Should Glasgow's suburbs subsidise the city?

I belong to Glasgow, dear old Glasgow town. Or at least that’s what I tell people. I consider myself Glaswegian. I moan about its flaws to other Glaswegians while fiercely defending it from the barbs of outsiders. I take pride in its achievements and mourn its losses. I laugh at its in-jokes. I feel its weariness in my bones.

But I wasn’t born in the city; I arrived in Glasgow’s West End at 17, fresh from the Ayrshire coast, hungry for adventure. And for nearly two decades, I haven’t lived in the city proper but, rather, a few hundred feet over the boundary, in a part of East Renfrewshire newspapers tend to describe as “leafy”, My council tax goes into different municipal coffers. 

This contradiction is particularly problematic for a journalist. When I write pieces about Glasgow’s perceived decline, and the lack of funding that contributes to it, to what extent do I have to concede that I am part of the problem? And is it legitimate to claim a stake in a city I have effectively spurned? 

My husband and I moved our family to Giffnock from Pollokshaws 18 years ago when our sons were aged 9, 7 and 3. We didn’t move specifically for East Renfrewshire’s feted state schools, but our sons benefited from their excellence. 

But while taking advantage of East Renfrewshire’s schools, I have continued to rely on Glasgow for other services. I travel on the city’s roads, read in the Mitchell Library, spend afternoons in the Burrell and the Kelvingrove. I wander through its many parks, and my sons learned to swim in its swimming pools. Yet the arbitrary line across the bottom of our hill means however much we avail ourselves of its facilities, we’re not paying as much as we could towards their upkeep. 

Moving from the city made me feel conflicted in 2007. Now, with Glasgow on its knees — its budget slashed and services raggedy — my guilt grows, along, I sense, with the resentment of those who have remained on the city side of the boundary. 

What is the root of these tensions? Blame the 1994 Local Government (Scotland) Act. This was the piece of legislation which abolished Strathclyde Regional Council (and its district councils) and replaced them with 12 unitary authorities.

Sure the region was big and unwieldy. Stretching all the way from the Inner Hebrides to South Ayrshire, it covered 5,300 square miles and contained 2.3 million people, 45% of the Scottish population. But the motivation for scrapping it was political, an attempt to dilute what the former Secretary of State for Scotland Ian Lang described as “the baleful shadow of socialism that stretches across the central belt”. 

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Glasgow’s population had already been affected by mid-20th-century policy decisions: the decanting of skilled workers out to the New Towns and tens of thousands of those who remained into peripheral “overspill” estates, like Pollok and Drumchapel, which quickly became synonyms for deprivation. 

The drawing up of the 1994 boundaries was gerrymandered to make sure Glasgow held on to all those estates, while more affluent, and prospectively Conservative areas, were hived off to form the likes of East Dunbartonshire and East Renfrewshire. 

Professor Iain Docherty, dean of advanced studies at Stirling University, grew up in Bishopbriggs with parents who “escaped a few hundred yards over the [East Dunbartonshire] boundary to buy their own house.” He wrote his undergraduate dissertation on the changes. “There was all this bullshit being written about how areas like East Renfrewshire and East Dunbartonshire had their own identities,” he says. “So I went out to [those areas] to ask people questions about what they did and didn’t identify with, and of course it turned out they are just part of the city; everybody knows that.” 

The act left Glasgow — current population 635,100 — with the twin problems of disproportionately high levels of poverty and a low council-tax base.  

This inequity is not lost on those who live on either side of the line. “I first started to think about it when I looked at the SIMD (Scottish Index of Multiple Deprivation) map and noticed two protrusions at the Glasgow/East Renfrewshire boundary,” Thomas*, a 36-year-old public sector worker who lives in Mount Florida, tells me. 

“The first keeps Giffnock, Williamwood and Netherlee on the East Renfrewshire side and Carnwadric and Arden on the Glasgow side. The second keeps Castlemilk in the city.” 

The SIMD map marks the most deprived areas in shades of red and the least deprived in shades of blue. Giffnock, Williamwood and Netherlee are all blue, while Carnwadric, Arden and Castlemilk are red. The boundary is also carefully drawn to divide the cheek-by-jowl communities of Drumchapel (red and part of Glasgow) and Bearsden (blue and part of East Dunbartonshire). 

“It’s very stark, Thomas says. “Once you’ve seen it, you can’t unsee it.” 

It's unmistakable in the real world too. Here’s one glaring example: the playpark at Queen’s Park — with its handful of rundown swings and roundabouts — versus the playpark at Rouken Glen (East Renfrewshire, of course), with its giant ship and helter skelter, and maze of climbing frames and netting. This disparity exists even though most of the housing next to Queen’s Park is tenement flats, whereas Rouken Glen is flanked by big houses with extensive gardens

“I spent a lot of time at the playpark [with my children] during lockdown,” Thomas says. “There was one roundabout fenced off for 18 months, then removed for another year and then finally put back. Three years to repair a single item. Rouken Glen is better maintained, cleaner and there’s no sense of danger.” As for leisure centres, of the two pools my children learned to swim in, Bellahouston is closed for a year for refurbishment, and Pollok is shut evenings and weekends. The pool at Eastwood Leisure Centre in East Renfrewshire is open every day.

The most intense resentment, though, is focused on education, where differences are at an extreme: Glasgow, resource-starved, but socially and culturally diverse, and East Renfrewshire, middle-class, well-equipped and highly aspirational. 

As a teacher who moved from Glasgow to East Renfrewshire when her twin daughters were one, then back to Glasgow when they reached the end of P1, Olivia Drennan is well-placed to compare the two. “I must be one of the very few people who moved out of East Renfrewshire when they had kids in primary school,” she laughs. 

She and her husband bought their terraced house near Rouken Glen because they needed more space. At the toddlers’ groups, it was mostly grandparents and childminders, and she found the local nursery very focused on ensuring the children would perform well at their start-of-primary standardised assessments. 

At first, moving back to Glasgow was “a breath of fresh air”, but now her daughters are sitting their Highers, it’s more of an uphill struggle. “Their secondary school is more diverse [than it would have been in East Renfrewshire], but they haven’t had the experience they would have had in terms of homework and expectations,” she says. “I know a lot of parents are getting tutors now, so, in a way, they are still buying their way out of the system.”  

Such disparities bring tensions. Pauline*, a charity worker who lives in Shawlands, told me her friend’s decision to move to East Renfrewshire almost caused a rift. “We lived close by,” she said. “Had she not moved, our boys would have been in the same year. So it sort of felt like: ‘I see: something that is good enough for my son is not good enough for yours’.” 

The 39-year-old likes that parents at her children’s primary school have a wide range of backgrounds and jobs, and she thinks Glaswegians owe it to local schools to stay put. “They are being run really bare-boned,” she says. “The kinds of things our parents’ association is fund-raising for are not luxuries, they are essentials. But there is something to be said for staying put and helping to raise it up.”

Those of us who live on the East Renfrewshire side of the line are not oblivious to these criticisms. We know the attraction of living where we do comes from its proximity to the city, and we feel judged for not contributing.

Marie Fleming, who works in HR and grew up in Govanhill, moved to Giffnock 20 years ago. “I consider myself Glaswegian and use Glasgow’s facilities all the time — I love going to its galleries and theatres,” she said. 

“It was awful when the Tron Theatre lost its [council] funding last year. Living outside Glasgow, I can support these companies as commercial organisations by going to them, but it just feels so unfair that the burden falls on a small population in Glasgow when we know those of us outwith the boundaries who don’t pay for these facilities make excellent use of them. I’ve always felt bad about that.”

Glasgow’s financial struggles are well-rehearsed. In the last decade, the city has been affected by a real-terms drop in Scottish Government funding. So have all local authorities. But Glasgow has been hit particularly hard on account of its poverty, its equal-pay debt, its legacy of Victorian buildings, and the fact it is a dispersal city for asylum seekers. (The Home Office’s move towards batch-processing of asylum decisions has put extra pressure on homelessness services, and there is no UK funding to support it.)  

The city is impacted by other anomalies. It has several galleries and a library of national standing which, like Edinburgh’s, are free to enter but unlike Edinburgh’s (and V&A Dundee), receive no Scottish Government money. It also owns the Clyde Tunnel, the only piece of national road infrastructure which is not centrally funded. 

Council tax only accounts for around 20% of local authorities’ income. But here again Glasgow is at a disadvantage because of its higher-than-average exemptions (around 25%) and its lower valuations. Of its 237,668 chargeable dwellings, more than half (130,750) are in band A or B, and only 7,076 (2.9%) are in band G and H. This means Glasgow has fewer G and H Band properties than East Renfrewshire, though East Renfrewshire only has 40,000 chargeable dwellings. Moreover, 29% of chargeable dwellings in Glasgow are eligible for council tax reduction compared with a Scottish average of 18%.

For the past few years, the population of the city has been growing again. The council expects to have collected £350m in council tax by the end of the financial year — £4.2m more than it anticipated at the start of the year — as a result of there being more people in more homes. But its boundaries are tight. There are places where the line between Glasgow and its neighbouring local authority cuts across a street; so there are limits on how much it can expand. 

Because of this, the city is looking for ways to increase its income from those who live outside the city. In May, the Scottish Government passed the Visitor Levy (Scotland) Bill, which gives local councils the power to introduce a tourist tax. In Glasgow, a working group has already been set up to look at the possibility of introducing this policy. But Glasgow is unlikely to derive the same benefits from a visitor levy as Edinburgh. 

Instead, city treasurer and deputy council leader Ricky Bell rhymes off some more promising income-generation possibilities: including a congestion charge, a toll on the Clyde Tunnel and an entry fee for museums, each imposed only on those living outside the city boundary,

The problem is the council would need to seek legislative consent for each of those proposals. What Bell would like is for the Scottish Government to delegate a more general power to local authorities so they can introduce measures that work for them. 

“People say the city is not looking as good as it should, and there is an element of [truth in] that, but a lot of it comes down to the city being in a difficult financial situation,” Bell says. “We are legally required to balance the budget, but we are not being given the levers to do it.”

Yet — like most things — the idea of making those who live outside the city boundaries pay for the services they use is more complicated than it seems. Just ask Ryan McGovern, a junior doctor based at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital.  

I catch up with him as he is making his daily commute home after a hard day’s work. He and his wife moved from a tenement flat in Shawlands to Lenzie in East Dunbartonshire four months ago with their baby because they could not afford a three-bedroomed house in the up and coming southside where property prices are rocketing.  

“We both work in the city and have family there, so we spend a lot of time crossing the boundary, and though we aren’t using public facilities like museums right now, we know that the big appeal of living in or around Glasgow is its cultural offering,” he says. 

Then he breaks off to warn me he might lose signal because he is about to enter the Clyde Tunnel. “Ah,” I say. “How would you feel about the council introducing a tunnel toll for people like yourself?“

“I understand that, as someone who isn’t paying council tax to Glasgow any more, I am not contributing to the upkeep of this piece of infrastructure,” he replies. “I guess my argument would be that I work for the NHS, so hopefully I am contributing to the greater good of the city in a different way. “

Ryan also points out that as a junior doctor he moves around every year. Last year, he was living in Glasgow and working at Crosshouse Hospital in East Ayrshire, and next year he will be living in East Dunbartonshire and working at Monklands Hospital in North Lanarkshire. “Where I end up is beyond my control,” he says.

The resentments directed towards those of us who, like Ryan, live on the more affluent side of the city boundary are thorny and potentially dangerous because they divide communities, and lead to questions about who has the right to “belong”.

In his 2023 work, ‘The Broken Promise of Infrastructure’, Dr Dominic Davies refers to these narratives as “infrastructures of feeling”. Access to infrastructure — clean tap water, smooth roads, to be able to leave a place with ease and come back, via bus or train — represents our rights as citizens. 

Our use of such services are “the way a person exercises that citizenship”. In recent years, our infrastructure has begun to fail, exposing whose citizenship is — seemingly — prioritised.It is no wonder some bitterness festers against those in East Renfrewshire who have better public infrastructure — or can circumvent its failure by using private means. 

But the decisions that have led to Glasgow’s decline are not down to individuals who find themselves in a specific location or set of circumstances. They are and have always been political. “We have inherited this odd system that was literally Thatcherite and doesn’t fit what we need,” Professor Docherty says. In the years since the boundaries were drawn, the gap has been entrenched by the shift of power eastwards, and by successive administrations in Westminster and Scotland which have turned a blind eye to Glasgow’s plight. In particular, one might look at the rejection by both governments of more progressive taxation, particularly, in Scotland, the failure to replace council tax, as the SNP promised. 

Human beings live in a constant state of flux. They move around as their job, finances and personal circumstances dictate. City boundaries will always be arbitrary; during lockdown, a ban on crossing from one local authority to another meant I wasn’t allowed to shop at my local supermarket, though I could travel 10 miles to Uplawmoor. 

Moreover, even in Glasgow, the use of other local authorities’ services is not one-way traffic. Those who live in the southside often bring their children to play in Rouken Glen, while those affected by the closure of Bellahouston now take their children to Paisley’s Lagoon.  

Perhaps, instead of allowing ourselves to get caught up in a cycle of blame and guilt, we should ask ourselves whose purposes it suits for citizens of what is — in truth — just one big city to turn in on ourselves and each other? The resentment of the people who live in the city, and the self-flagellation of people who live in East Renfrewshire and East Dunbartonshire, serves only to obscure the roots of Glasgow’s problems and divert attention from possible ways forward.

A better solution might be something loosely modelled on what is happening down south. The Greater London Council (GLC) and England’s metropolitan county councils were abolished by Thatcher almost a decade before Strathclyde was broken up. 

But in 2000, the Greater London Authority — composed of a directly-elected assembly and mayor — was set up to close the gap in the capital’s political structures. Elsewhere, the country has seen various councils come together to form Combined Authorities. These authorities, each with their own mayors, have resources and powers devolved to them by Westminster so are able to take collective decisions across council boundaries. 

Glasgow is one of eight authorities that have formed a City Region cabinet, largely for the purpose of spending City Deal money. Although also involved in the Clyde Mission (the effort to transform a riverside corridor running from the city centre to the sea) and planning for the Clyde Metro, the City Region cabinet lacks the powers or the resources of England’s Combined Authorities, Nor does Glasgow have a mayor. “It’s a very weak way of trying to stitch back together some strategy at regional level,” Docherty says.

Bell is not bothered about having a mayor — “mayors centralise power and we need to look at decentralising it” — but he does want to see more done at a strategic level. 

And yet Docherty says that, while Greater Manchester Combined Authority has performed well as a result of “preferential treatment” from central government, the others have struggled to make much of an impact. “Combined Authorities are the easy option,” he says. “You just take the existing authorities and you layer something on top of it.” So what would he do? “I’d rip it up and start again.” 

*Names changed to protect the identity of individuals.