting our communities is more crucial than ever. Local agencies need to make savings that don’t make poverty worse and invest Scottish Government funding where it matters most, at the heart of our communities.

Healthy n Happy does not have funds in reserve to enable continuation of services funded by Tackling Poverty. We cannot stress with more clarity that these services will stop if this funding is withdrawn. Tackling Poverty funding, awarded to Councils by Scottish Government, is critical and it allows us to attract other funding directly into Cambuslang and Rutherglen and to support our work. Without this range of funding the work of Healthy n Happy will be completely undermined.

It is alarming to us, as a provider of vital local services, that South Lanarkshire Council are making financial decisions that impact on the poorest and most vulnerable in our community. The proposed cuts in Healthy n Happy funding is based purely on a flawed assumption and a reserve figure that has not been investigated properly. An assumption the council never consulted us on in advance of their recommendation to withdraw 100% of funding support.

We have faced many funding challenges through the years but this is the most serious threat we have ever experienced by a long way.  Did the authors of these proposals stop to think how much pain could be caused to local residents? This is people’s lives we are talking about, the lives of their families, friends and neighbours. Yet again our poorest communities are being let down.

South Lanarkshire Council has been advising and supporting us for years to be business-like and we have followed this advice to the point where just this year we were the only Scottish charity shortlisted and we won a UK wide award for excellent governance.

Their comments on our current financial position now completely contradict their own advice and suggest that we should dump our business-like approach and use our reserves to replace Scottish Government funding. This is effectively asking trustees of this charity to run down our reserves even further and threaten closure of the charity. It is by default also asking the charity Trustees to effectively breach charity regulations. This is deplorable.

We know from our work that all 12 Councillors in Cambuslang and Rutherglen along with our MP and MSP work exceptionally hard to make our society better and our two towns better places to live. However, local Councillors have been advised by officers who have got this proposal badly wrong. The rationale for these proposed cuts to our poorest communities is fundamentally flawed and misleading. We trust that our Elected Members will make the right decision once they have the full information they need.

For further information about this press release please contact:

Brendan Rooney, Executive Director, Healthy n Happy Community Development Trust on 0141 646 0123 or brendan@healthynhappy.org.uk

Author: The Guardian

Coastal towns often face higher levels of inequality, lower wages and higher unemployment than other parts of the UK. The top five areas voting to leave the EU were all coastal communities in Essex, East Anglia and Lincolnshire. Dumfries and Galloway, on the west coast of Scotland, voted to remain but only by a slim margin.

In Portpatrick, a local seaside village, tiers of pastel houses stretch down to a small harbour where boats are moored. The place is so picture-postcard pretty, it’s hard to imagine that the harbour was almost left to rot – and with it, the future of the village – until local residents raised enough money a year ago to buy it.

As the closest port to Northern Ireland, Portpatrick was once the main crossing to Donaghadee. But over time the ocean smashed away two grand piers as well as Portpatrick’s future as a transport hub. When the crossing moved to nearby Stranraer, sailor numbers dwindled. Villagers knew that to get them back, they needed to improve the harbour with modern moorings and improved toilet facilities while keeping its charm, or risk losing precious tourist revenue to competing harbours up and down the coast.

The harbour’s private owners, Portpatrick Harbour Ltd, had applied in 2007 to build a 57-berth marina and fix pontoons to the listed harbour floor. Councillors quashed the plans, saying it was “completely inappropriate for the conservation of the area”. Locals then looked for a way to bring the harbour into community ownership where it could be maintained and improved in keeping with the village. They formed a trust, and by 2012 the villagers had reached an agreement with the owners to buy it for £350,000, financed through money from a local windfarm and a £125,000 loan from the owners themselves, which had to be repaid by 2015.

Banks and other lending institutions had balked at lending the trust the money to repay the loan for a harbour that had, since its purchase, been valued at only £75,000. And because it needed to finance debt, the trust wasn’t eligible for government grants or other types of non-profit funding like the marine coastal communities fund set up by Danny Alexander, then deputy treasurer in the coalition government, to address the desperate plight of declining seaside towns.

When Calum Currie, an offshore oil technician born and bred in the village, joined the trust in December 2014, he realised there was no way the community would be able to pay back the loan by the deadline. Currie sent a letter round calling locals to the village hall for an extraordinary general meeting. In January 2015, 160 people gathered to discuss what to do next.

Currie contacted Community Shares Scotland (CSS) – a scheme funded by the Big Lottery Fund Scotland and Carnegie UK Trust. He hoped Portpatrick Trust might be eligible to become Scotland’s first community benefits society, which would allow it to sell shares in the harbour to secure it into community ownership.

Kelly McIntyre, programme director of CSS, advised Currie to mobilise locals to buy shares to save the harbour. Emails were sent to regular visitors. Shops and stores advertised the share sale to tourists. The launch date was set for the annual folk festival in September, when the harbour would likely be full.

Robert Erskine, a lifeboat coxswain at Portpatrick since 1984, was among those going between the boats at the festival selling shares in the harbour for a minimum of £25. Each shareholder got one vote, no matter how many shares they bought. This key difference from other kinds of ownership structures prevents large investors from taking over. But few investors buy community shares to make money or wrest control. “A lot of people bought shares for their grandchildren,” Erskine says. “It made people feel part of the community.”

In just three weeks, Portpatrick had raised enough money to save the harbour, with the 554 shareholders coming from as far away as Canada and Bermuda. Currie was elected chair of the Portpatrick Harbour Community Benefit Society. “Without community shares we would have been dead in the water,” he says. “The financial benefits of the community share sale allowed us to find a future when there were no other avenues open to us.”

In Scotland’s more remote communities, radical action has a rich history. “Many Scottish communities are remote enough that they’ve just got to get on and find a way to make things happen,” says McIntyre. These projects aren’t always in response to budget cuts, but the result of positive changes in the way people look at community ownership, according to Jim Metcalf, head of practice at Carnegie UK. “Communities are finding ways to fund things that would have never happened without public support,” he says.

The community shares network runs parallel with an active Scottish community land movement, which started not long after the Isle of Eigg Heritage Trust was formed in 1997 to save the island from centuries of absentee landlords. The Scottish government got its Community Land Act through Holyrood earlier this year and has recently allocated £10m a year until 2020 to support communities trying to invest in land buyouts.

Holyrood has also bolstered asset buyouts with a Community Empowerment Act, passed last year, to help people take control of local assets assets when council resources fall short. Portpatrick wanted to use the act to acquire a strip of overgrown wasteland by the harbour to tidy it up and turn it into a picnic area. But the act was so new that the council didn’t have the paperwork. So Currie negotiated directly with them instead. “We said that we’re not the kind for hanging around, and – fair play to them – they worked with us,” he says.

By employing members of the community, the benefits society has turned the wasteland into freshly mown lawn and installed new moorings in the harbour. It is negotiating with the council to take over the running of some communal toilets and to modernise facilities.

Currie dreams of fixing up the village hall using the money earned from mooring fees; expected to be £20,000 this financial year. “What better way to save your community hall than off the back of your harbour. Together the two of them are stronger, and we could go on to save something else,” he says.

With each small improvement, the society must make sure the harbour is running a profit, so shareholders can get their money back if they want it. “Now we know the harbour won’t get spoiled or used for some individual’s private gain,” Currie says.

A year on from the share offer, Portpatrick is becoming the poster child for community action. Currie has been invited to give evidence to Scottish parliamentary committees about community ownership models. Kevin Stewart, the SNP minister for local government and housing, sees the harbour as part of a broader movement of local residents doing things for themselves.

“Portpatrick shows how a community can take control of its own future,” he says. “Handing decision-making to local people, especially in choosing local spending priorities, is exactly the type of activity we want to see more of.”

Not-for-profit organisations are also watching closely. “The Portpatrick Harbour Community Benefit Society is an inspiration. It is this kind of new political and economic energy that is needed to reverse years of neglect and decline,” says Fernanda Balata, project lead on coastal and marine environment at the New Economics Foundation thinktank. Nef is putting together the Blue New Deal, which advises coastal communities across the UK that lack funding and are looking for other means to help themselves.

Currie says that for the communities at the heart of the movement, it’s not all about the money. “For the community to have control of the harbour and for everyone to have a voice, that’s priceless,” he says.

Author: Andy Wightman MSP

In my view, organisations such as those represented here (SCVO) need to start  – and I know some have been doing this for some time – scaling up their level of engagement by going beyond the policy papers and the briefings to draft their own legislation – to engage in creative activism, subversive democracy, transparency initiatives and the unmasking of corporate power that will challenge the often complacent process of public policy-making and inject a bit of risk, danger, excitement and creative energy. Which leads me to some recommendations as to how we can deepen and strengthen democracy, hold power to account and create a new more local, engaging and relevant political debate.

1.            My first suggestion is therefore the establishment of a co-operative that will engage a network of trainers to deliver a series of modules and courses in creative activism, radical democracy, legislative expertise and para-parliamentary activity to communities, NGOs and others to empower them to engage and to pre-empt the conventional political processes of local and national governments and legislatures. We need a wiki-politics for Scotland.

2.            My second suggestion is to transform local democracy, to create in Scotland an exemplary framework of democratic engagement as close to the citizen as possible with real economic, fiscal and political power exercised at locality level. Again, Stephen (Maxwell) had much to say on this throughout his life and this remains substantial unfinished business.

3.            My third suggestion is to deepen economic democracy – for example by revitalising the mutual, co-operative and social enterprise sector – a sector that has and continues to deliver remarkable results but which remains still in the shadows. And we should be bold here too. For example, there will be a Bill this Parliament to complete the devolution of forestry. But Scotland is missing its targets for forestry expansion. What role might there be for a Scottish Forestry Co-op that could engage hundreds of thousands of people in a substantial programme of reforestation? Energy is the other obvious area in which this can and should be done and there are current good examples of this.

4.            My fourth suggestion is that however we move forward on local democracy, we need, just as Westminster and Holyrood have, a fiscal framework to govern the financial relations between Holyrood and local government and to provide predictability and clarity around fiscal transfers and powers. We need to get beyond the politics of the council tax freeze – a policy promoted by national politicians in the past who had no power or authority to deliver and had to effectively hold local government to ransom to implement it. This is a policy which, as I noted earlier, would be illegal in Germany.

5.            My fifth suggestion is to extend transparency in all areas of public life. To open up to free public inspection, for example, the registers of landownership and to create a public portal of information on all aspects of our land and environment so that there are no secrets anymore about the distribution of power and influence exercised over land ownership and use. Going further, I would require all public officials to publish their tax returns, to open to public inspection all bank accounts with balances of over, say £100,000, and to free up data by, for example removing Crown Copyright from our national mapping agency. The new economy will be built on information and data and it should as far as possible be made freely available to the citizen.

6.            My final suggestion is one you can all take up immediately. And that is to engage with the recently established Commission on Parliamentary Reform. This is the first substantial review of the workings of the Parliament and of how it might engage better with the people of Scotland whom it serves.

Author: Douglas Robertson, Stirling University writing in Bella Caledonia

 To read Douglas Robertson’s paper click here

Author: Yellow Book

Following the independent review of the Scottish planning system, the Scottish Government commissioned a team led by Yellow Book to carry out a research study into the barriers to community engagement in planning. To complete the research they  are conducting an online survey which will help us to test some of the ideas and key messages emerging from the review. We would be very grateful if you could:

(i) follow the link to complete the survey by Friday 23rd December 2016, and

(ii) forward the link to other people in your community and/or professional network – the more people who take part the better.

Author: Malcolm Fraser

Scotland could tackle its housing crisis with a serious effort to repair and renew existing urban infrastructure, especially in town centres, according to one of Scotland’s top architects.

Outlining his vision for housing in a new report, award-winning architect Malcolm Fraser discourages the idea that the housing crisis can be tackled through high-volume, low-quality new builds in the suburbs.

Fraser details a plan to reinvigorate run-down town centres through enhanced efforts to repair and renew Scotland’s 34,000 empty homes; lobby Westminster for the reduction of VAT on repairs; allow local authorities to compulsorily purchase vacant sites cheaply; and introduce a land value tax or derelict land tax to encourage development and reduce land speculation.

In the report called ‘Housekeeping Scotland: A Discussion Paper outlining a New Agenda for Housing’, published today by the Common Weal think-tank, Fraser argues that a major cause of the current housing crisis was the ideological pursuit of mortgage-backed and privately owned homes.

He said: “The United Kingdom’s housing policies have been ideologically-driven, and have led to the current crisis of strangled investment, under-provision and a general flow of power and money from civic society to the wealthy.”

Fraser, who also chaired and authored the Scottish Government’s 2013 Town Centre Review, added: “UK housing has suffered greatly from its politicians’ fixation with a single form of home and tenure, the mortgage-backed and privately-owned home.  But it is clear that, even if it was desirable to only have this orthodox model (which it is not), not everyone is going to get a mortgage;  and it is also clear that the ideological pursuit of this helped poison, and nearly bring down, the world economy, as well as being a key contributor to our current housing crisis.

“While Scotland has shown some appetite for broadening our housing horizons it needs to set out a clear agenda for achieving a diverse and sustainable market, that suits all incomes and interests while providing the shelter that is a fundamental right for all.”

A range of measures are advocated in order to achieve this, including:

•             Enhanced efforts to repair and renew Scotland’s 34,000 empty homes;

•             Lobby Westminster for reduction of VAT on repairs;

•             Allow local authorities to compulsory purchase order vacant sites cheaply

•             Introduce a land value tax or derelict land tax to encourage development and reduce land speculation;

•             A new financing model for the building of public rental housing;

•             Increased value put on high-quality construction apprenticeships;

•             The building of homes based on using the best of Scotland’s natural resources and homes that are desirable to live in and built to last

•             A “Central Housing Unit” to co-ordinate and provide leadership to disparate government housing initiatives.

Fraser, commenting on the paper, stated: “We all know we need to provide more homes, but to do this we need to think more creatively about where they might come from. Our proposal suggests more care for our existing stock, including more of Scotland’s 34,000 long-term empty homes repaired, more new homes in the hearts of our existing communities supporting their schools and services, and a reinvigorated and re-financed public rental sector (good new council housing, please!) alongside imaginative new private models. Our model also looks at using tax more creatively, how we should concentrate on the simple qualities that build good communities and how to entice young people into the building trades.”

Robin McAlpine, Common Weal director, said of the report: “Malcolm Fraser is a visionary architect and a respected thinker on how we should build and indeed how we should live together.

“Housing very often comes up as one of people’s top priorities when they’re asked about what government should be doing, but too often the agenda is set by so-called volume housebuilders who simply want permission for more and more low quality new build.

“What is so valuable about this report is that it asks what a proper, integrated vision for housing and urban development in Scotland would look like if the policy was designed for people who live in houses rather than people who make profits out of building them.

“Any report which concludes that designing the places our children play so they are bathed with sunlight is more important than a quick buck is a report that people should read.”

Phil Prentice, chief officer of Scotland’s Towns Partnership, welcomed the report, stating. “The last 10 years has seen Scotland position itself very differently from Westminster in that it has social justice at the heart of all policy.

“This report by Malcolm Fraser highlights how creating Place and Communities using strategic housing investment in town centres delivers on social justice, economic growth, community and importantly on sustainability and the environment.

“Scotland is a nation of towns with two medium sized cities so it is what we do in towns that will ultimately determine our social and economic success. Our towns are facing complex challenges and I believe that this new thinking, alongside Scottish Government policy such as Town Centre First, can be a driver to deliver a relatively simple but effective solution.

“Take Kilmarnock, last year it was awarded Scotland’s Most Improved Town – five former town centre retail sites were developed for almost 200 new council homes and the Council HQ moved almost 900 staff into a former Whisky Bond in the town centre. The resulting footfall lifted the fortunes of the town and these new communities were given fresh hope.”