Interview: Local government minister Marco Biagi on community and personal empowerment

Amid the sound and fury that has accompanied this year’s local government settlement is a feeling that no matter which way the funding negotiations fall, Scotland’s local authorities are at a tipping point.

The debate over council funding, sparked by a much reduced local government settlement contained within the SNP Scottish Government’s budget for 2016-17, has shone a spotlight on what local government is actually for: a provider of services, or a necessary function of local democracy?

It’s a question that has bubbled below Scotland’s democratic surface since the establishment of the Scottish Parliament in 1999 ushered in a whole new tier of Scottish politicians, many gleaned from the corridors of Scotland’s town halls.

And ironically, given where many of its political leaders like Jack McConnell and Tom McCabe came from, in their struggle to define themselves and their role, they helped to undermine their former colleagues in local government by taking back powers and introducing ringfencing.

However, in 2007, when the SNP formed a minority government, it struck up a relationship with local government that was mutually beneficial.

Bluntly, they needed each other.

That year they signed what was described as a historic concordat which promised more autonomy for councils, an end to central government ringfencing, and a right for local authorities to reinvest efficiency savings in return for a council tax freeze and a commitment to deliver on certain national objectives.

COSLA president at the time, Pat Watters, then a Labour councillor, said it was a relationship that there was “no going back from” and which Finance Secretary John Swinney described as “an unprecedented partnership”.

But since then, there has been something of a centralising creep. Councils may have been given power to make more decisions locally but increasingly with less flexibility in their spending pot.

And given Watters welcomed the concordat in 2007 as a departure from the days when councils had control of just 40 per cent of their budget with the words “if you control the purse strings, you control the organisation”, the fact they now have control over just 20 per cent of their total budget and currently directly raise just 12 per cent of their own funding through a council tax which has now been frozen for nearly nine years, that control has dramatically slipped away.

Tellingly, the SNP conference will next month debate three resolutions all firmly focused on the future of local government structures and its funding. One is blunt: it calls for conference to consider merging health boards and local authorities to create “more strategic bodies”.

It suggests devolving some of the current powers held by councils down to town and community level to allow decision-making to be “as close to people as possible”. And it further calls on a re-elected SNP government to consult widely on the proposal as soon as it can.

This underlying critique of current local democratic institutions follows various pieces of seminal work: the Commission on Strengthening Local Democracy in 2014, which called for a fundamental review of the structure, boundaries, functions and democratic arrangements for all local governance in Scotland; last year’s cross-party Commission on Local Tax Reform; and crucially, the passage of the Community Empowerment Bill, which was enacted in the summer of last year.

Marco Biagi, Minister for Local Government and Community Empowerment, described the bill, which he inherited from the previous local government and planning minister, Derek Mackay, as “a momentous step in our drive to de-centralise decisions and give people a stronger voice in their communities”. With even a change in the ministerial title to reflect a commitment to communities, it does feel as if there might be a theme developing here.

So, as local authorities across Scotland struggle to fully realise the impact on their communities of the reductions in public spending, there has been a parallel debate taking place about where local democracy itself actually lies and who with.

It is a debate that Biagi has fully embraced. But with a two-pronged ministerial portfolio straddling councils as well as empowering communities to take control of their own destinies, is there a potential for any conflict? 

It has been noted, for instance, that he has been largely absent when it comes to the local government funding debacle. He dismisses this, saying that Swinney, as the Finance Secretary, is the “funding guru” and that local government has a strong input from Swinney, Alex Neil [Cabinet Secretary for Social Justice, Communities and Pensioner], who has a “strategic relationship with local government”, as well as from him.

“We have a strong ministerial team when it comes to local government relationships and I think that is valuable because we do need a lot of people around the table thinking about local government,” says Biagi. “We are all doing slightly different things but when you have the DFM dealing so directly with the local government settlement, that is an indication of how important that relationship is.

“Every year you have a fairly robust negotiating process between Scottish Government and local government over how much money is going to be in the settlement and this year’s not much different from any of the others.

“There’s also a difference in the tenor in negotiating with local government compared to setting any other parts of the budget because it is a partnership, a relationship, and the people in that can speak quite loudly back – and often do – and so I would disagree with the characterisation of this being any more adversarial.

“I would love not to go through this every year, that would be very nice, and it would clearly be a lot easier if we were in different financial times. Back in 2003, for instance, when the Scottish Government budget went up by 11 per cent and it was able to pass a rise like that to local government, that would make things a lot better. But we are not there and we have to deal with the hand we are dealt.

“There is always going to be an element of discussion and disagreement and eventually reaching some kind of workable consensus and while lots of people say, ‘wouldn’t it be nice if politicians just agreed’, if politicians just agreed we wouldn’t need politicians of different parties and we wouldn’t need elections and there would be no democracy – so that is just what we have to work our way through.”

Biagi was elected MSP for Edinburgh Central in 2011. It was something of a “surprise” for the academic who had graduated from St Andrews six years earlier with a first in international relations. He had embarked on studying for a PhD at Oxford but after “a moment of clarity” which led him to conclude “I don’t want to be writing about this, I don’t want to be observing this, I want to be changing this”, he returned to Scotland to work for the SNP – both in party HQ and for the MSP Keith Brown – while studying part-time for his Masters at the University of Glasgow.

He stood for the Scottish Parliament in 2011 not expecting to take the Edinburgh Central seat held by political veteran, Sarah Boyack, but he won with the slimmest of majorities of just 237. He was, at 28, the Scottish Parliament’s youngest ever MSP to be elected to a constituency seat and if sometimes he appeared a bit gauche in the glare of the political spotlight, that’s because he was.

Biagi remains someone who appears much more comfortable in the background than on the more adversarial political frontline. He tells me that he had made his mind up that he would not stand for a second term “quite quickly” after his electoral success and, true to his word, he is not seeking re-election this May.

And although he denies that he became disenchanted by the realities of political discourse, he does admit the bureaucracy of the civil service can frustrate. On his own website, he describes himself as a “serial placard waver and community campaigner”. He likes to get things done. And looking back, he describes his involvement in student politics at St Andrews, which was less party political and more issue-based, including working with Amnesty, as having been “formative”.

Biagi joined the SNP at 16 after what he describes as the “complete betrayal” by former Prime Minister Tony Blair over tuition fees.

“I remember being at school the day Tony Blair got elected and looking at the faces of all my teachers and it was just pure joy from all of them,” he says.

“I had watched the election because I was a precocious child but hadn’t really appreciated the wider impacts of it and then the first thing that actually came into my world from that election result was tuition fees. Now Humza [Yousaf, MSP and Minister for Europe and International Development] talks about Iraq being his political awakening, but tuition fees was the first practical example for me of politics and it was something I just couldn’t grasp, that a party that everyone was saying was so progressive and so much for ordinary people, would put a barrier onto certain people going on to university and that was a particular betrayal for me.

“I joined the SNP in August 1998 having had over the course of the year time to look at everything. There is no doubt that if we were in another country that had a centre-left party and a centre-right party and no independence question, I would probably have joined the centre-left party and then tried with great frustration to keep it honest.

"I looked to the politics at that time and I saw the SNP as the authentic centre-left party that also supported independence, which was, for me, the way of ensuring those ideals happened because I looked to the Westminster parliament and even aged 16, I saw something that would take most well intentioned centre-left politicians and through political pressures turn them into Tony Blair. I thought that was something that we should get away from.

“I have, however, observed a phenomenon that I call synthetic outrage quite regularly in the Scottish Parliament and I do sometimes worry that things get opposed not because they are good or bad but because who is proposing them. I think that is inherent to politics but I think Scottish politics has a particular difficulty in that the two main parties are both professedly of the centre left – although I will spare the assessment of whether I think that is a genuine description of Labour – whereas in Westminster you have a very clear ideological divide, no matter how close those two parties get together. In Scotland, there is a constitutional divide between the two main parties but beyond that it’s about authenticity and that I think leads to a very different debate.”

Biagi strikes you as someone who thinks deeply about where his allegiances lie and appears to be a politician who has remained true to his principles who might be disappointed in the way politics actually plays out in real life. He voted against overturning SNP policy on non-membership of NATO and wrote at the time: “It’s odd to be characterised as a rebel for upholding what has been the policy of your party for 30 years, and doing so entirely in accordance with the democratic structures set out in that party’s rulebook.

"Those democratic structures will give SNP members an important decision this weekend: not just about our policy towards membership of NATO but also what kind of party the SNP is.”

He made an impassioned case for maintaining the status quo, which he lost, and it was a stance that perhaps cost him the chance of an early move into the ministerial team. However, it did increase his political profile and after Jean Urquhart’s resignation from the SNP over the NATO policy change, Biagi replaced her as deputy convener of the Scottish Parliament’s Equal Opportunities Committee where he made his mark as a keen intellect driven by principle not party.

Nicola Sturgeon brought Biagi into her first Scottish Government team as Minister for Local Government and Community Empowerment in November 2014, and in early 2015 he was appointed as co-chair, along with COSLA president, Councillor David O’Neill, of the Commission on Local Tax Reform – a cross-party group set up by the Scottish Government, tasked with examining alternatives to the council tax.

It was in this role that some political observers say they first detected that Biagi was not perhaps comfortable with institutional politics and identified his ability to compartmentalise his roles. “He basically produced an essential resource guide on local tax options,” said one source close to the commission, “A fantastically researched reference book which could be handed over to politicians to make the decisions. It was almost as if he forgot he was one himself.”

Biagi tells me that far from being a politician standing back from a definite position on local taxation, he will bring forward fully-worked plans before the end of this parliamentary term.

“The experience of the minority government in 2007 was quite illustrative. There was quite clearly a majority in the Scottish Parliament to get rid of council tax in its current form but no majority for any specific replacement, which was a bit like the vote on the House of Lords reform at Westminster where nobody could rally around any particular option.

“That has really been the challenge. Every so often you’ll get a commission brought in that is independent of anyone that has to actually implement a system. They will sit in a room and come up with something that academically appeals to them but in the real world, you just wouldn’t touch it – and that has happened regularly.

"The one we have just done was different because we brought the politicians into the room – the people that would have to actually implement and who would have to stand in front of the electorate and say, ‘this is what we would want to do’ – they were in the room contributing and, as a result, I think we had a much richer discussion tempered not with utopian dreams of economists and public finance professionals but, actually, a workable consensus.

“It sounds odd but we came to an important conclusion which was there was no one perfect system. That’s an important conclusion because if you find a negative and prove a negative then you should argue for that which in a way does refute all the other commissions that say there is a perfect solution.

“What we have is a key set of principles that four parties agreed to which are fairer, broader and more local empowering and that is a platform for going forward.”
So what will the SNP propose?

“That is in the late stages of being worked up and as you can imagine, this is not something you want to produce half-baked. You have to be clear about what you are doing, what the implications will be and how you are going to deliver. The parliament has seen a few too many half-baked proposals by people who are just trying to get a headline in recent months…a £100 rebate on a SRIT [Scottish Rate of Income Tax] power, for example… we need something workable and we will have that ready in time for the end of parliament, so I would imagine it will be an election issue.”

A replacement for the council tax has been a long time coming and if Biagi comes up with a viable solution, he will leave office stamping his very definite footprint on the future of local government. Within council circles currently, Biagi has a reputation for being a bit of an enigma. Although when pressed, the consensus is that he is ‘very brainy’. He has used the full force of that intellect on wrestling with the principles of community empowerment.

“I remember at university, when I was learning about communitarian philosophy, and I sat there and I thought I don’t connect with any of this but I became a convert at the very start of when I became a minister and going around the country in a very rapidly organised set of visits and tours seeing some of the things that were going on out there.

“I’ve always been aware of the issues that communities are raising but I hadn’t seen yet the really impressive attempts to overcome them. I look at any situation and it is easy enough to see the problems – much harder to find the solutions – and very early on, I saw examples of what communities were doing and what public bodies were doing with communities that just filled that gap for me. I very rapidly became a passionate evangelist.

“The Community Empowerment Act is one of those things that will take a long time for all the things to fall into place and there are things that have been triggered that aren’t necessarily legislative that we want to follow through on, so it is going to be an act that has a very big impact for a very long time.”

I ask him if we are seeing the start of an end to local government as we know it.

“We have a different kind of local government now to the one we had five or ten years ago and then there were all these big expectations and promises about shared services that haven’t really materialised in the way that everyone expected at the time of Arbuthnot, and the ongoing financial pressures may cause the need for that to be re-examined. Local government is like [the] Scottish Government – it changes depending on circumstances.

“There are some people out there who start from the position that they would like to reorganise local government and will try and find reasons why. But what we have are a series of things that are recognised, such as councils having to co-operate on a regional basis and also a desire for things to be a lot more local.

“Anyone who looks at a wholesale restructure of local government now would need to ask themselves where the money was coming from to do that because the last one 20 years ago cost hundreds of millions of pounds. At this time, you would have to prove very high benefits to justify that cost when what you have at the moment is something that is evolving anyway and that is also being led by local government and communities rather than being from the top down.

“I think there’s already things under way and if you look around the country, there is a lot of locally driven work that takes into account the local circumstances. The islands were probably the first out of the blocks on this but then you have the City Deal that Glasgow and neighbouring authorities took forward and you have other City deals in the offing, the Borders councils creating the Borderlands Initiative, the three Ayrshires looking at a strategic partnership, and then on top of that, you have the Community Empowerment Act which attempts to bring communities closer to decision-making.

"When you then add on to that local tax reform, which the Scottish Government has recognised for a long time has to happen, the next five years for local government are clearly going to be interesting.”

Which leads us to why he is leaving.

“Why am I leaving? Because I was elected at 28 and I’m 33 now and I feel that a lot of the things I would like to do in life and a lot of the ways I would like to contribute, I can’t necessarily do in parliament. It has become very all-consuming to me and the idea of life-work balance in parliament is an exotic one. I want to hand over the role to someone else and I knew from the Westminster election – because there was so much quality in the people that want to be involved – that I would be leaving Edinburgh Central SNP in safe hands.”

He tells me that while he is leaving elected politics for academia, he never says never to a return. Regardless, he’ll never stop marching for a cause and will always be involved in politics in some form.

“But that’s politics on the basis of how do you change the structures that are so fundamentally unfair to so many people,” he says. “Not politics in the sense of middle-aged, bald, white men arguing over things.”

Some see Biagi’s decision to quit as brave, for others it is quite threatening. For Biagi, it is just another stage on what is quite clearly a journey of self-discovery. In 2002, when he was at university, he realised what he had been struggling with all his life – that he was gay.

His battle to identify and accept his sexuality was best expressed during the debate on Equal Marriage in the Scottish Parliament, which he led, when he told the chamber: “It will come as no surprise that when I was young and my classmates were noticing girls, I was noticing boys and I was afraid. I looked out at our society and I did not see myself looking back.”

He was afraid. As a small boy, he looked out at life and it frightened him. As a mum, that horrifies me. I ask him how he would describe Marco Biagi, the child. “Fat, geeky and unhappy…”

Biagi talks eloquently about the personal struggles he has had in accepting his sexuality and talks much less openly about the impact that has had on his relationship with his parents and his two older brothers. Publicly, he will say it was “strained”. But, privately, it is only too obvious that feelings run much deeper than that. He admits that he still seeks acceptance despite what has clearly been a large element of rejection. It’s been tough and it’s is still being worked through.

I ask him if that search for a sense of belonging and a confidence in self was somewhat satisfied by joining the SNP. Did being a member of a club with a common bond offer him that sense of acceptance that had previously eluded him? 

He says there is something in that. I suggest his passion for communities to discover their own sense of place, to take control of their own future, might also be rooted in a similar place. He concurs.

“It’s hard to track back to when I originally felt different because it was just always there, but when I became aware that some of the things that seemed to be the expected things of people my age just weren’t happening, like an interest in girls and other interests, I guess. Then you see representations of male/female couples everywhere, you get the school yard banter, all of that kind of stuff, and it just wasn’t me. But also, I took from that this idea of what being a good boy was. That a good boy married and had kids and a church wedding and did all of these things. I have always been somebody that has been motivated by morality and doing the right thing, etc. and that was a real internal dissonance for me.”

How did that manifest itself?

“I just was the classic fat, geeky child, interested in the things that were the minority pursuits, the sci-fi and so on. There were other people that were like that, the computer kids that sat in the corner with no friends, and that was OK because I could just be labelled as one of them. But the other dimension, my sexuality, was much more of the internal issue.”

Couldn’t he have been that fat, geeky, lonely child regardless of his sexuality?

“I think it was an unlucky combination. I lost three stone as soon as I got to university – I put it all back on again over time, well not all of it but I always had a battle there – but there was just that combination of things and they weren’t being addressed.

“I had a girlfriend in high school that I went out with twice and once was a double date, and in retrospect, I probably spent more time thinking about the guy. But then that’s the nature of it and I took any kind of feeling like that and sort of bottled it up and thought I’ll deal with that later. I did that all the way through childhood.

“I compartmentalised and I internalised things and instead of thinking the words ‘I’m gay’ or ‘I might be gay’ I just thought ‘och well, I wonder what that means’ and ‘I’ll think about it later’. I kept on doing that … and then I went to university and I went through two years before I eventually came to the realisation that there was nothing wrong with homosexuality despite everything that I had been picking up from the media and so on. Then eventually, I got to the point in 2002 where I finally bumped into somebody in a social context that was gay and that I was attracted to. That was when I had to confront it rationally – I think this but, emotionally, I think this – and I had to deal with it.

“That was when I went through the process of coming out over the space of a few months. Up to that point, I had not expressed these feelings to anyone ever.”

Biagi phoned his parents after too much drink and says he blurted out his news in “less than ideal circumstances”. His feelings about his mother, in particular, with regard to his sexuality are complex and deep-seated.

He remembers off-the-cuff remarks from his childhood that to most of us would have disappeared in the mists of time but to him have an enormous resonance. And when I ask him if he had to choose between happiness in his sexuality and his family, it is the former that wins. He describes his relationship with his parents as “very strained when I came out and it has somewhat recovered”. That sounds like an overstatement but a situation he recognises as being a common one.

“I remember just after I came out meeting someone who had been out since he was 14 and thinking ‘the world is changing and that’s brilliant and in just a few years, everything will be fine’. But you still hear the stories and you see the statistics and you read the case studies of people who have attempted self-harm or suicide while they were at school, and that is not happening in remote parts of America, that’s happening here in Scotland now.

“We are still in a place as a society where we might have legally got over some issues, but prejudice still prevails. And if you look around, you can see depressing examples like attitudes towards women, which may have moved on tremendously but we are still nowhere near equality of attitudes. Or if you really want to look at ridiculous things then 100 years ago, people who were left-handed were called devil-handed and it was practically beaten out of them in schools but now the very idea that would be an object of prejudice is laughable. It would be nice to have the same level of acceptance for homosexuality and for it not to take so long.”

Biagi is clearly not someone yet totally comfortable – quite literally – in his own skin, He references his weight Bridget Jones-style constantly and I ask him if he still sees himself as that fat, geeky, unhappy boy. “Well, I wouldn’t say I’m slim – I’ve gained two stone since becoming a minister which I intend to lose this summer – but I’m certainly still geeky and I am a lot happier than I was when I was a teenager, that’s for sure. But then, can’t everyone say that?”