Felly, gwybarnau i gŷnodd mewn gweithio y 10 oesol yn 2024 o gyflwygau localiad, rhagleniau, i'w gwybod cyffredinol, i'w ddweud ar gael ddim yn cael ei fod y dyfodol. The first item of our agenda today is to decide whether to take items four and five in private our members agreed. We're all agreed, thank you. The second item on our agenda today is to take evidence as part of our community wealth building inquiry in a round table format, and we are enjoined in the room Matthew Brown, leader at Preston City Council. Rob Davison, strategy manager of community wealth building at the South of Scotland Enterprise. Ian Gulland, chief executive at Zero Waste Scotland. Angus Hardy, director at the Scottish Community Alliance. Louise Kirk, representing the Airshore Community Wealth Building Commission. Neil McEnroy, chair of the Economic Development Association Scotland, and Linda Somerville, deputy general secretary at the Scottish Trade Union Congress. Online, we are joined by Stacy Dingwall, who is the head of policy and external affairs at the Federation of Small Business Scotland. I warmly welcome everyone to the meeting. I am going to begin our conversation this morning by inviting everyone to briefly introduce themselves. That may seem odd, because I have just named you all, but it is part also because we get to hear your voice and just speak into the space. I am Ariane Burgess, convener of the committee, and also MSP for the Highlands and Islands region. Hi, folks. I am Willie Coffey, MSP for Kilmarnock and Irvine Valley, and I am also the deputy convener of the committee. Hi, I am Louise Kirkham, head of service for economic development growth and regeneration at North Ayrshire Council, and I am here representing the Ayrshire Community Wealth Building Commission. Just before Miles goes, sorry, Miles. You do not need to operate your microphone, so we will take care of that. One less thing to think about, Miles. It was not late. I know you weren't, but others were. Good morning. I am Miles Briggs, MSP for Lothian region. Good morning. I am Rob Davidson, strategy manager for Community Wealth Building with South of Scotland Enterprise. Good morning, Matthew Brown. I am leader of Preston City Council. I also work part-time for the Democracy Collaborative Think Tank. Gordon MacDonald, MSP for Edinburgh Penlands constituency. Good morning, everyone. I am Neil McRoy. I am the chair of the Economic Development Association of Scotland, but my day job is the global lead for Community Wealth Building with the Democracy Collaborative, who is a USA-based Think Tank. Pam Goswll, member of the Scottish Parliament for the West region and a member of this committee. Iain Gullin, chief executive at Zero Air Scotland. Good morning, everyone. I am Linda Somerville, deputy general secretary from the STUC. I am Mark Griffin, MSP for Central Scotland. Good morning. I am Angus Hardy, director of the Scottish Community Alliance, a coalition of Scotland's community-based networks. Good morning. I am Stephanie Callhan, MSP for Uddingston and Bailstone constituency in Lanarkshire. Thank you very much. As I said, welcome to the session. Oh, sorry, apologies, yes. Stacey, apologies. Would you like to introduce yourself? No problem. Morning, everyone. It's Stacey Deng, well-headed policy, next-term law fairs at FSB Scotland. Thank you so much for joining us. We're going to turn to questions from members. I'll just give you a little bit on how to involve yourself. O'r cyfle o'r cyflwrs wedi'i gweld y cwestiwyr mewn i'r diwrnod yn gweithiadd, ond, ychydig i ddiw meddwl i'n cefnogi, byddai'n glideitid i'n wneud am fynd. Steici, if you want to join online and put an hour in the chat function. As I said earlier, there's no need for you to turn microphones on and off us. We will do that for you. I'm really delighted that we're doing this round table this morning. It feels that we're getting quite a start on the fact that the government is talking about a community wealth building bill but my sense is that community wealth building and certainly some of you are representing that community wealth building is already happening in Scotland to some degree. So I think initially what I'd be interested in understanding from you and maybe I will direct this question to Neil to start with just to give you that heads up is that is there do you have a sense in your work that we really understand that community wealth building will bring the benefits does there agreement across Scotland around that and how does this approach differ from what's gone on before for example with community empowerment and inclusive growth and I know that you talk quite a lot about the idea of the pre-distributive and redistributive model of that so how do we ensure that that that is really taking place? Good, thanks for that. Is it convener or chair? What's the best way of describing chair? Convener, thanks convener. Look I think three things to say on that. Firstly is that there's lots of great things happening in Scotland anyway that's under the orbit of community wealth building and its beauty is is that it brings them all together and by bringing them all together it amplifies in scales the impact of all those great things so it's a intentional way of bringing strategic way of bringing lots of good things together. The second thing to say is that for many years in Scotland we have had you know regeneration a process of redistribution to poorer places and poorer people that's not enough work is not enough we need to think deeper about how more scots can actually control the economy in terms of being shareholders stakeholders in that economy itself and so community wealth building is fundamentally saying hold on here can we redirect the wealth in Scotland can we create a productive Scotland so more scots have a genuine stake in it and that is where we get to the redistribution and predistribution redistribution says we grow the economy we tax then we redistribute it what predistribution says is let's make more scots have a fundamental stake in the economy before enduring economic activity it's almost like a wealth stakeholder society if you like now the third thing to say is that we we know we have aspirations for a wellbeing economy we know of aspirations for a progressive Scotland the Scotland where we're all prosperous and greener what community wealth building is through its five pillar model it's deeply practical it's actually a way of a practical way of delivering on a wellbeing economy and inclusive economy aspirations it's not it is strategic it's got big aims in terms of this wider wealth stakeholder society but it actually you can start with procurement you can start with fair work you can start with community ownership you can start with you know community ownership of a wind wind activity you can start with a credit union you can start with our community shares it takes all those great things um and it's somewhere to start but it seeks to amplify and scale them up thank you like thanks for that that great beginning anybody else want to come in on on that do it does everyone agree around the table that community wealth building is something that we need to be uh pursuing here in scotland angus does this come on that's on yes all right um yeah it's interesting neils sort of overarching kind of reference to community wealth building as as if it kind of subsumes all of this good stuff that's happening in scotland already and i think eventually that's what we need to get to but i also think that we don't yet fully understand what community wealth building is and the extent of it and i was reading a piece of research from glasgood cally that was commissioned by the royal society of edinburgh just came out last month which kind of reflected a fair amount of confusion about what community wealth building is some people saw it as a values driven tool for economic development others saw it as a a mechanism for organisational change and others saw it as a kind of space for the community development agenda to further develop and take you know the whole community empowerment journey to take that on to the next stage and my view is that community empowerment to a large extent has stalled in scotland and so i think you know i really welcome the community wealth building agenda to that's that's now beginning to be developed because i think it will take community empowerment the the kind of the principles of community empowerment into that next iteration but i do think we need to sort of build a national consensus about what community wealth building actually is and get everybody at all levels of society not just government about to legislate but local authorities community sector third sector everybody understanding what it is so that we can all buy into it because it requires sort of multi-tier buy-in to make it work it's not going to be something which we can deliver kind of top down thanks for that matthew you've had experience in Preston around community wealth building and and do you have the sense that when you were first starting out on that community community wealth building journey there was confusion and and the work to try to get people to understand that it's it's not necessarily a values driven values driven form of economic development but it's more than that indeed i think people struggle with new ideas i think there's resistance to new ideas generally culturally within institutions within politics within economic development and myself and colleagues found that because what we were doing was responding to several things i mean like lots of areas Preston's are very less well off you know diverse working class communities who have been let down by the current economic model we'd also had the failure of conventional corporate developer led approaches to city centre regeneration and in position of the worst forms of austerity in the northwest of england and we were trying to respond to that and this is where we came across work in cleveland ohio around even in tougher conditions that we had how they were really trying to you know regenerate the communities that way through anchor institutions democratic ownership and the rest of it so it was tricky it's still tricky because there's still one or two closed minds but i just think in terms of what communities face whether it's the northwest of england scotland or wherever it might be i think we need something new because we've had decades of an economic model nationally that is letting people down and the inequalities we're facing is really severe and that's amplified based around you know gender and ethnicity and so this is why we started community wealth building and the exciting thing for me in Preston is how this has spread to places like this and internationally but also how in Preston and in scotland we're seeing a dynamic where this is embedding itself within communities within faith organisations unions small businesses are working with local government and regional governments and anchor institutions and other things to actually make those changes thanks thanks for that and and in your experience of it how do we make sure that it doesn't just end up being this kind of i mean i think what i'm hearing talking to people around scotland is that there's a concern that it's just it ends up being another form of economic development how do we really make sure that it is about community wealth building that it has that redistributive pre-distributive aspect to it how have you done that in Preston well we've got various levers that are looking at different things so say for example promoting fair work at a real living wage that is something that is very pre-distributive and that is something that can be done across the local public sector together as well as a private sector and three procurement and other elements of the economy so it's really that collaboration the way we're doing it is we've probably got about 20 or 25 policies that are being implemented sometimes the council on its own sometimes with partners sometimes within the community and trying to bring about a really resilient democratic economy so whether it is the council itself building cinemas and regenerating museums and using local suppliers whether it's us establishing worker on firms with partners whether it's community land trust or insourcing whether it's what we're doing across the northwest of England with partners trying to establish a regional cooperative bank to stop wealth extraction it's all those pillars together really and that is where we're getting the success but also we're getting community understanding and community support for it it's not easy and also the the trying to get big institutions like the NHS to change it and the in Preston the NHS is recruiting people in the areas of the highest deprivation and focusing that recruitment on women from minority communities so that is very exciting in the sense that they're in secure employment and it tackles that deprivation really I think the challenge you have is that because it's not one big thing that's happening at the same time it's hard to communicate it to the people but obviously we've got a quite a sophisticated strategy now that's looking to do that okay that that's a really interesting point or how do we take the people with us Louise I want to bring you into the conversation because obviously we visited Great Cymru and we saw some of the work that's been happening in North Ayrshire and as part of the Ayrshire community wealth building commission you've obviously been doing this work but I'm going to kind of bring in another question which is that in all of the all of the work you've been doing as part of the commission obviously we're looking at this now because we're anticipating a community wealth building bill and so it'd be good to hear a bit about your experience but also what have you kind of bumped into that has indicated that yeah we do need some legislation we do need some primary legislation what or what's in the way of you being able to really flourish in what you're doing so thank you convener um obviously the just to give a kind of overview of the Ayrshire community wealth building commission was formed in 2020 and is a partnership in the UN organization so the three local authorities NHS Ayrshire and Arran Police Scotland, Scottish Fire and Rescue Service, Ayrshire College, Scottish Enterprise and our third sector interface and the purpose of the commission is to progress and promote the development of that collaborative approach to community wealth building in Ayrshire and it's currently chaired by the leader of North Ayrshire Council with support through our economic policy team. Beside that we have an anchor charter which was developed in October 2020 and that's 16 pledges across the five pillars and climate change and we have 11 organisations signed up to that charter including the three Ayrshire integrated joint boards so in developing the regional approach we've kind of identified that we needed a dedicated resource with a lead organisation to coordinate that activity and also to that the coordination of that activity has taken time to obtain buy-in develop strategy and requires a focused effort to support those organisations not traditionally involved in economic development activity but to recognise the role as economic influencers and take forward community wealth building in the way that's the most appropriate to their respective organisations. We've delivered a lot of similar activities as Matthew's outlined there in terms of we have three work streams in relation to land and assets, fair employment and procurement and sort of taking that regional approach as help support activity across the anchor institutions more generally. In particular some of the anchor organisations have appointed programme managers to help support and deliver on their ambitions. In terms of the challenges associated with that finance is obviously hugely restrictive for local authorities and other public sectors and their competing priorities and increasing pressures and I think that's where we feel the legislation could help support that and also create an opportunity to take a look at the funding landscape going forward and the legislation we're hopeful would provide a kind of more coordinated approach to that delivery. The Community Wealth Building Commission obviously submitted a full response to the legislation of outlining its ambitions to support this and similarly the Community Wealth Building Commission members are supportive of a duty that aligns with option C so a hybrid approach that allows organisations to embed community wealth building within their strategies as well as producing a collective play space community wealth building strategy going forward. We've recognised that the ability to deliver community wealth building is dependent on the anchors having adequate capacity and resources to collaborate and engage and that's why within the Community Wealth Building Commission as it stands we've concentrated on those first three pillars recognising that currently some of our anchors don't have capacity and capabilities to support the other two pillars and therefore looking for flexibility around about the duties to allow us to prioritise activity based on capacity, local needs and challenges. Okay great thanks for that. Does anyone else want to come in on the general sense of community wealth building and how this approach differs but also why we might need new legislation for this because I get a sense that it is happening in Scotland so what have we come across at the moment that would say ah we need the legislation I mean Linda's indicated the kind of financing aspect and a more coordinated approach there but anybody else got any thoughts? Stacey you want to come in great. Thank you very much. Yes so for small businesses the main the most important pillar of activity as you'll know there's a five pillars of activity so our focus is really on the spending pillar as the key one for FSB and our members to as you'll know Scotland's been through quite a journey in the last decade in terms of procurement reform and one of the main aims of that has been to increase that public spend with micro and small businesses in particular. So in the last 10 years we have seen a bit of progress on that but we feel that with community wealth building there's an opportunity here to build on that process that progress that we've made in the last 10 years so for example to look at the stats in 2019 FSB there's a report which looked at five years on from the procurement reform legislation how much spend had increased with our smallest businesses or micro businesses in particular so that would be those with fewer than 10 employees and how many of those were winning a larger share of public contracts. If you look at the data that public contracts Scotland produces every year sometimes they will provide details on procurement spend by size of business in Scotland for that year so the last available report which includes this data which is from 20 to 21 shows that only a small proportion of the value of contracts awarded that year which was more than 13 billion went to the smallest enterprises in Scotland despite them accounting for the vast majorities of businesses in Scotland and then if you take that back to 2016-2017 which is often referred to as the baseline year for procurement you can see that there's not been any progress made between 2016 and 2017 in terms of the spend that's gone with the smallest businesses in fact there's been a bit of a decline in progress since the introduction of procurement reform so something like community wealth building where there's talk about introducing statutory targets in order to get that procurement spend up we can see that there's been some progress across Scotland particularly with the community wealth building pilots and click manager for example they've put a real focus they set a target for increasing the proportion of spend with the smallest businesses in their area and they actually achieved that before the deadline that they'd set for themselves so we believe that there's evidence there that shows that if we set these statutory targets within the community wealth building legislation then we will make some progress on the government's aim of procurement reform and increasing that level of spending with smaller businesses okay thanks for that i've got a few people have indicated they want to come in so i'm going to go to Linda, Rob and then Neil and then Matthew i'm going to come to you and ask you how did Preston do it without legislation so Linda thanks very much i mean i'd certainly echo some of the comments that Matthew's made about the kind of failed economic models and development models that we've seen i mean the shift to out-of-town retail for example you know it's devastated our high streets and all of that's been obviously compounded during Covid and beyond that and a lot of businesses have never ever recovered and the impact on the workforce and the workers has been enormous. Scotland is actually despite having fair work you know as a key priority for the Scottish Government there has been some change there which we really welcome around the real living wage being implemented in certain places and that is now embedded within the governance grant giving as well that is a new part of procurement to look at the real living wage but the reality is there's still lots and lots of workers that are left outside of that and without actual control of employment law under this Parliament it's quite difficult sometimes for government to do more about it however we do think that there is more that they can do to actually implement fair work which would be one of the key pillars that would be needed for community wealth building and the real living wage as a key component of it but we need to do a bit more than that the expansion of sectoral bargaining is one of the things that would certainly help because when we're talking about creating new jobs we're talking about creating jobs that are quality jobs that are meaningful jobs and that give secure employment to people and one of the best ways to do that is through collective bargaining and the government actually has an aim under the national performance indicators to expand collective bargaining in Scotland so we would like to see that that approach is taken towards any part of community wealth building bill that comes in. It's not easy but it's well overdue within social care so social care in Scotland a number of years ago identified that as a key sector that for low pay in work poverty and insecure employment at times predominantly women and with a large black and minority ethnic workforce proportionate workforce within that and yet the government has still not managed to implement sectoral bargaining within fair within their fair work implementation in social care so you know I think the government's ambition in this I think should be applauded but they need to actually get on and implement it. One of our concerns probably is and the consultation showed that there was over I think 25 or 28 pieces of significant policy directives that the government was currently working through national strategy for economic transformation, a well-being economy, a whole load of others that would be impacted by community wealth building so unless there's significant resource and political direction and leadership given to both from government and across local authorities and other institutions, Louise's outlined the type of institutions you need on board at a regional level to make this happen then we would be slightly concerned that it's just adding another strategic aim to something without actually the resource behind it. The consultation again showed repeatedly through the consultation responses in the summaries the need for resource because the reality is that our local authorities are struggling there's increased demand across all of our their services and there is a workforce that is really really struggling because of resource to deliver that so there needs to be some thought given to that in terms of you know when it comes to where the spend goes but where are the spend coming from where does that budget come from and I know people and other committees have argued with me about you know what's on their spreadsheets but the reality is if you speak to your constituents and say is the service you get from your local authority right now whether it's you know paying in getting out asking for something needing help whatever service that is is it better or worse or the same as it was before the pandemic you're going to hear worse most of the time so there needs to be something done about thinking how do we resource particularly the local authorities to deliver on this I think if we've got this ambition and we would very much welcome the discussion around that I mean the corporations and you know the market-led approach that we've led had have had this decline in growth across most of our cities and the out what you outlined about Preston there could apply to every city parts of it across Scotland and our towns as well because rurally as well there's a huge impact and I think that's something why we've seen rural communities and I know that Angus will probably have more to say about that take initiatives because people feel a bit closer to decision making sometimes and think that they can actually do something a bit more about just thinking about the workforce a little bit more I think recruitment skills and training initiatives particularly for those in low income sectors and areas of the or geographical areas is something to be thought about apprenticeships needs to come into the picture as well because all too often they're missed out when we think about workforce planning and we look at how this might impact you know but we also need to make sure there's trade union involvement at every step of the way and I'd be interested to know what Matthew's experience was of that in terms of people getting on board with it the consultation talks constantly about collaboration the need for collaboration across institutions across organisations and with workforces and with communities and that's really is about building trust and I think people at the moment a lot of their experience hasn't been about building trust are they with their employer sometimes or indeed for communities trying to access services so I think we need to think quite carefully about how you know as much as strategic common strategies will help that but it's really action where people can see things delivered and see that they are valued within that both within communities and in workplaces where they believe they've got some agency within that to actually make meaningful change so I mean that's one of the things that we would want to be looked at but in general I think the idea of community wealth building if it's not just another strap line to wrap around a lot of component parts but actually has both that strategic aim but a meaningful action plan that people can regionally and locally get on board with then yes the last point I wanted to make just briefly there is actually thinking about and you mentioned it adding climate to the pillars how does this fit with just transition because there's a huge opportunity to look at when we're creating jobs what are these jobs around green growth as well and how does that fit you know with the Scottish Government's ambition around just transition the future economy Scotland does think tank in Scotland has recently just just done a piece of work around community wealth building and just transition which committee might might want to consider as well so I'll leave it at that for just now thanks very much Linda I think that's very helpful and thanks for pointing us to that resource okay I'm going to go to Rob and then Neil and then I'm going to come to Matthew the question about the legislation and then I think Ian you've indicated but also I think maybe some of you wanted to come back in on things that other people brought up so please feel free to do that Rob thank you very much convener I think thinking about the legislation and the impact that it could have so on the context of the south of Scotland certainly it is a region in which you quite legitimately say there is a good deal of community wealth building already happening has been happening in an entirely organic way I think and over a number of years to a large extent perhaps even predating any particularly widespread knowledge or understanding of the term itself but examine individual projects individual communities and their ambitions against the five pillars and they obviously match up I think that's one of the strengths in community wealth building incidentally but where I think that legislation and where Sosia thinks legislation could have value it is in terms of establishing community wealth building as a national priority legislation gives it a degree of authority arguably and it may help us collectively to get to the point where there is perhaps more of a critical mass in favour of community wealth building which strikes us as being a valuable target having said that setting those ambitions I think is really vital it will be equally important to try if possible and I'm conscious of parliamentary adjustment we'll probably not like this but to try and frame the legislation in such a way that it actively encourages as much local design of the practical implementation as is at all possible I recognise that's a bit of a tension and in turn while we think it's probably the best way of doing it it's highly likely that that will create a significant ask for resource a significant resource requirement probably outstrips what is currently available so we're very conscious and we're very respectful of the fact that you know some of our other partners in the south of Scotland are more concerned and reticent about a duty and concerned about its implications particularly for the resources and capacity they don't have the luxury of the staff who have been dedicated to this at present and are naturally concerned about that against the landscape of competing priorities that we've I think heard reflected around the table so it may be that what we see is the best way forward in terms of legislation does create a conversation that is required about resource and how we support that very individual and bespoke way of implementing community wealth building on the ground south of Scotland so far as we're concerned that's absolutely critical what will work in Selkirk just won't work in Strindor for argument's sake so retaining that locally rooted and bespoke attitude towards the development of community wealth building we think is critical in whatever direction the legislative agenda goes thank you thanks very much for that I think certainly the committee would be very supportive of that we're aware from all the work that we've been doing over the last week while that Scotland has a very nuanced landscape in terms of community needs and that's what we need to be really looking to support I'm going to bring in Neil yeah the approach that Scotland's taken to community wealth building has been kind of three legs to a store really there's been obviously the practice in the five pilot areas um there's been movement building if you like in terms of many other players being made aware of community wealth building and starting to do things in the health boards is a case in point and then there's this policy and legislation and I suppose there's three things important about the potential legislation is that I work across the globe and I see many administrations and I see I see lots of good things in Scotland but it's quite cluttered and so I believe that a community wealth building legislation could kind of declutter that landscape a bit it could be a unifying piece of legislation that brings many things together across those five pillars in a sense it's saying Scotland is a community wealth building nation it's looking to build a new economic model and here are the components of that so I see I think I think clutter is a problem for administrations for governments across the world and the more that you can declutter while still being progressive and ambitious is the way to go and I think many administrations are they are progressive and ambitious they tend to fill the space of lots of nice stuff but there's where is the unifying vision and purpose and I think that's what community wealth building brings I think there's many things that then across the five pillars that's in the consultation that's been that I think could be amplified in scale things around procurement things around fair work things around finance land and property plural ownership in terms of enhancing community ownership social enterprise and so forth there's tweaks and there's changes that may have legislative ramifications across those five pillars and finally I would say is that there is something here about a glue you know across the public bodies in Scotland that say you know the health boards health boards for instance they're obviously making people better and not get ill but they are an economic agent they buy things they employ people they have land and property assets they are an economic player and they should be seen as one as all other public bodies should be including this fine building here should also be seen as part of the economy so there's a potential here in the legislation to state that Scotland's economy is in bedded in our institutions of the other country and I think there's something there in louise indicated in terms of the duty options I think there's something where there's a duty on public bodies broadly yeah that actually in bed solidify their role as economic agents in Scotland across those five pillars thanks right so when you say decluttering are you actually looking at actually maybe removing some legislation that's kind of in the way I think also you my sense is that the cluttered landscape is also a problem for communities because there's a tremendous amount of opportunity for communities but and Angus might want to come in on this there's tremendous opportunity for communities but there's no coherent framework for them to find their way to all of all of those opportunities no absolutely and in two small examples I live in Oban and you know a very vibrant community but you're trying to try and develop Oban as citizens and citizens you're trying to link the economic, the social, the environmental and there is a lot of stuff yeah and we there is a sense of disempowerment because there is quite a cluttered landscape and there's different policies and there's different things I think community wealth born in Oban community wealth born in Argyll and Bute community wealth born in North Ayrshire creates that unifying force and it's kind of a a golden thread that runs through it it's also in the second example in the usa where where community wealth born term was invented you do see things like in the economic development administration the federal agency for economic development in the usa they have community wealth born run it through like a golden thread in Chicago they have a community wealth born approach it is a way of unifying economic social environmental policy under one orbit of consciousness but also action and volition thanks Matthew I said earlier I wanted to ask you how did Preston do it without legislation but maybe there is legislation but how have you done it well we had no choice in many ways what we found in terms of you know the restrictions we faced with austerity and failure of the conventional economic development approach so obviously we looked around and tried to see what we had already which was lots of public sector institutions that had land employed many people had a budget of £1 billion plus so we really started with things like real living wage and trying to buy locally and Neil at the time was chief executive Claes so we worked with Claes a lot of it was very unglamorous for the first three or four years it was getting procurement practitioners together and just going through contracts breaking them into pieces you know meet the buyer days all that kind of stuff but we managed to dramatically increase spend with locally based businesses especially construction and what we did find is that you know if a contract were 15 to 20 million went to a medium-sized construction company they had a family of subcontractors often individual self-employed people smaller businesses and there's actually more jobs created by doing it that way than having a construction big business which would extract wealth away from the community and not use local suppliers so that collaboration of the public sector was very positive we did things like work with the local public pension fund to invest a little more in the community and even if you can shift 1% to local investment with the pension fund that's worth 10 billion it's not insignificant in terms of the investment you get locally and then because we were saying things differently we attracted lots of interest which is nice but what was more positive than the interest was the fact that we started getting some funding from you know open society and others to look at the democratisation of the economy and then obviously we tried to embed these ideas in communities so you know people form a prison to set up a work a cooperative people in our minority communities to set up a work a cooperative there's a digital business a trade union set up a cooperative education centre we've got environmental activists setting up a community energy network which is putting solar panels on roofs of anchor institutions just speaking with the local NHS about do you have some land could that be used to develop socially affordable housing things like that all made a big difference really and we did it without legislation but if we do get legislation it'd be even more positive but very recently officers have been very good at you know successfully being successful with things like levelling up funds and towns funds and that then accelerates community wealth building so we can now afford to redevelop our city centre and we're doing it in municipal ownership so we have that resilience for our community but also have a say over local supply chains how it contributes to tackling the climate emergency and working conditions as well really so that's the way we've done it but legislation would be very positive I think whether that's Scotland or the United Kingdom because I mean the more coral law is an excellent example which actually gives tax incentives for workers to actually acquire a business and run it as a cooperative business and the democracy we see here why not have a lot more in the economy in fact we don't have that democracy in the economy in North I think it's leading to a lot of social problems because people got other agency in the workplace you know it's very frustrating very abnormal we are in the United Kingdom compared to other parts of Europe in terms of the smallness of our cooperative economy but even compared to some american cities and regions as well certainly in the cross party group on social enterprise we've been talking about the need for growing the economy the social enterprise and cooperatives need to be at least a third of scotland's economy so it's quite an effort that needs to happen there Ian you had indicated you want to come in hi thanks community I'm struck just sitting here the similarities with the kind of what we're talking about here and the circular economy and that was the kind of main thrust of our response to the consultation I mean in lots of ways I mean even just listening you know some of the language that everybody's using similarities with the approach that you know the circle economy is already happening in scotland you know there's examples in communities we can talk a bit more about some of these practical examples as well as businesses there's a growing demand for circular business models but I guess one of the challenges as others have said how do you how do you kind of mainstream it for a better word rather than it just being to name a broad blanket title for all of these component parts and that's one of one of the challenges I think of the circle economy which is very similar to the community wealth building but the two things are so that's a similarity but the two things are intrinsically linked for us so we do believe that a successful circle economy of scotland will or can deliver a strong elements of a community wealth building approach and I say can so one of the challenges with the circle economy if we don't design it right we will miss these opportunities so I really do think this is an important proposal of terms of a bill terms of legislation because I think you do because there is obviously a circle of bill going through parliament there's an approach there's a strategy being developed obviously subject to parliamentary approval but not having something similar for the wellbeing I think you know could disadvantage that to some extent I think we really need to to see the importance of having something in the statute books for all their good reasons it does it does create a kind of lightning rod a coordination a focus all of the things it does it puts something out there that says we are going to be a nation with wellbeing at our heart and and brigades people around that so and that's very similar to what's happening in another part of this parliament you know in terms of the circle economy how do we bring all of those other actors together to kind of really focus on the issue around reducing resources and the circle economy isn't just about climate change that's being mentioned it is about you know tackling lots of other global pressures but at the heart of it is about tackling inequality basically social inequality not just here in scotland but global as well so again why these two things are intrinsically linked so I guess that that's the similarities and there's obviously specifics why I think it's important to the community wealth building is if we don't link the two things together certainly I don't think the circle economy will be as impactful in terms of the social dynamic unless we link them together but also if we don't link them together then people who are doing community wealth building will have lost a tool from the box because thinking about resources thinking about ownership thinking about all of the things business models community involvement in our management of resources our you know repair cafes you know recycling ownership of materials being part of that system because it is a system the circle economy is how do we change the system if you're not part of that if the community are not part of that a local and a national level level and a regional level then I think the community wealth building ambition will be a lot harder to achieve so the two things I really do think need to be brought together as much as we can it's just one thing on our I'm not saying it's lessons learned from the circle economy one of the things we've learned from the circle economy and others have touched upon it again this place to the why do we need legislation why do we need a bill for instances but whilst it's all happening there's great examples and I could you know talk all day about great circle economy business models in Scotland embedded in community activity and the potential and the opportunity then it is really hard for those things to scale up in mainstream because the landscape the ecosystem that they operate in is to some extent skewed against them and that's for all the things that people have said it's about skills it's about finance it's about capacity of these organizations to actually get involved in some of the opportunities both at local and national level procurement for instance could be much more streamlined to benefit the involvement of those organizations to take to take greater ownership of the opportunities so it's the same thing so it's really about how do we to some extent rebalance the ecosystem that's what we're really the heart of our work it's here we've scotland thinking about the circle economy how do we this isn't just about focused on the projects per se it's about how do we create a new ecosystem for the for all of these organizations not just businesses social enterprises but local authorities and other actors that have been mentioned already how do we create a different type of ecosystem how do we replum the economy to ensure that there is much more advantage for these people to participate rather than creating a different type of economy over there for them to thrive and to prosper but to actually embed it into the mainstream so it's really about how do we create that different type of ecosystem which to be fair is about policy is about potentially legislation regulation is about duties it's about that as much it is about finance and changing the skills and or embedding the skills and capacity of organizations thanks very much for that i really appreciate you coming to the committee and kind of like putting that big highlighter through the connection between the circle economy and the community wealth building bill i'm just going to bring in gordon mcdonald briefly i think you might have wanted to respond to something earlier that was said and and then i'm going to bring in stephanie calhan who's got a couple of questions yeah it was a couple of points that were raised earlier on and before we lose sight of them i thought i better come in with my questions and stacey you spoke about earlier about public procurement obviously when public contract scotland portal was introduced in 2008 it was cutting edge brought a lot of contracts together and gave a lot of SMEs the option to bid for contracts but you know my experience in the economy committee is that there is a lack of capacity within micro and small businesses and there is a perception of too much bureaucracy whether that's true or not so i was wondering what practical steps need to change in procurement in order that SMEs can basically help keep money circulating in the local economy because local businesses use local services etc and before you answer that my second point was to martheon neal and it was what's the definition of local if we're going to keep money circulating in the local economy does it mean businesses that operate in that council area does it mean businesses that are registered have a registered office in that area or does it mean where the invoices paid at the end of the day which might be hundreds of miles away from where the particular business is operating so stacey first you're on mute i certainly agree on your second point there that's one of the issues that we have in terms of measuring that spend within a local economy because yeah you kind of a business they've just got registered address in that area but the money's not necessarily been kept within that area so it kind of defeats the purpose of community wealth building from our point of view but yeah you're completely right public contract scotland um as you said when it was brought in it might have been thought of as cutting edge i don't think that that's the case now um you know i've certainly worked at a job where i had to deal with public contract scotland every day and it's a really difficult site to navigate i think it's achieved its aims of bringing those contracts together um but i think it definitely needs a bit of a refresh um our members that we speak to as you say about 40 percent of our members are self-employed or just one man bans so they don't have that time that it takes actually navigate public contract scotland um and that's what we hear from our members all the time in terms of um they just don't bother going for contracts because they don't have the time to deal with that um bureaucracy in terms of going for it um i think they also feel that um even if they did to go for it that the system is pretty much set up um for larger businesses anyway um and it can be quite difficult when there's opportunities obviously um becoming part of a supply chain um and you know being a subcontractor to larger businesses um but that can be quite hard for them to devote the time and navigate as well um we do see some uh you know obviously um at the same time as i think public contract scotland was brought in so it's a supplier development programme that's really um a popular with our members i think as Matthew said he hosted the meet the buyer events in Preston and that's certainly already happening here in scotland it's quite widespread um in terms of the programme um i think what it needs is more capacity um so it needs more resource in order to help more smaller businesses um and i think that would be true across the board in terms of local authorities and the support they're able to provide um to small businesses to get them more involved in um local procurement opportunities and there's quite quite quotes is that of benefit to SMEs and should the threshold be increased yes we'd certainly support the threshold to be increased for that um but because it is a useful tool for SMEs okay thanks Matthew yeah in terms of the question around spend what we wanted to do was dramatically increase spend within the local authority boundaries but also within the wider county and we did that pretty successfully i think at the time it was whether the organisation was registered within the local authority boundary or the county however a big part of what we were doing was ensuring we spent with uh small and medium-sized enterprises as well so both things were being done at the same time what we have done as well since then is the developer we're working with to develop much of the uh publicly on regeneration is a not-for-profit developer which is very rare which is two miles from our city centre and again through community benefit agreements and other things to stipulate x number of contracts must be with locally best companies and employ local people within the area okay just how do we get your money to circulate near local economy yeah it's a good it's a good question Gordon um i think i think we need to think not just about local's a proxy but it's not the only thing to think about here you know community wealth boners about about its pro-social pro environment it's making sure that wealth is not extracted in lands in neighborhoods localities regions in the nation so we're not just talking about local though it's a useful proxy and and i think what's interesting is in terms of some of the you know take example from california the land of the free of you like they have an employee ownership act right which is for which is to help businesses retirees retiring the owner retires and it helps employees to buy up on that firm now that is that is not just about protecting local it's also saying well we employ ownership is a really good thing because they're seeing misallocation of capital particularly in silicon valley where you're getting huge profits being made but they're being extracted to people buying making rockets buying the islands wherever and so they think employ ownership model is a way of recirculating that capital for innovation for for greater rnd and also for greater productivity so in a sense that form of community wealth born in terms of that form of ownership it's actually seen as a means by which we have better use of capital but also resources through the firm and that that so i'm bringing that in there Gordon because i'm trying to say that it's not just the local it's also about the re plumbing of the economy and how it actually functions and locals are proxy but it's not the only proxy we need to look at but in order to do that you have to have resource and what we need to do is anchor institutions to start spending more locally which helps to supply that seed corn in order to get where you want to be absolutely but not just think about spending local also spending their their their for goods and services thinking about how they are attracting spending their money on firms who are pro-social and pro-environment no matter where they are you know a co-op based in Preston yeah is arguably more virtuous than a global ink yeah based in in Verruri great okay brilliant i'm going to bring in Stephanie got a couple of questions and i think we've started to touch on some of those areas it'd be perfect for you to bring in those questions thank you convener so i should probably mention that i was a councillor at South Lancer council up until 2022 and i'm really interested in the role of community planning partnerships in delivering community wealth building i'm aware that the FSB have said that significant system and behavior overall is needed so i'm really interested and it'd be good to hear from yourself stacey in what the role is that you see for community planning partnerships and other existing structures how those can perhaps be developed do we have the right people sitting at the table is there a need for legislation around those to change so i'm interested to hear from stacey louise and i think neil would probably have a contribution anyone else who's who's interested thanks yeah but Stephanie you're right we did mention that in our consultation response to community wealth building that we do feel that obviously community planning partnerships are in place and they you know they have their place in terms of what they do but to us when you look at you know obviously as i mentioned we've had the procurement reform legislation that has all been brought in but we're still not at that point where the spend is where we would like to see it with small businesses and so we feel that if you know if we're bringing in the community wealth building legislation it is time to you know i don't think we'll be able to achieve what we want to do if we just rely on the same systems that we've had in place it feels to me that we need a bit of a fresh start in terms of making sure that obviously the community planning partnerships weren't designed to deliver community wealth building specifically and so if we are going to bring in legislation it makes sense to us that you would look at that structure and you know refresh it for what we're trying to achieve now obviously small businesses and certainly some of my colleagues have participated in community planning partnerships for various reasons over the years but i think it is just about in terms of particularly small businesses and i'm aware it can be quite difficult for small businesses to participate in things like that just to due to issues of time but i think we just need to look at how we can make it more meaningful and make sure that you know a lot of times i think we see that unfortunately you know we have a bit of box ticking it's like we've got a small business here so we've covered that we can say that we've consulted the small business community whereas if you spoke to that small business they might not feel that they actually been able to have had a meaningful voice within that structure so i think if we have this legislation and it's got something like the statutory targets for instance driving the procurement and it's actually set out we want to achieve i think that will help us design a new structure in order to develop a community wealth building at that local level it's a great question and i came back to scotland about two and a half years ago and i knew a community planning partnership and working on community wealth building went brilliant brilliant community planning partnerships you've got a ready-made anchor collection of anchor institutions so quite exciting because in other parts of the world you've got to create these partnerships of all the anchors to consider community wealth building scotland's got one of the community planning partnerships oh yeah who yeah who and i'm speaking personally rather than representing any organisation like he does but i felt that they they're heavy on process without purpose right and i think they need that they have the the process seems to overtake the actual rationale of what they're trying to do which is the collective wisdom and power of all those agencies in place and i do think community wealth building is a way of creating that purpose yeah they could be guardians of community wealth building and we're seeing it often in lewis can talk to this in terms of other places in scotland where you've got the anchor charters and you've got anchor partnerships coming together it's driven by those pillars it's guardians of it it could be overseeing and trying to cajole and nudge and push a community wealth building agenda at a local level so we do need governance mechanisms for community wealth building at a local level if we're talking about the totality of public social and commercial agency cpp's are the place but it would need to be refashioned to be much more purposeful much more driven on actions much more driven on impacts um sorry please would you would you say then are there legislative changes that you would be suggesting whether it's it gets in that situation where it's legislation or whether it's guidance it seems to me that i don't i don't know but i'm not sure it's legislative changes such it's more of a more focused guidance with the cpp's being key players in the c in the community wealth building agenda um and i think it's inimical or similar to the the anchor charter partnerships we have in some areas in scotland including in northeasher louise do you want to come you wanted to come in earlier but you want to come in on this yet do you want me to cover what was going to come absolutely it's just round about the kind of procurement piece and round about the regional approach that we've taken in ayrshire so there is a regional procurement work stream as part of our community wealth building commission and we've done analysis over the last few years round about supplier spend and local supplier spend in ayrshire and we have seen an increase across the board in the last few years in terms of increased local supplier spend and a lot of that has been down to our approach and pragmatic approach to the quick quote process that you mentioned earlier about that disaggregation of contracts etc however we recognise there are some kind of opportunities to kind of further improve that for example through increasing the regulated procurement threshold for supplies and services from the £49,999 to potentially round about the £100,000 mark until after more scope for award locally via quick quote and future increases potentially being aligned to inflation that would enable local authorities for example to progress open quick quotes that are a lot less onerous than the full tender process and to encourage that more local birds and we recognise the challenges that you know that places on enterprises but also that the quick quote threshold hasn't increased in a number of years also through the community wealth building programmes part of ayrshire growth deal we've been doing support for local businesses and supported over 900 local businesses in that sort of period that has been exceeding targets across a range of indicators and has been raising awareness of what community wealth building is within the business sector and how it can be adopted by them to bring economic benefits to the communities in which they operate we're also looking across our business development support offer to more closely align that to our recently adopted regional economic strategy which is community wealth building embedded across it and as a cross-cutting theme to help further enhance and inform the support that we provide to businesses to help them be suitably prepared to participate in sort of tender and procurement processes so just to cover that first as Neil has outlined north ayrshire and all three ayrshers sorry through the community wealth building charter are using it to provide examples of the pledges that anchor institutions can make to change their practices and embed community wealth building across those organisations I learned some of that earlier the commission is it's there for supportive of the proposed organisations that are covered by that fairer scotland duty and community planning partners to be included within proposals for a community wealth building duty and recognizing what Neil's already said that those partners are considered the key anchor institutions within the area and therefore have a high level of significant economic power and influence going forward and we feel it's important to consider the role of the third sector within this and ensure that the benefits and opportunities created from community wealth building are appropriate we have third sector interface participation in our commission and we feel they have a crucial and important role to ensure community wealth building strategies and action plans are relevant going forward so therefore we'd suggest any future legislation requires a bit of autonomy to allow flexibility in how best to involve communities businesses and the third sector within it and that might include consideration to involve you know key groups community councils community development trusts and others going forward thanks for that I wonder if you want to come in with your next question I know there's some other folks in the room who want who indicated they want to come in but we're almost at an hour or I think we're over an hour I think this conversation might need to extend a little bit but I'll check in with you all about that in a wee while but if you want to come in with your next question Stephanie and then I think we are going to be coming back maybe a little bit to procurement and that kind of thing with another question that's going to come in a bit thanks convener and just a quick comment as well I have heard people in the third sector say that they should be known as the community sector rather than the third sector but I'm also really interested in the five pilot areas as well that have happened over the past five years and stay with you for now louise some wonder what differences is that you can actually see in that area what kind of data or evidence is it that you're collecting as well of the differences that's making for example to things like inequalities so the collaborative approach in Ayrshire has been really beneficial in bringing together all of the partners and broadening the kind of understanding of community wealth building and the potential for it we have seen as we've kind of outlined some you know real advances in terms of uptake in terms of sort of businesses procurement participation in the fair work work stream higher levels of real living wage being demonstrated at a local level and helping to inform and in shape the employability offer and supporting skills that are provided across the board. In terms of the sort of measure of that we are looking at the moment at the inclusive economy dashboard and that refresh of that with the inclusive growth network and looking across those social economic environmental wellbeing indicators that we're currently measuring to kind of help inform that going forward and are also working across council services to ensure that we continue to measure that so through the kind of three main work streams at a regional level we are seeing significant levels of progress and also identifying opportunities going forward to kind of refresh that and kind of learn from the experience over the last four years since the adoption. So those wellbeing indicators then something that needs to be kind of front and centre? Yes and that's very much of our approach going forward so we have been measuring those across the board but we're also reflecting on which of those indicators we can actively influence and what is measured at that kind of local and regional level to ensure that going forward and reflecting on the past we have indicators that are sort of meaningful to measure progress. Do you have a perspective on the pilots and how they're going? Thanks, convener. Yes, absolutely. If I can mention community planning partnerships as well very briefly, I would absolutely concur with Neil that I think that there is potential strength in them as the nascent networks of community anchor on institutions that they could become and I think in particular the kind of real benefit is thinking about Stephanie's point about measuring impact. So, for example, Dwyffres and Galloway community planning partnership has very good area profiles that they built up in conjunction with Public Health Scotland, very, very detailed across a very broad range of indicators which we should in due course be able to interrogate and understand so are there economic benefits, social benefits, health benefits, really across a very broad range. Some of those may admittedly take time to establish and understand. However, I think we possibly have a bit of a question mark over the relationship between community planning partnerships and regional economic partnerships, which I'm conscious that Louisa alluded to. In the south of Scotland, for example, community wealth building has really been driven by regional economic partnership and the regional economic strategy, rather than by community planning partnerships so far. So how those will interrelate in practice, I think, won't need a bit of thought. It may be again that that's not a one-size-fits-all situation, being conscious that really I suppose every community planning partnership and indeed every regional economic partnership is to some extent different. Again, that's possibly one for guidance in due course. In terms of our experience as a pilot area, we're certainly at a much more developmental stage. We did start considerably later than North Ayrshire did, so we're still very much building those strategic partnerships and starting those work plans. What we are trying to do, however, is in tandem build up the practical pilots. For example, looking at local procurement of energy efficiency retrofit, starting with registered social landlords as anchor institutions, but trying to, using an archetypes approach, broaden that out into retrofitting the entire south of Scotland. Not overnight, admittedly, but over the next 20 years that's worth thousands of jobs and millions of pounds in local economy if we can get the local procurement aspects right and identify those key critical actions to make that happen and deliver it over time. Early and developmental, but we think that in time has the prospect of being genuinely transformation. That's great. Neil, I wonder if in your role, feel like you've got the kind of big overview role, do you have any view on what's going on with the Vibe pilot project? I should say that I was part-time seconded into the Scottish Government during the pilot process just two days a week for three years, but they were chosen for different reasons. You had Fife, you had Clackmannanshire, you had North Ayrshire as local authority areas, and then you had South of Scotland Enterprise area, and then you also had Glasgow City Region. The Glasgow City Region and South of Scotland Enterprise is only focused on a few of the pillars, not all of them. I think that in all of the areas, North Ayrshire, Clackmannanshire and Fife, there's been a number of progress and successes. I think that Fife's worthy of note in terms of the way it's managed to connect, if you like, its economic development approach, its poverty approach and its public sector reform together, and the orbit of community wealth building, which is quite impressive. Clacks is the smallest area in Scotland. They've got some things here that they've set up. They've got an employment charter in Clackmannanshire. They've seen a 4 per cent increase in council procurement. They've got a new supported women into business programme. They've got a community anchor partnership. They're trying to beef up and muscle up their credit union. There's a range of things happening within the pilots that's worthy of note and mention. Going back to an earlier point, part of the beauty here is that it gives a licence in some way to some of the so-called smaller stuff. It gives it licences being embedded as there's quite significant economic development activity. Through the five pillars, it seeks to join those things up. It's not just procurement. It's procurement of a local firm with local jobs and the recirculation of the finance that comes from that. There's been good progress. Other areas that were not the pilots that have taken up the mantle of community wealth building, including Gail and Bute. I forgot to mention Western Isles. Moray and Dundee, there's a number of councils taking on that under their own two, if you like. Why have they done it? I think that they've done it because we can see the additive benefit of taking on that approach to their economic and social activities. That's great. Very helpful. I had conversations with Moray and Western Isles. I think that that's interesting where Western Isles is a bit ahead of it, and Moray can get inspiration from it. That's a peer-to-peer learning aspect. Stacey, you wanted to come in on that. We have been encouraged by the success of the five community wealth building pilots. Our colleagues who work on the ground in areas and local areas with members have given us significant feedback about the progress that they've seen in the pilot areas. The main way that we track evidence of the impact of the pilots is through the improvement services benchmarking framework. For instance, that lets us look at click manager, for example, as I mentioned before. They'd set a target in their 2019 strategy to take local spending to 21.5 per cent by 2022, and they actually hit 23.4 per cent by 2021. In five in particular, they've made significant progress and gone from just over 20 per cent that spends in 2010 to over 40 per cent 10 years later. That's the kind of progress that we are really keen on seeing. As I mentioned, my colleagues on the ground tell us that there are two factors that have enabled the progress in the community wealth building pilot areas. The first part of that is ownership on the part of the local authority and strategies with clear targets and detailed monitoring arrangements. For example, if you look at click managers' annual procurement report that they produce, that allows them to not only let evidence to community wealth building stakeholders like our members what progress that has been made, but it sets out the concrete actions that they've taken in order to produce and sustain that progress. When you compare the report produced by that local authority in that pilot area with those that haven't taken part in the pilot areas, there's a clear difference. You can see why the progress has been enabled in that pilot area. As I said, we have been very encouraged by what has been achieved in those pilot areas. Thanks for that, Sisi. That is very encouraging. I'm going to bring in Linda, who you've been wanting to come in for a while, and then Angus. Thanks, convener. I'm circling back a bit some of the questions that we raised earlier in your talk specifically about institutions a lot, but I just wanted to expand that sometimes in the word and from institutions to also infrastructure, because we maybe are assuming that that said, but I think it needs to be stated specifically. Thinking about the infrastructure that we have in Scotland and the areas have and what can be done and what are the missed opportunities around that. Already, you know, we've got a situation where Scotland contracts have just been put out by the Government as well. You know, Glasgow are looking at how they run their transport system just the other Friday. They had made some decisions about franchising for that as well. So, we need to think about energy and transport. It's absolutely key, not just in terms of the buildings and the people within them, but how we can link those up when we're beginning to look at procurement for them and who delivers them. You know, when we talk about community wealth building, the flip side of that really is about stopping wealth extraction in many respects, and that's maybe not the direction that we're seeing some things going. So, whilst the Government has at the moment said they're investigating in this area and they're very keen on it, most people generally around this table and beyond seem to be looking that that's a good idea, it's maybe not the direction that we're going in with some of the decisions that are being made. So, much more can be done about municipal bus services, much more can be done about the benefits that we'll get from that for the workforce and environmentally, and also around some of the amazing opportunities that will be for the workforce under just transition if we do it the right way. You know, in thinking about our energy supplies in Scotland and how we go about doing that. So, I think there's something around that. Also, we talk about different models of how to achieve this. We've heard a bit different models of ownership. Cooperatives are very, very low numbers in Scotland. There's very little expertise, I think, in Scotland around that as well. There is significant, you know, good expertise, but it's not widely available. So, thinking about how we can upskill that, but another thing for local authorities particularly, but other organisations to think about as part of this model is a bit insourcing, and how they take the workforces back into their good terms and conditions that they can probably have, because that's not happened in a lot of areas. We think about procurement. The biggest procurement spend in Scotland is generally around social care. Again, social care has gone, much of that money has just gone straight into offshore accounts. We did some research a couple of years ago about social care in Scotland and the financialisation of social care, not just for residential care homes, but for other types of social care delivery in the community. The number of providers is declining rapidly, for a whole variety of reasons, not only more so even now, since we did the research, because of the costs that have gone up. That means that, therefore, there are more and more large providers, which means that we are at market fracture where we can rely on people. If there is any kind of failure in those big organisations, which happens often in the private sector, they pull out and it all gets handed back to the local authority as a duty of care anyway and the provider of last resort. The national care service, which this Government is going ahead with at the moment, is looking at the national care service. Again, where in the national care service bill and the work that's going on in that is a priority, we were told that it was the biggest change in public sector delivery in Scotland for a long time. It's not going to change that fundamental about who delivers the service and is it still going to be for profit. When we're thinking about community wealth building, how do we tie it into the things that are already running and make sure that we don't lose any of the opportunities because we know for a fact that the for-profit sector, particularly in social care but in others, is more likely to lead to a higher number of complaints, lower wages and better quality service being delivered. We can evidence that. I think legislation, thinking about what the legislation is thinking about local authorities, local authorities within legislation should need more power and that's something that the Scottish Government has up to now being less reliant, very reluctant to do but actually local authorities need to have some more powers to raise their own revenue as well. In fact, we're seeing the opposite approach being taken for example with council tax freeze which has not been welcomed, I think, predominantly by a lot of people and very heavily criticised because of the limitations that it will put on local authorities to raise their revenue. Thinking about the fair work part of it as well, fair work gets thought about in a certain way. The real living wage is a key part of that but it can't be the only part because it doesn't deliver just on its own. There's also very little way for enforcement of fair work in Scotland at the moment. We have lots of examples of where procurement has been used to give out government grants and yet that's not happening on the ground. The creative industries is a good example of that where the money comes from creative Scotland but they will claim and rightly claim that they are not an enforcer of fair work and have no capacity to do that or inclination that is not their job. Once the money goes from there, how do we know where that ends up in terms of fair work across a sector that is very precarious in nature? Scotland still has an ambition to be a fair witness by 2025, which is very soon. We don't see that delivering at the moment because there is much more that needs to be done in that area. It is key to that as well as how do you measure fair work, what are the actual parameters that are put in there, what is workforce experience of that and how are trade unions involved in it? I will come back to collective bargaining and I will have trade unions at the table to make sure that they are involved in all of those things. I think that we are going to get a bit of a, I call this a lasagna, where we are bringing in lots of different layers in the conversation and it's tricky sometimes to manage it all, but I'm going to bring in Angus. I'm not sure quite what point you wanted to come in, but I think that it was around the five pilots and that kind of thing. Then Ian, you've indicated that you want to come in and that might be on infrastructure. It wasn't actually about the pilots, but it's really just a couple of thoughts just listening to the conversation. One is a small one, but I'll make it anyway, which is something about the appropriation of language around community wealth building, in particular community wealth, community anchor institutions, which is causing confusion in our sector, because we, back in 2020, around the community empowerment legislation sort of gestation, we tried to find a term which gave us, in some way, embodied what community empowerment was or meant. We stole a phrase from a Home Office report called Firm Foundations, which was community anchor organisation, which kind of is a development trust or a community controlled housing association. Those are community organisations that anchor their communities. Then, as community wealth building has come in with community anchor institutions, it's kind of just people going, am I an institution or am I an organisation? It's just a small point, but I'm just laying out there. I don't think it's a small point at all, because when I first started getting into community wealth building and trying to understand it, this was certainly an issue that I've been trying to unpack. Neil, I see you nodding, so maybe you want to explain what you think, how we handle that. Where does the anchor organisation or institution sit? Yeah, I mean, I think there's the anchor institution, which is the large public institutions, and then there's community anchor institutions. Yeah, I think it's part of the growing the movement, I suppose, in Scotland, and you would like to think that there's any legislation, there's clarity over terms and glossary and all that sort of stuff, and also some kind of light touch support architecture that starts to make the lexicon real and make sure it's fitting into particular context. Across the world, there's different languages used. In America, the phrase now is backbone organisations for community wealth building. Those are your organisations, if you like. I guess they're community organisations that are called the backbone organisations, as they say it. The lexicon is important and the language that you use is important, but as we mature, we need to get clear and clear definitions, and that needs to be set out about, so everybody's on the same hem sheet. I don't think that discourse on lexicon is a problem, but it shouldn't be seen as a problem of competition or competition of overlap. For me, it's more of a question of getting the language right. I don't think there's anything in terms of saying community anchors is different from what you're saying community anchors, I just think we need to get the language correct and defined. My sense of community anchors, so again, in talking to people around this subject, there's an example would be Urus Galson and the Western Isles, and they generate an income of £400,000 a year from three wind turbines. I would see them as a community anchor organisation, they're employing a lot of local people and really have the local people in interest. My sense is about context, to use the word context, it's about context. Also, though important that the local authorities, if they're the anchor institution or the CPPs, as we're beginning to talk about, that there is real recognition of the strong community anchor organisations that are a really important part of the mix. At this point, something that's been growing in my mind in this conversation is that another thing that we've got going on in Scotland at the moment is the local governance review and the whole piece around democracy matters. There's an opportunity in there in terms of really, and more and more people talking about, and this is even people, I've had conversations with people from COSLA, recognising that communities need to be supported into a place of leadership. So, I think there's a lot going on at the moment, it is very exciting in Scotland. Having said that, okay, Angus, you want to come back and then I'm going to, yeah, go on, yeah, come on. Start for 10. The second point, really, which was most substantive, is that within the conversation that I've been hearing again this morning, the question in my mind is where is the community sector in that conversation, because it doesn't sound like it's in the usual place, which is kind of late to the show and kind of last in the queue. I mean, when we read the consultation last year, we got quite excited about it. We thought that community wealth building represented an opportunity to be genuinely transformative in terms of the systems that we all operate within. So we don't see it as a rebadging of what's going on already and just a kind of nice wrapper, as somebody said earlier, that describes a lot of good stuff. We see it as an opportunity to really seriously move, it's a step change in the way in which we operate. In our response to the consultation, we laid out one central proposition, which was that communities, third sector communities, I don't know what you want to call it, should be front and centre in shaping how community wealth building emerges and manifests at a local level. I think Rob, you made the point that it's going to be different in different places, which is absolutely right. But where is the third sector community in that process? Are they the architects of it or are they the traditional recipients of an engagement process? In order to deliver that central proposition and put communities at the heart of the process, two things in particular need to happen. One is that community wealth building legislation needs to be absolutely locked in right across Government, right across all of this. You can talk about the local governance review, circular communities bill, everything. It has to be almost have primacy across all of the policy areas, which I'm not hearing at the moment that that's really the expectation. And the second is that communities need to be enabled to play that role, communities in the wider third sector. And also I think there needs to be some kind of new sort of alliance between the community sector as it manifests locally and small businesses, SMEs, so that we who live and work in these communities can be enabled to really shape the future of these local economies. So, yeah, those two kind of key issues. And in terms of, if I've got, can I steal a mic for another two minutes, in terms of the community planning partnership question? I think that the duty to advance community wealth building is going to sit with community planning partnerships, but what does that mean? And we had a couple of suggestions in our response that we thought might kind of give that more substance, which is that in the last land reform legislation, they created the land rights and responsibility statement, which I think is, I mean, it's slowly evolving and developing and becoming more significant in terms of the impact on the ground in terms of how land is managed and used and owned. And I think a similar kind of statement, high level statement that might come through the legislation would set out the kind of key principles and the first principles of community wealth building that community planning partners should comply with. And possibly, and I know this will be a resource implication, but similar to the land reform agenda, the Scottish Land Commission, which has the establishment of which has kept land reform on the public consciousness and the policy agenda in ways that otherwise, and in the past, we've seen land reform slip off and become slightly a subtext to policy world. And because the land commission is there and constantly churning out policy thoughts and papers, it keeps the ball rolling. And I think we need something like that to keep community wealth building evolving and with new ideas coming in all the time. So those two ideas might give the community planning partnership world a focus on community wealth building. Yeah, I think that's very helpful. And I think it's also interesting that the CPPs were highlighted in the Verity House agreement as well. So there's something about CPPs that, as Neil said, they're brilliant, but need some help to kind of bed in or kind of move into a more strategic partnership in that way. I'm actually going to suspend briefly, if that's okay with everyone. I'd like to suspend briefly, just so that we can understand, we're going to rapidly go over time. So I just want to check and get a game plan with everybody. That's okay. So welcome back to our community wealth building around table, and we're going to bring up some more questions starting with Pam Gosall. Thank you, convener, and good morning everybody. Hopefully I can get two questions. There's three questions altogether. I'm going to put two of them together because they would go under local procurement and then there'll be one after on resources. So my first question is around the FSB and their consultation response highlighted concerns that community wealth building goals might not be achieved if Scottish Government policy continues to align with EU spending protocols. In the economy and fair work committee, the Scottish wholesale association pointed out that complying with EU regulations could prevent initiatives like prioritising Scottish produce as the primary choice. So what kind of barriers would that present to community wealth building and empowering local supply chains? That's my first question. The second one is around for community wealth building to be successful. We all know that we need to remove barriers to smaller businesses becoming involved in delivery of public contracts. So late payment is an issue that was raised by the FSB in its submission to the consultation. And it also features heavily in the economy and fair work committee scrutiny of public procurement. So my question is around that. Do any pilot authorities have any concerns about the late payment being barrier to smaller firms participation in the community wealth building? And if current issues with late payments remain, will this likely be a barrier to the success of community wealth building? And could I ask both questions first to Stacey, then open it up to the pilot authorities please or anybody else? Thank you. Yes, the point about EU spending protocols came when we were completing our consultation response. We held a round table of our members who'd been involved in procurement previously and who wanted to talk about their experiences and some of the barriers. So that certainly came from some of our members that it was their belief that if we continued with that alignment, that community wealth building, the aims would not be able to be realised. It's been probably coming up to a year since we spoke to our members about that. So it's certainly as things move forward that it's something that we would want to check in with our members to see where they sit with that now a year on from the consultation response. In terms of late payment, late payment is just an issue for small businesses overall, not specifically related to local government. Obviously, we know that the Scottish Government has made it very clear in their procurement reform legislation that late payment is something that should not be happening at all in Scotland. And I know that there's been a lot of progress in terms of public bodies, in terms of paying promptly to their suppliers, particularly small businesses, where we're still seeing the issues. Unfortunately, we do a survey of our members across the UK and in Scotland every quarter who tell us about how they're experiencing late payment. Particularly in Scotland, unfortunately, quarter on quarter we're still seeing an increase and the number of our members who are reporting late payments. That tends to be a lot of our members feel that larger companies who they're either subtracting forward living services for, see smaller suppliers as a bit of an overdraft facility for them. So I think not specifically related to community wealth building, but there just is an overall all concern among small businesses about late payments continuing and being on their eyes, as I said, unfortunately. Thank you, Stacey, if I could open up to any of the pilot authorities on the piece. Maybe Rob, do you want to come in on this? Okay, thank you, convener. So I think we'd absolutely recognise that we want to minimise late payment across the piece. The RSL colleagues we're working with on the procurement pilot in particular, I think, are absolutely supportive of that and structuring things in such a way that we minimise that. Do you recognise the concern raised specifically that Stacey has regarding V subcontractors? There's a role for a careful examination of that, just working through how that really functions in practice. In terms of our pilot, the one doubtedly the biggest barriers that we're facing are skills and accreditation. So retrofit qualifications, past 2035 in particular. It looks like it's going to be quite a significant bottleneck, certainly in the immediate future. That's an accreditation that we're really going to need to support local instructions industry in the south of Scotland to gain various methods. We can do that, certainly, but it is quite onerous and detailed in terms of obtaining that. It's going to be increasingly critical to further get down the retrofit journey. Part of the barrier to participation in that has actually been in a slightly different direction and is potentially not one that we have particularly anticipated when we started, but we're really keen to engage with and support local contractors to work their way through so that they can get the full benefit. Past 2035, for example, it would mean that they are more likely to be the contractor versus the subcontractor, for example, so that they wouldn't be working under another contractor's accreditation. Therefore, perhaps I announce some of the issues that Stacey had identified. Louise, the Ayrshire is not a pilot project, but you've been doing it under your own toot, as Neil has said. Maybe you have some perspectives on that. Thank you, convener. As I outlined earlier, through our business support offer and all through the community wealth building Ayrshire growth deal project, we work very closely with a number of businesses across Ayrshire, specifically for myself within North Ayrshire, to help and support and understand the challenges to procurement and recognise the number of the points that Stacey has outlined. As an authority, we keep a close watch across the payment landscape and ensuring that we can minimise the potential for late payments. Obviously, our procurement colleagues continue to work around the legislation. Through recent engagement with our broader business base to help and form a business support offer going forward, we have identified a number of on-going concerns from businesses in terms of procurement and are looking to work across our services within the council to tackle those concerns and see where the opportunities and potential changes might come forward. However, we also recognise in our consultation response that there is potential for amendment to procurement legislation to allow and help to support preferential treatment to local suppliers where the local supply base exists and that reserving contracts over the regulated threshold for local providers would only exclude non-local providers in certain circumstances as the supply base does not exist in North Ayrshire for all our requirements. Again, as I said earlier, increasing the regulated threshold would also allow more scope for locally awarded quick quote with definite benefits from businesses. We monitor the level of regional spend across that workstream, but we are seeing challenges going forward in terms of the potential to keep increasing percentage year on year without necessarily legislative change to support that. I heard a wee bit of a red hern that, and I heard it quite a bit that the EU's Scottish Government aligning to EU procurement rules is fettering our ability. If you look at, say, the Basque region, Emilia-Romagna, Barcelona, Montreux, Bermont, Burlent and Vermont in America, Vancouver even, what you are seeing there is that it is not really about the procurement rules that is the issue, the issue is about supply. We have a fairly thin set of supply in Scotland and what we need to see this as is that we need to bulk up our supply by unbundling contracts by giving bigger notice for contracts being let. And trying to animate the supply and its links to the convener's point earlier on, we need to grow our social enterprise, small business, cooperative, employee ownership, community ownership sector in Scotland and that increases the girth or potential for them to be bid and be fit to bid. Community wealth building is not a protectionist policy, it is actually increasing more entrants to the market to compete for public goods and services and we know what happens when you have competition, arguably you can't have better quality and perhaps even lower prices. I've not looked at it but I suspect in Scotland if you unpick some of the big contracts that we have in Scotland you'll find virtual monopolies and that needs to be unpicked by unbundling but also creating a domestic supply chain that can start to be bid, be fit to bid and compete and that's what we're seeing in comparable regions nations across the world and I would mention Basque region, Amorio, Rymania, Barcelona's areas that do have a density of local suppliers and that's because they have proactive, aligned community wealth building policies in growing the social enterprise and employee ownership in co-operative sectors. Under those international examples we certainly have a look at that. Matthew, you indicated you wanted to come in. Just really briefly, in terms of very progressive procurement, I was always inspired by the Evergreen co-operatives so this was in Cleveland, Ohio that I alluded to earlier where the not-for-profit anchor institutions actually bought goods and services from new worker co-operatives that were played strategically in the most deprived parts of the community and within those co-operative businesses there were about 300 or 400 jobs just by them choosing to buy new things, not things they bought already, from a worker owned business which was then created to help people in the less deprived communities there and this is something we've been trying to do impressed and we're getting close to it with one of our retrofit co-operatives but we've not been able to do it the way we thought we would do so legislation will be helpful obviously you've got to be careful around competition rules and obviously there's issues around preference and other things but in terms of trying to have a playing field what we've seen is a domination of outsourcing corporations and others have actually just won so much of this public sector procurement wealth and trying to rebalance it with new businesses that are going to be owned in communities by people in communities so they can share the wealth, seems a positive thing so if this could be cracked in Scotland or elsewhere I think it could be really transformative okay that's a very very helpful pointer Pam do you want to come in with your next question thank you convener and thank you for those responses Stacy obviously from the FSB expressed concerns about the success of the legislation if additional resources are not given to local authorities to deliver and monitor these targets so my questions around you know as we embark on the community wealth building what can you tell us about the resources needed and whether councils at present have the capacity to successfully deliver and monitor community wealth building targets so yeah it's open to everybody even Stacy Stacy do you want to pick that one up first and we'll see who else wants to come in yeah of course thank you um yeah I think you know obviously um local authorities are struggling at the moment with the resources that they have available to deliver um just basic services so you know obviously community wealth building um well especially if we bring forward legislation put um and the targets that we would like to see that's obviously gonna put more demand on local authority resources and you know I think we've seen you see quite regularly now local authorities hiring for community wealth building officers managers that kind of thing which is great but I suppose the just concern would be in the current climate I think someone touched on the council tax breeze as well you know with declining resources community wealth building is going to be something new for local authorities to implement so it would be our concern if they're not properly resourced to do so um it would jeopardise the success of the legislation should it be implemented oh thanks for that so I've got a few people that have indicated they want to come in so Angus, Rob and then Louise yeah just very briefly I mean on the resources thing um I mean this might be an unpopular view but um I mean as I understand the community wealth building it's in a sense asking the system to do things differently not to do necessarily new things or they would be new but they'd be presumably dropping things so it may be just using resources existing resources differently and the other thing is I just remember back post christie all of the kind of the millions that was lavished on everybody third sector local authorities for sort of transformation funds I can't remember why they were calling transformation funds anyway well we know what happened or not happened in that respect so I just you know it might be a kind of obvious reaction to say well we need more resources and obviously local authorities currently are very stretched and they do need more resources per se but I just it's got to be wary of that you know a whole new set of tasks ergo a whole new set of resources well not necessarily okay I have that's an interesting point that is I mean certainly some of the kind of conversation that is going on at this time and kind of efficiencies and things like that and I think also Linda brought in an interesting point earlier around the infrastructure and looking to the renewable renewable sector and the potential certainly community land Scotland community energy Scotland I've been putting forward and Scottish community lines have been putting forward this proposal around how do we actually get community ownership really of the renewable energy rather than just the kind of community benefit payments so I think that's something that would be interesting to look at and explore within this mix. Rob, do you want to come in? Thank you very much convener so I should say that I wasn't elected member of the Freezing Allway Council for 15 years finishing in 2022 and I certainly wouldn't wish to try and speak on behalf of our partner councils but I think that both what Angus and Stacey have said it is actually true and I don't think they're mutually contradictory I think we would agree 100% that this is about changing how things are done and how systems work but I think that our partner councils would probably observe that they feel that it would be much easier to do that so far as they are concerned with a little bit more capacity than they have at present on the basis of the fairly significant reduction in capacity they've experienced since probably around about 2009-10 somewhere in that in that region roughly I do think that they're for the both are the case and it is an issue thank you convener. Thanks please. Thanks convener so I think reflecting on our learning of the kind of formation of the community wealth building commission and our approach to north Asia we recognise that it has taken as a substantial level of resource one to form the community wealth building commission at that Asia level and then to sort of lead and kind of coordinate the delivery of that also embedding community wealth building across our kind of corporate plans and that is very much the approach we've taken it's considered in every committee report in every proposal round about external funding and opportunities there also requires kind of coordination across services as well as that kind of monitoring and coordination of activities to ensure the maximum outcomes are achieved from the approach and the time and capacity that it's taken to embed community wealth building out across the organisation we don't feel should be kind of underestimated the council did and continues to invest in a number of dedicated officers to support the delivery of community wealth building through a range of services and teams and similarly NHS Airshire and Arran has also appointed a temporary community wealth building programme manager which has allowed kind of both organisations to lead in a kind of comprehensive programme of activities to align community wealth building with their activities so for ourselves through the community benefits programme and our community wish list aligns to community wealth building as well but also for NHS Airshire and Arran looking at a community wealth building self-assessment, their community wealth building communication and engagement plan and the development of a strategy and similarly within North Airshire we're now progressing with our second community wealth building strategy but we do have a dedicated resource within our economic policy team that helps drive that across a range of council services so you know we would still be of the opinion that if that choose transformational power of community wealth building is to be realised through a proposed duty and or legislation that local authorities and other public sector organisations not just ourselves and also the community third sector depending on how we want to refer to that needs to be adequately resourced to deliver that and as I've said we are looking across the external funding landscape so looking at projects and funding that comes in and taking very much a community wealth building approach to that. Matthew mentioned earlier about levelling up fund and we are taking a community wealth building approach across that but it does take resource to deliver on that. Clearly you've decided that community wealth building is an important thing to kind of get out and get on with with dedicated officers and what would you say to other local authorities and other councils that are maybe kind of wavering on this? I mean I think I've heard some councils where they had a community wealth building officer full time that's now gone down to part time but it seems to me you've decided to just go out and kind of invest in this in a way what's made you encouraged to do that? I suppose that's the fact that we see community wealth building as a key mechanism to achieving a wellbeing economy for North Ayrshire it's embedded across our council plan it's embedded within our regional economic strategy we really see the kind of potential and opportunity that rises from that and as such have made that decision to invest in that way but also looking at it across a range of other strategies so there was mention earlier about transport it's across our local transport strategy it's informed our spend across a range of external and internal funding sources and in our business support landscape we actually measure participation across the five community wealth building pillars and how it's supporting that within enterprises so it really is embedded across the council's activity. So even before a legislation you'd be encouraging other councils to? Yeah definitely and I think that's something the team have been really keen to do there has been engagement across the board and with other local authorities to kind of help support and sort of learn from our experience but also you know learn from their experience you mentioned some of the other really innovative approaches being taken by authorities so we're keen that it very much stays as a priority and it stays fresh and stays you know kind of help support and delivering that at the council's broader objectives. Great thanks. I'm going to bring in Neil and then I'm going to move on to questions from Miles Briggs. Yeah linking to what Lee's and Nangas has said and I think there's a little bit of lance in the boil here about resources and clearly you know this is about system change and we know that the economic determinants of ill health can be addressed by policies relating to community wealth building for instance there's been a 10% 9% reduction in mental health in Lancashire and Preston that's a kind of study that was in the Lancet so that's a preventative agenda to do this means there's less demand in public services means there's more money for public services so there's a preventative element here. The second thing is this is replumbing the economic system and for instance in Chicago there's a part pivot of traditional business support systems towards co-optive ecosystem so they see that their business existing envelope is being pivoted less towards the mainstream business and more towards the co-optive ecosystem under a community wealth building programme so this is about repurposing your or rewiring or re-plumbing your resources for business and enterprise support and thirdly Scotland's quite advanced by point earlier on about clutter it's got quite a lot of individual pots of money for different purposes community land fund and regeneration funds and so forth so forth and these are all great things right but I think with a serious consideration of those funds in the round and having a unified criteria under the orbit of community wealth building could see some rationalisation of those funds and more impactful use of those funds if directed towards community wealth building activities in local areas so I'm not denying it'd be great to have a lot more money but we don't right and we need some resource to oil the wheels surely but this is not should not be seen as a another project another programme another big regeneration project this is about replumbing and rewiring the existing system and there's something about prevention there's something about in terms of repurposing existing forms of support to enterprise and also looking at all the I kind of call it funny money but you know those extra monies for different programmes how that is put underneath a community wealth building lens and certainly you were talking about I think it was you talking earlier about health boards that have a considerable spend how do they redeploy that and make sure it's kind of it's supporting the local economy rather than leaking out so that would be an example of here's the here's the resource spend it in a different way yeah I mean it's very difficult this tactics for this is very difficult because the pressure that's under the immediate crisis and helmet ill health people coming to the A&E there does need to be given license for health boards as part of anchor partnerships parts community wealth building to see themselves of economic agents and not just see the preventive agenda as a preventive agenda it's actually a wider economic community wealth bon agenda that actually has a playback into reducing demand on their own services and savings for the Scottish public purse yeah so I'm looking forward to seeing this roll out but I'm going to bring in Miles Briggs with a couple of questions thank you convener I think my questions around those not traditionally involved have been answered but just to follow on from that question Neil just wondered and others as well what role Scottish National Investment Bank could play in this do you think?  The part of the finance pillar on community wealth building looks to create a effective ecosystem of different types of financial instruments and different types of financial leverage across the piece in the United States there is many many more different forms of financial public private and other forms of investment routine resumes but also how it is returned and how payment returns. Scottish National Investment Bank is a great thing for sure I would like to see it have mission some of its missions that are targeted on the plural ownership of economy co-operatives employee ownership community ownership all that sort of stuff and also have them be perhaps it's what's required for its return is be perhaps given more patience in the market so the return is not just 5 10 it's 15 it could be 20 or 30 years in terms of turning around the Scottish economy and so I think SNP is a really important role but I suppose speaking individually not representing the organisation I see it as a fairly fairly traditional investment type bank and not cutting edge in terms of dealing with the climate crisis and dealing with wider questions of wealth extraction that we see elsewhere in the world I don't I want to just set that up a little bit because I read in our papers that a president council worked with other councils set up the north west mutual bank a new regional co-operative bank so it would be great to hear you going to pull that into your response to and because because do we do we have to rely solely on the Scottish national investment bank could there be smaller banks that are more regional we're in the process of establishing the north west mutual across the north west of england you might want to look to the Welsh assembly as well because it's interesting work there because the first minister current and former pledged to establish bank Cambria and that's going to be a regional co-operative bank across Wales and we're trying to do similar in the north west of England there's a similar expression in Avon Avon mutual which is Bristol Somerset area as well that's quite essential just because within some parliamentary constituencies in england and Wales and I presume Scotland as well there's been something like 70 75% of branches which have shut because often the big banks don't want to have to have access to our own money you know and they've actually withdrawn from the high street and the idea is these banks will actually reopen over a period of eight to ten years but what it does need is support from politicians whether that's locally or regionally or in a devolved parliament like this really not always there to be honest to support alternative banking arrangements so I think you can have an interface of a publicly owned investment bank doing good things like you have here you can support credit unions you can support a regional co-operative bank like we're doing in the north west in Wales as well but interestingly as well there's a movement towards public banking in many american cities where they're looking to set up banks that will you know do stuff that you do with the Scottish investment bank but also lend to individuals businesses grow the social economy as well and provide mortgages and that's very interesting and the fact that's coming from places like los angeles and san francisco you know with the economic culture you've had in america for so many decades is really interesting because they're seeing these vehicles as a way to really regenerate communities because you know the financial crash 15 years ago it wasn't people in our communities that caused that it was the behaviour of very large global financial institutions and obviously austerity came from that because the public had to bail them out and where you've had a dynamic where you've had a concentration of co-operative and public banks and credit unions those those areas have had resiliency whether that's germany or some parts of america or france where obviously there's a lot more co-operation within the banking sector really so that's why we're trying to do what we're doing and apology that was a very long response interesting point and i'll maybe return to you with my other question because housing is obviously integral part important part of our our remit but wanted to move on to where potentially housing could be part of this and rob you touched upon the work south of scotland enterprise are doing with registered social landlords but you said earlier mathew with regards to auditing of land across i think the public sector you're probably referring to and just wondered what that has them produced or not produced yet in terms of this agenda and the housing crisis which you know many parts of the UK are are declaring we're still obviously in a situation where we don't have enough money to develop affordable housing in this country that's my that's my perception of it all however impressed and and elsewhere doing things like having land commissions they've done that in Liverpool city region to identify where public sector land could be used to develop things like community land trusts i think they're going to have about 100s in Liverpool city region they can you can do that you can work with anchor partners that have substantial land holdings and work with housing associations to maximise the amount of affordable housing you can also use your planning system to ensure we develop as a provider for affordable housing if you do all that together it's very positive and i mentioned pension funds before i know in greater manchester the greater manchester pension fund did invest in local housing associations and manchester city council provided land and there are hundreds of units that were provided now if you put that all together it's pretty transformative and you can do a lot of this now even in the very difficult circumstances we find ourselves in yes thank you very much community yes please two very brief points and perhaps i take the housing one first and wanted to just highlight the work that south of scotland community housing has been doing with communities to develop community-owned affordable housing and a number of benefits to that so certainly communities having ownership of assets that are both very socially useful to them but also should make money and that in some in cases in fact in many cases these have been derelict or vacant sites that have been repurposed to a very high standard in a general way so there's been a triple benefit you could argue from from that now of course the volume of these is small by comparison with the overall demand but in many instances it's taken place in allocations and in the numbers of units in the number of homes i should say really which are perhaps more difficult for our sls to be considering rather than that the kind of larger scale that they perhaps tend to prefer to operate at we're thinking with reference to snib we commissioned south scotland enterprise commissioned a piece of herising scanning work to look at potential value of future community benefit from onshore wind there are about 21 percent of the national fleet is in the south of scotland and so the estimate came back it's something like 900 million pounds over the next 35 years that's just community benefit it gives an idea of the potential value if communities were to be able to take up the 5 percent 10 percent stakes that should be getting offered and that the sector deal it now says you know really ought to be offered as a more standard offer across the piece the issue however is that that scale will be one which is probably more difficult for communities to raise the finance in order to buy into again massive benefit potentially for them to do so ownership of things that generate income for communities has got to be a healthy thing but there is probably a larger hurdle than there ever has been in terms of raising the capital in order to be able to buy in in the first place conversation i think we'd like to continue further because it strikes us that there's potentially a direct relevance to the finance pillar something really strong in that for the for the medium term absolutely something that it does need to be cracked the way is you indicated you want to come in yeah thank you convener so it was just supposed to outline some of the the work that's kind of happening and so through the community wealth building commission again we have a land and assets work stream working across our anchor partners and what we're trying to do through that is to map that estate across all of the the anchor organizations to understand land that's potentially surplus or land that creates opportunities for some of that development we're talking about here we also recognised within northeaster some of the real challenges around about vacant and derelict land having some of the highest levels of vacant and derelict land in scotland and created a fund to support both communities and landowners to look at opportunities to repurpose land so doing that that feasibility study stage through to detailed design and development and we have seen some applications with a particular housing focus but that's recognising some of the challenges and barriers to the redevelopment of land particularly around the cost of investigating those opportunities and identifying potential solutions to tackle that we're also working with our communities on aran round about an isle of aran housing task force just recognising the local challenges round about island communities and as well as that we as a local authority are developing a couple of pilot town centre living projects which look to repurpose very challenging buildings within our town centres one of which was a former hotel pub and another is a former council housing council house so i'll put my teeth back in council office to repurpose that into town centre living opportunities for social housing going forward so tackling some of the challenges round about town centre regeneration alongside the need for additional housing provision thanks very much for that willy town centre regeneration was an area you're particularly interested in do you want to come in at this point thanks very much good morning everybody and that that really brings me neatly to the question i wanted to ask colleagues about can we have successful community well building if we have at the same time dereliction and abandonment particularly within the urban environment in our towns all of our towns have this this problem and try as i might it seems almost impossible to get a change of attitude particularly by owners to the premises that they own we know that local people live in our towns cities and villages and they have a sense that they own the town and the village but they don't you know the buildings that are in our towns and villages and so on are so well they're usually owned by people that have never been in the town or the village and never will be and probably don't care so how do we turn that around do you think and are there any examples of particularly for buildings in the urban setting how do we turn that particular problem around because it seems to me that we could we could talk all day and we could talk about the strategies and policies to implement this if the people on the ground are still living in our towns and villages and seeing this level of dereliction and abandonment in front of their eyes so it'd be really great when i've heard some good examples from louise already for from for earshore but i'd be really pleased to hear from other colleagues about how they have approached and tackled this. Would we start with Rob? Thank you very much convener i'm so midstable quarter in the middle of Dumfries i think is an excellent example and the the problem really was that of of vacant and semi derelict property certainly above the first above the ground floor but also the size of the commercial units that were on offer which was almost that anti-goldilock situation where they were too small for the big players and far too large for everybody else that might want to give setting up and establishing a retail outlet a try so the purchase of by now a substantial proportion of the originally planned block by a community interest company and its subsequent redevelopment in stages. While not finished yet i think has real potential to create a bit of a new hub of activity and includes of course accommodation so repopulating the town centre being a really important part of the overall plan and also creates much smaller and more flexible premises for a variety of business uses so you're continuing that mixed use town centre approach but doing it in a manner which is perhaps more responsive to the way that town centres work now and also has the benefit of taking a really sizeable and prominent chunk of the immediate centre right on the pedestrianised middle of the town right next to the mid-steep hole you know where everybody is and everyone sees and looks at it and improving it dramatically by comparison with its previous you know relatively dilapidated condition so i think a really good example of where that's working well. Do you think it makes a difference that mid-steep hole quarter is a community led initiative community owned community led do you think that's an important part of it because i was thinking about i think about the town i live in and it's quite a lot of town centre living there's a few empty buildings and it's kind of like that's what i'm trying to grapple with is it really an important piece that's community led yes i think it has been i think it has been because i think it's actually created a degree of public support and interest that perhaps any other method of trying to do the same thing wouldn't perhaps have reached and i do think that's important there's something about how people feel about the place just as much as the facilities and the services that it provides and i think mid-steep hole quarter could get into that part of the equation in the way that you know your your your general developer perhaps could not okay gordon you want to come in briefly on this just a very quick question you mentioned mid-steep hole quarter as a member of the economy committee actually visited and what they were doing was was great but what struck me was right opposite the building you're talking about was an old Burton's menswear building which wanted to open as a cafe and restaurant but because of the council zoning policy which said that that had to be retail open only it was lying derelict so how do we tackle derelict buildings in our town centres when the council's own policies are undermining what we're trying to achieve so i think there's a big argument in favour of that collaborative approach that we really need to get right in order to do town centre regeneration in a really comprehensive way so mid-steep hole quarter for example was specifically highlighted in ldp2 which is very nearly done and going to be succeeded by ldp3 but it was specifically highlighted it had its own definition in ldp2 so effectively you had really a green light for the vision the community already had to be implemented there were no planning obstacles to it i think that probably the building that you refer to wasn't included in anything like the same way ldp3 certainly ought to give the opportunity for that to be ironed out so that that ambition can go ahead potentially there would seem at face value to be no good reason not to because anything is going to be better than the derelict site that it is at the moment so i think perhaps there's just a slight issue in there in terms of the the local development plans being set and fixed and then not necessarily being all that easily updated in between times that may be a just a bit of an unintended consequence and i think is probably part of what's caused that issue there hopefully ldp3 might sort that one out because ideally you want to see this kind of positive donut effect of the ripple effect of the good stuff in mid-steep hole quarter spreading out across the remainder of the town center thanks for that so yeah so some some kind of coherence in the thinking there neil you wanted to come in very quickly this thing about town center regeneration is cultural and practical i think it's been touched upon i think that sense that citizens in towns have a sense of their own power and having that sense that it's our town for ensam in woven and we've embarked a process called who owns woven we don't even know who owns woven yeah and just actually surfacing that and what bloody hard worked actually to find out who owns your town right but once we've got that it's surfaced and there's actually surfaced quite interesting things about who actually owns bits of woven london pension companies distant you know this yet that's a really important thing in terms of culture and then practical you know it's about ownership and control so again it involves this is this is not edas hat it's my personal hat but like you know we've now taken over a local shop community's taken over local shop and have it's a recycling kind of store and so it's about ownership and control and the more you can get those little footholds as in the mid-steep steep quarter the better because that can be a ripple effect there's also practical things though i think in the it's been touted as part of the community workbo