Scotland's Community Councils have a role to play in helping to increase local participation in governance.
15 November 2007
Scotland’s 1200 community councils are one of the most neglected and underdeveloped institutions of representative democracy in the Scottish political system. Across Scotland – in islands, Highland villages, small burghs, suburbs, private and public housing estates and in central city areas - groups of citizens meet monthly to seek to remedy problems requiring attention in their neighbourhoods, draw the attention of local authority councillors and officials and Scottish and UK parliamentarians to them, and engage in a variety of activities that enhance life in their local communities.
In recent years when there have been numerous complaints from commentators and elected politicians about the perceived low level of public involvement in their communities and politics; various high level commissions have sought to promote greater participation in the political system; the Scottish Parliament has sought to transform participation in Scottish democracy and the UK and Scottish governments are seeking to promote the devolution of power to local communities– but despite all of this there has been little effort to build on the immense potential of community councils to provide the framework for greater citizen involvement in local governance across the breadth of Scotland. Most local authorities who have to administer schemes establishing community councils make only a token gesture in their direction; some appear to neglect them deliberately and a few others have been positively supportive.
Community councils originated as devices to allow small burghs and island communities to have a continuing local democratic assembly after the reorganisation of Scottish local government in 1975. While community councils are in general more common in rural areas they are to be found in all types of localities around the country they provide a very convenient way to facilitate the involvement of citizens in the self-government of urban areas as well. There must be somewhere between 12,000 and 20,000 community councillors in Scotland as a whole. There is no comparable mechanism to encourage systematic and large scale participation by the population in the governance of their communities across the breadth of Scotland. And in the one fifth of areas in Scotland where a community council does not exist it only takes a petition of 20 electors in any area for one to be established.
If the Scottish government is serious about its manifesto pledge to empower communities it could do no better than to give additional momentum to measures to establish new community councils where they do not exist, increase their budgets (which are usually a few hundred pounds a year), and consider handing over important local functions to them.
Supposed initiatives to ‘renew local democracy’ in recent years have sidestepped community councils. Local authorities have preferred to establish their own local area forums which they call at their convenience and where they control the business and agenda. Focus groups and citizen’s juries of small numbers of citizens are convened by local authorities again at their convenience and for their purposes. Some local area partnerships, particularly focused on deprived urban areas, have engineered alternative forms of ostensible local participation that are often under the control of local authority or Scottish government politicians, rather than genuinely engaging with the local community. These latter initiatives have raised questions about the representativeness and accountability of the various local community groups that are active in such programmes. The community council framework, by requiring regular public nominations and elections, provides a way of ensuring that there are open and public ways to ensure representation and accountability if the elections are positively promoted by the local authority.
Perhaps the main reason why community councils have not often found favour with local authorities and Scottish government is that they exercise a genuine independence. They are genuinely self-governing associations of local citizens who determine their own agenda and strive to achieve what is best for their communities usually on a non-partisan and cross-party basis. While they often have constructive relations with their local authorities it is not uncommon for them also to be critical of the local authorities and Scottish government agencies that make decisions that go against what they perceive to be the best interests of their local areas.
But rather than stifling them for reasons of narrow party or political interest, far thinking governments and local authorities would encourage them since they stimulate participation, discussion, debate and controversy – the very stuff of democratic politics. It is no accident that many local authority councillors and MSPs have themselves started their political careers in community councils. They are a base in which citizens can begin to play a wider role in the political system.
