Chamber and committees

To come back to my fixation on financial transactions, how certain are we that financial transactions will go away in the future—in other words, that they are finished?

Thank you for clarifying that. In the budget for 2024-25, the enterprise agencies and the Scottish National Investment Bank got quite challenging budget settlements on the back of the pressure on the Scottish Government’s budget, which has been reduced. What impact will that have on the services that they provide? Will they have to prioritise which of their activities will be scaled back and which they will focus on?

To come back to the original question, are you aware of any evidence that councillors are not performing their duties?

Not having that data is a huge loss because it would have been valuable in enabling us to understand the reasons behind someone stepping down. People step down for a variety of reasons, as you touched on. It is unclear whether salaries, as such, would have been the major issue in that.

I find that to be a little bit extraordinary. If you are standing for office, you know what your salary will be if you win. It sounds odd that someone would step down a year later because it was not enough.

Did you find particular issues—

Ordinary councillors have to take another job to top up their earnings. Does that impact negatively on the time and effort that they are able to put in to the councillor job? Obviously, if they have a full-time job, unless they have a very understanding employer, they will find it tough to get the time off to attend council meetings and do the training and everything that one would expect of them. Is that an unfair pressure to put on councillors?

You talked earlier about some of the pressures on councillors and on their relationships. One problem that I got feedback on—I have been out hunting for people to stand for councils—is mortgages. Did you touch on that issue at all? Councillors in particular are often refused mortgages simply because of the unstable aspect of their employment. It is bad enough for MSPs and MPs who have similar uncertainties, albeit that they have a slightly better salary. Did you encounter that with councillors? Patching together a couple of salaries—maybe a bit from the council work and a bit from private work—will not give the cover that is needed to enable people to buy their own home. Those things have had a negative impact when it comes to people stepping up to the role.

It seems that a bit of legislation could be involved in this; I am not an expert on what bit has to come forward for legislation. Some changes can be done by agreement with the Scottish Government. How easy will the implementation be? It does not seem that it will be complicated, if agreement is reached between, for example, the Scottish Government and COSLA. Am I being too simplistic?

I will ask Shona Morrison a question. If the Scottish Government accepted the recommendations of the SLARC review, what changes in legislation would be required to put them in place?