In the past few weeks, parties of all colours have been making wide-ranging promises about how they would transform the Granite City, and in 2017 the Aberdeen Labour manifesto was no different.
We thought we should go back in time to have a look at the 15 pledges made in that document, and check how they hold up…
It was the sole blueprint adopted by the new administration after the party went into coalition with the manifesto-less Conservatives.
- Were as many houses built as pledged?
- What about new schools?
- And did they create as many jobs as they said they would?
We’ve gone through every commitment in detail to give each of them a verdict: thumbs up, thumbs down or thumbs in the middle.
Here’s what we found out.
Buses
Look to set up a council-owned bus service to provide affordable and reliable services for the travelling public of Aberdeen.
If this pledge looks familiar to you, that might be because it reappears in Aberdeen Labour’s manifesto for the upcoming local elections.
However, that doesn’t mean efforts were not made over the past five years.
In June 2019, there was unanimous support across the chamber for a motion asking officers to write a report on how the council might put in a bid for First Aberdeen, after the group said it planned to sell its UK operations.
But ultimately, First decided to abandon those plans, so Aberdeen City Council had to ditch theirs as well.
The idea was floated again in July 2020, but came to naught.
So, has the council looked to set up a council-owned bus service? Yes. Has it set one up? No. Though they haven’t given up hope.
Verdict: The manifesto did include the magic words “look to”, but we think it would be fair for anyone reading it to expect a council-owned bus service to be set up by now.
Thumbs down.
Housing
Address the continuing crisis in affordable housing by building 2,000 new council houses over the next five years and work with partners to provide a further 3,000 affordable homes.
A fairly straightforward one to answer – 2,000 new council houses have not been built over the last five years.
Last May, Town House bosses confirmed that only half of those would be completed by election day this year, if not less: the range given was somewhere between 800 and 1,000.
They did say that the rest would be under contruction by Christmas, and in February work started on a 536-home development at Cloverhill in Bridge of Don.
In January it was revealed that 930 council homes in the city are ready to be occupied but sitting empty, as the waiting list climbed towards 5,250 would-be tenants.
The target of 3,000 affordable homes has also been missed, with just over half of that number – 1,548 – delivered by the administration since 2017 according to statistics provided by the council.
However, a total of 3,613 homes for social rent have either been delivered since 2017 or are under construction.
Verdict: Work may have begun, but those houses aren’t built.
Thumbs down.
Roads
Commit an additional £10m over four years to resurface damaged roads and pavements.
Another one that’s easy enough to answer: a quick look at the “rolling programmes” section of the council’s budget in 2019/20 shows £10m for additional investment in roads spread across four years.
But that’s not the end of the story.
Last May, councillors were warned that the amount of money required to bring Aberdeen’s roads up to an acceptable standard could be at least £135m over the course of a decade.
So sorting out the issues with city streets appears to be a bigger task than originally thought.
You can have a look at the pothole problems on your street with our interactive map here.
Verdict: The money was promised, and it was provided.
Thumbs up.
Care
Look to deliver new care homes through Bon Accord Care and other registered providers to give a lead in providing a new high standard of care for older people, delivered by well-trained and well-paid care staff as part of integrated joint working between social care and the NHS.
Through its arm’s-length operator Bon Accord Care, the council purchased Kingsmead Care Home in 2018, and the site is now called Kingswells Care Home.
But the manifesto implied more than one care home would be delivered – and Kingswells was a care home before it was taken over by Bon Accord Care, so is it strictly “new”?
Verdict: The manifesto implied more than one care home would be delivered.
Thumbs down.
Internet
Provide free wi-fi in the city centre and communities, putting Aberdeen at the cutting-edge of the digital age and introduce 5G mobile connectivity, stimulating a digital economy innovation hub and launching a city-wide digital skills programme.
Oddly enough, free wi-fi was launched in Aberdeen city centre in April 2017, the month before the local elections. So we’re not sure what it was doing in a manifesto that was likely floating around at the same time.
It’s also available at community centres and other facilities in different parts of the city.
Last year, the wireless signal was complemented by a number of BT Inlink devices dotted around the centre, which give access to free ultrafast wifi and call-making facilities.
The rollout of 5G, meanwhile, was largely a Scottish Government project without much direct involvement of local authorities.
A digital economy innovation hub has arrived since 2017 though, in the form of the £1.5 million ONE Tech Hub, and council leader Jenny Laing pointed us towards an initiative launched last January as an example of a new programme involving digital skills.
Verdict: A tricky one.
Thumbs wavering about somewhere in the middle.
Schools
Work to strengthen further the quality of our city schools by delivering the Schools’ Estate Strategy, including a new secondary school in the south of the city and new primary schools in Tillydrone and Torry.
Only one of the three schools referenced here has actually opened since the last local election: Lochside Academy in the south of the city, which started construction almost a year before Aberdeen went to the polls in 2017.
Work began on Riverside School in Tillydrone in December last year while the £28 million Torry Primary School will not be ready for the 2023 summer term.
Countesswells School in the west of the city is also due to open in 2023, after construction finally began in November 2021 following a number of delays.
As with many such projects in Aberdeen and beyond, timelines for each of the schools were thrown into the air by the Covid pandemic.
Verdict: One was already being built when the 2017 elections were being held, and the other two aren’t finished.
Thumbs down.
Education
Continue to invest in closing the gap in educational attainment by funding dozens of new classroom assistants to support both teachers and pupils, lobby for support in teacher recruitment, including more teacher training at the University of Aberdeen, and focus on housing for teachers and other essential workers.
Exam disruption resulting from the Covid pandemic has made it difficult to compare recent educational attainment to the years before 2020, but here’s what an Accounts Commission report from June 2021 said about Aberdeen:
“Over the four-year period [from 2015/16 to 2018/19], the gap between the percentage of pupils achieving five or more awards has increased from 22 to 26 percentage points for pupils at level five and from 18 to 22 percentage points at level six.”
So the most recent statistics suggest that the educational attainment gap has not closed, and has in fact increased – but they do need to be taken with a pinch of salt, as they don’t reflect the unique situation in the past few years.
Our 2022 school league table, published on Tuesday, showed just five miles separate the best and worst-performing schools in the north and north-east – with both in Aberdeen.
We can say that dozens of new classroom assistants have indeed been hired since the last election – this Freedom of Information response from 2018 says 26 had been recruited at that point – and support in teacher recruitment has come in the form of more than £1.5 million in funding from the Scottish Government over two years.
It is unclear, though, to what extent that was a result of active lobbying.
As for the housing earmarked for teachers and other essential workers, initiatives at Smithfield Court and the former Craiginches Prison site were both launched before the 2017 election.
The council’s Local Housing Strategy from 2018, which set out the plan for the following five years, suggests that such initiatives were not necessarily needed any longer as “the housing market has now changed”.
Verdict: The gap in educational attainment was increasing at the time of the last available statistics, but changes have been made since. It’s difficult to judge their impact due to Covid’s disruption of education…
Thumbs wavering somewhere in the middle.
Masterplan
Deliver hundreds of new jobs and millions of pounds of new investment through our City Centre Masterplan, recognising that the city centre belongs to us all and is the key to making Aberdeen a world-class city fit for the twenty-first century.
It is difficult to quantify new jobs that have been delivered through the City Centre Masterplan. Places such as Mackies 19.2, All Bar One and Tony Macaroni at Marischal Square have all hired staff, but do roles at the refurbished Music Hall or Art Gallery count?
And what about the construction jobs that have resulted from the transformation of Broad Street and Union Terrace Gardens?
While we can’t put a precise figure on it, the number of jobs related to the masterplan is likely to be significant.
The second part of that sentence in the manifesto is a lot easier to confirm: the work at UTG alone is costing almost £30 million, so millions of pounds have certainly been invested.
Verdict: We can fairly confidently give this one a passing grade.
Thumbs up.
Funding
Continue to lead on delivering the Aberdeen City Region Deal, bringing back some of the millions of pounds which central government takes from the north-east every year. Ensure we continue to be the go-to city for oil and gas technology and innovation for years to come and to lobby the UK and Scottish governments for a second City Region Deal to enable investment in key projects.
Like the City Centre Masterplan, the Aberdeen City Region Deal from 2016 consisted of many moving parts, with funding earmarked for a host of projects over ten years.
However, two of the headline projects were the Oil and Gas Technology Centre and the expansion of Aberdeen Harbour.
The OTGC was created back in 2017 – and the harbour expansion is moving ahead too.
As for the second City Region Deal, that has never materialised.
There has been a North Sea Transition Deal and a £20m levelling up fund from the UK Government, though.
Verdict: Key parts of the Aberdeen City Region Deal are in the process of being delivered, and more money has come.
Thumbs up.
Environment
Introduce Low Emission Zones and scope a rail link to the new Exhibition and Conference Centre, while developing our existing strengths in hydrogen buses, combined heat and power schemes and renewable energy, to ensure we remain a Global Energy City long after North Sea oil.
After a bit of bandying back and forth over the precise area the Low Emission Zone would cover, the council has now confirmed it will come into effect by the end of May – pending the Scottish Government’s approval of the plans.
However, no fines will be issued until 2024, when we’re a couple of years into the new council administration.
The idea of a rail link to the new Exhibition and Conference Centre, completed in 2016 and named the P&J Live, was certainly “scoped”, but didn’t get much further than that.
The council’s vision for the link was first unveiled in 2016, but the plans were abandoned three years later after transport consultants estimated the project would cost £100m – £30m more than first expected.
On to that list of “existing strengths”. A fleet of double-decker hydrogen buses (the first in the world) was launched in January last year; several more venues have been connected to the Aberdeen Heat & Power network; and a bunch of initiatives have begun to help along the transition to renewable energy with several others in the works.
Verdict: Despite the lack of a rail link to the P&J Live, we think enough has been done with the rest of this pledge to give this one the nod of approval.
Thumbs up.
Business
Set up a Co-operative Business Development Fund to support small businesses and their staff to explore new ways of working in future.
Councillors voted to approve the implementation of the Co-operative Business Development Fund in September 2018, with Jenny Laing writing in a blog post the previous March that the fund would be worth £75,000.
Verdict: Bish bash bosh.
Thumbs up.
Culture
Work to make Aberdeen the UK City of Culture in 2025 and to bring the Tall Ships Race back to the city as part of our tourism strategy, work with Aberdeen Harbour on attracting high-value cruise ships, and invest in the Greyhope Marine Centre to make Aberdeen the number one city in Britain for wildlife experiences.
If you’re struggling to remember when Aberdeen was made the UK City of Culture 2025, or when you last saw a tall ship or a cruise ship in the harbour, you’re not alone.
Within a year of the elections, the bids for the City of Culture and the Tall Ships Race were both abandoned.
Key to the effort to attract cruise ships to the city is the ongoing Aberdeen South Harbour development, which will provide water deep enough for the massive ships to dock. The project has been delayed a number of times.
One ray of sunshine for the administration in this section of the manifesto comes in the form of the Greyhope Marine Centre.
A grant for £40,000 towards the plans was approved in 2017, and in March 2020, the council agreed to lease the site for five years at a peppercorn rent of £1.
Speaking to the P&J, owner Fiona McIntyre said the local authority had been “really supportive of our plans”.
Verdict: The Greyhope Marine Centre may have opened its doors, but everything else listed here is conspicuous by its absence.
Thumbs down.
Consultation
Ensure that everyone in the city has a say on council spending priorities by consulting with communities on the Local Outcome Improvement Plan.
Easy enough: an online consultation for the Local Outcome Improvement Plan ran for two weeks in June last year.
Verdict: Yep.
Thumbs up.
Cars
Review current car parking charges and bus lanes to make sure they are fit for purpose, and take action to get cars off pavements and improve safety on our streets.
Car parking charges are reviewed every year as part of the budget, so it would have taken considerable effort for the administration to not meet that pledge.
In June 2019, Nestrans published a report entitled “Assessing the State of the Bus Network in Aberdeen and Aberdeenshire” which did look at issues facing certain bus lanes in the city.
The “action to get cars off pavements” has not yet been taken – Jenny Laing told us the legislation they required to do it has been delayed by the Scottish Government, but a manifesto pledge is a manifesto pledge.
Verdict: One part of this pledge has been achieved, the other hasn’t.
Thumbs in the middle.
Campaigns
Support campaigns against further centralisation or closure of local public services by the Scottish and UK governments, campaign for reform of local government finance, including business rates, and for replacement of the Council Tax, and oppose any attempt to hold a second independence referendum the people of Aberdeen do not want.
At the State of the Cities conference in November 2019, Jenny Laing said local authorities should be able to take responsibility for issues like tourism tax and business rates.
She said the independent report at the centre of the conference, which stated the city and shire’s economy was likely to continue to grow.
We don’t know what campaigning or lobbying takes place behind closed doors, but we do know that the Council Tax has not been replaced.
It didn’t take long to find an example of the administration opposing any attempt to hold a second independence referendum.
In 2018, after First Minister Nicola Sturgeon said she was planning to “restart a debate” over independence, Mrs Laing said: “Aberdeen citizens do not want another independence referendum based on the same divisive arguments as before.”
The Press and Journal can confirm that no independence referendum has taken place since 2017.
Verdict: Jenny Laing has indeed been quite vocal on these issues for the past five years, so we’re giving this pledge…
Thumbs up.
The results
In total, we’ve scored the 15 manifesto “commitments”:
- Thumbs up: 7
- Thumbs down: 5
- Thumbs wavering about somewhere in the middle: 3
Will the 2022 manifesto fare any better?
All aboard! Labour promises free bus travel for all Aberdonians in council manifesto
