Following a letter from the Council Leader regarding resources for Community Councils, Colinton CC has sent the following reply linked below.

Read the letter from Colinton CC below:

Dear Mr Day

Support for Community Councils

Thank you for your letter of 8 October and particularly the assurance in your last sentence that you value Community Councils (CCs) and the work we do.

Unfortunately, the technical provision of hybrid equipment misses the point. In Colinton CC, we have run alternate face-to-face and Zoom meetings for some time with very low take-up in terms of wider attendance from members of the public. To run a successful hybrid meeting requires the same level of human resource required to run one of your CEC Committee meetings. To expect this to happen with voluntary resource is unrealistic.

The voluntary time and effort required to run CCs is very precious and should be spent efficiently in co-ordinating local actions and achieving results that enhance local communities. This is what really would attract “a greater diversity of people to engage with local democracy.”

Instead, far too much time in a CC is taken up with basic administration and since contact with Council officers to achieve results is so difficult and time-consuming it is very challenging for voluntary community councillors to add any value to local democracy.

The support that CCs like us really need is for CEC to provide far more of the basic administrative support that keep our meetings running (in whatever format) and free up community councillors for meaningful local activities.

There are two ways that this could be done:
1.  Extend CEC Committee Services remit to provide officers to run/minute CC meetings just like they do to administer CEC committee meetings (including hybrid meetings if required).
2.  Provide Community Councils with much larger budgets to take-on paid staff to administer CC meetings and assist with other local projects.

Option 1 is feasible now. Rather than centralising a small group of CC support staff, why not have one permanent member of staff devolved to each of the 17 Wards in the City?
They would do all the administration for the 3 or 4 CCs in their Ward relieving volunteers from time-consuming meeting organisation, minute taking and other duties and enabling CCs to focus on community initiatives. These 17 officers would interface directly with the Ward Councillors and help co-ordinate information seeking from CEC Service Delivery Officers.
This could be a helpful component of the new CEC efficiency drive approved by Council as it cannot be efficient to have potentially 47 Community Councils all trying to get individual responses from frontline CEC Officers.
This initiative, with a very small impact on the total CEC Budget, would show true support for Edinburgh CCs and local democracy. At a stroke, the role of a community councillor would be far more attractive and it would be much easier to recruit other local volunteers.

Option 2 may be best done as set up for Parish Councils in England. These are generally much smaller bodies than Scottish Community Councils and yet have the statutory right to set a small precept within the local Council Tax. This generates a realistic local budget which is typically sufficient to pay for at least one part-time officer and fund local initiatives. Also, the Parish Council is responsible for justifying the level of precept to their local community – a mechanism which motivates local people to participate in devolved financial decision making.  This is true community empowerment which is sadly lacking in Scotland. It could be quite independent of the much larger Council Tax set by Scottish local authorities. It could free up community councillors from mundane time-consuming tasks that distract from local decision making and activities. Clearly, this would require new legislation from the Scottish Government and so is a longer term idea. However, it would be helpful if a large influential Council like CEC could promote this through COSLA and in other ways.

Incidentally, I raised the issue of inadequate funding of CCs in my personal submission to the first phase of CEC’s recent consultation on CCs. I am sure many other current CC councillors made similar points but none of this was picked up in the summary of responses. It is very disappointing that such an important point could be missed in a statutory consultation.

Please give real substance to your statement about valuing  Edinburgh Community Councils by finding better ways to support us financially such as those outlined in this letter.

Regards and thanks,
David Houston