Many readers of The National have, I know, followed with growing despair the saga of the sale of Castle Toward. For several years, and on several occasions, the local community has tried to purchase the 19th century house with extensive grounds that sits overlooking the Clyde at the tip of the Cowal peninsula in Argyll.

However the community has been constantly stymied by Argyll and Bute Council. Their latest refusal in February took place amid accusations of deceit, delay and dissembling. The council’s final excuse was a supposed difference in price between what the community offered and what the building was actually worth. A professional valuation by international property company Saville’s which supported the community's case was ridiculed by council officials who persuaded the majority of councillors to reject it out of hand.

As I wrote in a piece for The National at the time, any private sector landlord which behaved as badly as this public sector one would have been pilloried the length and breadth of the country. But Argyll and Bute carried on regardless, refusing to accept criticism and instead claiming that anyone who dared to dissent was malicious.

To add insult to injury, a couple of months ago the council , in conditions of the greatest secrecy (a hallmark of Argyll and Bute) selected a preferred private sector bidder for Castle Toward which promised huge investment and a wide range of activities on the site.

The price to be paid – once certain conditions are met by the Council – turned out to be not much different from that which the community could have put on the table. The entry date has now been set for the end of September. This has confirmed the local view that the council rigged the whole process against the community in order to secure a private sale.

Those most closely involved in the whole matter remain very angry. Their anger is mostly directed at council leader, Dick Walsh (who actually represents the Toward ward) and the council’s senior management. Audit Scotland, which looked at the issue, is said to have let the community down badly and continues to allow the current administration and management of Argyll and Bute to ride roughshod over democratic norms.

A report from council officials this week about the review Audit Scotland is presently undertaking added fuel to that fire with quite open assertions made about measures that were being taken to silence elected members who have been speaking out and using the views of Audit Scotland as justification.

However there has now been an unexpected twist to the saga which has the potential to open the whole issue up again and offer the community some hope.

Three months ago the council’s own Performance and Scrutiny Committee looked at the community buyout process in a session that resulted in some robust questioning of the officials involved. Now the independent chair of that committee Iain Ross, who is not a councillor, has issued a devastating report which will be considered by the committee this Thursday.

In his opening paragraph, Ross describes the final council meeting in February which rejected the community bid as an “ unedifying adversarial and confrontational denouement to the process which left all diminished”.

He goes much further. Starting with advice from the Council’s Executive Director of Customer Services to councillors regarding the valuation of the property brought forward by the buyout, he clinically dissects a process in which, as he puts it, the “formal input of two globally-respected organisations” (Savilles and Arups) was dismissed as not being “material”. Instead, what Ross calls a “perverse” report by the council’s own selling agents, DMH Baird Lumsden, was given official precedence.

Ross then goes on to be scathing about the issue of discounts. The buyout claim that they were promised a major discount in exchange for withdrawing their appeal against the District Valuation, which then never materialised. Ross confirms that best value would have been met by a sale to the community (something councillors were privately warned wouldn’t be true) and is sceptical about the council’s accounting procedures which, it was claimed, made them insist upon maximum value. He concludes with the hope that that “ if the council again has the opportunity to work with a community within Argyll and Bute as engaged, empowered and enthused as South Cowal, the strategy shall be in place for a less divisive conclusion.”

Ross then delivers his coup de grâce. Councillors were told in a briefing report for the final meeting on February 12 that the Saville’s report for the community had a caveat attached which said that they “accept responsibility …. only to the addressees and no third party (may rely on our report)” . in the appendix to his paper, Ross notes that report did not say that there were similar caveats written into the other external reports on which councillors were told to rely and indeed that those caveats were much more wide ranging.

For example, the District Valuer declared that “ the building services had not been tested and it is assumed that they were in working order and free from defect “ (something that was not the case) while DMH Baird Lumsden specifically said that they would recommend a more detail inspection and that they were unable to report that “any part of the buildings, property and its dwellings are free from defect”. Those issues would of course have a major impact on valuation and possible offers.

This appendix gets to the nub of the matter. Councillors were not presented with the information they needed and should have had. Over emphasis was put on reports which favoured the rejection of the community bid that the leadership wished the council to take whilst anything that contradicted that position was presented in the worst light possible. The outcome was, inevitably, neither fair nor honest. It would have disgraced a 19th century banana republic but it happened in mid Argyll this winter.

Ross has confirmed that the process was rigged against the community just as the community has suspected since the day and hour their bid was rejected.

That affront to democracy and that perversion of the balanced intent of the community buyout legislation cannot be allowed to stand unchallenged. At the very least, the council must abandon the private sale and enter into meaningful negotiation again with the community. In addition key individuals on the council side should consider their position given the contents of this report.

If this matter is swept under the carpet again by Argyll and Bute Council this week there will be anger a-plenty in South Cowal and beyond. But worst, a manifest injustice will have been allowed to go by, revealed but unpunished and uncorrected.

That cannot be allowed to happen in the Scotland we live in now, still less in the better Scotland we all should want to create.


Mike Russell is the MSP for Argyll and Bute