Live from 9am, our Director Robin McAlpine will be giving evidence to the Scottish Parliament's Covid-19 inquiry.

Watch at: http://ow.ly/CS6Z30rjlsW  https://twitter.com/SP_Economy/status/1325831233239191554

Robin's key point is that if we focus entirely on "jobs" to the exclusion of the shape of the surviving economy then we may lose our small local companies that don't have reserves and see them replaced by multinational companies that have better means to weather the storm.

Local businesses have seen their income collapse but their outgoings - rent, some wages etc - still exist.

We need a rent freeze and debt moratorium.

Another idea could be to use the SNIB to form an asset cooperative to buy and protect small business assets. After the crisis has passed, the assets can be sold or leased back to the business holders.

Doing so might even cut rents in the longer term.

Robin mentions our fully budgeted Scottish Green New Deal. You can read it here.

https://commonweal.scot/policy-library/common-home-plan

Marrying the changes we need to recover from the Covid crisis with the changes we need to protect ourselves from the climate crisis is at the core of our Resilience plan.

https://commonweal.scot/resilience 

"This is not a blip, this crisis is accelerating the changes that were already coming....those changes could be as devastating as the deindustrialisation of the 1980s"

On the Scottish Government's Wellbeing Economy plans.

Doing what we were doing before but calling it something different isn't Wellbeing. At least the rhetorical desire to do something different is in place. But now we need to do something different.

Asked by @andywightman about local governance, Robin re-iterates that Scotland is the most centralised democracy in Europe. You can't do local wealth building if there is no local infrastructure to build it around.

We need better local democracy.

https://commonweal.scot/policy-library/development-councils-proposal-new-system-local-democracy-scotland

The core and foundation of a wellbeing economy is housing.

If you have a warm house that you can afford and that leaves you with enough money to buy everything else you need, you are a long way towards a Wellbeing Economy.

https://commonweal.scot/policy-library/good-houses-all

One problem with our public procurement is that our contracts are too big. We have local companies that can build one school but if we only issue contracts for five schools at a time then those companies cannot bid for them.

The same goes for supply procurement. A local farmer that can supply enough butter for their local school cannot bid for that contract because they can't supply to all of the schools in the local authority.