Interview with Cllr Richard Bell, Deputy Leader of Glasgow City Council and COSLA’s Resources Spokesperson

In this interview, LGIU’s Scotland Commissioner, Paolo Vestri, sat down with Councillor Richard Bell, Deputy Leader of Glasgow City Council, City Treasurer, and COSLA’s Resources Spokesperson, to discuss the meaty topic of local government finance in Scotland. The conversation also explores Glasgow’s No Wrong Door policy and its Tackling Poverty Strategy, highlighting how the council is working to support communities amid increasing financial pressures.

Cllr Bell was first elected in 1992 and brings a wide breadth of experience to the role. For over two decades, he worked as a finance and commercial executive across several national news organisations before returning to politics in Glasgow in 2017. He became City Treasurer and Chair of the Strathclyde Pension Fund in 2020, and ahead of Glasgow’s hosting of COP26 he was appointed an ambassador to the city’s Climate Finance Leadership Alliance. Following the 2022 local elections, he was appointed Deputy Leader of Glasgow City Council, while retaining his position as City Treasurer. Most recently, in November last year, Councillor Bell took on the role of COSLA Resources Spokesperson.

Watch the full conversation on YouTube here.

Timestamps:

01:25 Richard’s journey into local government
03:47 COSLA’s key priorities for local government finance
05:54 Advocating for fairer funding
08:00 Vision for resource and finance sustainability
09:21 Decentralising decision-making powers
12:00 Tackling child poverty in Glasgow
15:41 The importance of trial and error
17:54 Glasgow’s No Wrong Door Policy
22:03 Implementing No Wrong Door
23:03 Successful outcomes of No Wrong Door
24:40 Partnering with schools to tackle poverty
26:56 Challenges in implementing No Wrong Door
30:18 Always room for improvement
30:47 Partnering to tackle poverty
33:43 Understanding people’s barriers to finding long-term solutions
37:27 The need for increased funding and power for local government

Before we dive into the questions proper, can I ask you to tell us a bit more about your background in local government and, in particular, local government finance?

I first ran for elected office when I was a very young man and was elected to council for a single term. It was a very different role then. At that point, the SNP probably struggled to win a raffle, never mind an election, so it was a seat that we weren’t expected to win, and there were three of us on a council of 30 councils at the time – we didn’t make a huge amount of progress. I then pursued a career in newspapers for many years, which I enjoyed considerably. I was made redundant from that post and decided that I needed to do something else with my life.

For my first venture, I opened a restaurant in Glasgow, a business I’d never worked in before, a business I had no background or ideas in. After a number of years, we sold the restaurant, and I decided this was an opportunity for me to give back to Glasgow, so I stood for election in 2017 in the Govan Ward. I was born in Govan, although mostly raised in Shawlands, and I wanted to give back to an area of the city that I felt needed the most help and support. I was very keen to do that.

I think it was two days after the pandemic started, the leader of the council asked me to take on the role of City Treasurer. Then, after the last council elections, I was elected as the Deputy Leader. So it’s been a very interesting journey. I think it’s really good. I try to encourage as many people with business backgrounds to come into local government because I think there is a real opportunity for them to bring that level of experience from running other organisations into local authorities to help improve what they’ve got to offer the city.

Moving on to the first set of questions around finance, these are directed to you as your role as the COSLA Resources Spokesperson, can you tell us about your key priorities, or COSLA Resources’ key priorities for local government finance and resource allocation?

The priorities for COSLA in the short term were about getting a proper budget settlement from the Scottish Government. We have run a campaign in advance of the budget, asking the government to give us a significant amount of money. Money, we probably, to be fair, knew that the government were not going to be in a position to give. But I think at COSLA, we thought it was really important we highlight where the difficulty is.

Local government have seen 14 years of austerity budgets and we are now at a very critical point where local government is really on its knees. Each year, councils have to make fairly drastic budget cuts to their own budgets in order to try to balance the budget. I think, and COSLA thinks, that we need to draw a line in the sand and say we need to have a more serious conversation.

Hopefully when the new government’s in place, we can sit down with them and talk about how we properly fund local government. How we properly look at how local government touches more of people’s lives than any other sphere of government in this country. How the services local government provides are the ones that people interact with most frequently. We have to work out how we can find a better way of funding local government, and be more practical about how we fund local government – and probably be a bit more honest about it.

How is COSLA advocating for fairer funding settlements with the Scottish and UK governments and what progress have you seen so far?

COSLA launched its manifesto for the Scottish Parliament elections, and we took the extracts of that manifesto and made them into a campaign for this budget. It would be remiss of me not to say that the budget falls very far short of what the Scottish Government settlement has been. That’s quite disappointing for us.

We are realistic enough to understand that the government probably couldn’t have given us everything, but I think more worryingly for us is not just about this year’s settlement, but it’s about the financial forecast for the next two or three years. At the moment, that shows a deprioritisation of local government, and an increase in prioritisation around health services and other services.

In COSLA, we understand our role is to advocate for local government, but we’re not naive enough not to understand the Scottish Government has a budget that it has to spread across a number of areas. I expect they are constantly being told that the NHS is their number one priority, but I think our argument would be that the solutions to the NHS are not always just about throwing money at it, and you have to look at what is actually wrong with the system. Why are there so many blocks within the system, and how do we work together?

Local government is also part of that solution, getting medically fit people out of hospital and back home often involves social work and home carers. There’s a whole system approach needed there. We do work very closely with government but I think we need to better understand what’s causing some of the difficulties around the health service. It can’t just be about throwing money in one direction, but COSLA are really concerned about the deprioritisation of local government in the future year budgets.

What is COSLA’s long-term vision for resource and finance sustainability in Scottish local government?

Our position at the moment is very concerned with where we’re at. We’ve not been in the position in Scotland where any of our local authorities have gone bust, but we’ve seen that in England, and I have a real fear that we could see that in Scotland if we don’t find a solution to the way government’s funded. One of the things we’ve been talking to the government about, and certainly, wearing my Glasgow City Treasurer’s hat, I’ve been very keen to campaign for, is to allow local government more opportunities to raise money itself.

I think we’re in a difficult, negative spiral if we keep expecting all of the money to come from the Scottish Government. That then leads to arguments where the Scottish Government says the problem is that they’re not getting enough funding from Westminster.But that’s where we need to be honest, because I don’t think our constituents are that interested in who isn’t giving money to whom. They’re interested in who’s emptying their bins and cleaning their streets. We need to have a more honest discussion. Part of that has to involve recognising that politicians sometimes forget local councillors are the democratically elected voice of local communities.

They should give us the respect and the authority to make decisions that are right for our community. I’ve been saying since I was elected in Glasgow that Glasgow City Council needs to move away from the one-size-fits-all solution for our communities because what’s an issue in Kenan Park might not be an issue in Springburn or vice versa. It’s the same for the Scottish government. It’s about giving democratic control and accountability to people so they’re able to make the right decisions for their communities, but then to be held accountable for that when it comes to election time. Councillors are having to put themselves up in front of an electorate having made cuts to their budget that they didn’t want to make either, but we are legally bound to set a budget every year. It’s not something we have a choice on, and if you don’t have enough money, your options are to have eye-watering rises in council tax or cut valuable services.

The problem is, 14 years into this cycle, we’ve cut all the services you really can without it hurting people quite significantly. For me, it has to be about finding other ways of funding, giving some democracy, and decentralising the power to local government. Thankfully, John Swinney has announced that the government are very supportive of decentralising some decision-making around the Glasgow City region. That’s really exciting for us, but from a COSLA perspective, we have to think about how that impacts all the other authorities that maybe don’t have the base that Glasgow has.

Child poverty is a priority for the Scottish Government and the next version of the Tackling Child Poverty Delivery Plan will be announced by the Scottish Government in March. Glasgow City Council has made tackling child poverty its Northern Star and is a child poverty pathfinder authority. Can you tell us more about this work in general, what lessons you’ve learnt and how you see it progressing further?

Clearly, child poverty is very close to my heart. I’ve been very lucky as a citizen of Glasgow. I’ve had a decent job. I’ve had a not-bad income. I’ve had challenges and difficulties in my life like everybody else. But I think poverty is the scourge of our city. I think everybody should hold their head in shame that in this day and age, we still have people living in poor conditions. Since I took on this role, I’ve wanted to make child poverty front and centre of what the council’s doing and I’ve been supported in this from all the senior officers in Glasgow.

I think it’s helpful that our Chief Executive in Glasgow comes from a social work background and understands poverty. I’ve had phenomenal support from Suzanne Miller in this journey as well. What we’re seeing in Glasgow is that you can’t just keep doing what you’ve always done. Glasgow spends a significant amount of its budget on tackling and challenging poverty, but it doesn’t really move the dial. What we want to do is to look at how we can do things differently. One of the things we’ve done is set up four wards across the city where we’re doing what we call the ‘demonstrators of change’, to look at what the barriers are.

Another thing that I think has been really helpful for us is the Scottish Government’s introduction of the child payment, which has been really helpful, and obviously, they’ve just increased that for first children in the recent budget. That is something that we welcome, and COSLA welcomes hugely. But what else do you need to do? Yes, it’s very important to put money in people’s pockets to help them get out of poverty, but what are the other barriers that are causing people to stay in these cycles? We’ve had this approach, as everybody does, that if you turn up to one of our debt advisors, for example, and say, I’ve got rent arrears, they’ll give you a solution to those rent arrears. But they’re not, or they previously weren’t saying to people, “Well, why have you got rent arrears? What’s changed in your life? What’s changed in your circumstances? Has something come up? Have you lost your job? Has someone in the family developed an addiction?” It’s understanding what the barriers are, and then how do you support people to work through those barriers.

In Glasgow, it became very obvious, as we started moving through this journey, that we fund our third sector providers by the number of clients that they see. Which means it’s beneficial to them to just solve one. I don’t mean that people are doing that deliberately, but the system is built to solve the problem, and in three months, they’ll be back with a similar problem. We’ve changed the whole funding model, we’ve set up an external body that will now be responsible for funding of the third sector financial inclusion, and that’s all about having flexibility to move the money where it’s needed most. If there’s a sudden problem in one part of the city, we can move staff and money to that as well.

We also set up Glasgow Helps, which was actually a response to COVID. We discovered it allows and educates the council to move much more swiftly and respond to circumstances almost immediately. The learning from that was so strong that we’ve invested in that system, and it’s still running today. We’re even looking to expand that where we possibly can. I think there’s a huge amount of work going on in this field, but it’s just trying to work out what. I’ve said to the teams, we have to accept that some of this stuff we’re trialling won’t work, but if you don’t try it you’ll never understand what works.

Something else we’re trying to do is to say to people with lived experience, come to the table and help us shape that, because if you’ve been through that process, you will be able to help solve it.

In the Calton Ward, we’re doing a lot of work around childcare, and something that’s become apparent is that although the government’s providing 1140 hours of childcare, it’s not always in a pattern that fits with the work practice. A mum said to us that it’s great her son gets childcare paid for by the government, but she cannot get him from school to childcare while working her first and second jobs. We’re now working with one of the childcare providers to go to the school and take the children to the childcare facility. There’s a lot of that work going on, as well as trialling things to better help and support families.

A new initiative in Glasgow is the No Wrong Door policy, which aims to provide seamless support to vulnerable people. Could you tell us a bit more about this approach, including how it was developed and what key challenges it seeks to address?

No Wrong Door is an extension of the Glasgow HELPS programmes. It was something that we set up during COVID because, like everybody else, we weren’t sure how we were going to continue to deliver our services that we would normally be on the ground delivering. It’s trying to break down barriers so there’s a single point of contact. So you come to us and we do a full holistic analysis of what’s going on in your life, what’s happening, what are the barriers, what are the challenges.

It’s about breaking that cycle. I’m a great believer that you can’t be what you can’t see. Giving one person in a family a job sometimes transforms that whole family, because everybody then sees the benefits of that person being in work.

We, as a council, are struggling to recruit staff. We’ve got a massive amount of vacancies across our council and there are loads of people in the city who don’t have a job. So there’s an obvious disconnect there. It’s how do we build a program that can get people back into work? In last year’s Glasgow budget, we had a significant investment in cleaning the city and getting it into a better space, and we were very specific about supporting people who maybe hadn’t been in work for a while. So, we did a number of job fairs and we went out to other organisations that work with one parent families, to try to get people into those jobs.

That seemed to me to be an obvious thing. We can get the city looking better and cleaner and people feeling that their city looks a bit better, whilst at the same time supporting families who’ve maybe had a history or a longer period of time in poverty. Also, it’s getting away from the view that people who aren’t working are just lazy. Then it’s understanding what the real barriers to that are, and often it’s childcare and disabilities. There are loads of families that we deal with who have a disabled young person, which means that either one of the parents needs to be at home almost full-time, which is a real difficulty when it comes to supporting that person into work. So, what else can you do to try and support those families? And it’’s goes back to moving away from one size fits all.

One of the other things that’s come out is that we spend a lot of money on English as a first language because we’ve got a very diverse population in Glasgow, but what we discovered is that we’re training people for conversational English and it’s not helping them with job interviews. Now, through one of our college partnerships, we’re supporting people to do English as a second language, which supports them to apply for jobs and do interviews. That was something we’d never thought of. We thought, we’re doing fine, we’re putting there’s loads of ESOL on the ground across Glasgow, everybody that wants that service should be able to get it. But then you discover it’s not actually teaching them what they need to know. Again, that goes back to bringing those people to the table and saying to them, what else can we do to help you?

Can you explain how the No Wrong Door policy has been delivered on the ground in Glasgow, which organisations are involved beyond just the council, and can you give us some examples of early outcomes or successes?

Like all local authorities, we rely heavily on our third-sector partners. We’ve brought those partners to the table so we can work together. We’ve rolled out our No Wrong Door policy and approach across the third sector so that everyone understands what it means and how it works. But it’s also about saying to organisations: you can determine, to some extent, how it works within your own organisation. We don’t want to be overly prescriptive — it’s outcome-driven. That’s the key. We’re now much better at measuring outcomes and seeing what effect this is having on the ground. We can already see a whole host of work under No Wrong Door having a really positive impact.

One of the main things we’re doing is using data much more. A lot of our work is now data-driven. For example, last year we used council tax data to identify people in the city who were over 70 and not claiming all the benefits they were entitled to. They had shared that information with us when applying for council tax, and we sent officers out to their doors to explain that they could be entitled to additional support.

I had a really interesting experience with one constituent who came to my surgery a couple of nights later and said, “Ricky, something funny’s going on.” I asked what he meant, and he said, “A man came to my door, said he was from the council, and he was trying to give me money.” I said, “Oh good,  did you sign the form?” He said, “No, I shut the door on his face.” I won’t repeat the expletives he used. So I had to get the officer to go back out and explain things properly. A couple of weeks later, the constituent came back and said, “That man’s now telling me I’m entitled to money for looking after my wife,” because his wife had dementia. He said, “She’s my wife, that’s my responsibility.” And I said, “Yes, but you’ve contributed to the system for all the years you worked. This is your entitlement. We’re just trying to make sure you’re getting what you’re entitled to.” Small things like that make a real difference. We’re now working with other organisations to look at how else we can use data.

All of the organisations working through our financial inclusion system are now using the same casework system provided by the council. That means we can access the information and use it to make sure people are getting the benefits they’re entitled to. The data side of this has been massively helpful and has driven significant change in our work. We’re not just relying on people coming to us, because one of the other problems we’ve encountered is that there are lots of people in the city living in poverty who either don’t know there’s support available or are simply too proud to put their hand up and say they need help. This approach enables us to go out and speak to those families directly.

For the last couple of years, we’ve also had financial inclusion officers based in our secondary schools. Sometimes, for a variety of reasons, not everyone has a good relationship with their local council. People can find councils frustrating, or they may have had a bad experience, and they don’t want to engage with us.

But most people have a reasonably good relationship with their school and trust the teachers. By embedding these officers in schools, teachers can flag when a family is struggling. They can often tell from the young person’s situation, the clothes they’re wearing, or if they’re arriving hungry. That has been transformational. We’ve seen significant casework where families have received fairly large sums of money – support they were entitled to but didn’t realise.

I was speaking to the head teacher at Govan High School last year, and she told me they’d introduced an attendance award as part of their annual awards ceremony. She said some of the challenges young people face just to get themselves into school can be substantial. So it’s about how we help and support those families, and making sure we know where people are and what we can do as a local authority, even with declining budgets, to support them.

Can you explain what the most challenging aspects of trying to implement the No Wrong Door policy in practice have been?

I think the biggest challenge for us has been data sharing.

We work very closely with the Department for Work and Pensions, and they hold a lot of data about people. We’ve been allowed to run trial projects where we overlay their data with ours. That shows us how many people across the city are not claiming all the benefits they’re entitled to or are in financial difficulty. But until very recently, we couldn’t get agreement to use that data fully. That now looks as though it’s about to change, which is really positive. But for about two years, the frustration of knowing where those families were and not being able to reach out to help them was incredibly difficult. That’s been the biggest frustration.

More broadly, another major challenge has been getting everyone to the table and helping people understand that we all need to do something differently. As I said before, if you keep doing what you’ve always done, you’ll keep getting the same results. Some organisations have been doing fantastic work for 15 or 20 years and understandably might say, “Who are the council to tell us we need to change?”

So it’s about showing the evidence that, despite all that good work, poverty in the city hasn’t shifted significantly. The most recent figures show a slight improvement, but it’s fairly marginal, and we think much of that is likely driven by the Scottish Government’s child payment.

We need to show impact. There are many individual cases where we know we’ve made a significant difference. For example, a couple of years ago, when we piloted embedding financial inclusion officers in schools, a young mum agreed to come to the committee and tell her story. That put it in very clear terms for elected members and helped them understand why we should move from a pilot to a permanent, embedded service — especially in challenging budget circumstances. It was very powerful, and elected members were very supportive.

One of the great strengths of this work is that it’s largely cross-party. It’s not one party pushing it while others oppose it. The vast majority of political parties across the council see the benefit of what we’re doing and accept that we can’t just keep doing what we’ve always done if it isn’t shifting the dial. In some ways, that’s been both the biggest challenge and the biggest success. It’s meant giving officers and third-sector partners permission to try new approaches – and being clear that if something doesn’t work, we’re not going to overreact. It’s about creating space to look at services differently and ask how we can deliver them better.

Can you explain how some of the other public sector organisations, like the police, the health service and housing organisations, are involved in No Wrong Door and working effectively with the council and where there might be room for improvement?

I’ll answer the last bit first. I’m a great believer that there’s always room for improvement. You have to keep pushing that. I’d never get to a stage where I thought, “Right, that’s it – we’re doing everything we possibly can.” It’s about sitting down and asking: what else could we be doing? How can we make this better or move faster? We need to keep challenging ourselves and our third-sector partners.

That said, I think the partnership is working really well. We regularly bring partners into the council to talk about what more we can do and what’s worked well. We showcase examples of things that have gone well so everyone can understand how and why they worked — across the third sector, the police, and particularly our housing providers.

Glasgow itself isn’t a housing provider, we don’t own any homes, so we rely entirely on housing associations across the city. We work very closely with them, and many now provide additional services, including financial advice and welfare rights support. We work together on delivering the No Wrong Door approach.

So far, I don’t think any organisation has said they don’t want to be involved. Most see it as an exciting project because it’s trying new things in an environment where, as I’ve said, failure is allowed — hopefully not too often, but it is allowed. Some organisations say they’ve been suggesting these approaches for years and no one listened. That creates a responsibility for the council and for me; there’s no point asking people to come to the table if we’re not prepared to change our own thinking as well. That can be challenging for people who’ve worked in the council or these services for many years and have done great work. But there comes a point where you have to recognise that while we may be helping people, we’re not necessarily changing their lives.

For me, that’s what this is about – making as many Glaswegians’ lives better as we possibly can. I’ve always said that poverty is a political choice. Governments make decisions that allow people to live in poverty, and I find that unacceptable. While I can’t change governments directly, I can lobby and try to influence them. At the same time, I want us to be doing as many practical things as we can here in Glasgow to improve people’s lives and help everyone have a better future.

Looking ahead, what role do you see local authorities playing in tackling poverty and equality over the next decade, and what more do you think they can do?

I think that takes us back to the budget question. There’s a lot more we could do, but it’s about where you find the resources. As I’ve said earlier, I’m not advocating that the answer is simply to throw money at the problem. It’s about understanding people’s barriers, what’s causing them, and how we work with individual families to address them. If we had more money, bigger teams and more people on the ground, we could almost create an individual solution and plan for every family. That’s where we’d like to get to – where each family has a clear plan setting out how we can help and support them.

Some people fall into poverty because of one piece of bad luck, losing a job, for example, and we can often support them back out of that relatively quickly. But other families have experienced generational poverty. If young people don’t see others in their family getting up, going to work and earning a living, they may not see that as an opportunity for themselves. So it’s about how we change that culture and show that there are jobs and opportunities available.

At the same time, we need to ensure the pipeline of jobs is there. We’re in a period just now where many employers are looking for workers, but there have also been times when jobs were much harder to come by. So we need solutions that can cope with both situations, and we need to work with families to identify what the best outcome is for them and what support they need. I don’t see a time when local authorities won’t play a significant role in this. I’d love to say that in 10 years’ time we could close these services because no one is in poverty, but realistically, that’s unlikely. So, as we discussed earlier, it’s about not only supporting people who are already in poverty, but going further upstream, asking what’s causing it and what interventions can prevent it.

One of the four demonstrators of change I mentioned earlier focuses on working with families who have just fallen into poverty. There are many families who are in poverty, but there are also families who are in very deep poverty. We need to support both those who are deeply affected and those who have just fallen in or are on the brink. The aim is to prevent more people from falling into poverty while also helping those already there to move out of it.

Sometimes, on my way home, I pass the pantry in my ward and see people in the queue who have clearly just come off a shift or out of an office. These are people who had jobs and assumed they wouldn’t need to worry about paying bills or feeding their family. And yet they now find themselves in that situation too.

As we approach the 2026 Holyrood elections, what would you want national decision makers to understand about the pressures councils are under and the choices facing local government in the years ahead?

I guess the pressures are financial. We need a proper funding settlement. I suspect there isn’t enough time to sort that between now and the election, but hopefully a new government coming in will be able to take that forward.

If some of those decisions are difficult for governments to make, the best time to make them is when you’re farthest away from the next election. So I would encourage whoever is in government in Edinburgh after May to start that process immediately, so we can make changes to things like council tax and how local government is funded.

In terms of structures, I think it’s about giving councils more power, not just to raise their own funds, but to do more of the work we’re trying to do. As I said earlier, we had a long battle around GDPR and the ability to use data. That’s just nonsense. If we have the data and can see where people are, why on earth are we not out there knocking on their doors and saying, “We’re here to help you?”

So I’d say decentralise power to local government so we can keep doing the really good work in this space. And give us the funding that allows us to provide these services. Because, tragically, we’re at a stage now where I have to find a way to balance Glasgow’s budget by the 24th of February. The last thing I want to do is touch the services we’ve been talking about today. As I said earlier, we put significant investment into cleaning up Glasgow last year. I certainly don’t want to be forced to take that back out again this year.

So those are some of the challenges. But with a better financial settlement for local government and improved powers, I think we’d be in a much better place.