Covid crisis highlights Edinburgh Council's flaws. The city needs a change – Ian Whyte

As we move well into 2021, the new year brings hope with the rollout of the Covid-19 vaccines. But for many the return to harsher lockdown and severe winter weather mean change seems quite far off.

Schools need to be more flexible, says Iain Whyte, for example by extending the term into the holidays (Picture: Andrew O'Brien)

For the council things just don’t change. Our schools may have returned virtually but online learning broke down on the first day. Cue resounding choruses of complaint from pupils, parents and teachers. And it’s still not clear how this learning method will pan out in the longer term.

Once again, the winter weather seems to have stumped the council despite the leadership buying 16 new mini-tractors with your money – supposedly to grit the pavements and cycle lanes. It’s a shame they didn’t have people to drive them all.

On the vaccine rollout itself, national criticism masked worse problems locally. In the council’s healthcare partnership with NHS Lothian, only about a third of care-home residents and staff had been vaccinated at the point when over half had been vaccinated across Scotland. They had all had been done in the Borders. Meanwhile the over-80s await appointments but are supposed to receive a dose by February 5.

Finally, from a council committee, we have the truth about the SNP council’s commitment to build 10,000 affordable homes in five years. They will only get to 5,000. The spin is that they only wanted a “programme” to build the homes, not actual places to live. That’s a public disgrace.

With these issues in mind, I have some suggestions. I just don’t expect our out-of-touch council leadership to take accept them.

We should be locally flexible on schools. If we can’t open them now, let’s talk locally about moving dates to get children back in classes in what would have been holidays later in the year.

In the meantime, we should find our best online educators, record their work, and promote it for use it across Edinburgh’s schools, leaving it up online. Not every teacher has built up the skills or been given the training to be excellent at teaching through technology. But using our best can free up the others for the pupil discussion and support they are so good at.

Where we have public assets we should use them. Let’s have flexible contracts in the council so that we can redeploy staff quickly to things like winter maintenance. Currently, they must volunteer.

And let’s get the vaccine rolled out without creating barriers. The care home delay seems to be because the vaccinators aren’t being sent to homes where there is an active Covid case. We can all understand that a vaccination won’t work for someone with the virus. However, many of our care homes have 60 residents plus many staff. They need protected quickly or we risk a cycle of Covid infection in some care homes.

Finally, let’s ditch the panoply of glossy strategies and measure performance and delivery. For housing, it should be numbers built not a notional number that far exceeds the supply of land available.

If we learn anything from this pandemic, I hope it is that our public services need to be much more flexible. They should be locally accountable and concentrated on the needs of those they serve. Changing the council may seem impossible but it’s badly needed.

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