Policy Papers

Town centre regeneration has been a topic subject to dichotomies in Scottish political thinking. For every person who believes that “something should be done” to reverse the long term decay of our towns, there are others who simply accept that the decline is either inevitable or even hold it to be a positive thing. Common […]

Nick Kempe investigates the Care Inspectorate’s attempts to assess the ongoing response in Scottish care homes to the Covid-19 pandemic.After the previous foreseeable disaster laid out in Kempe’s earlier paper for Common Weal, The Predictable Crisis, the Care Inspectorate has been attempting to assess Scottish care homes in light of the pandemic.Whilst some care homes […]

Part One of the Resilient Scotland plan covered the immediate recovery from the ongoing coronavirus pandemic up until the 2021 Scottish elections. Part Two covered the four years of the next Parliamentary term and laid the foundations of the plan to come. It worked within the constraints of devolution but will bring Scotland to the […]

There is a very big gap between the aspiration and the information contained on how to achieve it; the level of detail contained in the recommendations means it is generally impossible to envisage what is actually proposed. The vast majority of it seems to be to propose to do the same thing we were doing before – but […]

RESILIENT SCOTLAND: PHASE TWOThe first phase of the Resilient Scotland Plan covered the period between the easing of lockdown and the 2021 Holyrood Elections.It set out the underpinning strategy and set some emergency actions which could be taken quickly to start to rebuild the economy. This second Phase covers the period of the four-year parliamentary […]

This is the second part of a three-part plan for creating greater economic, social and environmental resilience in Scotland and focusses on the four- year period of the next Scottish Parliament. It contains too many individual recommendations to summarise all of them here. At the same time it does not cover a number of areas […]

Common Weal launches the first part of its economic recovery plan, showing how Scotland can become a productive, high-wage society without government bailouts by letting Scottish businesses unlock Scotland’s underdeveloped potential. It explains how by focussing on reprofiling public procurement and using public stimulus in housing, energy, land, food, advanced materials and light manufacturing to […]

Common Weal launches the first part of its economic recovery plan, showing how Scotland can become a productive, high-wage society without government bailouts by letting Scottish businesses unlock Scotland’s underdeveloped potential. It explains how by focussing on reprofiling public procurement and using public stimulus in housing, energy, land, food, advanced materials and light manufacturing to […]

Resilience Economics is a new economic framework produced by Common Weal to begin the process of rebuilding our economy after the Covid pandemic and to ensure that future crises do not demolish it again.You can read the report in full here.You care also read a shorter summary of the report here.Resilience means that we create […]

Resilience Economics is a new economic framework produced by Common Weal to begin the process of rebuilding our economy after the Covid pandemic and to ensure that future crises do not demolish it again.You can read the report in full here.You care also read a shorter summary of the report here.Resilience means that we create […]

Common Weal welcomes the opportunity tocontribute to Scottish Power’s DFES questionnaire.We believe the security of energy supply and the decarbonisation of the economy to be amongst the most important tasks facing the Scottish and UK Government and indeed the world.We believe that there is no going back to the world before Covid-19 and that many […]

We in Common Weal are very pleased the Scottish Government Covid-19 Framework for Decision Making in all but one respect as we think that its Test, Trace, Isolate and Support plans are limited and unambitious.We feel strongly that a policy of mass testing is needed if we are to know where the virus is prevalent […]