A community-owned renewable energy project has reached a crucial milestone with the submission of detailed planning application to Highland council.

The project, which has been jointly developed by two Edinburgh-based community organisations, aims to generate clean, renewable energy, contributing to Scottish Government efforts to tackle climate change.

The two wind turbines at the heart of the project will also generate a financial return that will be shared between local community organisations near the project and the non-profit groups that developed the initiative, Greener Leith and PEDAL Portobello.

Charlotte Encombe, Greener Leith Chair said: “Volunteers from both Greener Leith and PEDAL Portobello have invested hundreds of volunteer hours to get the project to this stage, fundraising, managing contractors and meeting with local community groups.

“All the environmental studies on the site show that our community-owned wind project will have little impact on the surrounding area, and unlike most commercial energy developments, this project will provide a significant financial return to support community-led initiatives in the local area as well as in Leith and Portobello.”

The project is currently 95% owned by two Edinburgh-based community groups Greener Leith and PEDAL Portobello. A number of community organisations local to the project have already been approached by volunteers from the project, and offered the opportunity to invest in the project.

Eva Schonveld, PEDAL Portobello Chair said: “Whilst community groups close to the project are already guaranteed to receive annual community benefit payments from the project, we are also able to offer non-profit organisations in the local area the opportunity to invest in the project directly too.”

“All over Scotland, renewable energy projects like this are generating resources for community groups that can help them revitalise their areas, whilst simultaneously tackling climate change and UK dependence on fossil fuels from foreign countries.

“We’re really excited about reaching this important milestone in our project and keen to start playing a part in the community-owned renewable energy revolution.”

Should the project receive planning permission, construction of the wind turbines is expected to begin in 2015.

Author: GWSF

For a copy of the report  – Still Transforming Communities – click here

Forward by Harry Burns, Professor of Global Public Health,Strathclyde University

For many years, I have been promoting the importance of asset based approaches and the health benefits that come from people having control over the decisions that affect their lives. Because of this, I am delighted to have been asked to write a foreword for this brochure produced by the Glasgow and West of Scotland Forum, which represents 63 community controlled housing associations.

CCHAs are voluntary organisations which operate in many of the areas of the West of Scotland where social and economic outcomes are poor. They are run by local people and work in discrete geographic areas providing and maintaining affordable housing and, more generally, improving the community and providing opportunities for local people.

CCHAs are a real success story. For more than 40 years, local residents have been responsible for major building programmes, owning and maintaining significant housing and community assets, and taking strategic decisions about creating sustainable communities. Glasgow would look completely different were it not for the initial pioneers (the residents who challenged the wholescale destruction of communities and imagined a different way forward through the improvement of their neighbourhoods) and their successors, who have tirelessly sustained their approach. The landmark

Victorian tenements in much of the inner city would not be here – and the streets that people ran and cycled through during the 2014 Commonwealth Games would have been decidedly less photogenic.

Local residents in CCHAs took control of local assets long before we all started talking about asset based approaches, the Christie Commission, co-production and community empowerment. But there can be no doubt that they demonstrate the characteristics that we now aspire to in Scotland and have been doing this successfully since the early 1970s.

This is a story that is well worth telling. And we can all learn from the powerful change that can come from giving residents the opportunity to take the important decisions about what happens in their area. 

Author: George Monbiot, The Guardian, Tuesday 18 November 2014

Growth: the destructive god that can never be appeased

Another crash is coming. We all know it, now even David Cameron acknowledges it. The only questions are what the immediate catalyst will be, and when it begins.

You can take your pick. The Financial Times reported yesterday thatChina now resembles the US in 2007. Domestic bank loans have risen 40% since 2008, while “the ability to repay that debt has deteriorated dramatically”. Property prices are falling and the companies that run China’s shadow banking system provide “virtually no disclosure” of their liabilities. Just two days ago the G20 leaders announced that growth in China “is robust and is becoming more sustainable”. You can judge the value of their assurances for yourself.

Housing bubbles in several countries, including Britain, could pop any time. A report in September revealed that total world debt (public and private) is 212% of GDP. In 2008, when it helped cause the last crash, it stood at 174%. The Telegraph notes that this threatens to cause“renewed financial crisis … and eventual mass default”. Shadow banking has gone beserk, stocks appear to be wildly overvalued, the eurozone is bust again. Which will blow first?

Or perhaps it’s inaccurate to describe this as another crash. Perhaps it’s a continuation of the last one, the latest phase in a permanent cycle of crisis exacerbated by the measures (credit bubbles, deregulation, the curtailment of state spending) that were supposed to deliver uninterrupted growth. The system the world’s governments have sought to stabilise is inherently unstable; built on debt, fuelled by speculation, run by sharks.

If it goes down soon, as Cameron fears, in a world of empty coffers and hobbled public services it will precipitate an ideological crisis graver than the blow to Keynesianism in the 1970s. The problem that then arises – and which explains the longevity of the discredited ideology that caused the last crash – is that there is no alternative policy, accepted by mainstream political parties, with which to replace it. They will keep making the same mistakes, while expecting a different outcome.

To try to stabilise this system, governments behave like soldiers billeted in an ancient manor, burning the furniture, the paintings and the stairs to keep themselves warm for a night. They are breaking up the postwar settlement, our public health services and social safety nets, above all the living world, to produce ephemeral spurts of growth. Magnificent habitats, the benign and fragile climate in which we have prospered, species that have lived on earth for millions of years – all are being stacked on to the fire, their protection characterised as an impediment to growth.

Cameron boasted on Monday that he will revive the economy by “scrapping red tape”. This “red tape” consists in many cases of the safeguards defending both people and places from predatory corporations. The small business, enterprise and employment bill is now passing through the House of Commons – spinelessly supported, as ever, by Labour. The bill seeks to pull down our protective rules to “reduce costs for business”, even if that means increasing costs for everyone else, while threatening our health and happiness. But why? As the government boasted last week, the UK already has “the least restrictive product market regulation and the most supportive regulatory and institutional environment for business across the G20.” And it still doesn’t work. So let’s burn what remains.

This bonfire of regulation is accompanied by a reckless abandonment of democratic principles. In the Commons on Monday, Cameron spoke for the first time about the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP). If this treaty between the EU and the US goes ahead, it will grant corporations a separate legal system to which no one else has access, through which they can sue governments passing laws that might affect their profits. Cameron insisted that “it does not in any way have to affect our national health service”. (Note those words “have to”.) Pressed to explain this, he cited the former EU trade commissioner, who claimed that “public services are always exempted”.

But I have read the EU’s negotiating mandate, and it contains no such exemption, just plenty of waffle and ambiguity on this issue. When the Scottish government asked Cameron’s officials for an “unequivocal assurance” that the NHS would not be exposed to such litigation, they refused to provide it. This treaty could rip our public services to shreds for the sake of a short and (studies suggest) insignificant fizzle of economic growth.

Is it not time to think again? To stop sacrificing our working lives, our prospects, our surroundings to an insatiable God? To consider a different economic model, which does not demand endless pain while generating repeated crises?

Amazingly, this consideration begins on Thursday. For the first time in 170 years, parliament will debate one aspect of the problem: the creation of money. Few people know that 97% of our money supply is created not by the government (or the central bank), but by commercial banks in the form of loans. At no point was a democratic decision made to allow them to do this. So why do we let it happen? This, as Martin Wolf has explained in the Financial Times, “is the source of much of the instability of our economies”. The debate won’t stop the practice, but it represents the raising of a long-neglected question.

This, though, is just the beginning. Is it not also time for a government commission on post-growth economics? Drawing on the work of thinkers such as Herman Daly, Tim Jackson, Peter Victor, Kate Raworth, Rob Dietz and Dan O’Neill, it would look at the possibility of moving towards a steady state economy: one that seeks distribution rather than blind expansion; that does not demand infinite growth on a finite planet.

It would ask the question that never gets asked: why? Why are we wrecking the natural world and public services to generate growth, when that growth is not delivering contentment, security or even, for most of us, greater prosperity? Why have we enthroned growth, regardless of its utility, above all other outcomes? Why, despite failures so great and so frequent, have we not changed the model? When the next crash comes, these questions will be inescapable.

Author: South Seeds

A year ago, on 8th November 2013 the owner of the land at Agnew Lane hired a squad of men and machines to bulldoze the community garden. The garden had been built by the local community over two years, to improve the derelict land they over looked. The garden had been productive, the presence of regular gardeners had reduced antisocial behaviour and it was no longer used as a regular drinking den. After the garden was destroyed, we all expected the land owner to start building on the land but a year later, Agnew Lane still lies empty and has attracted regular fly tipping and antisocial behaviour.

To view photographs of the Agnew Lane site before and after the community took it over and then to see what it looked like after the developer had destroyed the site click here 

In the last year, South Seeds has developed a new community garden at Queen’s Drive Lane, a block away. Local residents helped South Seeds build the garden. Following an abundant harvest, the Queen’s Drive Lane garden won the Thriving award 2014 from It’s Your Neighbourhood. The garden was built during weekly sessions over the 2014 growing season, this film shows a typical weekly gardening session at Queen’s Drive Lane towards the end of the season. The next growing season starts March/April next year.

To view a short film of the new site that South Seeds have moved to and to get a feel for what they have achieved, click here

Author: Fife Today

A project to bring disused land behind council homes in Kirkcaldy, which was initially opposed by some residents, has ultimately brought everyone together.

And this week the allotments in East March Street, run by Kirkcaldy Community Garden Allotments, opened a beautiful new community garden area to the public to enjoy.

The communal garden was the brainchild of local residents Zander Meldrum and Wayne Evans who were instrumental in getting the East March Street project off the ground after it initially came up against opposition from some local people.

Work started around April last year and within six months its grounds were producing a huge variety of fruit, vegetables and flowers for its allotmenteers. The latest addition of the community garden is being hailed as “another huge step forward.”

Zander said: “The whole area has been created from recycled materials, with the wood for the seats coming from wood cleared from Ravenscraig Park and old Fife Council fence posts.

‘‘The built-up area was made using boulders and rubble from the cleared plots as well as three layers of recycled pallets, while the decking area came from wood which had been used to cover the windows at the new wing of the Victoria Hospital.

“We started doing it around July last year after we had sorted out our own allotment plots, and we just worked away at it during every spare hour we had.”

The garden will be open to the public to come in have a wander around or enjoy some chill out time.

Councillor Kay Carrington who represents the area on Fife Council, said: “It is looking absolutely fantastic.

‘‘This has been a wonderful project because it has really brought the community together.

‘‘It is also encouraging people in the houses around the area to start working on their own gardens and to try growing things for themselves, so it’s having a great knock-on effect and we are noticing a real difference.”

Peter Duncan, allotments officer with Fife Council, added: “This all ties in really well with the council’s health and wellbeing policies and is really delivering great results for people’s physical and mental health.”

Author: Love Milton/DTAS

For the last 5 years Love Milton have been working hard to achieve their dream of building a new community centre in Milton in the North of Glasgow as a community self-build project. Using the building process to actually train, upskill and qualify local residents in sustainable building techniques giving them the skills, confidence and access to better employability. Love Milton have already trained over 135 people through smaller building projects in the area and have everything lined up for their first big community build. The land they have identified for the project is derelict and owned by the people of Glasgow. However, ownership of the land is where the problem lies.

City Property have refused to negotiate with the community, saying that even if the group bought the land (which was overvalued anyway), they weren’t capable of building or managing a centre.

So the Love Milton found another site. Glasgow Housing Association offered the piece of land in question for £5.  But in order to gain access to the site, Love Milton need to cross a strip of land owned by City Property. Again City Property proved to be obstructive, proposing a rent of £500 per month. The local school even tried to donate another piece of land to allow access by declaring it surplus to requirements.  City Property then moved to take control of the newly declared surplus land and have refused to transfer it. And so it goes on. An endless saga of top down municipalism obstructing a community’s aspirations.

You can sign a petition to support the community here

Author: Borders Telegraph

BACK in 1996, Ettrick Park, the home of Selkirk FC, was sold to Scottish Borders Enterprise for £17,500. The deal was struck by outgoing Borders Regional Council and ratified by the incoming Scottish Borders Council.

Although the football pitch, on what is now Riverside Industrial Estate, was part of Selkirk’s Common Good, that fund received no financial benefit from the sale. Instead the cash went straight to the club, helping it relocate elsewhere in the town.

It was a land disposal which did not go down well with local GP Dr Lindsay Neil, at that time a member of Selkirk’s community council. Dr Neil recalled this week: “The decision to sell Ettrick Park may have been the correct one, but it was taken without consultation with its beneficial owners – the people of Selkirk – and that was just plain wrong. The fact that just a few years ago part of the site was sold for £60,000 by Scottish Enterprise which assumed ownership on the demise of the local enterprise company network, shows, in my view, that Selkirk’s common good was not best served.”

Since then, Dr Neil, now retired and a member of the Selkirk Regeneration Company, has been convinced that the way common good funds in Scotland are controlled is undemocratic and should be reformed to bring decision-making closer to the people.And last week, he was at Holyrood encouraging MSPs to ensure that new legislation will redress what he considers an imbalance – and effectively wrest power from local authorities like Scottish Borders Council.

Since SBC’s inception, disbursement and investment decisions relating to the funds of Selkirk, Galashiels, Jedburgh, Lauder, Hawick, Kelso, Peebles and Duns – with combined net assets of nearly £10million – has rested with local working groups, comprising only SBC ward councillors.

Last year, it was agreed that one community representative – in Selkirk’s case community councillor Tom Combe – should sit on these groups which meet in Newtown. Although these meetings are open, members of the public who attend are not allowed to participate. Dr Neil believes that there should be at least as many community representatives on these bodies as councillors and that they should have the power to veto decisions if they feel they are not in the best interests of their communities.

Last Wednesday he was called to give evidence to the cross party Local Government and Regeneration Committee which is refining the content of the Scottish Government’s new Community Empowerment Bill.

If enacted, that groundbreaking bill will allow certain bodies to buy abandoned or neglected land, to allow councils to vary non-domestic rates and, crucially as far as Dr Neil is concerned, “to make provision for registers of common good property and about disposal and use of such property”.

“The section of the bill dealing with common good funds will play a major part in restoring their local status and community relevance,” he told MSPs.

“I hope it will address the legal shortcomings and sloppiness of previous legislation and marked improve hitherto unsatisfactory outcomes in the administration of these funds by local authorities.”

Dr Neil said he wanted the bill to clarify that councils do not “own” the common good funds they administer.

“Local authorities may own the title to common good funds, but it’s the burgh inhabitants who are the beneficial owners,” he stated.

Dr Neil called on the MSPs to ensure the new law exerted “much tighter scrutiny” on how councils spend common good money. He said SBC had charged Selkirk’s common good around £20,000 in the two years from 2011-13 simply to administer the fund.

He cited “several examples of profligacy” since the Ettrick Park sale, notably when last year the fund was charged £718 to set up a £50 a year lease for the Selkirk Angling Association to fish on the “town” section of the Ettrick Water.

“Such incompetence is intolerable and local common good beneficiaries have had no say in the matter and no powers to prevent such occurrences of common good fund raiding,” said Dr Neil. “For this reason a clause or amendment [in the bill] subjecting such charges, before they are debited, to independent assessment would stop this nefarious practice.”

Energy and Climate Change Secretary at Westminster Ed Davey MP has announced changes to the Community Energy Feed in Tariff which have resulted from the recent consultation on the current policy and guidelines around support for community energy projects.  Rules produced by DECC – The UK Department of Energy and Climate Change – had previously prevented UK Charities and their wholly-owned trading subsidiaries of from benefiting from the Community Feed in Tariff.

Community Energy Scotland’s Nicholas Gubbins said ‘Community Energy Scotland has lobbied for this change for a long time.  Ed Davey’s decision is very welcome indeed.  It signals that DECC understands that all charities and their trading subsidiaries need to be included in the Community Feed in Tariff arrangements.  Many of our members are charities formed as Companies Limited by Guarantee with trading subsidiaries to operate the wind or hydro schemes. This is a tried and tested legal set-up which ensures that renewable energy projects benefit local people and that all revenue generated has a positive effect on their communities.

Nicholas concluded ‘This change will ensure that more community energy projects have the certainty they need to proceed.’

Full announcement can be read here

A recommendation from the Short-Life Working Group included the need for modern methods of communication to encourage and enable the sharing of good practice, support and experience with other community councillors.  Other recommendations included the need for Local Authority information and support for Community Councils to be more publicly available, and that Community Councils need to be more inclusive and representative of the communities they live in.

In response to these recommendations and as part of the Scottish Government’s on-going work in collaboration with COSLA, to enhance the role of Scotland’s Community Councils, the Improvement Service has developed a Community Council website.  The purpose of the website, which went live in November 2014, is to raise awareness of Community Councils amongst the general public and to provide a national digital source of information for Community Councillors to help them in their work.  The website also includes a Community Council Location Finder designed by Edinburgh Napier University which is a map for members of the public to find their nearest Community Council.

Author: Callum Macleod's blog - Beyond the Horizon

In January 2014 Charles Moore shared his insights on Scottish land reform via a mercifully short Spectator blog. Its hackneyed title – How is Alex Salmond like Robert Mugabe? – suggested that Mr Moore was less than enamoured with the prospect of communities owning the land on which they live. Quite the opposite in fact because according to him:

“Without philanthropists, megalomaniacs and serious sportsmen pouring cash in to maintain these difficult places, their communities, and so the environment, would suffer. You can see this happening already in the islands where crofters’ rights have been exercised”.

It’s not immediately clear which Fantasy Islands were populating Moore’s imagination in his portrayal of benevolent private lairds gallantly stepping in to protect otherwise enfeebled and helpless communities with their limitless largesse. They can’t possibly have included the Western Isles where I come from and where I spent a couple of days earlier this week working with the communities of Great Bernera and Barvas in Lewis, each of which are investigating the feasibility of buying the privately-owned estates they call home.

Now in one sense it’s perfectly plausible to call the Western Isles’ “difficult” in terms of distinctive challenges their remote-rural geography present. Some of these challenges are demographic and relate to aging and declining populations in parts of the islands, leading to social exclusion and pressure on essential services. Others relate to key infrastructure gaps such as the dearth of decent broadband and the absence of an interconnector to the National Grid to enable the islands to fully tap into their formidable renewable energy generation potential. Life is hardly made any easier by energy surcharges faced by islanders (and Highlanders) for the privilege of electricity supply. Then there is the scandalous disgrace of 71% of Western Isles householders languishing in fuel poverty(the comparable figure for Scotland as a whole is 27%).

All of these challenges are writ large in Fionnsbhagh (Finsbay) in the bays of the eastern seaboard of Harris where I grew up. As with many settlements along that seaboard, the township evolved under the shadow of the Clearances. Fionnsbhagh and the surrounding areas were mainly first settled in the 1790s as part of the fishery schemes set up by Captain Alexander MacLeod of Bearnaraigh, who had bought Harris in 1779. The Captain died in 1790 but as Harris historian and genealogist, Bill Lawson, recounts, by the late 1830s the estate factor Donald Stewart and his successors, working on behalf of the Captain’s son, (also called Alexander), “had cleared the crofters out of every piece of worthwhile land in Harris, and sent them to Cape Breton in Canada, or among the fishing villages that the Captain had set up along the East Coast Bays of Harris”.

Not a great deal of philanthropy in evidence there.

Let’s be clear that while the islands have been no strangers to the odd serious sportsman and occasional megalomaniac, the philanthropic input of the lairds who have owned great swathes of the Western Isles has been pretty negligible ever since Captain MacLeod’s ill-fated fisheries experiment. You might want to argue that Lord Leverhulme’s ownership of Lewis and Harris in the aftermath of World War 1 provides an historical exception to that rule but that’s another story; one brilliantly told by Roger Hutchinson in The Soap Man, his account of Leverhulme’s slightly surreal time in Lewis and Harris.

On the whole, however, the pattern of private landownership in the Western Isles might most charitably be described as one of benign neglect. Many of these Lairds may have been perfectly affable but they’ve tended to run their estates as private playgrounds rather than the alternative localised welfare system Mr Moore and his ilk would have us believe. There’s a big difference between passive ownership and proactively ensuring that an estate meets its full development potential for the benefit of the community. The latter is in essence the case for community land ownership.

Let’s be equally clear that despite the pressing socio-economic challenges outlined above, the Western Isles has enormous assets in terms of culture, environment and quality of life with which to build a sustainable future. Significantly, community land ownership is already playing a major part in helping to build that future.

As long ago as 1923 the Stornoway Trust became the first community landlord in the Western Isles. It has been joined by many others; all of them committed to improving the sustainability of their communities in various ways. On the west coast of Lewis the Galson Estate Trust oversees distribution of income generated by the estate’s wind turbines via its newly launched community investment programme. In the North Harris estate the community landlord has facilitated much needed affordable housing near Tarbert and operates a community recycling facility in partnership with Comhairle nan Eilean Siar.

Affordable housing, repopulation and renewable energy also feature heavily in the plans of the West Harris Trust further along the machair coast of Harris from where over 200 years ago the tenantry made their unwilling way over the hills to the lunar landscape of the island’s eastern side. Meanwhile, Stòras Uibhist, the community landlord for Benbecula, Eriskay and South Uist is taking the leading role in the multi-million pound, multi-partner Lochboisdale regeneration project amongst many other activities.

Other communities in the Western Isles seem eager to follow suit or at least explore the possibility of doing so. The Carloway estate on the west coast of Lewis has recently been transferred into community ownership. That increasingly well trodden path may soon be followed by the Barvas, Great Bernera and the Bays of Harris estates when their feasibility studies regarding community buyouts are completed. It’s a privilege to be able to provide assistance to some of these communities as they decide whether to take a leading role in shaping their own destinies.

None of the above is to suggest that community land ownership is a panacea for all the development challenges facing the Western Isles or anywhere else in Scotland for that matter. At least some of the infrastructure gaps referred to above are in the gift of Government to address if there is the political will to do so. How can it be politically or socially acceptable that in the 21st century 71% of the inhabitants in one of Scotland’s local authority areas are experiencing fuel poverty?

There will also be situations where communities in Scotland are perfectly satisfied with existing landlord arrangements, whether their landlord is of the private or public variety. In such cases, any attempts to foist alternative arrangements on such communities would most likely prove counter-productive.

That said, if most of Scotland’s political parties are as committed to genuine community empowerment in the public interest as they claim, then their vision for land reform following publication of the Land Reform Review Group’s report on ‘The Land of Scotland and the Common Good’ must be bold. In the apparently restless brave new dawn of Scotland’s post-referendum politics anything less would seem dispiritingly like business as usual.