Council must reconnect with communities - Joanna Mowat
December seems a good time to look back at the year and what has and hasn’t been accomplished.
A group of councillors has been looking at how to make council meetings more efficient and productive. The purpose of this work being to get better outcomes for the residents of Edinburgh. This has turned out to be a Gordian knot.
Under the dome of the Royal Bank of Scotland in St Andrew Square while celebrating the ground breaking of the Dunard Concert Hall I think I have found an end of the thread and the beginnings of a solution to how we could do things better.
The council has failed to address the 2020 Best Value Report in which it was criticised the council for not working effectively with communities. As I considered the overstuffed committee agendas in the council, attitudinal polling that shows lack of trust in local government and the frustration that I hear all too often from community representatives who are trying to fix things in their bit of the city I realised that all the problems we had been trying to solve in the working group could be vastly improved if the council improved how we work with communities.
This doesn’t mean more consultation that is then ignored, but finding ways that local problems can be solved by local people. How can the community, councillors and council officers work together to to fix the things that don’t work in a local area?
This sounds simple but it has become increasingly complicated to achieve as the council has grown away from communities and looked inwards to find solutions.
We spend increasing amounts of time on high level strategy documents and policies rather than asking the local expert – ie the residents what they want fixed and how we can help them to do that.
So as we approach the New Year and resolutions and budgets are being prepared let’s make next year a year of delivery. We need to properly resource community working so residents can seebest value from their council.