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My name is Ian Cooke. I'm the Director of the
Development Trusts Association Scotland which, as you would expect, is the
national organisation for development trusts. We run an independent,
member led organisation and we've got just under 200 members
so that's development trusts in urban, rural and island communities across Scotland.
And I think that does give us quite an interesting perspective.
I've been asked to talk this morning about community assets.
And generally what I'll be talking about is the community ownership of
physical assets and where that sits within community-led regeneration.
This is quite clearly different from the asset based approach to community development.
I don't think the language is particularly helpful and there's a sort of confusion potentially
of agendas but both approaches arguably could be seen
as complementary. I'd like to begin by quoting
somebody called Archie Thomson, who, when he was establishing rent and development trusts,
famously said, we're not building good housing in renting for local people
to enjoy their poverty in. And I think that one line is not a bad critique
of what's passed for Scottish regeneration policy for the last 30 years or so.
When funding has been available we've undoubtedly improved housing and
sometimes the wider physical infrastructure but have made very little
impact on levels of poverty and all the health and other problems
associated with poverty. And often the regeneration which has taken
place has been less than sustainable. Let's consider the role of communities
with their regeneration. In the worst regeneration initiatives,
and I've certainly seen some of them, local people have been largely ignored.
In the better initiatives, local people have been involved or engaged.
But I would suggest involving or engaging local people is not enough.
If we want regeneration to be an on-going, sustainable process
then we need to have local communities as the drivers of regeneration.
They need to feel they have the ownership of the process,
that they control what's done, how it's done, who it's done with
and the pace at which it's done. The experience of Development Trusts,
and it's a very recent experience over the last probably 10, 15 years, suggests that
this happens best by developing strong, independent community anchor organisations.
It doesn't matter what they are or what they're called or
how they came into existence. They can be community controlled housing associations,
development trusts, community land initiatives, tenants' cooperatives,
big credit unions. What's important is how
they operate and what they do.
Our view is that there are four principles which underpin successful community
anchor organisations such as development trusts.
Firstly, they quite clearly have to be independent and community led so
directly elected by local people and working to an articulated community agenda.
They also need to be multi-purpose organisations.
They're trying to improve the quality of people's life or local peoples' lives
across the economic, social, cultural and environmental agendas
and by doing that they tend to achieve synergies that may not otherwise be there
so they're not single issue organisations. They do have to be committed
to working in partnership. But partnerships that they form with
specific organisations for specific purposes. What we're not talking about here
is a sort of top-down, multi-agency talking shop which have characterised partnership
working in Scotland for the last 20 years or so. And these partnerships can be with
the public sector, with other third sector partners or with the private sector.
They can be informal arrangements and they can be formal arrangements
including joint ventures. And I think most importantly community
anchors need to have strong enterprise focus. They may use grants to get
activities happening but from the start they need to be committed
to developing a trading income and trying to reduce dependency on grants
and in doing so become more independent and more sustainable.
I think communities used to be much more resilient than they are these days
and much more enterprising. I think we need to reclaim the term enterprise
from big business which I would argue isn't particularly enterprising
if you look at it closely. And part of that community enterprise,
and I suppose the part that is particularly associated with development trusts,
is the ownership, development and the management of physical assets.
When I'm speaking to politicians I often use this slide and ask them what these
four photographs have in common. The top left's the stable block in Castlemilk;
top right's Govan Hall work units. The bottom left's Isle of Gigha
and the bottom right is Braemar Castle. And of course what they've got
in common is that they are all owned and run by the local communities.
And I think the point of that slide is that over the last probably 15 years or so
in Scotland, largely under the media radar, there's been a silent revolution
taking place with communities throughout Scotland taking more and more
physical assets under community ownership.
So what kind of assets are we talking about?
Scotland has quite a significant level of community controlled housing - housing
associations, tenants' cooperatives. Outwith housing, land is probably
the most widely acknowledged publicly community owned asset.
People might be aware of land buy-outs such as Eigg, Gigha, Knoydart etc.
and indeed if you go up to the Western Isles in Scotland, just over 55%
of all the land in the Western Isles is under community ownership.
But in addition to housing and land, all sorts of buildings,
businesses, work units, parks and open spaces, renewable energy projects,
harbours, ferries, sports facilities, almost any physical asset you can
think of will be in community ownership in some part of Scotland.
And not only has there been a significant increase in community ownership,
but done in the right way, I would argue, it has proved to be largely successful.
Community controlled housing has been a Scottish success story.
None of the community land buy-outs have failed. The Plunkett Foundation,
I think was about two years ago, looked at community owned
and run shops in England. And what they discovered was that if you
looked back about 20 years ago there were 260 shops that were community
owned and community run. Twenty years later, 250 of these
260 shops were still trading. Now that's a success rate which the
private sector can only dream about. And the reason for that success
is that communities bring lots of different qualities to the ownership,
development and management of assets. They invariably bring
passion and commitment. It's not a town hall, it's our town hall.
But they also bring local knowledge and they can tap into local networks.
I think really importantly they bring creativity that ability to think outside of the box.
They can also achieve synergies which for some reason public services, often working
in departmental silos, don't even recognise. They can mobilise voluntary effort when that's appropriate,
although clearly you need to get a balance between paid staff and volunteers.
Communities can take a much more enterprising approach than councils
and other public sector bodies are able to do. They can trade, they can take risks,
they can form joint venture companies with other partners and community organisations
clearly have access to alternative funding which the public sector doesn't have access to.
And if they have charitable status, they can get some form tax relief and tax exemption.
What I would stress is that it's not about communities owning assets for the sake of it.
It's what they can do with these assets that's important.
And how that combination of community ownership and community enterprise
can become the building block for community-led regeneration.
I could give lots of examples but the time doesn't permit it this morning, unfortunately.
Within the Development Trusts' movement, we've been arguing for a number of
years now about community ownership of assets, about community enterprise
and about community-led regeneration so we're obviously pleased
when last December the Scottish Government announced its new regeneration strategy
which signifies a major shift in policy direction. It's very early days yet
and I'll be the first to acknowledge that, but we are pleased to see the
emphasis now being placed on community-led regeneration.
Our sense is that the Scottish Government isn't entirely sure what this means,
what it looks like and how they're going to deliver it, so there's a potential
opportunity, for those of us who are involved in community-led regeneration, to
contribute to the shaping, to the development and to the implementation of the strategy.
Within the regeneration strategy, there is however clear recognition about
the positive impact which the ownership of assets can have on communities.
The strategy crucially recognises that top-down regeneration, regeneration
that was done to communities, although often well-meaning, has at best
been only partially successful. The strategy also acknowledges that
regeneration should be a Scottish-wide activity, not just something which
happens in a very small number of the more deprived communities in Scotland.
And I think that's quite important because regeneration by and large has been
a very marginal activity within Scotland and there's possibly an opportunity here
to widen it and make it a much more main-stream activity.
There's a big question about what resources will be put in place to
deliver community-led regeneration and people like Andy
have done some analysis of that. He can probably speak better on that than I can.
I'm not suggesting that community-led regeneration is some
sort of panacea, but it does offer some new opportunities.
It will certainly require fresh thinking and it will require cultural change
within local authorities and other public sector bodies.
It will also require some cultural change in many communities.
If community anchor organisations are going to be charged with leading regeneration
processes then they have to be fit for purpose. They have to be representative and inclusive.
They have to be working to a community agenda. They will need to have appropriate
government structures and asset locks built in. They will need to have sufficient
capacity to rise to the challenge. Where no community anchor exists
support will be needed to create one, perhaps like pulling together a number of
small community organisations into a bigger more strategic community organisation.
In some cases support will almost certainly be needed to build capacity,
reduce grant dependency and foster a more enterprising approach.
Done well, however, this kind of community-led regeneration has the potential
to unleash local creativity, to create new synergies, to foster innovative
responses and solutions and to shift the power dynamic between local
communities and the regeneration partners. When communities own assets and run
services and activities they become players. They can make things happen
and they can influence others. And this contrasts sharply with local
people simply being treated as consumers of public services.
Regeneration in the wider sense takes place at different levels.
And we need to be clear about which issues and challenges have the potential
to be addressed at a local level. Community anchor organisations need
to consider what they can do themselves, what they can do in partnership with others
and what things they need to be putting pressure on others to deliver.
To some extent, the issue of poverty falls largely within the latter category.
Unfortunately, local authorities do not have the power to redistribute
income and wealth, to set benefit levels or control tax credits.
But having said that, it doesn't mean that there's nothing that can
be done at a local level. Previous regeneration initiatives
have, I would argue, tended to equate poverty with unemployment.
And while working with long-term unemployed people is important
it also has its limitations. We all know that many Scottish families living in
poverty have one or more parent in work. But what have previous regeneration
initiatives offered the woman who's juggling three part-time jobs?
Or the young man with no formal education qualifications, who's in an
entry-level job with no real career prospects? These people have employment
histories, they're job ready but they're still living in poverty.
These are the people who could be offered better economic opportunities
within the sort of new community enterprises which could be created as
part of community-led regeneration. So in conclusion, the community
ownership of assets, when aligned to more enterprising approach, has the
potential to be one of the central pillars of a new approach to local
regeneration, community-led regeneration. For the first time in years,
communities have the opportunity to take control, to redefine terms like
partnership working, to build individual and collective confidence, to become
more enterprising and through all this, hopefully, to become more resilient.
But don't take my word for it. I think you should go and visit some
of the communities who are actually doing this in different parts of
Scotland at the moment. I'll leave you with the addresses of our two websites.
The first one is about Development Trusts and the Development Trusts approach,
it's also got a profile on all our members so you can actually identify
individual development trusts and what they're doing. And the other website is
one that's dedicated to the Community Ownership Support Service and it's
where we support local communities who are interested in exploring taking on
an asset or acquiring an asset.
Thanks very much for listening and I look forward to taking part in the discussion.
Thank you.