Chamber and committees

Good morning and welcome to the 17th meeting in 2024 of the Local Government, Housing and Planning Committee. Please note that apologies have been received from Mark Griffin and Stephanie Callaghan. I welcome Colin Beattie, who is attending as a substitute for Stephanie. I remind all members and witnesses to ensure that their electronic devices are on silent and that all notifications are turned off during the meeting.

The first item on our agenda is to decide whether to take item 3 in private. Do members agree?

Members indicated agreement.

Thank you for that clarification. It is helpful to get that. As you say, we do not have an understanding of how that was defined for 2005 and it is good to get clear what the public purse should be funding.

I am trying to frame my question. Much of what is included in the sample role outlines would have been familiar to councillors 20 or 30 years ago. I am interested to understand what councillors are doing now that they were not doing before. You have covered this to some degree, but is there anything else that you think they were not doing at the time of the last review in 2011, but are doing now? You have touched on quite a lot of things.

Thank you very much. We will turn to questions. We will operate your mics. We will direct our questions to Shona Morrison, who can then bring in Steven Heddle or Brianna Fletcher—that is the simplest way to go about it.

I have a couple of questions to get us going. I am interested to hear COSLA’s views on the role profiles and the workload calculations that are included in the SLARC report. Do you have any thoughts about the change in the role of the councillor? A point that came up in the previous session is that it has become more complex over the past 10 years.

Steven, do you have anything else to add?

That is good news. It also points back to what you are underscoring here today about the data set that would tell us the make-up of Scotland’s councillors. If we had that, we could really build on it.

I have a final question around next steps, which have also already touch on a little. The recommendations of the previous SLARC review were published in March 2011. They were rejected by the then finance secretary, John Swinney MSP. How confident are you that the recommendations in the 2024 review will be accepted?

It has been a very useful session and I thank all of you for the work, diligence and the robustness of the report. It is a very helpful next step. We asked the Scottish Government to join us this morning but the officials were not available; I hope that we will be able to get them along to the committee. The next panel is from COSLA. We are interested to hear what they have to say. I thank all the witnesses for joining us this morning.

I briefly suspend the meeting to allow a change of witnesses.

I welcome our second panel of witnesses, who are from the Convention of Scottish Local Authorities. We are joined online by Councillor Shona Morrison, who is the president; Councillor Steven Heddle, who s the vice-president; and Brianna Fletcher, who is the policy officer for human rights and equalities. I welcome you all to the meeting—it is good to see you. I begin by inviting Councillor Morrison to make a brief opening statement.

Thanks very much for that. There is maybe something about the general public understanding that it is a unique set-up and that each councillor will be managing their time in different ways.

I can certainly imagine that, because we have a greater understanding of equalities and community empowerment, we have shifted our perspective of what we want to see Scotland become.

Congratulations on that acknowledgment. That is great. Given what you said earlier about the challenge with the time and the limitations, you have certainly gathered excellent information.

We will go into a new theme of understanding barriers to local elected office. I will bring in Gordon MacDonald. If you could make your declaration of interest that would be great.