Author: TFN

A West Lothian town is celebrating being the only Scottish nomination for a prestigious environmental and community award thanks to work done by many of its voluntary organisations.

Linlithgow is nominated for an International Award for Liveable Communities (LivCom Awards).

The awards are given to towns and cities which improve the quality of life for their residents and visitors through environmental work and community organisations.

Linlithgow, which is already classed as a Fairtrade town, is famous for being the birthplace of Mary Queen of Scots. The Linlithgow Heritage Trust has taken care preserving both the ruins of the palace and surrounding loch for visitors and wildlife.

As well as looking after its environment the town was judged to have created a vibrant community through a variety of clubs, societies and voluntary organisations.

Its Burgh Beautiful group has involved the local community in making over specific areas of the town to generate civic pride and a number of local clubs have helped promote healthier lifestyles for its residents through activities such as cycling.

This is not the first time Linlithgow has been recognised for an international award. It is one of only two Scottish towns to be awarded Cittaslow (Slow City) recognition.

Earlier this year the town joined the Cittaslow movement, which gives recognition to towns that care about the people who live, work and visit them as well as protecting its local environment, promote local goods and produce, and encourage the individual character of the town.

Linlithgow is a finalist this time around in the Category A (Whole City) section of the LivCom Awards for towns with an average population of up to 20,000 and will be competing against towns from Ireland, China, Belgium, Australia and Canade for the title awarded at Dongguan, China, next month.

The nomination came after West Lothian Council, who will be sending someone over to the ceremony, submitted a 13 page application highlighting the sustainability of the town in June this year.

Council leader Peter Johnston said: “This is wonderful news for the town of Linlithgow and it adds to the growing list of prestigious accolades that are associated with the town.

“Linlithgow has a community with an array of voluntary organisations and community groups who are all committed to enhancing the vibrant town. Linlithgow residents have a great deal of civic pride and I am delighted that their efforts are being recognised on an international stage.”

Author: Edgar Cahn

The primary focus of the Manifesto for co-production has understandably been concerned with enlisting people as co-producers of public services such as those provided by the National Health Service (NHS). Coming from England where statutory rights to effective service are extensive, that is an appropriate focus and co-production provides the appropriate framework for system change.

But coming from the United States, a country that does not guarantee such rights and that has instead embraced a kind of market theology, the value of co-production as a framework for system change shifts to another level. For me, it becomes important to point out that co-production entails a second, more fundamental partnership – a partnership between the monetary economy (comprised of public, private and nonprofit sectors) and the core economy of home, family, neighbourhood, community and civil society.

The perspective from the States thus emphasises a different and overriding purpose to co-production: creating a new core economy which no longer can rely upon invisible labour exacted from the subordination of women and the exploitation of ethnic minorities and illegal immigrants. When focused on co-production, the prism supplied by a lens of social justice highlights the varied hues of racism and sexism that have historically undermined efforts in the United States to address economic disparity.

My development of the concept of co-production stems directly from examining the core principles underlying timebanking. And my development of timebanking stemmed from an appreciation of the limitations of government efforts to empower people for whom the market had no use and who did not enjoy the same rights to subsistence or to care that are a birthright in England. This commentary reflects the journey that led me to articulate co-production as a fundamental framework for public and charitable initiatives.

That journey began with my involvement in the civil rights movement, my cofounding of the National Legal Services programme, my work in the War on Poverty and my subsequent efforts to address disparities which seemed destined to persist and to grow, so long as those who were disenfranchised were viewed, at best, as objects of pity and charity. The challenge was: how to value the labour and contribution of those whom the market excluded or devalued and whose genuine work was not acknowledged or rewarded.

“The value of household work in 1998 was estimated to total US $1.911 trillion – about one quarter of the size of the US gros domestic product that year.” 1

First comes a rejection that money and market price is the sole acceptable measure of value. Timebanking rejects price, valuing all hours equally, because price equates value with scarcity relative to demand. Timebanking values what it means to be truly human and to contribute to each other as humans – as members of the human family. Those are the universals that enabled our species to survive and evolve: our willingness to come to each other’s rescue, to care for each other, to stand up for what we believe is right. There are domains we all recognise are beyond price: family and loved ones, justice, patriotism, spirituality, the environment. We cannot allow a rejection of market price to mean a denial of economic value.

From that, it follows that co-production need not and cannot be limited to the labour wanted by professionals to make their human service delivery systems work better.

If co-production focuses exclusively on the types of labour needed to enable public systems work better, it will tend to undervalue the significance of the effort invested in giving love and comfort, approval and disapproval, caring and mentoring – and equally the effort involved in civic engagement ranging from attending meetings to making phone calls to mobilising social protest. And it will tend to overlook the contribution that co-production can play in redefining the labour force needed to rebuild community and reclaim habitat for our species – a labour force that must include children, teenagers, persons on public assistance, the disabled, the elderly and even the bed-ridden and housebound. Because timebank initiatives have consistently valued the hours expended by all making such a wide variety of contributions, it broadened my understanding of the labour force and the types of labour that Coproduction would entail.

Third, timebanking has illuminated and heightened our awareness of the scale and magnitude of a critical portion of the non-market economy – the core economy. It is a genuine economic system of vast magnitude. Appreciation of that goes back before my work – to Hazel Henderson and the love economy; to Neva Goodwin who coined the term, the core economy. Marilyn Waring tried to wake us all up to that in her book:

If women counted. The women’s movement and more recently, Nancy Folbre, have stressed the significance of caring work. Alvin Tofler reminds us of the obvious in his question to Fortune 500 executives: “How productive would your work force be if they were not toilet trained?” Different efforts to quantify the value of productive labour not reflected in monetary indices vary – but at a minimum they equal or exceed at least 40 per cent of the GDP. A calculation made in 2002 of the scale of unpaid labour in the United States that keeps seniors out of nursing homes topped $250 billion dollars – six times what is spent on the market for equivalent services.

Robert Putnam has certainly tried to alert us to the decline of social capital. If social capital is critical to the well-being of society, then we must ask what its home base and source is. Social Capital is rooted in a social economy – and surely, the home base of that economy is the household, the neighbourhood, the community and civil society.

That is the economy that co-production seems to rebuild and to reconstruct.
The extent to which that core economy has been eroded came home to me personally when we looked at 786 young people who had committed some offence and been sent to the Time Dollar Youth Court. Only 14 of them were being raised in a two-parent household.

Co-production is more than making social programs work. We see entire neighbourhoods depopulated in the States: a majority of young African American males are in prison; welfare reform sends the mothers elsewhere to work; and the neighbourhoods are populated by the gangs, the drug dealers, latchkey children, seniors – and a handful of neighbourhood workers sent in to regenerate the community from 9–5 on weekdays. Co-production involves reclaiming territory for the core economy – territory lost to the commodification of life by all sectors of the monetary economy, public, private and non-profit.

We will be unable to create the core economy of the future so long as we live in a bifurcated world where all social problems are relegated either to paid professionals or to volunteers whose role is typically restricted to functioning as free labour within the silos of the non-profit world.

It will take massive labour of all kinds by all to build the core economy of the future – an economy based on relationships and mutuality, on trust and engagement, on speaking and listening and caring – and above all on authentic respect. We will not get there simply by expanding an entitlement system which apportions public benefits based on negatives and deficiencies: what one lacks, what disability one has, what misfortune one has suffered.
We have to begin creating a new species of entitlements: earned entitlements that vest by virtue of how one contributes to rebuilding the core economy. That is the new path we must blaze through co-production if co-production is going to transcend professionally defined domains of problems and rebuild an organic world of community that reunites the human family. Timebanking supplies a tool and a medium of exchange to help do that.

Finally, because timebanking and co-production grow out of my own life and work in the civil rights movement, I have to add that hell-raising is a critical part of coproduction and of the labour that it entails and must value. Those with wealth, power, authority and credentials hold those assets as stewards for those who came before and in trust for those yet unborn. They must be held accountable – and sometimes that requires the creation of new vehicles that give rise to scrutiny, to questioning, to criticism, and to social protest. Timebank programmes can create those vehicles in ways that enlist the community – and that tap the knowledge that the community has about what is working and what is not working.

In Washington DC, 13 teenagers who had served as jurors on our teen court dealing with delinquency were organised as a Youth Grand Jury to investigate what the city was and was not doing about teenagers and substance abuse. The Youth Grand Jury undertook a six-month investigation. In a report titled, Speaking truth to power, the Youth Grand Jury indicted the mayor, the drug agency and the District government for failure to fund any prevention or treatment programs for youth. It recommended specific roles for young people as co-producers of a more adequate system of prevention and treatment for substance abuse including training and certification of teenagers as drug peer counsellors. To make it cool to be drug free they called for the creation of a drug-free club where dues were paid in Time Dollars earned doing community service and where membership carried rewards.

I add this only by way of illustration of the more fundamental point: democracy itself requires co-production in order to work if the people are to exercise their theoretical sovereignty. Native Americans have a saying: ‘We did not inherit this land from our ancestors; we borrowed it from our descendants.’ Co-production embraces the exercise of that stewardship.

More here http://www.neweconomics.org/gen/uploads/wyifkx552bjzvkjumj2zcnyq11072008194321.pdf

Author: DTA

Community Allowance Briefing – September 2008
DTA

Background: Problems with the Benefit System

In January 2002, the Neighbourhood Renewal Unit, in the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister (now CLG), established the National Community Forum to advise Government Ministers and ensure that policy makers could hear about the experience of neighbourhood renewal from a grass-roots perspective. At the end of their first 2-day meeting, all 24 forum members agreed that the benefits system represented by far the biggest barrier to neighbourhood renewal.
o Why? The £92 billion a year we spend on benefits (not in administration or in employment support, but the actual weekly money) is keeping people just above the gutter but forms no part of the ladders or bridges that we need to lift people out of poverty.

The benefits system is constructed as an on-off switch not a dimmer switch. Research at Oxford University[1] has found that the benefits system is over-responsive to this kind of work and that as a consequence people prefer to stay with the certainty of benefits rather than risk losing them and having their income and other safeguards like free school meals thrown into chaos for months.

The labour market in poor communities creates predominantly part time, sessional and irregular jobs and reflects a national shift away from a 35-hour week towards a labour market that is more dynamic. Many of these are ideal ‘entry level’ jobs that could be a first step into work for the long-term unemployed.

The consequences of this are significant:
Community organisations often have money to create part time, sessional or short term work but are unable to recruit local unemployed people
Socially valuable work does not get done, often in our most deprived communities, where it is most needed
As a result money is lost from the local economy
Individuals stagnate, trapped on benefits instead of gaining invaluable experience and skills in a supportive, rewarding environment
Individuals get work in the informal economy, which can mean working at below the minimum wage in exploitative situations, making it impossible to draw on references for future employment opportunities

Proposal: The Community Allowance

o Over the last 8 years the CREATE Consortium[2] has evolved from the National Community Forum’s work on this issue, to develop a proposal called a Community Allowance.

o The work to pilot a Community Allowance is backed by over 80 organisations[3], including key national infrastructure organisations from England, Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales. Over 50 community-based organisations wish to pilot the Community Allowance for the benefit of their community.

We want community organisations to be able to pay people to do work that strengthens their neighbourhood, while supporting them on their journey back to work, without it affecting any of their benefits for a limited time period.

Maximum earnings on top of benefits would be capped at £4,305 or the equivalent of up to 15 hours a week on the minimum wage. Earnings could fluctuate depending on what work is available and the payment of benefits would be unaffected over the course of one year.

To pilot the Community Allowance we estimate this would cost £69,000 per pilot area, which would generate £92,000 of investment in jobs in the local economy – the pilot would also enable us to calculate an additional cost saving to the state from the socially beneficial work that is undertaken.
Outcomes: The Benefits

For the individual participant the Community Allowance would enable them to:

Gain access to personalised, tailored support and training, from a local community anchor organisation, that would address barriers preventing them from working

Unlock their talents to increase their confidence, skills, knowledge and experience

Build new connections with people and groups in their neighbourhood, increasing their social capital, health and well-being

Draw people away from the informal economy

For the local community:

Vital work for the well-being of the community is carried out; this work will benefit the local community in a number of ways, making it cleaner, greener, safer, healthier and more cohesive while generating considerable cost savings for the state
For the local economy:

We have estimated that around 80 part time (4 hours a week) jobs could be generated by the Community Allowance on a single estate, unlocking around £92,000 a year investment into each disadvantaged community

Money invested in this way not only improves the lives of individual residents, but also circulates within the local economy rather than being drained away via external contractors

At a time of economic downturn, these part time, sessional and short term jobs are a relatively stable source of work for local people, as funding for them comes from a range of statutory sector partners involved in neighbourhood renewal, enabling the community anchor to earn additional income through trading, creating a virtuous circle of economic development

Policy Context

The Government’s aim to pilot the Community Allowance was announced in the Community Empowerment White Paper[4]

The UK National Action Plan on Social Inclusion[5] talks of increasing labour market participation through targeting areas of high worklessness by devolving decision-making and empowering communities

Work Skills: Unlocking Talent[6] – we would like to unlock the resources in Skills Accounts and Train to Gain initiatives in neighbourhoods with high concentrations of worklessness through Community Allowance pilots

The DWP Welfare Reform Green Paper[7] has proposals to pilot ‘work for your benefit’ initiatives for the projected 2% of JSA claimants who are still unemployed after 2 years by requiring them to undertake mandatory full time work in their community, the DWP’s own research[8] has found that this approach is not effective

Next Steps

We believe that a Community Allowance pilot programme should take place as soon as possible alongside other pilots proposed in the Welfare Reform Green Paper

We urge you to write to James Purnell MP, Secretary of State for DWP, copying it to Hazel Blears MP, Secretary of State for CLG to gain their support for a Community Allowance pilot programme as soon as possible

For more info or to join, see http://www.communityallowance.org/get_involved/Back+the+Campaign.htm

Author: Paul Gosling, The Independent

One third of the local economic infrastructure of the UK – the corner shops, post offices, pubs and bank branches – is predicted to disappear between 1990 and 2010. That is more than 100,000 independent businesses and local branches of national companies that are going bust or giving up.

The result, in the words of the New Economic Foundation that made the prediction, is both ghost town Britain – with large numbers of shops boarded up – and clone town Britain – because every shopping mall looks much the same. A symptom and cause of the problem is the domination of the major supermarket brands, the subject of the continuing Competition Commission inquiry.

Now independent retailers are fighting back. Across much of the country local loyalty schemes are springing up, which aim to get consumers to come back to local shops time and again. Some of these are issued for individual towns and villages, while many shops have started their own schemes.

The most ambitious project is the Wedge Card. It was established by Big Issue founder John Bird and his daughter Diana. “It’s going very well,” says Diana Bird. “We launched in December and it’s been a really interesting time.” Initially Wedge is operating in London, but there are now four pilot projects to assess its expansion into other localities.

Within London there are already 23,000 individuals who have bought Wedge Cards at £10 a time, with about 500 retailers signed-up. Holders of the cards obtain discounts on purchases – for example, 20 per cent off a meal at an upmarket restaurant – and at least a quarter of the joining fees goes to local charities. Unlike loyalty cards used by supermarkets, shoppers’ buying habits are not recorded and there is no use of information through database marketing.

Traders are promoted as members of the Wedge network, through the card’s website (www.wedgecard.co.uk) and e-mails to members. One new restaurant member told Wedge it had one hundred reservations in the first month from its Wedge membership. The scheme also binds local retailers together within the network, encouraging them to promote each other. Future developments include the possibility of either using Wedge as a prepaid payment card or integrating it with mobile technology as a payment method.

Matthew Knowles of the Federation of Small Businesses believes other local loyalty card schemes are “in germination”. “They are probably working well in some areas,” he says. But, he suggests, retailers can achieve similar benefits without the need to formally join a scheme. Knowles points to the trading advantage obtained by the big supermarkets because of their large, free, car parks and says that town centre retailers can join together to repay car parking fees when shoppers spend a lot of money.

Another option, the FSB suggests, is discounts for repeat business. This can be done by printing an offer on the back of a receipt. But the FSB would also like stronger regulatory action to prevent supermarkets abusing their dominant position. The FSB is lobbying for the supermarkets to be banned, as is the case in France, from offering loss leaders, and questions whether they should be allowed to offer free car parking.

The New Economics Foundation is itself involved in an initiative that intervenes to challenge ghost town Britain by encouraging a rebirth of entrepreneurial spirit in those areas of sharpest local economic decline. Together with the Civic Trust it has set-up BizFizz, which coaches individuals to help them set-up their own businesses. In Clownes, Derbyshire, the project achieved its objective to get all the high street shop units let and used, where previously a third were empty. BizFizz has worked in 30 local areas in the last six years, with almost 5,000 clients – many of whom have gone on to set-up their own businesses.

Natalia Fernandez of the New Economics Foundation, who is national co-ordinator of BizFizz, says: “We have a clear intention of trying to promote enterprise within communities, to regenerate communities. Local businesses are more likely to recruit local people and this can reduce unemployment. They can provide services within those communities and improve local communities. It circulates wealth within that local economy.”

While BizFizz concentrates on supporting new businesses, it also works with established small firms in deprived areas, stimulating greater mutual trading and networking – assisting with business support services such as marketing and public relations. Mutual support networks can, like loyalty cards, offer real benefit to independent traders battling against the might of the massive multiples. In truth, independent entrepreneurs need all the help they can get.

Author: Fablevision

That’s a big laddie you’ve got there – he’ll soon be as tall as the Fairfield Crane!’

Many a proud Glasgow mammy would have beamed with joy at her bonnie wee wean being compared to what was at one time the tallest crane (pronounced ‘cran’) in the world, towering over the Govan shipyards – and their workers – all through the last century.

But what about today’s mammies – would they understand the compliment? Sadly, it would probably be only the grannies – and granddads – who would know what the Fairfield Crane was. In these days of service industries and call centres, with the most famous ‘Apprentice’ being the winner of Sir Alan Sugar’s TV show, we’ve lost a lot of working class culture and language.

However, one project, based in Govan, is trying to reverse all that. The Sparr project is looking to interview former shipyard workers and their families, with the aim of collecting their ‘stories’ and experiences on film. The documentary film will be used to make educational materials for Scottish schools, so that the next generation will be able to understand and appreciate this vital aspect of working class culture and heritage.

It’s not just older people who will be involved in the project – Sparr is recruiting young people to train as documentary film makers and researchers so that they can be at the forefront of collecting stories from their own communities, maybe even from their own families!

So why is a project about Glasgow shipyard workers called ‘Sparr’? Well, its a Gaelic word which loosely means ‘to prise open’ – and the Sparr project will be opening up the histories and Gaelic roots of many of today’s Govanites, whose ancestors came down from the Highlands and Islands to work in the shipyards in the 19th and 20th centuries. Fablevision is co-ordinating the project: a collaboration between Theatre Hebrides in Stornoway and Cran Theatre Company in Govan. Many other Govan organisations are partnering in the process – including the GalGael Trust – to research the ancient boatbuilding traditions and ancestry of these modern day Govanites.

A web based learning resource and a full-scale theatrical production will be produced – both based on the lives and experiences of shipyard workers and their families as told to our young film makers.

Do you have any interesting, funny or sad stories about your days in the yards? If not you, do you have a father or grandfather with a lot of stories? Should these stories be lost over time or would you like to help us collect them and treasure them forever? Are you a young person who would like to train as a documentary film maker in order to help us collect these stories?

Do you want to talk to someone about Sparr and how you could contribute to keeping working class culture alive? Then contact Di Jennings, Sparr Co-ordinator, at 0141 425 2020 or 07933 389307, or email her at dijen@pl.net. If you want to read more about his exciting project and how you can get involved, look up our website: www.fablevision.org/sparr/. Come on – it’s your culture and heritage – don’t lose it!

Author: Selkirk Advertiser

THE findings of a major investigation into common good funds, including Selkirk’s £1million assets, are being kept secret.
And Dr Lindsay Neil, vice-chairman of the community council, believes the decision to discuss the findings of Scottish Borders Council’s scrutiny panel in private last week is “totally reprehensible”.

Newtown’s legal eagles ruled the report contains commercially confidential information, including details of what individuals pay for renting common good assets, so could not be debated in public when it came before SBC’s executive.

Dr Neil blasted: “This is a smokescreen. Common goods are owned by all the people in those towns which have them. The 34 members of SBC are merely trustees and their performance up to now has been far from satisfactory.

“I welcomed the probe, but for the results to be kept under wraps merely confirms my suspicions that SBC is not really interested in the views of the public it purports to serve.”

Some details of the report, compiled over six months, emerged after Councillor David Paterson of Hawick demanded a call-in of the executive’s clandestine decisions.He was angry three recommendations had not been accepted.

The watchdog wanted grants in the gift of each Common Good Working Group (comprising SBC elected members whose wards cover the relevant towns) restricted to the current £10,000. The executive felt this should be £20,000.

Scrutiny did not believe “community interest members”, such as community councillors, should be involved in decision-making. The executive disagreed, ordering leader David Parker to ask Scottish Ministers to amend legislation to allow this to happen.

Scrutiny also demanded each of the Borders eight common good funds should receive a grant to cover the cost of administration levied by the bean counters at Newtown. Again, the executive demurred, claiming this would be unfair to towns without common goods.

Mr Paterson’s request was granted and a special meeting of scrutiny will take place before the full council has the final say on September 25, probably in private.

Dr Neil told The Wee Paper: “I strongly believe community councils and perhaps other local organisations should be represented on the working groups.

“I told the scrutiny team this on behalf of Selkirk Community Council in May, but it seems to have been ignored.”

From next year, councils will be legally required to publish a register of Common Good assets: an ancient system of safeguarding property and land administered by the former burghs on behalf, and for the benefit, of local people.

Author: Barry Quirk

Barry Quirk, author of last year’s review into community management and ownership of assets, has urged councils to review their strategies on underused property to help community groups to benefit from the credit crunch.
Speaking at the DTA Annual Conference in Leeds, Mr Quirk, who is chief executive of Lewisham Council, told delegates the current climate was more of an opportunity than a threat for community groups hoping to acquire assets.
He said there was less private sector interest in public property, which could make it easier for development trusts to take control of facilities.

‘This is the time to bring in community groups. The government recognises that allowing people to deal with local issues is the way forward.’

A copy of the Report of The Quirk Review can be downloaded from http://www.communities.gov.uk/publications/communities/makingassetswork

Author: LPL

For 140 days it was occupied by activists desperate to keep life in an old Edwardian bathhouse that had served generations of a Glasgow community. Then, for seven years, all fell quiet at the Govanhill Baths, with pigeons and a growing array of weeds the only patrons of the listed building.

That was until yesterday, when the landmark re-opened its doors to hundreds of curious visitors as part of a city-wide doors open day.

Glasgow City Council announced the closure of Govanhill Baths, a B-listed building, in 2001. Now, campaigners hope the time is ripe for its renaissance and that funding can be secured to reopen the landmark in 2011.

Volunteers were yesterday running tours of the derelict building to raise awareness of the potential it holds for redevelopment, that could cost as much as £9m.

Many of the guides were veterans of the occupation, that ran between March and August, 2001, and some described their return to the building as an emotional experience.
Danny Alderslowe, now representing the Scottish Green Party on Glasgow City Council, was one of the original activists on the 2001 campaign.

Showing his three-year-old son round the centre yesterday, he said: “It’s my first time back in the building since 2001, and it is quite a poignant time. I was here every day for nearly eight months, and we were sleeping in here too.

“Today it feels like we’re really on the path to getting the baths re-opened. We’re getting a lot of interest from the council officers, and loads of people have been turning out to visit all day.

“There are some seriously bad health statistics in the area, and we need this place re-opened yesterday. It would be a great social place for all the different nationalities in the area to meet up as well.”
Underlying the campaign to re-open the facility is the desire to protect and display one of Glasgow’s little-known architectural treasures. Designed by Scottish architect Alexander Beith McDonald, who also worked on the People’s Palace, the Govanhill Baths are a rare example of the Edwardian Baroque style.

Original tiling and doors are still evident in some parts of the building, which opened in 1917, and the cast iron railed gallery around the main pool is one of the baths’ most distinctive details.

Fatima Uygun, director of the Govanhill Baths Community Trust (GBCT), stressed the importance of preserving the building and its features for the people of Glasgow.
She said: “They are the only remaining Edwardian baths in Glasgow. Edinburgh has kept theirs, but it seems like we were considered unworthy in Glasgow. These baths had been open for more than 80 years before they shut. How can you not want a building like this in the community?”
Local residents mourned the loss of the baths in 2001 as a blow to the local community, with alternative facilities in the Gorbals and Holyrood areas too far for many to travel.

Cathy Wotherspoon, taking a tour with her 10-year-old grand-daughter, said she would look forward to the baths re-opening if funds could be found.

She said: “We used to come here for exercise classes before it shut, and it’s my first time back since 2001. It’s a bit lonely, seeing how badly it’s decayed since then.

“The closure had a definite impact on the area – it takes a good 45 minutes for me to get to Tollcross for classes now, because I’ve to get a bus into town and then another one out.”

The GBCT is working with a number of bodies to secure funding, including Glasgow City Council, the Big Lottery, Glasgow Buildings Preservation Trust, Architectural Heritage Fund and the Scottish Community Foundation.
Estimates for the refurbishment range from £7.5m to £9m, that would see the centre revamped as a state of the art leisure and health centre.

Facilities would include three pools, a gym, a roof garden and an asthma clinic, all powered by a ground source heat pump, that could also provide heat to local tenements.
Organisers of the funding drive yesterday highlighted the impact the centre could have on the area’s health.
Ms Uygun said: “The health benefits to the community would be massive, so though £9m may seem a lot, it would actually make more financial sense than people realise.”

Author: Barry MacCarthy, New Start

The biggest challenge ahead for the new asset transfer unit is to persuade councils in England that handing over disused public buildings to communities will help them achieve their objectives, according to Hazel Blears.
The communities minister told New Start asset transfer ‘must be connected with what people care about like jobs and homes and support for people in their neighbourhoods’.

Her comments came after she announced the Development Trusts Association (DTA) would lead the unit with support from the Local Government Association and national federation Community Matters.

The unit, which was first announced in the community empowerment white paper in July, will provide advice to residents and councils by drawing on lessons learned from the successful transfer of 20 buildings to local organisations.

Ms Blears told delegates at the DTA’s annual conference in Leeds this week that she expected the scheme to accelerate asset transfer once it is up and running in January.
She said the government was supporting 60 local authorities that are hoping to transfer assets to communities over the next two years.

‘Making a success of asset transfer is about a long-term relationship between local authorities and community organisations. It’s about a hard-headed business model that works.’

But she added that asset transfer was not the answer to every problem and that councils sometimes needed to sell land to maximise their receipts.

DTA director Steve Wyler said the association was working with communities to help them recognise the difference between public assets that would be a liability and those that could be acquired to benefit the community.

Author: Marilyn Murray, Rannoch, Perthshire. – The Herald, Letters to Editor

Community resilience? More like dereliction of duty in Rannoch

A recent article in the Herald by Professor Allyson Pollock demonstrates conclusively that, despite Scottish Government promises to keep primary medicine, and particularly GP practice, within the public domain, the very opposite is being allowed to happen in remote and rural areas of Scotland to the detriment of those who live there.

Kinloch Rannoch is a case in point. A fully equipped, fully manned medical centre is positioned in the village to serve the needs of this remote and rural community, along with a local school and a local fire station. But inexplicably the local GP practice was allowed to opt out of providing any out-of-hours emergency service and since then, because the Rannoch area is beyond ambulance cover within acceptable time limits from either Pitlochry or Aberfeldy, lives have on a number of occasions been put at risk. The present setup, with none of the local GPs being prepared to give emergency cover, is palpably unsafe and cannot continue.

But what does the local health board propose? The chairman has stated that “local access to an emergency care service does not necessarily have to be provided by a GP on call 24 hours a day”, and he wants instead to train up first-aiders to come out at nights and over entire weekends instead of doctors. He calls this “community resilience”! People in Rannoch call this dereliction of professional duty.

As Professor Pollock points out, this so-called “First Responder” model, which is being specifically proposed to replace the GPs in Rannoch, is both a breach of NHS’s core principle of continuity of care and a denial of the human rights and legitimate expectation of the resident population to all-round GP care which is provided elsewhere in the Highlands and islands of Scotland. Rannoch should be no different.

Fortunately, Rannoch residents have refused to accept an inadequate substitute for their GPs and have stated so in packed protest meetings.

Professor Pollock’s intervention is welcome, but Nicola Sturgeon must now intervene to prevent the residents of Rannoch being fobbed off with a third-world medical service that is unacceptable to them.