Too big to be local

Scotland is one of the most centralised countries in Europe with the largest local councils. The average council has 170,000 citizens, whilst the European average is 10,000. Councils here have fewer powers and are often seen as merely the delivery arm of the Scottish Government.

One description is that our councils are too big to be local and too small to be strategic. They meanwhile have limited ability to raise income and increasing amounts of their funding from Government are ring-fenced.

As Coordinator of the Scottish Constitutional Convention, I helped finalise and launch the scheme  it produced after several years of hard work and consensus building. ‘Scotland’s Parliament, Scotland’s Right’ (SPSR) was launched on St Andrew’s Day 1995 with the support and commitment of several political parties, MPs, councillors, trades unions, churches and other civic organisations. The scheme included a commitment to devolve powers out of Parliament and to a system of strong local government based on the principle of subsidiarity – decisions taken at the most local level appropriate. It also contained a commitment to sign up to the European Charter of Local Self Government.  SPSR went on to form the basis of the Scotland Act 1998.

Over the next two years till the referendum in September 1997, I toured the country explaining the plan to audiences ranging from half a dozen people at a Chamber of Commerce event in the north of Scotland to 200 people at major conferences. One of the most common questions I was asked was whether the new Parliament wouldn’t just suck up powers from local government. Given that all the members of the Convention had signed up to the commitment outlined in SPSR, I answered with complete confidence and certainty that this definitely wouldn’t be the case. How wrong could I have been? Subsequent governments have drawn powers to Holyrood and further centralised many of the functions of local councils.

Local democracy – and funding

In the years since 1999, there have been various attempts to address the original aspiration for more local democracy but none has yet been implemented. In 2014, a report was published by the Commission on Strengthening Local Democracy chaired by the then Convention of Local Authorities (CoSLA) President, Councillor David O’Neill. The Commission made no specific recommendations about the number and size of councils but outlined a number of principles, one of which was that local governance should be built from the bottom up.

More recently, the Verity House Agreement between the Scottish Government and CoSLA included similar commitments and agreed to revisit the legislation to enshrine the Charter of Local Self Government which was stalled by the previous UK Government.

There has also been significant work to address the funding of local government and in particular to replace the Council Tax. This was originally intended as a short term replacement for the Community Charge otherwise know as the poll tax. There appears to be broad agreement that a new approach is needed with several options explored by various think tanks and commissions but to date no action has been taken to implement any of the proposed solutions.

Elected provosts?

All of these efforts have been built around the need to address the democratic deficit in local governance which in my view is a major contributor to the increasing loss of trust and confidence in democracy and politics. A recent development has been the proposal that Scotland should follow the English model of elected mayors.  Besides the distraction about whether they would be mayors or provosts lies a bigger and more significant question: what is the problem elected mayors are expected to solve?

The common denominator behind many of the arguments in favour seems to be that Andy Burnham has done a great job in Manchester. There is certainly plenty of press coverage of his achievements around transport and capital projects. What we don’t see is much about how the people of the area feel or how engaged they are in the decisions being made. Nor do we hear much about other mayors in England. Turnout in mayoral elections is notoriously low and in some areas the decision to have a mayor has been reversed. Likewise, this approach does not extend to much of the country and is a very uneven form of devolution.

There are significant risks in centralising power in the hands of one individual and this approach would do little to devolve power closer to communities. Meanwhile, in the absence of local democracy, communities across the country have taken action to meet their local needs and priorities. Examples range from the Isle of Eigg community buyout to the Govanhill Baths Community Development Trust and Greener Kirkcaldy.

On a recent trip to Shetland I stayed in Bigton, a village of just 300 people and was blown away to learn the scale of their activities.  A group called the Bigton Collective had raised the funds to buy St Ninian’s Church and create Hymhus, a venue with a focus on arts, health and well-being. The villagers also run a vibrant community hall and a community shop. These ambitious ventures are quietly replicated all over the country often with little support or resource from local or central government.

Democratic deficit

It is long overdue to revisit this unfinished business and address the serious democratic deficit. I believe we need to engage the people of Scotland in a discussion to build a consensus on how best to build a local Scotland and bring us into line with European democratic norms. This would harness the energy and creativity of the public and begin to rebuild confidence in democracy.

For that reason, I am part of a group of individuals who came together earlier in the year to launch a campaign to fulfil the promise that devolution would bring a return to genuine local democracy. There is a real lack of understanding of how unusual our local governance is. People are often shocked when they see the evidence and quickly make the connection to why they feel they have little influence or control of what happens in their communities.

We want to stimulate a public debate about the issues and the potential solutions and then call on political parties to include their proposed solutions in their manifestos for the 2026 parliamentary election. This is a key issue where we need the politicians to work together with the public to find a consensus as was envisaged by the campaign for our Parliament. We are therefore calling for citizens’ assemblies to be established to address the evidence and recommend a way forward.  To learn more, visit buildlocal.scot

Featured image: Glasgow City Chambers, via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0 ; Image of St Ninian’s Church, home of the Bigton Collective in Shetland, by David Dixon via Wikimedia Commons CC BY-SA 2.0