Speakers: Taylor Cross-Whiter, David Henderson, Carey Doyle
Taylor Cross-Whiter
So thank you everyone for joining us on this very lovely, warm evening, thank you for giving us your time. If you would like throughout the event, the event is being recorded, and we also have a live transcript of the event so you can click the little icon, the otter.ai icon at the corner of left hand corner of your screen and that will give you a live transcript of the event, or if you click along the bottom of your screen we also have a closed captions as well available for you. So if you have any difficulties with those just pop a message into the chat box, and my colleague Silvia Scopa she’s doing the tech in the background, and she can help you with that. Alrighty so I’m Taylor Cross- Whiter, I’m the Development Officer here at Glasgow City Heritage Trust, Glasgow City Heritage Trust is a charity that offers grants that conserve and promote Glasgow’s built historic environment. Our grants cover everything from building repairs to early stage projects to heritage outreach and community engagement work, as well. Tonight we are going to be joined by David Henderson from the Community Ownership Support Service, as well as Carey Doyle from Community Land Scotland’s new Community Ownership Hub for Glasgow and the Clyde region. And we’re going to be discussing community ownership of historic buildings. Community ownership does offer direct benefits for neighborhoods and communities by enabling local control of assets, and the ability to respond firsthand to community needs. However, we are aware here at GCHT that some of the elements of community ownership can seem somewhat confusing, and there’s quite a lot of information about it so that’s why we wanted to host this event, just so that you could hear some information firsthand from people who are responsible for working with community ownership within the area, and also just ask any questions that you have, as they come up. We’re going to hear from David first about Community Asset Transfer, nd then we’re going to hear from Carey about other routes to ownership, particularly with private landlords, and if you have any questions as they go along please do just pop them in the chat function and the Q&A function down at the bottom of the screen. Otherwise, just remember them, and at the end we’re going to have a chance for a full Q&A so you’re welcome to come on screen and ask your question directly, if that would be easier for you otherwise just pop it in the chat box down there at the bottom. This event is part of our Historic Investment Forum series of talks, which aim to demonstrate how the built historic environment can act as a driver for sustainable development and also help build capacity for communities working with historic buildings, and how, and things that they are most interested in learning about when dealing with historic buildings especially vacant buildings and other concerns that they have around historic buildings and neighborhoods, as well, so we will be sending out a survey at the end of the event, and just asking you about how you found the event, as well as if there any topics that you would find interesting to look at going forward, if there are other things that you would like us to look at in future Forum events, so please do fill that out if you have a chance because it really does help us know what people are interested in and how we can help with future events going forward. Alrighty, so that is enough from me. I am going to go ahead and stop sharing my screen, one second. Sorry. Sorry. Mouse problems. There we go. Sorry about that. All righty, I will stop. So, um David If you want to go ahead and get started I’ll pass it over to you. Thanks, everyone.
David Henderson
Thanks so much Taylor. Thanks for the invite. Yeah, I don’t have too many heritage groups that I work with, so if I end up working with any of you after tonight that would be great, it would be a good outcome. I’m just going to put my presentation up, and so I’ve been asked to speak for about 25 minutes or so I think there abouts. Yeah, so share my screen. Can people see that okay? Just stick a thumb up or something if you can. That’s good. Okay, so, yeah, so my name is David Henderson I work for the Community Ownership Support Service. I’m the advisor for Glasgow and West Coast of Scotland really, and I’ve been doing this job for for about four years, and absolutely love it. And for those of you who don’t know the Community Ownership Support Service, or COSS, as we tend to call it. It’s part of the Development Trust Association for Scotland group if you like. We’re funded by the Scottish Government, we cover the whole of Scotland. It’s a free service, you work with community groups, they also work with the public authorities as well, who own the assets that you might be interested in, so it’s a free service. We work with groups at any stage in the process from idea generation all the way through to negotiating a lease, or a trial or outright ownership also record the ownership, community ownership service, and we also a lot of our work is around leases, particularly long term leases, so. Yeah, so that’s what we do and we’re fairly flexible. We don’t have much by way of funds, but we do have advice and we can access funding sources for a variety of different things like community learning exchanges, technical advice occasionally we can can help groups purchase specialist advice in when it’s lacking, and support around business planning as well. Occasionally we can bring support in for these kinds of things. So we work with other organizations to address the gaps and bring in support that groups need. In terms of legislation, for those of you who are interested in that kind of stuff, the Community Empowerment Act introduced quite a lot of different rights for communities, and we work primarily around part five, which I’ll touch upon in a minute, which is about Community Asset Transfer, and that is around publicly owned assets, which can be land or buildings. We also, the other areas that are highlighted, a lot of groups that come, or we work with, are actually interested in privately owned land or buildings, and we work with them up to a point, and then we would sort of hand them over to the Scottish Government who administer that part of those processes. There are quite interesting rights there around vacant and derelict land for example, and land for sustainable sustainable use. So there are important and powerful rights there which might be of interest to you, I think Carey’s gonna talk about some of those things in her presentation, So, I’m not gonna say too much about it.
Move the camera over so I can see the text. So just in terms of the basics, Community Asset Transfer, what, what does it mean. It’s a process which allows community groups to take over publicly owned land or buildings, in a way that recognizes the public benefits that the community use will bring. And it can be about outright ownership but it can be about a lease, a long term lease, or it can be around about management agreements, any of those things really. And it may be at a discounted price. It doesn’t have to be and I’ll touch upon that a little later on as well. So, but those are the core elements of Community Asset Transfer. Community Asset Transfer creates new rights for groups. And what do those rights look like. So I’m going to close that down. That’s better. Well the basic rights are they give groups, a chance to ask for information about assets that are owned by public authorities. So, one of the first things I’ll do with the groups that I work with is get them to seek as much information as possible about the asset in terms of a copy of the title to see if there are any burdens or running costs or site conditions, all these kinds of questions, a group has got a right to ask that. And the public authority expects to provide whatever information they have. A group can request the transfer of a publicly owned asset. It doesn’t have to be on a surplus list. So that’s one of the things that was different from prior to the Community Empowerment Act. Any land or building owned by a public sector authority in theory is covered by the Act. So don’t make the fact that it’s not an a surplus list, put you off, if you’re interested. And there’s an assumption that a community group will be successful, if it applies for an asset transfer, unless there are good reasons why that’s not the case. And I think the important thing about the process that sits behind this is that it’s all transparent, it’s all done online, so that if there are rejection reasons, they are also given online, and can be challenged as well, so that degree of transparency, I think changes the way the process is handled. A group can, it can request the price that it wants to pay for an asset or the rent that it wants to pay based upon the benefits it brings. So if you want a substantial discount on the asset, you’ve got to show that the benefits you produce for the community are substantive. And that’s one of the things that we quite often work groups around. And one of one of the other key rights that groups have, is that if they feel they’ve been poorly treated, if they’ve been rejected unfairly, or if they feel that there are conditions attached to transfer they’re unhappy with, they can seek a review or ultimately they can appeal to the Scottish Government for a reversal of that decision. So, there are quite important rights that groups use in this process. And I can see when you’re working with groups you can see that, once those rights are established, it does change the power balance a little bit, that the groups have with the public authorities, and gives them a little bit more clout in the process, it’s not perfect by any means, but it does help right balance a little bit. The public authorities or the relevant authorities are required to do a range of things that one of those that might be of interest to you, is they’re required to have an asset register on their website. So, this is an excerpt from Glasgow’s asset register. And in theory you can go on that spreadsheet and you can identify land or buildings in your neck of the woods, and then go and explore whether that is suitable for your group and its requirements. I don’t know if any of you’ve come across the People Make Communities portal, but that’s something that’s been created by Glasgow City Council and Glasow Life. There’s a link to that on this slide. But there are also assets on that register, which might be of interest to you too. They’re held by Glasgow Life. There may be heritage assets there, and possibly libraries, that sort of thing, which may be of interest to you. And that is a slightly different route to exerting more community control over assets. More and more of the groups I’m working with in Glasgow are going down that route. Or are in fact going down both routes, which is both an opportunity and a challenge as far as I’m concerned, but we’re learning more about it as we go.
This is one of the tools that we use with, usually with groups, just to kind of plot what it is they’re interested in doing and who the community is and what their route looks like to achieving asset transfer, and it works quite well with a lot of groups, particularly if you’re, you know, if you prefer sort of visual prompts as opposed to written guidance documents, it’s a good way to work through the group, what where they are on the journey and what questions we need to ask and who’s out there that can help them. Some of the key questions I’ll ask the groups at an early stage are, what their objectives are, what is it they want to do to their community, who actually is a community. And whether they need the land, the buildings, to provide the benefits they want to provide or whether there’s an alternative. And the reason that I’ve included this slide is because I think one of the things about heritage assets, is that for us, the way the legislation is framed, it’s about the community benefits, you can use and the building itself is almost secondary. And in fact because heritage buildings tend to be older, it will require more funding to be brought into use, it can be even more of a challenge for groups, then other, other types of assets so I think what I’m trying to say is that it’s the community outcomes that you produce that are key for us, and that we work with you on and that’s what we look for when we work with any organization. The process itself, just to give you a flavor of that, it can take, even when it goes smoothly, and it usually doesn’t, can take up to 18 months. So, for the groups that we work with, it is quite a challenge, it is demanding, and probably one of the key things that it’s important to get across is the first stage in the process is the validation date, and the validation date is what you get when you submit your application with outline information in all of the key questions that you’re required to answer. Once you’ve got that in, your formal rights kick in. And I mentioned the power balance before but that really does change things. Once you’ve got that validation notice from the public authority that says Yes, they’ve received your application, and they will process it, they’ve then got six months to reach a decision, your application isn’t set in stone. You can work with the public authority to strengthen it as you go. And that’s what’s encouraged by the Act, this ethos of cooperation between you and the public authority. Who’s eligible to use the legislation, well to be eligible, you’ve got to be a community controlled body. And I’ll talk about what that actually means because it is quite important. The other route is you can be designated by the Scottish Government as being a community controlled body, if you don’t quite fit the criteria. But essentially you’ve got to be a community controlled body. So what that means is, if you’re looking for a lease or a management agreement, you’ve got to show that your organization is controlled by its members. That’s what it boils down boils down to, really, that you can show in your constitution that you’re controlled by other members, whether those members are a geographic community, or whether they are a community of interest. It doesn’t really matter, but you’ve got to show community control there. And when you get the slides, there’s a link in the slides to the guidance, so you can read more about that, if you wish. It’s important, I should say also that you don’t have to be an incorporated body, you don’t have to be incorporated, but we tend to encourage organizations to become incorporated, because you’re taking on a degree of risk. And I think it’s safer for the individuals involved in the Board. If you’re seeking outright ownership, then you’re going to be one of these three prescribed bodies, a Scottish Charitable Incorporated Organisation, a SCIO, a Company Limited by Guarantee or the middle one there, the Community Benefit Society, which is the one that people know least about, that is the model that you’d adopt if you’re interested in a community shares issue, and that is something I think heritage groups might be interested in, because we do have examples of heritage groups that have used community shares as a way of funding the development.
I’m not going to talk about the advantages and disadvantages of lease versus ownership, and we could get into that, and we often we do with groups, but I just like to highlight the fact that quite a number of our groups are now going to what we call a phased approach. So they’re seeking a lease in the first instance maybe for one year, two years, but they’re seeking to build in a break clause which then allows them to seek outright ownership, once they’re once they’re in the building, once they’ve gotten a track record, they know the running costs, some of those fundamental questions, and there’s a confidence there. Then they feel better able to take a building on. So, a lot of detail there. But it’s a route worthwhile exploring for certain groups, especially if you’re in a building that is going to require a lot of investment, if there are bits of the building you can use in advance, or in the meantime, then perhaps this is the model that might suit you best. I touched upon the price, groups have a right to request the price they think an asset is worth based upon community value. And just to say a little bit more on that. So, yeah any group can, can, can suggest the price it wants to pay based upon the condition of the asset, and the rest of it. But what’s important is that the group sets out what it wants to achieve in terms of community benefit. So, economic benefit, health and well being, environmental benefits. Spelling these out as clearly as you possibly can is really important if you want to justify a discount. And we’ve got some really amazing groups doing fantastic things that quite often aren’t particularly good at saying this is what we do, this is who benefits, and this is what the outcomes are. So that’s an area where we spend quite a lot of time with groups working on. And we do have access to our own in house legal adviser who can provide you with support, can’t provide you unfortunately with detailed conveyancing advice. So groups have got to kind of contract their own legal support, but she can provide an overview, and that can be really helpful for groups, and especially just thinking about a lease the more forewarned you are about what a lease looks like and about the terms that might suit you, as opposed to the landlord, then, the stronger your position is. So very worthwhile resource. Funding requirements, the sorts of things you’re expected to talk about in your application would be how you might cover the development costs, and the business planning side of things, technical design service to transfer costs. If you’re going for ownership, how you intend to pay for that capital costs. How you think you might be able to pay for the redevelopment of the building. And you’ve also got to think about the operating costs, how you’re going to run this asset, and make it sustainable and have resources, that if things go wrong you can cover those things, so there’s a lot to think about in terms of funding needs, and we’ll work we’ll work those through with you as well. For those of you who want to explore some of the funding in more detail. These are some of the key funding sources that we work with, Scottish Land Fund being probably the key one. But there are also funds that cover capital costs in the National Lottery too National Heritage is one that will be of interest to most of you I’m sure, and Community Shares, my colleagues in Community Shares Scotland they sit within the DTAS fold. As I said, there’s a couple of interesting projects, heritage projects, that have involved community shares so it is a source of funding that might be of interest to you. Funding Scotland is a good starting off point. Again, there’s a link to Funding Scotland on this slide, so if you want to pursue that and see what kind of funds might be available to you, worthwhile worthwhile starting off point. I’m going to just finish with a few mini case studies if you like, and started off with Castlemilk stables because not because I know much about it, but it’s on your website. I think Taylor, I think there’s a couple of pictures I noticed on your website. So, and I think it’s run by the Cassiltoun Trust, and I think the key thing about the case studies I’m going to show you is, is that point that the community benefit being really strong, so I think the Castlemilk Stables apart from being a really beautiful building and (inaudible) like the picture. I think just looking at the range of things that are involved in, museum display and community garden, gives you a sense of some of the community benefits they’re producing. Campbeltown Town Hall, which was taken over by the South Kintyre Development Trust in around about 2012
A really rundown town hall, and they’ve done a fantastic job of turning it into a really successful functioning valued community resource. It was a six year project I think to undertake and develop, and it provides some space and a community hub, they’re now looking at because of the success of that, they’re now looking at taking on I think it’s the Red Cross building to provide opportunities for for smaller smaller spaces for community groups in in the in the area. So, this one that maybe some of you might know about Kinning Park Complex, on the Southside of Glasgow, it’s a school built in I think 1910, there or there abouts, fell into decline, which they saved through community activist activism, they occupied the building I think in 1996, and said, unless you do something about this we’re not going to move. So, Kinning Park Complex did a survey and high levels of support to retain the building, and bring it into community use, and they’ve been really successful in negotiating a discount with CAT with City Property and bring in funding from the Lottery, and the Regeneration Capital Fund on the back of that. So, and again you can get a sense of the huge range of community benefits that Kinning Park Complex delivers and will deliver once the building is redeveloped. A really interesting building, really interesting approach. Rockfield Centre in Oban, which, is a B Listed building in the center of the town. And this is one of the projects I mentioned, where there was a community shares issue, as part of the cocktail funding to develop it. It’s actually one of the largest share issued in Scotland, outside of renewable energies. So they’ve taken on that building. And I think what’s interesting about the Rockfield was, they developed that phased approach I touched upon earlier. So, couldn’t afford to do all the work at once. So they started off with the car park, and the car park was a source of income. And that allowed them to build up an income source and keep going to bring in the funding to actually develop the building, and to become a community hub and a space for artists. So, quite an interesting, interesting little example. Govanhill Baths here in Glasgow, not quite there yet in terms of the funding to redevelop the baths, but already it is like a hugely important community resource, with a wide range of community activities going on. Again, they also brought in funding through community shares so, and I think they’ve also got Heritage Lottery Fund support as well. So some really interesting things going on with Govanhill Baths. Friend’s of Dundonald Castle, not strictly a heritage project but because it’s one of mine. And it’s just gone through very recently, I was keen to include it. So, 14th century castle is actually the visitor center that Friends of Dundonald Castle have taken on, and they negotiated a deal with South Ayrshire Council, to take on that building for 20,000 pounds, and they negotiated I think two and a half thousand pounds off that based upon the community value they produce. I think what I like about Friends of Dundonald is that thing about heritage being a home for community benefit and they do a fantastic range of things. One of my favorites being a bit of a geek is the Scrabble club, for example. So, I just love what they do, I think it’s a great example. And it brings heritage together or brings heritage into that kind of community benefit arena, which I think is really interesting. The key resource that me and myself and the other COSS advisors use is really this one here. It’s again, there’s a link to it on the, on the slide, but quite often what we do is just interpret the guidance around Community Asset Transfer for groups and help them work their way through it. And that’s, I think, all I want to cover and happy to hang around and answer any questions or have a chat to people, or follow up with any of you outside of this event, but hopefully, that’s me within my 25 minutes and Taylor won’t be too angry with me if I go on too long. Thank you.
Taylor Cross-Whiter
Thanks David. That’s perfect. Bang on time. That’s great. So yes, I think what we’ll do is just keep the Q&A until the end of the session, just so that people can kind of think over their questions, as I say just do pop them in the chat function as they occur to you, and then we’ll focus them all at the end. I should also just quickly say because I noticed that Andrew McConnell from GBPT is here. The Castlemilk stables was actually Glasgow Building Preservation Trust who worked on that project so yeah the acronym soup of the heritage sector, but just so Andrew doesn’t think we’re taking, taking credit for that. All right, perfect. Thanks so much, David. We are now going to move over to Carey who’s going to talk a little bit more about when you’re not working with say a local authority, with private landowners land owners and things like that, so I will just let you take it away, Carey.
Carey Doyle
Hi everyone, I’m hoping you can hear me. Thanks to Glasgow City Heritage Trust for the invite, I’m going to go ahead and share my screen and get my presentation up. So you should shortly be able to see my slides. There we go. I’m getting nods from Taylor so we’re all good and I will just go ahead and get started. So I wanted to, I suppose I’ll start with who I am, I Well, I’m Carey Doyle and and I’m the manager of the Community Ownership Hub at Community Land Scotland and I’m going to talk a little bit more about the project and what Community Land Scotland does because I know we’re new on the scene in Glasgow, so I’m going to provide a bit of scene setting in terms of that and then we’ll get into the detail. So Community Land Scotland is the representative voice for Scotland’s community landowners, we were set up around 10 years ago by the individuals in that picture who were involved in some of the first community buyouts in the Highlands and Islands so community purchases of land and assets. And at that point, those benefits were restricted to rural areas. So they were set up due to the issues of unequal land ownership in Scotland, those those land ownership patterns which had profound effects on the communities in rural areas. And the people who set up Community Land Scotland at that point and continue to sort of advocate for as well these these guiding forces for our work which is a need for more land reform and a need to address fundamental issues of land ownership. So I suppose the guiding idea behind that then is it community ownership should be a normal option across Scotland for everyone. And then over time the, the benefits of community land ownership and land reform were then rolled out across Scotland. That was in 2015 as part of the Community Empowerment Act and there’s a parallel Act, which is a 2016 Land Reform Act. So it’s been about five years since all of the benefits of land reform have been open across Scotland and there’s some really good successes. So the Community Land Scotland approach is to support groups with private land ownership acquisitions drawing on our heritage working with groups who’re buying out from the largest states in the Highlands and Islands which were owned privately. And we also work to change the conditions for community ownership so I talk a bit in this presentation about land reform and the big picture, because for us that’s very much part of it. So, I want that to come across so that everybody can understand that sort of approach and the work, and the way that we support groups also relates to our policy and advocacy work so I’m going to talk a little bit about that so you can see how we’re approaching questions of community ownership. As I said land reform is a work in progress, um, it’s been going on since 2003 in the modern era.
And we’ll talk a bit more about land reform going forward. As I said five years ago, the benefits of land reform were were opened up across Scotland and there’s some great successes but there’s also a lot of challenges still, and what Community Land Scotland came up with was the idea of a place based approach focusing on an urban area in Scotland which provided more resources that allow us to encourage and enable community ownership. We’ve got some increased support, we’ve got action research and we also promote land reform and community ownership, and I’ll explain more about what that means. And so we provide support for groups seeking ownership and this is for community groups seeking ownership from private landowners primarily, that’s the support that we would provide directly. And what this means in practice is if you come to us and you have a question about something that you think might be privately held or just about land and you’re not sure who owns it, we would start with an initial review of the group and your aspirations for community ownership and sites you’re interested in buying out, and then we would look at available sources that anyone can freely download to understand ownership and other constraints on the site and that builds a picture for us about what the land ownership patterns are for that site and what things that a community group would need to be aware of from the beginning, and then once we understand where the community group is approaching things we would typically sign signposts to other expertise and funding sources so if it turns out that the group is talking about an, a land or asset that’s held by a public authority we would be sending you straight to David who’s part of Community Ownership Support Service and they do excellent work supporting groups for that. There’s lots of other sources of support, which we would be pointing people to if it’s an, if it’s an objection to a planning application for example we would do referring to Planning Aid Scotland and we can talk about that as well. So there’s lots of different groups come to us and they have all sorts of different questions so we’re signposting people as effectively as possible. We also have targeted money for targeted support at current gaps to make things easier and better for groups and you may say what does that mean, exactly. And the thing is is that there’s a stew of all these different organisations supporting groups and involved in community ownership and land reform, but it’s confusing and there’s also things that get dropped between the cracks, we could say, so I think the groups in our experience, they sometimes tend to get stuck, unnecessarily. So we’ve got targeted support to help people push things through, where it’s just not working, so if a group comes to us and they say oh I have a question, and we feel like we can point them directly to someone who already does that, then that’s an easy one but if they come to us and it’s an issue that’s somewhat intractable, really hard to solve, we do have a bit of money there to help out with that, for example, at the minute we did a pilot round of engagement support for groups, and then we’re doing creative engagement with groups because at our experience taking artistic approaches to engagement is really useful for transmitting the ideas of community ownership, as well as early stage community engagement so we’re working with some groups to help them understand from a very early stage what the community needs and how that’s gonna work in terms of community ownership. So that’s how we’re supporting groups and then what we’re doing is we’re connecting that support up with our action research which I’m not going to talk very much about here but if you’re interested, get in touch, we’re doing action research on three, three key topics at the minute, one is diversity and inclusion in community ownership to make sure that it’s as inclusive as possible and that everyone can benefit from, from, from community ownership and land reform. We’re doing work around strategically supporting communities address addressing vacant and derelict land. And we’re working on, what I call planning innovations for land reform or better lighting how the planning system works with community ownership and land reform. And this action research is very much part of Community Land Scotland’s work around changing the conditions for community ownership and I thought I would give some examples of the work that we’ve been doing around that that strategic work, influencing policy legislation. So one of the sort of the key things that people are looking forward to in land reform, for sure in land reform you look forward to these things, like me, there’s a register of interest in land to be published in 2022, so that’s been part of the Land Reform Act which came out in 2016, and it’s about to be published and that will be publicly searchable, to understand what the register of interest is in any land and would be held by the Registers of Scotland, there’s a commitment by the SNP and the Greens. So that looks looks increasingly likely that there’ll be a new Land Reform Act in the new Parliament. So that will contain new, new land reform measures. There’s also a commitment from the SNP and the Greens and a number of other Parties to increase the size of the Land Fund and in particular, double the Scottish Land Fund to 20 million by the end of the Parliament so that Scottish Land Fund which currently supports community ownership looks to be doubling. By the end of this Parliament which is great and there’s also a commitment to improve the legal routes to community ownership, because you know that there’s many success stories but it does take quite a long time and there’s a lot of challenges along the way.
So I wanted to touch briefly on where we are with community ownership. The most recent government data is from 2019 and there’s 590 assets owned by 418 community groups and they cover a vast range of different types of projects and buildings and all sorts of things so. Looking forward, our work then. There’s a lot been achieved with land reform. Land community ownership is on the up, but Scotland still continues to have one of the most unequal land ownership patterns in the world. Absentee landowners remain a challenge. This is a photo from the Midsteeple Quarter in the High Street in Dumfries and in I think in a historic butcher shop front anyway and you can see what an absentee landowner’s done to that, that building. The legal routes to community ownership remain challenging, they could be better, they could work more effectively. Clyde Valley contains 79% of the vacant and derelict sites on the land register, that’s a lot of sites, thousands. And of course, climate change, the existential crisis facing us so we see land reform and community ownership as a part of ways to empower communities to address all of these issues, and that’s the way we approach, supporting communities, in their ownership approaches. So enough of the big picture we’re going to get into the details now here a little bit. Firstly community ownership. There are basically, we can call them the three routes to community ownership, two of which are legal. The first one is a negotiated sale with a private landowner. Then there’s the legal Community Rights to Buy which I can, I’ll be covering, and David mentioned, and then there’s the legal asset transfer from public bodies which David covered in detail so I’m not going to go into anymore on that. Um, it was also covered this, it’s this is a busy slide, so apologies for that but the Community Ownership Model is quite important. And I’ll just run through it again, this is the model of an organization that is set up that is supported by the Scottish Land Fund and they can access the Community Rights to Buy, so can access that government support for community ownership. So the key traits as, you know, it’s much more complicated than this but we’ve pulled out some things to be aware of, open membership to anyone. The main purpose needs to be consistent with furthering the achievement of sustainable development, nonprofit distributing, evidence of community support. There’s going to be a business plan and revenue models and all those practicalities. And there’s going to be a linking to a geographic community as well. And then there’s templates for setting these up under the three structures that David went through which are listed here on the slides. So the geographic communities point can be a little bit tricky for historic buildings so I wanted to break into that in a little bit more detail. It’s required by the Scottish Land Fund and the Community Right to Buy to have a geographic community defined. Community groups which aren’t geographic can of course own property, lots do, but they just don’t benefit from these supports so if you want to access this government funding and systems and rights then there’s a requirement to do this definition, and then asset transfer from public bodies doesn’t require this community of geography point which David discussed, technicalities there. But a group with a particular interest around a building say, or what we would call a Community of Interest, can become a Community of Geography. And I’ve given you some examples about how groups have done that on this slide, Govanhill Baths there and I’m not going to read that for yourself you can go and find it later if you’re interested, and also the Pyramid at Anderston. Again, a B Listed building. So um negotiated sales with private landowners the first route to community ownership in my IR three, three routes, which is actually the most common route to community ownership, is just a straight up sale with the private landowner, it’s like a domestic property transaction, as you would imagine you’re paying the market value in this case which is a challenge, particularly as markets are going up and up and up. There’s a protocol and negotiated sales, there’s a screenshot from it there and I can provide a link if you’re interested or you can get it off the Community Land Scotland website. And then there’s the Community Rights to Buy and I have a bunch of slides here so I’ll go through them, and if people have, I’ll probably skip some and if people have questions we can come back about the particular aspects of it. So basically the Community Rights to Buy are legal process. And there’s different requirements for community bodies if you’re accessing a Community Right to Buy than if you’re just accessing the Scottish Land Fund, we were dealing with this recently for a group, so if you’re going to go through the Community Right to Buy there’s gonna be a higher threshold for getting everything just right because you’re going to be exercising a legal right which could very much end up in courts where the Ministers can be taken to court over over the exercise of the Community Right so it’s a higher threshold, there’s lots of technicalities. There’s also a really great team in the Scottish Government who’s going to help you through all of this but, when when you get to the Community Rights to Buy it all becomes technical. So there’s a new requirement for defining geographic communities including drawing it on a map, as well as describing it descriptively in your applications. And then when you’re exercising these rights, there’s going to be some type of Petition List which basically means a public vote, showing support. There’s different levels of vote depending on different types of rights, and that is based on the electoral register. And there’s some examples there on the right hand side about size of balloting being undertaken. So success rates for Community Rights to Buy. I’m saying this up front now, there’s been 24 successful Community Rights to Buy since it was introduced in 2007 according to the registers as yesterday I think I pulled that down, but those are 24 success stories, and many of these applications go on to become negotiated sales which is where you get that being quite the most popular route ultimately. And Scotland benefits from these world leading collective rights to ownership. These are unique rights which are, which again are you, you know, are amazing and we should enjoy exercising them even if they don’t quite work as well as we would like them to at all times. So how do they work, right, there’s basically three to be aware of that I’m going to cover tonight, there’s more than that, in principle, but the first is Registering an Interest to buying land, and there’s a reference there it’s part two of the 2003 Act. So this is when you’re going to Register an Interest to buy land and then the Right to Buy that is only triggered when the landowner moves to sell it, the community body would have first right to proceed as the buyer, and you would need to do balloting to register the interest, requires 10% support. Now, Communtiy Land Scotland has published the top tips on Community Right to Buy and I’ve done a screenshot here of a top tip which I’m not going to get into but you can see there’s quite a lot of detail there and little ideas about things you should be aware of so you can get the slides after the presentation and read through that or get in touch and we’re happy to provide that as well. The second right then, is a Right to Buy, abandoned, neglected or detrimental land, and it came in a few years ago. What it does is it forces the sale of any type of land owned by anyone. The land needs to be wholly or mainly abandoned, neglected detrimental, there’s legal definitions around that, causing harm to the environmental well-being of the relevant community and that needs to be proven in the courts or in the law to stand up in the courts anyway. And one of the challenges with this Community Right to Buy, is that if the owner addresses the issue with that land and that is, those causing harm to the relevant community, then the Right to Buy doesn’t proceed because the harm is gone. So there’s a few cases and you can go online and see them in the Register of Community Interest which is what that top tip is, and you can read about how that’s worked in the past and get a sense for how that all happens, has happened in practice and in the few cases that have exercised that right so far. And then last year a new Right to Buy was implemented, which is Community Right to Buy Land to Further Sustainable Development. This one also forces the sale, that the community needs to come forward with a proposal for an improved use which is going to be a significant benefit. And there’s a number of legal tests around that, which I’ve put here on the side, on the side of the slide, but I won’t go through all of that at the moment. So again, it’s, it’s come in last year, and no one as far as I know has has used it yet. It’s quite exciting though, because it basically allows communities to come forward and say we, we know that the landowner was doing something with this land, we have an idea that’s better, it’s going to further sustainable development, and here’s how we’re going to do it. So I thought after the details of how Community Rights to Buy’s work in that sort of sense I would go through a bit more of some good information, some high points, it’s getting late in the day so we’ll get back into the positive things and then we’ll, we’ll go for questions. And so I thought I would pull this one up, number of assets in community ownership and type really, so well over 300 buildings in community ownership, which is which is quite impressive, across Scotland. And here are some, some achievements that have, communities have pulled off. Bellfield Portobello in Edinburgh, which is called Action Porty sometimes that was the first urban Community Right to Buy exercise, just after that right was introduced for urban communities in 2016 and it’s grade B Listed, beautiful building. The Pyramid Anderston, I’m guessing people on this call will be aware, aware of that it was actually the hundreth Scottish Land Fund award a few years ago, and it was bought from the Church of Scotland, and they’re refurbishing it quite soon, I believe.
And Govanhill Baths has already been talked about as well, so wanted to put that one in. So then, a few sort of final points about historic building challenges and community ownership as we see it in our work. So a few top three challenges is how the money works out, David has covered this really nicely in quite a lot of detail, but you need to be thinking about your capital costs, your refurbishment costs, your revenue, and how it’s all going to work out in the long term. I want communities to be buying true assets not liabilities, and I love historic buildings and understand falling in love with with a beautiful building, but we also have to be very, very practical, when we’re coming to drawing down these funding and exercising these, these rights, that communities have over land and buildings. Community ownership of historic buildings, it’s about the community and the building in this case so you need to balance that need to set up an organization which is open to anyone that can come in and ultimately the building is going to meet the need of a community, not to save the building or save a public service. That’s what the community ownership legislation and supports are there for, is to meet the needs of community and provide those benefits that communities can provide as David was describing. Opportunities, loads of them. Communities have Right to Buy out buildings owned by absolutely any type of landowner, that’s what the rights do, there’s different rights depending on what type of landowner and how things are exercised and different funding as you will appreciate now tonight, but ultimately communities have Rights to Buy absolutely any type of building owned by any landowner, in principle, save a few minor exclusions, which probably don’t apply in Glasgow around MOD land and the Crown. We won’t worry about that. There’s great support networks for community ownership which is an opportunity for everyone. There’s pioneers to learn from. There’s great funding, there’s lots of different funding sources for historic buildings which which make addressing historic buildings, possibly more optimistic than other other types of groups we work with. There’s a lot of inspiration from the pioneers, you can learn from what’s come, people have come before and think about how to do things yourself and ultimately it’s an opportunity to understand what does your community need, what does that community need, and how can historic buildings meet this need, which then brings life into the historic building in a new way, which is which is exciting. So I wanted to finish with the big picture because we’re about the big picture. Scotland has a rich history of land reform. Its amazing stories, there’s a picture here from the 10th anniversary on the, on the Isle of Eigg they’re celebrating their buyout, they’ve just started their 25th year of community ownership on Eigg and they’ve, they’ve achieved so many things they own lots of buildings, some of which are quite pretty, but they’ve achieved all sorts of other things like their own electricity grid, etc. And then, so what we’re doing here is we’re marrying up this amazing rich history of land reform and ownership and creating a more just system of ownership, as well as supporting Scotland’s amazing built heritage, bringing those things together to address the challenges of the future. It’s exciting, but not easy. So that’s all from me, and I look forward to the questions.
Taylor Cross-Whiter
Great, thank you so much, that was really great. Um, so yeah let’s go ahead and if people do have questions, just pop them in the chat function, or if you would prefer to ask them verbally, then you can just raise your hand, there’s under the “reaction” emoji there at the bottom and then I can know to call on you. So while people are, we don’t have any questions at the moment, but while people are maybe having a quick think I was wondering, just a sort of a starter question, a starter for 10 so to speak, what are some of the major pitfalls or common pitfalls that you often see community groups falling into either David or Carey? If you have anything off the top of your head that you would like to warn people around and things that you see quite often happen for groups.
Carey Doyle
I mean I’ve already said it so I’ll say again, I think in this audience, you know, it’s not about the building, it’s about the community and the building. We can fall in love with the building and save it by doing something amazing for the community, but it’s a pitfall to just fall in love with a building and try and save the building. Sometimes, it can’t be saved. Would you agree with that Taylor I don’t I don’t know if that’s ok to say in this audience.
Taylor Cross-Whiter
It might be slightly controversial, but no I mean, I think it’s, you know, we always have to look at these things holistically and understand the bigger picture and understand yeah, why, why are we doing, you know these projects and it is definitely this is not a process to enter in lightly, so understanding what it is that you’re, that you’re getting involved in is good.
David Henderson
There are so many different pitfalls, it’s really hard to pick, pick out one, but I think just the bigger projects, like the ones we’ve talked about, I’m thinking of Millport Town Hall for example which is a group I’ve been working with. They started it at cost four years ago, and who has done a lot in four years, they’ve got to the stage where the fundings virtually in place for most of what they want to do, but it’s taken four years, and that I think is pretty fast work for, for, for a big building that was in a state of disrepair, pretty complex. It’s just the timescales involved and the complexity and the demands that puts upon people and requirements upon a, I mean Millport is a really small community. There are several people involved in a variety of different projects, and the amount of energy it takes to persevere and the skills that are required, people to bring all these things together in one place, and sustain over a period of time, I think is really really tough. And, you know, we put we put volunteers through horrendous experiences, sometimes to achieve what they want to achieve. And you know it’s not, you know, Carey’s right, I mean the rights are fantastic, they way that they’re applied isn’t always so fantastic and I think I really feel for some of the some of the volunteers, I see, who are developing these things but it’s the sheer demands of that I think are, are the biggest challenge. And yet when people get through it, the, the scars do heal, and you can see people are really, you know, they’re glad they’ve gone through it and the change in some in some communities is quite remarkable.
Taylor Cross-Whiter
Perfect. Well thanks both, um, so we’ve got some questions coming in. Joanne I see you’ve got your hand raised, I’ll come to you just a second, we just first have a question from Colin, asking, When does the wider community get a say in the process? So there’s no mention of if they disagree with the application. So that’s a really good question, so you have one community group that has a very specific idea of a project, what happens when that’s not, because we always say community, acting with the understanding that sort of everyone agrees, but yeah I don’t know if who wants to take that one?
David Henderson
I can say a bit about the Community Asset Transfer legislation. I mean, I mentioned it’s quite a tough process, I mean Community Asset Transfer in theory is a little bit easier than Community Right to Buy in some of the process. And yeah, even then, the demands are really tough. So there are lots of checks and balances built into the process. And one of the big ones will be the requirement for community consultation and again so the expectation, for a group, it’s maybe quite iconic for, a project can be in quite an iconic building that means a lot to people in a community, then the expectations of the group doing the consultation, are really high. And there’s quite a lot of pressure on the public authorities to get it right as well. So there might be pressure from that side too, because if there is community conflict that will stop a transfer dead in its tracks, and I’ve got examples of that actually, where really good proposals have floundered because the groups that have taken this on haven’t really brought the community with them, even though they’ve got great ideas. So, but there are checks built into the process, and a group’s got to work away at that and get people onside and do what they can do. And there are some really good resources around, around how groups can do that, even, even in difficult circumstances like COVID and the pandemic and lockdown so, yeah it’s an important area, community consultation is just so important.
Taylor Cross-Whiter
Yeah, yeah. Carey, anything to add to that or?
Carey Doyle
Yeah, I mean I again agree with everything David says of the then the technicalities around CAT, because he’s the man for that for sure. But I suppose picking up on the questions around, you know when communities engage in terms of Right to Buy, I was talking a bit about the electoral, I was touching on the electoral requirements for those rights and and again that provides a check where there’s this requirement for for a ballot or a petition rest of the community and you need to define what that community means, which is quite challenging in urban areas because you need to draw a line around a map and say okay it’s all the people in here and then you need to go out and do the the awareness raising and promotion to get enough people to turn up for the vote to evidence that support, so it’s quite a strong check to be honest because it’s difficult to raise a lot of resources to get those kind of balloting happening, although there’s, you know, examples of it happening, it does happen successfully but it’s not easy and again, volunteer work here as well it’s a big undertaking. For the Scottish Land Fund, there’s a requirement to evidence community support for a project as well, it’s not as onerous, as the Community Rights to Buy because again, we’re spending public money on these projects so we need to demonstrate again that there’s that public support for it, but we’re not exercising a community right which is being balanced onto the courts with a private right to own that land, so that’s why there’s a higher threshold that, but there are checks within the Scottish Land Fund about that community support. And, you know, community engagement is one of the trickiest parts of community ownership because it tends to be, particularly in urban areas, there’s a small group of people who have a vision, they’ve got a dream, and what they have to do is translate that dream into something that the whole community can get on board with. And that dream is sometimes historic buildings but sometimes it’s a community woodland or it’s growing, it’s a garden or whatever it is, there’s all sorts of amazing dreams and when you go down the community ownership route you have to open that up to the community and feed in, and in some cases, they’ll say that’s great but we don’t actually want that, we want something else. And that is actually built into the process, it should be built into the process. That’s why, what I was talking about, we’re providing targeted support at gaps in this process to help things out. The first one we’ve done is targeted community engagement support because you need to get this community engagement part right from the very beginning, and then things will be easier ideally.
Taylor Cross-Whiter
One hundred percent. Um, alright so I’m going to go to Joanne, thank you so much for your patience, and if you would like to either unmute yourself, or you can go on video, whichever you prefer voice or video and go ahead with your question.
Joanne
I’ll just stick to unmuting, it’s quite long in the day. Not ready for video again. It was probably actually more of a general question to both, to everyone really, previously I worked in the heritage sector, still volunteer within it and also work within with volunteers as well, but I’m interested in what your thoughts might be around what potentially could change with new legislation, Carey you mentioned earlier I think around people seeing a building in their local area which we, we love for whatever reason, but seeing the deterioration and having that wait for the owner, whoever that might be to say, right okay, I’ll sell or okay and we’ll, we can negotiate, by which point the enthusiasm might have waned, waned, but equally the costs are then rising, and suddenly it becomes unsustainable. Do you think having the abandoned, neglected detrimental will help address that? But equally, where you’ve got buildings that have multiple owners, trying to get all of them to talk to each other. We see in Glasgow, hundreds of buildings in that state and the local authorities can be so resistant to applying a Section 13, um to take it on because they themselves don’t have the means either. I was just wondering if you see there was going to be further development that would help address that ownership and working with owners to free up that assets.
Carey Doyle
I mean, I suppose, maybe not the best answer, but, you know, there is moves to introduce new Community Right to Buys as well as acknowledgment that the ones we have haven’t worked as well as they could be. So there’s a possibility of creating new ones that work better for an urban context which is sounds like what you’re describing ultimately all the issues around shared spaces and tenements and all of that. We don’t quite know exactly what those would look like just yet and that’s the work I think of the next few years is getting ready to, well it’ll be less than a few years, in the next year or so, put, put all that information into a possible new Land Reform Act and introduce rights so we’re working with really an urban context.
Joanne
I was just hoping that there is going to be, we can, I mean, having seen the legislation develop in leaps and bounds, to me it seems the next step would be to start proactively looking at buildings of multiple owners and there might be some out there in the Highlands and Islands etc, rural areas as well, but certainly in Glasgow we know about it. Thank you. If David wants to add anything?
David Henderson
Yeah, my starting off point for, for any group would be, you know, what is it you want to achieve what kind of, what kind of outcomes you want to have. And so, you know, it might be the case actually that you know the building that you’re looking at, won’t, isn’t the best way for fulfilling those, those, those ambitions, so you know if the building is falling into disrepair, as is quite common, and I’m sure we’re gonna see more of given the state that most local authority finances are in, and then it will become a more common issue I’m sure. But sometimes the building, isn’t the best solution for what it is you want to achieve and maybe there are other alternatives. In terms of the legislation, you know I think the new Act, the new rights that are available are interesting, but they’re really untested, and there’s no case law built up yet. So, the vacant derelict land one is, it’s potentially very powerful, as to how that works with multiple owners, I’m not sure, that’s complex, and that’s maybe a sort of sort of research project sort of thing that maybe, maybe, Carey and the Hub might want to sort of think about, but it seems like a tough challenge. That’s a very gloomy response, I’m sorry.
Joanne
No, no. I’m actually in the midst of a law degree so this, this might be my dissertation.
David Henderson
Right, ok.
Carey Doyle
I’m laughing because you have to like it, you know, you either like it or you don’t like it, the details of all the law, I’ve put a link in the chat as well about land rights and responsibilities protocols. So one of the, one of the things that’s come out of the land reform work is this idea that landowners have rights as well, rights over land but responsibilities as well, to communities to do a variety of things which is what the Scottish Land Commission has been taking forward and the protocols that they’ve produced is what I’ve put in that chat, a lot of it is aimed at landowners providing access to their land, for example in rural areas and right to roam and things like that, but there’s probably something of use in there around vacant and derelict land and maybe there’s more work to be done bringing that out, what is a landowner’s rights and responsibilities around urban urban buildings as well.
David Henderson
Maybe just a quick aside there, if you’ve got a legal background Joanne. We’ve got a project called the Scottish Universities, land, land, Land Unit, and essentially it’s we invite students across Scotland to write responses to issues around complex legal issues to do with land ownership and property ownership. And I know that my colleague Elspeth, our kind of legal person, heads it up, is always looking for good questions. So if you could formally, if you format what you said tonight into like a short, pithy question, I’m happy to pass it on to her and see if she’s got an answer for you, or can set a student to work on it.
Joanne
As long as it just doesn’t come back to me, that’s great. Yeah, that’s great, thanks for that and I’ll check out the Land Unit. Thank you.
Taylor Cross-Whiter
Great. Thanks Joanne. We’ve got a question in the chat from Andrew, directly for Carey, Carey you mentioned 24 successful CAT projects since 2004, assuming these had to go all the way through the legislative process, how many start on that journey, and do you have a stat for the number which end up being negotiated transfers?
Carey Doyle
First thing is we’ve got a bit of an acronym soup here so I was talking about Community Right to Buys which we call CRTBs Community Right to Buy and CATs are Community Asset Transfers, which is, which is what David does. So this question is about Community Right to Buy not CAT just to be clear, so there’s a, there’s a register of interests and land which is the first Community Right to Buy I talked about where you can just register an interest to buy, if it comes up for sale and then be for that first right of refusal. And you can, there’s a register of interest to anyone can go see so I’ve put a link on the chat to where that is and I, when preparing, to the top one on there and saw how many had been activated, and it was 24, since 2003 so that’s where I got that statistic from. And the question asked for other better statistics which I don’t have to hand, I would love to spend the time pulling out better stats about all this but I don’t have it yet so if anyone wants an internship, we can maybe pay someone to pull all of that together.
Taylor Cross-Whiter
Great thanks. All righty, so it looks like the last question we’ve got here in the chat has been somewhat answered in the chat as well by Andrew so thank you Andrew but I will just read out the question and Andrew’s response as well, just in case there’s anything that yourselves want to add, so Julie has said, we’re a group about to sign a lease on a C Listed derelict building working towards being able to buy it. We’ve discovered wet rot, dry rot, woodworm and weevils. But the private owner isn’t interested in doing anything to the building, is there an obligation for him, however, because it’s listed? Or do we, because we’re keen to just crack on with the repairs? Thanks, big learning curve. Yeah, so this is a question that comes up quite a lot with groups, working with historic buildings, vacant buildings. And so then Andrew has responded, So your local authority could serve statutory notices, Listed Building Repairs Notice, Urgent Works Notice, Dangerous Building Notice etc etc, any of these would help reduce the valuation of the existing building until the repairs are done, but sadly some local authorities have an aversion to serving such notice, citing lack of need, slash resources, slash political will to follow through. So yeah this is quite a common one that comes up. So, was there anything either of you would want to add to that, clearly you know this is a huge problem but unfortunately the legislation, as you said sometimes doesn’t quite catch up with the needs of the building, and maybe the people responsible for it, or wanting to be responsible for it, I should say.
David Henderson
It’s well, well outwith the bounds of my experience and knowledge. But the one thing I would say is that if I was working with a group. I wouldn’t sign, I wouldn’t sign the lease until, I’d encourage any group to push back on the terms of a lease, I think, lots of groups I work with are really reticent to push back on on the terms and accept the kind of standard terms that the public authorities tends to offer, obviously not a local authority in this case but, so I would, I would push back on the terms as hard as you can get get good legal advice, you know, it’s, if you can afford to buy it in, then, then do so, but yeah that’s that’s as far as I can take it, I can safely take it.
Carey Doyle
Yeah, similar response in the sense that this question raises a few alarm bells with me because it’s about signing a lease and then putting a lot of time and effort and value, money and work into a building which isn’t owned and what if the landlord does something and then all that effort is lost. So, you know, that’s why ownership was introduced, was to address these kinds of issues so that communities could benefit from, you know, all that effort that they’re putting into buildings, doesn’t mean it’s easy but at least that system is in place to you know, to stop the situation where the landlord then benefits from all that time and effort.
Taylor Cross-Whiter
Yeah. All right. Um, so I think we are past 8:30 here so I will go ahead and wrap it up unless you have any last minute questions? And just to reiterate, both Carey and David’s organisations both have really really helpful websites that also lay out a lot of information that they’ve discussed tonight so definitely they’re really helpful resources, and definitely check them out. And this has all been recorded, and there was a transcript so I will be sharing that with everybody in the near future. So you can share it with other people, colleagues who you think might be interested and it will be available on the GCHT website as well. And then also really quickly, before we, before we wrap up, I should just, shameless self promotion for GCHT, for Glasgow City Heritage Trust we are a grant funder, so we do have grant programs for some of the things that both David and Carey have talked about today, in particular the Development Grant Programme which I oversee. It aims to help projects in their early stages, so when it comes to things like taking on vacant historic buildings there is potential grant funds there available for groups. And so the best way to find out more about that, is to go to our website which just Glasgow heritage dot org dot uk, and we have a bit more about the grants there, and you can also fill in an enquiry form that will then send your enquiry to me and I can have a chat with you as well. I will also just quickly pop my email in the chat in case anybody is interested in just having a chat directly. Whoops, spelling, there we go. That’s great. All righty. And then last but not least, just thank you so much for our speakers tonight, for giving up your time and for everyone that attended. It is a very, very warm evening so thank you everyone. We really appreciate it and do just let us know in the little survey that we’ll be sending out, future events that you would find interesting and future topics that you would like to hear more from in this series of events with the Built Historic Environment Forum. Thanks everyone.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai