Common good fund revelations hailed as 'major breakthrough' for Wick
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Revelations about the extent of common good assets in Wick have been hailed as a "major breakthrough" for the town.
Investigations by Highland Council found that some of the town's most prominent sites and historic items had been "misclassified" for decades. Public consultation will now take place with a view to creating a common good fund – something that could be "very beneficial" for the community, according to local councillor Nicola Sinclair.
The list includes land on the north and south sides of Wick River, the town hall, Market Place, Bignold Park, the Camps car park and Green Road playing fields, as well as the charter of the Royal Burgh of Wick from 1589, local government regalia and a number of paintings.
Common good assets are defined as property that belonged to Scotland's former burghs before local government reform in 1975. They are held by councils principally for the benefit of the community of the former burgh in question.
Details of the investigations were presented to the latest meeting of the council's Caithness Committee. These were carried out after it emerged that the riverside car park was on common good land.
Before a common good fund can be established, an asset register has to be compiled – as required by the Community Empowerment (Scotland) Act 2015. The first step towards this is a 12-week consultation on the list of property the council is proposing to include.
Councillor Sinclair, who chairs the Caithness Committee, said a common good fund would be a source of income for the town.
“People in Wick have been saying for a very long time that there is common good land and buildings here. I remember it being raised in 2015 when I joined the community council," she said.
“When the royal burghs were abolished, any land belonging to the royal burgh was transferred to Caithness District Council and then to Highland Council. If it belonged to the royal burgh and then became the property of Highland Council it is considered common good, which means the council legally owns it but there are certain rules so they have to manage it for the good of the people of the royal burgh."
The issue came to light at the turn of the year, during discussions about the town's riverside car park, when Councillor Raymond Bremner produced a copy of an 1883 title deed confirming that the former bleaching green was common good land.
Councillor Sinclair explained: “Under the Community Empowerment Act, as soon as a local authority discovers that an area of land belongs to a common good they have a statutory responsibility to do further investigations – and the result of those investigations was that they found extensive common good land, buildings, paintings and artefacts. It has been misclassified for decades by Highland Council."
She said she "wouldn't want to get people's hopes up" about the amount of money a Wick common good fund might generate.
If we can find a way to monetise the common good fund it will be an income stream for Wick.
“Some areas of Scotland have common good land and it actually isn't much benefit for them. If anything, it can be a burden," Councillor Sinclair said. "But one of the most successful areas of Scotland for common good is Inverness.
“You can run it in a way that can be very beneficial for the town, but it has to be carefully done. You have to find a way to make this land and these assets bring in revenue. That money won't go back into a Highland Council pot – it has to go into a secondary pot managed by local councillors.
“So if we can find a way to monetise the common good fund it will be an income stream for Wick. It might not be a large one – I wouldn't want to get people's hopes up that it's going to be a lot of money – but it will be a stream of income for Wick.
“The difficulty is that in time, if it does start to generate revenue, Highland Council is likely to want some share of the ongoing management of those areas to be picked up by the common good.
“Just now, Highland Council will still be cutting the grass in the play parks and maintaining the town hall. But, once income starts coming in, there is a conversation to be had about how much of this does Highland Council pay for and how much does the common good fund pay for?
“We have uncovered a large amount of land and assets that belong to the common good and now we will go to a public consultation. So that list gets published, and the public will be given 12 weeks to review the list.
"If they think there's something missing from it they can ask for investigations to be done, and ultimately what we need is for the public and Highland Council to reach an agreement and then we can start to discuss how we make money from it.
“We've given the green light so it should start soon. It's all listed on the council website and every community group that might be interested will be consulted.
“Before Covid we said we wanted a public meeting, because people are going to have a lot of questions. We can't obviously have a public meeting because of Covid but I've asked the officers to consider whether we can have a webinar and whether we can publish some frequently asked questions.
"I think we need to be as proactive as we can, because people are going to want to know what this means.
“It's a major breakthrough for the town. It clarifies a question that has been hanging there for decades and it resolves it by establishing that this land and these assets do exist, they have been misclassified by Highland Council, and the process now is about setting that right and ensuring that it starts to work for the benefit Wick and the people of Wick, which it was legally intended to do."
Councillor Sinclair added that there are also implications for Thurso.
"During these investigations they started to look at Thurso too and they've already uncovered a couple of places in Thurso that are common good, so again there is a legal responsibility now to investigate it," she said.
"There's only one common good officer for the whole of Highland, she does have a big workload, but we can expect a similar investigation to come.
"Right now it's Wick – we're a little bit ahead in Wick, just because we asked the question about the riverside car park and pushed it – but Thurso will be next.”
