Chamber and committees

Gordon, do you want to pick up your other questions? Steven, perhaps you cannot see us but I want to assure you that we are definitely here and listening very keenly.

Okay, super. We have come to the end of our questions and it has been very helpful to hear from you and your reflections on SLARC’s work and their report. Thank you so much for joining us. As that is the final public item on our agenda , I now close the public part of our meeting.

I will bring in Colin Beattie on another topic—information gathering by SLARC.

I take your point about not equating the role with hours necessarily, but I want to ask a further question. In 2005, the first SLARC report found that councillors worked 32 hours per week on average. The most recent report says that the average is now about 29 hours. I am interested to hear what evidence you found that the workloads and responsibilities of councillors have increased over the years.

The next item on our agenda is to take evidence on the Scottish Local Authorities Remuneration Committee’s recommendations for councillors’ remuneration and expenses from Angela Leitch, who is the committee’s convener, and from Peter Argyle, Rosie Docherty, Martin McElroy and Laura Simpson, who are all members of the committee, which is otherwise known as SLARC. I welcome the witnesses to the meeting and invite Angela Leitch to make a short opening statement.

Although I said that I would come to Shona Morrison first, I will pick up this question with Steven Heddle because it is relevant to what he was talking about. SLARC has stated that the role of a councillor should continue to be fulfilled part time, but from what Steven Heddle said—and Shona Morrison said previously—is that the appropriate description for the role?

I will pick up another question about barriers. We touched on it earlier in the session, but I am interested to understand a bit more detail on the evidence that you found about pay being a significant barrier to potential candidates, particularly women, people with disabilities, lone parents and young people.

I think that you were concluding there, Gordon. Your mic was not on.

I will pick up the point about tracking councillors performing their duties. That is interesting because, if you measure activity, somebody might not be that active, but they might be good at connecting the dots, finding a way through and coming up with a solution. It might not take them as long or they might not need to attend to as many things in order to do that. It is a very difficult thing to measure, is it not? It is quite challenging to measure the time that people spend showing up, supporting the community and finding solutions for issues to do with equalities, community empowerment or whatever it might be.

That makes sense.

I will introduce a new topic of pay and severance, and I will bring in Miles Briggs to cover that.