Don’t just shrink the chamber, change who sits in it

The rosette vote

There’s a bit of a running joke that if a party-affiliated local councillor proposed a detailed, workable cure for world hunger, the rest of the parties would vote it down if the councillor was wearing the wrong colour of rosette. Anyone who has sat through a full council meeting knows this is barely an exaggeration. Motions are read out by party A. Party B brings forward a range of amendments, often not to improve the thing but to make sure the other lot can’t claim it. Party C chimes in with a slight rewording of the thing Party A said in the first place and claims it as their own. The whip is applied to questions that have no conceivable left or right, like whether a play park gets resurfaced this year or next.

This is not a complaint about any one party. It is what the structure produces. Put people into groups, make the groups compete for the same seats every five years, and they will behave like groups. Whether the bins get collected on time is inconsequential as long as there’s a chance to one-up the opposite number.

Scotland is now being offered a once-in-a-generation chance to rebuild local government from the ground up. The question we should be asking before anything else happens is simple. Who sits in the new rooms, and on whose behalf?

What’s on the table

On 21 September the Scottish Government published a proposal to replace the 32 councils with a two-tier system: between six and ten regional authorities above, and up to 160 community authorities below. The regions would take economic development, transport and strategic planning. The community tier would get local planning, licensing, parks, leisure. Leith was held up as the kind of place that might run its own affairs again. Ministers want a shared direction agreed by early December.

The First Minister’s line is that the current councils are too small to be strategic and too large to be local. He is right on both counts. North Ayrshire Council covers Irvine, Kilwinning, the Garnock Valley, Largs, West Kilbride, Skelmorlie and the North Coast, the Three Towns and even the Islands of Arran and both Cumbraes, and the idea that one chamber can speak for all of them with any precision is a polite fiction.

But the proposal is almost silent on how the community tier is to be governed. The suggestion is that members would be elected to sit on both bodies. This would fly in the face of any real community-led local government. Do this, give every elected member a seat on two bodies, one regional and one town-based, and all you’ve done is spend several years and a great deal of money moving the same arguments into a smaller room.

There’s a genuine opportunity here for the Scottish Government to make a real change. Mandate that members, regardless of party affiliation, are there to represent the interests of their residents, not their political parties. Keep the whips in the cupboard.

We already run a non-party tier, badly resourced

Scotland has had non-party local representation since 1975. It is called the community council, and there are around 1,200 of them. By statute they are non-party. Members stand as themselves, decisions are taken on the argument in the room, and the agenda is set by whatever residents raised that month.

I chair one. I will not pretend it is a model of efficiency. Community councils have no money, no staff, patchy attendance and wildly variable capacity from one town to the next. Some are excellent. Some are three people and a biscuit tin with the Christmas tea dance funds inside it. None of that is an argument against the principle. It is an argument that the principle has never been properly funded.

What the model does prove is that a room full of people with no rosette or party waiting to whip them in the corridor can take a decision about a planning application, a road closure or a derelict building without first checking what their group leader thinks. I have watched a Conservative, a Nationalist, an environmentalist and someone who has never voted in their life agree a response to a licensing consultation in twenty minutes, or decide on a formal response to a consultation unanimously. The difference is that, regardless of individual political leanings, everyone is in the room because they care about the town and its people getting the best deal they can. That is not unusual. It is the normal condition of a body where the only thing you represent is the place.

The new proposal would, in effect, create a tier of community councils with actual powers and actual budgets. Good. The one thing worth carrying across from the existing model is the thing that makes it work when it works: nobody is there for a party.

Why the parties will want the seats

A hundred and sixty new authorities is a lot of seats. Several thousand, on any plausible maths. For a party that is where the councillor base lives, where the next generation of candidates is grown, and where a safe seat on a licensing board is a reward for loyal service. No party machine is going to look at that and volunteer to stay out.

Party politics has often become so tribal in many parts of Scotland that a party could hypothetically sellotape a flag (saltire or union jack, dealer’s choice) to a labrador, run said labrador in an election and still come away with enough votes for a council chamber seat.

So the default will be party. Not because anyone decides it, but because the people writing the rules are party people, the consultation responses will come from party groups, and the simplest thing to do with a new chamber is copy the old one. The regional tier will almost certainly be party political, and the argument will be made that the two tiers should match for tidiness, and that a “cost saving” after the expense of the reboot would be to have the same members sit on both. This would render the entire exercise pointless.

The cost saving argument should be resisted. As the saying goes, if something is worth doing, it’s worth doing right. The regional tier is where the big ideological choices live: how to raise money, what to spend it on, which services to run and which to cut. Party competition belongs there. The community tier is where you decide whether the local park gets reseeded and how often the weeds get sprayed. Nobody needs a manifesto for that, and nobody benefits from a whip.

What non-party as standard would mean

It does not mean banning party members from standing. That would be unworkable and probably unlawful. It means three things, none of them radical.

• No party labels on the ballot paper. Candidates stand under their own name and their own words. If a voter wants to know who they knocked doors for last May, they can ask.
• No recognised groups and no whips in the chamber. The standing orders of a community authority should not know what a party is. Members vote as members. A group that wants to caucus in the car park can, but it has no status, no allocated speaking time and no committee places to hand out.
• A committee system, not a leader and cabinet. Decisions taken in open committee by the members who sit on it, chaired by whoever the members elect. The leader and cabinet model exists to let a majority group govern. Remove the group and the model has no purpose.

Add a fixed share of the budget allocated by residents directly through participatory budgeting, and you have a tier of government that a person with no political background could stand for, sit on and understand. That is the point. The reform is being sold on bringing decisions closer to people. People are not closer to a decision if the first thing they have to learn is which party is the best at keeping their members in check.

The objections

Independents are just parties in disguise. Sometimes, yes. Independent groups form and some of them behave like a party with the serial numbers filed off. The key difference is that they often form around an especially local issue, their loyalty remains to their cause and, most importantly, they cannot be whipped from Edinburgh or London.

What about accountability? A party councillor is accountable to the group first, because the group chooses whether they are reselected. An independent member is accountable to the people who elected them and nobody else. If you want to know what they will do, you ask them. If they do something else, you remove them. That is a shorter line than most voters currently have to their councillor.

The two tiers need to coordinate, so they need the same politics. They need to coordinate, which is a question of structure, not of rosettes. Build the regional authority with seats for local committee chairs, or a formal consultation duty, and coordination follows. Parties do not coordinate across tiers now in any case. Ask any community council how often its local councillors vote the way the community asked, or any local authority elected member how they feel about decisions made in Edinburgh or London (of course depending on the colour of rosettes in the given government).

You cannot run a licensing board without party balance. Licensing boards already run on quasi-judicial lines where party membership is supposed to be irrelevant. Making it actually irrelevant would be an improvement.

The test

The Government says this reform is about empowering communities and strengthening local democracy. Fine. Here is the test. If the new community authority in Irvine, or Leith, or Elgin, holds its first meeting and the first item of business is which group has control, the reform has failed on its own terms. It will have given the parties 160 more places to have the argument they are already having, and told everyone else it was for them.

Time is ticking. Ministers want the direction settled by December. The number of regions and the shape of their boundaries will take all the oxygen, because that is the part the current councils care about. The governance of the community tier will be settled quietly, by default, unless someone insists it is settled deliberately.

So insist. If you sit on a community council, say it in your response. If you are an elected council member in a local authority who has ever voted against something you agreed with because the whip said so, say it louder. Non-party representation at the community tier should be the standard, written into the Act, not an option left to each region to decide. Otherwise, we are not devolving power to communities. We are just redistributing it among the people who already have it.

But what can you do?

If you’re thinking of how you can make a meaningful change, why not consider standing as an independent candidate in the forthcoming Scottish local elections in May 2027? As far as we are led to believe, these will go ahead as normal, so there’s an ideal opportunity for change. Regardless of the outcome of the Scottish Government’s decision, perhaps now is the time for truly local representation at local government level.