Edinburgh Council's 2050 Vision plan: How will anyone know if it's a success or failure? – John McLellan

After Edinburgh Council’s administration gave itself full marks for its all-round brilliance in a self-assessment last week, the new Accounts Commission report is somewhat more sobering.

There is a lack of clarity about how Edinburgh Council's 2050 Vision plan will be measured, according to John McLellan (Picture: Fred Tanneau/AFP via Getty Images)

In particular, the Commission lambasts the coalition’s 52 Commitments, which masquerades as a business plan, because it “does not provide a clear focus for the council” and, as has been repeatedly pointed out, many of them are hard to measure.

It is the same story with the 2050 Vision plan, in which the authority has invested considerable credibility and cash, and has been four years in the making so far. The Commission noted that after a draft report was presented in 2018, a further £500,000 was spent on a public awareness campaign and in the end some 32,000 people made contributions.

But the Commission points out that after all that effort and expense, the one-page 2050 City Vision document differed “only slightly” from the draft, and which the Policy and Sustainability Committee endorsed in June this year again “with no supporting information or performance measures to monitor its success”.

I do hope commissioners checked the minutes of that meeting because they would find a Conservative amendment, which I’m very glad to say I seconded, which noted that “there were no measures of success in the document which made it impossible to check progress”.

We called for them to be included in any future versions of the City Vison, but guess what, all the other parties voted it down. 2050 Vision? Shoulda gone to Specsavers.

John McLellan is a Conservative councillor

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