I’m keen to talk to Susan Aitken about the Glasgow deficit. This is the massive funding gap between what Glasgow gives the rest of Scotland and what it gets back.
This is how it should work and it doesn’t need to come dressed in abstruse economic formulae or any delivery and outcome flannel.
The Glasgow metropolitan region (formerly Greater Glasgow) is home to almost a third of Scotland’s entire population. Within that sprawl exist large areas where patterns of generational deprivation, stemming from rapid post-war de-industrialisation, have led to vast inequalities in health and educational outcomes.
Glasgow therefore should receive a cut of the nation’s cake that acknowledges this. Instead, it receives proportionately less of it than any other city in Scotland. Make it make sense, as the Gen Zedders say.
This gap widened when local government reform in 1996 cleaved off the most affluent areas of Glasgow into boutique regions like East Renfrewshire and the arboreal parts of East Dunbartonshire. The wealthy paid their rates and council taxes into these contrived lowland arcadias while continuing to use Glasgow’s free and discounted museums and galleries.
I’m pleasantly surprised that me and the leader of Glasgow City Council are in agreement here. “I prefer to call it the gerrymandering of local government and it affected Glasgow adversely more than any other city,” she says, “and it was deliberately designed to do so.
“Glasgow’s wealthier and higher tax-paying neighbourhoods were deliberately cut off from the city because the Tories at the time sought Glasgow’s decline. Let’s be 100% clear about that.
“The route to addressing this is proper recognition of Glasgow’s metropolitan status: that the city serves a much wider area beyond its boundaries.
“One of my officers told me Glasgow is Europe’s premier post-industrial city: that no other European city was so heavily industrialised and then so heavily brutalised by an obscenely unjust transition and so quickly.”
Ms Aitken and I both love Edinburgh, a city where I spent 10 very happy years. But let’s speak frankly here: its city centre has now become a chintzy, over-priced, year-round folderol for an itinerant circus of early hedge-fund retirees.
Most people don’t even know that Edinburgh gets an annual and very generous capital city allowance which has amounted to hundreds of millions of pounds over the last 15 years. Yet Glasgow, Scotland’s real capital city, gets nothing like it.
Read the part of the Susan Aitken interview:
The narrative of decline in the city is absolutely false
“Glasgow is Scotland’s pre-eminent economic driver,” says Ms Aitken. “We are also the cultural heart of Scotland. Edinburgh’s international festival is a lovely thing but Glasgow is Scotland’s cultural heart all year round.”
She rails against the absurdly ridiculous distribution formula across Scotland which discriminates against Glasgow. This is where Glasgow’s Council Tax payers support national assets like Edinburgh’s four national galleries, while we’re left to fund our own assets, all of them national in scale and character.
“We’ve got the Riverside museum and Kelvingrove art gallery and museum, the most visited in the UK outside of London. We wouldn’t even be having conversations about Scotland hosting things like the world athletic championships or the Commonwealth Games, were it not for Glasgow. We support a whole range of national assets that serve 1.8 million people. This is a deficit that’s not recognised within the allocation formula.”
“So what are we going to do about it, Susan,” I ask her. “For the first time we’ve actually quantified it and done work to make the case and present it.”
And have you heard this one? Scotland’s allocation formula for roads is based on distance, not usage. Take it away, Ms Aitken. “Annan High Street, for example, is funded for maintenance at the same rate as Hope Street, one of Europe’s busiest urban streets.
“Glasgow has roughly 11% of Scotland’s population; the city region considerably more. Around 15% of Scotland’s population is using our roads every day, but we get 6% of the allocation for roads the dense infrastructure they require.
She describes herself as a ‘Glasgow nationalist,” and this also pleases me. I tell her I’d have independence for Glasgow and let the rest of Scotland fend for itself and see how it gets on. She pretends she hasn’t heard that. “We need a metropolitan allowance that recognises the intensity of usage, infrastructure and generational social inequality that have never been addressed.”
Read more in the series:
The Future of Glasgow – Find all articles in the series here
Dani Garavelli: It's time to get off the sidelines and show people make Glasgow
She seems to be a woman in a hurry, eager to see the conclusion of the works in progress that have led to so much criticism about The State of Sauchiehall Street. She’s been offered opportunities to go for a Scottish Parliament seat but says that local government is where the action is really at. You sense that there’s too much unfinished business here for her to consider Holyrood.
And so, we talk about the night-time economy which my hospitality contacts claim is being eviscerated by exorbitant parking charges, the LEZ zone and cycle lanes.
Ms Aitken is having none of it and proceeds to get me tellt. Not sure if I’m buying it, but she’s insistent. “Young people’s social life choices are changing,” she says. They have every right to do things differently from our generation.” She cites the emergence of outlying neighbourhoods near the city centre like Shawlands, Finnieston and Cathcart.
“We’ve commissioned research into what is the night-time economy right now and what people want from it. Rather than making assumptions, let’s actually get some data. It’s now older people who are coming into the city centre and using bars and restaurants and they’re not staying out as late.”
“The UK economy isn’t improving any time soon. People don’t have as much money to spend. They’re buying a couple of bottles of wine rather than going out.”
She refuses to entertain any opposition to the imposition of LEZ. “We can’t have a city centre economy that kills people and had a level of air pollution that kills approximately 300 Glaswegians a year. If that was our water we wouldn’t accept it.”
I can’t leave her without raising the issue of the city centre parking charges, which have more or less become a stealth tax. She’s not having it, though. “75% of people who access the city centre don’t access it by private car. I think there’s been a disproportionate focus on the relatively small number of on-street parking spaces. These should be expensive.
“Glasgow has the lowest car ownership of any city in the UK. We give more street space over to stationery cars than any other city in the UK. We have to have a different balance on our streets. That’s part of what The Avenues is about. That means we’ll have to say to people: ‘we don’t want you parking on our streets’.
“We have 13,000 of parking spaces available in the city centre and all under cover. Yes, I acknowledge that multi story car parks have a bad reputation and we have to work to make people feel safer in them at night. If I listened to some industry voices, I’d never set foot in Glasgow city centre on a Saturday night.
“There’s been some exaggeration about the challenges of getting in and out of Glasgow and that’s putting it mildly. It’s never been safer. We’ve never had lower levels of crime than we have now in our city centre. It’s still a brilliant place to have a night out.”
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