This is a very belated update on what happened to our attempt to purchase the former Bank of Scotland branch and to set up a community-owned coworking and local enterprise hub.
In brief, having failed to make use of the Community Right to Buy legislation, as outlined in our June update, we also failed to get the Bank of Scotland to enter into discussion about the possibility of arranging a private sale. The bank insisted on following their usual procedure for disposing of surplus properties by putting the property on the open market. Once this happened, we had no chance of making an offer because the timescales simply didn’t match with funding sources available to us, such as the Scottish Land Fund.
The Scottish Land Fund exists in order to support community groups with grants towards purchasing local assets for community use but, understandably, they insist on a detailed assessment of the community’s plans and business case which means that the whole application process takes a minimum of six months and often longer. Also, with currently much reduced funding from the Scottish Government, obtaining a Scottish Land Fund grant is increasingly competitive so any grant award is by no means guaranteed for any particular project. And obtaining interim, bridging finance to secure a purchase renders groups ineligible to then apply to the Scottish Land Fund (because they would then already own the asset).
As it happens, once we were finally able to take a detailed look inside the former bank branch, after its closure, it was clear that much more work would have been required to convert the premises than we had originally envisaged and it would actually have been quite challenging to build a viable coworking enterprise in this space.
Meantime, we are actively exploring other possibilities for setting up a local coworking hub and we hope to have more news shortly.
Also, the Scottish Communities Climate Action Network is now in dialogue with the other community networks that form the Scottish Community Alliance to discuss the possibility of creating more agile support structures to help communities take ownership of local assets and we look forward to seeing what emerges from this. See here: What if we had a community owned land-bank? Offers of help from anyone with relevant expertise would be gratefully received.