Author: Pam Yule, Wyndford Residents Union

The Wyndford Residents Union is fighting to save their home from one of Scotland’s biggest demolition projects proposed by Wheatley Homes Glasgow.

It is largely accepted that demolition and rebuilding have more negative environmental and climate impacts and cost more than retrofitting. Despite this, Glasgow City Council approved Wheatley Homes’s proposal without requiring an Environmental Impact Assessment.

In September 2023, the Residents Union won a judicial review which ruled that the Council’s decision was unlawful and ordered the demolition to be paused. However, after additional challenges from Wheatley Homes and the Council again deciding an Environmental Impact Assessment was not necessary, the Union is now pursuing a residents’ referendum and second judicial review. 

Wanting to save their homes, the Residents Union collaborated with architects and experts to offer more sustainable solutions for retrofitting the houses. You can read about their work in this report.

This is the speech that Pam Yule from the Wyndford Residents Union gave to the Cross-Party Group on Nature and Climate at the Scottish Parliament alongside our Chief Officer Shivali Fifield on 28 February 2024.

Pam’s story illustrates that it is often urban development in disadvantaged areas where residents are making the connections and leading the fight for social, environmental and climate justice. Reforming legal aid would empower more people to act and enforce our right to a healthy environment.

The Wyndford Estate

The Wyndford Estate in Glasgow was built in the 1960s at a time when architects thought deeply about social wellbeing and housing that supported and nurtured a person from cradle to grave.  

Our beautiful, Saltire Award-winning Wyndford has a range of housing from bedsits to 3-beds. Much of the housing is built in the courtyard style, with kitchen windows overlooking greens and cars banished out of sight. 

Neighbouring the River Kelvin wildlife corridor, the design of the estate included over 10 acres of beautiful parkland and mature trees, hosting badgers, otters, bats, kingfishers, a peregrine falcon roosting on one of the high flats, hedgehogs, weasels, tons of wildlife and biodiversity. I have seen a deer outside my kitchen window – just a two-minute walk away from the very busy A81. 

The threat of demolition with no Environmental Impact Assessment

In November 2021, Wheatley Homes notified all 600 tenants of four 26 storey high flats located on our beautiful greenspace that their flats were going to be blown up.

Their so-called “consultation” provided no alternatives to demolition.

Shockingly, since Wheatley Homes promised a bright new dawn for Wyndford we are suffering deepening neglect from them. Damp, mould, leaks, broken pavements, litter left on the ground for months, untended green spaces and rising crime are all going unaddressed whilst they ignore repeated repair requests and complaints.

Residents’ collective action to hold power to account

Due to a high level of resistance, Wheatley were unable to empty the buildings until September 2023 when they started demolition despite an ongoing judicial review brought by the Wyndford Residents Union and supported by the brilliant Environmental Rights Centre for Scotland (ERCS). 

ERCS has supported and steered us through investigating the initial “consultation” which was deemed unlawful by a legal advocate, and have helped us with Freedom of Information requests.  Right now, they are supporting us through a judicial review (our second, we won the first) on Glasgow City Council’s refusal to have an Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) done on the demolitions.

We are extremely fortunate to have a union member eligible for legal aid.

Why are residents’ solutions for more inclusive and sustainable homes being ignored?

We have to ask – why do the council and Wheatley resist an Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA)?

I have a quote from one of Scotland’s most renowned architects, Malcolm Fraser – one of the many outstanding architects who support us – who says:

“I can’t get Planning Permission for a teeny wee Children’s Nursery without a detailed swathe of Environmental Assessments; so the idea that you can demolish four 26-storey social housing towers, adjacent to a residential neighbourhood and an important urban wildlife habitat without one is either a)  wrong, or  b) proves that, in Scotland, the rules only apply to the little people, and not to the powerful.”

The high flats represent the interconnection between social, climate and environmental crises that are affecting us all. Gentrification is not the answer.

We envisage a new life for the flats with a community supermarket and flexible working spaces on the ground floors. A catering school for local young people and a restaurant on the top floors with the gardens for the school and a restaurant as well as outdoor learning on the beautiful green space below. On the lower floors, small flats could be reconfigured to make 3- and 4-bed apartments and the upper floors already work beautifully for young people, students, support workers, refugees and the elderly with resident reps and communal spaces throughout. New housing could be built along Wyndford Road, and all this would be much cheaper and better – and avert the environmental catastrophe Wheatley’s current plans generate. 

But Wheatley refuse to even speak to us.

Voices for Justice

We are not nimbyists.

We are trying to ask the difficult questions about the future of our urban realm, but we are being failed by our representatives who seem to be powerless in the face of Wheatley’s might, either burying their heads in the sand or happily colluding with them. 

We need you to be asking the big questions: 

• Why are bankers moving into the CEO positions of the biggest social housing providers in the UK?  
• Why are these CEOs collecting salaries of over £300,000/pa? 
• Why are they running at over 100 million pounds of reserves when desperate people need urgent repairs on their housing? 
• Why are they hellbent on demolishing sturdy, quality buildings to replace them with rickety new builds at a social, environmental and climate cost? 
• Why are decisions on the future of our housing and greenspaces made between councils and housing providers behind closed doors and before public consultations are carried out? 

If you look up and around you, you will see that a policy of managed decline is rampant in the housing sector all over the UK.

We need our representatives to be the voice for our marginalised urban and green spaces and the people who live on them and to listen to residents who are identifying the lack of concern in addressing our climate, housing, and nature emergencies.  

ERCS is working with communities, and together we know that we are not alone in caring about protecting our wildlife, our health and social realm. We know that communities want to work with their elected representatives, but many representatives – even though they have privately told us they support us, have feared to do so in public.

We are witnessing a crazed last hurrah of the wrecking ball and this a terrible indictment on the people who are supposed to be acting to protect us and future generations. How can we work together to protect us all now and shape healthy communities for future generations? 

Author: Scottish Food Coalition

Are you keen to ensure the Good Food Nation (Scotland) Act delivers on its promise?

Do you want to help shape the National Good Food Nation Plan, and scrutinise how the Government implements the promises outlined in the Act?

The Scottish Food Coalition wants to encourage as many people as possible to feed into the draft GFN National Plan before it goes to Parliament.

We are inviting anyone with an interest in food to host an informal group conversation, a KITCHEN TABLE TALK, to ensure everyone in Scotland has their say.

Not sure what’s involved?  All you need is a small group of people, a table for you to sit around, a couple of hours together and a desire to explore how we can ensure Scotland is a nation where everyone can afford food that is good for themselves, good for the people that produce it and good for the planet.   

We will send you hard copies of all the resources in our Kitchen Table Talks resource pack, to provide you with everything you need to support anyone – friends, family, colleagues, community members – to take part in the consultation.

Interested?

1. Have a read through our “Guide for Hosts”. 
2. Fill in our pre-event form to let us know when you want your Kitchen Table Talk to go ahead and we’ll send you a pack in the post with:

• prompt cards
• simplified consultation response forms
• pre-paid envelopes for participants to return their responses
• a record sheet for you to jot down some of the questions, hopes and aspirations that come up in your discussion.
• facilitation notes to guide the conversation.

We’ve designed these Kitchen Table Talks as in-person events, but if the group(s) you support can only meet online,  the activities can easily be adapted for on-screen conversations.

Not sure whether this works for you? Tempted but you’d like to know more? If you have any questions, please contact us at info @ foodcoalition . scot​ .

Author: Parkswatch Scotland

The current position

” Risks associated with reinstatement of the Cairngorm funicular railway were addressed through robust internal and external governance and project management”  (HIE Annual Report 2022-23 as laid before the Scottish Government in October).

There was no public news release but last week Highlands and Islands Enterprise let it be known through the BBC (see here) that it would be “probably months rather than weeks” before the funicular re-opened.

Besides the hubris that is another winter season gone.  And the one place in Scotland that has had reliable snow this year on account of its altitude, the Ptarmigan bowl, generally inaccessible due to lack of uplift.  Far from securing the future the snowsports industry in Scotland, the funicular and Hie’s mismanagement of Cairn Gorm have undermined it..

Separating the wheat from the chaff in the BBC news report

The BBC story repeats HIE’s claim that  after the repairs were finished in January 2023 “the funicular was closed again in August due to snagging issues”.  Some snagging!  HIE’s claims at the time were that the funicular would be re-opened by the end of September (see here). But the BBC report also refers to  “the latest problems”.

If those problems are new, i.e have developed since the funicular was closed in August, ascertained their cause and developed a new business case to see if they were worth fixing?  It seems more likely the new problems that have been detected were actually there all along, begging the question of how the funicular was declared safe to use last January?

Possibly the most important sentence in the BBC story is easy to miss:

“HIE said the latest issues with the funicular were complex, and involved checks to thousands of metal rods in the railway structure”.

The key phrase is “inthe railway structure”. If true it means HIE has been checking not just the metal brackets round the structure but the metal rebars inside.   Exactly how HIE was doing this was not explained.  However, if they were doing this that would suggest the concrete beams which support the funicular tracks have been cracking up not just from the outside, hence the metal brackets, but from the inside too!  Contributors and people helping Parkswatch have been consider this possibility for some time and we will now investigate further.

The second most important sentence was the one where HIE admitted this work “did mean continuing costs to HIE”.  Previously, HIEhad claimed the repair work was covered  by the guarantees it obtained from the design engineers and main contractor, Balfour Beatty.  This means yet more public expenditure on top of the £25m the BBC reports has been spent on the repairs so far. The Full Business Case approved by the Scottish Government originally allocated “£16.16 million in capital funding to support funicular reinstatement”, far more than the initial estimates.

The best spin in the story came right at the end:

“Before it was closed, the funicular’s operators estimated that it carried about 300,000 visitors each year.”  Really?  Here are the figures for the total number of passengers, both summer and winter, before HIE started to try and cover up how few people were using the funicular:

2010/11: 238,733.

2011/12: 181,689

2012/13: 242,893

2013/14: 119,585

2014/15: 204,279

That’s an average 197,435, considerably less than HIE’s claimed 300,000. The relatively high figures in 2010/11 and again in 2012/13 incidentally were due to good snowsports seasons.  And the number of visitors HIE predicted would use the funicular under Option 3a in the full business case approved by Scottish Ministers?  162,789!

Scottish and UK Government involvement in the decision to repair the funicular

The BBC story quoted a government spokesperson as saying:

“We recognise the importance of the funicular and the Scottish government is working with Highlands and Islands Enterprise to ensure it is back up and running as quickly as possible.”

Comment: What importance? Its irrelevant to the economy on Speyside in summer and a poor form of uplift in winter that keeps snowsports enthusiasts away.  A new ski lift with mid-station could have been built from the base station to the Ptarmigan bowl for a fraction of the repairs costs and been operating for the last three years.

“The current programme of works has proven more technically challenging and complex than had been expected.

Comment: this suggests that Scottish Government officials confirmed the business case to repair the funicular without any proper understanding of what went wrong and whether repairing it was sensible.

“The project team also had to contend with severe weather conditions and below-freezing temperatures on the mountain.”

Comment: how many times has the weather now been used to justify delays at Cairn Gorm? And why are allowances for the weather never built into project management timescales and costs from the beginning?

The UK Government is also now implicated in the funicular repair fiasco.  As I explained in my last post (see here) the Department of Transport issued a certificate in January 2023 that the funicular was safe to use but then refused to release much of the evidence behind that decision on the grounds that the funicular might become a target for terrorists.

This is completely ridiculous and I am delighted the media is now on the case. Can we now expect the DfT to counter this with a story in the Sun or Express about how Putin is planning for elite Russian alpine troops to take over Cairn Gorm?!

The underlying point, however, is very serious.  Why should anyone trust that the funicular will be safe to use again when both the Scottish and UK governments appears to be colluding with HIE rather than providing critical checks to protect the public interest?

The only government minister to have come out of this with any credit so far is Ivan McKee who, when he was business minister, “agreed reluctantly that continuing with the reinstatement was the least worst option” (see here for FOI). His hands, unfortunately, had been tied by his predecessor Fergus Ewing, but he has been the only person with real power who has questioned what has been going on.

Why is local opposition to the funicular so muted?

Given the current state of snowsports at Cairn Gorm and the £50m and rising that has been wasted on the funicular, one might have expected some organised opposition and demands for change to have emerged locally. There isn’t any and it is worth considering why?

The Aviemore and Glenmore Trust was created in 2017 because some people in the local community knew they could manage Cairn Gorm better than HIE. HIE soon managed to sideline them into other ventures (see here), ostensibly to show they had the capability of managing somewhere like Cairn Gorm –  as if anyone could have done worse – and has then used small amounts of grant funding to silence them.

Local MSPs have generally been conspicuous by their silence.  Given the way Fergus Ewing has backed the funicular from the start and his responsibility for the disastrous decision to repair it, one can understand his silence, but this would normally have created plenty of opportunity for politicians from other parties to seize the initiative politically.  The only one who has tried to do so is the Tory MSP, Edward Mountain, who has called for a Public Inquiry.  His stance has been weakened by his continued support the repair of the funicular while he has actively pressed the Scottish Government to meet the cost of the repairs. While critical of HIE, this lets them off the hook.

Other MSPs, while occasionally pressing concerns,  have been less vocal  For example, after Natural Retreats collapsed, Rhoda Grant (Labour) urged the Scottish Government to transfer Cairn Gorm to the local community (see here).  Later, John Finnie (Greens) (see here) called for greater community involvement.  Those utterances have never been followed through.  Kate Forbes, so vocal on so many issues in the Highlands appears strangely silent on the funicular – but maybe I have missed something?

The most likely explanation for this political silence is that local MSPs are concerned that too much focus on the scandals at Cairn Gorm could justify the Scottish Government re-opening its 2016 proposals to re-organise the enterprise agencies.  This met with considerable opposition in the Highlands. Better an unaccountable agency like HIE  than to lose a body  which now brings/disburses £100m a year through the Highlands and Islands. And better still if the Scottish Government always steps in to pay for that agency’s mistakes.

At the local government level, HIE uses its economic power more directly to prevent criticism.  Bill Lobban, the most vocal and arguably most powerful Highland councillor on Speyside, was quickly appointed to the board of Cairngorm Mountain Scotland Ltd when it  was set up to manage the business after the collapse of Natural Retreats. Gagged! For other councillors, the threat of HIE funding for other local projects being turned off is sufficient to ensure compliance.

This also works at the local community level as touched on before in Cairn Gorm – Corporate Gaslighting, Cock-up or Bullying?  In small communities, where people either know each other directly or know someone who does, it is generally very hard to criticise any employer, private or public, for the way they are managing their business. Most people understandably don’t want those they know to lose their jobs particularly if they are relatively well paid. Even where those jobs are threatened, it remains hard to speak out because doing so is perceived to make the job situation even worse.

A good example is provided by the ski schools at Cairn Gorm.  They used to provide significant employment but anyone dared speak out about the run-down of lift infrastructure at Cairn Gorm risked losing their place on the mountain.  Now all that is left to the survivors in this process is a tiny patch of artificially created snow.

Unsustainable development – where is the Cairngorms National Park in all of this?

Even had it been properly designed, the life of the funicular was always limited.  When HIE pushed through the decision to build it, no proper consideration was given to the costs of removing it eventually. The proof of that is in HIE’s Full Business Case for the repairs.  This claimed that removing the funicular would cost £13.3m and it would be better value to repair it at an estimated cost of £16.16m. The removal costs were overinflated (see here) and, although they will now have increased significantly due to the enlarged structure, they would still be considerably less than the £25m temporary repair job.

Whether or not HIE manages to re-open the funicular for a time, sooner rather than later Cairn Gorm is going to be left with a pile of concrete junk as wise people predicted when it was first mooted.

The funicular railway not only provides a classic example of unsustainable development, it is located in a National Park whose statutory aims include:

• “to promote sustainable use of the natural resources of the area”; and
• “to promote sustainable economic and social development of the area’s communities.”

In retrospect, if the Cairngorms National Park Authority (CNPA) had refused to grant planning permission for the repairs to the funicular on the grounds they were unsustainable, that would have been not only the right decision, they would have being doing both the environment and the public an enormous favour.

Moreover, had they questioned the development case for repairing the funicular, as set out in the Full Business Case which committed over £73m of public funding to HIE’s subsidiary over 30 years, the CNPA might have provided the sort of checks and balances that is essential if public authorities are to make good decisions. They didn’t.  It is worth considering why.

Part of the reasons appears to have been fear of local politicians and local public opinion.  Fergus Ewing, in particular, was not only very powerful, he had a long history of attacking the CNPA whenever they raised any concerns about a proposed development in the National Park (see here). But one can also imagine the outrage locally if the CNPA had blocked the repairs as being unsustainable. People at that time saw their jobs and the future of the local community depending on it.

This points to the challenge of embodying sustainable development into our National Parks. If people had known then they know now, the CNPA might have been very popular as the body that intervened to sort HIE out.  Indeed, had the Loch Lomond and Trossachs National Park Authority (LLTNPA) refused planning permission for the Cononish goldmine on the grounds it was unsustainable, they too would have been on the right side of history (see here).  The challenge, in terms of winning public support, is that it is very difficult for anyone to predict  the future of developments such as the funicular or the goldmine with certainty.  Meantime, government backing for less regulation over business interests, has made it even harder for our National Parks to implement their duties  to promote sustainable development and make wise use of resources.

The neglect of those duties is is very evident in the way both our National Parks handle planning applications.  Planning staff in our National Parks have hardly ever given any consideration to whether a development is sustainable for not (new houses that use fossil fuels are still for example being regularly approved).  National Planning Framework 4 has slightly strengthened the had of Planning Authorities in policy terms but does not address the challenge of how they do this in practice.

Planning staff and National Park Authorities are just not equipped to critique the sort of business case that HIE presented at Cairn Gorm or Scotgold did at Cononish, let along the engineering considerations: was a concrete funicular structure sustainable or was there really enough gold in those seams at Cononish?  We now know the answer to both questions is no. Nor do our National Parks have the  expertise or resources to question assertions made by developers about the likely environmental consequences of a development.  Instead they rely on reports from developers and consultants who won’t get paid unless they say what the developer wants.

In other words, setting aside all the specific political pressures to approve anything that might create jobs, Scotland’s planning system provides no means to question whether a development is sustainable or not even in our National Parks where sustainable development is a statutory aim.

Sustainable development and Lorna Slater’s proposals to reform our National Parks

What the funicular disaster shows is National Parks in Scotland need more power and powers.  Until they have these not only will they never deliver a more sustainable approach to development, there is no point in creating a new one.

Moreover, our weak National Parks provide a breeding ground for local conflict.  This is illustrated by local communities response to the Scottish Government’s consultation on National Parks (see here) and what has been  going on on Speyside. Farmers and crofters who have been actively campaigning against the CNPA, prompted by the re-introduction of beavers, are now campaigning against the creation of new National Parks and lobbying for the bid from Lochaber to be withdrawn.

While I have a lot of sympathy with the predicaments farmers face, it is striking that those interests, some of whom are privately critical of HIE, aren’t campaigning publicly against the money being wasted on the funicular (or indeed the £300m + being wasted on erecting masts in wild land areas) while telling people elsewhere National Parks are a waste of public money.

This all comes down to power.  The CNPA has a small  budget, just over £10m, which illustrates just how weak they are but also makes them an easy target for criticism. HIE has ten times that so is too powerful to be criticised.

This is never going to change unless our National Park Authorities have the powers and can command the budgets that force landowners and business interests to take them as seriously as HIE. Transferring responsibility for rural forestry and agricultural payments to our National Parks would help achieve that in a stroke and provide a means of ensuring Speyside crofters don’t end up having to meet any long term costs caused by the reintroduction of the beaver.

While Lorna Slater is right to put tackling the nature and climate emergencies at the centre of what national parks should be doing (along with supporting local communities and visitors) she will only achieve that if National Park Authorities have the power to do things differently and cease to be administrative bodies that apply the same rules as apply elsewhere in Scotland, whether these are about planning, forestry, agriculture, grouse moor management or deer numbers.

A good starting point for considering what new powers and resources are needed should be how the idea of sustainable development can  be turned from policy into practice.  This is not just about developments up mountains or down mines, its about land use, for example treating most tree planting for what it is, an unsustainable development designed to promote vested forestry interests ( see here for example).

A re-imagined National Park could actually offer a solution to the years of HIE’s failure at Cairn Gorm and enable far more constructive local debate and involvement on that and similar matters.  Allowing the CNPA to continue in the same old way and setting up a new National Park that mirrors what it has done to date is pointless and won’t benefit anyone.  The funicular disaster is proof of that.

Author: Andy Wightman, Holyrood Magazine

Amid the squeeze on public spending, there is one group of people still favoured by Scottish ministers. It is probably the only group to be regularly graced with the presence of cabinet ministers from Scotland and London at their AGMs. This year both the first minister and the cabinet secretary were in attendance. That group is the National Farmers Union of Scotland (NFUS).

With a new agriculture bill going through parliament that creates a new post-Brexit framework for farming subsidies, debate is once again focusing on why and how the public should support agriculture in Scotland.

In 2022, 50 of the largest landowners in Scotland shared a total subsidy pot of £48m, almost £1m each of public money. The top 10 per cent of recipients (1,920 farm businesses) received £382,393,417 – almost £200,000 per business, accounting for a whopping 49.7 per cent of total available public funds.

Among those receiving over £1m were the Duke of Buccleuch, Duke of Roxburghe, the Earl of Moray and the Earl of Rosebery, who between them shared over £8m in public subsidy from a system intended to support farm incomes and rural communities.

Earlier this month, representatives of smaller producers such as crofters, market gardeners and smallholders held a rally outside parliament. Their main demand is for fairness from a system that currently privileges the largest and wealthiest farmers. 

As the Scottish Crofting Federation argued: “Under the current system, most subsidies are awarded per hectare of land and based on land quality, so those with the most land and the best land receive the most money. In recent years, the bottom 40 per cent of agricultural subsidy recipients received only five per cent of the total agricultural budget while the top 10 per cent received half of it.”  

The NFUS has also been demonstrating outside Holyrood but, unlike the smaller producers, it doesn’t really need to. The president of the NFUS has been co-chairing a group to develop the new farming support system with the Cabinet Secretary for Rural Affairs, Mairi Gougeon. For a number of years, NFUS policy officer Jonnie Hall was seconded to the Scottish Government (paid for by the NFUS) for two days per week to advise ministers at the same time as spending his other three days per week lobbying those same ministers.

As Gougeon proudly admitted at the NFUS AGM earlier this month: “With your president co-chairing the board with me, and the NFUS’ policy director, Jonnie Hall, playing a critical role on the policy development group that works closely with officials, the NFUS is absolutely at the heart of co-designing and developing…”

And if that was not sufficient, new agricultural minister Jim Fairlie is a member of the NFUS and will oversee what the first minister has described as “the most generous package of support that’s available anywhere in the UK”.

Back in 2013, the then minister, Richard Lochhead, even admitted in his speech to the NFUS AGM that “I have had the honour of being your representative in government”. 

The NFUS, of course, has no representatives in government, except for co-chairing government working groups and seconding policy officers. Lochhead was then a minister in the Scottish Government representing the interests of the people of Scotland.

The key reason why the system is so generous to the biggest and most influential farmers is down to Scotland’s extremely concentrated pattern of private landownership. For the past decade, this could have been mitigated somewhat but, while EU rules permitted capping the level of payments and redistributing them, Scottish ministers have consistently declined to do so. And they have refused to do so because of the institutional capture of Scottish policy-making by one of the most successful lobbying operations in the country.

The current Agriculture and Rural Communities Bill is a framework bill giving wide powers to ministers to develop the details of future farm support. But that did not stop the first minister at the NFUS AGM announcing – well before any statement to parliament – that at least 70 per cent of future support will be spent on direct payments to farmers. As has long been the case, the more land you have, the more money you will receive.

Unsurprisingly, the president of NFUS described this as a “a lobbying success for NFU Scotland”. NFUS represents around 15 per cent of Scotland’s farmers and food growers but its interests continue to shape public policy. Smaller producers are squeezed out. If you grow fruit and vegetables for local markets but have no subsidy “entitlement” or you farm less than three hectares of land, you are ineligible for any support at all. If, on the other hand, you farm 1,000 hectares and grow barley to sell to multi-national whisky companies, you are eligible for hundreds of thousands of pounds.

Earlier this month, the first minister said that “producing more of our own food, doing so sustainably, creating of course more resilience in these uncertain times, is absolutely vital to our economic interests”.

He is right.

So why are millions of pounds of public money being used to provide multinational drinks companies with subsidised barley but no support is available for growing fruit and vegetables to provide local people with dependable, healthy food?

If, as looks likely, future agricultural policy wastes scarce public resources on subsidies for some of the wealthiest people in the country and on subsidising global alcohol manufacturers while doing nothing to support small-scale local producers of high-quality food, then it will have failed.

Author: CES, CLS, DTAS, SCA

Scotland’s communities could benefit by £170 million per year if Holyrood acts now on renewables.
Local communities could benefit by hundreds of millions of pounds if The Scottish Government would commit to community-owned renewable energy and a national community wealth fund as an urgent priority.
Five of Scotland’s Community Development groups – Community Energy Scotland, Community Land Scotland, Development Trusts Association Scotland, Scottish Community Alliance and Scottish Communities Finance – have united to press for reform of the renewable industry to ensure that the huge wealth being generated by Scotland’s natural resources are more fairly shared.
In a new report ‘A Fair Energy Deal for Scottish Communities – Call to Action’, these five organisations have come together to highlight the risk of corporates and multinationals dominating the vastly expanding renewable energy sector, while local communities lose a transformational opportunity. The report highlights how accelerated Government support would bring Scotland into line with many European countries, where the local communities get much greater advantage from the massive growth in renewables.
By contrast, in Scotland community-owned renewable projects are being held back with only one new community windfarm becoming operational in 2023.
The community organisations argue that current community benefit models are out of date, calling for community benefit payments to be linked to the consumer price index, rather than being frozen as they have been for the past 10 years.
Furthermore that a National Community Wealth Fund should be established with a proportion of community benefits from onshore, offshore and transmission developments being placed in a national fund to support the delivery of a just transition to Net Zero for all communities across Scotland, not just those located nearest to developments.
Community Land Scotland, Policy Manager, Dr Josh Doble said, ‘While our Call to Action represents an ambitious and major scaling up of the sector in Scotland, it is entirely deliverable.
‘Denmark and other European nations have demonstrated that community-owned wind power can and should be done at much larger scale than the Scottish or UK status quo’.

‘Local communities in Scotland have long experience of delivering successful renewable projects with a high level of expertise which generates a significant amount of sustainable development opportunities. However, these developments have slowed in recent years and the community energy sector is at risk of stagnation.
‘There is now huge corporate investment in the renewable sector – offshore and onshore. There is a huge opportunity for communities and for ‘Scotland PLC’ to benefit in a transformational way. Unless urgent action is taken, that opportunity could be missed.’
The five community organisations have prioritised a number of steps to reach the new target, calling on Holyrood to set a new target of 1 GW of renewable energy production being community-owned within six years. This would be ten times the current levels of community-owned renewables and entirely possible with the current expansion of the renewable sector.
This higher target would still only represent 12 percent of the current capacity of onshore windfarms alone. But this commitment could deliver £170 million per year directly into communities through earned revenue. In contrast, the same level of installed capacity of private sector developments – paying community benefit at the current good practice rate of £5000 per installed MW – would bring in just £5 million to local communities.
The Call to Action also prioritizes easier access to the National Grid for smaller community projects. It calls for the establishment of a cross-party working group to help accelerate rapid expansion of the community energy sector, and greater support for shared-ownership agreements between communities and corporates.
The community groups state that community benefits should be linked directly to the Consumer Price Index so that income to communities fairly reflects the wider economic situation.

Community Energy Scotland, Policy Manager, Kristopher Leask said: ‘There is a very strong feeling that communities have to benefit properly from renewables which are being developed in and around these communities, using natural resources, like the wind and the sun and the sea.
‘The benefits to society and economy of having community-owned power businesses are clear. That is why most European countries transitioning to green energy have developed their domestically-owned and democratically-owned Green Energy base. ‘This has been achieved not just through large public sector companies, but through community companies and cooperatives.

‘For example, In Denmark, 50 percent of onshore wind capacity is community-owned. In Scotland, it’s 2 percent.’ Dr Doble said, ‘The Government must work urgently to review its onshore good practice guidance and the guidance around Community Benefit funds to ensure community benefit payments are unrestricted, fair and proportionate. ‘Renewable energy in Scotland is a multi-billion pound industry. We now have a chance to enable local communities to be empowered by these opportunities.’ Kristopher Leask said, ‘The Scottish Government’s stated priorities for 2023-24 include equality, building a fair, green, growing economy, and community wellbeing. ‘Community-owned energy delivers on all of these. It could be transformative, with sustainable wealth creation at community level that feeds through to boost the whole country. Without urgent action, there is a real danger that our communities lose this opportunity.’

Author: Community Enterprise

The perfect storm of covid, Brexit, funding constraints and severe cost increases are putting exceptional pressure on the community, third and social enterprise sectors in Scotland.  An increasing number of organisations are finding themselves in highly challenging circumstances.  This can range from financial viability to governance and organisational dynamics.   

Scotland has a well-supported eco-system of support but we know that it can be hard to find and access that support when groups are stressed about the future.  The support that exists must be easy to find and simple to access, especially for those in crisis.  To address this four key agencies, (Scottish Community Alliance, Development Trust Association Scotland CEIS and Community Enterprise) have come together to collaborate on providing that support.    

A new Crisis Recovery button has been added to the social enterprise support map which can be accessed here https://sesupportmap.scot/recovery/.  This will lead to a very quick “request for support” form which will be assessed within 24 hours and a support package put in place.   

Crucially this is not a new service or programme.  It is a smarter, quicker and more collaborative way to access the eco-system of support that already exists.  Please spread the word to organisations who need support at a challenging time. 

CLICK HERE IF YOU THINK YOU NEED SUPPORT

Author: Kate Connolly, The Guardian

They have hurled tennis balls and chocolate coins on to the pitch; they have disrupted play with remote-control cars and planes mounted with smoke bombs. In recent months German football fans have thrown almost everything they have into protests aimed at preventing foreign investors from increasing control of their much-loved clubs.

This week it appeared their dogged defiance, driven by deep-seated grassroots sentiment, had paid off, after the German football league (DFL), which runs the Bundesliga, dropped its plans to sell an estimated €1bn (£850m) stake in its media rights income to a private equity firm.

The league’s board said it would no longer go ahead with the deal, in the hope, it said, of ending the unprecedented wave of protests, which have disrupted almost every game in the top two male divisions of German football since the start of 2024.

The stunts have led to lengthy delays, even match cancellations, which bosses said were a threat to the integrity of German football.

For fans, though, they were a winning gameplan that pulled off an unlikely victory. Comparing the struggle to that of David and Goliath, the fan group Unsere Kurve (Our Stands) celebrated the decision, and noted: “Ultimately the key to this success were these comprehensive, and very peaceful and creative protests.”

Last Saturday, among the most dramatic actions, masked football fans from Hansa Rostock jumped over advertising barriers during a match against Hamburger SV and placed two toy cars on to the pitch. Egged on by the crowds, they proceeded to steer them via remote control over the grass, with attached flares spewing out white and blue smoke, the Hansa colours.

As fans cheered in delight, lapping up the slapstick flavour of the moment, frustrated officials were seen to shake their heads and bury their faces in their hands, while two beleaguered stewards were laughed at as they tried to pounce on the cars.

At a time when many Germans have been joining demonstrations, including against the far-right populist AfD, often for the first time, taking a stand in support of democracy, the football protests have also touched a popular nerve and public support for them has been high.

The weekly newspaper Die Zeit commented: “The country’s football fans look to have pulled off the most relatable protest of the moment – and the most entertaining.”

The debate as to the future face of German football in the wake of the crisis has spilled into mainstream debate, including on primetime TV discussions, mirroring as it does other debates about the course the country wants to steer as it faces the challenges of conflict, climate crisis and the drastic economic knock-on effects of these.

At another top-flight match, disrupted by flying tennis balls, chocolate coins – a symbol of the perceived money-grabbers trying to “steal” fans’ clubs – more remote toy cars were deployed. A banner spread across the stands, read: “Why toy cars? Well, we won’t be remote-controlled.”

The humour has helped to galvanise support for the protests.

Among other stunts, protesters clamped combination bike locks to the goalposts. They were removed by bolt cutters, but could have been more simply unlocked with the code 5001 – a reference to the almost sacred 50+1 ownership rule governing Bundesliga clubs, according to which a club has to either in whole or as a majority own its association football team.

In case of majority ownership, the football team is operated as a separate company. The parent club has to have 50% of the votes, plus one vote, ensuring that an investor does not have majority control, to reduce outsider influence.

Critics of the protesters say they have left German football exposed, and open to blackmail, leaving questions as to how multimillion euro income shortfalls caused by the pandemic can be filled.

Admitting defeat, Hans-Joachim Watzke, a spokesman for the DFL executive committee, and CEO of Borussia Dortmund said: “In view of current developments, a successful continuation of the process no longer seems possible.

“Even if there is a large majority in favour of the entrepreneurial necessity of the strategic partnership, German professional football faces an acid test, which is causing major disputes not only within the league association between the clubs, but in some cases also within the clubs, between professionals, coaches, club officials, supervisory bodies, members’ associations and fan communities, which are increasingly jeopardising match operations, specific match schedules and thus the integrity of the competition,” he said in a statement.

The only investor left in the deal had been CVC Capital Partners, which had been expecting to receive a 20-year stake in broadcast and sponsorship revenue, in return for an upfront payment.

A second private equity firm, Blackstone – like CVC, backed by Saudi Arabia, leading to fans’ taunts of “blood money”, due to the country’s human rights record – had recently dropped out of the deal.

Author: Dan Gregory, Stir to Action

Building on research for Local Trust (Skittled Out) – on the decline of ‘social infrastructure’ in our communities, such as pubs and social clubs, Dan Gregory turns to the unprecedented rise in new social spaces – from board game cafés and bouldering centres to mosques and makerspaces. But where are these spaces located, who steps through their doors, and, importantly, who owns them? To regain control of our declining social capital, Dan suggests, we should be fighting to transfer ownership of these important spaces into the hands of the communities who use them

Over the last few years, a remarkable consensus has emerged among the ‘wonkerati’ about the crucial role played by social infrastructure in holding together our fragile communities – from Danny Kruger MP to Aditya Chakrabortty, from the Bennett Institute and Onward, to Local Trust and the Government’s Levelling Up White Paper.

While ironically the emergence of this term has given some of us yet another divisive definitional debate, we do know that social infrastructure is at least something like “the spaces, facilities and networks that are crucial to the development and maintenance of social connections within a community”.

But it seems we face a ‘crisis of social infrastructure’. My research Skittled Out for Local Trust documented this decline, fanning the flames. Yet this work was focused largely on established, traditional, often Victorian-era or post-war institutions, such as pubs or social clubs.

Meanwhile – and whisper it quietly – other new social spaces have been emerging and are mysteriously undocumented. What are these new places where people meet and interact? Where are they? Who owns them? Do they fulfil a similar function to the models we mourn?

Skating, scootering, & BMX parks

The UK’s first commercial skatepark opened on the South Bank in London in 1997. There are now over 1600 in the UK, used for skateboarding as well as for BMX, adapted wheelchairs, scooters, roller skates, and blades. They may be indoors or outdoors, in parks, or on industrial estates. Many outdoor skateparks are owned by local councils, while indoor skateparks typically operate as social enterprises or private businesses. While skateparks often have a poor reputation, some evidence suggests that skateparks actually reduce antisocial behaviour.

Climbing walls & bouldering

The first climbing wall in the UK was created in the 1960s, with the first indoor bouldering centre following in the late 1980s and the first dedicated commercial centre in Sheffield in 1991. The British Mountaineering Council (BMC) reports that there are now over 450 climbing walls in the country. These sites can be found in former Victorian water pumping stations, mines, churches, and warehouses. They typically cost to use and are most commonly used by fit and active young or middle-aged people. Centres are a mix of privately owned businesses, franchises, charities, and social enterprises.

Gyms, health and fitness clubs, & exercise studios

The first commercial gym in the UK is generally believed to have opened in the 1880s in London. As late as the 1980s there were still fewer than 200 gyms in the UK, but there are now more than 7,000 health and fitness clubs in the UK with over ten million members. Meanwhile, there are 4,476 pilates and yoga studios businesses in the UK.

More than half of UK gym members are female with those on higher incomes more likely to visit. Most gyms are private commercial operations, while some are non-profits. Gyms used to be most often in leisure centres or connected to tennis clubs or private schools. Then, new facilities appeared out of town and, most recently, in town and city centres.

Mosques & gurdwaras

Britain’s first purpose-built mosque – or masjid – was commissioned in 1889 and the second mosque not until 36 years later. There were around 30 mosques in the UK in 1971 but there are now an estimated 1,500 mosques in Britain. Meanwhile, the first Sikh gurdwara was established in 1911 in Putney, London and there are now thought to be over 200 or 300 gurdwaras across the UK.

Mosques and gurdwaras are used by all ages and both genders, often in urban areas. Mosques may be owned by the individual, family, or organisation who built the mosque but may also be transferred into a trust or charity.

Martial arts dojos

There are reportedly over 6,225 martial arts schools, clubs – or dojos – in the UK. These include Karate, Taekwondo, Judo, and Mixed Martial Arts. Around 200,000 people practise martial arts in the UK. They tend to be located in units in industrial estates or other former light industrial units. They rely on membership fees and are largely private businesses, as well as non-profits, and are mostly attended by boys and young men.

Soft play centres, trampoline parks, & family indoor entertainment

Soft play centres have grown in popularity and the Association for Indoor Play now represents approximately 1,100 operators. Most recently over a dozen ‘Ninja parks’ have emerged. The first indoor trampoline parks opened in the UK in 2014 and there are now around 200 across the country. Most are privately operated with a few non-profits, and some owned by the public sector. Initially, independent, single-site operators were located “at out-of-the-way industrial units with limited parking… That model is now changing, with large operators opening sites at retail parks”.

Laser tag, bowling alleys, escape rooms, & karting

There are over 300 ten-pin bowling centres in the UK. While there was an initial boom in the 1960s, almost two thirds closed in the 70s before a renaissance in the 80s and 90s. Venues are often out-of-town, and largely privately owned. As researcher Emma Jackson describes, lanes are “used by a diverse population in terms of age, class and ethnicity”. The first commercial laser tag arena was opened in the US in 1985.

Growing from half a dozen in 2013, there are now around 1,500 escape rooms in the UK, run by over 250 companies. Many are near high streets, typically pay-per-play and largely private for-profit. There are also more than 160 karting tracks in the UK, often located out of town. These also tend to be used by boys and young men.

MUGAs & outdoor gyms

Multi-Use Games Areas are fenced-off outdoor synthetic pitches used for various sports such as football and basketball. Built over the past few decades, many are in urban areas, in parks, or on housing estates. Make Space for Girls reported in 2021 that there “must be many thousands of them all over the country – although, again, no one’s got the data” and that there has only ever been “one research paper written about MUGAs”. They seem to be used less frequently by girls than boys. MUGAs are often owned by public authorities.

Men’s Sheds, hackspaces, & makerspaces

The first Men’s Shed in the UK was set up around 2011. These are community spaces where people can come together to share skills, typically woodworking, a social support network for men who may be dealing with isolation or mental health issues. Men’s Sheds are typically run by volunteers and funded through grants and donations. Today there are over 600 in the UK.

A hackspace or makerspace is a community workshop equipped with tools such as 3D printers. In 2015, there were reportedly 97 makerspaces in the UK and 72 active hackspaces today. Members pay a fee and are typically but not exclusively used by men.

Nail salons

Hairdressers are well documented as important social spaces in the US and UK, especially for many black people in urban areas. Yet nail salons less so. Millie Kendall, CEO of the British Beauty Council, says two decades ago she only knew of two nail salons in London. Yet by 2021, there were more than 4,000 nail salons in the UK. They are often found on high streets in cities and towns and the vast majority of the workforce and customers are female.

Board game, animal, & death cafés

Board game cafés provide a space where people can play games with friends and strangers. There are dozens in the UK, often in urban areas. Animal cafes often feature cats or dogs or more exotic animals. Death cafés aim to provide a space for people to discuss end-of-life-related topics in a safe, respectful, and comfortable setting. They are commonly held in another space, such as a library or community centre. The first in the UK was opened in 2011. Board game cafés may charge per hour, while animal cafés may charge an entrance fee.

Microbreweries & tap rooms

In the 1990s and 2000s, the microbrewery movement gained momentum, with more small breweries opening focused on producing high-quality, hand-crafted beers. Many of these also began to open tap rooms, where customers could sample beers on site. Today there are more than 3,000 active breweries in the UK, often situated on industrial estates. Many are owned privately but some are community-owned, sometimes with a strong local identity, and are most often frequented by middle-aged, middle-class men but not exclusively.

So what?

Our stock of social capital has been declining in the UK. Trust in government, in institutions, and in other people where we live has fallen. A majority of people in the UK believe that nothing in Britain works anymore. In this context, the argument made in Skittled Out persists, “if we are to maintain and replenish our stock of social capital, then we must consider the structures that support its formation”.

Yet we have an almost entirely undocumented rise of these new social spaces – thousands of gyms in place of pubs, hundreds of skateparks and climbing walls instead of youth centres, hundreds of mosques serving communities where churches are no longer viable, soft play centres instead of children’s centres, and ten-pin bowling alleys in the place of skittle alleys.

These new spaces may be just as flawed as the old working men’s clubs and bingo halls. You often need money to get in. You need a car to get there. They may be full of people just like you. They may be quite gendered spaces. In many places, they don’t exist at all.

In this context, are we right to be so focused on the death of the high street? These new spaces are often outside our towns and cities. Perhaps the high street has moved while we weren’t looking – to industrial estates in peri-urban settings.

And shouldn’t we be concerned about the ownership and control of these new spaces, which are mostly under the control of private interests? Or culturally, have we come to accept that our social spaces are not really ours?

Maybe fighting to save the high street through the power of social enterprise and community business is the wrong fight. Maybe we should be fighting instead for ownership of these new places in the new high street?

Sometime in 2024, the UK may see a new Labour government. Perhaps a Starmer administration is likely to be just as uninterested in the idea of ownership as Blair’s. But maybe not. Who knows, Labour might be thinking already about how the institutions left to us by the noughties and the teens – the likes of UnLtd and Nesta and Big Society Capital – could be reformed to help transfer power and control of the places we use? Our new social spaces.

Author: Eve McLachlan, P&J

The Uist First Responders were officially welcomed into service by the Scottish Ambulance Service this week.

It is a team that’s been years in the making.

The chief executive of the Scottish Ambulance Service has said that he is “delighted” by the establishment of Uist First Responders, a new first responders group in the Western Isles island community.

“Our Community First Responders play a vital role in their communities, starting treatment while an ambulance is on route as every second counts,” Michael Dickson said.

They’re especially vital in rural areas like the Western Isles, says local paramedic Claire Bagley.

“There are two ambulances in Uist, and they could be on the other side of the island when another emergency comes in,” she says.

Add in Uist’s wild weather, which can make travel difficult, and it’s clear how important the Uist First Responders are.

“The group really is a fantastic asset,” she says.

Getting the group up and running has been its own challenge.

“There was a previous unit in Uist – the North Uist first responders – from 2008 to 2016,” Ms Bagley says. “Then unfortunately numbers dropped and we struggled to get someone over [from off-island] for training.

“We have probably spent the last four or five years trying to make this happen again,” she says.

Problems caused by Covid, as well as the practical difficulties of bringing trainers over, made things difficult. But the community didn’t give up.

“We had a high number of people who wanted to volunteer,” Ms Bagley says.

Eventually, “two trainers were able to come over last September to do four full days of training over two weekends.”

The volunteers came to the training with very different levels of experience.

“Some of the volunteers had never done first aid before, some had done first aid as a part of work, two were old responders from the North Uist group and we have an ex-nurse too, as well as a ambulance technician.”

But all of them will help save lives.

Their training means they can operate an automated external defibrillator (AED), perform CPR, and use the FAST test to quickly diagnose a stroke, all in the vital minutes before an ambulance can arrive.

The volunteers can also “take observations like respiratory rate, pulse rate, blood pressure and temperature”, Ms Bagley says.

But it wasn’t just the volunteers themselves that have made Uist First Responders a reality.

“Local businesses from across Uist came together to help to fund the CFR kit bags, which include an AED,” says Ms Bagley. “We’ve also had an amazing response from the community who have also been fundraising.”

She hopes that the team will continue to grow.

“We are hoping to hold another training event this year and already have around nine more people wanting to volunteers,” she says.

“Anyone else that would like to volunteer can contact us via our Facebook page or email address.”

Author: Severin Carrell , Guardian

Plan for picnic stop in Muirkirk and similar projects contrast with land system in rest of UK, where state or crown keep assets

The villagers of Muirkirk, a former mining community known for its religious revolutionaries and its footballers, have plans for the derelict petrol station they are about to buy for a knockdown price.

An acre square of crumbling tarmac and scrub, it will soon become a community garden and a picnic stop for tourists travelling through Ayrshire on the A70, thanks to an unusual deal with one of Scotland’s oldest state institutions: the King’s and Lord Treasurer’s Remembrancer (KLTR).

Muirkirk’s old filling station is a case study for a major new initiative by the KLTR to give away, for a minimal fee, dozens of buildings, pieces of land, factories and offices across Scotland that have become ownerless and unused.

Founded as the Scottish court of exchequer in 1707, the agency would ordinarily try to sell these properties at the market rate, passing on revenues to the Scottish government’s consolidated fund under a long-established system known as bona vacantia, where ownerless properties were transferred previously to the monarch and more recently to the state.

Under the KLTR’s new ownerless property transfer scheme, due to formally start on 1 March, local communities will be offered buildings or land worth up to £500,000, potentially shifting millions of pounds worth of property into community ownership.

It has already given away a small uninhabited island near Eday in Orkney, used by seals as a haul-out, and is negotiating the community transfers of a derelict Grade A-listed art nouveau office block in Glasgow called the Lion Chambers, which is one of the first in the UK to use reinforced concrete; an old hotel in Falkirk; and vacant land beside some Glasgow tenements which has a market value of £300,000 and will be converted into a market garden.

This policy, endorsed by Scottish ministers, highlights the growing contrast over land ownership policy with the rest of the UK. England’s bona vacantia policies which, unlike in Scotland, include the assets of people who died intestate, remain rooted in their feudal past.

In most of England and Wales those revenues go direct to the Treasury, but the royal family’s duchies of Cornwall and Lancaster have the legal right to all bona vacantia assets in their areas. The Duchy of Lancaster decided to donate £100m to ethical funds last year after a Guardian investigation found it used bona vacantia revenues to finance its property empire.

David McLatchie, a director of Muirkirk Enterprise Group (MEG), a social enterprise linked to the village’s community council, said the filling station project was a helpful part of Muirkirk’s regeneration.

The closure of its coalmines and ironworks plunged Muirkirk into significant poverty, but over the last 25 years MEG has worked to reinvigorate the area by opening heritage parks, community plantations, a bird hide, a skate park, and by refurbishing buildings for small businesses.

The village, which was the first in the UK to install gas lighting, has a revolutionary history: Muirkirk was a centre of the 17th-century revolt by the Covenanters, lowland Protestants who rejected the king’s attempts to control their religion, initially aligning themselves with Oliver Cromwell’s parliamentarian army.

It was also the birthplace of a host of professional footballers, with the Liverpool manager Bill Shankly born in nearby Glenbuck, and is home to two 18th-century poets associated with Robert Burns: John Lapraik and Isabel Pagan.

McLatchie said the derelict filling station was an eyesore, and that replacing it with a garden would improve villagers’ mental wellbeing. “This is going to enhance the village in terms of the attractiveness of the village … it’s not the last piece in the jigsaw, but it’s part of it.”

The KLTR’s new strategy, which was proposed by the Scottish Land Commission, which advises ministers on expanding community buyouts, is akin to the asset transfers that local councils and Forestry and Land Scotland are overseeing under a ministerial mandate to expand community ownership.

Bobby Sandeman, the KLTR’s head of department, said transfers had to demonstrate clear public interest and community benefits, and prove they had strong local support and a comprehensive business case. Its decisions are overseen by a panel of expert advisers.

Sandeman said the goal was to support community creativity and wealth-sharing. “It’s not just about money, it’s also thinking about how to realise social and community capital; that’s the genesis of this,” he said.

 This article was amended on 23 February 2024. A caption on an embedded image said that Lion Chambers in Glasgow had already been given away when in fact negotiations over its future are taking place.