Lothian council leaders give their views on Scottish Government plans for reorganisation
‘Our engagement is not tacit agreement for whatever the final proposals might be’ - Cllr Kelly Parry
Council leaders across the Lothians say they want to improve local government, but they voice varying degrees of scepticism about the Scottish Government's reorganisation plans and agree that underfunding is a key issue.
Deputy First Minister Jenny Gilruth set out initial proposals for the government’s planned shake-up in September, replacing Scotland's current 32 councils with between six and 10 regional authorities and up to 160 community authorities. Councillors would be elected in the current wards, but serve at both levels.
The government says reorganisation is needed because current councils are often “too small to be strategic, but too large to be local”.
The regional bodies would be responsible for transport, economic development and strategic planning, with the community authorities in charge of local planning, licensing and park maintenance.
The shake-up plans have already come in for criticism from Edinburgh council leader Jane Meagher, who has argued the Capital needs its own local authority and pointed to its leading role in developing new policies like the Visitor Levy.
Lawrence Fitzpatrick, Labour leader of West Lothian Council, is blunt in his assessment of the proposals. "I see it as a power grab - the Scottish Government wants to centralise everything."
He says councils are doing a good job. "In West Lothian we have a top-performing education service, we're number three in Scotland in terms of attainment, we have good reports from HM Inspectorate, social work exactly the same.
"What's caused local government difficulty is 10 years' council tax freeze. That slowly crippled us and if you look at number of council employees overall in Scotland we have lost about 35,000 over last two decades or so."
He is sceptical about the idea of a small number of large regional authorities. "If West Lothian was banded with the rest of Lothian, and Borders, that would be 170 councillors - where are they going to meet?"
And he is also worried by the large number of small community authorities. "They've all to get a budget. What are they going to be responsible for? There's going to be overlapping areas. And there's a possibility they could end up squabbling amongst themselves over peanuts."
Cllr Fitzpatrick makes clear: "If there's room for improvement, we will improve because we want best value for money and we want to give the best service possible to local people."
But he believes zeal for change would be better directed at Scotland's quangos. "There's 130-odd quangos which are under ministerial control, all of which have a chief executive, chief finance officer and so on, which costs a fortune, and all have their own offices as well."
East Lothian Council's Labour leader Norman Hampshire says he and his colleagues are not against looking at how the current system could be improved, be he's not keen on the government's proposals.
"I don't think a lot of thought has been put into how it would work," he says. "It's not what we as a council see as a way forward."
He too would like to see quangos broken up and thinks the current councils should keep their current responsibilities and could take on more.
"We are at a scale where we can manage services well," he says. "East Lothian recycling service, for example, has the lowest level of contamination in the UK."
He says the government's plan to create so many community authorities "seems crazy". "It would take a lot of staff and administration, whereas East Lothian Council has thinned itself right down - we are as efficient as you can possibly make us."
And he says East Lothian already has six area partnerships for the main towns, where communities can take decisions on what happens in their area.
Midlothian's SNP council leader Kelly Parry may be from the same party as the Scottish Government, but she still has reservations about what is being proposed.
"Local government has been saying for a long time that we need to deliver services differently for people, so we're engaging with this process in good faith, but there are perhaps more questions than answers. I've said our engagement is not tacit agreement for whatever the final proposals might be."
On the idea of regional authorities, she says: "I think there is space for devolving down powers that sit nationally at the moment and there seems to be some consensus on that, so transport and employability and those sorts of areas make sense."
And she said the councils involved in the Edinburgh and South East Scotland city region deal were already looking at what could be done together. "If things work better on a regional level I think there's a willingness to do that because we're already well established."
Under the government proposals, Midlothian - like Edinburgh and all the other existing councils - would seem destined for the axe.
But Cllr Parry says: "Midlothian is a very proud place, we're very proud of our identity, our cultures and our traditions and I think anything that affected that should include what the communities think of that.
"Midlothian is a fantastic authority, we do work strategically and we perform well as a council."
And she says evidence needs to be provided that the proposed community authorities would perform better than the current system.
"I'm not saying the status quo is good enough. People in local government have been saying for a long time that the status quo is not good enough and that we're underfunded, so it's difficult to see if that would improve anything. Would it make governance better? The evidence is not clear yet on that."